
Another interesting tidbit from the recent search share numbers: Facebook is rapidly becoming a meaningful player.
According to Liz Gannes' analysis of the March Comscore numbers, Facebook has already blown past AOL and is catching up to Ask.
Here are the relative shares, as Liz calculates them. (The shares will look unfamiliar, because Liz is assessing each company's share of the whole US search query market, instead of the relative share of the top 5.)
A few important points:
In a few months, Facebook will have left Ask and AOL in the dust. Facebook will also likely be catching up with Bing, without having to shell out massive dollars for toolbar distribution, the way Microsoft is doing.
Taken together, all the non-Google players still have only 27% of the market. Google has 60%. The other 13% is presumably distributed in tiny shares. This "other" will gradually disappear, as Bing or another provider becomes the back-end engine for everyone but Google. The possible exception is if Apple makes a big push here.
If Bing buys the Facebook search business (pays Facebook a huge share of each query to serve the results) and Facebook's share continues to grow, then it's possible Bing could cobble together 35%-40% of the search market just by buying it. Importantly, Microsoft's economics on this 35%-40% will be horrible relative to Google's, because it will have to pay majority revenue share for most ot it. But there does seem to be a path for Microsoft to control those queries. IF Facebook agrees to a deal.
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Before tonight there were probably 30 to 50 teams making a serious play to build the best mobile client for Twitter. Tonight one of those teams was annointed the official selection of Twitter itself and its leader at least is now a millionaire.
People are saying that the acquisition of Tweetie by Twitter is bad news for the ecosystem of 3rd party developers that made Twitter so much more useful for millions of people. In truth though, those odds were pretty good for all of them. Tonight's news demonstrates again that independent developers can code their way into cash, equity and a job at one of the hottest startups on the web. That bodes well for those of us who love to use the software built by all of them, too.
Tweetie developer Loren Brichter is just 4 years out of college. He graduated from Tufts in 2006 and got a job doing embedded graphics and iPhone development for Apple through July, 2007. That month, the iPhone 3G was released and that year Time Magazine named it the invention of the year. After more than a year of development Tweetie was launched in November, 2008. Less than 18 months later Brichter and Twitter announced tonight that Tweetie has been acquired and will become "Twitter for iPhone."
Between cash and equity, Brichter must be a millionaire on paper at least. Brichter's one employee is Ash Ponders, who is in Spain and isn't saying anything on Twitter tonight. These guys built a service that won the big contest. If there were (and this is generous) 50 viable mobile Twitter clients - do you really think any of them launched this kind of business expecting better odds than that?
There are a number of other companies that could have become the official mobile app for Twitter but at this stage of the game Tweetie was an obvious choice. It loads fast, is relatively feature rich, is attractively designed and has proven popular with users.
Tweetie offers an attractive and simple desktop Twitter client, but was most valued for its iPhone version. Its strongest competitors were Twitterific, Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Twitterific is beautiful and perhaps a viable ad-supported small business but is too complicated to be appreciated by all but power users. (It's great on the iPad though.) Seesmic is strong on the smaller Android platform and is extending beyond Twitter alone.
Tweetdeck is the most powerful 3rd party Twitter app but it has higher aspirations, is exploring development of sophisticated Artificial Intelligence, is more complex than mainstream users need and is most likely to be bought by an enterprise, media or financial services company - not Twitter itself.
Tweetie is the everyperson's Twitter app. Twitter is chronically confusing for mainstream users, something the company has been trying desperately to change. If you are looking for a simple, attractive Twitter app for casual use then Tweetie on the desktop works great. When you're on a mobile phone, that's really all you ever need. In his blog post tonight Loren Brichter mentioned "simplifying the Twitter experience." That's something Twitter needs and something he's very qualified to help do.
There is still a place for other, more complex, Twitter apps. Media companies around the world (including this one) are finding Tweetdeck invaluable in carefully parsing the stream of Tweets for high-value nuggets. Seesmic is believed to be working closely with Microsoft in order to bring social media stream reading to all kinds of different platforms.
But tonight one of the many Twitter apps hit it big. That's good news for app developers in general and for the users who would use their software. Go ahead and build a client for a major social network. Odds are it won't prove a viable business, but if you were risk averse then building a Twitter client startup is probably the last thing on earth you'd do anyway. The fairy tale came true for one of these companies. That's reason enough for many more developers to build many more innovative apps in the future.
DiscussApple's mobile gaming platform is huge compared to its rivals. During its iPhone OS 4 presentation Scott Forstall, SVP iPhone software, flashed this slide.
He said, "If you look at dedicated gaming devices like the Sony PSP and the Nintendo DS, we just blow them out of the water."

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Back in November, we started hearing murmurs that Google was considering whether or not to factor site speed into its search ranking algorithm. In a blog post today, the search giant confirms it is now adding site speed to its list of criteria that could affect your Google ranking.
It’s another step on Google’s long road toward achieving maximum speed and efficiency. The company even launched a Site Performance tool as part of its Webmaster Tools suite to help assess site performance statistics and make changes accordingly. Today’s blog post recommends a few other tools for evaluating your site’s speed as well, including the Firefox Add-on Page Speed, Yahoo’s YSlow and WebPagetest.
The new site speed criterion isn’t weighted as heavily as something like page relevance, however. Google says less than 1% of actual search queries performed are being affected by the site speed dimension in the current implementation.
Do you think web site performance should affect search result rankings?
Tags: Google, performance, Search, site speed, Web Development

According to stats just released from Twitter, more than 60% of Twitter users reside outside the United States. International expansion has been on the rise since last year, when Twitter began launching in languages other than English.
In October 2009, Twitter announced it would be releasing versions of the site in different languages and asked for volunteers to help with the translation process.
In November, the site became available in Spanish, launching shortly thereafter in French.
December brought Twitter to speakers of Italian and German. But Twitter’s focus on an international audience predates any of these releases; Twitter Japan will celebrate its second birthday later this month.
Matt Sanford, Twitter’s lead engineer for the international team, wrote today on the Twitter blog:
“In the days following the tragic Chilean earthquake, people turned to Twitter to establish much-needed lines of communication. Signups spiked 1200% and nearly all of those were using Spanish as their language. In Colombia, signups are up 300% after politicians like Piedad Córdoba Ruíz began using Twitter as a platform to speak to constituents. Signups in India have increased nearly 100% since the beginning of 2010 due in part to politicians like Shashi Tharoor and Bollywood mega-stars Sharukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra and Abhishek Batchan. We partnered with Bharti Airtel, India’s largest carrier, to ensure that a large portion of India’s 550 million cell phone users can send and receive tweets via SMS at standard rates.”
Because of the company’s translation and outreach efforts, Twitter has been able to expand to reach an entirely new segment of the population. Their global traffic stats are beginning to look more like Facebook’s.
In fact, we told you a couple months ago that half of Twitter messages were in a language other than English. Since June of last year, Twitter users from outside the U.S. have grown from less than 45% of all accounts to a stunning 63% majority.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Sanford wrote. “We continue to work hard to enable new languages and new partnerships around the globe and we look forward to seeing what happens as we make it easier for the whole world to communicate over Twitter.
Tags: international, twitter

Een Duitse consumentenorganisatie roept mensen op om Facebook de rug toe te keren. Steen des aanstoots is het privacybeleid.
De oproep van de Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband (VZBZ), waarbij 42 consumentenorganisaties zijn aangesloten, volgt op een open brief van de Duitse minister van Consumentenbescherming, Ilse Aigner. Zij dreigt daarin haar Facebook-pagina te sluiten uit protest tegen Facebooks plannen om gegevens over zijn 400 miljoen gebruikers te delen met 'derden'.
Facebook lanceerde vorige maand nieuwe privacyrichtlijnen waarbij het delen van persoonsgegevens met andere bedrijven werd aangekondigd. Facebook biedt daarvoor wel een opt-out mogelijkheid, maar volgens de VZBZ is dat de wereld op zijn kop: Facebook zou zijn gebruikers juist elke keer om toestemming moeten vragen als hun Facebook-informatie met derden worden gedeeld.
'We raden gebruikers van Facebook aan om in het geweer te komen tegen de aangekondigde veranderingen en met hun vrienden een andere netwerksite te zoeken', aldus Gerd Billen van de VZBZ.
Information and Research company Nielsen has released a report called “Changing Models: A Global Perspective on Paying for Content Online” which aims to quantitatively answer the question of how willing people are to pay for online content.
The survey which polled more than 27,000 consumers including 500 Australians produced some interesting results for local content producers.
First cab off the rank is the highly contentious area of paid news content, particularly considering Rupert Murdoch’s attempts to bring in broad-based paid online news services
The numbers show what a battle he and other traditional news producers have in trying to monetise the content they provide.
Only 1% of respondents said they’d paid for online news in the past with 68% saying they’d never pay for online versions of newspapers and 78% said they wouldn’t pay for online only news content.
Other forms of content fared much better. For instance, 51% of respondents said that they’d consider paying for online movies, 49% said they’d pay for books and 46% said they’d pay for professionally produced videos including television shows.
On the other hands, there was little interested displayed in paying for user-generated content such as blogs (9%), videos (16%) or social communities (14%).
Podcasts (24%), Music Radio (19%) and Talk Radio (11%) were slightly more likely to be paid for by respondents.
Other interesting results were that 74% of respondents said that paid-for content would have to be significantly better than what is currently available for free online before they would consider paying for it and 75% said there should be no advertising on Internet content for which they have paid, the survey said.
While the numbers look grim, you’d expect a large amount of people to say they wouldn’t consider paying for content online, particularly when it’s available for free and there’s no simple distribution method for getting much of that paid content.
It will be interesting to see how responses change next year after the release of the iPad and other devices which are looking to do for all forms of content what the iPod has done for music.
Original title and link for this post: Nielsen Study Shows How (un)Willing We Are To Pay For Online Content
If you can’t beat ‘em, bypass ‘em.
That’s the latest solution the local community has developed to counter the Australian Government’s mandatory ISP-level internet filtering plans.
It started with an odd combination of pro-Euthanasia group Exit International, headed by the well-known euthanasia advocate Philip Nitchske, and the Pirate Party of Australia, giving senior citizens classes on how to bypass the Internet Filter.
Now Computer World has released the 20-slide powerpoint deck that’s been used in those classes.
It briefly explains how the Internet works, how the filter works and how to bypass it if/when it’s implemented.
OK, before you jump across there and look for new techniques, I have to admit I may have talked the whole hacking thing up a little.
I mean, there’s nothing that complicated about the method – it essentially says use a proxy – but the idea of grannies sitting there teaching each other how to“hack the filter” will give me something to smile about over the weekend.
It should also give the Australian Government something to think about.
Looks like all the filter is going to succeed in doing is to create massive demand for proxy services in Australia.
Still worth doing Senator Conroy?
Original title and link for this post: Australian Grannies Reveal Their Government Internet Filter Hacking Secrets
A major revision to the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement released to developers today has seemingly blocked all routes for Flash apps to make their way onto the iPhone.
The amendments to the agreement were spotted by Daring Fireball author John Gruber, who noticed a change in a section which detailed which API’s developers could use to create iPhone applications.
Within Section 3.3.1 of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, the new terms read as follows:
Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
Summarising the content, the agreement now requires developers to accept they will no longer be able to use cross-compiling tools to create iPhone applications. Application designers will have to drop tools that utilise private API’s and start learning Objective-C and Cocoa Touch frameworks in order to get their apps to market.
Apple’s stance will be a crushing blow to Adobe with Flash Professional CS5 not far from being launched. A small number of application developers had been granted access to private CS5 betas which allowed them to create rich Flash based apps and package them for release on the Apple App Store using a Flash-to-iPhone compiler.
With these new amendments, Flash Professional CS5 may launch with a feature that will be of no use to developers if they can’t get their applications approved. Unless Adobe are able to change the way Flash-to-iPhone compiles and packages the resulting app, making it look like it was created using the official Apple SDK, they might be left with no choice but to release the software without it’s much sought after Flash-to-iPhone compiler.
Whilst Apple will never admit that they had a problem with Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone compiler, Gruber says it best; “It could hardly be more clear if they singled out Flash CS5 by name”.
Original title and link for this post: iPhone OS 4.0 Kills Flash-To-iPhone Apps