Mobile ad network AdMob (now part of Google) released its final Mobile Metrics report today (embedded below), at least for a while. AdMob gathers data from millions of phones and mobile devices which serve up its ad impressions, including almost 44 million iOS devices (iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads). The decision to stop disclosing the data may have something to do with its new owner, Google, wanting to assess what it wants to let out there, but it could also be tied to the fact that AdMob might no longer have access to any iPhone data since Apple is specifically threatening to block it. Whatever the reason, AdMob’s reports have proven to be a rich source of data on the mobile Web across platforms since mobile ad impressions on the mobile Web and in mobile apps are a decent proxy for mobile Web/app usage overall. So let’s dig in. Over the past two years, mobile ad impressions from smartphones have grown from 22 percent of the total to 46 percent in May, 2010.  Apple iOS devices account for the largest portion worldwide, with 40 percent share. But as you can see in the chart above, that share has been declining since it peaked above 50 percent in November, 2009.  Over that time, Android has been steadily taking share, rising to 26 percent.

The ratio of handset market share to mobile Web and app usage is not directly correlated. Nokia’s Symbian has a 44 percent share of handsets worldwide, but only 24 percent of of mobile Web/app usage. In contrast, Apple only has 15 percent handset market share, and Android has 10 percent, but together they account for two thirds of mobile Web and app usage.

On a worldwide basis, Apple devices still outnumber Android in terms of mobile ad impressions by a factor of almost 3.5 to 1. In the U.S., that ratio is about 2 to 1.  According to an AdMob survey, iPhone users are more satisfied (91 percent) than Android (84 percent) or Palm’s WebOS users (69 percent).  Android’s 84 percent satisfaction is pretty good, but there is still a gap with the iPhone.

Some other interesting stats from the report:

While the iPhone is the single biggest device driving mobile ad impressions, Android phones account for 7 of the top 10 handsets (the other two are Nokias). Only 58% of iPad users are in the U.S. The next biggest countries are Japan (5%), UK (4%), China(4%), and Canada (3%). Android is less international, with 66% of users in the U.S.  But the No. 2 country for Android is China (13%), followed by the UK (4%). HTC and Motorola phones account for 83% of Android usage. Twice as many iPhone users download paid apps as Android users. WiFi is huge.  Nearly a quarter of U.S. mobile traffic comes over WiFi. The biggest percentage of WiFi requests (nearly two thirds) comes from the iPod Touch—which is a WiFi-only device—but 35% of iPhone traffic goes over WiFi as well

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Today, I had lunch with AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui just before he went onstage at the CM Summit in New York City. The FTC finally approved Google’s $750 miillion acquisition of his mobile ad startup on May 27. He told me about the long ordeal of going through that approval process, turning Apple into a competitor, and how AdMob will fit in with Google’s other advertising businesses. Hamoui will be running all of mobile advertising for Google. In the video above, which I shot outside the conference, he touches upon these topics. I asked him about Apple’s new policies as written in their licensing agreement for the iPhone 4.0 OS and its restrictions on sending phone data to third party providers. Hamoui is taking a wait and see approach, but told me it could be potnetially devastating to AdMob’s iPhone business. John Battelle asked him the same question on stage, “Are you concerned Steve will take his toys and go home?” Hamoui response: “They haven’t enforced that yet. If enforced as written, it would be complicated or near-impossible to serve relevant advertising on the iPhone platform.” And what if IAds became the only functioning advertising network on the iPhone? Hamoui feels strongly that Apple should let AdMob and other ad networks compete: “It is not good for developers to have only one choice. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t think it even benefits them [Apple]. They should want developers to make more money. Having more advertising providers is better than having less.” Another tidbit Hamoui told me: about 30 to 40 percent of iPhone AdMob ads are cross-promoting other apps, which explains why Apple is aggressively going after that market. CrunchBase InformationOmar HamouiAdMobGoogleInformation provided by CrunchBase

