Music identification app Shazam has announced big feature updates to its iPhone and iPod touch music discovery apps. There are now customised settings for 'tagging on start-up' make the process of identifying a music track faster, a new UI, the ability to search for ringtones and videos on iTunes and better video. You can also share tunes you find via Facebook and Twitter. Shame it doesn't own its name on Twitter then.

comScore has just released some telling stats about the massive growth of live streaming video over the web. According to the analytics company, over the past year, the amount of time American audiences spent watching video on the major live video publishers (Justin.tv, Ustream, Livestream, LiveVideo, and Stickam) has grown 648% to more than 1.4 billion minutes. Of course, video consumption on the web has grown generally—U.S. audiences watching YouTube and Hulu increased 68% and 75%, respectively, over the same time period. comScore says that even though live stream viewership still represents a fraction of the total time spent watching online video, it does indicate that viewers are increasingly looking for live streams on the web.

While live online video sites don’t have nearly as much of an audience as static video sites, the live video sites have been able to keep their audiences more engaged for a longer period of time. For example, the average live streamed video view is 7% longer than the average online video view.

Live video could also be good news for advertisers looking to target demographics via video advertising. Live video sites are 72% more likely to deliver the demographic, males age 18-34, than the average online video site. In fact, males age 18-34 comprise almost 30% of the total live video viewing audience on comScore’s sample sites.

In particular, comScore says that Justin.tv, Ustream, and Livestream have all grown significantly in terms of viewership over the past year. In July, Ustream reached more than 3.2 million unique viewers, with Justin.tv reaching 2.6 million and Livestream 2.4 million. Livestream, however, served more than 160 million videos, compared to roughly 130 million from Justin.tv and 20 million from Ustream. Vut those 20 million videos on Ustream were viewed eight minutes longer on average than videos on Justin.tv and 17 minutes more than those on Livestream. In terms of total minutes, viewers logged nearly 900 million minutes watching Justin.tv in July, outpacing the other two sites.

The growth in live streaming viewership isn’t particularly surprising. More and more viewers are looking to their computers and mobile devices for live video content as players like Ustream and Justin.tv provide a platform for these events. Justin.tv just released and Android app that allows you to broadcast video live, and an iPhone app is in the works. And Ustream has already released a similar Android app. Ustream has raised a whopping $90 million in venture funding, and CEO Jon Ham is confident that his company can remain a leader in the space when YouTube eventually starts its own live stream platform (YouTube has dabbled in the space but it is rumored that Google will be launching a live streaming feature).

Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, ousted in this year's election, is forming the Gordon and Sarah Brown Foundation, and has accepted three pro-bono appointments all with some connection to the Web. He's joining Queen Rania of Jordan's Global Campaign for Education. Queen Rania has 1,337,872 followers on Twitter and last year spoke at Le Web. Brown is also working on a new programme to bring the internet to Africa and joining the board of Tim Berners Lee's World Wide Web Foundation. If you recall, just prior to the election in May, Brown launched a policy initiative to put £30m into an "Institute of Web Science" which would have been headed up by Berners-Lee. That centre has been cut dead by the new government, so perhaps Brown joining BL's Web Foundation is a sort of thank you?

Media measurement and Web analytics company Quantcast has some interesting numbers on mobile browsing in the United States, and it’s preparing to release some of those statistics, across vendors. Earlier today, the company put up a teaser blog post, showing two graphs, one of them representing the share of mobile Web consumption in the US per mobile OS.

As you can tell, Quantcast concludes Android is storming ahead, now taking up a 25 percent share of total mobile Web consumption in the US. Apple’s iOS, meanwhile, is seeing its share decline, from approximately 67 percent in May 2009 to 56 percent in August 2010.

Provided this trend continues at current rates, Android’s share should be equal to that of iOS in another twelve months, at least according to Quantcast. It’s important to note that both are still growing rapidly in absolute numbers – what we’re seeing is the relative shares shifting.

Research In Motion’s share is roughly 10 percent according to Quantcast, as much as all ‘other’ mobile operating systems combined, but showing no signs of growth whatsoever.

Clearly, the battle for dominance over the mobile Web is being fought by two companies only at this point, and their names are Google and Apple.

In a second graph, Quantcast reports that Android took share from every corner of the market last month. The company adds that it’s the operating system’s best month share gain since November 2009, when it surpassed the 10 percent share mark.

Now, we should point out that another Web measurement company, Net Applications, has just released statistics that suggest iOS dominates the mobile Web far more clearly on a global level.

According to Net Applications, devices that run the iOS operating system (the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad) accounted for 1.1 percent of all hardware on the Internet last month, compared to a mere 0.2 percent share for Android. This suggests a 6:1 ratio in favor of iOS, looking at worldwide statistics.

It also tells us Android is making strides in the United States much faster than in the rest of the world when it comes to browsing the mobile Web, placing Quantcast’s and Net Applications’ numbers side by side.

