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While some are still sounding the trumpets over Google's proclamation that its Chrome Web browser technology will be elevated to the role of operating system sometime next year, there are some Web applications engineers who wonder why it isn't one already. Once Chrome 3 is proclaimed fully functional on Linux, it will essentially make the same Web applications accessible from the desktop that Chrome OS plans to do. And if you don't mind the fact that the Chrome 3 Web browser is in the development stage, whether you're running Linux or Windows XP on your netbook, it does that right now.

Though I've made the point before that most businesses and a majority of consumers today still prefer Microsoft Office, there will be a small, though potentially beneficial, market of consumers who appreciate the flexibility and versatility that a Web application may offer. If they can suffer through the bugs, users will have the opportunity to produce some respectable, if not altogether spectacular, documents. But what is there for users to gain by installing these Web apps on their desktops, and use them like software installed on their computers, as opposed to simply running them in their browsers?

Yahoo begins beta rollout of new front page

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 • After what feels like a Google-length testing period, Yahoo is rolling out access to its fresh-and-widgety front page redesign to US users, to be followed within a week or thereabouts with rollouts in the UK, France, and India. The design features a configurable "my favorites" bar with several dozen applications that can fly out and preview content above the main screen, improved localization, slightly smaller type, and the ubiquitous purple.

It's an odd time to launch an e-bookstore, in the wake of Amazon's Orwellian book-deletion shenanigans as we are, but Barnes & Noble is jumping in with both feet. The new Barnes & Noble eBookstore launched Monday with over 700,000 titles, leapfrogging it past Amazon's efforts.

The store allows downloads to readers for the iPhone/iPod Touch and the BlackBerry, along with Windows and Mac machines; whatever the reader, it's optimized to the .pdb and .prc file formats. (The readers are free and come with free books -- including, if you register, a Merriam-Webster dictionary, plus access to half a million public-domain books from Google.)

Adobe Systems has made two new frameworks available on opensource.adobe.com under the Mozilla Public License: Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) and Text Layout Framework (TLF),

OSMF was originally part of the Strobe initiative announced in back in May, which aimed to establish an open standard for custom Flash-based media players. It includes a plug-ins API that allows for third-party advertising and reporting metrics to work alongside the standard video player features such as buffering, dynamic streaming, and video navigation.

Fourteen months after the previous service pack (and six months after giving the world a peek at Macworld), Microsoft on Monday rolled out Office 2008 for Mac SP2. There's still no sign of the promised Entourage upgrade to Exchange Web Services (EWS), but fans of Office Live Workspace and SharePoint ought to be pleased.

Document Connection, which improves users' ability to work with documents on both of those collaboration platforms, is perhaps the biggest addition in SP2. It engendered not only a major effort to bring Microsoft's current vision of Web-based collaboration into the Mac world, but a push to get Office right with Safari 4. Those improvements are also part of SP2.

All P2P networks must go "establishment" someday, and today another formerly popular P2P service rended by courtroom battles announced it has turned around. Like P2P pioneer Napster did six years ago, this morning, Kazaa (now with just one capital letter) has come back as www.kazaa.com, a subscription-based music service with all of the "big four" major labels in its corner.

For $19.98 a month, Kazaa.com users get unlimited music downloads on up to three PCs, and unlimited ringtone downloads on one mobile phone, but that's it. The service does not support portability and tracks cannot be moved onto MP3 players.

Microsoft-Yahoo: Carl Icahn weighs in

Morning of July 20, 2009 • Still no official word on that rumored deal between Microsoft and Yahoo on the advertising front, but Reuters phoned up one of the heavy hitters and asked him for his thoughts last week. It's probably no surprise that principal Yahoo investor Carl Icahn, though not willing to discuss anything current, still seems inclined to make a deal -- even if it wasn't the deal he tried to broker for the two companies in 2008.

This episode of Recovery is brought to you by caffeine, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems (with apologies to Homer Simpson).

