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Despite the recent pairing between Yahoo and Google, signs indicate that Microsoft is after the Sunnyvale-based Yahoo for its search capabilities. That doesn’t come as a huge surprise since that was the essence of the last round of talks before the deal was completely yanked off the table. And if we’re likening this courtship to teenage love, I suppose that makes Carl Icahn the too-cool-for-school senior who’s waiting to see how and when he can benefit most when the dust finally settles.

Like two teenagers trying to figure out if they like each other, Yahoo and Microsoft are back at it again, trying to determine if a relationship can work. In Wednesday’s edition of the Daily Debrief, I spoke with CNET News.com’s Ina Fried about this latest round of talks and who is more desperate for the partnership.

This may be the first survey we’ve seen that puts Facebook ahead of the News Corp.-owned MySpace in U.S. traffic. It also puts Twitter as the third-biggest social-media site in the country by total page views, with only about six million unique visitors but a whopping 54 million views.

Still, statistics are like tequila shots. Always take ‘em with a few grains of salt and a slice of lime, and be warned that they may give you headaches.

Also pulling in notable numbers are LinkedIn, with about 11 million unique users, Classmates.com, with about 17 million, and Reunion.com, with slightly under 14 million. On the other end? AOL’s Bebo, an $850 million purchase, which Compete.com clocks in as having just shy of three million unique visitors. True, its biggest user bases are in the U.K. and Ireland, but that’s not good considering the price tag.

Compete’s numbers are interesting, because they often are pretty different from other analytics firms’. Here are some clarifications, explained to CNET News in an e-mail sent by Compete’s Andy Kazeniac: These are numbers stemming entirely from Web browser data in the U.S. That means that you won’t be pulling in any international numbers, where most of Facebook’s users are now, or data from widgets or third-party applications, which are how many avid Twitter users access the service. That means that it’s likely that Twitter’s reach is bigger than the numbers indicate.

What’s also intriguing is that there are a few social-media sites, like Flixster and LiveJournal, with relatively low unique visitor counts but proportionally very high page view counts, indicating that they probably have smallish bases of very loyal users.

The blogosphere simply loves to slurp up social-networking traffic stats, and on Monday we got a nice tasty serving of them with some new numbers from Compete.com for the month of January. The results? Facebook is in the lead, with about 68 million unique visitors, well ahead of MySpace’s 58 million. (The two are pegged at 1.1 billion and 810 million page views, respectively.)

(Credit:
Compete.com)

The software driver will enable the ability to have two views–left eye and right eye–which, at the push of a button, appear blurry and pixelated to the naked eye. When viewed through 3D lenses though, the game pops into three-dimensional mode.

The important part is that game developers won’t have to do anything differently. They just continue to make their games the way they want, and Nvidia will take care of the rest. It’s just an option for gamers though–it doesn’t mean all games have to be three-dimensional.

Thanks to a new software driver Nvidia is cooking up, any PC game can be played in 3D, with no extra work on the part of game developers.

Beginning this summer, any PC with an Nvidia graphics processor will have the ability to run a game in normal mode, or in 3D, with the aid of 3D glasses.

(Credit:
Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)

Nvidia's Drew Henry models the working prototype of 3D glasses.

And yes, they promise the final product will be much cooler than the glasses pictured above.

The challenge for Nvidia is making the glasses widely available at retail, as well as turning the silly-looking lenses into something actually cool and “not as geeky-looking,” said Drew Henry, general manager of the company’s Media Communications Processor (MCP) group.

“Our team has been busy reviewing each submission and we’re amazed and excited by what we’ve seen,” Lee wrote. “We’re blown away by the remarkable amount of creativity, dedication, and hard work put into each application. The competition is intense!”

FBFund was first devised by Facebook last year, with cash provided by company investors Accel Partners and the Founders Fund, as a way to encourage developers to create high-quality applications for its platform. It hit an early snag, however, when Facebook abruptly voided existing applicants and asked that they re-apply while agreeing to a new set of fine print. FBFund’s initial round gave away 10 developer grants, which were announced at the company’s F8 conference in July. But those applications–which include wedding planner ConnectedWeddings, game creator HotBerry, and carpool organizer Zimride–were not selected in a contest process.

Several applicants for this year’s round of FBFund have made their pitches available on the Web: e-commerce gifting service Real Gifts, contacts management system Socialfly, and greeting card creator GroupCard.