Plex is about to get big. The offshoot of the XBMC project just announced that LG will be using its media platform in upcoming Netcast HDTVs and Blu-ray players, in turn, making these devices about the best media streamers imaginable — even better than the upcoming Boxee Box or just-refreshed Apple TV.

After all, Plex already works with Netflix, Hulu, BBC’s iPlayer, and supports playback of just about every media format ever created via the best interface in the business. There’s even an iOS remote viewing app coming soon. Forget about having an extra box sitting on your TV stand just to stream random content, it’s going to be built into your HDTV. Welcome to the future, ladies and gentleman.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab is going to sell well. It won’t be a blockbuster like the iPad, but it should still do alright mainly because it’s the first consumer-worthy Android tablet. Samsung can even price the tablet well north of the iPad’s $500 starting price. It will not matter. People will buy it even if it’s, I don’t know, $800. You might not, but there are enough Android fanboys that will.

Rumors have popped up over the last 24 hours about the Tab’s price. Some European retailer’s pricing has leaked out although Samsung is saying it’s all speculative because the official pricing hasn’t been announced just yet. But still, it makes you think. The pricing ranges from €699 ($890) to €799 ($1,020) for the 16GB and 32GB respectively. Remember, the Galaxy Tab comes with a 3G modem and there likely will not be a WiFi-only model because Google requires cellular capability for the Android Market. But for a quick minute, forget that the iPad offers a bigger screen and twice the storage for the same price. It doesn’t matter.

Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson fame may be too chicken to invest in WeedMaps (think Yelp for pot), but that isn’t stopping other companies from sniffing around the startup, looking to score.

In fact, a company called LC LUXURIES LIMITED, or rather its most recently established subsidiary, US Cannabis, is very close to buying WeedMaps. According to this press release, the Nevada corporation has entered into formal negotiations with the startup to acquire the domain name “weedmaps.com” as well as the current operating website.

Best part of the announcement is the statement from James Pakulis, President of US Cannabis:

“Having an equity interest in Weedmaps.com is only natural. We are truly looking forward to consummating a transaction.”

Instant classic.

WeedMaps.com is an online community where medical marijuana patients connect with other patients in their geographic region to discuss and review local cannabis co-operatives, dispensaries, medical doctors and delivery services.

At present, WeedMaps is home to over 43,000 medical marijuana patients and receives more than 25% of its revenue outside of California, mostly in emerging medical marijuana states like Colorado and Nevada. The company says it’s not just a Yelp clone anymore, having built a business model based on the concept charging dispensaries for the ability to post their menu of items for sale on the site.

Menu items are posted via an AJAX interface called the WeedMenu, which is specifically designed to categorize the products commonly found at cannabis dispensaries, eg edibles, concentrates, indica, etc.

Currently, WeedMaps is tracking 15,703 items across 630 dispensaries in real-time via the WeedMenu. The WeedMenu is searchable, filterable, and shows the products prices (if entered by the dispensary). Businesses pay anywhere between $195 – $395 per month to post their menus online with WeedMaps, depending on region population. WeedMaps says over 75% of the listings update their WeedMenus at least once per week.

LC Luxuries Limited, US Cannabis’ publicly listed parent company, was in the business of selling beauty products such as makeup and perfume on the Web through its website makeup.com. As a result of the sale of certain domain names, the company says it is currently developing a new website and seeking new business opportunities.

At this time, the terms and conditions of the acquisition of WeedMaps are still being negotiated and no terms or conditions of the acquisition have been agreed upon between the parties.

Maybe they should light one up in tandem and see if they can become closer buds.

We all know Google Music is coming, it’s just a question of when – and what it’ll look like, of course. According to Reuters, Google hopes to launch the service as early as December 2010.

Citing unnamed ‘people familiar with the matter’, Reuters says Google’s VP of Engineering Andy Rubin (which we likened to a Steve Jobs-caliber product fanatic in the past) is spearheading talks with music labels on plans for a digital music download store and cloud-based song locker service, which he hopes will see the light of day before year’s end.

Only thing that could get in the way of a pre-Christmas debut: the company has yet to sign a single licensing deal with the music labels, those same sources told Reuters.

It’ll be interesting to see if Google can get some of those deals signed in time for the launch of Android 3.0, code-named Gingerbread, which is expected to come in the fourth quarter of this year. Perhaps writing Santa a letter will help?

We recently broke the news that Google had hired well known music attorney Elizabeth Moody to assist them with negotiations with music labels and other rights holders for their upcoming iTunes rival. Needless to say, such negotiations aren’t exactly a walk in the park.

Each major label has different goals and strategies for digital music, and people in the know we’ve spoken to in the past say it’s nearly impossible to get them to agree to terms that will make a streaming music service viable. In particular, they tend to disagree over how long a free trial period might last, and whether or not a credit card from the user needs to be on file before the trial starts.

