Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s Chrome Web browser is just over a year old and it already has about 30 million active users.

“Chrome has been doing very well for us,” said Sundar Pichai, VP of product management at Google, in a public interview with at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday.

As a point of comparison, Firefox, initially released in late 2004, has over 300 million active users.

Pichai said that Google’s goals for Chrome — speed, simplicity, and security — have resonated really well with users. He also said that Linux and Mac versions are coming soon.

To the suggestion that Chrome OS — the operating system that Google is developing around its Chrome browser — is on a collision course with Windows, Pichai responded that the world is entering a period of tremendous innovation in personal computing. “Browsers are suddenly hot again and I think operating systems are too,” he said, referring both to Chrome OS and Android, Google’s operating system for mobile devices.

“There haven’t been other choices for a long time,” he said. “Most operating systems today were designed before the Web existed.”

“The goal with both our efforts is to get great free open source software stacks out there,” he said.

In the case of Chrome OS, everything is built around the browser. “Web apps are our core platform,” said Pichai. “You write something that works on the browser, it works on Chrome OS.”

“We describe Chrome OS as Chrome on top of Linux, with a new windowing system,” said Pichai.

But Pichai said the Chrome OS computing paradigm differs from the Linux experience.

“As a user, you don’t install software, you don’t maintain software,” said Pichai.

That reflects Google’s focus on simplicity and Google’s view that the technical burden of PC maintenance is something the world would be better off without.

As Pichai put it, if your car did what computers do today, stopping frequently for adjustment and tuning, drivers wouldn’t accept it.

Nonetheless, Pichai expects Chrome OS will be able to support browser extensions without the maintenance and security problems that come with user-installed software. Chrome extensions, he said, run in their own process and can be killed, without any access to native system resources.

Pichai said that people are spending more and more time on the Web and the trend is continuing.

“The browser is what matters,” he said.

Source: Informationweek.com

Microsoft has announced that it will add live updates from micro-blogging service Twitter to its search engine – Bing. Following that, Google too announced plans for live Twitter updates integration in its search engine. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Microsoft mentioned about its public access to public Twitter feed and also got Bing Twitter search beta; only for U.S. residents as of now. Google promised to roll out Twitter integration in its search engine “in the coming months”.

Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online services group, said, “We are going to get access to all of the public Twitter information in real time.” Bing will also get the Facebook status feed at a later date. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, Facebook, said, “We are giving Bing a feed of data made open to everyone. No money exchanged hands. We are not trying to make money on data.”

Bing Twitter search comprehends text of a Twitter update and any shortened links tagged with it. Domain names are displayed after the shortened links mentioned in the Twitter update. However, Bing Twitter search throws up results after indexing only a week’s Twitter updates. Protected and deleted Twitter updates won’t be displayed into Bing Twitter search since it shows up results after indexing data of public Twitter Feed.

So, if there’s a Twitter update: Apple updates Mac Mini Lineup http://bit.ly/crLDU, Bing Twitter will show it up as “Apple updates Mac Mini Lineup http://bit.ly/crLDU (techtree.com)”.

Back in April, Google and Twitter were reportedly involved in preliminary discussion over real-time search and product search. Marissa Mayer, vice president of Search Products and User Experience, stated in a blog post on the Official Google Blog that Google’s search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data. Basically, Google is finally bending to include indexed data for real-time search.

We know not what’s going on in the minds of Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Twitter had acquired Summize.com and integrated the search engine to show it as Twitter Search. A few months down the lane, we’d get to see real-time content to seep into mainstream search. With this integration and more people joining Twitter, one major issue has been burning since a while – spam. Not to worry about it anymore since Twitter has already pulled up its socks to fight spam.

Source :Techtree.com

In an attempt to make its blogs more mobile-friendly, WordPress has launched two themes that will automatically be displayed when a WordPress.com blog is accessed from a cell phone, the company announced Tuesday.

The type of mobile phone a user employs dictates what the different blogs will look like, the company said in a blog post. A modified version of WPtouch will be displayed on phones with “modern Web browsers like those on the iPhone and Android phones,” the company wrote. A second, unnamed theme from an old version of WordPress Mobile Edition will be displayed on all other mobile devices.

The themes will be displayed automatically, regardless of the themes used for normal browsing.

According to WordPress, those who access WordPress.com blogs from their iPhone or Android-based devices will be able to access the particular blog’s “posts, pages, and archives.” WPtouch will also support AJAX-based “commenting and post-loading.” Header images will be scaled to fit the device’s screen.

Those accessing blogs on other phones won’t be treated to all the bells and whistles. According to the company, those visitors will see a simple page that focuses mainly on loading blog content as quickly as possible.

The decision to automatically display two themes was rooted in the success of mobile devices, WordPress said in the blog post. So far, the company said, mobile devices have helped its WordPress.com blogs generate 60 million page views per month. But content was loading slowly or, in some cases, not at all. By automatically displaying these two themes, WordPress can limit those issues.