«It's official: Google is ditching its homegrown Gears offline web app API in favor of backing HTML5 for the win.»

«Android 2.0 just got its first killer app: Google Maps Navigation. Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 will be available for free and will be part of the default Google Maps app on Android 2.0 phones. The service offers all the features that users expect from a modern GPS app, including traffic data, 3D view and turn-by-turn voice guidance. Because it's connected to the Google cloud, the app can also display street view images, satellite imagery and real-time traffic data. Google also implemented a voice recognition feature.» # Jealous for the first time since getting an iPhone.

«Google Website Optimizer, a powerful tool that allows website owners to split traffic and test the effectiveness and conversion rates for an array of variables, has traditionally required a lot of back-and-forth between any given site and the Website Optimizer interface. With the release of a new API, announced today, Google is allowing site owners to conduct multivariate and A/B testing from their own platforms. Part of Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer (GWO) is a free tool that "handles splitting a website's traffic, serving different variations and crunching the numbers to find statistical significance."»

«Today's high-school and college students got their first email account at an average age of 13. Most students have had one of their email addresses for 8 years and have an average of about 2.4 addresses each. But if you really want to reach these students, you should forget email. Send a text message instead.»

«But there is one problem. Basecamp is browser native. I want mobile native. And ReadWriteWeb's VP of Content Dev Marshall Kirkpatrick tweeted today that he wants a Basecamp AIR app. Either way, it's clear that browser-only doesn't cut it anymore for Basecamp.»

«In a day and age where more and more applications are built on the Web, availability and scalability are critical concerns for the companies developing these apps. And that has made the business of content delivery an extremely lucrative one. Unfortunately for smaller players, the pricing of content-delivery services has been prohibitive at best, leaving more traditional CDNs out of reach for small to medium size businesses. With CloudFront, Amazon hopes to tap this under-served market.»

«Officials at Boston College have made what may be a momentous decision: they've stopped doling out new email accounts to incoming students. The officials realized that the students already had established digital identities by the time they entered college, so the new email addresses were just not being utilized.»

«Wouldn't it be great if you could keep an eye on your other Google apps - like Calendar and Docs - without having to open multiple tabs or traverse from window to window? Now, thanks to the latest feature releases from Google Labs, you can. Introducing Google Labs Calendar and Doc gadgets for Gmail.»

"If you are looking for a tool that will allow your team to easily post messages to one Twitter account, then CoTweet is definitely worth a closer look."

"People already have a lot questions about the Chrome OS and the answers may ultimately determine how well it succeeds as a true competitor to both Microsoft and Apple, as is being widely speculated. We'll explore some of those questions in this post."

"Street View in Google Maps is a somewhat controversial feature, but there is no denying that it is quite an interesting product. Until now, however, navigation along streets was a bit difficult, but Google just introduced a new, smarter way to navigate Street View's panoramas. Instead of having to click from one arrow to the next, you can now simply double-click anywhere in an image and Google will take you to this point. In addition, Street View now also recognizes the facades of buildings and will show a rectangle when you mouse over a house. Thanks to this, you can now also easily zoom in to any spot in an image by just double-clicking."

"During the Google I/O conference this week, one of the presentations from Day 1 was on the subject of Google Chrome's extension system. The long-awaited feature will finally deliver what Firefox and IE users have had for ages: a way to add more tools, services, and additional features to the browser."

"We recently had the opportunity to test the new Microsoft Office plugin from OffiSync, which integrates Google Docs and Office. We can sum up our findings with one word: WOW. Although still in beta format, the plugin worked extremely well, providing that one missing aspect to the Microsoft Office software suite - an online component for storage, sharing, and collaboration."

"The emergence of mobile operating systems, the ability to install and run third-party apps, and the wide availability of multimedia features (camera phones, video phones, and MP3-playing phones abound) have all been game-changing developments in the mobile field, but they are quickly becoming commonplace."

"In a few minutes Facebook will become the biggest example of a social network that allows users to log-in with OpenID credentials granted to them by other companies' websites. Major networks have said for months that their ID could be used as OpenID, but becoming "relying parties" that accepted OpenID from elsewhere was the step everyone was waiting for. The dam has broken."

"Illegal movie and TV show downloaders, rejoice. Soon, you will no longer have to wait and hour or two to start watching your favorite obscure dramedy series. Streaming torrent site Bitlet.org is preparing for instant gratification beyond your wildest dreams: Streaming video from torrent files."

"Publishing the metrics of sharing on the social web is something that is very fairly compared to indexing the pages of the web and analyzing the links between them. We may not find the next Google in Bit.ly or the services built on top of it, but something very important is afoot."

«"The open, realtime discussions that occur on FriendFeed," he says, "are going to become a major new communication medium on the same level as email, IM and blogging." That's a pretty ambitious claim, but Buchheit has the credibility to make it.»

"Pulling high-priority sources out of the full stream and putting them in a special place enables you to catch more of the high-value information those sources publish. Why lose valuable messages in the whole sea of marginally valuable information that we all have access to? High value sources don't always publish high value information, but the increased likelihood of their doing so warrants putting them in a special place in order that the unusually high signal-to-noise ratio they offer is maintained."

"It may not be a co-incidence that the new Google Public Data search option was announced on the same day that the much-anticipated Wolfram|Alpha data-centric "expert knowledge" engine was first demonstrated to the public."

"If you need any more proof of how fast the mobile web is growing, just look at the latest numbers coming out of Opera today. The company is reporting a 157% increase in usage of their Opera Mini web browser from March 2008 to March 2009."

«Concrete CMS today announced the general availability of its easy-to-use open source CMS product, Concrete5. The new release builds on Concrete's foundation offering of a CMS that is as easy to use and configure as a blog, with the flexibility of a full web development platform. Improvements in Concrete5 include an updated file manager, embedded Picnik image editor, new help system and more. Concrete's main competitors in the CMS space are Drupal and Joomla, but Silicon Florist says Concrete5 "crushes them in terms of ease-of-use." »

"The current generation of browsers does a decent job when it comes to keeping a current browser session organized, but Reichenstein wants to create a system that structures the browser more like a mutimedia file system. He proposes a new interface that looks more like iTunes than today's Firefox, with folders, libraries, and bookmarks in a sidebar."

"This is where the copyright witch hunt has brought us: in order to access the content we want, we have to become anonymous and hide our identities. Because people just want to watch a TV show or see a movie, they have to play a ridiculous cat-and-mouse game with the authorities who somehow equate downloading a file with stealing a car."

"It's kind of a modern day horror story, isn't it? Web 2.0's potential benefit for humanity tragically sold short by social media because it fell under a fog of marketing software. Would-be short-form conversationalists jumping in with CRM-tinted glasses secured to their faces."

Voice and Data Cannot Remain Separate

"Laconica, the Canadian company offering the most popular Open Source alternative to Twitter, announced plans today to begin selling subscriptions to hosted microblogging installations for businesses. The default address of these new sites will be yourname.status.net. We suspect that this could be a very big deal."

"The bottom line is, other apps may get the job done, but due to bad interface design, a critical missing feature, or trying to do too much, are not a pleasure to use. This client actually is a pleasure."

"Whatever the reason, a company that has $500 million in revenue, is profitable and growing, and has a shot at becoming the largest player in what is now a $2 trillion (yes, "t" for trillion) market, should get more respect."

For situational use, Silverlight could be a player.

You might have missed it, but this Twitter thing is for real.

"The number of people who accessed news and information sites from their mobile phones in the U.S. more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2009. ComScore estimates that about 63 million people accessed mobile news and information sites from their mobile devices in January 2009, and about a third of these did so on a daily basis. The mobile Internet is clearly becoming a mainstream phenomenon."

"Part of the reason for this increased spending is thanks to the low cost of social media tools. Compared with larger expenditures like that of advertising for example, social media requires much less investment. In fact, three-quarters of those surveyed who knew their budgets said they allowed for $100,000 or less for social media tools over a 12-month period."

Great idea, but it slowed my Google.

"Google APIs are an incredible resource and today's announcement should further their adoption."

Innovation. It's what's for dinner.

Etsy's got a fantastic business model: solve someone's need in a way that makes them happy. They'll do the rest.

Finally some real competition for Amazon.

"Better than RSS, the Times Newswire API offers chronologically ordered cross-site results, including rich metadata. The response data fields include headlines, summaries, URLs, sections and subsections, bylines, date fields (created, updated, published), indexing terms, media and more. In the words of NYT developer Michael Donohoe, this truly is 'One Feed to Rule Them All.'" It's all about mindshare, not dollars and cents.

The next step after ubiquity is invisibility. The internet, my friends, is about to invade your life outside the computer.

Why Zappos is so awesome

Facebook is moving in the right direction