Facebook is moving to the next step of its $10 million FBFund developer grant program, the company announced Friday in a blog post by employee Catherine Lee. The first round, announced early in August, is now closed, and 25 winning proposals will be announced on September 22; 5 final winners will be chosen out of all first-round winners who apply for the second round, and winners will wind up with grant money between $25,000 and $250,000.

The reality is this: the tech industry is dominated by companies that are willing to do something a bit more innovative and a bit more thoughtful of consumer desire. How many people are really buying that extra DVD player at Wal-Mart? How many people really want that run-of-the-mill home theater system or that ugly desktop that doesn’t break the mold in any way? The list goes on.

So here’s my call to every tech company and tech lover who has had enough of derivative products and boring ideas: start making products that are both innovative and unique, useful and affordable. Start making products that appeal to our desire for something new. And for goodness sake, start making products that buck the current trend. Only then will companies see real rewards and only then will they be able to maintain the kind of position Apple and Nintendo currently do.

But for most other companies in the tech industry, innovation is either too costly or too unknown for them to move off the beaten path. More often than not, these companies let competitors innovate and use that technology to either mimic or slightly improve that original product.

“We had dreams that computers would improve education and improve communication and help us achieve a lot of tasks. A lot of us in our group understood it,” Woz told the crowd. “What we were doing was not (figuring out) how build a computer. It was how you get a computer that fits into the home. Price, looks–a lot of that stuff. It gave us more passion. We used the word ‘revolution’ all over the place.

I realize that sometimes components govern the success of a product and that it’s not always easy to innovate. But I think we’ve moved beyond the realm of excuses and most companies are more than willing to justify the release of products through the “trends in the industry.”

As a person that loves technology and has dedicated his life to the covering, opining about, and using it, I hope Wozniak’s words inspire not just engineers, but companies that are looking to do special things. I hope that what Wozniak says so eloquently will resonate in the offices of Dell or the garages of companies we’ve never heard of before.

When it comes time to evaluate major companies, only Apple and Nintendo seem to understand innovation. Both companies have strayed from the status quo and went their own way in hopes of doing something bigger and better. And both companies have succeeded.

Set-top boxes are one of the worst culprits in the space. How many set-top boxes do we need before someone finally tells companies to stop? I understand streaming music and content throughout the home may be the future and people want to take content on their computer to their HDTVs, but can’t we see something a bit different? Can’t we see a company try to innovate off that idea and give us a product that deviates from the norm and doesn’t copy every other device in the space?

As someone who literally immerses himself in the world of technology each day, I have the opportunity to see and use products that companies are trying desperately to promote. And almost each day, I’m disappointed by what I see: the same basic premise for the given market with nary a consideration for what consumers are really looking for.

At this week’s Intel Developer Forum, Steve Wozniak took the stage and discussed his career and his hope for the future of tech. All the while, it had me thinking about what I would like to see happen in this brave, new world of technology and how I hope that derivative products don’t ruin this industry’s appeal to the mainstream.

I hope that innovation, that simple premise that we see so little of today, will lead this industry forward and become the cornerstone of its development from now on.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

What a joke. All that means is other products have been successful, so other companies think they can be too. Newsflash: that rarely happens.

“The rewards are in your head.”

Isn’t it ironic that when an innovative device is released like the Slingbox or a Harmony Universal Remote, the tech press and tech lovers themselves all swoon? Not at all. We swoon because we see something in those devices that don’t do what other products do. We swoon because we love this industry and we want to see it move forward and stop sitting in the mud hoping something will get it out. We swoon because those products are innovative and they do something most competitors don’t: they fail to toe the industry line and don’t put cash and revenue projections before risk and tangible reward.

I understand business and I realize that companies have a vested interest in jumping in on the right markets and need to differentiate based on price or product. But I simply can’t understand why more won’t try to differentiate on product in a meaningful way.

“We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows,” he wrote. “We promise and will deliver such a dialogue with this blog.”

Microsoft had already said that Windows 7 would be on the PDC docket in some manner.

One thing that should be pointed out, Microsoft has said that it is engaging much earlier and deeper with computer makers as part of the Windows 7 design process. From what I’ve heard from PC manufacturers, this has been true so far. “It’s like night and day,” one PC company executive told me.

On the plus side, Windows engineering boss Steven Sinofsky did at least put a date to when he would share some more details.

Microsoft is launching its
Windows 7 blog, but it still doesn’t have much to say.

In an interview with CNET News in May, Sinofsky did disclose a few details–namely that it would use the same driver model and basic kernel approach as Windows Vista and that the company wanted the whole thing on the market by January 2010, three years after the mainstream release of Windows Vista. Microsoft also showed in May a glimpse at a new multi-touch interface that will be part of Windows 7.