That’s not to say the industry isn’t excited about Google’s imminent entry into the digital music arena. As good as Apple’s iTunes, which just got a new, social-network enhanced version with the launch of iTunes 10 earlier this week, has been for them, executives at the major music labels have long considered Apple’s immense stronghold in the field an issue.

Surely, they welcome competition from a rival the size and reach of Google, as the iTunes Music Store has cemented itself the king of the hill over the years, accounting for approximately 70 percent of all digital music sales in the United States. Dependence on a single player isn’t exactly the industry’s vision of a bright future.

One label executive, who asked not to be named, told Reuters as much:

“Finally here’s an entity with the reach, resources and wherewithal to take on iTunes as a formidable competitor by tying it into search and Android mobile platform. What you’ll have is a very powerful player in the market that’s good for the music business.”

Another unnamed label executive expressed more caution despite his or her optimism, stating that Google lacks a track record in “selling stuff” (which is true).

It’s also worth questioning if Google’s entry in the digital music space leaves much breathing room for smaller, innovative startups to compete and maintain viable relationships with the music industry.

With Apple, Google and Amazon fighting for every penny, it’ll become even harder for the likes of Spotify, Rdio and MOG than it has already been so far. Which, to be clear, isn’t to say none of them will thrive or attract sizeable audiences – I just wonder if they’ll be left battling for increasingly smaller pieces of the pie rather than grow into giants themselves.

Yesterday, news broke about a new feature Facebook is testing out called “Subscribe.” For a second, I thought it might be the equivalent of Twitter’s “follow” ability — that is, a feature which would let you follow the updates of someone that you’re not technically “friends” with on Facebook. Sadly, that’s not the case. Instead, this is simply a way for you to more closely follow someone you are already friends with (or fan pages), by getting alerts when they update. But that doesn’t mean Facebook isn’t working on the follow idea. In fact, last year, they definitely were.

Facebook had a secret project last year that involved testing how best to implement a Twitter-like follow feature on Facebook, multiple sources have confirmed to us. The name of the project? Project Dance Party.

But at some point, the project was scrapped. It’s not entirely clear why, as at one point, it was being fairly widely tested within Facebook, we’re told.

In fact, apparently it looked similar to this new Subscribe feature that is currently being tested. It existed as the top link under a user’s profile picture that read: “Follow NAME”. Clicking on this allowed you to see all of that user’s public updates in your News Feed — without the user needing to accept a connection request from you. Yes, just like Twitter.

The thought amongst some familiar with the project was that it was a knee-jerk reaction to the failed acquisition of Twitter in late 2008. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently stated that he thinks he “paid too much attention” to Twitter following the failed bid. “I looked at their rate and thought if this continues for 12 months or 18 months, then in a year they're going to be bigger than us," he told Inside Facebook in June of this year.

His plan to catch them? Project Dance Party. An asymmetric follow feature could make Facebook grow even faster — like Twitter, may have been the thought.

But over time, Zuckerberg saw Twitter’s insane rate of growth slow down. And Project Dance Party likely became less interesting to him because it would mean fundamentally changing Facebook’s friend network and social graph.

But that doesn’t mean Facebook isn’t keeping it on the back-burner. Some of the same sources with knowledge of Project Dance Party now wonder if this Subscribe feature isn’t the first step towards a follow feature. This may be a way to break this ice, as it were. Maybe at first you “subscribe” to friends you want to follow, but later you’ll be able to subscribe to the public updates of anyone.

In fact, Facebook already has a follow feature in place right now — it’s just that most people have no idea it exists, because Facebook doesn’t talk about it. Currently, if you request to be someone’s friend, and they keep you in their queue (meaning they never accept or reject you), you will see all of their public updates in your News Feed.

It’s ridiculous for an actual feature to work this way — but it is essentially Facebook Follow. Clearly, Facebook is still open to the idea in some form.

Obviously, I’m all for a full-fledged version of this. And not just because at one point it had the name Project Dance Party. Facebook’s sharing dynamic has become too convoluted. They need to bring it back to a basic idea: either you share with your friends, or you share with your followers (which includes your friends). It’s an either/or proposition. Sure, lists could still exist to create sub categories of friends. But as Zuckerberg himself has said recently, “nobody wants to make lists.”

Instead, perhaps they’d like to dance. Facebook, just dance.

YCombinator-funded Cloudant, a database platform built around Apache's open source CouchDB framework, officially launches after three years of hard work.

Cloud-based like Cloudera and Amazon Web Services and part of the NoSQL movement, Cloudant scales your database on the CloudDB framework but also provides hosting, administrative tools, analytics and support so “You don’t have to think a lot up front about what your database is going to look like.”

Going up against Goliaths like Oracle, Cloudant focuses on scalability, flexibility, and high availability. Its method of data storage is ideal in any situation in which data is generated in a distributed way, such as with sensor networks, web servers, and mobile device service, in essence “small companies with big data.”