When HTC announced earlier today that it is countersuing Apple for patent infringement in response to Apple’s earlier patent lawsuit, it failed to mention which patents it is using to fight back. Well, now we have the official complaint (embedded below)> And despite a propaganda video claiming that HTC changed the way we use our fingers in 2007, its complaint has nothing to do with multitouch gestures. The five patents it dug up to strike back at Apple are much more boring than that. They cover ways to access the phone directory on a mobile phone and power management. The five patents in question are: Patent No. 6,999,800, “Method for power management of a smart phone” Patent No. 5,541,988, “Telephone dialler with a personalized page organization of telephone directory memory” Patent No. 6,058,183 “”Telephone dialler with a personalized page organization of telephone directory memory”" (same title and inventor as above, oddly) Patent No. 6,320,957, “Telephone dialletr with easy access memory” Patent No. 7,716,505, “Power control methods for a portable electronic device “ The last patent, No. 7,716,505, was just issued yesterday.

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In his keynote speech today at the Mobile Web Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed off what could end up being a crucial tool for anyone trying to figure out a menu in a different language or a street sign in a foreign country. Google Goggles, which creates search queries based on images instead of typed-in keywords, will soon start to be able to translate from foreign languages using Google Translate. It will do this using optical character recognition to first convert the images of letters into words it can understand, and then put those through Google translate. Schmidt showed an image of an Android phone translating “Spring salad with wild herbs and parmesan cheese wrapped in bacon” from the German. (MobileCrunch editor Greg Kumparak took the photo at left). Of course, Google Translate often gets the translations wrong, to humorous effect. But even a partial translation is better than nothing when you don’t speak the language. Google Translate works in more than 50 languages. Schmidt also revealed that 60,000 Android phones are being sold each day now. CrunchBase InformationGoogle TranslateInformation provided by CrunchBase

Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux kernel, has an absolute disdain for mobile phones. All of the ones he has purchased in the past, the man writes on his personal blog, ended up being “mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights” even though they were naturally all phones run on open source operating systems. Things have changed now, he adds, now that he has caved and bought Google’s Nexus One a couple of days ago. Torvalds has owned a number of phones before, including Google’s G1 device and ‘one of the early China-only Motorola Linux phones’, but it took for Google to add multi-touch capabilities to the Nexus One before he finally broke down and bought one from the company’s web store. And he’s loving it: But I have to admit, the Nexus One is a winner. I wasn’t enthusiastic about buying a phone on the internet sight unseen, but the day it was reported that it finally had the pinch-to-zoom thing enabled, I decided to take the plunge. I’ve wanted to have a GPS unit for my car anyway, and I thought that google navigation might finally make a phone useful. And it does. What a difference! I no longer feel like I’m dragging a phone with me “just in case” I would need to get in touch with somebody – now I’m having a useful (and admittedly pretty good-looking) gadget instead. The fact that you can use it as a phone too is kind of secondary. While Google hasn’t disclosed how many phones it’s sold so far, the company is believed to have sold closer to 100,000 than 1 million devices. But at least one of them made one of the most famous software engineers in the world one happy camper.

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We all know Marissa Mayer is a tech nerd turned fashionista, and it looks like her taste for designer clothes is rubbing off on the search giant. But unlike the media or mobile industries, the fashion industry appears safe from Google. Google is selling “Google-inspired” scarves and other clothing to the public that were designed by emerging designers. Last year, designers who participated in a Vogue and Council of Fashion Designer program were asked to create a one-of-a-kind item inspired by Google in some way that reflected Google’s aura. Google transformed the finalists creations into iGoogle Artists themes but selected three of the designers to produce and sell their Google-inspired couture. Here’s the description of the scarf:

Flora Gill designed an oversize, multi-yarn, intarsia hand-knit scarf incorporating silk bias trim with wool and nylon yarn. Inspired by Google’s multi-functionality and diversity, the scarf features Google’s signature colors and is designed to be worn in several ways. In case you were wondering about the “several ways” you can wear the scarf, I guess you can wear it as a headband, around your neck, or as an armband as a symbol of solidarity with the Googleplex. I don’t know about you, but to me the scarf aesthetically is not worth $300. I mean, come on, for $200 more I could get an iPad. You can also purchase Peace “Vintage” T Shirt inspired by the point on a Google Map that will set you back by $85. And for any jewelry fans out there, Google is peddling a $200 Old Fashioned Magnifying Glass Pendant, meant to be inspired by Google’s search.