Fun fact: The Simpsons -- the longest-running sitcom in history and arguably one of the most formative -- has never been nominated for a Best Comedy Emmy. I've got a theory that if the television voters had done so about 18 years ago, they wouldn't currently be in the embarrassing position of nominating for their awards "shows" that don't give a damn about television. Hear me out.

Twitter, Google Apps, TechCrunch -- Why can't everyone be to blame for that hack?

The morning after the morning after... • Watching TechCrunch spool out those 300-odd documents lifted from Twitter has been fascinating; the two companies have been talking throughout the process about what is and isn't reasonable to reveal. Very socially-networked of them, as TheNextWeb points out. (Or, says Biz Stone, not.) Now, whom shall we keelhaul for all this?

Since Apple terminated iTunes' compatibility with the Palm Pre this week, there have been a number of services that have rushed to the forefront to make sure users aren't left with an unsyncable Pre for too long. This morning, Web-based syncing service Dazzboard announced its support for the Pre.

"We feel it is very unfair of Apple to penalize Palm and its growing Pre community, and we hope our free application will provide a solution for users are now left in cold due to Apple's decision," said Dazzboard CEO Tera Salonen.

Admitting after that the fact that "a quarter ago we had no idea where the bottom was," Google said on Thursday that the bottom was apparently a quarter ago. The company reported its lowest ever growth rate for revenues in its recently ended second quarter, expanding just 3% year-over-year.

The company reported revenues of $5.52 billion for the second quarter. Operating income (GAAP) was $1.87 billion, up about $290 million year over year, but representing a larger percentage (34% vs 29%) of revenues compared to the previous year. Net income (again, GAAP) was $1.48 billion compared to $1.25 billion in Q2'08. And EPS was... insert drum roll here... $4.66, compared to $3.92 last year, and about 25 cents/share above analysts' predictions.

Earlier this month, the first sampling data from Web researcher StatCounter suggested that Microsoft's new Bing search service was gathering momentum, albeit slowly. Today, the first broader-based data analysis from ratings service comScore closely confirms what the early samples were saying: During the month of June, Microsoft-hosted searches including Bing for US customers numbered just 30 million more than for Microsoft-hosted searches including Windows Live the month before. This is during a month when just over 14 billion general searches were processed by the nation's top five providers.

The news looks a little better for Microsoft when you consider that June was a slow month for searches overall -- down by 2% among the nation's top 5 providers, and flat overall when advanced searches and the sites that facilitate them, are entered into the picture. So while Google's general search traffic declined by 2% in keeping with the general trend, its US usage share overall stayed flat at 65%. Bing gained 0.4% of usage share over Windows Live last June -- better than flat, but not the "Bing Boom" that some made it out to be.

I tune, you tune, we all tune to iTunes.

Except if you own a Palm Pre.

Last Month, Betanews' Scott Fulton asked "What will become of MySpace after a 30% headcount reduction?" None other than the highest man in the MySpace architecture, parent company News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, answered that question this week.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal yesterday, Murdoch said the fading social network will need to refocus itself as an entertainment portal.

In the final scenes of Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), which history may yet restore to its rightful place as one of the dumbest movies ever made, the President of the United States (Charles Durning) learns from a renegade general-turned-prison escapee (Burt Lancaster) that the whole point of the Vietnam War was a geopolitical bluster intended to convince the Soviet Union that the US was crazy enough to engage in World War III if it had to. After the President is told this Earth-shattering information by his kidnapper, his own cabinet conspire to assassinate him to prevent the information from being revealed in a press conference. This despite the fact that the real world was already entitled to The Pentagon Papers in paperback for several years, though readers clearly preferred Jaws and The Exorcist.

It is no "eyes-only" confidential secret that bluster is a very effective political and marketing tool at the disposal of anyone who can afford to use it. So you're safe from any assassination attempts from the likes of Joseph Cotten or Richard Widmark. Meanwhile, anyone reading Betanews on a daily basis over the last few weeks might get the impression that World War III is about to be triggered by the volatile mix of Google and Microsoft, or that at least some of us here who may have stayed up too late to watch Twilight's Last Gleaming on AMC may think so.