Starting next month, the more than 400 million Facebook users could begin seeing a new kind of status update flow through their news feed: the current locations of their friends.

Facebook plans to take the wraps off a new location-based feature in late April at f8, the company’s yearly developer conference, according to several people briefed on the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss unannounced services.

In preparation for the launch, Facebook updated its privacy policy last November. The new policy states: “When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.”

At that time, the company also offered some foreshadowing of the new feature: “If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.”

Facebook has been working on a location-based tool for close to a year, but decided to wait until the product was completely ready for mainstream adoption before announcing it, said the people familiar with the project.

Meredith Chin, a Facebook spokeswoman, said Tuesday that the company wasn’t ready to discuss any possible location-based features. “We’re constantly experimenting with new things around here, but we don’t have any details to share right now,” she said in an e-mail.

The new location feature will have two aspects, according to the people familiar with Facebook’s plans. One will be a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their location information with friends.

The other will be a set of software tools, known as A.P.I.’s, that outside developers can use to offer their own location-based services to Facebook users.

In the past, the company has relied heavily on its strong developer community to create innovative content around new tools and features. This community has also been instrumental in spreading Facebook Connect, which allows smaller Web sites to give their customers the option of signing in using Facebook and tapping their existing social networks.

Of Facebook’s more than 400 million users, about 50% log in to the site at least once a day, and 100 million people access the service from mobile devices. That makes the location feature an area of strong focus for the company.

The staggering number of users on the site has also brought a heightened level of internal scrutiny to the project, according to the people familiar with it. Facebook has been trying to figure out how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, as it has in the past with new features and redesigns.

One of the people familiar with the project said that the company is not trying to beat the smaller location-based social networks, such as Loopt, Foursquare and Gowalla.

Instead, Facebook wants to go head-to-head with Google in the fight for small-business advertising. Facebook redesigned its business pages last year, with the hope of offering more features for small-business owners. According to Facebook, the Web site currently hosts more than 1.5 million local businesses from around the world.

In 2009, Google launched Google Latitude with the pitch to let users “See where your friends are right now.”

Twitter, another Facebook competitor, has also added an option to include location data with tweets.

The Daily Telegraph reports that a new Apple patent has surfaced which could potentially allow the iPhone, or another Apple portable, to act as a sort of electronic key. The potential applications are as limitless as the number of things locked by old-school metal keys. It could be used for cars, offices, homes, or lockers. Basically, anything that could have an electronic receiver mounted to it in place of a metal tumbler-style lock could then use an iPhone as a key.

While Ars Technica notes that "the patent application itself merely describes a unique way of using motion detection to generate an input, such as turning a virtual combination lock-style dial," the patent itself, as reported by the Telegraph, says that the device could be "any suitable electronic device such as a portable media player, personal data assistant or electronic lock" that could open up any number of physical lock types just by communicating wirelessly.

The following series of stories detail some of what happened in 2003 and 2004 after then Harvard-sophomore Mark Zuckerberg launched a site called theFacebook.com.  This site, of course, quickly grew into the dominant global site known as Facebook, which is now used by some 400 million people a month.

• At Last -- The Full Story Of How Facebook Was Founded
• How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked Into Rival ConnectU In 2004
• How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked The Harvard Crimson Using Data From TheFacebook.com

The stories are based on a long investigation into the origins of Facebook that included interviews with more than a dozen sources familiar with aspects of what happened, as well as what we believe to be relevant IMs and emails from the period.  Much of the information has never been reported.

The stories detail some troubling behavior by Facebook's then 19-year old founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.  A source close to the company suggests that the fallout from this behavior has played a profound role in shaping Facebook's current privacy policies and Mark's current attitudes and conduct as a now 25-year old CEO.

It's astounding that until this moment, three years after the iPhone, the biggest software company in the world basically didn't compete in mobile. Windows Phone 7Series is more than the Microsoft smartphone we've been waiting for. Everything's different now.

Today, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft is publicly previewing Windows Phone 7 for the first time. The brand new, totally fresh operating system will appear in phones this year, but not until the holidays. All of the major wireless carriers and every likely hardware maker are backing it, and they'd be stupid not to. It's awesome. We've got a serious hands on for you to check out, but here is everything that you need to know:

The name—Windows Phone 7 Series—is a mouthful, and unfortunately, the epitome of Microsoft's worst naming instincts, belying the simple fact that it's the most groundbreaking phone since the iPhone. It's the phone Microsoft should've made three years ago. In the same way that the Windows 7 desktop OS was nearly everything people hoped it would be, Windows Phone 7 is almost everything anyone could've dreamed of in a phone, let alone a Microsoft phone. It changes everything. Why? Now that Microsoft has filled in its gaping chasm of suck with a meaningful phone effort, the three most significant companies in desktop computing—Apple, Google and Microsoft—now stand to occupy the same positions in mobile. Phones are officially computers that happen to fit in your pocket.