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Facebook is completely rewriting their messaging product and is preparing to launch a fully featured webmail product in its place, according to a source with knowledge of the product. Internally it’s known as Project Titan. Or, unofficially and perhaps over-enthusiastically, the Gmail killer. Facebook messaging has been the bane of users’ existence for years. My first public gripe was in 2008, when I said that urgent changes were needed. The biggest problem is simply deleting old emails. It takes so long that I have thousands of unread and read but not deleted messages in my inbox. But Facebook messaging is also only indirectly linked to the email, which is still the standard way that people exchange digital messages when not on Facebook. Facebook has occasionally dabbled with improvements to messaging, like adding the ability to search messages. But for the most part it has remained static. And not very useful. Even MySpace moved away from their aging messaging platform to a true webmail service in 2008 (albeit one that lacked POP or IMAP support). But now Facebook is getting itself back in the game. And if the details we’ve heard are accurate, Project Titan, or whatever it’s called when it launches, may be the kind of product people flock to. First, our understanding is that there will be full POP/IMAP support, meaning users can access the account other than through Facebook itself. Your email account name will be your vanity url – vanityurl@facebook.com. Email is all about identity. And Facebook is ahead of everyone else in the identity game via Facebook Connect. Facebook says more than 60 million people log in to 80,000 third party websites each month via Facebook Connect. Tacking a real webmail product on top of those vanity URLs and Facebook connect is something even Google may shudder at. Gmail killer? I don’t think so. But a strong product move nonetheless.

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Google has just started to deploy an update to the Nexus One that brings a long-desired feature to Android: Multi0touch.  In a blog post announcing the news, Google says that the new update will bring “Pinch-to-zoom functionality” to the Nexus One, which will allow users to pinch-to-zoom in the Android browser, Gallery, and Maps applications. So does this mean that Multi-touch will be coming to all Android phones? Not quite yet.  A Google spokesperson says that multi-touch support is part of the Android 2.0 framework and that its integrated support on the Browser, gallery, and Maps applications will be part of the next Android update.  However, it will be up to carriers and device manufactures to roll the updated software to these devices.   The post also says that Nexus Ones will be receiving some other updated apps.  The new version of Google Maps Navigation will include a ‘night mode’ that automatically changes the screen for optimized night time driving.  And Google Goggles, which lets you search with pictures, will now be included in the default set of applications on the phone.  Finally, 3G connectivity has been improved. You may have to wait a little longer to get your update though — while the over-the-air update will start going out today, Google’s post says some users may not get it until the end of the week. It’s worth pointing out that Android has actually supported Multitouch for some time — the functionality just hasn’t been implemented on most popular Android devices, like the Droid and Nexus One. Some software add-ons have been circling that enable multitouch in the Android browser, but this is the first time Google has baked the feature in.

When Google launched Extensions for Chrome in December, they had around 300 of them ready to go in their gallery. A day later, that number was already up to 500. By now, there are a few thousand available, and that number just got multiple by several times as Google has announced that the latest official version of Chrome, version 4, now natively supports Greasemoneky user scripts. As Google engineer Aaron Boodman (who also happens to be the creator of Greasemonkey) writes today on the Chromium blog, on the popular site userscripts.org there are over 40,000 scripts alone. While he notes that not all of the user scripts written for Greasemonkey will work seamlessly with Chrome immediately (because of the differences between Chrome and Firefox), that should only affect 15%-25% of those over 40,000. He also notes that Google will continue to work on issues on their end to improve compatibility with these Greasemonkey scripts. While neither side is likely to admit it, this is another big blow to Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Boodman wrote Greasemonkey in 2004 specifically for Firefox, and now he’s just helped a rival browser implement the majority of these scripts natively. And in fact, the native support works so well that Chrome actually treats these user scripts just like regular Chrome Extensions, so you can install and disable them in the same way you do with regular ones. Boodman cautions users who choose to install these user scripts to be careful, as they can potentially access private data you’re browsing on a website. He notes that you should read the comments and descriptions on a user scripts’ page to figure out exactly what it’s doing before installing it. Still, there are a ton of very useful Greasemonkey user scripts out there, and this makes Chrome even better. While obviously, Chrome 4 is only officially launched for Windows, the beta versions available for both Mac and Linux are also version 4. And actually, the newer dev builds across all platforms are already onto version 5, so these user scripts should work fine on all of them.

