Webware

Windows Marketplace for Mobile debuted in October as Microsoft's answer to smartphone app stores. As with Google's Android Market, Windows Mobile 6.5 users could initially only find and purchase apps from the device. Now Microsoft has published an online catalog to mirror its mobile storefront.

As with iPhone's app store in iTunes and BlackBerry's online App World, Windows Marketplace for Mobile site lets you find apps by browsing, searching, or discovering programs from lists of what's most popular or new. App screenshots, ratings, and version details are accessible from product pages. Like BlackBerry's App World, you can pick apps from the online catalog to install via Marketplace for Mobile on your smartphone.

In addition to discovering new applications to download, the online mobile Marketplace has a management window for you to track your download history and tweak your account settings.

Developers will see a separate portal that contains community resources, blog posts, and lists of upcoming events. Although Microsoft has been the tardiest of the major mobile platform developers to implement an app store solution, it's to Microsoft's credit that the company is quickly rounding out its storefront with an online catalog. Now Microsoft just needs to open up the Marketplace to phone owners using older versions of Windows Mobile operating systems.

Even though Hulu Desktop and other software have stolen its thunder a little, we love Boxee. It was one of the first and best ways to browse streaming media from multiple outlets on a big screen, and we like its indie spirit, even though some content providers have given it a hard time.

Rumors of a Boxee Box--an actual piece of hardware to free the software from a PC--have been floating for a while, but it's becoming real very soon, according to the Boxee blog. Boxee's first hardware partner has been found, and we are already guessing as to what the Boxee Box will have inside. More importantly, how will it compare with Roku? Or, could it possibly be...

A launch event on December 7 in Brooklyn will give a lot more details including mock-ups, and CNET will be there. Look for more then. Until that day, enjoy the kittens.

The online video directory service Clicker launches Thursday at the NewTeeVee Live conference. If you watch TV, you will love this site.

Clicker is not a full-on video search engine like Bing or Google, and it's not a video-viewing site like Hulu. It is, instead, a carefully curated directory of full-length video content, with several extremely nice features and user interface flourishes that make it a good first stop online if you're looking for an episode of your favorite show to watch.

Unlike a search engine, Clicker won't give you every last shred of online video on your search query. If you're looking for the "Dr. Horrible Sing-along Blog" on Bing or Google, you'll get hundreds of clips and related videos. On Clicker, just four: the three 15-minute episodes individually plus all of them combined into one long stream. Each video also has a very good "Related" sidebar showing other videos that are thematically linked. No matter what I threw at it, I found the Related suggestions pertinent.

Clicker's behind-the-scenes engine is constantly crawling video sources to add and remove content as necessary. The "remove" part is key, as many networks take episodes off the Web as frequently as they add them.

In the Clicker interface, an auto-completing search box that's focused just on video makes it incredibly fast to find content. Searching within a show (for example, looking for "Clinton" in the Daily Show page) is also very fast, as the search results change in real time as you type.

When you want to watch a video, Clicker plays it either by linking to the source, such as aggregator like Hulu or a network site like that of CBS or AMC, or it displays an embeddable player. This depends on the content owner's terms of use. Some content is not available for free, but Clicker knows that it can be streamed on Amazon.com or Netflix; Clicker will direct users to log on to their accounts on those services.

This service does an amazing job of taming the morass of online video, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. The site has been in private beta for a few months; it is scheduled to go live Thursday at 10:30 a.m. PST.

What's next

But this isn't the end of the story for Clicker. The shame of this product is that it is in many ways a better television experience than you can get on your TV. Unless you connect your computer to your living room TV, you're going to have to sit in front of your PC or laptop when you want to watch a show. A partnership with Boxee will yield a better set-top-like experience for the service, Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone told me. An iPhone player will follow next, and the service will be smart enough not to find videos you can't play on that device.

From a business perspective, advertising will become a part of the model, although Clicker won't try to get in the way of pre-roll videos from the content sources. In some key vertical content areas, though, like health and finance, Lanzone thinks there's a good opportunity. Also, Clicker could end up driving traffic to sites like Hulu and could potentially monetize those click-throughs.

The challenge for Clicker is to get viewers to know about it. A strong SEO effort will be applied to get Google searchers to the site when they're looking for shows. That will help. There may also be privately labeled versions of the service for various institutions. But--and I rarely say this--this service is good enough to grow organically. Once you try Clicker, you'll be back again.

Google, ever eager to renovate the computing industry for the benefit of the Web and its own business, is working to link two nascent but potentially significant projects, its experimental Go programming language and its Chrome Web browser.

Specifically, the company is building a foundation to let programs written in Go run directly within a Web browser endowed with Google's Native Client software. Native Client is designed to let browser-based programs run faster than is possible with today's widely used JavaScript; though it's still in its early stages, it's built into Chrome and available as a plug-in for other browsers.

