The momentum, was too strong. Real-time search — and Google’s (Google) inability to beatTwitter at it — became a huge trend in 2009. Everyone wanted a piece of it, and Twitter had the goods. When you want to find out what’s happening right now, this very minute, Twitter’s search trumped Google, and Google had no choice but to react. Luckily for Twitter, the reaction came right on time. Both Bing (Bing) and Google signed a deal with Twitter to incorporate real-time results from Twitter into web searches, just as Twitter’s flat traffic figures became impossible to hide. The effect of this deal is still unknown, but when Google sends you traffic, you can bet it’s going to be noticeable.

Twitter’s future is still uncertain. We still don’t know the overall business plan beyond a few hints at at least some current revenue, and we still don’t know if the service’s huge popularity boom in 2009 was just a passing fad. One thing is certain, though: The Google deal was the adrenaline injection Twitter needed. If Twitter is really destined to become the world’s new SMS, 2010 is the time to do it, and we’re happy to be along for the ride.

Details we’ve all been waiting for… the Google Nexus One phone.  We posted a Nexus One Android 2.1 walkthrough video earlier this month and today Engadget has managed to score a full spec sheet for the phone, as well as some details about its release date.

According to Engadget’s source, the phone will initially be available by “invitation only.”  It looks like Google will be deciding who gets invites (hey, Google, call me), but the specifications also indicate that T-Mobile will be able to sell the phone directly to the customers in the future.

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The Breakdown

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Here are some highlights from the screenshots that Engadget posted:

- 512MB RAM, 512MB ROM, included 4GB microSD card, expandable to 32GB

- 5 megapixel camera with LED flash and mechanical autofocus

- 3.7″ WVGA AMOLED screen — in other words, as big as the Droid and brighter

- Worldwide GSM/EDGE, but 3G only on T-Mobile in the US (supports 2100, 1700 and 900 frequencies, meaning Europe should be covered)

- 1GHz Qualcomm chip — if accurate, that would make the Nexus One one of the fastest — if not the fastest — smartphones on the market.

- Wi-Fi A/B//G/N

- Bluetooth 2.1

- GPS

- Accelerometer

The specs look solid, the phone matches or beats every competing Android phone on the market (aside from having no physical keyboard) and also compares quite favorably to the iPhone (faster processor, nicer screen, wireless-N).

The only caveat for potential U.S. buyers is that, barring some sort of firmware upgrade (assuming the 1900 band is just disabled), this phone will only work in 3G in T-Mobile’s network.  If you live in a large city, that might not be a problem, but T-Mobile does have the smallest 3G footprint of any of the major U.S. wireless carriers.

For international users, this is really enticing, because the phone should be compatible with all UMTS bands in Europe, Asia, South America and Australia/New Zealand.

Now all we need is a solid release date and a price.  My friends are ready to buy this sight-unseen.  What about you?  android, Google, nexus oneWhat do you think of the Nexus One?

Could the Google phone be the death of the newly released Android?? The HTC-built device called the Nexus One was handed out to Google employees last week in the “mobile lab”. The rumor is that these phones would be sold unlocked directly to consumers.

The million dollar question is: How would Google bring an unlocked phone to market? There are really only three ways to sell phones.

1. License spectrum from a carrier and become a mobile virtual network operator or MVNO — a business model that time has proven to be a failure.

2. Of course, is to partner with carriers and offer phones at discounted prices through carrier subsidies, which is more or less the case with every successful device on the US market today.

3. Sell unlocked devices at full retail price that can be used by consumers on the network of the their choice. This is allegedly the model Google will be using to sell the Nexus One.

Stay tuned… we’ll see when and if the phone comes out to the market anytime soon.

On the consumer side of things, Google has just released a bevy of new features like Google Goggles and real-time search. But the search giant hasn’t forgotten about its business users. For you they offer up a holiday present.

Now Google Analytics users can add annotations to dates in order to better document spikes in traffic, use custom variables in advanced segments and view them in custom reports, and even use a super simple analytics tracking code wizard for setting up specialized situations.

Google also took to their Analytics blog to announce that a new version of the Analytics API is coming soon and will support advanced segmentation.

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Annotate Your Graphs

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The majority of Google Analytics users will get the most value out of annotations, especially since the notes can be used to designate why there were peaks or dips in traffic, campaign launches and other information to help team members process traffic data.

To use the annotations, simply click the tab below the date on the graph. The tab will expand to include a date field and text entry box for your note, which will be attributed to you once you save. You can also save your note as private or edit previous annotations.

As the post points out, the use cases for annotations are manifold:

“Annotations can become your central repository, or logbook, for all online marketing and website design actions within your business. So even if you have multiple marketing teams, agencies, or webmasters, or if you have employee churn or other disruptions, you can always see which events may have caused conversions to increase or decrease.”

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Go Custom: Advanced Tools for Tracking

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If slicing and dicing data is your thing, the refreshed Google Analytics also offers up custom variables in advanced segments plus specialized variables in custom reports. This means that “if you’ve created a Custom Variable such as ‘Logged-In Member,’ you can also create an advanced segment based on that variable and see it across all of your reports.”

Should comprehensive traffic tracking be more your style, look no further than the new tracking code set-up wizard. The wizard will automatically generate the right tracking code for your site profiles, so you can more easily track cross-domains, multiple sub-domains, mobile sites and the like.

On the whole, the new Google Analytics features are perfect for data-crunchers and Web site admins looking to better understand their site metrics.

It’s been rumored that archenemies MySpace and Facebook have turned friendly in recent months, discussing the possibility that MySpace users might actually be able to sign into the social network using Facebook Connect.

Now, a more detailed report from the blog Inside Facebook says that this will become reality “in the first part of 2010.” According to their sources, MySpace is thinking along the same lines as Yahoo, who earlier this week announced major Facebook integration across many of its services. That thinking could essentially be summarized with the old proverb: If you can’t beat them, join them.

For MySpace’s purposes, that hypothetically would mean users accessing the site with their Facebook credentials, and then sharing back the increasing amount of exclusive entertainment type content that the site has been acquiring to their Facebook friends. In turn, MySpace gets more traffic that it can sell to advertisers, but ultimately cedes the race to be the Web’s social identity provider.

That space is seemingly a war that will be waged between Facebook and Google . The latter just launched integration with Twitter earlier this week, that allows users to sign into Google Friend Connect— its Facebook Connect rival — with Twitter. Maybe social identity ultimately won’t be that complicated after all.

We’ve been matching up popular web services, applications and mobile apps against each other in heated one-on-one battles here in our weekly Faceoff Series. Last week Microsoft Office bested Google Docs in a head to head race for the title of office suite champion.

This week we turned our attention to a rather timely battle being waged on the mobile front, between Apple’s still wildly-selling iPhone platform and Google’s slower to boil Android mobile operating system. Apparently the latter has been gaining some ground, resulting in our first unexpected upset victory in the Faceoff series.

… Google Android is the winning platform by a more than 2:1 margin. Out of 5045 total votes, Android walked away with 3323 of them or 66%, while the iPhone platform only netted 1494 or 30%. The tie vote included 228 or 5% who just couldn’t choose between them. Many people cited the openness of the platform and third-party development process as well as Android’s versatility, being able to be put to use not just on phones but also netbooks, tablet devices, eReaders and more.

Still, given the popularity of the iPhone we were a little surprised by these results. Are you? Let us know in the comments.

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Web Faceoff: Overall Results

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Week 1:
- Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome
- WINNER: Firefox , 4600 votes (Chrome: 3310 votes, Tie: 911 votes)

Week 2:
- Tumblr vs. Posterous
- WINNER: Tumblr, 1809 votes (Posterous: 1496 votes, Tie: 256 votes)

Week 3:
- Pandora vs. Last.fm
- WINNER: Last.fm, 1187 votes (Pandora: 1156 votes, Tie: 122 votes)

Week 4:
- Twitter vs. Facebook
- WINNER: Facebook, 2484 votes (Twitter: 2061 votes, Tie: 588 votes)

Week 5:
- WordPress vs. Typepad
- WINNER: WordPress, 2714 votes (Typepad: 267 votes, Tie: 357 votes)

Week 6:
- Windows 7 vs. Snow Leopard
- WINNER: Windows 7, 3632 votes (Snow Leopard: 3278 votes, Tie: 121 votes)

Week 7:
- TweetDeck vs. Seesmic Desktop
- WINNER: TweetDeck, 3294 votes (Seesmic Desktop: 1055 votes, Tie: 260 votes)

Week 8:
- Microsoft Office vs. Google Docs
- WINNER: Microsoft Office, 1365 votes (Google Docs: 994 votes, Tie: 315 votes)

Week 9:
- Apple iPhone vs. Google Android
- WINNER: Google Android, 3323 votes (Apple iPhone: 1494 votes, Tie: 228 votes)

There is a lot of hype surrounding the real-time web, and much of the feeding frenzy reminds me of the RSS space four years ago — though there is a lot of potential, there is also a lot of noise. How do you navigate through it all and which developments should you be paying attention to? What are the emerging trends for companies and entrepreneurs to watch for? Here are four real-time web trends that I’m tracking.

1. Real-Time Collaboration is Ripening

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Real-time will play a major role in the future of online collaboration. We’ve seen all the hype around the new Google Wave platform, as well as the growth of Twitter and Twitter-like communications (such as Facebook status).  On the business side, SAP’s Gravity, a prototype of real-time collaborative business process modeling within Google Wave, is a good example. But I see this as the tip of the iceberg.

Companies that are more efficient have an advantage whether within their walls or with their customers. Imagine being able to make real-time changes with your colleague in another city and graphic designer at your local Kinko’s to finalize a presentation and print it hours before your meeting. Or working with your manufacturer in Nanjing, China on changes to your new BBQ grill design and seeing if it’s possible in real-time. Or game developers in Korea and Dallas story boarding a new video game concept in a new real-time game development application. There is massive potential for real-time collaboration across almost every discipline, and I believe there are an incredible amount of exciting possibilities here.

2. Real-Time Analytics Will Be Hot

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The reality right now is that there isn’t enough critical mass of real-time data in most areas, but when those tipping points are met, watch this space. This is not just about Twitter feeds, but shopping information, individual health information, movie and show reviews, and many other treasure troves of data.

Waze, which is a crowdsourced mobile map and traffic information service, is effective in Israel where it initially launched and needed just 0.5% of the population to become a reliable service. It recently launched in the United States, and will be challenged to reach critical mass in its target markets for its product to be useful to end users, who provide the real-time data that is uses. While Waze is not necessarily an analytics application — it’s a real-time information app (though it does analyze the data it receives in real-time to expose traffic patterns, accidents, and speed traps to users), it is an example of necessary tipping points for analytics to be relevant.

Once you have these real-time data sets, so many fields will be able to become more accurate and relevant in their decision-making processes. What type of real-time data would you like access to?

3. Real-Time Search is Looking Up

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With Microsoft’s and Google’s recent foray into real-time search, it would be easy to assume that real-time search startups are dead in the water. But I believe there are many opportunities for startups in the space, especially as public life streaming activities increase (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, IMs) and real-time search moves to vertical categories.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you’re wondering if you should you go see Depeche Mode in concert or if they are too old now to put on a good show. What are people saying about their concert from the evening before? If your search allows you to narrow your focus by date to make sure you’re getting info only from last night’s show, exclude all messages under 10 characters to filter out irrelevant information, and those from their home area of Basildon, Essex UK to rule out biases, you should be able to get a clear picture of what people think.

For the larger players, it will be a golden opportunity to capitalize on more event-driven ad dollars. Imagine the euphoria during the World Cup or Superbowl and all the tweets and messages surrounding these events. Now imagine the highly targeted ads that could be displayed to these users selling them championship videos or t-shirts at the height of their emotions. I’m still amazed by the uncanny targeting of ads within Gmail so it should be a short step for Google and other major advertising companies to be able to implement targeted ads across real-time streams.

4. Real-Time Ecommerce is Coming

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German company Apnoti indexes real-time pricing for consumers in the U.S and Germany. The primary benefit of their service is to help consumers find dramatic price fluctuations and to take advantage of pricing errors on various ecommerce sites. But this is really quite elementary compared to what is possible. For true real-time pricing to occur, there needs to be real-time inventory management, which will depend on major infrastructure companies such as EDS or IBM to build out those systems. As retailers move closer to real-time inventory management, they’ll improve on their pricing and sales efforts since they will be able to create more efficient price equilibrium adjustments.

Microsoft’s latest effort to gain relevance in the search wars is about to get a whole lot more interesting.

According to All Things Digital, the company is set to announce deals with both Twitter and Facebook to integrate status updates into its Bing search engine.

Details are expected to be announced later today at the Web 2.0 Summit, but the stage has been building for this for some time. Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook back in 2007, and has since signed search and advertising deals with the social network.

Meanwhile, Twitter has been known to be exploring search partnerships for at least the past month, though it’s long been suspected that the company would eventually eye significant revenue in this space. Although Twitter has been said to be willing to offer a full stream of tweets to search providers on a non-exclusive basis, it would appear that Microsoft has beaten Google to the punch in making it happen.

In All Things Digital’s latest report, both of the leading social sites are said to be talking to Google, so Bing’s advantage may be short lived, though it will be “weeks, if not months” until we see any actual integration go live.

More to come …

Last week launched the social revolution for search. Microsoft’s Bing fired the first shot by announcing search deals with Twitter and Facebook and, at the Web 2.0 Summit, launching its Twitter integration. Google fired back almost immediately though, completing its own deal with Twitter and, perhaps more importantly, announcing a new feature: Social Search.

Social search, demoed at the Web 2.0 Summit by Google’s VP of Search Marissa Mayer, combines results from your friend’s blogs, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed and a wide variety of other social media sites (so long as your friends have connected their social accounts to their Google with Google’s regular search results. The feature will go live this afternoon, and can be found within Google Labs.

The experimental feature, once activated, will display relevant search results from your social circle at the bottom of the search results page. This could be travel photos from your friends, a recent blog post, a set of status updates, or other information Google pulls.

For now, the feature is opt-in, only affects certain searches, and appear at the bottom of the search results page. However, we won’t be surprised if Social Search results start blending into regular search higher up the page. After all, your social circle is often far more relevant than even the top Wikipedia article on a subject. Google seems to betting on it in a big way.

Here’s a demo of social search from Google:

While there are bloggers on both sides of the monetizing-of-blogging fence, there is no doubt there are those who take the route of running ads. Those that are using WordPress have a seemingly endless supply of themes to choose from, but not all the selections lend themselves to ad placement. There are, however, some kind souls out there who have made free themes for this very purpose.

All4WordPress.com – Offers several themes with 125×125 placements, such as the above Clouds Rounds, as well as at least one with a 25ox250 slot.

BlixKrieg – The extremely versatile Blix theme got abandoned as a project ages ago, but it then resurfaced as BlixKrieg with built-in placements for Google AdSense units. Even though this theme is aging, new authors do try to keep it up to date.

BlogOhBlog.com – Offers several free themes, with AdsPress being the most ad friendly of them with some fairly subtle Google AdSense placements.

DailyBlogTips – The popular blog about all-things-blogging has started offering free monthly WordPress themes, all of them with an eye to advertising. There is a mixture of choices with 125X125 ad blocks and those supporting Google AdSense.

EasyWordPress.com – Offers a few free monetized WordPress themes for free (registration required for download) that have various types of monetization units.

ElegantWPThemes.com – ElegantWPThemes offers several free themes with 125×125 spots, the above pictured one is named Soloss.

Jauhari.net – Jauhari.net offers numerous themes, a few with Google AdSense placements, and two with 125×125 spots. This one pictured, My April Reloaded, also features a 729×90 banner spot that can be used for images or as an ad spot.

Monetizing The Web – You can’t do an article about monetization themes without including one named “Monetizing the Web”. Available in 17 different colors, there isvirtually no monetization they left out of this: Google AdSense units, text links, Google Referrals and more.

Slick Blue – From HackWordPress, this theme includes four 125×125 placements as well as a Google AdWords banner slot at the top.

WPThemesPlugin.com – WPThemesPlugin offers several free themes, several of them monetized such as Vestique which features 125×125 ad slots, Google AdSense on the individual posts and a 468X60 slot at the top.

WPThemesPress.com – Offers several free themes with ad placements, but they seem very targeted to niche blogging, like the one above, Deliciously Nature.