As we noted back in December, VeriFone wasn’t just going to sit back and let Square, the new startup by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, dominate the iPhone/iPod touch payment space. Unfortunately, their announcement of PAYware Mobile looked rushed (and Photoshopped), and Dorsey himself didn’t seem too worried. Since then though, VeriFone was nice enough to send us the hardware they are going to use to accept payments on the iPhone — it’s very real. Today, the other key part of the equation has just gone live in the App Store, the PAYware Mobile app. This free application, when paired with the hardware, allows you to use your iPhone to easily accept credit card payments, just as Square does. Still, as Dorsey noted in the original video we took with him (second video below), Square is being aimed at a broader market of people who may not have merchant accounts but still wish to be able to accept payments. Also, while VeriFone’s hardware is clearly better designed for use with the actual iPhone, Square’s method of using the headphone jack is so that it will be able to be used with other mobile devices eventually (Square is currently working on an Android app, for example). VeriFone promises support for other platforms as well, but this particular hardware unit will only work with an iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS. VeriFone also clearly believes its solution is the safer bet for merchants thanks to its secure payment gateway. Truth be told, running transactions on this device does feel a bit safer than Square’s, but there are also a range of confusing options. And setting the thing up is kind of a pain. You’re also paying for this extra security. VeriFone’s solution has a $49 activation fee, along with a monthly fee of $15 — on top of the 17 cents you’re paying on each transaction. Square gives its hardware and accounts away for free, but plans to take a small percentage of each transaction. This will be an interesting battle to watch. Watch a quick demo of VeriFone PAYware Mobile in the video below. You can order the hardware here. And you can find the app in the App Store here.

Square, the startup that is making mobile payments for the iPhone, just announced it’s full list of angel investors. Kevin Rose announced his involvement in a video demo (embedded below) he did a few days ago, but until now it wasn’t known who else was involved. The full list includes: Marissa Mayer from Google, Dennis Crowley from Foursquare, Kevin Rose from Digg, Ron Conway, Biz Stone of Twitter, Joshua Schachter, Shawn Fanning (who’s starting a new venture with Dave Morin), Zachary Bogue, Andrew Rasiej, Greg Yaitanes, Jean-David Blanc, David Lee, Esther Dyson, Robin Chan, First Round Capital and Fritz Lanman. Basically, it’s an extremely impressive list. Most notable are Marissa Mayer and Dennis Crowley, making their first investments, and it seems like a great investment to get into. Square has gotten off to a fast start these last few months. When it raised $10 million, it was rumored that the company was valued at $40 million. For a company whose product isn’t even available to the public, that’s not bad. Our own MG got a demo of Square, and saw its potential to democratize mobile payments.

Flurry, a mobile app analytics company, has noticed approximately 50 devices in the Cupertino that match the characteristics of Apple's tablet device. Flurry claims to have reliably placed these devices on Apple's Cupertino campus, and are confident that they are "observing a group of pre-release tablets in testing."

This make sense - as the Apple Tablet has to be tested before it is announced this Wednesday, January 27 in San Francisco. Furthermore, Flurry has been an extremely reliable source on analytics data thus far and don't often break stories unless they are sure they've checked their facts.

They've noticed that a large number of the apps downloaded were Games (140 total downloads or launches) and the next group was Entertainment, followed by News and Books. Here's a chart of the usage data:

YouTube is on a roll. Last night, the world’s largest video site rolled out HTML5 support, its first video rentals, and even a nifty music feature called Disco. Today, it’s making an even bigger change: the site is launching a new ‘Watch’ page, stripping it down to its most key elements and ensuring that nothing is drawing your attention away from the video on the screen. To most people, this Watch page is really the heart of the YouTube experience — it’s where you view clips and browse for the next thing you want to watch, so any significant changes are a big deal. The new streamlined page is opt-in for now, and you can activate it here. Many of the changes are aesthetic. You’ll find that YouTube has removed nearly all labels and extraneous text, resulting in a much cleaner feel (and one that feels more Googleish). The logo has even dropped the “Broadcast Yourself” tagline, though YouTube hasn’t committed to dropping that entirely. Things like the video description have been moved around, the all-important view counter is bigger, and nearly all ‘advanced’ information has been collapsed (you can hit buttons to reveal it again). But there are also some changes that may affect how you use the site. First, YouTube has ditched the five star rating system it has employed for years in favor of a binary “Love It” or “Thumbs Down” system. The company has been talking about how useless its rating system is for some time now, so the move doesn’t come as a surprise. YouTube says that any rating your video currently has in the old system will somehow be transitioned to the new one, though the details haven’t been worked out. The other major functional changes are related to navigation. The right side of the screen features a list of videos that you might be interested in watching next (just as YouTube has always done). But now it’s contextual. Say, for example, I ran a search for “Avatar”. Clicking on a result would bring up the video as usual, but instead of just showing Related Videos on the right hand side of the screen, YouTube will now show other search results from that query, making it much easier to jump between different results. You’ll also find that you no longer have to scroll within a widget to browse these additional videos, which was one of my gripes with the old design. YouTube has also implemented a very slick feature for when you’re actually running a search. In the “old” YouTube, when you run a query you leave the video you’re watching and are taken to a results page. Now when you run a query, the currently playing video will slide to the left side of the screen while results populate the right-hand side, allowing you to queue up your next videos without having to stop the one you’re watching. Other changes include new controls that let you specify what video resolution you want to view a movie in (YouTube will serve the “ideal quality” as the default).

Here’s a shot of the old site:

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Motorola held a press conference in Seoul yesterday to announce a partnership with SK Telecom, a major Korean telecommunications company. The occasion: SK Telecom will be the first company to distribute an Android phone in that country, the so-called Motorola Motoroi.

It's not a rebranded Droid, but a completely new phone (in Europe, the Droid was named "Milestone" but remained largely unchanged technically). SK Telecom customers will be able to lay their hands on the Motoroi in early February.

But Motorola Korea and SK Telekom representatives are quoted as saying that Motorola is ready to roll out the Motoroi in the US in March, too. And apparently it will be available in a number of other countries as well.

Last night, we started seeing some Tweets from Google employees and others about a new Android-powered Google phone that was apparently handed out at an “all hands” meeting. Now Google is confirming that it is indeed “dogfood” testing a new Android device with employees around the world. But this isn’t just another Android phone. Very trustworthy sources who have seen the phone say that it is the Google Phone we first wrote about last month (despite the uninformed saying we were dreaming). It will be branded Google and sold by Google as an unlocked phone, which could change everything. As we wrote in our original post: Google is building their own branded phone that they’ll sell directly and through retailers. They were long planning to have the phone be available by the holidays, but it has now slipped to early 2010. The phone will be produced by a major phone manufacturer but will only have Google branding (Microsoft did the same thing with their first Zunes, which were built by Toshiba). There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be. The phone itself is being built by HTC, with a lot of input from Google. It seems to be a tailored version of the HTC Passion or the related HD2 (Unlocker scored some leaked pictures back in October which are of the same phone). Update: Here is a more recent picture. Here are the details we know so far about the phone: It will be called the Google Phone (update the official name is “Nexus One”) and will launch in early January, 2010. It won’t be sold by any one carrier, but instead will be an unlocked GSM phone. In the U.S., that means T-Mobile and possibly AT&T, whose exclusivity deal with the iPhone is about to run out. It will be running Android 2.1 The phone is “really, really fast,” says someone who has seen one in action. It runs on a Snapdragon chip, has a super high-resolution OLED touchscreen, is thinner than the iPhone, has no keyboard, and two mics. The mic on the back of the phone helps eliminate background noise, and it also has a “weirdly” large camera for a phone. And if you don’t like the touchscreen keyboard, a voice-to-text feature is supposed to let you dictate emails and notes by speaking directly into the phone. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