A little poking around the Go source code reveals a reference to NaCl, the abbreviated name for Native Client. And Native Client is indeed on the Go agenda, said Rob Pike, one of the five core members of the Go team, in a Wednesday interview.

"We have an embryonic implementation of the NaCl support for Go using 8g," a compiler that produces code for x86 chips such as Intel's Core line, Pike said. "It's restricted by a couple of details of NaCl's implementation, but we hope to see changes to NaCl one day that will make Go a full-fledged language in that environment."

The Native Client compiler--the tool that converts what people write into software a computer can run--is specially modified to screen out a variety of software instructions that could expose a computer to an attack from a Native Client module downloaded off the Web. And the Native Client software itself checks such modules before they run. The result, if the security approach stands up to security scrutiny, is browser-based software that runs close to the speed of ordinary software that runs natively on a PC.

Native Client has been maturing, the most recent stage being inclusion of NaCl within Google's Chrome browser, though disabled by default for now. Google is using Chrome as a vehicle to distribute other Web technology, too, including Gears, which can let people use Gmail while offline, and WebGL, which gives hardware acceleration to 3D graphics in the browser.

Go is only experimental at this stage, but Google hopes to use it to produce some of the software running on its vast array of servers. Google's scale makes even academic projects potentially commercially relevant, which is enviable to many companies who've tried to get projects off the ground.

Indeed, an episode earlier in the Go team's history is illustrative. Pike, Unix co-inventor Ken Thompson, and Russ Cox all worked on the Plan 9 operating system project that, like Unix, began at Bell Labs. (Yes, Plan 9 is named after Ed Wood's famously bad movie, "Plan 9 from Outer Space.")

Unlike Unix, Plan 9 didn't have much commercial success, although Vita Nuova does sell a version called Inferno. Getting a mainstream operating system off the ground is hard: you must convince programmers, software companies, and hardware makers to embrace it; you must convince people to use it in the real world; and you must keep pace with the evolution of entrenched operating systems.

A bit of Plan 9 lives on inside the Go project, with various Plan 9 tidbits appearing in the Go source code. Pike, though, says there's not much.

"The 6g/8g/5g compilers are almost completely new but are tied to the open-source Plan 9 compiler suite's C compilers and linker," Pike said. "That's really about it except for the obvious historical connection for some of the protagonists: Ken, Russ, and myself."

Programming languages face similar challenges as operating systems in getting off the ground: A lot of interdependent elements in the ecosystem must all be built simultaneously. It's what's known in the trade as the chicken-and-egg problem: you can't make a chicken without an egg or vice versa.

But Google makes things different for Go. It's devoting real resources to the project and believes it could be useful on its own servers to run software such as the Gmail service Web browsers tap into. It's got the chicken and the egg under its own roof.

And with the money Google could save by increasing the performance or efficiency of its servers even just a fraction of a percent, it has abundant financial incentive to make things work.

Marrying Go to browsers is just another aspect of the same issue.

Assuming Go and Native Client mature enough to be useful, Google can't mandate that Web developers embrace them; indeed, they generally haven't embraced Gears even though it can help with some Web site matters. But again, Google has a browser and some awfully big Web sites it can use to get the ball rolling.

Apple released a security update for its Safari Web browser on Wednesday. Available for Windows and Mac, Safari 4.0.4 plugs what sound like moderate to severe security holes. Unlike competitors Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome, Apple doesn't rate the severity of its security fixes.

The security fixes address a wide range of problem points. On both Windows and Mac, parsing maliciously written XML content could have led to a browser crash, using shortcut menu options within a maliciously created Web site could have led to the disclosure of local information, and visiting a maliciously built Web site could have resulted in unexpected actions on other opened Web sites.

For Windows only, viewing a maliciously made image with an embedded color profile that could lead to a browser crash or running arbitrary code is no longer a threat, nor is accessing a maliciously crafted FTP server, which could have led to an unexpected crash, information disclosure, or arbitrary code execution. For Mac only, an exploit that could have allowed e-mail to remotely load audio and video content when loading a remote image has been disabled.

Although it's good practice to update a program whenever a security fix has been released, more transparency from Apple on the matter would pull the company up to competitors' standards.

Click here to read the full changelog for Safari 4.0.4.

It was a controversial new addition: Twitter had just started rolling out a new feature that built "retweets," a user-created way to quote other tweets, into the main Twitter application. But on Wednesday, plagued by errors, Twitter appears to have pulled the feature for further maintenance.

A post on the Twitter status blog late on Wednesday morning reads that it was "working on (a) high number of errors." The Next Web dug up some discussion from Twitter's developer IRC channel and found that "retweet is temporarily unavailable while we deploy a bug fix." There is not yet word on when it will be back.

