Yahoo is not waiting around for 2008 to pack it in, and has released the top stories (and top searches) for the year that still has 30 days to go. I just spent 20 minutes on the site, and I love it. The presentation is simple, elegant and inviting. It is definitely better than most of the lists magazines are going to churn out. I wonder why Yahoo doesn’t do more of these technology-enabled media properties. Regardless, the top 10 searches of 2008 is an ironic reflection on our times - Britney Spears and WWE beat Barack Obama as the top search for 2008. (Yahoo offers a rational explanation for that as well.) The rest of the top 10 is also highly skewed towards entertainment artists. The site has also top 10 picks in different categories - News, Olympics, Politics, Economy and more.

Today Clearwire said it had completed the transactions that will allow it to build the first nationwide WiMAX network, to be known as Clear. CEO Ben Wolff took a few minutes to answer some questions about what the upcoming service will look like, how Clearwire might handle network congestion and how the recession might affect the speed with which Clearwire builds its network. Below is an edited transcript of our interview:

GigaOM: How much will it cost to build the nationwide network and will the economy slow the buildout?

Ben Wolff: Coupled with what we’ve spent, the $3.2 billion from our investors, and based on the same build schedule we released in May, we need to raise $2 billion to $2.3 billion in additional capital and will look at doing so in the next couple of years. We’ve got the ability to modulate the build plan to the point where we could reduce that funding gap by slowing down the build. That’s one of the first things the new board is going to address in the January meeting — make decisions about how quickly we build.

GigaOM: How will the white spaces broadband spectrum compete with WiMAX?

Wolff: We don’t see the whites spaces spectrum as being competitive with our network, much as we didn’t view the Muni wireless networks as competitive. We see it very much as being complementary with the Clear service. The white spaces spectrum will be unlicensed, and any time you have unlicensed spectrum as the primary means of connecting to the Internet you have the potential for interference and quality-of-service issues. We like the idea of relying on white spaces in some of the more rural areas and dense urban areas.

GigaOM: Will Clearwire or its partners use femotocells to build out the wireless networks?

Wolff: I think that femtocells are promising for any kind of wireless network. Having a femtocell indoors will provide better in-building coverage, and an opportunity for our [cable] partners to look at ways to utilize the backhaul they have going into the house. I think all wireless networks going forward could use them, but there are still questions about the business model — who pays for it and getting the cost of femtos down to a point where they can be cost-effective for a home.

GigaOM: Will WiMAX be as fast as LTE and can it act as a fat enough pipe to deliver Internet service to the home?

Wolff: I don’t think there is going to be much in the way of performance differences in LTE and WiMAX. The limiting factor is unlikely to be the technology; it’s likely to be how much spectrum the operator has available for 4G services. We have 100 MHz of spectrum and are in great shape to ultimately deliver a robust broadband experience.

GigaOM: What kind of services can Clear deliver using WiMAX?

Wolff: The suite of services people will eventually be able to buy are residential broadband, mobile broadband for each individual in the house, residential voice, and ultimately, mobile voice.

GigaOM: Since this is all IP network, will you charge for this as individual services or will this be one service that consumers can buy and add things like VoIP to?

Wolff: There will be some customers that will use a bring-your-own-VoIP service and we’ll offer our own managed mobile voice services that will offer higher quality of service.

GigaOM: What about network management such as blocking some traffic or slowing it down when the network is congested?

Wolff: We will have to experiment with how were dealing with network management issues. We won’t ID specific bandwidth-hogging apps and try to restrict or limit those. What we’re going to do is manage the network on a sector-by-sector basis, so if there’s no congestion we do nothing. If it turns out we do have congestion, we’ll manage bandwidth for all users in that segment rather than by applications.

GigaOM: Can a WiMAX network really provide the amount of bandwidth necessary to offer services such as streaming video that can really clog wireless networks today?

Wolff: One of the benefits over 3G is we have much more capacity, and we designed it to have a large number of customers using a large amount of data — including consistent streaming capacity.

The Internet is close to a meltdown, according to The Register. The culprit, according to author Richard Bennett, is the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, which introduced a new type of file transfer with its most recent alpha version. BitTorrent clients have long been using the TCP protocol to facilitate file transfers, but now uTorrent is moving to UDP, a protocol that is very popular for streaming media, VoIP and other real-time transfers. This will essentially lead to torrents eating up all of the bandwidth available for VoIP, according to Bennet, who calls uTorrent’s UDP transfers a “net-killing feature.”