Cloudant was founded by MIT Physics PhDs Alan Hoffman, Adam Kocoloski, and Mike Miller and recently received a seed round of $1 million dollars from Avalon Ventures.

The company currently has has 1,300 users and 10 paying customers and hopes to be the leading provider of CloudDB moving forward. Says founder Mike Miller about future plans, “There will be some huge changes in what web stacks will look like and we want to remain poised to be the cloud service that underlies those technologies.”

It’s hard to remember a product I’ve become so dependent on quicker than Gmail’s new Priority Inbox. I’m so addicted, that the few times I’ve accidentally clicked on the old “regular” Inbox view in the past week have really annoyed me. So much so that I actually moved that view into my “more” drop down (you can drag any sidebar item in there). And now I have good news: you can all share in this addiction.

While it began rolling out to users on Monday, Google is now saying that Priority Inbox should be available to all users (including Google Apps users) today. Look for the “New! Priority Inbox” message in red in the top right corner of your Gmail account to activate it. There’s a slight learning curve with it, so you’ll still probably want to watch Google’s official video. But once you get started, it’s unlikely that you’ll go back.

Overwhelmingly, the people I’ve talked to since the feature started rolling out on Monday are also now addicted to the feature. But some seem deadest against it, instead preferring to use their own filters to better tailor their mail consumption. I’m a big filter user myself, but I simply could no longer keep up with the amount of message coming into my inbox — I needed someone, or something to sort it for me. This isn’t a longterm solution for the email problem, but it will work for now.

When Six Apart launched Vox, a blogging/social network platform with strict privacy controls, in 2006, investor David Hornik had high hopes. Vox is an “amazing blogging platform,” he said, because “Finally I have a place where I can post pictures and video of my kids without concern about who is looking at them.”

Vox will be shut down on September 20, says Six Apart.

What they’re not saying is why. Part of it is likely cleanup for a merger that the company continues to flatly deny – CEO Chris Alden will have fun explaining his way out of that one if it actually happens.

But it’s also that Vox is just pretty much a ghost town. The site has just 5.7 million monthly uniques, says Comscore. And if you really want to show family pictures to your friends, you’ll probably make the effort to just wade through Facebook’s privacy settings quagmire. As for private blogging, well, it just isn’t all that SEO friendly. WordPress ate their lunch, and they do private blogs, too.

We’ve put Vox into the TechCrunch DeadPool.

Heard of Tagged? Back in 2005 it was a teenager-only social network, catering primarily to U.S. high school students as Facebook charged through the college crowds. By 2007 they were profitable and worth over $100 million.

Just one problem though. Facebook eventually started letting high school students in, and then everyone else. Tagged responded by opening up to everyone, too. But by mid 2007, CEO Greg Tseng tells me, Tagged knew it was in trouble.

“Facebook beat us,” he said. “We were just another social network…but not in the top five.”

So Tseng and team decided to reach out to users and ask them what they wanted. “The most important thing we learned was that people were using our site to meet new people.”

Bingo! Facebook isn’t big on helping you meet new people. You can search by name, and you can click on friends of friends, but you can’t just find new people you aren’t already connected to via someone else. At Tagged, people were using filtered search to meet people. For sharing activities, dating, or whatever.

“We focused on being the best place to meet new people for any social reason,” Tseng tells me.

Dating is obviously a big part of this. Facebook doesn’t have dating profiles. And there’s a stigma associated with Match.com and other dating sites, at least for some people. But on Tagged people can meet and date or engage in other activities. “Going to Tagged is like going to a bar with friends, and you will probably meet new people. Going to Match.com is like going to a singles event, and there’s a stigma with that.”

Users definitely agree. In 2007 Tagged had 20 million active users. Today they’ve hit 100 million. 1/3 to 1/4 visit the site each month and the site has 5 billion monthly page views.

And they’re spending money. Virtual gifts. VIP accounts that let you do things like see who’s viewing your profile for $20/month. Revenue has grown to $30+ million, and Inc. named them one of the 500 fastest growing companies two weeks ago. 2011 revenue should be $50+ million, says Tseng.

A/B testing, which entails running multiple versions of a site at once and tracking which one performs best with users, is a key part of launching a new version of any website.Visual Website Optimizer, which I’ll just call VWO from here on out, helps users manage this often complex process. The service shares some similiarities with a Y Combinator-funded startup called Optimizely, which launched in July.

Among some of VWO’s features are multivariate testing (you can adjust more than one item on your site and VWO will run them in various combinations to determine which ones have a positive effect), heatmaps showing off where users are clicking (which are useful for visualizing where your visitors are clicking for different variations of a site), and split URL tests, which gives you the option to redirect
traffic to two alternate versions of your website.

The site also has WordPress, Drupal and Google Analytics plugins, and allows testing of pages which are behind login/signup wall and enables segmentation and running targeted tests (say, for example,
you want to test only new visitors who came to your site searching for ‘Techcrunch’.

