Part of the new iTunes 10 software, announced and launched yesterday, is a significant new social networking feature for iTunes called Ping. It allows you to comment on music, 'like' it a la Facebook, or rate it. Ping is also very similar to Twitter, in that you can 'follow' people and music stars. All of this happens inside of the iTunes application, either on your computer, iPhone or iPod Touch.

We took the new feature for a spin and came away intrigued, despite some initial flaws. We do however wonder at the overly commercial focus of Ping. Is this really about social networking, or mostly for Apple and artists to sell more music?

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To access Ping, you first need to download iTunes 10 onto your computer. You'll need to also download 300+ MB worth of iPhone Software Update, to get it on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

On the computer, once you've downloaded iTunes 10 click the iTunes Store link in the sidebar. You'll see a "Get Started" link in the top right of that page (also 'Ping' appears as a menu option in the sidebar). You'll need to turn on the Ping feature and agree to Apple's privacy policy. After that, create a profile.

Note that you may encounter issues with uploading a profile photo and connecting to Facebook. If you wait for about 10 minutes, eventually your photo will upload. However Facebook Connect appears to be broken at this stage. We assume these are technical teething issues.

Once you have your profile set up, you're invited to follow other people and also stars like Lady Gaga and U2. This is very similar to how Twitter works, except that it's all happening inside of iTunes (on your computer or on your iPhone or iPod Touch).

Ping isn't entirely intuitive. It took some head scratching to figure out that to actually post content, you need to be in the iTunes Store. You can't create new content from within Ping itself, although you can comment on what others have added.

To add new content to your Ping stream, go to the iTunes Store and either comment on an album, 'like' it or give it a star rating.

The fact that you need to be inside the iTunes Store to create new content or like something, seems a rather cynical move to encourage people to buy more music. Why not let users search inside Ping for a song or album? Or, even better, let them right-click and comment, like or rate music from within the iTunes player?

To track - and optionally comment on - what others are doing, click on the Recent Activity feed in Ping.

Ping places more focus on feature accounts than Twitter, inviting you to "set your inner groupie free by following your favorite artists on Ping." The service comes pre-loaded with accounts for some leading pop, rock and other music acts.

These accounts don't offer much more than what the stars can already do on Facebook and Twitter. The main difference is that it's within an application where people can buy the music.

Overall, I can see Ping being useful for following friends who have similar tastes in music to me. In those cases, if they 'like' a new album then it's a great recommendation - and yes, I'm more likely to buy it. Also the ability to see which concerts they plan to go to is a useful feature.

However, Ping is probably not going to be very useful for following friends who don't share my music tastes. That could be most of them. You may be a mate of mine on Facebook, but if you listen to electronica then sorry I'm not very interested in the content you're liking (you probably feel the same way about the alternative music I tend to favor).

Have you tested out Ping yet? Let us know your verdict in the comments!

App store analytics provider Distimo yesterday published its latest report, once again zooming in on the pricing of mobile applications across a variety of platforms.

Consistent with its previous findings, Google’s Android Market has by far the largest share of free applications available compared to other mobile app store, but the gap is also widening.

In July 2010, 60% of all applications on Android Market were free of charge, representing an increase of 3% since May 2010 when it was 57%.

As you can tell from the graph below, that share is more than double the share of free apps on other mobile app stores, with the exception of Palm’s App Catalog (albeit barely).

The share of free applications is smallest on Windows Marketplace for Mobile (22%), followed by the Apple App Store for iPad (26%) and RIM’s BlackBerry App World (26%).

(click image for full size)

Let’s take a closer look at the prices of paid apps across mobile application stores.

Distimo posits that the average price of the 100 most popular apps in Android Market and Palm’s App Catalog is higher than the average price of the entire catalogue of applications.

While the average price of all applications is only 16% higher in the Apple App Store for iPad than in the App Store for iPhone, the average price of the 100 most popular applications is nearly three times as high in the former.

More than 60% of applications are priced below or equal to $2 in the App Store for iPhone, Android Market, Nokia’s Ovi Store and Palm’s App Catalog. The proportion of applications priced
below or equal to $2 is much lower in the App Store for iPad and Windows Marketplace for Mobile.

Notably, it seems prices of apps for iOS devices are on the rise. The proportion of paid applications priced below $1 on the Apple App Store for iPad and Apple App Store for iPhone has decreased in both in July 2010, from 30% to 25% and from 49% to 45%, respectively.

(click image for full size)

(click image for full size)

Ever since it became stable enough to use on a day-to-day basis on a Mac last year, Google Chrome has been my browser of choice. Other browsers have been adding some nice features — but Chrome keeps adding them faster. And today on its second birthday, that rate of change isn’t slowing down.

Google has officially rolled out Chrome 6 as the latest stable version of the browser today. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone using the dev or beta builds of the browser, but it’s nonetheless an important mark as it means it’s stable enough for mass consumption.

Remember that it was just two years ago when Google surprised the world by announcing a new browser (a little early) via a comic. The next day, we got the first shots of what the browser would look like — and it was released as a beta for Windows users. It actually looks pretty much the same today, but it’s now much, much faster (and when it launched it was already faster than most browsers out there).

Google says that Chrome today is a full three times faster when it comes to JavaScript performance versus Chrome circa 2008. The rapid speed increases have also undoubtedly pushed rival browsers to become faster, so we’ve all benefited.

Arguably more important to me is that despite adding all the new features – and extensions — Chrome still seems lightweight today. I fondly remember the good old days of 2004 when I first started using Firefox as my main browser and thinking how fresh and lightweight it felt compared to the atrocity that was IE. Firefox, sadly, got bloated over the years. So far, Chrome hasn’t put on the same weight. Here’s hoping it never does.

As I said, Chrome is also showing no signs of slowing down from a development standpoint. The browser is already in the process of morphing into version 7 as well. Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome is based on, has been hit version 7 a couple weeks ago — and the dev build of Chrome just went 7 as well. Google has said they hope to iterate every six weeks going forward.

