If you are using either Google Chrome 2.0+ or Mozilla FireFox 3.5+, you’ll now notice a little dot in the upper left-hand corner of Maps, just above the Street View guy. If you click that dot, Google Maps will show you your location on the map. It does this using the W3C Geolocation API standard, according to Google.

So how well does it work? Pretty well. It got my location slightly wrong, but only by about a block. That’s not as good as it is on mobile devices, but remember, many of those have GPS, which is more accurate. Google Maps location is pulling from WiFi access points or, if none of those are around, your IP address.

This is an important step for Google. If it wants services like Google Latitude to take off, there needs to be ubiquitous location information no matter if you’re on your phone or your laptop. Location is also potentially huge for Google if it can use it to start serving up localized ads based on your current location. It of course already does this somewhat, but being able to exactly pinpoint you will work better.

Of course, there are privacy implications with that. And Google devotes a whole paragraph to that in its announcement:

Google takes privacy very seriously, so your location will never be used without your permission. The first time you use My Location on Google Maps, you’ll be asked to confirm that you’re happy to share your location with Google Maps, and you can always undo your decision. See the help center article on Privacy and My Location for more information about how your location is used.

If you don’t have these latest versions of Chrome or Firefox (the two browsers currently supporting the Geolocation standard), you can still get your location if you install Gears. Google says support for more browser is coming soon, and notes that if you’re using a browser that doesn’t currently support it, you won’t see the location dot.

Update: Lots of commenters are pointing out that Maps is placing them at completely wrong locations — sometimes in wrong countries.

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I’m sorry, but RSS feeds are way too slow. I know this first-hand. As part of my job here at TechCrunch, I monitor a lot of RSS feeds for breaking news. We also produce our own feed and I can see how quickly it propagates to various feed readers and feed-powered news aggregation services. The lag time between posting a story and seeing it pop up in the RSS feed is usually a few minutes, and then it can take another 10 to 15 minutes or so for it to appear in something like Google Reader. And the TechCrunch feed is probably checked more frequently for updates than most other feeds. In our business, every second counts and RSS just isn’t cutting it.

While there is an argument to be made that RSS is dying, being replaced by more instantaneous forms of content delivery such as Twitter and other real time streams, many people aren’t quite yet ready to give up on it. Instead, they want to save it by speeding it up. Tomorrow, at our Real Time Stream CrunchUp, we will see three demos of projects that do just that in slightly different ways.

Google engineers Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin will show a demo of a new push protocol called pubsubhubub, Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini will demo his similar RSS Instant Update Hub, and WordPress engineer Andy Skelton will show off a Jabber client which uses the XMPP protocol to push blog headlines into an IM-like environment faster than RSS.

The pubsubhubub and Netvibes technologies create RSS hubs, which push out feeds as soon as they are available. This approach is in contrast to the polling method which is the foundation of RSS. The polling method sucks because it requires the server acting on behalf of the RSS subscriber to constantly ping the server where the RSS feed is published to ask if there is anything new yet. Depending on how often this happens, you end up with a lag. As communications become more real-time, this lag is becoming more noticeable.

The way pubsubhubub fixes this is by putting an RSS Hub in the middle which more efficiently pushes out the feeds to the servers subscribing to them. It is an open protocol and can be applied to any existing RSS or Atom feed, as well as other real time streams. If you think about the Twitter firehose that everyone wants access to, this approach lets anyone create their own firehose for different types of data streams. It is more of a federated approach. You can think of these RSS Hubs as a content delivery network of sorts for RSS feeds, similar in concept to what Akamai does for video streams.

Netvibes is creating its own proprietary version of this for its own service, which it is developing independently. It is called the RSS Instant Update Hub. All of those widgets on your Netvibes page today take forever to load because they each have to fetch the underlying feeds of data. The Instant Update Hub will cache and push these feeds automatically so that the widgets load faster and they update continuously without requiring a refresh. Any data stream that is supported by a Netvibes widget today, which goes well beyond RSS, will be pushed through the Instant Update Hub. It will also form the basis for a new stream reader which Netvibes will introduce later this year as an alternative to its current widget grid and magazine-style layouts (see screenshot below).

The WordPress Jabber client uses a different push technology, XMPP, to speed up RSS. The effect is that headlines pop up like instant messages. Jabber is mostly used for IM clients such as Gtalk, but Wordpress is using it as a feed reader and micro-blog publisher. The great thing about it is that it is two-way. In the demo, Skelton will show how the Jabber client can be used as an interface to to post directly to your blog. Feed reading and blog posting can all be done from the same place in a more real-time fashion. The Jabber client can also be used as a blog commenting system and embedded as a widget directly into a Web page, turning comments into more of a chat room.

