Google Earth now features local news-style weather animations for snow and rain drops.

To see this, open up the latest version of Google Earth, enable the weather layer and head for a place where it is currently raining or snowing. Google Earth will adjust the animations depending on how heave the rain or snow fall is.

Obviously, this is not a major new feature (Google Earth had weather overlays for years now – just the animations are new), but maybe this hints are more animations and interactive features in Google Earth for the near future. Maybe we will soon see this feature in the mobile versions of Google Earth, too.

Twitter in Real Time – It’s Different Here

Thanks to this, you can now respond to incoming messages in real time, which makes Twitter feel more like an instant messaging service than SMS. If you are a business, for example, you can immediately respond to a tweet about your product, increasing the chance that the person who wrote it is actually still online. here is also something about just seeing this constant stream of information scrolling down your screen that feels a little bit like you are connected to the Matrix. Overall, though, it’s this new immediacy that changes how using Twitter feels, even though it is hard to pinpoint the exact reason for this.

Limitations

For the time being, the real-time stream in TweetDeck only works for your core columns (all friends, mentions, direct messages), old TweetDeck groups and searches. Sadly, it doesn’t work for Twitter lists yet, which is quite a shame, given that there is so much value in these lists.

Get the Beta

If you would like to apply for TweetDeck’s closed beta, click here.

Infographic byWordStream Internet Marketing

Thanks to its tagging feature, you can ensure that the right people will see your questions.

Social vs. SEO

With Ask.com, Quora, Google’s recent acquisition Aardvark and a few other startups, the Q&A market is getting very crowded now. Facebook, with its 500 million users is likely to crush all of these services, though more SEO oriented Q&A platforms like Yahoo Answers may not suffer the same effects as the more socially oriented products like Aardvark (assuming Google does anything with it) or Quora.

Chances are, though, that if users will find Facebook Answers to be a satisfactory solution (to a problem most probably never considered in the first place), they won’t go out to explore these other products.

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We can only assume that Apple plans to specify the company’s reaction to the current groundswell of criticism Apple has faced over the issues with the iPhone 4′s antenna placement.

What Will Apple Announce?

Apple could announce anything from a massive recall to free bumpers for current iPhone 4 owners. Steve Jobs might also just take this opportunity to teach Apple fans the right way of holding the phone.

1. Squidboots: If you were alone in the woods, and no one were around to smell you, would you smell as manly and awesome?

2. Chmown: How can I smell like fighting and space shuttles?

3. Porknog: Dear Old Spice Man, How many times should I lather, rinse, and repeat? My wife says I’m going to get a rash if I keep this up.

4. Desimusxvii: Is it true you tore the wings off Pegasus and ate them buffalo style to achieve the manliness you exhibit today?

If yes, please recount your battle with the beast. If no, please do this immediately.

5. Robotjox: If you could meet one great historical figure, then arm wrestle them while signing opera, who would it be?

That, of course, is a major achievement for any company. Even more impressive, however, is the fact that TweetDeck is now 5 times larger than its closest competitor.

Looking Ahead

According to Dodsworth, Tweetdeck’s “mission is to help our users manage and harness these information flows. To that end, we are moving towards being truly multi-stream, re-building our clients from the ground-up with multi-stream functionality ingrained rather than simply bolting on new disconnected networks.”

TweetDeck wants to be at the intersection of all of the multiple networks that its users use and ensure that it doesn’t make a difference on which network somebody says something.

Of course, like many of its competitors, TweetDeck is also still looking to effectively monetize its service. For the time being, it still isn’t clear how TweetDeck plans tomonetize its service.

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Nice Tech Demo – But Inconsequential for Users

As a technology demo, this is an interesting gimmick. It shows that YouTube is able to handle this kind of material and will be able to support video producers who want to shoot in 4K.

For users, however, this is an inconsequential move for now. On my own fast broadband connection, I was able to easily download 4K videos (you can find a playlist here), but I neither have a screen nor video card that is able to handle this kind of resolution with any grace.

According to Google, the ideal screen size for a 4K movie is about 25 feet – a bit larger than the screens most of us have on our desks and in our living rooms. And – if course – unless you own a Red camera – you can’t actually shoot any 4K video yourself.

So why is Google doing this? Is it just a technology demo to show off at VidCon? With HD, Google was very late to the party, so maybe the company is trying to stay ahead of the curb here.

What’s interesting, too, is that WebM – the open video format Google supports – can’t even display this kind of video.

So if you have any idea why Google is doing this now, let me know in the comments.

It’s hard to say why Bing gained so much in the last month, but the release of Bing’s entertainment search feature, as well as Microsoft’s continuing marketing efforts for Bing surely helped. In addition, the summer travel season is surely helping Bing, which focuses strongly on this niche. According to Hitwise, Bing saw triple-digit growth (162%) in the travel niche since June 2009.