In the mobile OS world, Google’s Android is still a challenger but with the amount of devices that will be running the system that are due to come out in the coming months alone in combination with its open approach it is definitely a contestant to watch closely. The success of Apple’s App Store for the iPhone / iPod Touch is often measured by how many apps have already been developed for the platform (around 70,000), but since Google doesn’t disclose exactly how many apps are available through Android Market it was difficult to compare the two on that particular level.

But thanks to AndroLib, which provides a useful website where you can browse Android apps from your computer (unlike the Android Market website), we can conclude that there are currently at least 10,000 applications and games available on the platform today.

AndroLib’s latest stats show a total of 10,072 apps that were crawled by their system, the majority of which were free (64.2% to be exact).

The company is first to admit that there are probably more than the 10,000 applications they can track, but says there’s no better way to get an idea of how many applications are currently in the Android Market. The only time that type of information was disclosed that I can remember is when T-Mobile CTO Cole Brodman told PC World back in May that there were 2,300 applications in total available for the platform at that time.

Going by both numbers, that means the Android market has grown 4.4 times in size in just four months.

For the record, the Android Market was first announced on 28 August 2008 and was made available to users less than a year ago, on 22 October 2008. Priced application support was added for US users and developers in the US and UK in mid-February 2009, and UK users gained the ability to purchase priced applications on 13 March 2009.

Of course, it’s not that simple; but if you believe Dr Tracy Alloway from the University of Stirling in Scotland, Twitter and Facebook are very different beasts when it comes to improve your “working memory“, which relates to “the structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information in short-term memory.”

Dr. Alloway has developed a working memory training programme for slow-learning children aged 11 to 14 at a school in Durham, and she found out that FacebookFacebookFacebook did wonders for working memory, improving the kids’ IQ scores, while YouTubeYouTubeYouTube and Twitter’sTwitterTwitter steady stream of information was not healthy for working memory. Also, playing video games, especially those that involve planning and strategy, can also be beneficial.

As with any such study, one needs to take the results with a grain of salt. Without going into the benefits of training working memory for improving your IQ results, it’s obvious that Facebook and Twitter are hard to compare. Facebook is extremely versatile: you can play games there, chat with your friends, view photos and videos; you can even take IQ tests.

Twitter is a much simpler, more streamlined service. Does that fact alone makes it detrimental to your working memory? Dr. Alloway claims: “On Twitter you receive an endless stream of information, but it’s also very succinct. You don’t have to process that information. Your attention span is being reduced and you’re not engaging your brain and improving nerve connections.” That may be true, and while looking at Twitter like a zombie for the better part of the day is probably bad for you, if you mix it up with other online activities – such as Facebook – I doubt you’ll see any negative effects.

We’re hearing of numerous reports that older versions of WordPress are exposed to security threats. WordPress is one of the largest blogging engines with over 5,317,360 – and counting – downloads for their latest version, 2.8. Many large blogs, including TechCrunch, rely on WordPress to get the news out and post content online.

Writes Lorelle on her WordPress-centric blog:

There are two clues that your WordPress site has been attacked:

First, there are strange additions to permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize.

To prevent this attack, if you have not done so already, update your WordPress install immediately to the latest version. Change all your passwords to a strong password (cough), including WordPress blog access for all users, database, FTP, control panels, etc. These are all highly recommended procedures.

Automattic, WordPress’ parent company, hasn’t commented on this issue, but we’ll keep everyone updated. In the meantime, we urge you to update your WordPress blog immediately.

Update: We’ve reached out to Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, and he mentioned the following. Automattic is not the parent company of WordPress. Automattic contributes to WordPress.org like many other companies do. Mullenweg published a blog post mentioning what steps people should take to ensure their WordPress blog is safe.

Imagine a small device that you wear on a necklace that takes photos every few seconds of whatever is around you, and records sound all day long. It has GPS and the ability to wirelessly upload the data to the cloud, where everything is date/time and geo stamped and the sound files are automatically transcribed and indexed. Photos of people, of course, would be automatically identified and tagged as well.

Imagine an entire lifetime recorded and searchable. Imagine if you could scroll and search through the lives of your ancestors.

Would you wear that device? I think I would. I can imagine that advances in hardware and batteries will soon make these as small as you like. And I can see them becoming as ubiquitous as wrist watches were in the last century. I see them becoming customized fashion statements.

Privacy disaster? You betcha.

But ten years ago we’d be horrified by what we nonchalantly share on Facebook and Twitter every day. I always imagine what a family in the 70s would think about all of their photo albums being posted on computers and available for the entire world to see. They’d be horrified, they couldn’t even imagine it. Heck, a life recorder is less of a privacy abandonment step forward than we’ve already taken with the Internet and electronic surveillance in general.

A Business Week article talks about a ten year old Microsoft project called SenseCam (more here) that is just such a device.

It’s clunky today and doesn’t do most of the things I mentioned in the first paragraph above. But a true life recorder that isn’t a fashion tragedy isn’t that far away.

In fact I’ve already spoken with one startup that has been working on a device like this for over a year now, and may go to market with it in 2010.