Windows Phone 7 is also something completely new for Microsoft: A total break from the past. Windows Mobile isn't just dead, the body's been dumped, buried and paved over by a rainbow brick road.

The Interface

It's different. The face of Windows Phone 7 is not a rectangular grid of thumbnail-sized glossy-looking icons, arranged in a pattern of 4x4 or so, like basically every other phone. No, instead, an oversized set of bright, superflat squares fill the screen. The pop of the primary colors and exaggerated flatness produces a kind of cutting-edge crispness that feels both incredibly modern and playful. Text is big, and beautiful. The result is a feat no phone has performed before: Making the iPhone's interface feel staid.

If you want to know what it feels like, the Zune HD provides a taste: Interface elements that run off the screen; beautiful, oversized text and graphics; flipping, panning, scrolling, zooming from screen to screen; broken hearts. Some people might think it's gratuitous, but I think it feels natural and just…fun. There's an incredible sense of joie de vivre that's just not in any other phone. It makes you wish that this was aesthetic direction all of Microsoft was going in. Another, sorta similar interface, in terms of data presentation, is this Android Slidescreen app, which gives you a bunch of info up top.

Windows Phone 7 is connected in the same sense as Palm's webOS and Android, with live, real-time data seamlessly integrated, though it's even smoother and more natural. Live tiles on the Start screen, which you can totally customize, are updated dynamically with fresh content, like weather, or if you've pinned a person to your Start screen, their latest status updates and photos.

The meat of the phone is organized around a set of hubs: People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace, and Office. They're kind of like uber-applications, in a sense. Massive panoramas with multiple screens that are each kind of like individual apps. People, for instance, isn't just your contacts, but it's also where social networking happens, with a real-time stream of updates pulled in from like Facebook and Windows Live. (No Twitter support announced yet, it appears—a kind of serious deficiency, but one we're sure will be remedied by ship date.)

As another example, Music + Video is essentially the entirety of Zune HD's software, tucked inside of Windows Phone 7.

A piece of interface that's shockingly not there: A desktop syncing app. If anyone would be expected to tie their phone to a desktop, you'd think it'd be Microsoft, but they're actually moving forward here. All of your contacts and info sync over the air. The only thing you'll be syncing through your computer is music and videos, which is mercifully done via the Zune desktop client.

Hello, Connected World

The People hub might be the best social networking implementation yet on a phone: It's a single place to see all of your friends' status updates from multiple services in a single stream, and to update your own Facebook and Windows Live status. Needs. Twitter support. Badly. But you have neat things going on, like the aforementioned Live tiles—if you really like someone or want to stalk them hardcore, you can make them a tile on your Start screen, which will update in realtime with whatever they're posting, and pull down their photos from whatever service. There's also your very own profile page, where you can scan your current social state and post updates to multiple services simultaneously.

All of your contacts are synced and backed up over-the-air, Android and webOS style, and can be pulled from multiple sources, like Windows Live, Exchange, etc. Makes certain other phones seem a little antiquated with their out-of-the-box Contacts situation.

Holy Crap! The Zune Phone!

Microsoft's vision of Zune is finally clear with Windows Phone 7. It's an app, just like iPod is on the iPhone, though the Zune Marketplace is integrated with it into the music + video hub, not separated into its own little application. It's just like the Zune HD, so you can check out our review of that to see what it's like. But you get third-party stuff like Pandora, too, built-in here. Oh, and worth mentioning, there will be an FM radio in every phone (more on that in a bit).

Pictures is a little different though, and gets its very own hub. That's because it's intensely connected—you can share photos and video with social networks straight from the hub, and via the cloud, they're kept in sync with your PC and web galleries. The latest photos your friends post also show up here. Of course, you get around with multitouch zoom and zip-zip scrolling stuff.

Xbox, on a Phone

I'll admit, I very nearly needed to change my pants when I saw the Xbox tile on the phone for the first time. Obviously, you're not going to be playing Halo 3 on your smartphone (at least not this year), but yes, Xbox Live on a phone! It's tied to your Live profile, and there are achievements and gamer points for the games you can play on your phone, which will be tied to games back on your Xbox 360.