Of course, the same argument was made when UDP-based VoIP connections and video streams became popular — and the Internet hasn’t ceased to exist. The truth is that uTorrent’s UDP implementation could actually be a step toward alleviating congestion problems. Bennet, however, decided to ignore this and instead serve up nothing more than a thinly veiled rant against net neutrality.

Bennet’s piece is based on a belief that UDP traffic is “aggressive” and uncontrollable, whereas TCP is the nice and proper protocol that can be easily managed. This notion ignores the basic fact that P2P developers, in order to make the protocol work at all, need to implement TCP-like functionalities on top of UDP, one of which includes congestion control. You simply can’t operate a P2P client that eats up all of its users’ bandwidth, much less build a successful business model on top of it.

BitTorrent Inc. has been working on establishing itself as a CDN solutions provider, offering media companies the ability to tap into its vast user base to deliver video and other huge files. Of course, this only works if end users are actually willing to provide some part of their upload bandwidth, and they are only willing to do so if file transfers don’t stop them from doing other things, like playing online games or making VoIP calls.

BitTorrent has traditionally entrusted its users with figuring out how to balance their network load, meaning that users had to manually limit their client’s maximum upload and download rate in case they encountered choppy Skype connections or similar problems.

uTorrent’s new implementation wants to automate this process by regulating its UDP traffic in relationship to ongoing TCP transfers. The company has tested its congestion control in recent months, and the first results seem encouraging, as a quote from a report (PDF) that the company recently shared with the IETF reveals:

“In one example, (BitTorrent) was used to download and seed game updates while an online multiplayer game was being played. With TCP used for transport the way it is usually used in BitTorrent, ping times shot up to 2000 milliseconds and beyond and stayed there while seeding. With the novel congestion control, ping times were in the 50-100 millisecond range, while the upload rate remained essentially unchanged.”

For now, we do have to take the company’s word for it that this actually works. uTorrent is not open source, and the client’s UDP file transfer protocol hasn’t been publicly specified, either. BitTorrent Inc. V-P Simon Morris has declared in a public response to the Register article that his company is working with the IETF to find “solutions that can be standardized and broadly adopted in due course.” In fact, BitTorrent engineer Stanislav Shalunov is co-chairing an IETF working group for this very purpose.

So why did Bennett chose to ignore all of this? Because a little scaremongering can go a long way to make the case for an ISP-based network management clampdown on P2P traffic. The only way to prevent the coming Internet meltdown, he contends, is to filter out uTorrent’s UDP transfers on the ISP level, and the only way to get this done is do away with net neutrality. Right — because if there’s one thing that we’ve learned from the financial sector, it’s that meltdowns are best prevented by doing away with regulation.

Pownce, a microblogging service started by Leah Culver and others back in May 2007, has been acquired by blogging software giant, SixApart and will be shutdown. Culver and other members of the Pownce team are going to work for San Francisco-based Six Apart, well known for products such as MoveableType and TypePad. What it means — negligible or no money changed hands.

Pownce seemed like a pretty cool idea, but it never got any major traction, losing out to the simpler and more popular Twitter. I used the service for a few months but then lost interest, and so did many of my friends. From Culver’s post, it seems that SixApart is going to incorporate Pownce’s microblogging technology into its blogging platforms. It makes a lot of sense for SixApart to buy a microblogging platform, since microblogging is one of the faster growing parts of the “social media ecosystem.”

Poor Beaumont. The tiny Texas town gained fame in the technology world when Time Warner Cable said in January that it would use it as a testbed for its tiered broadband trial. Then Hurricane Ike hit in September. And right before Thanksgiving, AT&T told the local paper it would start trialing its own brand of tiered broadband service there. When I ask AT&T why it would pick on Beaumont, a spokesman told me via email that, “While we are aware of Time Warner’s local trial in Beaumont, our decision was based on Beaumont’s good representation of many of our other markets.”

Perhaps, but it’s also a classic example of why we need competition in the broadband arena. Beaumont is a small market and as such, doesn’t offer a lot of choice when it comes to broadband providers — making it easy for the dominant players to implement anti-consumer initiatives such as overage fees and tiered plans. AT&T will charge its Beaumont customers $1 for every gigabyte over 150 GB per month, while Time Warner Cable has a set of plans that allow users to download between 5 GB and 40 GB per month before facing overage charges. The FCC is attempting to bridge the broadband gap by encouraging new wireless technology, but I’m not sure those networks will be robust enough for the home, which will require fast speeds and the ability to stream video content. That means the digital divide will continue to exist even as companies and the government attempt to eliminate it.

Clearwire said today that it has closed several transactions that will allow it to build out a nationwide WiMAX network, including gaining control of Sprint’s Xohm network and a $3.2 billion investment from several large companies. These deals were announced in May, and despite the downturn that has pummeled stocks since then, the terms of the deal have not changed. The new nationwide WiMAX service will be branded Clear.

Clearwire received the $3.2 billion investment from Comcast, Intel, Time Warner Cable, Google and Bright House Networks. The cable providers will also resell the WiMAX service, even hinting that they will integrate wireless into some of their other broadband and entertainment offerings, much like AT&T and Nokia each hope to do. Sprint will also resell access to its current 3G network to the newly created Clear, paving the way for dual-mode 3G and 4G devices that will ensure that WiMAX devices work even where there’s no WiMAX network. This will be important in signing up mobile users. Below are other important bits from the call:

• Baltimore, Md., and Portland, Ore., will be the first cities to go online, with no mention of Chicago and Dallas which were to go live under Sprint’s Xohm brand soon.
• Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff says most of the $3.2 billion investment will go toward building out the nationwide network. Many of the pre-WiMAX markets that currently have Clearwire service will get Clear service in 2009.
• Wolff also said that Clearwire is building the Clear network with equipment that can also be used for LTE deployments, meaning if LTE becomes necessary, Clearwire can upgrade its network more easily.
• Barry West, the former CTO of Sprint Nextel and head of the Xohm efforts, will become president and chief architect of Clearwire.
• Atish Gude, formerly senior vice president of Sprint’s XOHM mobile broadband operations, is now senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Clearwire.
• First products on the market are embedded WiMax chips in laptops and USB modems, but by mid-2009 consumers will see more mobile Internet devices, MP3 players and other consumer electronics that can run on the Clear WiMAX network.
• The Clear network should provide customers with average download speeds initially of 2-4 megabits per second and peak rates that are considerably faster.
• Clearwire now has 100 MHz or more of 4G spectrum in most markets across the U.S.

The Federal Communications Commission is expected to address the issue of creating a nationwide, filtered broadband network at its Dec. 18 meeting according to the Wall Street Journal. That gives that meeting the potential to be as controversial as the one held last month on election day. The November meeting approved two mergers and created the potential for free wireless spectrum over the protests of broadcasters. This upcoming meeting could create free, licensed wireless spectrum in the AWS-3 band, ticking off T-Mobile, which paid $4 billion to lease the adjacent AWS-1 spectrum.

The FCC had issued a rule making on the topic back in June with a proposal that would create two tiers of wireless Internet service in the 2155-2175 MHz spectrum band. The lowest tier would provide free wireless broadband for the 100 million Americans who don’t have access to broadband right now, and a carrier would sell access to the faster tier for all comers. The rule making was similar to a proposal created by the Kleiner-backed startup M2Z Networks, which had asked the FCC to give it the spectrum for free.

Originally, the FCC had talked about filtering that free wireless network to rid it of objectionable content for everyone, but in October, when the FCC issued a report saying that such a network wouldn’t interfere with T-Mobile’s network, a spokesman for the regulatory agency said the filtering provisions would only be aimed at children. That could stop some consumer advocates from protesting the FCC actions, but it won’t stop T-Mobile, which shows no signs of backing down, even though its efforts to stop the proposal on the grounds that it will interfere with the T-Mobile network have failed.

At the meeting, the Commission is also expected to take up the issue of a la carte cable, as well as cable providers’ tactic of switching some formerly basic channels to a higher service tier — in effect raising the price for service for some subscribers, angering consumers and content providers. Much like the outgoing Bush administration is striving to issue its own rules before the changing of the guard, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is attempting to make his mark on the nation’s communications before his exit.

Updated: The sales of Cable modem termination systems (CMTS) declined 32 percent in the third quarter of 2008 to $246 million, according to research firm Infonetics Research. In comparison, $360 million worth of CMTS’ were sold in the second quarter of 2008. One way to interpret this is as yet another data set pointing to a severe slowdown in demand for broadband across the board. We had earlier pointed out that the economic problems were impacting U.S. communications companies, especially those with exposure to hot housing markets. No wonder UBS analyst Nikos Theodosopoulos is projecting global service provider spending will go down by as much as 10 percent in 2009.

Any slowdown could be bad news for gear makers like Arris, which provides broadband gear to companies like Comcast. At a recent UBS telecom conference Robert Stanzione, Chairman and CEO of Arris, said his “key growth opportunities going into 2009 will be largely centered around DOCSIS 3.0 deployments,” along with sales in the international markets. The company felt that the cable capex could be flat or down net year, but Stanzione said Arris will do well anyway, because it thinks DOCSIS 3.0 will be key priority for cable companies and they will spend on it.

Not so fast. Infonetics analyst Jeff Heynen thinks that with consumers holding onto their purses tightly, the cable companies might slow the rollout of DOCSIS 3.0 wideband services, as “it remains to be seen whether consumers will want to upgrade their broadband connections when budgets are already strained.”

Inventor and tech philosopher Dave Winer Twittered tonight that federation is the hot thing, pointing to a New York Times article about Facebook Connect. And just like that, he touched upon the third rail of our increasingly social web. The big question facing the social web depends on the direction it needs to take. A sharp increase in the number of web services and social networks has many of us yearning for a single sign-on, which has led to the idea of “federation.” On the flip side, we also want one place to manage our diverse web services in one place — in other words, aggregation. These two diametrically opposed views of how we are going to come to grips with our social web are going to face an intense debate until consumers vote with their clicks.

United Federation of the Social Web

Federation, as explained on Wikipedia, “describes the technologies, standards and use-cases which serve to enable the portability of identity information across otherwise autonomous security domains. The ultimate goal of identity federation is to enable users of one domain to securely access data or systems of another domain seamlessly, and without the need for completely redundant user administration.”

Facebook Connect, which was announced in May and is being rolled out this week, allows you to use your Facebook login to access Facebook’s partner web sites, then broadcast what you are doing on those sites to everyone on Facebook. It’s like Facebook Beacon — minus the marketing sleaziness. Partners include the Discovery Channel, the (irrelevant) genealogy network Geni, and (hot) video site Hulu.

“Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer told The New York Times. “They can build their own social capabilities, but what will be more useful for them is building on top of a social system that people are already wedded to.” Of course, as I pointed out earlier, this is desperately important for the company to figure out how to make money. As a competitive matrix, here are some of other projects Facebook Connect is teeing off against: Google-sponsored Friend Connect, Open ID and MySpace’s Data Availability initiative.

HyperAggregate

On the flip side of federation is aggregation. There’s a small army of startups, such as FriendFeed and Ping.fm, that want to act as a dashboard for your entire social-web infrastructure. The latest startup to join the ranks is Power.com, a Rio de Janiero, Brazil-based startup that has until now operated in stealth and has raised $8 million in venture funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Esther Dyson. The company was started by Steve Vachani.

Vachani’s big idea is that you can come to the Power.com web site, log in and interact with all your social networks, as well as other web services. It is not the first startup of its kind. Several others — MyLifeBrand, Spokeo, Loopster and ProfileLinker — have walked down this road. What Power.com has done is use virality and focus on Orkut to get a big enough user base. Vachani describes his service as “Facebook Connect for everything — an ultimate mashup platform” that connects to data from any service and allows Power.com users to interact with that information.

It works like this: You register all your web services and social networks on Power.com. Once you log on, you are automatically logged on everywhere that matters and you can easily go from Power.com to any one of your social networks with a single click. Your start page on Power.com (a stripped-down cross between Facebook’s start page and Netvibes) will show you all of your friends, messages and content — from all their social networks, soon from instant messengers and email accounts — in one place. All your friends, messages, updates, birthdays and photos from diverse social networks will be aggregated nicely together.

A Power “communicator” will allow you to send information to all your friends across networks with the ease of sending an email. “This is just like Meebo,” Vachani insisted, where they log in to and constantly interact with the service. It doesn’t use any APIs, and all the magic happens using this technology developed by the company. Vachani called it “intelligent proxy.” I have asked for more details to understand how exactly it works.

Power.com claims that all your information is going to be arranged by people, not by discrete web destinations. Soon you will be able to use its dashboard to do everything on the web — or so it boldly hints in the press materials. The company claims it has 5 million registered users in Latin America and India and says it will hit 30 million by 2009. How it is claiming all these numbers and growth is a tad fuzzy.

Theoretically (and only theoretically) the idea of aggregating your web content and activites makes a lot of sense. Back in March 2007, in a column for Business 2.0, I wrote: “This is one of the hot opportunities in new new media: hyperaggregation. If aggregation is what we’ve seen so far on YouTube and Flickr, hyperaggregation is aggregating the aggregators…It’s impossible to keep up with dozens of social networks, millions of videos and thousands of blogs. Hyperaggregation is simply a way to do in the new-media world what old media has done for centuries: neatly package information.”

The demo of the service was quite impressive, but there was something about the service that makes me uneasy. Don’t get me wrong — I think they have built an interesting service, but many questions remain before it wins me over.

A Privacy Problem?

First of all, how is this going to turn into a big business? My guess is that our profiles would be used for some kind of marketing. In its terms of service, Power.com says:

You agree that Power may use your image for advertisement purposes. These advertisements will only be displayed to the same user whose image is being used.

Given my distaste for Facebook’s Beacon and other ad-supported efforts, this line makes me pretty queasy. Down in its TOS, Power.com notes that by saying yes to its service agreement, you are authorizing “Power.com to add the URL WEBSITE to my profile, linked to the site My.Power - Power profile of the user.” In other words, they can become your presence on the web, and the company can build a global social directory.

All these issues I would still be able to put aside, but I am not sure I want to aggregate and trust all my private information, including my personal communications (IM messages, emails and what not), to a tiny startup. What assurance is there when it comes to fidelity of my data? I am waiting for Vachani to outline how his company will be able to do that.

Instead, I very much like Loic Le Meur’s concept of “centralized me. “I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third-party service,” he wrote. I couldn’t agree more.

Image courtesy of Luic Le Meur

The bad news for mobile VoIP startups keeps coming. EQO, which had cut nearly 65 percent of its workforce about two months ago, might have finally hit the deck and be down for the count, according to Canadian technology news site, Techvibes.

In response to my previous post, EQO CEO Bill Tam said that cuts would allow the company to operate near profitability. He also claimed that the company had 2 million users, was doubling every eight weeks and growing its revenues. Apparently, that wasn’t enough.

EQO had raised about $13 million and was trying to sell itself, but apparently it didn’t find any buyers, according to the report. Some of my sources are confirming this shutdown. There has been chatter about VCs trying to claw back unspent cash, though I have not been able to confirm it. Some senior executives, including CFO Laura Colwill, have been job hunting. A sure sign that the party is over: information about the management team has been removed from EQO’s About Us page.

Last month I had the chance to chat with a top U.S. Nintendo exec and suggest how, with a few savvy improvements to the Wii system, the company could turn it into the living room Net appliance of choice. But despite the opportunity Nintendo has with the Wii, the company seems determined to let it remain a mere video game console.

Big-screen HDTVs have reached a price point of several hundred dollars. That means consumers are now bringing home television displays both large and crisp enough for browsing the Net from their couches. And all the latest video game consoles come with Net access. Yet the Xbox 360 and Sony PS3, despite attempts to broaden their user base and include new mainstream-friendly features, seem unable to expand beyond their niche audience of hardcore gamers. Meanwhile, the Wii’s global install base is already double that of its competitors combined — and its growth shows no sign of slowing down. Indeed, Merrill Lynch expects the console, which has attracted buyers from both genders and across the demographic spectrum, to reside in one of three households by 2011.

Add to this the Wii’s innovative Wiimote, which is essentially a 3D mouse, and thus ideally suited for the speedy, point/click/drag navigation that a true big-screen Internet experience requires.

With that in mind, I think Nintendo would only need to add three features in order to win it the world — or at least, the world’s living rooms.

1. Full-featured, optimized web browser

The Opera browser that comes pre-installed in the Wii is no-frills, and frustrating to use. A Yahoo-style web portal would greatly increase its popular appeal; a version of Opera robust enough for, say, watching Quicktime movies, editing Google Docs, and playing casual Flash games, would be even more compelling. Add a Nintendo-branded keyboard peripheral, and your game console suddenly becomes a low-budget, cloud-computing PC.

2. iTunes-like interface for purchasing content with Wii Points

Wii Points already links virtual currency to users’ credit cards, but other than casual and classic video games sold in the remarkably crippled Wii Channels, there’s little to actually buy with them. Wii Points cry out for purchasable movies, music, and other audio/video content, but none have been forthcoming. (The lack of a hard drive for downloading content is, of course, part of the problem.) Why stop there? Imagine if a site like Amazon were added to Wii Channels and accepted Nintendo’s currency. The Wii would become an online retail shopping appliance, too.

3. Multiplatform social network with seamless chat/IM

With little ability to really interact across the Net, the Wii’s cute-but-trivial Miis are avatars without an MMO or a social network to give them a community. Linked to Facebook, the iPhone, Nintendo’s handheld DS, and other platforms, Miis would become your “home” avatar, the communication stream you’d use from your couch.

While the Nintendo exec I spoke with listened attentively, he explained that such features don’t fit the company’s main goal: to provide a platform for fun and games. For the moment, then, the Wii seems destined to become this generation’s Playstation 2 — an epically popular game console, but little else. Which is a shame, because if Nintendo misses out on this opportunity, we do, too.

Image credit: wii.com

The Sunday Times of UK reports (more like speculates) that Microsoft is going to buy Yahoo’s search business for $20 billion in a very complex transaction. The Sunday Times claims that Jonathan Miller, formerly chief executive of AOL, and Ross Levinsohn, a former president of Fox Interactive Media, are going to run the new management team.

Under the terms of the proposed transaction, Microsoft would provide a $5 billion facility to the Miller and Levinsohn management team. The duo would raise an additional $5 billion from external investors. This cash would be used to buy convertible preference shares and warrants which would give it a holding in excess of 30% of Yahoo. The external investors would also have the right to appoint three of Yahoo’s 11 board directors. The talks with Yahoo involve Microsoft obtaining a 10-year operating agreement to manage the search business. It would also receive a two-year call option to buy the search business for $20 billion. That would leave Yahoo to run its own e-mail, messaging, and content services. It is expected that the operating agreement would boost Yahoo’s income by as much as $2 billion per annum. (my emphasis added)

If true, that would value the search business — not exactly a champion — more than Yahoo’s actual market value of approximately $16 billion. Microsoft might be desperate to win online, but as we have seen time and again, trying to buy share in search is a failing strategy. With little or no sources, I find this story as unreliable as a piece of swiss cheese left for too long in the pantry. Levinsohn who described the Times story as “total fiction” seems to agree. What are your thoughts?

Eric Schmidt is fond of saying it would take Google 300 years to achieve its goals. I always thought he must have been at least partly joking. The shelf life of Internet companies is short; it’s taken Yahoo and eBay little more than a decade to reach what appears to be their respective “best-if-used-by” dates.

And judging from the way investors have been treating Google’s stock, you’d think it was also on track to face an early downgrade from Internet giant to also-ran. After hitting an all-time high of $747.24 a share in November 2007, Google’s stock slid to as low as $247.30 a week ago — a 67-percent drop (the shares closed at $292.96 in a shortened trading day Friday). True, most stocks have suffered from widespread selling, but consider that rival Microsoft is down about 50 percent from its 2007 peak.

There is plenty of reason for concern in the short term. Google’s bread and butter is still online advertising, which is looking to be more vulnerable to a downturn than many initially thought. And it still hasn’t cultivated any rich revenue streams outside of search. Word of widespread contract worker cutbacks only add to that image of a giant on the ropes.

But there are signs that Google is growing slowly more integrated into many facets of our online experiences. Its market share in search expands slightly each month. Chrome is proving a bigger hit than the first reviews intimated. Google’s mail, chat, calendar, maps and feeds are becoming incrementally more useful. You may not be using all of them, but chances are you are using some of them more than you used to.

That’s because Google has been tweaking many of its far-flung offerings with new features and/or better performance. Not just Chrome, but video chat, and voice search on mobile devices. They don’t have to be perfect — and often fall short — they need to be just useful enough to steal our attention from a rival’s service.

Is Google making more money from these micro-innovations? Usually not. But they have a value that could last long after the next financial quarter. They foster loyalty, nibble up market share, and — most importantly — observe user interactions so that Google can be even more useful to you tomorrow.

The New York Times’ David Carr this week detected a larger pattern in all these micro-innovations. Confessing that he was at once seduced and creeped out by how useful Google’s programs were, he nonetheless concluded:

“Google’s Web platform, in all of its high-functioning glory, is its marketing.… If Google owns me, it’s probably because I am in favor of what works.”

When ad spending recovers, Google is going to have more ways to spread it around in front of us, and take up even more of our attention spans. But it’s not content with that, prodding its tentacles into other areas such as energy conservation. Schmidt recently spoke about the company’s early efforts to help make energy usage more efficient. Again, it’s not clear how Google would or could monetize it, but its influence in an area of changing demands is notable.

Does that make Google under $300 a bargain? In the long term, quite possibly. Remember when Google went public at $85 a share and people said its P/E of 58 was too high? Google’s 2008 P/E is now 18. And while Google’s profits are growing much more slowly, they are likely to be growing for years.

Google executives have long acted blasé about its stock price and investor obsessions like profit margins. Still, when a stock loses 67 percent of its value in a little more than a year, it has got to be worrisome for workers holding options. And so there may be a couple of stomach-churning years ahead for Google.

After that? The subtle moves Google has been making with an eye on long-term growth could lead to bigger payoffs for years to come. Maybe not 300 years, but certainly into the next decade or so at least.

Update: Few online events have ended as horrifically as the Lori Drew case. Befriended by a boy on MySpace who later began bullying her, a teenager named Megan Meier hung herself, and her online friend later turned out to be the mother of a school classmate, who created the persona specifically to torment the young girl. Lori Drew was found not guilty of conspiracy on Tuesday, but guilty of a lesser misdemeanor charge as a result of setting up the fake persona, which the court decided was a case of “unauthorized access” to the social networking site (under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act), because it was in breach of MySpace’s terms of service. It’s easy to sympathize with the urge to punish Lori Drew (Megan’s mother has said she wants Drew to get the maximum penalty). After all, her actions helped lead to the death of a young woman whose life was full of promise and potential, and that is something almost anyone would find unforgivably repugnant. But finding her guilty of a federal offense because she created a fake MySpace account leaves the entire online world on a very slippery legal slope. Yes, doing so is technically a breach of the terms of service for sites like MySpace and Facebook, but those rules (which few people read anyway) are routinely overlooked. There are hundreds, possibly even thousands, of phony accounts on both networks — people who have created personas based on countries, religious figures, even inanimate objects.

Are all those people now guilty of a federal offense? If the Drew ruling stands, then legally they will be, as the New York Times points out. In effect, they will be seen by the courts as criminal hackers. No doubt supporters of the decision will argue that such a case is only likely to emerge if the fake account is used in the commission of a crime, such as theft or murder — at which point it could provide an easy way of nabbing a wrong-doer, in the same way that tax evasion managed to hook Chicago crime boss Al Capone. But how do we know that it would only be used in such cases? We don’t. It could just as easily be used to prosecute users who created fake accounts for some other purpose, such as poking fun at a prominent public figure, or to protect their identity in some way.

That’s getting awfully close to impinging on freedom of speech, and yet it would be more than possible if the Drew case stands. Anyone who altered their name, their age, or their gender for virtually any purpose — benign as well as harmful — would be liable to federal prosecution. And is any of that going to make social networks safer for people like Megan Meier? Not really. What happened to her was definitely a tragedy, but it was not a crime. The Drew case should be overturned.

Update: It’s obvious from the number of comments here — and the passionate feelings expressed in many of them — that my post has struck a nerve with a lot of people. Some believe that finding Lori Drew guilty of virtually any crime is worth it, because of the heinous nature of her actions, but I think laws should be used when they are justified by the facts, not just because we are desperate to find a way of punishing someone. And the fact is that the “unauthorized access” law was designed to apply to criminal hackers, not people who create fake personas on social-networking sites — regardless of what that persona allegedly made someone do. If we are going to prosecute everyone who doesn’t abide by the terms of service for a website, then the courts are going to be filled to the rafters.

I think @Jeema put it well in a comment that said: “Anyone could now be prosecuted for violating a terms of service agreement if this precedent stands, regardless of whether or not they ever intended to cause harm or not. If we want to make a law against cyber-bullying, fine, but we should not abuse existing laws and throw away freedom of speech in the name of mob justice.” The reality is that the charges against Lori Drew were designed to take what she did and twist it until it fit into a specific law, so that she could be punished for something — anything — as a result of her behaviour, as noted by Diogo. That’s not justice, it’s revenge.

A number of commenters have said that they don’t think this case has anything to do with freedom of speech, since companies such as MySpace are allowed to do whatever they like. In fact this isn’t the case, as others have pointed out. It may not fit most of our definitions of speech, but I think it could quite easily be argued that creating a persona of your choosing for an online social network — provided you aren’t trying to hijack the identity of a real person — should fall under the protection of the First Amendment. Online researcher danah boyd has some thoughts on the decision here.

It’s far from certain — it’s even a fairly remote possibility — but the possibility of an economic depression is being discussed more and more these days. As is to be expected, the discussion tends to be centered around how much of what we’re used to having could be destroyed. As worthwhile as it is to brace for the damage an economic depression could wreak, this is Thanksgiving weekend — a time to reflect on what we do have, and what opportunities we see ahead. Not “opportunities” as in exploiting those in need during hard times, but as in adapting to and serving changing needs. A recent story in the Boston Globe that looked at the social changes a depression could bring got me thinking about how web companies might respond. The core strategy of the web’s biggest successes to date — make it faster, cheaper, more useful — doesn’t have to evolve much to respond to the dramatic shifts we’d see.

In the Globe’s article, staff writer Drake Bennett sees a 2009 depression unfolding differently from the 1930s: not bread lines, but long lines at emergency rooms; not migration from dust bowls to California, but an exodus from exurbs to cities. Durability would trump fashion, frugality and escapism would rule, and people might grow more isolated.

Again, this is all a mighty big “if,” and just speculation. But let’s imagine for a moment that a depression does descend upon us — how would the web adapt?

Let’s start with escapism. As Bennett noted, “The Depression was, famously, a boom time for movies.” As the current recession deepens, online video is already providing a contemporary equal in Hulu and other sources of free content.

The proliferation of online video, however, leads us to the issue of isolation. Here another recent web obsession, social networking, could come into play. Networks that pull people out of their houses — Meetup.com, say, or those that recruit people to do volunteer work — could become new stars.

The economic malaise is increasingly leaving thousands of skilled people with time on their hands. But the open-source ethic and user-generation spirit that has defined the web could be harnessed for group creation of new technologies as well as a new generation of entrepreneurs. Even a depression wouldn’t diminish the web’s power to help us promote our talents, so it could still churn forth labor-of-love innovations.

Free content, of course, will become more sought after than it was in the boom times. And while it will be difficult to generate revenue with a free (see: ad-supported) model, such an approach could become a way for cash-rich companies to build market share: Google is the most obvious beneficiary, but a free model could also offer leverage for Microsoft and even a life raft for Yahoo. Bartering could become more popular, which makes eBay’s current traffic decline hard to understand. Perhaps it will open a door for a rival upstart.

A quote this week from Lawrence Summers (yes, in declining to regulate derivatives in the 90s, he helped sow the seeds of this mess; and yes, he was also tapped to help clean it up) summed this up well: “All financial crises end — and when they end, they end in ways that create spectacular opportunity.”

Whether this financial crisis ends with the economy recovering quickly or stalling for years, web companies will end up with more than their share of opportunity. Either way, now is as good a time as any to begin wondering what those opportunities will be.

Chart courtesy of MarketWatch.

I have been saying for some time that the launch of the 3G iPhone was going to jump-start the demand for wireless broadband. The subsequent release of additional web-friendly mobile phones (we like to call them superphones ) — the Samsung Instinct, the BlackBerry Bold, the Google Phone, and Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X-1 — that use 3G wireless networks has now shifted that demand into high gear.

According to data collected by Chetan Sharma Consulting, the U.S. wireless data market grew 7.3 percent in the third quarter to hit $8.8 billion in data services revenue. Despite the recession, many in the industry are of the opinion that wireless data sales aren’t going to fall, and in fact will stay strong for the foreseeable future. A report from London-based research firm Analysys Mason predicts that “mobile network operators in developed regions should prepare for a tenfold increase in wireless network traffic by 2015.” Here are some interesting findings from their report:

• By 2015, developed regions will account for about 25 percent of the cellular user population but those users will generate 65 percent of total global wireless network traffic.
• Average wireless network traffic per cellular user (for all voice and data services) in developed regions will increase to eight times its 2008 level by 2015, rising from 56MB per month to 455MB per month.
• By 2015, data will account for 94 percent of total wireless network traffic in developed regions.

Such a data explosion, however, means that mobile network operators will have to spend a lot of money to upgrade their networks in order to keep up with the demand. As Dr. Alastair Brydon, the Analysys Mason report’s co-author, notes, “In the short-term, underutilisation of 3G networks allows mobile operators to offer low-cost USB services, but operators may be forced to rethink their strategies when they are confronted by the need to make further network investment.” Indeed, we have already seen how Verizon, Sprint and others are imposing data transfer limits on their “unlimited data offerings.”