These next few months are going to be arguably the most interesting times for the browser yet. The Chrome Web Store will soon open, bringing tightly integrated web-based apps into the browser. And then, of course, Chrome OS is due before the end of the year.

Happy birthday Chrome.

Chrome then:

Chrome now:

Infographics at their best are more than just pictures — they can provide new understandings, succinct summaries, or just plain old fun.

In that respect, reading newspaper archives isn’t the only way to get a deeper understanding of current events. Infographics can help us get a better grasp on what’s going on.

Check out these 10 visualizations to learn more about the news with a quick look.

Last month alone, Google acquired social-search service Angstro, visual shopping search engine like.com, and social currency company Jambool. Google has been on an acquisition binge for some time, and it’s getting tricky to keep track of its appetite.

This graphic shows a timeline of Google’s activity in three categories: “Building Revenue Streams,” “Cutting Competition,” or “A Little of Both.”

The campaign for gay marriage has passed a multitude of milestones over the last decade. Unfortunately for those trying to keep track of them, the victories and setbacks vary drastically by state. Decisions are reversed and in some cases overturned by higher courts, which makes progress hard to track.

This map from the LA Times shows the status of gay marriage in each state by month. Click on a state for its most recent ruling or watch the country change from being legally similar in its treatment of same-sex couples in 2000 to sharply divided in 2010.

The frequency and fatality of IEDs (homemade bombs) in Afghanistan was highlighted when WikiLeaks published more than 90,000 secret documents about the Afghan war. Anti-war activists published this illustrative video that includes all of the incidents reported in these leaked documents.

On April 20, an explosion on a BP drilling rig started what has become the largest accidental oil spill in history. Despite numerous strategies that were deployed to plug the leak, it wasn’t capped until July 15.

This video graphic by New Orleans online newspaper NOLA wraps timeline, graphic, and cumulative damage data into one easy-to-digest piece of media.

The CIA World Factbook has always been a great resource for putting news stories into the context of their geographic location. But now it’s also easy to get the information at a glance.

The World Factbook Dashboard allows you to color code the countries of the world by population, population growth, infant mortality, agricultural GDP, industry GDP, services GDP, total GDP, GDP/inhabitant, or inflation. Clicking on a country zooms in for more information.

This map from The New York Times illustrates not only which areas suffered the highest unemployment rate after the recession, but also offers the option to filter data by metropolitan areas, areas with housing bubbles, rural areas, and manufacturing centers.

The Wall Street Journal updates this map constantly with violent conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you want to learn about the day-to-day details of the war or understand its scope, there’s no better visual resource.

Even if you read through every health care bill article, it could be hard to exactly pick out what the law would change about your insurance coverage and taxes. The Washington Post made it easy by providing this nifty tool. Input whether you have insurance coverage, your family size, your income, and your marital status, and it will tell you how health care reform will impact your life.

For the broader picture on healthcare reform, see this subway-style map from GOOD Magazine.

The government is still busy spending much of the $787 billion it allotted for the economic stimulus in February of last year. This infographic effectively illustrates how that huge chunk of change is being distributed.

This chilling interactive graphic from USA Today simply illustrates the deaths in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Information seekers can search deaths by personal factors like name, age, gender, race, or home town as well as by military service details, date, cause, or place.

CNN has a more elaborate version here.

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Of all topics, this is one of the perennials. People want more traffic, more attention, more awareness to their blog. It’s fair. We work hard on our blogs. We want more attention and traffic. If your business depends on volume, this is especially important (for instance, if you’re using ads). Getting traffic is a tricky business, and it requires a lot of experimentation. I’ll tell you what’s worked for me, so far, and I’ll tell you what you might try. Maybe others will educate us both in the comments on their best methods.

The first few seconds of someone’s attention are the hardest to pass. If you have a lame blog post title, no one’s going to want to read the post. For whatever reason, we react to “how to,” we react to “7 great,” we react to all kinds of things. Not sure where to look? I stole this advice from Brian Clark years ago: go to the grocery store, buy some ladies’ magazines like Cosmopolitan, and learn how THEY write headlines on the front page.

This entire series (and most of my blog posts) use graphics to catch your eye. It’s an easy way to get one’s attention. Screen captures help. Video helps. There are tons of ways to get people into a receptive space with your material, and graphics are just the easiest one.

Now that we’ve got a decent title, decent graphics, let’s be quick about your content.

Keep your posts brief (unless you want tons and tons of bookmarks). People don’t have all day to read. If you can keep your posts between 250-500 words, that’s in alignment with most people’s attention spans. Hey, you’re welcome to write whatever length you want. You asked me how to grow traffic to your blog. I can only give you results that I’ve tested. When I write a super long piece, I get much less involvement with it.

I’ve written about making shareability a priority. If you don’t have easy-to-share buttons on your blog, you’re missing the easiest way for people to see your stuff on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and all the other sites where it would matter. Sharing out is a great way to make some more traffic happen. I also automatically push my posts into Facebook with their notes feature. I have an automated post into twitter via @broganmedia, but don’t do this same effect on my primary @chrisbrogan account.

In my case, subscriptions to my blog matter. I want people to subscribe, because I don’t necessarily survive on ad revenue. If you’re trying to monetize via ad revenue, and if your ads are in the header and the sidebar, a subscription really won’t help you get more traffic. If for whatever reason you want people to come to your website directly instead of via your RSS feed, you might want to obfuscate where you put your subscription information.

If you’re like me, you ask for the subscription all the time. In fact, I’ll ask now. You’re not yet subscribed? Enter your email (I respect your privacy):

Over in the Third Tribe, we talk about guest posts quite often as a great traffic-builder to your blog. Find someone who has a very similar kind of blog topic to yours (not sure where to start? Check out Alltop), and offer a guest blog post. Oh, and then actually follow through. I have heard recently from my friends who accept guest posts that often, people ask for something, get approval, and then don’t take an action. That doesn’t sound like a good plan. Just FYI.

This is one of those points where people disagree. I blog daily. Truth be told, I’m up to 2x a day most days. Why? Because the more I blog, the more people subscribe. I learned it from some of the larger blogger sites out there.