If Microsoft's got an ace-in-hole with Windows Phone 7, it's Xbox Live. Gamers have talked about a portable Xbox for years—this is the most logical way to do it. The N-Gage was ahead of its time. (Okay, and it sucked.) The DS and PSP are the past. The iPhone showed us that the future of mobile gaming was going to be on your phone, and now that just got a lot more interesting. The potential's there, and hopefully the games will be plentiful and awesome enough to meet it.

Browser and Email

Yes, the browser is Internet Exploder. And yes, the rumor's true: It won't be as fast as Mobile Safari. Not to start. But it's not bad! Hey, least it's got multitouch powers right out of the box. Naturally, you've got multiple browser windows, and you can pin web pages to the Start screen, like any other decent mobile browser.

The Outlook email app makes me question how people read email on a BlackBerry. It is stunning. I never thought I'd call a mail app "stunning," but, well, it kind of is. It's the best looking mobile mail app around. Text is huge. Gorgeous. Ultrareadable. Of course, it's got Exchange support too.

Apps, Office and Marketplace

Remember what I said earlier about Windows Mobile being dead? So are all the apps. They won't work on WP7. Sorry Windows Mobile developers, it's for the best. Deep down, we all knew a clean break was the only way Windows Phone wasn't going to suck total balls.

Apps will have some standardized interface elements, like the app bar on the bottom for common commands. But here's a question: Will they multitask? Um, that depends on your definition of multitasking! When we asked Joe Belfiore, the guy running Windows Phone, he alluded to live tiles and feeds as some ofthe ways that third-parties will be able to "bring value to the user, even when their apps aren't running." Which sounds to us like a big ol' "shnope," but we'll see more next month at Microsoft's developer event MIX.

The Marketplace is where you'll buy apps. Since we've got like 6 months 'til Windows Phone 7 launches and people should be excited to develop for it, hopefully there'll be plenty of stuff to buy there on day one.

Naturally, Bing and Bing Maps are built into the phone as the default search and maps services. They're nice, smartly contextual, and very location-oriented. Bing's also used for universal search on the phone, via a dedicated Bing button. (There is no search but Bing search, BTW.) Bing Maps is multitouchable, with pinch-to-zoom. It's rich, with built-in listings with reviews and clever ways of searching for stuff. And yeah, Office! It's connected to that cloud thing, for OTA syncing and such. Business people should be happy.

Hardware and Partnahs

Another way the old Windows Mobile is dead is how Microsoft's handling partners and hardware situation. With Windows Mobile, a phonemaker handed Microsoft their monies, and Microsoft tossed them a software kit, and that was that. Which is why a lot of Windows Mobile phones felt and ran like crap. And why it took HTC like two years to produce the HD2, the most genuinely usable rendition of Windows Mobile ever.

Microsoft's not building their own phones, but they're going to be picky, to say the least, with Windows Phone 7. Ballmer phrases it as "taking more accountability" for people's experiences. There's a strict set of minimum hardware requirements: a capacitive, multitouchable screen with at least four points of touch; accelerometer; 5-megapixel camera; FM radio; and the like. There are serious benchmarks that have to be met. And only chosen OEMs get to build the phones now, not like before, when anybody with $20 could get a license. The OEMs that Microsoft's announcing they're working with at launch are: Qualcomm, LG, Samsung, Garmin Asus, HTC, HP, Dell, Sony Ericsson, and Toshiba. AT&T's their "premiere partner" in the US (dammit). (Take note people! Premiere does not mean exclusive!)

Every phone will have a Bing (search) button and a Start button. Custom skins, like the minor miracles HTC worked, are now banned. The message to hardware makers is clear: It's a Windows Phone, you're just putting it together. Basically, phonemakers get to decide the shape of the phone, and whether or not there's a keyboard.

One other word on hardware, in a manner of speaking. Hardware it won't work with? Macs. Which is kind of stupid to us—a lot of the people Microsoft wants to use Windows Phone 7, like college students, have been going Mac in droves. You wanna lure them back Microsoft? Let them use your phone with any OS.

The Big Picture

Windows Phone 7 Series is, from what we've seen, exactly what Microsoft's phone should be. It's actually good. It brings together a bunch of different Microsoft services—Zune, Xbox, Bing—in a way that actually makes sense and just works. But there's a real, lingering question: Are they too late? The first Windows Phone 7 Series…phone—goddamn that is a stupid name—won't hit until the end of this year. That's more than three years after the iPhone, two years after Android, hell, even a year after Palm, the industry's sickly but persistent dwarf.

History is on Microsoft's side here—we know what happened the last time Apple had a massive head start. Microsoft is, if nothing else, incredibly patient. Remember the first Xbox? Back when it was crazy that Microsoft was getting into videogames? It's cost them about a billion dollars and taken nearly 10 years, but now, with Xbox Live, Project Natal and their massive software ecosystem, they arguably have the most impressive gaming console you can buy. That was a pet project. Now, mobile is the future of computing. What do you think Microsoft will sink into that?

The mobile picture is now officially a three-way dance: Apple, Google, and Microsoft. The same people who dominate desktop computing. Everybody else is screwed. Former Palm CEO Ed Colligan famously said a few years ago: "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in." That's preciselywhat's just happened. Phones are the new PCs. PC guys are the new phone guys.

Similarly to what happened last year, Acer is putting up quite a strong performance at MWC 2010. The company has showcased four new cell phones, including two brand new beTouch family members based on Android versions 1.5 and 2.1. The Acer beTouch E110 is being introduced as an affordable smartphone that comes with 2.8-inch QVGA display, 3.2-megapixel camera and 3G support, but without Wi-Fi. Finally, it appears to integrate a weakling processor, the ST Ericsson PNX6715 running at 416MHz. The beTouch E400 is more of a mainstream device that packs 3.2-inch HVGA display, 3.2-megapixel camera, 600MHz processor and Wi-Fi. Both cell phones will bring rich software functionality via a number of additional applications, similarly to the Acer Liquid A1. The Acer beTouch E110 is due this March, while the beTouch E400 is expected in April.

The Acer beTouch E110 and E400

The other two handsets run Windows Mobile 6.5.3 and belong to the neoTouch series – meet the P300 and P400. They are models that do not shine with any spectacular extra features – the Acer neoTouch P300 integrates 3.2-inch screen with WQVGA resolution, 3.2-megapixel camera and hardware QWERTY keyboard, while the neoTouch P400 is equipped with 3.2-inch display as well (but with HVGA resolution), 3.2-megapixel camera and lacks QWERTY. Both devices will come with the standard pack of features typical of cell phones in the same price category, including 3G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The market launch of the Acer neoTouch P300 is scheduled for March, but the neoTouch P400 will get delayed until May.

There is still no information on the retail prices that Acer's new models will be released at. 

The Acer neoTouch P300 and P400

Google is rolling out two more privacy tweaks for Google Buzz in response to a post by an outraged blogger who claimed that Google Buzz had given her abusive ex-husband and his friends access to personal information.

Google told Harriet that her report helped it "discover one bug and one product issue". The company says it is now working on the following:

1) People you block in Buzz still appear as following you in Reader.The spokesperson says, "This is a bug, and we're working to fix it. Provided that your shared items are protected, only the people you've explicitly allowed to see them can do so -- regardless of who appears to be following you in Reader."

2) No ability to block people from Reader. The spokesperson says, "Until now, there has not been functionality to block people from following you in Google Reader. We're adding this to the Reader interface."

Two further security concerns from her post were found to be simple misunderstandings. Harriet had worried that people -- including her ex-husband -- had been given access to her protected Google Reader shares. According to Google, while these people were able to nominally start following her on Reader, they wouldn't be able to see any of her shares as she had made them all private.

Her further concern that she couldn't alter privacy settings without creating a profile -- which she was uncomfortable doing -- was addressed by the changes made last night.

With these fixes, the situation will be much better. But Google has not announced any plans to fix the deeper problem -- that this is an opt-out service, rather than the opt-in service it should be.

Update: Google gave an official statement, basically repeating what they said in the email to Harriet. Here's the statement:

We reached out to blogger in question this morning and addressed her concerns with Google Buzz and Google Reader. Some of the concerns were due to confusion the product experience created. Her report also helped us discover one bug and one product issue in Google Reader:

1) If you block people in Buzz, they still show up as following you in Reader. This is a bug, and we're working to fix it. Provided that your Google Reader shared items are protected, only the people you've explicitly allowed to see them can do so -- regardless of who appears to be following you in Reader.

2) Until now, there has not been functionality to block people from following you in Google Reader. We're adding this to the Reader interface.

We are making these two changes as fast as possible and we'll get them live in the next few days.

Noted security researcher Ross Anderson and colleagues have published a paper showing how "Chip-and-PIN" (the European system for verifying credit- and debit-card transactions) has been thoroughly broken and cannot be considered secure any longer. We remember hearing rumbles that this attack was possible even as Chip-and-PIN was being rolled out across Europe, but that didn't stop the banks from pushing ahead with it, spending a fortune in the process.