“The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) on October 27 and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) the following week both represent the first venues where we will provide in-depth technical information about Windows 7,” Sinofsky and Windows Core operating system head Jon Devaan wrote in a posting on Thursday. “This blog will provide context over the next 2+ months with regular posts about the behind the scenes development of the release and continue through the release of the product.”

Sinofsky acknowledged that Microsoft continues to say less than many people would like, but repeated his standard line that the company doesn’t want to share details until they have reached a certain level of concreteness.

Sinofsky did suggest that the company wants to be more open at some point as it tries to create a product that serves the needs of a customer base as broad as Windows does.

European antitrust regulators are investigating whether Microsoft abused its desktop software market dominance in its effort to standardize the Office Open XML file formats.

He said that Microsoft will “fully cooperate” with any investigation from the Commission.

The Wall Street Journal in February reported that the investigation had started.

Clarification: Robertson said that a Google employee joined the Finnish committee but a Microsoft spokesperson said that it was in Denmark. The quote was changed.

In response, Standards Norway said there was heated debate but not any “inappropriate behavior that endangered our process,” according to a document seen by CNET News.com.

Office Open XML (OOXML) is a technical specification that describes the inner workings of how to read and create
Microsoft Office documents. In 2005, Microsoft started a process to standardize Open XML in an effort to appeal to government customers who favor standards-based software and improve interoperability with third-party products.

Standards Norway, however, issued a statement indicating that its position will remain yes.

The investigation is still ongoing, he added.

On Wednesday, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) announced that Open XML received enough for votes for it to be ratified as a standard.

In response, an IBM spokesperson on Wednesday said: “As always, the sentiment has to be organic. It will be up to people and organizations in individual countries to decide whether they want to try to appeal this.”

The effort stems from a complaint lodged by anti-Microsoft lobbying group ECIS (European Commission for Interoperable Systems). The Commission said in January that it is exploring whether the Open XML file formats are sufficiently interoperable with competitors’ products.

The head of the committee established to form Norway’s position on Open XML wrote a letter to the ISO, complaining that the country’s changed yes vote did not represent the views of most committee members.

Update 3:47 p.m. Pacific: Microsoft’s general manager of standards and interoperability Tom Robertson said that Microsoft, too, has been queried as part of the investigation.

In response to the accusations of stacking committees, Robertson said that IBM and other competitors have done exactly what Microsoft is accused of doing. For example, an employee from Google, which opposed Open XML standardization, joined the Danish national committee only three days before a vote.

The European Commission’s antitrust regulatory body sent queries to several European countries to see how the standards-setting process was working, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday.

In a letter seen by CNET News.com, European regulators queried the national standards body in Norway to gain details into the local standardization process. Specifically, the European Commission sought information on attempts to influence the debate or vote over the standards proposal.

The Commission query to Standards Norway came in February, before the results of the ISO ballot were published. The approval of Open XML reversed a previous attempt in September at standards approval that failed.

In addition, there have been reports of irregularities in the run-up to the most recent voting, which ended Saturday.

In some cases, people favorable to Microsoft’s pro-Open XML position joined standards bodies late in the process, bringing protests from Microsoft foes.

There was intense lobbying by Microsoft, IBM, and their partners to influence the international delegates from national standards bodies who participated in the voting.

Microsoft’s director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow, said on Tuesday that he expects IBM and its allies will launch “an orchestrated process attack in the hopes of overturning the ratification of Open XML, or at least to discredit what has come out of this long, global process.”

“It seems that one of the main concerns that people have raised about the process is the broad-based participation in the standards body deliberation,” he said. “I think it’s ironic IBM is complaining about new members in national standards bodies when they have been working around the clock to get people to join.”

Google’s shares have been sustaining a beating since mid-August, falling even further Thursday in early-morning trading to as low as $406.38 a share.

Google’s share price hit a new 52-week low Wednesday and continued its downward trek in early-morning trading Thursday.

But by late morning trading, the stock rebounded and was up roughly 1.5 percent to $420.66 a share.

Updated at 9:44 a.m. PDT, with Google’s stock price recovering.

The search giant’s stock fell as low as $409.68 a share on Wednesday, breaking past its previous 52-week low of $412.11 in mid-March.

That price pushes its shares back to a level where the stock was trading in October 2006.

On Wednesday evening five of Hollywood’s content producers gathered at the TechCrunch50 conference to chat about what the entertainment industry is doing to adapt in the ever-changing landscape of content consumption.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, who was moderating the panel, asked if it was simply an issue of ownership. Producer and director Stan Rogow said simply that it was no longer an allegiance game. Viewers were simply going to the content they liked, however they could get it, and that Hulu was the first real acknowledgment of that. “When two of the biggest brands in the network got together they didn’t all it FOX/NBC,” he said. “They called it Hulu because there are clearly negative connotations.”

Chris Henchy, creator of FunnyOrDie.com, tries to explain how Hollywood is approaching online content distribution.

The underlying theme of the panel was the “balancing act” that Hollywood has to manage to make sure its response to pirating and user-generated content does not keep legitimate users from bring down the entire system. That said, there was very little discussion of digital rights management.

Of the panelists, Joss Wheton, the creator of the popular TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Internet series Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along, said frankly that the studios are “trying to re-create the model of creating a successful television show where you pour in millions and get many more millions back,” but that the problem was really about rethinking an “antiquated” system that’s worked so well for so long.

Besides Hollywood’s latest creations hitting the Web legally, another interesting topic was celebrities making use of the Web for self promotion. More and more we’ve seen recording artists put more effort into things like personal blogs and short-form videos without any kind of official production. Wheton noted that this tends to work better for Internet video stars because that’s how they started, but when celebrities do it, it can backfire and remove some of the “mystique” that makes them celebrities in the first place.

Part of overcoming those negative connotations requires changing how content is delivered, including the restrictions that keep users from being able to get at it. Wheton’s Dr. Horrible series was another test of that, with a paid option through iTunes, alongside an ad-supported, limited time viewing window on Hulu. Hulu’s limited run of Dr. Horrible wasn’t an instance of restriction as much as trying to entice people to come and get it, or as Wheton put it “a place where you can have a time-specific event in an old fashioned way.”

(Credit:
Rafe Needleman / CBS Interactive)

Ultimately it’s just a game of getting some very large companies up to speed with a set of consumers who have a new device and way to access it every few years. “It’s control of money, control of product, control of what comes out after,” Henchy said. “People are still talking about DVDs and what extra content goes on that. It’s just a matter of time before (it goes) back to (what happened with) music. We’ve gotta figure it out.”

(Credit:
Mint - demo data)

The personal finance Web application Mint is adding investment tracking, making it a more well rounded service for people with moderately complex financial situations, as opposed to people who care solely about cash flow.

Other new features in Mint include deeper comparative data. You can now see how much other people are spending each month in each spending category (such as “groceries”), compared with you. Patzer says Mint’s smart auto-categorizing is a piece of making this work. It doesn’t hurt that most of Americans’ personal spending is debit- or credit-card-based; cash is not automatically categorizable.

Silicon Valley denizens waiting to get rich off their prepublic company stocks will find, though, that Mint doesn’t track vesting schedules on stock options. It also doesn’t yet track loans, although CEO Aaron Patzer says tracking for student loans,
car loans, and mortgages will be added around June, when the service official ends its beta period.

In some cases, Mint can get even more specific than categories, and analyze comparative spending per vendor. Mint has over 225,000 users, Patzer says, which yields enough data that it can tell you, for example, how much people like you spend each month at your favorite fast food restaurant.

The service also collects data on fees that show up in your stock accounts–important data that most online trading and retirement fund sites don’t go out of their way to highlight.

See also: Wesabe, Expensr (just acquired by Strands).

As it does with cash and credit accounts, the investment feature connects to your online accounts and reads in the data from them. You can get historical data only as far back as your brokerage site will provide it. However, there’s no capability to enter in your historical data (like purchase date and cost) for stocks you’ve owned for years.

Mint is, and will remain, free. The new features will be rolled out to public beta on May 6, but Webware readers who use Mint can get priority access by visiting www.mint.com/webware after 9:00 a.m. PDT today.

My grocery expenses compared with other Mint users in San Francisco, who must not have families or houseguests, ever.

(See initial review: Mint: Solid but incomplete online personal finance.)

Quicken users should take note that Mint does not let you actually transact. You can’t pay bills, trade stocks, or do anything else to spend your money. It’s just a tracking service. You have to go elsewhere (banks, brokers) to move your money around. However, as a tool for insight it’s quite good and getting better.

As soon as you point Mint at your accounts, you’ll be able to use it to visualize what’s happening in your investments, and in this area, Mint really shines. The Flash-based charting interface shows you either account value or comparative gains and losses by default, instead of stock price charts. It’s a more holistic way to look at investments, and appropriate for Mint’s mission.

Mint shows you how well (or not) your investments are doing.