Customers can use VWO’s API to integrate the data and management into their own dashboards. And VWO will track conversions across different domains via third party cookies, send email notifications of test results, and will send automatic screenshot generations of variations for archiving and reporting,

The bootstrapped startup is also seeing significant growth in traffic handles by its severs; its servers are now handing 540 million pageviews per month, a 500 percent increase in month-to-month traffic.
And VWO’s platform is being used by a number of well known companies including Microsoft, RackSpace and Vendio.

To many users, Twitter for iPhone (the artist formerly known as Tweetie) is perhaps the perfect Twitter client (though I’d argue that the new Twitter for iPad is right there with it). But the one thing it has been lacking and that users knock it for is the lack of Push Notifications. Well, good news. They’re coming. Soon.

Twitter is currently internally testing the feature, we’ve confirmed. Interestingly enough, we learned of its existence when the latest version of the app went out yesterday (the universal binary that included Twitter for iPad). It appears that users who have iOS 4.1 installed (which just hit Gold Master for developers, but won’t be official out until next week) get the option to enable Push Notifications for Twitter. They don’t appear to be working yet, but the feature is definitely there.

Here’s Twitter’s statement on the matter:

We’ve been testing push notifications internally. When we launched Twitter for iPad, there was a configuration error that caused us to offer push messages to a small set of users. We’ve stopped sending push messages, but users may see an option to turn on push until we release an updated version of the app. So, push isn’t ready yet but we look forward to rolling this out soon.

I’ve asked Twitter to clarify what exactly is getting pushed. I assume DMs and @replies are two options, but it will be interesting if search items or specific lists are options as well. Twitter hasn’t gotten back to me on that just yet.

Currently, a few third-party apps enable Push Notifications for Twitter, notably, Boxcar and Notifo (via Push.ly).

[thanks Nick]

Last time we wrote about Notifo, we called it a “simple mobile notifications platform for anything” — and really, that’s probably the best way to describe it. Take your iPhone, install the Notifo app, hook it up to your favorite services (like Twitter, or GitHub) or any of the “Projects” (read: plugins, like Growl alert forwarding, or Chrome-to-Notifo ), and bam! You’ve got push notifications coming down to your iPhone from just about anything you could imagine.

All that notification sending takes two things: users to send the messages to, and a message pushing backend to handle all the heavy lifting — the same two things, as it just so happens, that one would need to create a basic instant messaging service. And so they have.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

When I read Twitter CEO Evan Williams post tonight about the state of Twitter from a mobile perspective, the first thing that jumped out at me what that Twitter for Android, an app Twitter worked hard on, isn’t even in the top 10 most-used apps for the service. But Williams also used the post to whip out some impressive numbers. Chief among them: Twitter now has over 145 million registered users (though presumably less than 150 million, or he would have said that). And there are now nearly 300,000 registered apps in the Twitter ecosystem.

The latter number above is technically the number of registered OAuth apps in the ecosystem (and includes multiple instances of some apps). Twitter made the switch over from basic authentication to OAuth a few days ago, leaving behind some apps, such as the old Tweetie (which was reborn as Twitter for iPhone). Williams says this number of registered apps has tripled since their Chirp conference — which was only this past April.

Other big numbers thrown out there by Williams:

• Mobile users have jumped 62% since mid-April
• 16% of all new users to Twitter now start on mobile (it was 5% before Twitter started doing branded mobile clients)
• 46% of active users use some sort of mobile Twitter experience
• 78% of people who interact with Twitter still do so through twitter.com — though that number includes people who use more than one app
• m.twitter.com is the second most-used Twitter interface at 14%
• SMS and Twitter for iPhone are tied at 8%

Lastly, he throws in that Twitter’s Promoted Products (read: their first big monetization pitch) has “exceeded our expectations.” No word on if that means Twitter has turned a profit, but that seems pretty unlikely. Still, revenues are undoubtedly growing.

This evening Twitter CEO Evan Williams put up an interesting post about Twitter mobile usage. By just about every measurable metric, it seems to be skyrocketing. He also included a graph of the top 10 ways people are now using Twitter. This includes both Twitter’s own apps and third-party clients, but notably, Twitter for Android is nowhere to be seen.

I’ve confirmed with Twitter that this isn’t a mistake. It seems that Twitter for Android is in fact not in the top 10 ways people interact with the service. That’s incredible considering that Twitter for iPhone is number 4 and Twitter for Blackberry is number 5. Both of those were built by the Twitter team, just as the Android app was.

Even crazier, it’s behind third party clients TwitPic, TweetDeck, Echofon, UberTwitter, and even Google Friend Connect!

Obviously, Twitter downplays that in the post (and by downplays, I mean, doesn’t mention it), and instead only mentions Twitter for Android in the intro to say that it “launched a new version this week.” Remember, “new” is the best tactic to get people to try something.

So why is next to no one using Twitter for Android? Twitter won’t say. But I suspect it may have to do with the awful experience of trying to find apps in Google’s Android Market. Twitter for Android is by far and away the best client for the platform — but you’ll note that none of the other popular Android Twitter clients made the cut either.

So perhaps Android users just don’t like using Twitter? That’s probably not the case. Remember too that a lot of the newer Android phones come with custom skins that often include Twitter functionality without the need for a separate app. Still, for browsing tweets, Twitter for Android is much, much better. People should be using it, but they’re apparently not.

Update: One other thing undoubtedly at play here: Twitter for Android only works on Android 2.1 and later. Again, that’s largely an Android issue as fragmentation is preventing people from upgrading.

More: Twitter Now Over 145 Million Users, Almost 300,000 Apps

An interesting beneficiary of Apple’s launch of music-oriented social network Ping—social status updater Ping.fm. According to Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur, Ping.fm saw a record number of accounts created yesterday (Seesmic acquired Ping.fm earlier this year).

Could it be a coincidence? Definitely, not. When you Google “Ping,” Ping.fm is the second result under the golf equipment site PING (this doesn’t include News results). Apple’s Ping is actually the fourth result (not including Video results). On Bing, Ping.fm is the third result, behind the golf company and the Wikipedia page for Ping. Clearly, as people starting becoming curious about Apple’s Ping yesterday on search portals, they also found Ping.fm in results.

Le Meur declined to reveal the exact number of accounts created but he did say that the number of accounts created was three times the normal rate in a given day. Apple actually licensed the name Ping from the golf company, as PING owns the trademark.

It’s all hands on deck at Reddit this week.

In the wake of Digg’s bungled redesign, its rival is enjoying a surge in traffic and a jump in ad and subscription sales. Since Monday, the site has been averaging 900,000 uniques per day— a 50% increase from Reddit’s pre-”Digg 4″ average, according to senior programmer, Chris Slowe. The six-member team does not openly celebrate the technical woes of its competitor but there is a certain giddiness in the air at Reddit’s SF headquarters (a small room, tucked in the corner of Wired’s expansive office).

The Conde Nast owned startup is having a moment, and they know it.

However, there’s no time to bask in glory, as the number of page views rises and the press rolls out headlines like, “Backlash Continues For Digg as Reddit Steps in and Reaps the Benefits,” “Report: Reddit Ready To Defeat Digg‎,” and “New Digg Sucks? Reddit All Over Digg FrontPage Now!” No, for the four-person engineer team, it’s time to roll-up their sleeves and crank away, to keep the site afloat (no easy task) and create the next whizz-bang features to keep Reddit’s enlarged user base happy.

On Thursday, we dropped by their offices for a pulse check. While programmer David King’s eyes were glued to his monitor— tweaking a feature that will hopefully improve the site’s scalability— senior programmer Chris Slowe was available to take our questions, video above.

Highlights:

-Slowe says they first noticed a spike in traffic on Sunday night, as activity increased in Australia. By the close of Monday, Reddit saw 850,000 unique visitors, that number increased on Tuesday, with 900,000. Traffic has continued to hover around this level, with roughly 13 to 14 million total page views per day.

-Self-serve ads are up 30% since Digg 4′s launch. Overall ad sales have been growing roughly 5% per month, Slowe expects monthly sales to increase 5 to 10% for the remainder of this year. Subscriptions are also up, currently Reddit has 10,000 subscribers.

-Their prayer for more resources is finally being answered. They are currently in the process of hiring one new employee, but hope to have enough cash on hand to hire two full-time employees by year’s end.

-On Digg’s fumble, Slowe says: “I think the biggest complaint from their community has been that they feel marginalized…The only advice I would really give them…they haven’t been as communicative as they could be…Our only currency really is trust and candor and so if you treat your community like adults they’ll behave like adults.”

-On that whole Proposition 19 debacle: “Once the dust settled everything was just fine nobody’s been fired, everyone is perfectly happy. The main problem was that it was all happening very fast. It went from a blog post from the Prop 19 guys to a full blown community revolt on Reddit in about an hour… One of the problems with trying to be candid at all times, is that sometimes private political arguments end up public…we could have been a little bit more graceful in the handling of that.

-On the next feature for Reddit: “Our UI is not particularly friendly…we’d like to work on some tools to make it more friendly…another thing that’s been big is that its not necessarily clear off the bat that Reddit is customizable we have a whole bunch of communities and they all have different bends and you can subscribe to different communities…I think that’s not necessarily clear from a first look.”

We hear that former Palm Vice President of Public Relations Lynn Fox has given up on her "Consult Until-I-Find-Another-Job Consulting” plans and landed  a permanent gig at video streaming service Ustream. Her formal title will be VP of Corporate Communications and she will be reporting to Ustream CEO John Ham.