The flaw is that when you put a card into a terminal, a negotiation takes place about how the cardholder should be authenticated: using a PIN, using a signature or not at all. This particular subprotocol is not authenticated, so you can trick the card into thinking it's doing a chip-and-signature transaction while the terminal thinks it's chip-and-PIN. The upshot is that you can buy stuff using a stolen card and a PIN of 0000 (or anything you want). This was tried, on camera, using various journalists' cards. The transactions went through fine and the receipts say "Verified by PIN".

It's no surprise to us or bankers that this attack works offline (when the merchant cannot contact the bank)..

But the real shocker is that it works online too: even when the bank authorisation system has all the transaction data sent back to it for verification. The reason why it works can be quite subtle and convoluted: bank authorisation systems are complex beasts, including cryptographic checks, account checks, database checks, and interfaces with fraud detection systems which might apply a points-scoring system to the output of all the above. In theory all the data you need to spot the wedge attack will be present, but in practice? And most of all, how can you spot it if you're not even looking? The banks didn't even realise they needed to check. 

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google plans to take another stab at capturing some of the momentum surrounding social networking companies like Facebook and Twitter by leveraging Gmail, its popular e-mail service.

Later this week, Google will unveil add-ons to Gmail that let people post and view messages about their day-to-day activities, according to a person at Google briefed on its plans. This simple tweak to Gmail will let Google mimic the status updates that have driven much of Facebook and Twitter’s success, as people return to the services again and again to check out what their friends and co-workers are doing.

To date, Google has let people post only a brief message about their status through its Chat system, which is linked to Gmail. The new features would allow a more vibrant back-and-forth among Gmail users.

It is not clear whether Google will link the new Gmail features to rival social-networking services.

The Gmail move signals that Google remains serious about becoming a social media force at a time when some of Silicon Valley’s younger start-ups have stolen some of its thunder.

“It might look like a minor feature advance, but this is another blow in the war against Facebook,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Altimeter Group, a technology consulting company.

Google has a full-blown social networking service called Orkut which has proved especially popular in Brazil. In addition, the company has a Web browser add-on called Sidewiki that lets people jot down and share information about a Web site, and a Profile service where people can post information about themselves.

These efforts have done little to put Google on center stage when it comes to social networking. Google, in fact, finds itself in a similar position to Microsoft, as a company struggling to figure out how to stretch its traditional strongholds and brand into new areas.

Microsoft, a rival to Google in several areas, has invested in Facebook.

“You can see the factions starting to line up,” Mr. Owyang said.

Analysts remain skeptical as to whether a new twist on Gmail will do much to elevate Google’s position in the social networking realm. That said, the market remains relatively nascent, meaning there is room for companies to challenge the likes of Facebook, they said.

Google is also expected to create strong ties between Gmail and its YouTube video site and Picasa photo gallery service. It plans to unveil the changes to Gmail this week.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 has finally become the world's most-used browser, according to Net Applications' figures based on monitoring website usage. IE8 has taken over from IE6, which has been hit by the decline in the use of Windows XP.

In January 2010, NetApps reckons IE8 had 22.31% of the market, with IE6 on 20.07%. Firefox 3.5 took third place with 17.01%, ahead of IE7 (14.58%), Firefox 3.0 (5.29%), Google Chrome (3.92%) and Apple Safari (3.55%). Actually, IE8's lead is even larger if its 3% market share in "compatibility mode" is counted.

IE6 has maintained its user base because it shipped with what has been by far the world's most popular operating system, Windows XP. However, XP is now in decline. According to NetApps, XP's market share fell from 75.02% in March 2009 to 66.31% in January 2010. IE6's decline is very similar to XP's decline. It appears that the most effective strategy for those who want to be rid of IE6 would be to encourage Windows XP users to upgrade to Windows 7.

Windows XP, launched in 2001, still had two-thirds of the market in January 2010, ahead of Windows Vista (17.39%), Windows 7 (7.51%), Mac OS X 10.5 (2.36%), Mac OS X 10.6 (1.79%) and Linux (1/02%).

A STUDY by the German web analytics firm Webmasterpro.de claims that a huge 21 per cent of German PCs run the Openoffice.org suite or other open source office productivity applications.

Apparently the company tapped in to a huge sample of over one million German Internet users and its magic Flash Counter Statistics Service spat out thefollowing numbers. The largest group, 72 per cent of users stuck with Microsoft Office, 21.5 per cent chose a variant of Openoffice.org (including Sun's Staroffice, IBM's Lotus Symphony and other derivatives), 2.7 per cent preferred Corel's WordPerfect Office, 1.4 per cent used Apple's Iwork, 0.3 per cent selected Softmaker Office and 0.03 per cent chose Koffice, while 17.1 per cent didn't have any office applications suite installed at all.

The method used in the survey was a pretty nifty idea. The counter checked which fonts were installed on each user's PC, from which it could then identify the types of office suites being used.

We know that the Germans have a healthy respect for IT. They have a one of the best and most versatile IT publishing markets on the planet but 21 per cent is a staggering statistic.

A quick check of Wiki stats only found references to other European counties deploying Openoffice.org for public sector and small business workloads.

Facebook is well on its way to taking Yahoo’s spot as the third largest Web property in the world. (Google and Microsoft are No. 1 and No. 2, respectively). Last summer Facebook took the No. 4 spot globally, displacing AOL, but according to comScore there was still an estimated 241 million unique visitors a month separating it from the No. 3 site, Yahoo. In December, 2009, that gap narrowed to 125 million unique visitors globally. (That was also the same month Facebook passed AOL in the U.S. to take the No. 4 spot domestically).

In December, 2009, Facebook attracted 469 million unique visitors, up an incredible 31 million visitors from the month before. To put that in perspective, in a single month Facebook gained as many new visitors as Yahoo did all year. That one-month gain was also the equivalent of adding as many people as all of Digg or half of Twitter.com. Meanwhile, Yahoo lost 7 million unique visitors from November to December to end the year at 594 million unique visitors. (In the U.S., Yahoo is a stronger No. 2 after Google, with 161 million uniques in December, compared to 173 million for Google, 138 million for Microsoft, and 112 Million for Facebook).

These numbers are different than the 350 million registered users Facebook itself counts, half of which come every day. ComScore estimates total traffic, which is larger than the number of reported registered users (you don’t have to be a Facebook member to visit a public page). And these are estimates, remember that. And they don’t include the 60 million people a month who log into other sites via Facebook Connect.

For the year, Facebook grew by nearly 250 million uniques. Repeating that will be difficult in 2010, but even if it slows to half that pace and Yahoo remains stagnant, Facebook could overpass Yahoo within a year to become the third largest site in the world, all without even necessarily going public. Passing Microsoft (No. 2) or Google (No. 1) in unique visitors will take a little longer. Microsoft’s sites ended the year with 727 million uniques worldwide (up 80 million), while Google’s attracted 899 million in December (up 123 million).

By other measures, Facebook is already larger than both Yahoo and Microsoft. Its pageviews grew 141 percent last year to 193 billion in December, nearly double Yahoo’s 100 billion (down 2 percent) and Microsoft’s 109 billion (up 54 percent). Google is still the largest pageview generator with 274 billion a month (up 35 percent). Yahoo has simply lost its zip. At least Microsoft and Google are still showing respectable growth for their size. But it is not too hard to imagine Facebook catching up to Google here as well (see chart below). Facebook also beats Yahoo in terms of total minutes spent on the site (116 million versus 101 million) and average minutes per visitor (247 minutes a month versus 170 for Yahoo).

Steve Jobs held a town hall meeting with Apple employees late last week following the iPad launch. Wired reports on what was said at the meeting by Steve Jobs. Two of the biggest topics included Google and Adobe.

On Google, Jobs confirms the much-reported competition between the two companies.

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.

As for Adobe, Jobs said they are lazy and Jobs blames Adobe for a buggy implementation of Flash on the Mac as one of the reasons they won't support it.

About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.

Those are the main points covered by Wired's article. Many of the details of the Wired report line up, so we believe it likely to be accurate. Some additional key points that we learned:

- Apple will deliver aggressive updates to iPhone that Android/Google won't be able to keep up with
- iPad is up there with the iPhone and Mac as the most important products Jobs has been a part of
- Regarding the Lala acquisition, Apple was interested in bringing those people into the iTunes team
- Next iPhone coming is an A+ update
- New Macs for 2010 are going to take Apple to the next level
- Blu-Ray software is a mess, and Apple will wait until sales really start to take off before implementing it.

“We don’t know how to build a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk.”

“Netbooks aren’t better at anything.”

Those two quotes are both from Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The first was during an earnings call in late 2008 when Jobs fielded a question about why Apple wasn’t cutting prices amid the rising success of netbooks. The second came on Wednesday as Jobs was unveiling the iPad.

Apple has made it clear all along that they had no plans to build a netbook. And true to their word, they haven’t. But that doesn’t mean that Apple didn’t feel there was a need for a device that resided in between a full laptop and a mobile phone — in fact, that’s squarely where Apple is positioning the iPad. With it, they feel that they’ve created a $500 (for the baseline version) device that is superior to every netbook out there.