This evening at its Campfire One event, Google showcased a number of new technologies coming to Google Web Toolkit (you can see my live blog of the event here). The big announcements include the release of a new Speed Tracer tool to help developers speed up their web apps; a code splitting tool that enables developers to deploy apps as incremental downloads; and UiBinder, a UI framework that allows developers to separate the ‘logic’ presentation of their apps from the presentation portion. Speed Tracer is a new extension for Google Chrome that is meant to help developers streamline their web applications. In particular, the tool is built to help optimize AJAXy applications. Obviously there are other tools for speed optimization, but many of these have to do with load time. Speed Tracer is meant to track performance over an extended period of time, as users tap into an app’s various functions. Google’s Andrew Bowers explains that Speed Tracer can track performance bottlenecks in ways that were not previously possible, because it taps into APIs that were built into Webkit for that very purpose (APIs other browser engines don’t offer). The tool will allow developers to isolate exactly which functions in their app are taking a long time to perform, allowing them to monitor performance in real time. It will suggest that developers take a look at certain problem functions (namely actions that take over 100ms, which is when users begin to notice a lag time).

The second major addition announced at tonight’s event is developer guided code splitting. Bowers says that when the Google Wave team was first building Wave, the size of their JavaScript app grew to 1.4 megabytes (that’s a lot, and will lead to a long initial loading time for users). To help deal with this Google found a way to split code into chunks and to only initially serve the portions users needed. In other words, when you go to Wave now, your browser is only downloading the portion of the app it needs to run the most basic functions. If you decide you want to access something beyond that — say, the Settings menu — the app will quickly fetch that once you click the ‘Settings’ button. This isn’t the first time developers have been able to split their code — in fact, some of them try to fully automate the process. Bowers says that Google is taking a different approach. Rather than try to fully automate the code splitting, Google Web Toolkit will allow developers to pick and choose which functions users will need to be able to access. The tool will then identify which code corresponds to those functions. In effect, developers are still responsible for choosing which functions they want to have available on the app’s initial load, but the tool can manage things beyond that. The third tool to launch this evening was UiBinder, which came out of some of the work Google has done with AdWords. Bowers describes UiBinder as a declarative UI that allows developers to bind a layout template and associate it with a Java file, without having to merge the two. He explains that in a typical Java file, developers often have to combine the layout portion of the application with the logic portion of the app. In that scenario, when a designer wants to tweak the look of the app, the logic has to be tweaked too. Using UiBinder, developers can keep the two separate, so layouts can be adjusted without having to rewrite any logic code.

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While Mac users are getting their first official taste of the Chrome browser today, Windows and Linux users are also getting something. Finally, a day earlier than expected, Chrome Extensions are now live for everybody (before it was just for developers).
Extensions are what Google calls add-ons or plug-ins. We’ve been waiting for the Chrome extensions gallery to launch since last week. Here’s a preview of 11 early extensions, but now there are many more. Some featured extensions include ones from Brizzly, Picnik, Remember The Milk (ChromeMilk), Google Reader, NPR, Clip To Evernote, Woot, Feedly, and Chromed Bird. And they even have Facebook Adblock, although I don’t see regular Adblock (Update, there is AdSweep and Adblock is available elsewhere, see comments). I’d love to check these out, but I’m on a Mac. Guess I’ll have to wait. The extensions only work on Windows and Linux (in beta) for now. The wait shouldn’t be too long, however, since extensions already work in Chromium for Mac (the developer builds). Once my favorite add-ons or their equivalents hit Chrome, that is the last thing keeping me on Firefox.