Sources say that Fox is the first in a series of new hires at Ustream, hires which should be announced formally in the next couple of weeks. Fox’s first day will be Tuesday, Sept. 7 and her primary duties will be leading all things related to PR, Events and Social Media.

It looks like Ustream is taking advantage of its $75m round of funding from Softbank and other investors earlier this year in order to ramp up their recruiting efforts and attract major talent like Fox.

Prior to Ustream, Fox had to honor of working in the upper echleons of communications departments at both Google and Apple. She left Palm shortly before the HP acquisition in June.

Yesterday, Apple launched iTunes Ping, their new music social network. Part of that launch was a very basic implementation of Facebook Connect, simply to hook in and find out which of your Facebook friends were also using Ping. I tried it yesterday and it worked fine. But this morning the option vanished and everyone was left wondering what happened?

Well, it vanished because Facebook started blocking iTunes Ping from accessing their API, we’ve heard (just as AllThingsD and New York Times have as well). Obviously, there’s no point in having a feature that doesn’t work — so Apple simply removed it.

Apple won’t respond to requests for comment and Facebook will only give the vague canned response, "We're working with Apple to resolve this issue. We've worked together successfully in the past, and we look forward to doing so in the future" But yes, Facebook blocked access and so Apple removed Connect.

But wait, I’ve heard that canned statement before. When was it? Oh, that’s right, just about two months ago, when Facebook blocked Twitter from accessing the same API. “We are working with Twitter resolve the issue,” we were told at the time. Deja vu.

So what’s Facebook’s problem? Well, from what we’re hearing, size matters. Facebook is happy to let big companies like Apple and Twitter access their Connect API, but they want a structured, formal agreement in place so they have some control over it. That’s understandable given how large those sites are and how much strain they likely put on the API.

In both cases, from what we’ve heard, Twitter and Apple simply hooked up Connect without giving Facebook much (if any) of a warning. They were able to do this because they were using the same public APIs that anyone else who wants to hook into Connect uses. Of course, most of those other companies don’t have hundreds of millions — or even millions — of users. So Facebook feels there should be different rules in place for those companies.

Again, that’s an understandable position. But the problem is that in Twitter’s case, after months of talking, the two sides got absolutely nowhere. A week ago, Twitter simply removed the Connect feature altogether from their Facebook app.

I suspect things might be a bit different with Apple, as it would be beneficial branding, if nothing else, to have the Facebook Connect button inside of iTunes. But if Apple won’t agree to some sort of formal agreement, it will still likely be a no-go.

Of course, given some of the identity issues Ping is already facing, Apple may soon be happy to work with Facebook on the “issue” Facebook says they’re working on.

[image: New Line Cinemas]

Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post of Internet memes, wins the “more meta than thou” award for making “An Infographic Backlash Infographic” inspired by the tragic tale of a guy whose job it was to game Digg back when Digg had enough traffic to make it worth gaming.

Okay Buzzfeed, just because you understand recursion, doesn’t mean you have to rub it in our face all the time. Aside from the Greyhat SEO tricks, your anti-infographic infographic and the post that inspired it are actually just describing successful web-writing and content creation. It’s like…there’s a reason people are clicking on it.

From the Digg gamer’s playbook, which is really interesting if you care at all about how people used to build website traffic.

“Spam other sites with it too for bonus points. Email large blogs, etc. to try to get them to run with it too.”

From the Buzzfeed “community manager,” in our Tips inbox today:

Thought this might be up your alley -

a couple of days ago someone posted on Reddit about how he been paid to game Digg and other influential sites by creating infographics (those goofy, badly designed images with stats and pie charts called “everything you ever wanted to know about boobs” that keep turning up on content-sharing sites) and then loading them with keyword-spam embed tags once they start spreading.

today, we posted an infographic about how the system works: http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-truth-about-infographics

and within a few minutes, dozens of new fake accounts were created on our site to defend the practice.

the whole thing is pretty fascinating!

Well I do find it fascinating … But wait, didn’t you guys just tell me I shouldn’t link to infographics? Fortunately the spam infographic has some helpful suggestions for what to do when you’re in this kind of a situation. “If you do include a link to a spam infographic include a no follow tag in the html.”

Which is exactly what we did. Thanks guys! Hi Jonah ;)

Perhaps you’ve heard that Apple and Facebook are having a little bit of an issue at the moment. Despite launching with Facebook Connect integration yesterday, it’s now nowhere to be seen on Apple’s new music social network, Ping. And that’s too bad because even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg signed up to try out Ping yesterday, we hear.

While Facebook Connect will no longer help you find Zuckerberg there, if you do a simple name search, there he is. Well actually, there he is twice. Hmm. Which one to choose?

One has 46 followers, says he’s into “Dance, Hip-hop/Rap”, and has no picture. The other has 74 followers, doesn’t list musical preferences, but has a picture. So it’s gotta be the second one, right?

