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Apple continues to take baby steps in making iTunes a less software-oriented experience. The latest, which blog The Distorted Loop noticed early Thursday, shows that Apple now lets users listen to 30-second preview clips from its recently-introduced Web preview pages. Here, users who may not have iTunes installed, can listen to the first 30-seconds of a song, just as if they were using the media software. Though, in typical Apple fashion, streaming clips requires users to have its QuickTime browser plug-in installed.

It may be a relatively small addition, but it's likely a sign of larger things to come since Apple acquired online music streaming service Lala back in December. Short of letting users buy the track directly from the Web, this lets users see extended information about the track, including what it sounds like--all without software.

Apple's iTunes Web preview pages continue to be music-only, as there are no preview pages for video content, applications, or podcasts.

Users can now preview iTunes tracks from within their Web browser--all without having to open or have iTunes installed.

(Credit: CNET)

There's a delightful song in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life" called "Every Sperm is Sacred."

That's how people used to feel about every Google home page. Google.com paid homage to everything pure and noncommercial in the world.

No more Mr. Pure Guy. For no sooner had Google launched its shiveringly competent foray into mobile telephony than up popped a little ad on the altar that used to represent the tabernacle of all things Google.

Please look and ponder how the world has turned. Not only is Google advertising its new phone on its home page, it has even attempted a little copywriting.

Unlike the recent Chrome ad it also placed upon these hallowed square inches, which merely asked to "install" Chrome, the Nexus One ad goes a large and daring step further.

Yes, it asks you to "experience" Nexus One. Experience. This is an emotion. A deep, lasting, and memorable emotion. I see those engineers wanting us to feel something. Something human. Something tingly. I am excited.

SINGAPORE--Enterprise adoption of Netbooks running Google's Chrome OS will follow the path of its hosted apps, in which small businesses were the initial adopters, says a company executive.

Speaking at a press event here Thursday, Caesar Sengupta, product management director for Google's Chrome OS project, explained that Netbooks powered by the platform will be adopted first by smaller enterprises before garnering support from large multinationals.

Read more of "Chrome OS to follow Google Apps adoption" at ZDNet Asia.

A bug in Facebook's software appeared late Tuesday that caused some iPhone apps using the service to crash instantly, according to developers that spoke with CNET.

(Credit: Nodconcept)

The bug was originally thought to be with Facebook's application programming interface, which enabled developers to publish feed stories into their apps. Facebook reminded developers on Monday that the old APIs would be turned off on Tuesday, a plan that had been in the works since last October.

Chris Diskin of Nodconcept, makers of Emoti (iTunes Link), an iPhone app that enables users to post status messages on Facebook with custom emoticons, said his app stopped working on Tuesday afternoon, after the old APIs were supposed to be turned off. However, Facebook representatives later said a bug in the software, not the company's APIs, caused the issue.

The bug didn't affect all apps, and perhaps not even all apps in the same way. For instance, Emoti users that purchased the app and logged into Facebook before Tuesday afternoon were able to use the app just fine. Those that purchased the app after midafternoon on Tuesday found that the app crashed immediately.

Within hours of being alerted to the problem, Facebook engineers tracked down the problem and fixed it.

Diskin confirmed for CNET late Wednesday that Emoti was working again.

Facebook is completely dominating the rest of the social-media world when it comes to page views, according to these numbers.

(Credit: Pingdom/Google Ad Planner)

Wow. Numbers crunched by traffic and uptime firm Pingdom indicate that Facebook is absolutely crushing the rest of the social Web in terms of monthly page views. With about 260 billion page views, the sprawling social network's page view count is 11 times bigger than the second-place entry, News Corp.-owned MySpace. It's also 59 times higher than Twitter's, which comes in fourth. (Social network and gaming site Hi5 is third; Friendster, which was recently sold to a Malaysian tech company, is in fifth.)

These numbers are a testament to Facebook's phenomenal growth: remember, as late as June 2008, MySpace was still bigger than Facebook worldwide (and stayed bigger in the U.S. for several months more). And Facebook, at the time, was largely unsearchable and protected behind a log-in wall, keeping a damper on page views juiced by search engine optimization (SEO).

The catch with Twitter's placement here, it should be said, is that page views tend to be a very erroneous take on the microblogging service's actual reach, because so many of its users access it through third-party clients on both desktop and mobile devices, as well as through text messages.

In social news, Digg pulls in twice as many page views as Conde Nast-owned competitor Reddit (which is actually a smaller gap than I would have expected), and seven times as many as nerd-news hub Slashdot.

Here's what I find interesting: I wonder how much of this page view dominance on Facebook's part was achieved when Facebook got the SEO bump from letting users and brands' "fan pages" reserve unique URLs, hence making the Web address of an individual Facebook page much more search-result-friendly than a string of numbers. It's also potentially driving more traffic indirectly through Facebook Connect, which lets the users of 80,000 (and counting) third-party sites log in with their Facebook credentials--in effect, spreading the Facebook brand all over the Web.

Most importantly for page views, Facebook also has been gradually encouraging members to make more profile content public, starting with limited search-engine listings and then finally completely public personal profiles in accordance with a new set of privacy controls late last year.

