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Google Wednesday launched a new search feature called Google Instant, which offers search results as you are typing your query terms.

Around this time two years ago, Google unveiled Suggest, a feature which predicted what searchers were looking for as it was being typed in the Google search field. Instant takes this a step further and provides the actual results so the user doesn't have to even click "search" or hit enter.

Apple's foray into social music is not going well as its Ping service is experiencing a multitude of problems, including comment spam, a lack of promised functionality, and generally inconsistent user experience.

Security researcher Chet Wisniewski at Sophos said Apple is not employing any type of spam or URL filtering, as comments such as those advertising "free iPhones" were already appearing some 24 hours after the site's launch. He also said that Apple has made it easy for those to abuse the service.

Google continued its reinvention of the Gmail inbox Tuesday with the introduction of Priority Inbox Beta, a new mail filtering system that prioritizes emails based upon the user's viewing and responding habits.

The feature will be rolled out incrementally to Gmail users over the next week, and will break up inboxes into three categories: Important and Unread emails, Starred conversations, and "everything else." Incoming messages will automatically be routed into one of these three categories, which Gmail determines by user trends. For example, if a particular contact is someone frequently exchanging emails with the user, their incoming messages will be ranked as more important than someone else's. Similarly, messages that users actually opened instead of skipped, deleted or "marked as read" from certain senders will be considered higher priority.

Popular social link-sharing and bookmarking site Digg on Wednesday made its new, redesigned site available to all users after testing in an invitation-only mode for roughly four months.

"This redesign is a major revision of our platform -- front end to back end -- this is just phase one of what will be an on-going, iterative process, involving lots of input from all of you. We'll be pushing out features on a regular basis and tweaking often, "Digg founder and CEO Kevin Rose said on Wednesday. "Our goal has always been for Digg to be a place where people can discover and share content and conversations from anywhere on the web. With Digg v4, we are introducing a few things that will make discovering and discussing news a lot better."

Wednesday, Google officially announced that North American Gmail users can place voice calls to any phone number directly from their Gmail interface. The feature will roll out to all users in the next few days.

Users will be able to place totally free calls within the U.S. and Canada for "at least the rest of this year," and international calls for comparatively low rates. All outgoing calls originate from the user's Google Voice number, and calls can even be received within the Gmail interface.

Now approaching its third year online, Adobe's Web-based photo editing suite Photoshop Express underwent a significant redesign which launched Wednesday. Adobe Photoshop Express Editor, Organizer, and Uploader are included in the refresh.

Firstly, a Photoshop.com account is no longer needed to use Photoshop Express Editor. Users can simply navigate to the Web app, upload photos directly from their local drive, edit and change the photos, and then save them back on their local storage. Previously, an account was necessary, and photos were uploaded to online storage first before they were edited. This is still an option, as Photoshop.com members can still store and share photos online as well as create albums, but it's no longer the only way to use the Editor.

I experienced quite a personal shock when I aged out of having access to my university's research portal. The vast catalog of peer-reviewed journals, empirical studies, and thorough analytical research I had at my disposal as a student was boarded up behind a distinct paywall not long after I finished school.

The fast-moving news, blogs, forums, and free tools I had been taught to eschew were suddenly all I had. My principal option (besides re-enrolling in school) was to become a member of a research service like LexisNexis or NewsLibrary; but those portals cost several hundred dollars a year each.
I suddenly recognized that the best information on the Web is not free.

Leading social network Facebook Wednesday announced Facebook Places, a service which adds location awareness to the service's mobile experience.

The service launches tonight in the United States as a part of the Facebook application for iPhone, and on the HTML5 touch.facebook.com, and users will have the ability to "check in" to their locations similar to the way users on Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite can, and likewise they can find out who and what is available around them.

Yahoo said Tuesday that it would begin to switch over its search backend to the Microsoft platform in the US and Canada, the cornerstone of an agreement reached between the two companies last July. A "Powered by Bing" graphic would appear at the bottom of its search pages after the transition, the company said.

It would still be some time yet before other markets worldwide transition to Bing, for which Yahoo gave no timeline, although it's expected the full transition wouldn't be complete until 2012. Of course, one notable example would be Japan: that division is switching to a Google backend pending regulatory approval and any legal challenges.

Thursday, CBS interactive launched a mobile Web app called TV.com Relay, which lets users "check in" to the TV shows they happen to be watching and earn badges for their activities just like popular location-based games Foursquare and Gowalla.

Unlike those location based services, though, you don't actually have to go anywhere to use Relay.

GenosTV, a company billing itself as the first "virtual cable TV provider" is looking for beta testers for its IPTV platform. The service will differentiate itself in three ways: by not requiring a dedicated set-top box, by offering complete à la carte pricing, and by not being an on-demand service like Hulu and its competitors.

The service aims to be a platform agnostic linear streaming service, so any connected TV, media player, or set top box will be able to access the GenosTV service.

Google on Friday officially announced it has acquired Slide Inc., confirming rumors circulating earlier in the week. Slide creates entertainment products that tie in with social networks and online communities such as SuperPoke! and its family of related games, Top Fish, and FunSpace.

"For Google, the Web is about people, and we're working to develop open, transparent and interesting (and fun!) ways to allow our users to take full advantage of how technology can bring them closer to friends and family and provide useful information just for them," David Glazer, Engineering Director at Google said Friday.

Real-time collaboration app Google Wave was officially added to the dead pool this week. Despite plenty of hype and excitement, it failed to attract the adoption that Google hoped for. The site itself is expected to stay up through the end of the year, but users are likely to already be wondering about where to turn next in Web-based collaborative software. Here's our list of a few of the most promising candidates for replacing Wave in your workflow.

The first alternative to get out of the way is, which we won't count in the 10, Google Apps. Many users simply went back to this suite when they discovered Wave would continue to be confusing and cut off from the rest of Google's products. Look for Google to try and integrate more bits and pieces of Wave's technology into Apps now that its demise is imminent.

The patent infringement cases between Microsoft and Salesforce in both the U.S. District Courts of the Western District of Washington and in Delaware have been settled, Microsoft announced today.

Last May, Microsoft sued CRM software company Salesforce for nine counts of patent infringement, and Salesforce followed with its own countersuit a month later, saying Microsoft's .NET platform and SharePoint products violated five Salesforce patents.

Google has officially announced that it will no longer be developing Wave as a standalone product, citing a lack of user adoption.

Google's real-time collaboration platform nearly drowned in hype even before it was opened up to beta testing. Once users got their hands on the platform, countless software products were declared to be dead by Google's hand.