Lots of people justify once a week, or once every two weeks. That’s fine. But if you want to grow traffic to your blog, that’s a very long slow crawl towards that growth. That said, no matter which frequency you’ve chosen, stick to it. The moment you drop off the map, people who haven’t yet subscribed to you lose sight and move on.

You can always market your blog the good old fashioned way. I’ve had people hand me business cards at events that had a compelling question or interesting graphic, and then a URL to their blog. More often than not, I’ll at least check out the post. You might make postcards and bring them to the places where your prospective readers might congregate. For instance, if you write a restaurant blog, why not have a business card tray by the mints? Make an offer, just like you do with any other kind of marketing.

Often times, we sit around inside the fishbowl of social media and hope people from outside will find us. Here’s a hint, hero: the people you need are out there wondering what they can do to learn more about the thing you’re talking about. Go get ‘em, tiger.

I’m a big fan of the basics: write about what they need, make sure they see that you wrote about it, make it easy to carry on the relationship, make it easy for them to promote you to others.

Seems like a simple formula, and yet, we go through all kinds of hoops to come up with trickier methods. Try this one first. What do you say?

Samsung has finally spilled the details about its long-awaited tablet computer, the Galaxy Tab, during a press conference at the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin.

Samsung calls its tablet a “smart media device,” and Galaxy Tab definitely has the specifications to back it up: Android 2.2 support, a Cortex A8 1 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM and 16/32 GB of internal memory with the possibility of upgrading through microSD memory cards.

Furthermore, there’s a 7 inch TFT-LCD display with 1024×600 pixel resolution, a 3 megapixel camera with autofocus and LED Flash plus an additional fron 1.3 megapixel camera for video chats (that’s got to hurt iPad owners at least a little bit) as well as WiFi and 3G connectivity. The dimensions of the device are 190.09 x 120.45 x 11.98mm, with 380 grams of weight, and the battery should last through 7 hours of movie playback.

In other words, the iPad got a worthy competitor, not only because of the capable hardware the Tab is sporting, but also because it has the latest and greatest version of Android. Although it’s smaller than the iPad, whose screen measures 9.7 inches, Galaxy Tab does a lot of things the iPad cannot do: it has two cameras, it supports Flash and a wide variety of multimedia formats, including DivX, XviD, MPEG4, H.263, and H.264.

Samsung has partnered with Vodafone for the launch, and the Galaxy Tab will start selling in October in the majority of Vodafone’s European markets and later this year in the U.S and other markets.

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Thanks to a partnership with Vlingo, owners of Android 2.0 or higher-equipped phones can now check in to Foursquare and update their status on Facebook and Twitter simply by speaking into their phones.

To try it out, download the free Vlingo app to your Android handset.

Using your voice, you can then update your location status on Foursquare by saying “check into Logan Airport”, locate your friends with commands like “where are my friends?” and “who’s nearby?” as well as send shout-outs to your buddies (e.g. “shout at Logan Airport waiting to board a plane to San Francisco”).

That’s not all though. The latest version of the Vlingo app also lets users share the service with their friends with the click of a button and also update their status on Facebook, Twitter and/or Foursquare at the same time by saying “social update” and speaking the message.

Previous Vlingo features remain, too: you can still use the app to send text and email messages, search the web, use Google maps and more.

As for BlackBerry, iPhone and Nokia S60 users – they’ll have to be patient for a while before they can start updating their status and locations with their voice.

Vlingo says it plans to roll out this functionality to other supported platforms in a future release but didn’t mention specific dates.

Do you consider voice-driven applications to be an ideal way to interact with mobile apps on your phone? Why (not)?

Yesterday, at the Apple music event in San Francisco, I had a short chat with Apple CEO Steve Jobs, as he strolled through the demo room for the media, just after he had announced various updates for the iPod, Apple TV and iTunes onstage.

One of the those was the introduction of a new social network for music called Ping that Apple (AAPL) has integrated within iTunes 10 and which looks an awful lot like the experience you get on Facebook.

Essentially, it is a vertical version–in this case for music–of the powerful social networking site.

Facebook has noodled for years about creating its own social music offering, including doing a partnership with Lala, which was bought by Apple last year and shuttered in June.

But its efforts have largely gone nowhere.

And Facebook is nowhere on Ping too. Currently, there is no linking, sharing or participation of any kind with Facebook–or Twitter or MySpace either–on Ping, which will work only on the iTunes software on computers, iPhones and iPods.

When I asked Jobs about that, he said Apple had indeed held talks with Facebook about a variety of unspecified partnerships related to Ping, but the discussions had gone nowhere.

The reason, according to Jobs: Facebook wanted “onerous terms that we could not agree to.”

Definition, according to an online dictionary: “Involving an amount of effort and difficulty that is oppressively burdensome; Involving heavy obligations.”

Jobs did not elaborate on those troublesome terms and also would not say if Ping would incorporate Facebook Connect–which would make it much easier to find friends to share music with.

“We could, I guess,” he shrugged.

And when I asked how to find friends, Jobs offered, noting iTunes had 160 million users across the globe: “You can type their names into search or send them emails inviting them to join.”

Okay, although being more open would work too!

As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka noted:

“Maybe Apple plans on joining the rest of the Web, via an open API that will let Facebook, Twitter et al–maybe even the to-be-launched Google (GOOG) music service–play nicely with Ping. We’ll see.”

Facebook–including some execs who are definitely irked about how closely Ping resembles Facebook, right down to the blue color scheme–hopes so.

Consider the statement issued by Facebook to me–after attempts to get it verbally failed, due ironically to several dropped connections on the iPhone of the exec I spoke to:

“Facebook believes in connecting people with their interests and we’ve partnered with innovative developers around the world who share this vision. Facebook and Apple have cooperated successfully in the past to offer people great social experiences and we look forward to doing so in the future.”

In other words: Zing, Ping.

In any case, Jobs said he had great hopes for the social music service, adding that Ping could be the most significant thing to come out of yesterday’s announcements.

But soon enough, he moved right onto the new iPods, declaring enthusiastically: “Isn’t the Nano amazing?”

Apple announced on Wednesday a cornucopia of new hardware and software: sleek iPods, a brand new Internet-enabled video streaming device and new versions of its iOS software and iTunes 10. However, the most impressive to me by far was Ping, the music-only social network that Apple is opening up its 160 million existing iTunes users.

No, I’m not blown away by the 160 million number. What I’m impressed by is the thinking behind Ping.

Ping may function like a cross between Facebook and Twitter for iTunes by allowing you to follow celebrities, create social cliques and get artist updates via an activity stream. I think it could have tremendous impact on social sharing and commerce.

From a content perspective, there are three different types of media we love to talk about: movies we see, music we listen to and books we are reading. These are accepted social norms. In fact, many relationships are made on the basis of collective love of a movie and many friendships have started with mixed tapes.

It makes perfect sense for a music service to be social. I’m not alone: The popularity YouTube, the fast-growing MOG and the sadly defunct iLike and Imeem show that people gravitate towards music as a common, collective experience. A recommendation from friends on Last.fm often resulted in me buying many-a-few music tracks. My friends who listened to Thievery Corporation turned me on to The Broadway Project and Chris Joss, which I ended up buying on the iTunes store or via Amazon’s MP3 store.

This click-and-go-somewhere-to-download model of affiliate links can never match a unified experience. Amazon, for example, encourages bloggers and others to link to things they like and then get a piece of the action. This separates social from commerce and treats them as two discrete activities. On the post-Facebook Internet, I don’t think anyone can afford to keep these two actions distinct.

Ping, from what little I saw during Steve Jobs’ demo, allows a similar level of social interaction. It can tell me who my friends think are cool and the top 10 favorites of people in my social graph. Some of my friends are famous deejays. Others just have eclectic musical tastes. They can collectively sift through over 10 million songs and help with the discovery of music. This social-powered discovery is part of the biggest theme of our times: serendipity. About two years ago, when I wrote about serendipity, I said:

The problem is that there’s too much data coming online too quickly, and the traditional method of search that involves first finding and then consuming the information is not going to work for much longer. There just won’t be enough time for us to do that and still have a life. It’s a problem, and therefore solving it is an opportunity — a very big opportunity.

My belief has only been affirmed by growth in the amount of data available. With 12 million songs and 250,000 apps, the best way for Apple to enhance the iTunes store – aka its shopping experience — is through the use of social. Back in 2007, I argued that social networking was merely a feature that had to be embedded into applications to enhance their value. Apple has done a great job of that, but it’s also gone one step further, not only by adding a social networking layer to iTunes, but by meshing it with its commerce engine, the iTunes Store. And it’s made this experience available on both the desktop and its devices.

Apple received much of this social capability with the acquisition of Lala, an online music service, which as a standalone company used sharing of social objects to drive folks towards paid music downloads. Now Apple is only closing the loop by further sharing what users bought. I wouldn’t be least bit surprised if sales of music on the iTunes store rocket upwards, thanks to social discovery.

Amazon, which recently started experimenting with Facebook Connect, has similar ideas, but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. On Amazon, I’m reduced to reading reviews from absolute strangers for music. I have a handful of friends who have impeccable taste in non-fiction business books, are all members of Amazon, and they already use email to share new book suggestions with me.

What if they too could share their likes and dislikes via a social layer inside Amazon.com? Or what if I could follow my favorite authors and get updates on their books? Much like Apple, Amazon owns book-based social service, Shelfari, and should find ways to embed the social layer inside of all Amazon products and connect its tens of millions of users.

Like Apple, Amazon too has a lot more data about its customers and their behaviors and could create a compelling discovery experience. I believe with tens of thousands of products in its store, the retail giant needs to figure out ways to surface content and other offerings smartly.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

After looking at the different approaches to filtering for Relevance, I have been seeking a way to map them visually. There are many different startups competing in this space along with the giants, and a way to map them in a matrix would help us see the big picture of how the battle for relevance is evolving on the social web.

What are the fundamental ways in which these approaches and startups differ? These could form the axis around which we can then proceed to map them.

Filtering either works by showing us the most popular stuff being shared online, or by understanding our individual preferences and surfacing personalized content. Thus, we have the following axis:

You either search for content or you see it serendipitously without seeking anything specific. Search is actively initiated by the user and is goal-driven, while serendipitous discovery is gifted with the user being passive at the receiving end. This gives us our second axis:

We combine these two axes to form the backbone of our visualization. We then place different services within our matrix as per their core filtering approach. The result is the Filtering FOR Relevance Matrix (FORMAT) as seen below:

Let us now look at each quadrant closely.

This is the simplest and oldest of all. Search powered by algorithms to surface most popular content online. This also includes other Twitter search services like Topsy. These services are powered by algorithms such as PageRank, PersonRank, Resonance, etc. to surface the most popular result relevant to a query.

This approach dominated the Web 1.0 era before the advent of the social web.

Services in this category help you find the most popular content being shared online across different social networks. These were the next to evolve in the Web 2.0 era, beginning with social bookmarking services like Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.

There is an element of personalization provided by many of these, in that you “follow” some users, but the motive behind such following is less to seek personalized content, more to seek trending, viral content.

Note how Digg is attempting to move from this quadrant to the personalized quadrant, and facing hurdles along the way.

A breed of services has evolved around delivering personalized recommendations and content tailored for your needs. Hunch learns about you and acts as a “taste engine”, while Blekko allows you to personalize your searches with slashtags. Google is making forays in this space with its Social Search service, which tries to personalize search results based on your social graph.

This is the hottest space where most of the competition is today.

Twitter Lists are personalized (created by you) and deliver fresh, serendipitous content relevant to your interests. Facebook Likes give you serendipitous discovery from your personal friends. Flipboard provides a social magazine based on your personal social circle on Facebook and Twitter. My6sense delivers new content using ‘Digital Intuition’. Vertical networks like Last.fm deliver music recommendations based on your individual taste. Personalized Twitter newspapers give you fresh content filtered by your social graph on Twitter.