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The wait is over.  Google Chrome for Mac is now available in beta. It’s still missing a few features that are in the Windows version (like support for extensions), but the browser is lickety-split and more-or-less stable. I’ve been holding off really using Chrome until now. But I’m ready for something faster and less crashy than Firefox. (Crosses fingers). Right from the gate, you can apply themes from a gallery to trick out your browser. Are you more into gnomes (”Infected Mushroom” theme) or blurred out images of the Brooklyn Bridge (”Donna Karan” theme)? Yeah, I’m gonna stick to the minimal default look. Although one thing that takes getting used to is the almost complete lack of toolbar real estate. Where are all the buttons?
One little feature I like, which Chrome borrows from Safari, is that when you click on a new tab, it shows you a gallery of recent sites you’ve visited. And you can drag a tab off to detach it as a separate window. Handy. Update: Google also released Chrome for Linux and Extensions for Windows and Linux (in beta). More details on the Google Blog. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Today, at its Search Event in Mountain View, Google Fellow Amit Singhal (who recently participated in our Realtime Crunchup) took the stage to announce a big new feature for the search giant: Realtime. “It’s Google’s relevance technology meeting the realtime web,” is how Singhal described it. As we’ve learned over the past several months with Twitter Search, relevancy is perhaps the key to making realtime search a pillar of the web. Google seems to believe it has cracked the code for this, and has been internally testing it for a while now. But starting today it’s going live for everyone. Singhal showed off the new feature by doing a query for “Obama.” The results page shows results coming in in realtime. And yes, it works with Twitter. For example, Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted something from the audience, and in popped in the results immediately. This is the first time any search engine has integrated realtime results into a standard page, Google says. Obviously, this is huge. Google will offer realtime trends (it will be interesting to see how these compare to Twitter trends), and Trends is officially leaving Google Labs today. This new realtime search will work on both Android devices and iPhones immediately. Google says there are over a billion realtime documents a day that it will be looking at. This includes tweets, blog posts, and also information from sources like MySpace and yes, even Facebook. Other partners include FriendFeed, Jaiku, and Indenti.ca. “The importance of relevance has gone through the roof as the amount of information out there is growing. Relevance has become the critical factor,” Singhal noted. He went on to note that a lot goes on behind the scenes to make sure the relevancy remains intact — including Google apparently developing “dozens” of new technologies. Language is a key aspect to this (and on that front, realtime results will be available in English first, but should come to the rest of the web in Q1 2010). Another key is determining if things like tweets were sent automatically or manually by someone. When this goes live (update, it is live now), you will see a new “Latest” option in the “Show options” sidebar of Google Search. There is also a way to filter results just to status updates from Twitter and the like. “Light can travel around the world in 1/10th of a second, and we won’t rest until the speed of light is the only barrier to getting good search results to you,” Singhal noted. Quite a goal. Update: Realtime search is now live on some accounts (including ours). Below find a quick video of it in action and some screenshots.

[photo: flickr/fabbio]

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A couple weeks ago, Google unveiled its Chrome Extensions site after clues began popping up that a full-on push for extension support in their browser was imminent. Unfortunately, that site was only meant for extension developers who were allowed to upload their creations to Google. On the page, Google promised that end users who were looking for these extensions would have a way to do so “soon.” That will happen next week, we’ve learned. Two sources close to the situation say that Google plans to unveil its Extensions Gallery at some point next week, probably in the middle of the week. This makes sense since Add-on-Con 09, a conference devoted to browser add-ons, is taking place next Friday, and Google Chrome is a Gold Sponsor of the event. Obviously, Google will probably want to have something they can actually show off at the event, rather than just a developer dashboard. Apparently, the Extensions Gallery will be much like the Chrome Themes Gallery. It will be a page that lists a bunch of extensions and has a button to one-click download the ones you want. Presumably there will also be a link to learn more about what each extension actually does. Several developers already have their extensions ready to go for Chrome. We’ve profiled Aviary’s and Shareaholic’s recently. And actually, there have been hundreds of extensions unofficially available for Chrome for some time via sites like Chrome Extensions. This morning we profiled 11 of the best ones found there. Initially, Extension support will only be for the Windows-based version of Chrome. Even though the launch of the beta version of Chrome for Mac is imminent, that version will not have extension support built-in. However, the latest builds of Chromium (the open-source browser that Chrome is built off of) for Mac does support extensions, and even has an extension manager that works. It would appear that the Linux build of Chrome will support extensions whenever that beta is available. Extensions will be very important for Chrome as it attempts to hit Google’s stated 10 percent market share goal in the next couple of years. Extensions have been one of the keys to the success of Firefox, as it continues to steal market share from the once utterly dominant Internet Explorer. Disclosure: Add-on-Con is advertising on this site. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors