Net Applications data for January is out, and there are some interesting trends displayed.

First, the data shows that Google’s Chrome browser has managed to snatch usage share from Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Here’s the data:

• Chrome: 5.20% (up from 4.64% in Dec ‘09)
• IE: 62.18% (down from 62.69% in Dec ‘09)
• Firefox: 24.41% (down from 24.61% in Dec ‘09)

Note: While we may debate as to whether Net Applications is a reliable metric or not, Mozilla both accept and use its data in its PR propaganda.

Note that this is the second month in a row that Net Applications has shown a decline in Firefox usage.

I noticed over the holiday period that Google was aggressively pushing Chrome through ads, even going as far as to offer customized downloads that could be sent as gifts via email.

The top browser spot has also changed hands, now belonging to IE8, with 22.31%, beating IE6 (20.07%). Still far too many people browsing the web with IE6 …

In other news, Windows 7 global usage share hit 10% on January 31st. Overall, Windows 7 ended January with a 7.51% usage share (leaping ahead from 5.71% for Dec ‘09). Also interesting is the data that shows that Redmond WA, home of Microsoft, shows the highest Windows 7 usage share within the US, a robust 42%.

Overall, Windows usage is down to 92.02% (from 92.21% in Dec ‘09 – even strong Windows 7 gains can’t halt the slow erosion of Windows usage share), Mac is up to 5.13% (from 5.11% in Dec ‘09), which I admit probably isn’t significant, and Linux is unchanged at 1.02%. iPhone OS platform is also up marginally to 0.47% (up from 0.44% in Dec ‘09).

Net Applications measures operating system usage by tracking computers that visit the 40,000 sites monitored for clients, which represents a pool of about 160 million unique visitors each month. This data is then weighted based on the estimated size of each country’s Internet population.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes blogs.zdnet.com

According to The Nielsen Company, global* consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years.

Globally, social networks and blogs are the most popular online category when ranked by average time spent in December, followed by online games and instant messaging. With 206.9 million unique visitors, Facebook was the No. 1 global social networking destination in December 2009 and 67% of global social media users visited the site during the month. Time on site for Facebook has also been on the rise, with global users spending nearly six hours per month on the site.

blog.nielsen.com

Russia Internet search engine “Yandex” named the most popular search topic in 2009. As it turned out, the main event last year was its conclusion: the number of queries on the topic “New Year” close to 21 million. Closest pursuer – the theme “Ready homework” – left behind more than twice (about 9 million requests).

Judging by the rankings “Yandex“, the most popular dishes on New Year’s table was a salad with calamari and Caesar salad, goose or duck with apples and oranges. Legitimate to increased number of requests associated with New Year’s gifts and attributes, although the most popular purchase was the new operating system Windows 7 from Microsoft.

In the last five minutes of 2009’s most popular search query were online broadcast TV channels, as in the first five minutes of 2010 – social networking.

In the New Year, the top ten most popular topics of search queries in 2009 were three more holidays: Women’s Day (more than 4 million requests, 6 th), Defender of the Fatherland (3.5 million, 9-th place) and Valentine’s Day (2,8 million, 10-th place). Educational those two: in addition to those already mentioned finished homework in the top ten hit theme “EGE 2009″ (more than 6 million queries, 4 th place). In the top-10 were two computer games: GTA 4 (about 6 million queries, 5-th place) and The Sims 3 (more than 4 million, 7-th place).

The third took place in the rating “Eurovision 2009″ held in Moscow (7.8 million requests). Also in the top ten hit theme “Swine flu” (nearly 3.8 million queries, 8 th place).

lenta.ru

Lodgings advertising banners in runet in 2010 will be cheaper, writes Kommersant. “Yandex” has lowered prices on 25-31,5 percent, and Mail.ru – 17 per cent.
In “Yandex” explain that the traffic over the last year has almost doubled, and internet advertising market grew by 5 percent. Advertisers in these conditions are offered more extensive packages without significantly increasing their cost. Thus, the contract price falls.

According to the agency Index20, sells advertising for Rambler Media, the cost of placing a banner on the home page of the Internet resource is 80 rubles per thousand impressions, while in early 2009, it reached 83 rubles.

With regard to the growth of Internet advertising market, the Association of Communication Agencies in Russia recognized his market in the first three quarters of 2009 in 5,2-5,3 billion rubles, or 3 percent increase over the same period last year.

His prices are likely to increase only small Internet resources. First, as the newspaper notes, this refers to sites that are driving prices down sharply in crisis beginning in 2009.

lenta.ru

It was a big year for technology: Twitter and Facebook’s popularity exploded, while new smartphones, e-readers and a host of other gadgets cropped up to compete for our plugged-in affection.

But into each electronic life a little digital rain must fall.

We polled a handful of the most tech-savvy folks we know for their thoughts on the worst moments in technology from 2009 — the most epic “fails” of the year.

And now, in no particular order, our 2009 Tech Fails …

Y2-what? Zune gets off to a bad start

Technically it was a New Year’s Eve surprise. But many owners of Microsoft’s Zune media player started 2009 with little more than a paperweight with LED lights.

At midnight on December 31, all Zune’s 30-GB MP3 players froze up. Microsoft explained the problem as a problem with the way the device’s internal clock recognized (or didn’t recognize) leap years.

The glitch only lasted a day, but didn’t help a device that was already failing to gain ground on Apple’s iPod.

TwitterPeek fails to pique interest

The reaction of many in the tech community to the release of the TwitterPeek device was a collective, “Huh?”

Sure, there are some people who don’t have smartphones and don’t want to pay for expensive mobile plans. But is there really a market for a $199 device that does nothing but let you manage your Twitter feed?

“I already have a $200 device to update Twitter,” said one techie we spoke to. “It’s called my iPhone.”

The folks at Peek, makers of TwitterPeek, had already made the Pronto — a device that handled only texts and e-mails. Maybe a combination of the two gadgets is in the works. But even then, would enough people be interested? Probably not.

Facebook backtracks on owning your stuff

OK … so every time Facebook makes even the most minute changes, it sparks an outcry among its 350 million members, not to mention (irony alert) dozens of new Facebook groups geared at making the site change back.

But a terms-of-service change in February went further, implying that Facebook owned the rights to anything users uploaded to the site. Another change suggested that Facebook held those rights forever, even if people quit the site or took the material down.

Facebook responded that it simply needed those rights to be able to post information to other users. But when the backlash continued, the site eventually switched the terms back to their former wording.

Sidekick punts user info

In what one observer called “an almost incomprehensible data disaster,” T-Mobile told users in October that a server error at a Microsoft subsidiary had lost users‘ personal data it had stored for the devices.

All of it.

Phone numbers, contact lists, calendars and other information was gone — and even new data would disappear if users turned off or recharged the phone.

Users were offered free service and rebates in the wake of the mess, as T-Mobile scrambled to recover what little of the data it could. But that didn’t stop the lawsuits, Internet griping and ill will generated by the snafu.

Hacking Twitter

It started as a story about someone hacking the accounts of several Twitter employees. Then, after Twitter said the attack was limited to personal information, not sensitive, company-related stuff, the hacker behind the attack struck again — in a different way.

He sent 310 documents to leading technology blog TechCrunch. The blog published a small portion of them and sent the documents to Twitter, which is when the company learned that they included financial projections and notes from high-level executive meetings.

Twitter responded by reportedly closing the security holes that allowed the attack.

Enough with the updates, already!

This was the year that online social media exploded. That’s good news for the future of Facebook, Twitter and the like.

But sometimes it just got to be a bit too much.

Members of Congress abandoned any pretense of paying attention to President Obama’s State of the Union speech by updating their Twitter feeds as he was speaking.

There was the groom who updated his Facebook relationship status at the altar. And the women who tweeted during childbirth. [In fairness, the most high-profile tweeting new mom was Sara Williams, wife of Twitter CEO Evan Williams].

And that’s not even mentioning all those friend requests you got from your grade-school teachers and members of your mom’s knitting circle.

Hyped-up Conficker fails

This is a failure we’re glad to report.

The Conficker worm was, by all accounts, a serious bit of malware that infected as many as 10 million computers worldwide. Instead of attacking those computers, it was designed to control them, paving the way for later attacks.

When researchers spotted the date April 1 in the worm’s coding, speculation began mounting that a major April Fools’ Day attack was on its way. Instead, it was mostly quiet — a false alarm of Y2K proportions.

“I think the joke’s on us a little bit, which you would have expected, having an April 1 date,” Holly Stewart, threat response manager for IBM’s X-Force, a computer security service, said at the time.

Attacks cripple Twitter, Facebook

On August 6, the concept of computer addiction didn’t seem so silly.

A massive denial-of-service attack hit Twitter, Facebook and the LiveJournal blogging site. Twitter was by far the hardest hit, completely blacking out for several hours.

The attacks were believed to have targeted a blogger in the country of Georgia who had been critical of Russia. The attacks, the blogger said, coincided with the one-year anniversary of renewed violence between the two countries.

What was telling was how freaked out people became. Users described feeling naked, jittery and upset without the ability to post on Twitter. When the site came back up, the top topic of conversation was the hashtag for “When Twitter Was Down.”

Gmail crashes

We heard some different views on this year’s string of outages or slowdowns of Google’s popular e-mail system.

Some thought coverage was overblown.

But as more computing power moves “into the cloud,” people and businesses are relying on programs like Gmail not just for e-mails, but to archive documents, chat with friends or co-workers and store contact information.

Gmail went through several high-profile crashes in 2009, including one in February and two in September. While e-mail crashes are nothing new to any provider, 2009’s were the first since Google begain offering offline support.

Response to the crashes simultaneously showed how many people depend on Gmail and how easy it is to make fun of those people. Social-networking blog Mashable responded with a list of five things to do while Gmail is down (No. 1: “Immediately flood Twitter with tweets alternately proclaiming, ‘Gmail is down!’ and inquiring, ‘Is Gmail down?’ “)

I got Google Wave — now what?

OK, so it’s a little early in the game to call this one a total fail. But after the breathless anticipation that greeted Google Wave and the hot rush to get an invitation for its beta testing, lots of users found themselves asking, “OK … now what?”

Google, for its part, released an 80-minute tutorial video — leading some observers to argue that if you need an hour and 20 minutes to explain what your product does, you might be in trouble.

It’s designed as a platform to allow users to communicate and collaborate in real time — a tool some predict will be used effectively by developers in the future.

But for now, it’s inspired the creation of a Web site — Easier to Understand Than Wave — on which users compare the online tool to other sometimes obtuse subjects (Both Ozzy Osbourne and the geopolitical climate of Southeast Asia are easier to understand than Wave, users voted, while Sarah Palin and Scientology are both more difficult).

www.cnn.com

With All the Talk of CPMs Going to Zero, Here’s a Survey of Who’s Commanding Top Dollar

Online ad rates, we’re told, are on an express train to zero, helped along by gagillions of impressions generated by Facebook, Twitter and its ilk, and the networks, exchanges and targeting technologies that allow advertisers to buy audience as a commodity, without dealing with individual sites at all.

And while the recession has put another hit on CPMs — the term ad buyers and sellers use as shorthand for the cost for 1,000 impressions — across the web, some sites can still pimp fat ad rates either by virtue of their reach, specialized audience or unique environment.

Who’s getting the best ad rates on the web today? The slideshow that follows, culled from agency buyers and media sellers, is far from scientific, but gives a good sense of who can still charge bank and why.

Here’s who gets the highest online ad rates

adage.com

We reported that Google would be replacing Russian search leader Yandex as the default search engine and ad server on Mail.ru, the most popular online destination in the country with more than 50 million unique monthly users.

This morning, Mail.ru confirmed (in Russian) that it will be replacing Yandex with Google as its default search provider starting January 2010.

The company noted that Mountain View will indeed refrain from branding the search engine with the Google name and logo like it usually does.

Mail.ru has an estimated 10% search share in Russia, behind Google with 23%, but both pale in comparison to leader Yandex, which takes up no less than 58% of the market. By replacing Yandex as default search engine on the Mail.ru portal, Google will grow its share to over one third of the market.

Google will also be powering the contextual advertising part of the equation for Mail.ru, in a country where its size is estimated at around $400 million.

The agreement reportedly spans 1 year, and the terms stipulate that Mail.ru will receive a 60 percent share of revenues from ad clicks (which is more than Mail.ru currently receives from Yandex).

Mail.ru already worked with Google for search and ads from 2003 to 2005.

www.techcrunch.com

Marketers  continue to reallocate spend from traditional media into online. 83% of marketers increased online advertising spend during 2009 with 94% planning to increase in 2010. Audience targeting and cost efficiencies identified as drivers of online growth. Mobile advertising spend rising rapidly with format beginning to fulfil its potential  as the  ‘one to watch’.

EIAA research released today reveals that marketers across Europe continue to embrace the power of online during a year of recession due to its ability to maximise limited budgets. 83% of all marketers surveyed stated that online advertising spend during 2009 has been greater than in 2008 and the medium looks to go from strength to strength (94% expect growth in online in 2010 and 93% in 2011).

Targeting and cost efficiencies reign in tough times

Mobile is a rising star

Reallocation of traditional advertising budgets

Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is “the great challenge of the age,” Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

Gartner is the largest and most respected analyst firm in the world and much of what Schmidt said in his 45 minute interview was directed specifically at business leaders, but we’ve excerpted 6 minutes that we believe is of interest to anyone who’s touched by the web.

Highlighted comments include:

* Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.

* Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.

* Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.

* Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

* “We’re starting to make signifigant money off of Youtube, content will move towards more video.

* “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”

* There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.

* “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”

* It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

There’s lots more in the full 45 minutes of Schmidt’s interview, including a statement that a Google OS Netbook will be here in 2010, with HTML5 local caching for offline use.

That’s the roadmap, though, that’s guiding much of what Google is doing today. From Chrome OS to Google Social Search.

www.readwriteweb.com

One of the world’s largest media agencies has cut its forecast for global advertising spending in 2009, casting doubt on hopes of a near-term recovery for broadcasters and publishers in western markets.

Carat, Aegis’s media agency, now expects worldwide advertising expenditure to fall 9.8 per cent this year, having forecast a 5.8 per cent decline in March.

The US and western Europe face the most significant downgrade, with ad spend expected to drop 16.3 per cent and 11.0 per cent respectively in 2009.

But the Russian ad market – which grew by 16.6 per cent last year – is now expected to plummet 21.9 per cent in 2009.

Carat nudged up its global forecasts for 2010 to growth of 1 per cent from 0.7 per cent, but western Europe and the US are still expected to decline next year.

The downbeat outlook comes as the chiefs of WPP and Havas, rivals to Aegis, warned that they saw few signs of recovery in the media markets.

Fernando Rodés Vilà, Havas chief executive, said on Wednesday that he did not see “solid signs” of an upturn. He told Reuters he expects a 7 to 11 per cent decline in worldwide advertising this year.

The admen’s gloom contrasts with hope at media owners such as ITV, JCDecaux and News Corporation that the bottom of the market had been reached.

Yet the internet is the only medium expected to show growth this year, albeit at just 1 per cent, after 16.4 per cent growth in 2008.

Carat reduced its forecast for television advertising’s decline from 3.7 per cent to 6.3 per cent in 2009 globally. Newspapers and magazines are projected to fall around 17 per cent, while radio could fall 12.4 per cent.

That shift would see online reach a 10 per cent share of worldwide advertising spend for the first time this year.

In the first half of 2009, the UK became the first major media market where online overtook TV to become the largest advertising platform, according to PwC and the Internet Advertising Bureau.

As a result of the perilous declines in advertising revenues, publishers are looking to new sources of revenue. A UK poll of the Association of Online Publishers found 70 per cent expect to charge for accessing content on the web within the next year.

The UK is set to see total ad spend fall 11.7 per cent this year, according to Carat, with only internet and cinema advertising escaping a double-digit decline. A modest recovery of 1.4 per cent growth is expected in the UK in 2010, while the US ad market will drop another 2.6 per cent.

“We expect the market to bottom out in North America and Europe, and to improve further in developing markets” next year, said Mr Buhlmann. “Even after that initial recovery, however, the global advertising market will still be below its absolute 2006 level.”

www.ft.com