Note how Datasift lies at the center of the matrix. This is because Datasift is a platform providing different filtering services and approaches. Developers may use the platform to develop different services and apps that can lie in any of these quadrants.

So what is the point of this exercise? Using FORMAT:

• We see the big picture of how services providing relevance and filtering are evolving.
• We see how personalized serendipity is the holy grail of the social web right now.
• We see how different services relate to each other and who is competing with whom and how.
• We see how identifying the target quadrant is important for any new startup in this space.
• We see how users provide friction when a service tries to change quadrants (Digg).

If you are involved in a startup aiming to provide filtered, relevant content to users, which quadrant would you target? See how FORMAT helps?

Google is celebrating the second anniversary of its Google Chrome browser with the release of new stable and beta versions, bringing and even cleaner and simpler user interface and increased speed and performance.

As the Google Chrome Blog points out, Chrome 6 is years beyond where most imagined browser technology when it was first introduced just two years ago.

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The Google Chrome Blog takes a retrospective look at how much browsers have changed over the past two years, remarking that when Chrome was first introduced in August of 2008, "JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn't yet an essential feature in modern browsers, and the idea of a sandboxed, multi-process browser was only a research project."

In addition to some cosmetic changes, the new version of Chrome brings form autofill features, making it so you don't have to type in again and again that ridiculously long email address you now regret choosing. It also brings extension and autofill synchronization, meaning that your autofill data will remain the same from desktop to laptop to netbook.

Among the myriad features, the user interface seems to have an impact in the browser market. The soon-to-be-released Internet Explorer 9 looks like it stole a page from Chrome, adopting the clean and simple design that lets the browser step out of the way. Chrome's design manages to portray what we find most appealing about Chrome (which replaced Firefox as the default browser months ago now) - its lightweight operation. Just as it steps out of the way of the page, in terms of design, the browser manages to step out of the way of other programs, managing to run well (even on a netbook) without hogging all of the processing power.

If you haven't yet, we highly recommend giving Chrome a spin.

A new study by email software purveyor Xobni confirms what we bloggers know to be true, there’s actually no such thing as a day off in the Internet age (Want more visceral proof than an email study? Check out the timestamp of this post).

Information anxiety has pretty much put the kibosh on “time off” as two out of three Americans and Brits check their email outside of regular business hours (ha) and half of Americans email while on vacation (double ha).

The Xobni study, an online survey of 2,200 British and American adults conducted in August, holds that the traditional 9-5 work day has gone the way of the Dodo, due to the fact that Americans and Brits can’t stop checking their email. Apparently we sneak a peak at out inboxes while on vacation, weekends, sick days and even when we are (gasp!) in bed.

The press release blames this behavior on the down economy and the iPhone, but I blame it on the fact that we now live most of our lives online, and we feel compelled to check our email/Facebook/Twitter because that’s where most of the exciting stuff is happening anyways.

More highlights from the study/the life we have chosen:

* The 9-5 work day has gone the way of the Dodo. 72% of Americans and 68% of Brits say they regularly check their email on vacations, sick days, and at home in bed.

* Yes, IN BED. Conveniently for Xobni, work email in bed is apparently, you know, like a thing, with 1 in 5 Americans checking email as the first thing they do in the morning or the last thing they do at night before falling asleep (Again I can personally vouch for this).

According to Xobni, email has become an addiction, and like most addictions it is fueled by peer pressure:

* 27% check email outside of regular working hours because they feel it is expected.

* 26% of Americans feel they can’t handle/overwhelmed by the number of emails they receive during vacation.

Everyone in the world agrees that managing email has become a challenge to our sanity. And various companies are scrambling towards solutions including Google with its recent Gmail Priority Inbox launch and Xobni, obviously. My favorite low-fi way to deal with the bottleneck is a service called Sentenc.es which makes it clear to your email reader that you are limited to short responses.

Even though I’m not sure how well that will work, in bed.

Video, vaguely related.

Email overload image above: Ario_

As he was boasting that Apple is activating 230,000 iOS devices a day at Apple’s San Francisco event yesterday, Steve Jobs took the opportunity to accuse competitors of boosting their numbers when it comes to device activations.

“We think some of our friends are counting upgrades in their numbers,” said Jobs, most probably referring to the recent figures from Google, whose Eric Schmidt claimed 200,000 activations daily in August 2010.

Google has quickly responded to Jobs’ allegations. In a response to an inquiry from Fortune, a Google spokesperson said: “The Android activation numbers do not include upgrades and are, in fact, only a portion of the Android devices in the market since we only include devices that have Google services.”

So there you have it: according to Google, it might even have more than 200,000 Android device activations every day. Who do you trust: Apple or Google?

More About: android, apple, Google, iOS, steve jobs

Because Apple is entering some new market segments (or, in the case of Ping, some new markets, period) Apple is now a direct competitor to a number of other companies already in the social music and streaming content space.

Boxee, Rdio and Roku have all issued statements in response to Apple’s latest moves and what, if anything, it means for the future of those startups.

Apple is describing Ping as a social network for music. It takes a very Facebook and Twitter approach to following friends and artists and is designed to make discovering and sharing new music super simple.

Rdio, a startup created by the founders of Skype, also lists music discovery as one of its core strengths and missions. Of course, unlike iTunes, Rdio is a subscription service that allows users to enjoy on-demand streaming music for $4.99 or $9.99 a month.

This is the statement Rdio sent us in response to Apple’s latest social music plans:

“Today’s announcement from Apple completely validates Rdio’s social approach to discovering music through people,” said Carter Adamson, COO, Rdio. “But in our view, sharing a short clip doesn’t amount to sharing music and people are still restricted by Apple’s pay-per-tune platform.”

Rdio also notes that it has apps for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry.

When the first Apple TV was introduced back in January 2007, the market for connected video devices essentially started and ended with TiVo (at least on the commercial level). Almost four years later, the landscape is very different.

Steve Jobs highlighted some of the reasons Apple though the Apple TV didn’t really take off and many of the changes to the new Apple TV are designed to address those issues. Some of the changes, including a lower price, a focus on streaming, rather than storing content, and subscription access to Netflix, are familiar to fans of the connected device space.

