Remember back in October 2007 when Google acquired Jaiku , the mobile microblogging tool? Some people, including myself, thought the startup would become for Google what Dodgeball didn't: a viable entree into the world of mobile social networking. As I wrote on this blog then: Jaiku enables users to post thoughts, converse, and share photos, blog entries and other digital stuff with friends.In other words, Jaiku's software enables microblogs,

Amazon.com's Android activities continue to attract the attention of us media types, as the company quietly offered customers who buy an Android smartphone or tablet from Verizon Wireless a $25 credit to buy Android apps. On Friday I reported that Amazon was offering the HTC Thunderbolt for $129.99 through Monday, ideally to help Verizon make room for the Samsung Droid Charge and other 4G smartphones. When you go to buy the phone,

Android fans bask in the glow of the platform's 33 percent U.S. market share, which is 8 percentage points higher than Apple's iPhone share, according to comScore . But it's misleading. Everyone following this space closely knows there are well over 100 phones based on Google's operating system, compared to almost a handful of iPhones, only two of which are based on the current Apple iOS. I covered this last week .

Reuters reported that Apple has finished its cloud-based music service and will launch it before Google in news that should come as a shock to no one at this point. Google has been rumored to be struggling coming to terms with music labels. Some say labels are squeezing Google, while others say Google keeps changing the program. Reuters meanwhile said Apple's will allow iTunes customers to store their songs in Apple's servers, likely in the new North Carolina datacenter,

Anyone else think Google will become more or less acquisitive with Larry Page as CEO? Page replaced Eric Schmidt at the controls April 4. Since that time, the company only announced mobile music startup PushLife as an acquisition, but the company has $36.7 billion in cash to play with in M&A and investing in wind farms and solar towers and such. AllThingsDigital had fun with this working list of potential buys, some of which are old hat and obvious,

Google April 19 jazzed up Google Toolbar 7 for Internet Explorer with Google Instant, the company's predictive search technology. Google Instant surfaces search results to users as they type their require, eliminating the need for users to hit the enter button. You'd be surprised how much time this saves users, who spend 9 seconds on average entering a search query into Google. After they hit the search button,

Has anyone else noticed the new tweets section when you click into full coverage pages of Google News? Now when you click on a news cluster of stories from the front page, you'll see related tweets aggregated in the right hand rail of Google News. It's been live for two weeks and uses the same technology as Google's real-time search, Google told me. I noticed it by happenstance last week. After I wrote about the LG Thrive prepaid smartphone from AT&T,

For those interested in Google's Android platform, you must read Fred Vogelstein's latest piece in Wired when he calls attention to a number of points. My light bulb moment in reading the article, which rehashes a lot of what has been reported by myself and others who follow Google vs. Apple in the mobile space, is this passage: During the OS wars of a generation ago, it was hard to write software for one platform, let alone two,

Sentiment analysis software specialist SocialNuggets April 13 published a brief blog post noting how HTC handsets dominated the iPhone in social media buzz through March. SocialNuggets analyzed over "1,000,000 conversations quarterly on social media and forums related to smartphones." The company found that the iPhone 4 ranked tenth, while the HTC ThunderBolt was first, followed by the HTC Inspire 4G and HTC Incredible S in the top three handsets for the month: The reason?

Google's Goo.gl URL shortening service won't be mistaken for Bit.ly or any of the other well-heeled URL shrinking services yet, but the search engine isn't it letting it go by the wayside. Google, which feted Goo.gl with its own Webpage, history, and analytics last September, has added a number of features users have commonly requested. One key feature is a Google spreadsheet spam reporting form located at goo.gl/spam-report that lets users notify Google report any goo.

Google April 12 trumpeted the fact that its Google Docs now has pagination, which lets users see visual pages on their screen similar to the way people have been doing via the Microsoft Word word processing app for two decades. When users edit their documents in Docs they'll see visual page breaks while users are editing their documents, providing them context for their body of work, like so: Luiz Pereira, software engineer for Docs,

Ever since Google launched its Facebook Like +1 recommendation button, super smart people have weighed in with a number of suggestions on what Google needs to do to succeed in social, especially now that we realize the +1 button isn't the answer even if it could be a nice monetization boost. Talk intensified after Larry Page took the CEO reigns last week and things really heated up when it was reported that Page is doubling down on social,

ComputerWorld compiled the type of list people gobble up: a list of smartphones getting the bump to Gingerbread, or Google's latest Android 2.3 operating system. Gingerbread is best known for offering native support for near field communications )NFC(, a gyroscope for improved gaming, Internet )VoIP/SIP( calling, multitasking and a refreshed user interface with a better keyboard. This means better copy and paste capabilities as well.

Sometime you read things that are just, well, head scratchers. Take for example, Nicholas Carlson's scoop in Business Insider that Google CEO Larry Page sent out a memo April 1 to tell employees that 25 percent of their annual bonus will be tied to the success or failure of Google's social strategy in 2011. Page allegedly wrote in the memo, titled "2011 Bonus Multiplier" that the company multiplier will be somewhere between .75 and 1.25,

Congress held an antipiracy hearing April 6, in which Rep. Bob Goodlatte, chairman of a U.S. House Judiciary subcommittee that is investigating Web sites accused of pirating intellectual property said: "The question isn't what Google has done. But more about what Google has left to do." CNET noted that he then accused Google of allowing alleged pirate sites to fund their activities by posting Google ads on their site,

Yesterday I noted Baird's report that fragmentation in the Android platform is making some developers nervous. If developers can't publish their applications to the Android Market, fragmentation is kind of a moot point. Indeed, Android Developer Console, the content management application that lets developers publish their apps to the Android Market has been experiencing outages and other issues since March 31, Google confirmed.

Switzerland's top administrative court supported the country's Federal Data Protection Commissioner Hanspeter Thuer in agreeing that against Google Street View map service infringes on privacy. Street View provides 360° horizontal and 290° vertical panoramic street-level views of 100-plus cities all over the world. The service has since May 2010 been vilified the world over for collecting 600GB of user passwords, browsing info and e-mail via unsecured wireless networks.

As of this writing, Google's Android operating system has captured 33 percent of the U.S. smartphone market share through February, according to to comScore . That's one third of the total market in less than three years since the T-Mobile G1 appeared in late summer 2008. Research in Motion, Microsoft Windows Phone and Nokia Symbian abroad are all falling by the wayside as Android and iOS combine for 58 percent of the smartphone market. The new market positioning has some,

Google this week proved just how bullish it is on near field communications )NFC( technology, ending support for QR codes on Google Places and other products and joining the non-profit industry group NFC Forum, as a principal member. Until last week, QR codes )pictured right( directed people to businesses' Google Places Pages. Some 100,000 businesses joined Google' "Favorite Places on Google" initiative,

Ever since Foundem, eJustice and Ciao filed antitrust complaints with the European Commission in Brussels that Google was impacting their ability to do business online, it had been rumored that Microsoft had been behind the complainants, supporting them. The speculation is now moot. In a move drenched in irony thick enough to choke on, Microsoft has formally added a complaint to the European Commission that Google has violated European competition law in search,