TechCrunch writer Erick Schonfeld analyzed graphs from ComScore last summer that showed unique visitors to Facebook versus Twitter, and noted an uptick in Facebook's growth that coincided with the social network's introduction of an option to make individual pieces of shared content on profiles--status messages, links, videos, etc.--wholly public.

Some of these shifts in privacy policies haven't gone over so smoothly with privacy-conscious Facebook users. But if you look at traffic, the "opening up" has been a massive boon for the ad-revenue-reliant Facebook.

While Google Voice and Skype get most of the VoIP attention because they're, well, Google and Skype, VoxOx appears committed to making them work for their reputations. Announced in Las Vegas for CES, VoxOx's Personal Assistant 2 is the latest update to the sub-features that provide inbound call management as part of the full VoxOx program.

From Southern California-based TelCentris, VoxOx for Windows and Mac is a free desktop multi-protocol program that supports standard instant messaging, social networking, and Voice over Internet Protocol. The upgraded Personal Assistant features focus on remote access, and that's really the killer feature here. Once you set it up on your desktop, you can use it on both smartphones and standard cell phones, which are far more prevalent than their apped-up cousins.

(Credit: VoxOx)

New features in the Personal Assistant 2 let you check voicemail, initiate a regular call or outbound conference calls of up to 20 people, and manage "Find Me" settings so that, for example, your wife can always reach your phone, but your boss ... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog

Once again, rival start-up conferences TechCrunch 50 and Demo are being held this year on the same days, September 13 to 15. The September Demo conference is also moving from its traditional Southern California resort location to a venue closer to the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists it serves, in Santa Clara, Calif. (Demo also has another conference in March, in Palm Desert, Calif.)

Verbal sparring between the two event organizers has started. After IDG and VentureBeat, who partnered to produce Demo, announced their September dates, Jason Calacanis, who with with Michael Arrington produces the TechCrunch 50 event, said on Twitter, "TechCrunch50 is September 13th-15th, save the dates....and yes, it appears DEMO has once again moved their event to our dates. ugh."

Speaking for Demo, IDG Senior VP Neal Silverman said in a statement, "In order for us to bring the conference to Silicon Valley, these were the dates that worked best for all parties. We were not aware of specific dates published by TechCrunch at the time of our announcement."

Notably, the parties did not talk to each other about their conference dates before they booked their venues. And as far as I can tell, TechCrunch had not publicly announced its dates before the January 5 Demo announcement.

The real tragedy is that the people who run these events don't cooperate on timing. These conferences claim to serve entrepreneurs and their patrons (venture capitalists), but this willful refusal to coordinate makes the presenters pawns more than customers. Presenters know that no matter which event they choose (if they are lucky enough to have a choice), they're not getting the full audience they'd like, since potential funders, partners, and commentators will be split between the competing shows.

Of course, with TechCrunch saying "Demo needs to die," and cleverly undercutting part of Demo's business model--TechCrunch does not charge presenters to go on stage, while Demo charges about $20,000--one can't expect that it'd be easy for either party to make a move of reconciliation.

But please, TechCrunch and Demo, for the sake of the start-ups, don't let this happen again.

Extension support is active again and bookmark synchronization has arrived in the Google Chrome developer's build for Mac OS X. Default extension support was disabled in Chrome for Mac in December, followed by promises that it would be re-enabled within a month.

Bookmark sync does not yet work flawlessly: a known bug related to the sync process will crash the browser when you add a new bookmark folder.

As highlighted in the red box, RSS support is finally available in Chrome for Mac, via extensions in the developer's build.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

The latest developer's build, version 4.0.288.1, is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Windows users will only see two bug fixes: one prevented HTML5 audio and video content from not loading, the other stops content scripts from running twice on some occasions.

The Mac and Linux versions, being further behind in development than the Windows version, offer more new features. In addition to extension and bookmark sync support, and fixing the aforementioned HTML5 and script bugs, Google added for Macs "pin tab" as a context menu item, included a "learn more" link on the crash page, and baked in the Esc key as a shortcut to stop the page from loading.

Mac users should also note that to switch from the beta version to the developer's build, you'll need to manually download and install the developer's build. The automatic upgrade path from within the Chrome beta won't work because it's a different development channel--even though they did share version numbers.

In brief testing, both the bookmark sync and the extension support work without problems. If you encounter any problems in the latest Chrome dev, tell us in the comments below.

New York-based video service Vimeo announced Wednesday it will roll out 1080p video (also known as "full HD") to its members by the end of this month.

In order to upload 1080p clips, users will have to be members of Vimeo's paid Plus service, which costs $10 a month, or $60 a year. Though anyone can view a 1080p video regardless of whether they're a free or paid Plus user.

The company also announced that it has expanded its recently introduced mobile offerings, letting users pick which of their videos they want to be viewable on phones that can play back streaming media (like the iPhone and Android handsets). However, just as with the upcoming 1080p feature, users must be Plus subscribers to be able to set this as a viewing option.

While the move to 1080p is big for Vimeo (literally), it's a few months behind video juggernaut YouTube, which introduced the feature in November. And unlike Vimeo, YouTube offers both mobile viewing and 1080p uploading to all its users without requiring a paid subscription service. Though worth noting is that Vimeo was one of the first online video providers to offer HD video playback on the Web, long before YouTube and many others caught up.

Correction 8:40 a.m. PST January 7: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that users must be Vimeo Plus members to view 1080p content.