Meanwhile, Google has decided to target the market in between the laptop and the mobile phone as well. But whereas Apple is anti-netbook, Google is very pro-netbook — they just want to make them better. That’s the reason behind Google’s Chrome OS, as Google clearly laid out during its unveiling event late last year.

And so yes, we once again have Google and Apple on a collision course.

Now, it remains to be seen if people who buy an iPad will do so instead of buying a netbook. At first, I’m not so sure that will be the case. But it stands to reason that eventually, this will happen. And as Jobs’ comments on stage on Wednesday made abundantly clear, that’s Apple’s idea too. In their eyes, you shouldn’t buy a cheap, underpowered PC, you should buy an iPad, their anti-netbook.

Google, which plans to release its first Chrome OS-based netbooks in time for the holiday season next year, can’t like that plan too much. They have promised that netbooks that run Chrome OS will be better than current netbooks because they’re dictating certain minimum requirements (such as big keyboards) to manufacturing partners. But Chrome OS netbooks won’t be able to match the sex appeal of the iPad’s multi-touch screen. However, what they can offer is a familiar experience (much more like a traditional laptop then an iPad), and that will be appealing to a lot of people.

And what’s interesting is that for either of the two to be massive hits, they both will need consumers to continue to feel comfortable moving away from traditional software applications such as Microsoft Office. But their plans to get consumers to do that are very different. Google wants everyone to move towards doing everything on their apps in the cloud. Apple, as they made clear with their overly-long iWork for iPad demo on Wednesday, wants everyone to move towards using iPhone OS-based apps.

And that’s why this battle coming at the end of this year will be interesting to watch. Both Apple and Google are very popular with consumers, but their offerings are very different — while aiming for the same market. And as two companies that were once as close as could be, it’s also fascinating to watch the tension and awkwardness as they now compete in an ever-growing number of areas.

If this market between laptops and smartphones proves big enough, perhaps the two frenemies can once again find a common ground and band together to defeat their common enemy: Microsoft. But the obvious strategy for this used to be that Google would attack Microsoft from the bottom with its Chrome OS netbooks, while Apple attacked from the top with their premium computers, leaving Microsoft squeezed in the middle. With the iPad now clearly aimed at netbooks thanks to its pricing and Apple’s positioning, everything is different.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad today. Positioned between a smartphone and a laptop, the tablet does many of the same things as the iPhone, but on a bigger, more easily viewed screen.

Steve Jobs shows off Apple’s iPad on Wednesday.

Demonstrating the iPad at an event in San Francisco, Jobs showed how it could be used for e-mail and Web browsing, viewing photos, managing calendars and contacts, listening to music, and viewing video.

The iPad is a half-inch thick, weighs 1.5 pounds, and has a 9.7-inch LCD screen. It's run by a custom-made 1GHz CPU, and comes with 16, 32, or 64GB of flash storage. For connectivity, it has 802.11n, WiFi, and Bluetooth 2.1. Jobs claimed it will get up to 10 hours of battery life.

In addition to the built-in Apple apps, the iPad will also run third-party software. Senior Vice President Scott Forstall said that the tablet will run most existing iPhone apps unmodified, right out of the box. Those apps can run at their existing size in a black box or can be doubled to run in full-screen mode. Apple is also making a software development kit available to developers, to help create apps specifically for the new device. To demonstrate what vendors could do with those tools, Forstall introduced representatives from Gameloft, Electronic Arts, and the New York Times to demonstrate iPad apps they'd already built.

The days of Apple tablet rumor-mongering may soon be coming to an end—Apple confirmed that it will hold an invitation-only event in San Francisco on Wednesday, January 27 to introduce its “latest creation.”

The invitation to the January 27 event, sent out to the media Monday, doesn’t specify what will be announced. But for those who like to read the company’s tea leaves, the e-mailed invitation could be telling.

The e-mail reads “Come see our latest creation,” with the Apple logo super-imposed on a background of paint splotches. Apple’s invitations usually include some clue as to what the event will be about—the invite to last fall’s iPod-only event, for example, featured a silhouetted iPod dancer with the words “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it.” The fact that this latest invitation doesn’t reference any existing products will only fuel the speculation that Apple has something new up its sleeve—and that something could be the tablet-based computer of myth, legend, and song.

Apple will hold its event at 10 a.m. PT on January 27 in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco. Macworld will be on hand at the event to tell you every last detail.

Tablet rumors have been heating up for some time now, but speculation reached a boiling point last month. An ex-Google executive said that Apple would unveil a tablet in January, and The Financial Times reported that Apple had booked space at the Yerba Buena Center for a product unveiling. (Of course, the Financial Times originally reported that the event would be held January 26—one day off, as it turns out.)

Apple’s competitors seem to think a tablet is in the works as well. At this month’s CES, Microsoft honcho Steve Ballmer showed off a prototype of HP’s touchscreen tablet PC, a move many CES attendees saw as an effort to steal some of Apple’s tablet thunder.

Who remembers that annoying ‘uh oh’ sound ?  Well, ICQ is preparing for a comeback - of sorts!

More than 13 years after its first release, and nearly 12 years after AOL bought the company behind ICQ (Mirabilis) for a whopping $407 million, there is an updated client available for download that finally brings the product into the era of the realtime web and social networking craze.

The question is: is it too little, too late?

ICQ7, the latest iteration of the Internet communication product, is now a desktop client that does much more than instant messaging, and in fact will compete with the likes of Seesmic and TweetDeck as well as web-based aggregators like Meebo and eBuddy.

The new ICQ7 adds a familiar social layer to the messaging service, offering integration with Facebook and Twitter, as well as a number of content networks like YouTube and Flickr.

New tabs brings streams from these networks to the messenger client, and you can interact with your friends and content from inside the client to boot. Furthermore, status updates shared on ICQ can now be pushed to a wide variety of networks, in essence replicating functionality we know fromPing.fm (recently acquired by Seesmic) and HelloTxT.

The ICQ client, which is only available for Windows for now, has also been given a new lick of paint and is supposed to take less space and run much faster. The new version also includes a couple of new options aside from the social network integration, such as advanced picture-sharing functionality and the ability to extend your user profile.

Frankly, I think all these features are long overdue, and I doubt there’s any compelling reason for people to switch back to ICQ if they’re already happily using alternative aggregators or content with updating each social network individually. That said, the additions are nice for existing ICQ users, of which there are currently 42 million worldwide according to the press release (although I don’t know a soul who’s still on it).

ICQ has been rumored to be up for sale for a while now, and we heard Aol has been talking to Google, Facebook investor Digital Sky Technologies and Naspers recently.

The world has just dramatically changed.

Google Blog: Google threatens to leave China.

Intel Corp released a flurry of new computer chips on Thursday as the tech giant seeks to maintain itsdominant position in the PC industry and prepares for an expected boost in demand.

The new microprocessors, designed to power desktop and laptop PCs, are the first of a new generation of chips featuring smaller transistors that Intel said will juice performance and improve energy efficiency.

Intel released these new chips ahead of arch-foe Advanced Micro Devices, which is not due to field chips featuring the smaller 32-nanometer circuits until 2011.

"The juggernaut is rolling on, if you will," said David Kanter, an analyst with Real World Technologies. "It's important because it's their first 32 nanometer products, but if you're looking at what they're releasing in notebook and desktop, this is where they (Intel) already have a lead over AMD."

Intel, the world's No. 1 chipmaker, had an 81.5 percent share of the PC and server microprocessor market in the third quarter, according to Mercury Research. AMD had a 17.8 percent share.

The introduction of the new processors come on the heels of the release of Microsoft Corp's new Windows 7 PC operating systemsoftware, which Intel executives expect will prompt consumers and businesses to upgrade to new, more powerful PCs.

Apple today announced that more than three billion apps have been downloaded from its revolutionary App Store by iPhone and iPod touch  users worldwide.

“Three billion applications downloaded in less than 18 months—this is like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “The revolutionary App Store offers iPhone and iPod touch users an experience unlike anything else available on other mobile devices, and we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon.”

iPhone and iPod touch customers in 77 countries worldwide can choose from an incredible range of apps in 20 categories, including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel.

Apple's January event is slated for the 26th. The firm is believed to have rented out the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco to unveil a "major" product on January 26th. It would also have access to the small theater for "several days," most likely for Steve Jobs or other Apple executives to conduct final rehearsals in advance of the actual presentation. Traditionally, Apple has used the Yerba Buena Center for media-oriented rollouts such as iPod and iTunes updates.

What would be introduced isn't directly provided by the source for the Financial Times, but it comes after a flurry of rumors in the past day of Apple unveiling its tablet the same month. One of these expressed a strong level of confidence that it will actually involve a 7-inch screen rather than the 10-inch model supposed by many.

It's increasingly suspected that the tablet's larger screen area will be used not just for upsized iPhone apps but as a key delivery vehicle for Apple's media strategy, such as possible iTunes TV subscriptions or tablet-oriented versions of books and magazines.