The hardware is actually not the biggest challenge. How it will be stored, transcribed, indexed and protected online is. It’s a massive amount of data that only a few companies (Microsoft, Google, Amazon) are equipped to really handle anytime soon.

But these devices are coming. And you have to decide if you’ll be one of the first or one of the last to use one.

HTML 5 is the next major revision of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the core markup language of the World Wide Web. The WHATWG started work on the specification in June 2004 under the name Web Applications 1.0 . The W3C adopted the draft in May 2007 as its basis for review. The specification was published as a First Public Working Draft at the W3C on January 22, 2008.

HTML 5 is the proposed next standard for both HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0, as development on the next version of the latter has stopped. HTML 5 was initially said to become a game-changer in Web application development, making obsolete such plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.^[2] Such applications would be made obsolete by specifying a standard video codec for all browsers to use. However, in December 2007, the editor of the burgeoning draft specification dropped the recommendation of the free software Theora and Vorbis codecs, after opposition from Apple and Nokia. This means HTML 5 does not currently specify a common video codec for Web development.

The ideas behind HTML 5, originally referred to as Web Applications 1.0, were pioneered in 2004 by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG); HTML 5 incorporates Web Forms 2.0, another WHATWG specification. The HTML 5 specification was adopted as the starting point of the work of the new HTML working group of the W3C in 2007. The working group published the First Public Working Draft of the specification on January 22, 2008^. The specification is an ongoing work, and is expected to remain so for many years, although parts of HTML 5 are going to be finished and implemented in browsers before the whole specification reaches final Recommendation status. The editors are Ian Hickson of Google, Inc. and David Hyatt of Apple, Inc.

New markup

HTML
HTML and HTML 5 Dynamic HTML XHTML XHTML Mobile Profile and C-HTML Character encodings Font family HTML editor HTML element HTML scripting Layout engine Quirks mode Style sheets Unicode and HTML W3C Web colors Comparison of document markup languages web browsers layout engines for HTML HTML 5 Non-standard HTML XHTML
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HTML 5 provides a number of new elements and attributes that reflect typical usage on modern Web sites. Some of them are semantic replacements for common uses of generic block (<div>) and inline (<span>) elements, for example <nav> (website navigation block) and <footer>. Other elements provide new functionality through a standardized interface, such as the <audio> and <video> elements.^[6]

Some deprecated elements from HTML 4.01 have been dropped, including purely presentational elements such as <font> and <center>, whose effects are achieved using CSS. There is also a renewed emphasis on the importance of DOM scripting in Web behavior.

The HTML5 syntax is no longer based on SGML despite its markup being very close. It has, however, been designed to be backward compatible with common parsing of older versions of HTML. It comes with a new introductory line which looks like an SGML document type declaration, <!DOCTYPE html>, which enables standards-compliant rendering in all browsers that use “DOCTYPE sniffing”.

New APIs

In addition to specifying markup, HTML 5 specifies scripting application programming interfaces (APIs). Existing document object model (DOM) interfaces are extended and de facto features documented. There are also new APIs, such as:

• The canvas tag for immediate mode 2D drawing
• Timed media playback
• Offline storage database
• Document editing
• Drag-and-drop
• Cross-document messaging
• Browser history management
• MIME type and protocol handler registration

Some of the new features are part of HTML 5 mainly because there are no volunteers to split HTML 5 and maintain separate specifications of these features.

Differences from HTML 4/XHTML 1.x

The following is a cursory list of differences and some specific examples.

• New parsing rules oriented towards flexible parsing and compatibility
• New elements – section, article, footer, audio, video, progress, nav, meter, time, aside, canvas, datagrid
• New types of form controls – dates and times, email, url, search
• New attributes – ping (on a and area), charset (on meta), async (on script), data-x (where x is a user supplied custom attribute name.)
• Global attributes (that can be applied for every element) – id, tabindex, hidden
• Deprecated elements dropped – center, font, strike
• Frames made invalid
• Not based on SGML

Error handling

An HTML5 (text/html) browser will be flexible in handling incorrect syntax. HTML5 is designed so that old HTML 4 browsers can safely ignore new HTML 5 constructs. In contrast to HTML 4, the HTML 5 specification gives detailed rules for lexing and parsing, with the intent that different compliant browsers will produce the same result in the case of incorrect syntax.

FriendFeed is a real-time feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS/ Atom feed. It is possible to use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share, as well as originate new posts-discussions, (and comment) with friends. The goal of FriendFeed according to their website is to make content on the Web more relevant and useful by using existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information. Users can be an individual, business or organization. Bloggers writing about FriendFeed have said that this service addresses the shortcomings of social media services which exclusively facilitate tracking of their own members’ social media activities on that particular social media service, whereas FriendFeed provides the facility to track these activities (such as posting on blogs, Twitter and Flickr) across a broad range of different social networks. Some bloggers are concerned about readers commenting on their posts inside FriendFeed instead of on their blogs, resulting in fewer page views for the blogger.

The founders are all former Google Inc. employees who were involved in the launch of such services as Gmail and Google Maps. They include Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris, Sanjeev Singh and Bret Taylor. Venture capital agency Benchmark Capital is involved with the investment funding.