What we are seeing is the world’s of publishing and IM colliding. The faster we can close the loop between publish and response, the more we are going to see real-time data streams take on the look and feel of public IM systems. Twitter is asynchronous, but it often feels immediate with back and forth conversations sometimes happening almost fast as a private IM chats. That is just a taste of things to come, as all publishing platforms get up to speed.

(Photo credit: Flickr/joiseyshowwa)

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As a blogger, I search Flickr and other photo sites for Creative Commons commercial licensed content on a daily basis. I like Google’s image search feature but the ability to search Creative Commons and other licensed content was a missing. Today, Google is launching the ability to create and advanced search for images that you can use for free and that have been tagged with licenses like Creative Commons. Searches will also include images and art that have been tagged with other licenses, like GNU Free Documentation license, or are in the public domain.

For me, the new feature is already listed under the advanced image search page. Under the “Usage rights” section, you can select the type of license you’d like to search for, such as those marked for reuse or even for commercial reuse with modification. Google says they will slowly be rolling out this to everyone throughout the day.

Unfortunately, Google warns that its up to you to verify that the licensing information is accurate and says that they can’t guarantee that the content that is found under a search is in the public domain,or available under the license.

The nice thing about the search capability is that it allows you to do a licensed image search for Flickr, and a variety of other sites and sources, as opposed to searching for content only on Flickr. Yahoo has had the capability to filter image searches by licensed content for some time, but Yahoo’s licensed content search appears to pull images mostly from Flickr, where Google provides a diverse selection of sources of licensed images. I wonder when Bing will jump on the licensed content bandwagon?

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There has never been a better time to be a “fan” online. Whether it be via Facebook, MySpace, or even through fan-based social networks like TopFans, fandom on the web is taking off now that fans have more ways of expressing themselves. Just look at the recently deceased Michael Jackson, whose Facebook page now has close to 8 million fans, surpassing the fan count of Barack Obama’s Facebook page (6.4 million fans). SuperFan is a new way for people to express their loyalty and admiration for a show, movie, celeb, professional athlete or politician. SuperFan is a social gaming network where users build their network around who and what their fans of and compete with other fans to become the top fan.

Users of the network can become Fans of all their “Faves,” which include everything from ABC’s show Grey’s Anatomy to tennis star Roger Federer. Fans tag their Faves and can then use credits (via a virtual currency) to become the “SuperFan,” which gives them special privileges in controlling the favorite item or person’s profile. The network has enabled a bidding system to motivates fans to prove they are the number one fan.

Fans can earn points as they contributing more to the site. The credits can then be used to send virtual gifts, posting site-wide messages, customizing profiles with skins and colors and becoming the ultimate “SuperFan.” Fans can also create, take and share quizzes about their Faves, create and post to blogs on their homepages, and create battles (posted to the community) between Faves to drive traffic to the their respective pages (think Angelina vs. Jen). Users are also given a compatibility score with other fans on the site, that recommends friends to you base on your mutual Faves.

SuperFan is the brainchild of the co-founder of Tickle (which was bought by Monster Worldwide for $100 million in 2004), Rick Marini. Marini says SuperFan will make money mainly through e-commerce (via virtual currency sales), advertising and afilliate campaigns (SuperFan has partnerships in place with iTunes, Amazon, TicketMaster, StubHub, ThumbPlay to sell products and tickets.) Board members include founder of F*cked Company and AdBrite Philip Kaplan and Napster founder Shawn Fanning.

SuperFan is a innovative and engaging way for users to express their “inner fan” but I worry about how site will amass actual users when many people are already using Facebook and MySpace as fan hubs. Marini says that the site has implemented integration with Twitter and Facebook Connect to allows users to publish news onto their other social network sites, and also possibly catch the attention of potential fans at the same time. Still, MySpace, especially when it comes to music, and Facebook have a relative monopoly when it comes to combining fans with social networks. But Marini counters that on Facebook anyone can create a fan page for a celeb, show, athlete etc, creating sometimes hundreds of pages for one person or item and distorting the ultimate fan experience. Users often don’t know which page is the official one. With SuperFan, all “Fave” pages are pre-set and monitored so fans cannot create new pages but only add to them.

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CoTweet, the web based Twitter collaboration platform for businesses, has announced a Series A round of funding totaling $1.1 million.  The investors are Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Maples Investments and Freestyle Capital.

CoTweet helps companies and brands, like Whole Foods, Microsoft, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and the City of San Francisco’s 311 manage their Twitter accounts as a marketing channel.  CoTweet makes it easy to manage multiple accounts and supports group access to the same acounts, so a marketing team can split up Tweeting duties among themselves but still keep a unified public voice on Twitter.