Nope. As tempting as it is to think that Zuckerberg actually filled in his profile to say “It’s true, I invented Facebook,” this is a fake account. The one with no picture and less followers? That’s the real Zuck. He follows two people, Katy Perry and Bret Taylor. One of those is a famous pop singer, the other is Facebook’s CTO. I’ll let you sort that out.

Who cares? Well, it’s sort of interesting that anyone can create a fake account of someone else on Ping. Sure, you need an iTunes account, but there are undoubtedly many people who have no interest in using Ping and are happy to create fake accounts aplenty. As another example, here’s The Beatles. No, it’s not the group (iTunes doesn’t play nicely with them, remember?) — it’s someone who made their name “The” and “Beatles” and put an album cover picture in there.

These fake account could potentially lead to users who believe them getting tricked into making purchases that they think their idols recommend. Zuckerberg didn’t actually recommend Those Darlins, for example — Fake Zuckerberg did.

Seems like there’s an identification system that could potentially help with this. Oh yeah, Facebook Connect.

On Monday, Google made a big splash with a customized Arcade Fire video page that showed off all the cool things HTML5 can do, from video, animations and 3D rendering to gorgeous fonts and choreographed windows. It’s all cutting edge stuff as far as what is possible with a Web browser goes, but there is one very big problem. It doesn’t work so great in all browsers, even browsers that supposedly support HTML5. If you go to the landing page that launches the video in Firefox or even the forthcoming IE9 (which isn’t out yet, but is very HTML5-friendly), it detects your browser and suggests you use Chrome instead. I received the following message on Firefox:

This site was designed with Google Chrome in mind and is unable to render properly in your browser. For the best viewing experience, we recommend downloading Google Chrome and trying this site again.

But wait, isn’t Firefox one of those “modern browsers” that supports HTML5? This isn’t the first time there have been issues with HTML5 compatibility. The problem is that HTML5 is so young that the standards have not been hammered out yet across all browsers. The markup language required to produce the same effect is different for different browsers.

“The Arcade Fire thing . . . they are writing to the browser,” points out Dean Hachamovitch, the Microsoft general manager in charge of Internet Explorer. “They use proprietary Javascript.” HTML5 “done right,” he contends, would be using the same markup language across browsers. Seems reasonable. That is what the open Web is all about. It is why we have standards. But HTML5 is so new that we are getting flashbacks to the late 1990s with sites refusing to accept certain browsers.

To illustrate this point, Microsoft has an browser test page to show the difference between different browsers. Under one set of tests titled HTML5 Demos, there is a “Border Radius” test that changes the border around a block of text. Inside the block of text, it shows the markup code required to create different effects such as animating it or creating dots instead of a solid line. (Update: As pointed out in comments, this is technically CSS3, which is not exactly the same as HTML5, but both go hand in hand). Here is what the code looks like in Chrome:

And here is what it looks like in Firefox

What’s wrong with these pictures? One takes 16 lines of code, the other takes four, and they are completely different.  Even the dots that are created don’t match (Chrome’s dots are square).  A different set of code is required for IE9.  ”We want to make the same markup work everywhere,” says Hachamovitch.  ”If you have to write that differently for every browser it is kind of missing the point.”

Microsoft is working with the standards bodies, as are all the other browser makers, but what is really needed is better definitions and a thorough set of reference examples for every possible HTML5 feature.  It’s a lot of work.  Eventually, we will get there. But until then, expect to see grandstanding about which browser does HTML5 better.  When you hear that, just ask yourself, which version of HTML5 are they talking about.

Update: As many readers in comments point out, the Radius Border example above is not technically HTML5. It is CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheets). It is, however, a related technology. Microsoft lists it under HTML5 Demos here (although it correctly identifies it as CSS3 on the actual demo page), Apple includes it in its HTML5 Showcase as a related modern Web standard, and Google includes it in its HTML5 Studio (“nine demos that show off some fanciful sides of HTML5, CSS3 and friends”). While CSS3 is a different specification than HTML5, it is part of the same family of modern Web technologies that should work in all browsers.

The CSS3 Border Radius test is a good example because it shows visually how something very simple requires different markup. The same is often true for HTML5: the same markup doesn't produce the same results, and to get the same results, you need to write different markup.

This is the bigger issue. As Mozilla’s Christopher Blizzard put it in an instructive post back when Apple’s HTML5 Showcase only worked with Safari:

The most important aspect of HTML5 isn't the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it's actually the honest-to-god promise of interoperability. Even stodgy old Microsoft, who has been doing their best to hold back the web for nearly a decade, understands this and you'll see it throughout their marketing for IE9. (Their marketing phrase is "same markup" – watch for it and you'll see it everywhere in their messaging.) The idea that the same markup, even with mistakes, will be rendered exactly the same. HTML5 represents the chance for browsers to work together and find common ground.

The same argument applies to CSS3, Javascript, and everything else.