The feature was so new that some Twitter users, myself included, never had it in the first place. But it promises to significantly change one part of the Twitter experience: with official, integrated retweets, gone is the signature "RT" in front of a quoted tweet. Instead, a retweet button pushes the original tweets into the retweeter's followers' streams of messages. Like so many Facebook redesigns and restructurings, that hasn't gone over so well with existing users. The blog Twitter Watch called integrated retweeting "the worst ever."

"While current users may get used to the feature, it's going to alienate new users," the Twitter Watch blog asserted. "Twitter isn't like Facebook; it can't boast the same network effect that makes Facebook indispensable. So it needs to keep things simple for new users. But now each new user will need to understand why much of their early friend feed will consist of messages they didn't subscribe to."

But there are advantages, too: with built-in retweets, it gets much easier to track exactly how popular or influential a given message or user is.

Making microdonations on the Web is a little harder than it once was. Many of the services I would have included in this roundup have shuttered in the past year. In fact, there are just a handful of viable such services left.

Regardless, each of the services listed below will help you connect with the charitable organization (or person) you care about most. You can choose a cause, decide how much to donate, and you're done. It's a really simple process. And if you're in the mood to share, it should be a rewarding one.

Get giving

#BeatCancer Although the #BeatCancer initiative that asked for users to include the hash tag in their tweets to raise cash for cancer awareness is over, the organization's site still allows users to make donations to four different cancer organizations. They include organizations dedicated to breast cancer awareness, childhood cancer, an organization dedicated to better research, and a group that provides support for cancer patients.

You can use the site to donate whatever you'd like to any of the organizations. You can also get the word out about the organizations by clicking on the "spread the word" option in each donation widget. Upon doing so, your Twitter account will be populated with a link for others to donate to the same organization. It's a convenient way to be social and contribute to the fight against cancer.

ChipIn ChipIn is a fine way to start raising money for the charity you care about. It also provides an easy way to get all your social-networking friends to dole out some cash.

When you get to ChipIn, you'll need to input the cause you're trying to raise money for. You can also input how much cash you want to raise over the term of the fundraiser. From there, you need to input your PayPal account. It works well, but it's the social element that might help most. With the help of ChipIn's Facebook widget, you can put your donation box in front of all your friends. You can also add plug-ins to your Web site. Overall, ChipIn makes it quite convenient to make and receive microdonations.

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Google plans to release a Mac beta of Chrome in early December, judging by some chatter on a mailing list for the browser.

Chrome 4.0 is available today as a beta version for Windows but only as a rougher developer-preview version on Linux and Mac OS X. The standout feature of the new version is customization through extensions, a technology that long has been a core asset of another open-source browser, Firefox.

Google has been moving to a new extensions presentation technology called Browser Actions that let people interact with extensions through a small button toward the upper right of the browser window. "We've noticed that many of you have updated your extensions to take advantage of the new UI. We'd like to encourage the rest of you to do so as well," said Nick Baum, a Google Chrome product manager, in a mailing list posting.

But here's the hitch: Browser Actions only work on Windows and Linux right now. That means those building extensions will leave Mac Chrome users behind for a time. But in telling those developers they won't have long to wait, Baum mentioned the deadline for the beta version.

"The earlier you switch, the more time you will have to polish your experience for our Beta launch in early December," he said.

And Google is on the case for adding Browser Actions to the Mac version of Chrome.

"We realize this means dropping Mac support for a couple of weeks, but we already have people working on that," Baum said. "If you prioritize the Windows and Linux versions, we'll bring you cross-platform parity as soon as we can!"

Unsurprisingly, at least one research company agrees that valuing a company at $1.1 billion before it's unveiled a long-term revenue strategy is a little bit premature.

A firm called Next Up Research released a study this week that estimates Twitter's actual value as somewhere between $526 million and $674 million--or somewhere between 47 and 61 percent of what its valuation was in September when Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, and other investors pumped nearly $100 million into the company..

The positives for Twitter? It's been able to scale to approximately 70 million users while maintaining a single office in San Francisco and about 80 employees--well, sure, but the fail whale does tend to rear its head--and the fact that you can use it almost exclusively as a low-end mobile application means a whole lot of potential for global reach.

Next Up's concerns are pretty predictable: It's not sure how Twitter will keep up its momentum as it prepares to roll out a revenue model. It spelled out a few options that have been tossed around over the past few years--ads on Twitter.com, ads in tweets, charging for access to its application program interface (API), premium accounts, selling data and analytics--but noted that "most revenue generation options available to the company have the potential to alienate at least some of cult-like Twitter's user base."

Regardless, the research firm is guessing that revenues will come. It's projecting $134 million in revenues in 2013, "in an optimistic scenario." Now let's sit back and see how Twitter does it.