CoTweet also launched into public beta today — meaning anyone can now sign up for the service. Previously, CoTweet was an invite-only service, with invites being hard to snag.

Finally, CoTweet has announced that it has integrated directly with Bit.ly, enabling CoTweet users to access the real-time click tracking and analytics from the URL shortening service. CoTweet launched in 2008, and is based in San Francisco.

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The site’s API, which has been in use with selected partners for several weeks, will give third-party developers a chance to bake the results right into their sites or apps. One of the big developers that has already been using it is Microsoft, which has a version of its web browser, IE 8, with OneRiot built-in.

Another partner that has been using the API is the desktop social messaging client Nambu. You can imagine that a lot of the clients that offer Twitter functionality may also want to offer real-time link search capabilities, which OneRiot’s API will be perfect for.

Here are four of the main options that OneRiot will offer with the API:

Realtime Search Results – a realtime stream of related web pages and videos that the social web is buzzing about right now for any search query.
PulseRank Search Results – a feed of search results ordered by relevance using OneRiot’s PulseRank algorithm, PageRank for the realtime web.
OneRiot Trending Topics – a feed of emerging topics heating up across the web right now.
Simple Web Search Interface – allowing developers to provide innovative search integration with minimal investment.

OneRiot CEO, Kimbal Musk, will be participating in our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp this Friday.

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After Google dropped its Chrome OS bomb yesterday, the news that Google is working on a new operating system generated a media frenzy. Our own MG Siegler covered the news from all angles, and did a live interview on Attack of The Show (embedded above).

As MG points out in the interview, this is just an entry point for Google (netbooks today, PCs tomorrow), and the announcement was expertly timed to take some of the attention away from Microsoft’s expected Office-in-the-cloud announcement next week.

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Music collaboration service Indaba Music has launched a new version of its Session Console, which is a digital audio workstation that lets musicians record, mix and edit music together from different locations.

Indaba is a music community for musicians looking to share and collaborate with other musicians around the globe. The site offers artists a suite of online tools to help record and develop tracks in real-time. What makes Indaba’s newest version of its Session Console unique is that it brings high quality recording software to the web platform.

Built on Sun Microsystems’ JavaFX platform, Session Console 2.0 now allows users to add affects in real-time without effecting the audio. This feature makes changes appear seamless when testing out effects instead of creating breaks in a track. In addition, the console now includes a catalog of Creative Commons Commercial Licensed loops and audio clips that musicians can use and integrate into their tracks. Indaba commissioned professional musicians to create the sounds and then licensed the content to the community. The console also lets users remix and edit offline or online.

Thew new console is being launched in conjunction with a contest sponsored by the music group Weezer, where musicians on Indaba will have the opportunity to collaborate and remix a Weezer track that will eventually be recorded and produced. Indaba’s co-CEO and co-founder Dan Zaccagnino says that Weezer found the workstation compelling because of its ability to collaboratively capture the ideas of musicians in a rich format.

Previously, Indaba’s console was being powered by Flash, which Zaccagnino says wasn’t the right fit as a platform for audio production tools. After experimenting with other solutions, he found Java and JavaFX to be the optimal language and application to power and process (from any computer) the high-quality recording software that is now run on Indaba.

Indaba Music, which makes money through membership fees, has also updated its membership tiers to include a free account, a pro account for $5.00 per month and a platinum account for $25.00 per month. The paid accounts, which still seem pretty affordable for a fledgling musician, gives users access to higher quality sound clips, real-time editing effects and more.

Earlier this year, the site launched a number of news features, including a new Facebook-like chat system, enhanced commenting within tracks, and a recommendation engine that helps compatible artists find each other, effectively enabling it to automatically pick out potential bandmates. Since January, the site has steadily grown from 125,000 users to over 200,000 users. Zaccagnino says that while the basic focus of the Indaba has been to help musicians collaborate and remix music in innovative ways, but the startup also wants to help with the next step beyond just creating the tracks. Indaba is also looking into providing resources for musicians to distibute and promote music that has been created on the site.

Indaba competitors include Minimum Noise (covered here), WeMix, JamGlue and Indomite.

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Given that the product has only been out of beta since September 2008, that gives you an idea of just how much junk travels the digital highways. According to Mollom co-founder Dries Buytaert (also the creator of Drupal, one of the most used open source content management systems in the world), the solution is now used by about 10,000 websites across the globe, and the rate at which it is blocking spam messages from appearing on the Web is rapidly increasing. In a blog post, Buytaert says Mollom reached the 25 million blocked spam messages milestone five months ago, and got to the point where it filtered out 50 million of them only two months ago.