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, California.

Employees of FriendFeed created the Simple Update Protocol to reduce the load put on sites by aggregators such as theirs.

On August 10th, 2009, Facebook Inc. agreed to acquire FriendFeed^. FriendFeed was bought for $15 million in cash, and $32.5 million in Facebook stock.

Supported services

A user can configure their FriendFeed account to aggregate content from the following services:

The on-off relationship between Microsoft and Yahoo has been consummated. A new 10-year deal will bind the two companies as they seek to compete with Google.

In January 2008, Microsoft originally offered $47.5 billion to buy Yahoo outright. Despite Yahoo’s ongoing financial difficulties, the deal was rejected because co-founder and then director Jerry Yang demanded more money.

The latest deal is a revenue-share agreement that involves no money changing hands:

• Bing will become the search engine used by both Microsoft and Yahoo.
• Microsoft AdCenter will become the single search advertising platform.
• Yahoo will focus on media, marketing services, and sales.

Bing usage has been growing at an average of 25% per week. However, this has primarily been at the expense of Yahoo Search and it is yet to dent Google’s market share. The deal will instantly provide Bing with almost 30% of US internet queries and save Yahoo $200 million in search engine technology development costs.

Advertising prospects for the combined systems should also improve. Yahoo and Microsoft both offer effective search advertising platforms, but advertisers often choose Google because it receives significantly more traffic.

However, the link up will not be easy and both companies expect scrutiny from the US Department of Justice. The Google-Yahoo advertising alliance failed in November 2008 partly because of DoJ opposition. Ironically, Microsoft was the biggest and loudest complainer about that deal.

Assuming the legal, technical, and structural details can be overcome, the Microsoft-Yahoo collaboration creates a far more powerful competitor for Google. That will be welcomed throughout the industry, but can the companies work together effectively and beat Google in a market it dominates?

Yahoo has announced that two of its search engine-powered web services will be officially closed on 31 August 2009:

1. Term Extraction — a service that provides a list of significant words or phrases extracted from a larger document, and
2. Contextual Web Search — a service which allows you to search the Internet for web pages using a context-based query.

The announcement was made by Brian Cantoni of the Yahoo Developer Network in a Yahoo Groups posting. According to the post, both these public-facing sevices share an internal backend data source that is closing down.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Yahoo is re-evaluating their systems and technologies. Under the terms of the recent Yahoo-Microsoft deal, Bing will replace Yahoo’s search engine. As we reported last week, that is likely to have an impact on other projects — especially those that are related to the search system.

Neither of the discontinued services could be considered ‘high volume’ and few people have complained about their demise. Yahoo are not adverse to scrapping under-performing or obsolete systems (such as GeoCities), but this could be a first step toward a leaner, marketing-led, profit-orientated Yahoo. Projects may be culled, but at least the company will survive.

TinyURL is a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs. Kevin Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 so that he would be able to link directly to newsgroup postings which frequently had long and cumbersome addresses.

The TinyURL homepage includes a form that’s used to submit a long URL for shortening. For each URL entered, the server adds a new alias in its hashed database and returns a short URL such as http://tinyurl.com/2unsh in the following page. If the URL has already been requested, TinyURL will return the existing alias rather than create a duplicate entry. The short URL forwards users to the long URL.

TinyURL also offers an API that allows applications to automatically create short URLs.

Short URL aliases are seen as useful because they are easier to write down, remember or pass around, are less error-prone to write, and also fit where space is limited such as IRC channel topics, email signatures, microblogs, certain printed newspapers (such as the .net Magazine or even Nature), and email clients that impose line breaks on messages at a certain length. People posting on Twitter make extensive use of shortened URLs to keep their tweets within the service-imposed 140 character limit.

Starting in 2008, TinyURL allows users to create custom, more meaningful aliases. This means that a user can create descriptive URLs rather than a randomly generated address. For example, http://tinyurl.com/wp-tinyurl.

Celebrities get impersonated on the web. They’re famous — everyone is anonymous — it happens. Most celebrities just ignore it; but some get pissed off. Kanye West got mad as hell about Twitter users pretending to be him last week. This week it’s Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler who is up in arms — to the point of actually taking anonymous bloggers to court.

Tyler attempted to sue a group of bloggers that he says were impersonating him, sharing private facts, making false statements even using his likeness on the web, NBC Los Angeles reports. The only problem? The whole “anonymous” thing. Seeing as no one really knows who these bloggers are, they naturally didn’t bother showing up to court. Hell, I’m quite certain they didn’t even know they were supposed to be in court. So the judge dismissed the case.

Tyler is apparently most upset about these anonymous bloggers posting some comments about his mother who passed away last year. I wasn’t able to find those, but I did find a robust web community around “Fake Steven Tyler.” There’s a popular one in the Rock Band Forums, a group on Facebook (also based around his Rock Band avatar), there’s even a Wikipedia page and an odd YouTube video (embedded below).

Twitter took down the fake Kanye West accounts at his request, but it’s hard to see what Tyler or a court could do in this case. A good first step would be to figure out who you’re