Just about one year ago, Google finalized its plug-in for Windows Mobile that brought a Google search field to the WM home screen. Now, the app has expanded to include Maps, Gmail, News, and more in the same small window.

The resulting plug-in is actually more like a Google browser toolbar than anything else, due to the Windows Mobile interface, but the functionality is no less salient.

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ComScore's January 2009 numbers are out, and the most popular search site in America is...oh, that one you can easily guess. The less obvious numbers involve who's gaining ground, and which mega-funded search entity seems to be slipping.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Google leads the pack in market share, accounting for 63% of all search traffic from home, work and university locations in January. Interestingly, that's down one-half of one percent -- precisely the amount by which second-ranked Yahoo is up for the month, at 21%.

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Freeware media center Boxee is still very young, but offers a comprehensive solution for both managing a user's existent collection of movies, music, and photos, and discovering free online content. Unfortunately, it will be continuing ahead without support from Hulu.

In a blog post entitled Doing hard things, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar today announced that Hulu's content will no longer be available on boxee after this week. Done at the behest of content providers (aka Hollywood Studios), Kilar said that Hulu really had no choice but to suspend support for boxee.

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If Microsoft's Silverlight is indeed fizzling, someone didn't get the message out to the NCAA. For its annual endeavor in covering all the NCAA basketball playoff games online, CBS has opted to triple the NCAA's bandwidth over last year by switching from a Flash-based player -- which already received rave reviews -- to a Silverlight player produced in conjunction with Microsoft.

Like last year, the NCAA March Madness player will deliver every game in the NCAA Championship series to individuals who sign up for free. Online telecasts will be ad-supported, in the wake of poor reception to a subscription-based model in 2007 and earlier years, produced at the time in conjunction with YouTube. The 2008 move to an ad-supported player, the network says, led to 4.8 million total unique visitors downloading the player throughout the Championship series -- a 164% annual jump -- watching a total of 81% more hours of video.

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Social network MySpace is now battling back against Facebook by adding more smartphone support to its mobile site, including new applications for both the Palm Pre and Symbian OS-based Nokia S60 phones.

Beyond the newly added Palm and Symbian, the MySpace mobile site already supports the iPhone, BlackBerry, Sidekick, and Google Android mobile platforms.

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Switching it up a bit from its usual privacy-undercutting changes to their Terms of Service, Facebook's recently changed ToS slipped in new language that many users identified as a violation of personal privacy and copyright... and, after mass uproar, promptly rolled them back again.

Controversial Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg described the changes to the ToS as an attempt to "clarify a few points for our users," but close reading of the new terms indicated it might not be that simple. (Of course, Zuckerberg claims in the same post that "In reality, we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want," an assertion that anyone who's attempted to quit the service and remove all their information can easily refute.)

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Yahoo's announced Mobile service for smartphones, which goes into beta today, will be available in March for iPhones, but not until May for hundreds of other models running Windows Mobile, as well as other major brands.

Those brands that will have to wait it out include Motorola, Nokia, RIM, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.

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Only into its second day, the criminal copyright infringement case against file sharing site The Pirate Bay has already begun to crumble.

Exposing a clear misunderstanding of how .torrent files work, the prosecution was forced to drop all charges except those of "making available," a term common among all file sharing suits.

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Today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia announced that its Ovi suite of mobile applications will be getting its own App store in May, and Microsoft announced Windows Marketplace for Windows Mobile devices.

Nokia's store fits into the company's Ovi suite of mobile services, and will appropriately be named The Ovi Store. It will carry the applications, games, videos, podcasts, widgets, and "personalization content" (likely wallpaper and ringtones) previously found on Download!, MOSH, and WidSets, now combined into a single location.

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Microsoft had always promised interoperability as one of its key goals for Silverlight. The way it's accomplishing this on the Linux side of the scale is by empowering Miguel de Icaza to take the project and run with it.

This week marked an important milestone in a genuine effort to take a pretty good graphical Web applications platform and make it workable for Linux. The Mono Project, a team backed by Novell and Microsoft whose goal is to make the .NET Framework workable on other platforms, including Linux (and even, if you can believe it, Windows) has released its first non-beta version of the Moonlight 1.0 plug-in.

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This week, Google cranked out several tools that exploit the search company's strength in the LBS (location based service) model. Betanews took a look at one for Android, and one for Gmail.

Google Labs is a repository of potentially advantageous little gadgets, so when new product is pushed through, it usually warrants solid consideration. On Tuesday, a Gmail lab was premiered that carried a solid concept: Show the geographic origin of a user's e-mails as a signature.

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A settlement by Facebook's founder to college classmates, pegged by lawyers at $65 million, contained only $20 million in cash, according to an AP report this week which also revives the issue of Facebook's real stock value.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg paid the controversial settlement to former Harvard classmates who claimed he stole their idea for a social networking site. The classmates later started their own social network, ConnectU.

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So begins a new day for the venerable YouTube, the popular video streaming site is testing downloadable videos which include both a free and a for-pay model.

Thai Tran, Product Manager at YouTube announced today in the site's official blog that YouTube is "going offline." That is to say, it is giving video owners the option to make their videos downloadable under the Creative Commons License. Also, the option to make the videos available through a Google Checkout purchase is being tested.

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Apple is rumored to be readying an on-demand video service that would let users stream iTunes Movie and TV show purchases directly from iTunes servers for playback. The speculation springs from a report in Apple Insider, which proposes that such a service would benefit users by eliminating the need for local storage of media files.

According to Apple Insider, Apple is now putting the finishing touches on "iTunes Replay" for inclusion in iTunes 8. But the report also noted that it appears undecided by Apple whether or not it plans to charge for the service. Apple Insider does not cite any sources at Apple as the basis for the report. When Betanews attempted to confirm this information with Apple today, spokespersons were not immediately available for comment.

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With Larry Heck going aboard Microsoft this week, Microsoft has hired yet another Yahoo executive in efforts to make a larger dent in the search engine market versus industry leader Google. At Yahoo, Heck was in charge of a laboratory that developed algorithms for more accurate searches and ad targeting.

Although Microsoft announced 5,000 job cuts a few weeks back, its search arm is still hiring, and at least three of its recent key hires are from Yahoo. Others from Yahoo include Sean Suchter, hired by Microsoft in November, and Dr. Qi Lu, appointed president of Microsoft's online services group in December. In a new job slated to start within the next few weeks, Heck will report to Satya Nadella, a senior VP in Microsoft's online services unit.

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