Roku, a company that introduced the first Netflix Watch Instantly set-top box back in 2008, shares many of the same features and is also similarly priced to the new Apple TV.

Roku provided us with this statement:

Roku created the category for streaming players over two years ago with the original Netflix player for $99. Since then the category has continued to grow rapidly with large hardware entrants like Xbox, PS3, Wii, blu-ray players, and now AppleTV adding streaming capabilities. … During this time Roku sales have continued to accelerate as the overall streaming market grows, and customers enjoy our simple interface, low cost and large selection of services. Our customers are using the box more and more. Two years ago the average Roku customer used our product 11 hours a month, but now it’s 43 hours a month.

Beyond Netflix we have introduced over 50 additional content partners on our open platform that offer customers access to over 100,000 movies and TV shows, live sports, music, photo and video sharing, and more — all while continuing to reduce the cost of our products. Today, a customer can get a Roku player for as low as $59.99 and an HD-capable model for as low as $69.99, plus a 1080p model for $99.99. By selling direct to customers (on roku.com) we can offer more while maintaining lower prices.

Roku is completely confident that our strategy of offering more features and lower cost than competitors continues to be the right plan.

The core difference, as we see it, between what Roku offers and what Apple TV offers is that Roku is a streaming player that connects to bigger content networks. You can browse videos from Vimeo and blip.tv, you can watch UFC Pay-per-view content and you can watch premium titles from Netflix or Amazon VOD.

However, Roku doesn’t have a connection to a users networked content on the Mac, PC or mobile device. Roku has more content options for users but offers less content to a users personal local library.

For Boxee, the situation is a bit more complex. Boxee started as software that could be run on the Mac or Apple TV. Many original Apple TV owners (myself included) only bought the Apple TV because of Boxee. Boxee added the third-party content options that the original Apple TV lacked.

Meanwhile, the Boxee Box promised to be a streaming media device to both your local network and to sources like Netflix, Crackle.com MUBI.

On the Boxee Blog, founder Avner Ronen had this to say:

Most of us at Boxee are Apple fanboys. If it is silver and it has the Apple logo on it, we pre-order it. If there’s a line around the block, chances are we’re in it. And everything stops at Boxee HQ while we unbox the latest gadget to come out of Cupertino. We were incredibly excited when a couple of developers in the community made it possible to run Boxee on Apple TV (as hundreds of thousands of users have done) and the Boxee Remote for iPhone remains one of the most popular interfaces people use to interact with Boxee. Plenty has happened since then. …
We all watched the Apple announcement. We walked away feeling strongly confident about the space it left for Boxee to compete. We have a different view of what users want in their living rooms. We are taking different paths to get there. The Boxee Box is going to be $100 more expensive than the Apple TV, but will give you the freedom to watch what you want.

The new Apple TV features, especially the addition of AirPlay, really go to the heart of what Boxee offers: A simple way to access local and online content directly from the TV.

While lacking a direct link to the iTunes ecosystem, Boxee does have a layer of extensibility that the new Apple TV still doesn’t really seem to embrace.

The position that all three companies are taking is that Apple’s entry into their respective fields reaffirms their business plans. The secondary position is that the value proposition offered by each service is enough to differentiate them from Apple’s offerings.

This is true and false at the same time. While existing music networks and connected devices can surely still compete against Apple, make no mistake, this is a competition.

Apple is gunning not just for Boxee and Roku, but for Google TV, TiVo Premiere and video game consoles that tout the ability to stream content.

Mashable’s Ben Parr has already opined on the potential impact Ping will have on MySpace and other music networks like Last.fm and MOG should also be aware of the new competition.

Apple still has to sell itself to consumers in the living room, and the new Apple TV just makes that sales pitch more attractive. Where Apple doesn’t have to sell itself is with music. iTunes is the largest music store in the world and the go-to place for finding and buying music. Adding in social components to that is going to upset other sharing and discovery services.

This doesn’t mean that competing against Apple is going to be impossible, but music networks and connected device makers do need continue to keep an eye on Cupertino. Apple’s here to play.

What impact do you think Apple TV and Ping will have on its competitors? Let us know!

More About: apple, Apple TV, boxee, connected devices, itunes 10, Ping, rdio, roku

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For some in Silicon Valley, Asia remains an alluring black box. A promising world with pockets of hyper growth, obscured by a tangled web of unfamiliar languages, customs, regulations and native ecosystems. Although the walls are coming down fast, the road to Asia’s markets remains an intimidating one for many.

Enter Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups (a recently launched $30M super angel fund) and Geeks On A Plane, a program that takes tech entrepreneurs and investors to emerging markets. In its own small way, Geeks On A Plane is attempting to bridge that gap between the Valley and the rest of the world. Earlier this year, roughly 55 “Geeks” traveled to several key hot spots in Asia, including Shanghai, Singapore, Seoul and Beijing, to connect with the region’s top entrepreneurs, to mingle with Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and to sample local tech conferences like Shanghai World Expo and CHINICT.

“Asia is easily a third, possibly close to half of the world’s population, I think there’s a lot of innovation and a lot of growth that is happening in China, India, and Southeast Asia,” McClure says. “Some of the internet models that we’ve seen are starting to be transferred over there, and actually a lot of the internet business models are being copied over here…There’s actually an explosion of social networks happening in all those countries.”

Although McClure doesn’t consider himself an expert in doing business in Asia, through his trips and his new relationships, he says he now has a better understanding of the internal dynamics of Asia’s disparate markets and is acutely aware of common Western misconceptions. In particular, he says it was very eye opening to learn how advanced China actually is and how many have underestimated the region’s technological and economic progress.

“Well I think people tend to look at China as being a pretty big opportunity but they also tend to think about China as being a little bit behind and I think that’s just really the wrong impression. China has actually got more internet users than the US, they certainly have more mobile devices than the US…You know the top 10% of the Chinese population probably has more average spending power than the average US citizen…and they’re buying a lot of cars, they’re buying a lot of houses, they’re buying a lot of consumer products online.”

While not everyone can join a Geeks On A Plane Tour, Dave McClure is sharing a collection of mini-documentaries from his latest trip with TechCrunch TV. The videos were shot and produced by Ben Henretig, founder of Micro-Documentaries, a new startup that creates highly polished, short (hence micro) videos for clients. The first of four episodes is on their trip to Shanghai (second video from the top). You can also watch McClure’s interview with TechCrunch TV, where he discusses his new fund and expounds on his trip to Asia (first video).

One of the most common suggestions to bloggers who use shared hosting is that they will be much better off with a VPS or a dedicated server. I agree in principle; however, this doesn't mean the server will run smoothly without a bit of tweaking.

I'm currently in the process of moving several WordPress blogs from a dedicated server to a VPS. After moving five or six blogs, I noticed the server was slowing to a crawl, with high load after just a week of uptime. None of the blogs are particularly busy. What would solve this problem?

A quick way (no pun intended) to speed up WordPress is to install WP-SuperCache. This is the first thing I tried, but I didn't notice much of an improvement.

Security configuration changes may help if the slowness is caused by people exploiting weaknesses on your server. But this didn't help either.

The trick that worked for me was to install php-apc. Assuming you've got access to the command line and it's a Linux box, installation is simply a case of issuing the following command:

sudo apt-get install php-apc

This may vary depending on your Linux distro.

Installing php-apc has reduced the server load from a peak of 30 or 40 right down to a peak of 0.5, and the server has been happily running for a few days without any major problems.

Photo by Mykl Roventine: Out & About

[Updated at 1:05 p.m.] Mariner Energy, owner of the production platform, said in a press release that no hydrocarbon spill has been reported after an initial flyover of the incident.

"Mariner has notified and is working with regulatory authorities in response to this incident," the statement said. "The cause is not known, and an investigation will be undertaken. During the last week of August 2010, production from this facility averaged approximately 9.2 million cubic feet of natural gas per day and 1,400 barrels of oil and condensate."

The company also said no injuries have been reported.

[Updated at 12:48 p.m.] David Reed, a paramedic on board the Rowan Gorilla II oil rig located 14 miles from the platform that exploded told submitted an iReport saying he saw all thirteen workers rescued from the water.

“We were up here in the radio room and all of sudden we saw a whole bunch of smoke coming from the platform," Reed said. "Shortly after all the radios started lighting up like a Christmas tree. They called any helicopters in the area, any boats in the area to respond, they were saying there were people in the water. There were multiple people in the water.”

See Reed's iReport of what he witnessed

WWL: Coast Guard reporting production platform incident

WDSU: Production platform explodes in Gulf

iReport: Did you see the explosion? Share images

[Updated at 12:32 p.m.] White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday that the federal government has "assets ready" to respond to any environmental problems resulting from the explosion of an oil platform off the coast of Louisiana.

[Updated at 12:31 p.m.] All thirteen people aboard a production platform that exploded in the Gulf are accounted for and safely on a commercial vessel according to initial information, the U.S. Coast Guard said in a statement.

"We continue to gather information as we respond with full force, and have oil spill response assets ready for immediate deployment should we receive any reports of pollution," the statement said.

[Updated at 11:53 a.m.] U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Bill Colclough tells CNN that 12 people from the production platform are in water immersion suits as they await rescue.

Colclough told CNN there are reports the production platform, which is for both oil and natural gas, is still on fire.

"We don't know what caused the rig to catch on fire," he told CNN, noting the incident is under investigation.

Asked about concerns regarding oil leaks or pollution, Colclough said "there are reports the rig was not actively producing any product, so we don't know if there's any risk of pollution."

Mariner Energy is a leading independent oil and gas exploration and production company in the Gulf of Mexico. About 85 percent of the company's production comes from offshore assets, with a growing share of that coming from deepwater developments.

The explosion comes nearly five months after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded April 20, killing 11 people and causing oil to gush into
the Gulf of Mexico, leading to one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

[Updated at 11:43 a.m.] U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Bill Colclough tells CNN that all 13 workers involved in the production platform explosion are accounted for, but one person is injured.

Coast Guard Choppers are on the way to the site 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay.

[Posted at 11:33 a.m.] An oil production platform has exploded 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana, with 12 people overboard and one missing, the Coast Guard said Thursday morning.

Rescue attempts are under way for at least 12 people, Coast Guard spokesman John Edwards told CNN. 13 people were on board the production platform total, Edwards said, noting 12 have been accounted for, but one person was missing.

The accident took place 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana on the Vermilion Oil production platform 380, which is owned by Houston-based Mariner Energy.

The Coast Guard has multiple helicopters, an airplane and several Coast Guard cutters en route. It's unknown if there are any injuries.

We would love for you to join us, so we’re giving away passes to BlogWorld. To enter, answer the following question — “What is the future of blogging?” — in the comments below. Readers with the best answers will win one of five “full access” tickets to BlogWorld, which includes MashBash. Winners are invited to attend this industry celebration where the online world comes together to meet, relax and make important business networking connections.

Date: Friday, October 15
Time: 8:00 p.m.-10 p.m.
Location:Haze at Aria. 3730 Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, NV.
Tickets: Must have BlogWorld Badge to enter.

• Simply click the “Like” button on our Facebook Page (below).
• Respond to the question: “What is the future of blogging?” by noon ET on Monday, September 6, in the comments section of this post.

Please use your real identity so that we may contact you via e-mail, Twitter or Facebook to let you know that you’ve won and how to redeem your prize.

BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas on October 15-16: “Join us at the World’s Largest New Media event and learn about Content Creation, Distribution and Monetization strategies, step-by-step techniques and bleeding-edge tools from the most successful Bloggers, Podcasters, Social Media Pro’s, Internet TV and Radio Content Generators and New Media Marketing Pro’s! From the premier educational sessions at the Social Media Business Summit and BlogWorld Conference, to the resource-rich New Media Expo, to Amazing Networking events…it’s One economical trip, One weekend, One Big Show you can’t afford to miss!”

More About: blogging, BLOGS, blogworld, contest, Events, las vegas, MashBash, new media expo, Tickets

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In a statement, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said, “After nearly a decade-long partnership in search, we’re looking forward to expanding our global relationship to mobile search and YouTube. All aspects of our partnership will be improved by this deal.”

The extension of the deal wasn’t a given by any means; the $1 billion investment Google made in AOL back in 2005 proved to be disastrous financially. Further, Microsoft has been aggressively making deals to grow marketshare for Bing, most notably with Yahoo, which now sees Bing powering Yahoo search and its related advertising.

With the renewed AOL deal, Google locks up about 2.3% of the search market according to the most recent numbers from comScore. Google currently has 65.8% of the market, while Microsoft has 27.1% between Bing and Yahoo.

Beyond web search, today’s deal also broadens Google’s reach on mobile and gets additional premium content onto YouTube –- both of which are currently high priorities for the company, as CEO Eric Schmidt noted in his statement on the deal. “It’s particularly exciting to see our relationship expand into video and mobile. These areas are now at the heart of users’ online experiences and at the core of both of our businesses,” he said.

More About: aol, Google, Search

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Twitter has just launched its first official iPad application and the reviews so far have been glowing. The new app offers a few notable features: panes for interacting with content within a stream, media which displays inline without slowing you down and gesture support for common Twitter actions, among other things.

What stands out the most about this new application is not a summary of its features, however. It's how the app fits into this growing trend that positions the iPad as the go-to device for consuming streams. With its touchscreen interface, the Apple tablet is ideal for both viewing and interacting with flows of information - not just tweets, but also Facebook status updates, news, RSS feeds, photos and more.

Sponsor

With the official Twitter for iPad application, the process for interacting with Twitter's fast-updating stream of content has been addressed through the use of panes. You tap on tweets to open a pane on the right where you can see the posted video or photo, or, as is often the case on Twitter, the Web page being linked to via someone's status update. There, within this new pane, the content loads.

But the pane can also be pushed off slightly to the side with a swiping motion so that you can continue to browse through the stream of tweets on the left. By the time the content loads on the right (Twitter's blog post puts it well: "let's be honest, video is great but sometimes it can take some time to load"), you're ready to skim the news, watch the video, etc. and then you can move on to the tweet you've already queued up to take its place.

Initially, you'll have to figure out how this particular interaction works, but after a minute or two, it will be swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe and you'll quickly become addicted to the flow.

The other interactions, unfortunately - like the pinch to view author details or using two fingers to pull down on a tweet and see the entire conversation thread - are slightly less intuitive. Maybe more than slightly, to be honest. There's a learning curve.

For example, you first have to learn how to "properly" tap a tweet. Tap on the tweet itself and you see the right-side pane and its associated content (like the photo, video, news item or even a stream of the hashtag mentioned). Tap accidentally on an @mention within the tweet, however, and you'll end up seeing that person's profile information instead, displayed below the tweet in the right-side pane, and not the associated content. This can get a bit confusing for the new user - and it can easily slow you down, too, because you have to focus on where to tap. And that's just one example.

The two-finger pull-down has to be done slowly or it flips up like a window shade whose cord you just yanked and let go. The pinch a tweet - well, let's be honest here - someone is going to have to release a YouTube instruction video for that gesture. (Oh, thank you.)

In other words, Twitter for iPad is not perfect. (And no, it didn't just "kill" all the other Twitter applications, the Twitter website, or anything else). It's a good enough app, but it may not be for you.

But these days, there are plenty of other applications to choose from. We've previously been fans of Twitterific for iPad, but it wasn't exactly ground-breaking in its design. However, other startups, including Pulse, Flipboard, Entertainment Weekly's Must List, ABC News, Reeder and even some interactive iPad magazines like Wired, certainly are. Wired and EW's Must List each present new visions for magazine content on the iPad, both in long form and short, Pulse and Reeder are gorgeous, interactive news readers and, while ABC News may be a bit hokey for you with its Google Earth-esque spinning globe interface, it's definitely doing something different. Whether its interface ends up winning or losing in the long run is almost besides the point - the point is that new interfaces are possible now, thanks to the iPad.

At the top of the heap today, though, is Flipboard, a social news reading application we recently called "one of the best iPad apps available." In reality, that's selling it a bit short. It's one of the best apps available, period, iPad or not. In comparison with Twitter for iPad, the app clearly excels. There's no learning curve - the entire process is 100% intuitive. And any app that isn't needs to go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate whether its special "tweaks" really work.

Twitter for iPad, despite its many innovations, involves several minutes of practice to get it right. You couldn't hand it over to grandma without a how-to class either. And that's not grandma's fault - she readily mastered using iPad's built-in photo gallery application despite never owning or using a computer. We would argue that good design makes new interactions simple and intuitive - you don't think, don't don't have to practice and you certainly don't have to watch a video to figure out how you "pinch a tweet." You just swipe, tap, pinch, swipe, and all somewhat mindlessly. Twitter for iPad is a good start, sure to be a hit among early adopters, and there's no arguing it showcases some innovative ideas, but it's not a home run just yet.

We might not like to, but we all have to say “no” sometimes. The trick is how do you say “no” with integrity and without coming off like a jerk? There are a several steps we can take to answer in the negative, like a man, says The Art of Manliness. For example, the blog writes:

Don’t make the no personal. Instead of making it seem like you’re saying no because you don’t like the person, think their cause is crazy, or their parties are boring, just let them know you’re simply “following the rules.” By this I mean that your pre-set personal rules prohibit you from saying yes. Ex. “I can’t come to the Polka Festival on Monday night because Monday night is always family night for us.”

Let them know what it would take to get a “yes.” Don’t make the situation seem hopeless if it’s not.
“I can’t give you an A on this paper. But you’re almost there. Next time, include a stronger thesis statement and more supporting evidence and your grade will definitely improve. Ex. “I can’t give you an A on this paper. But you’re almost there. Next time, include a stronger thesis statement and more supporting evidence and your grade will definitely improve.”

Full tips at The Art of Manliness.

Leadership tips and tricks.

Photo credit: Fotolia

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