The full scorecard, as publicly posted on the company website:

“Mollom is currently protecting 10,052 active websites. The average efficiency is 99.93%. This means that only 7 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught. Mollom has caught 100,537,961 spam messages since it started. Today we caught 297,061 spam messages. On average, 89% of all messages are spam.”

In reality, the number of filtered junk messages is much higher, since he doesn’t take into account private servers it operates on behalf of larger clients and only counts the ones that get blocked on public servers. About 4 million of comment and post spam messages per month get filtered out of just one social network, the rapidly growing Netlog, with which it struck a deal two months ago. In aggregate, Mollom is processing up to 150 million messages a month, which translates to the company needing to handle over 200 million HTTP requests to analyze them appropriately.

That’s a lot of viagra selling drivel for you.

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Zoho Suite, a web-based software suite comprised of document, project and invoicing management tools, has rolled out another plug-in that allows integration with a Microsoft product. A few weeks ago Zoho launched an add-on that allows Zoho Office to integrate with Microsoft SharePoint. Today, Zoho will now provide access to Microsoft Access, a database management system for the desktop.

Zoho Creator is web-based cloud computing platform that lets you build and run applications online. With the new plugin, Zoho will allow users to easily migrate data from Microsoft Access to Zoho Creator and Zoho Reports. Zoho says that when you migrate entire databases from Microsoft Access to Zoho creator, you are able to retain your database structure and data while being able to still create a collaborative database app in Zoho. Once imported into Zoho Creator, the entire application or parts of it can be shared with several users.

Zoho continues to add innovations to its document management suite and includes easy access thanks to support for mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing across different app features. Last week, Zoho’s project management application, Zoho Projects 2.0, added the capability to import existing projects from MS Project, Microsoft’s project management desktop software. Zoho faces stiff competition from web-based applications offered by companies with a vast reach (Google, Adobe, etc.) which is why integrations with a big player like Microsoft are integral to the software’s success as an application suite.

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On Monday, Microsoft is set to unveil its plans to counter the attack Google previously had launched on it with Google Docs. Yes, Microsoft Office is going to the cloud. This is something which we all knew was eventually coming, and there is already some limited functionality, but the full details will pour out Monday at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. You can expect the new version of Office, that syncs with the cloud, and the ability to use it in the cloud without any software as well.

Almost immediately following the Chrome OS announcement, Robert Scoble took to his favorite home on the web, FriendFeed, to have one of his, I-know-something-you-don’t-know “discussions.” During the course of those “discussions,” Scoble dropped quite a few hints about what Microsoft planned to announce on Monday, including “Diego, no, it’s one of Microsoft’s primary businesses. Did you know Microsoft has 14 billion dollar businesses?” Guess what that is? Microsoft Office.

It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together. And several bloggers already have. And it was especially easy after Scoble ruled out the new browser project Microsoft has code-named “Gazelle.” Scoble also noted that what Microsoft was showing off would run in browsers beyond just IE.

So yes, it’s Office Web that was first talked about at PDC last year.

And it’s possible that Microsoft could unveil that this new web-based Office will reside on the great domain, office.com. That site is clearly going through a transition to new ownership right now, and that would make a lot of sense.

Office is obviously the 900-pound gorilla that Google is attempting to slay with Google Docs, but a 900-pound gorilla with a matching web offering will be a lot tougher. And that’s likely why Google wanted to get its own uppercut in first this week. And it’s a strong one. But now Microsoft is going to have to come up with some answers to how it can counter Chrome OS, rather than focus on talking about the new Office.

[photo: flickr/tipiro]

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We’re not talking about a small number of users who will be affected. Hotmail is still by far the largest web mail provider on the Internet, with 343 million monthly users according to Comscore. Second and third are Yahoo (285 million) and Gmail (146 million). A year ago Hotmail had just 273 million users, so it is still growing rapidly.

The new features let users search for and insert maps, movie listings and times, in addition to the restaurants, videos, images and business listings that were there before. And all of these have been upgraded with Bing functionality via the API.

Some of these quick adds are quite useful, particularly the maps and movie listings. For the masses that use Hotmail, it’s also a great way to introduce them to Bing.

Screen shots below:

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Until the very end when the word “BlackBerry” appears, I was sure this was an Apple ad. As a commenter noted on YouTube, this looks almost exactly like a cross between this U2 iPod ad from back in the day, plus a more recent Coldplay iTunes ad. Watch them below.

This

Plus This

Equals This

Much was made of Apple’s relationship with U2 when it signed the BlackBerry deal. After all, the BlackBerry is now a chief rival of Apple since the iPhone launched. And, of course, U2 used to have close dealings with Apple, even getting its own special version of the iPod. Ads like this won’t silence that talk. But it’s not like BlackBerry hasn’t had Apple envy before.

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