It’s hard to believe that two years have passed since the Chrome browser first hit the web. In that time, Chrome has come to control more than 7.5% of the worldwide browser market, according to Net Marketshare. Sure, Internet Explorer and Firefox hold 60.4% and 22.9% respectively, but if one considers that after 10 years, Opera holds less than 2.4%, then it’s fairly impressive.

Now, on its second birthday, Google has released a stable build of Chrome version 6. Heralding itself as “The Modern Browser,” Chrome 6 does indeed boast a number of improvements, but as with previous updates, the focus remains on speed and simplicity.

Like its previous release this summer, the new version has Adobe Flash built in. The important thing here, however, is its handling of HTML5, which remains topnotch.

With the increasing prevalence of HTML5, it’s hard to imagine a world where Chrome’s browser share does not continue to grow.

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Apple’s Steve Jobs has taken the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco to make a slew of announcements related to iOS, Apple TV, iTunes and the iPod. First though, he dropped some big stats on the state of the iOS ecosystem.

According to Jobs, Apple has sold more than 120 million iPhones, iPads and iPod touches. This is up from 100 million devices just three months ago. What may be more impressive is that Apple is activating 230,000 new iOS device every single day. That’s more than the number that Google touted in May of 100,000 Android device activations daily (though that number has likely grown significantly higher since then).

Unsurprisingly, the app store is also on fire. Jobs announced that 6.5 billion apps have been downloaded from the app store, and the pace of downloads is now at 200 apps per second. 25,000 of the applications in the app store are now iPad apps.

Apple’s retail stores are also growing. There are now 300 Apple stores in the world, including new ones in Shanghai and Paris.

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Today, Google will begin rolling out Priority Inbox for Gmail, a new feature for managing massive amounts of e-mail. Your inbox will never be the same again.

Priority Inbox is Google’s attempt to solve the e-mail woes of
power users. At its core, the feature is an algorithm; Priority Inbox uses information such as keywords, the people you e-mail the most and your e-mail habits to select the most pressing e-mails in your inbox. Those e-mails are brought to the top of your Gmail and marked as important so you deal with them first.

Priority Inbox is also an adaptive algorithm. Marking items as important or unimportant teaches the system what types of messages you deem the most urgent. You can also use Gmail’s filters to automatically mark certain messages as important (for example, from your boss or your spouse),

The new feature appears as a new menu item just above the “Inbox” link. Instead of indicating how many unread e-mails you have in your inbox, Priority Inbox only displays how many priority e-mails still require your attention. These appear at the top of Gmail as “Important and unread.”

The second layer of the new layout is your starred e-mails. These messages appear in their own section under the Priority Inbox. The goal is to get users to star important e-mails they have read but for whatever reason still need in their inboxes. Under the “Starred” section is “Everything else,” which contains the rest of your unarchived inbox.

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The Impact of the Priority Inbox

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During the many months of testing the feature internally, the search giant found that users spent 16% less time reading insignificant e-mail. If you do the math, that’s about a full week’s worth of time saved. According to Google, once someone switches to Priority Inbox, he or she never needs or wants to go back.

We can see why. We’ve had the chance to test out Priority Inbox for the last few days and discuss the new feature with Gmail Product Director Keith Coleman, and we’re impressed. Our inboxes get filled with hundreds of e-mails daily, but only a few of them require our immediate attention. Even with dozens of Gmail filters, important messages often get lost in the pile, leading to lost opportunities or missed meetings.

Priority Inbox, while not perfect, is a dramatic step toward solving that problem. Important messages bubble to the top, while e-mails that still require attention can sit in the Starred section until they’re addressed. It basically takes the feature and adds a smart algorithm for cherry picking the threads that require your attention.

Coleman says that the company has been working on the feature for 18 months, but the original version of Gmail had something similar to this before it launched, but was removed because it simply wasn’t ready for mass consumption.

Now it is refined enough for use by all. What do you think of Priority Inbox? Let us know in the comments.

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Watch out MTV, the music video has just got a new gold standard. Indie band Arcade Fire has released a vid for the song “We Used to Wait” off of their new album, The Suburbs, and it’s basically one big ball of HTML5/Google Maps/musical goodness.

The video was announced today on the
Official Google Blog, which details exactly what elements went into its creation. Dubbed “The Wilderness Downtown” (an undertaking created by writer/director
Chris Milk) the video is a new kind of musical experience, reminiscent of — but much more advanced than — hypertext storytelling of old.

Basically, you surf over to
“The Wilderness Downtown” page using Google Chrome (don’t use Safari, the program will murder your browser), and type in the address of your childhood home when prompted. If Google Maps has enough footage of home sweet home, you’ll be pulled into a multi-browser movie of your own making.

The experience of watching this highly personalized video is not easily described, but basically the story of childhood ending as time rapidly slips away becomes your own as trees shoot up out of nowhere on your old street, culminating in an opportunity to write a letter to a younger you. Check it out when you have a moment to really watch the whole thing, sans any other browsers.

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HTML5 + Music = Awesomeness

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Mashable’s own
Christina Warren and I chatted a bit about the technical aspects of the “The Wilderness Downtown,” and she pointed out that it really shows off the capabilities offered by
HTML5. As the
Chrome Experiments page details, the new audio, video and canvas tags in HTML5 are used to full effect.

“In addition to timed-playback, synchronized effects and custom windows sizes for the video and animated content, this video also features custom rendered maps directly from the Google Maps API,” Christina told me. “Using SVG, the drawing application, for the postcard aspect of the video adds an interactive and personal touch.”

“More than just a one-off proof of concept, the end project (the video) shows just what is possible with HTML5 and emerging web standards,” she added.

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Using Social Media to Score a Number-One Album

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Not only is the video a hit in terms of technology, it also marks yet another interesting venture on Arcade Fire’s part with regard to the release of their third album. Arcade Fire — which has been around since 2004 — has really set the precedent for online promotions and fan experience this time around.

After the album dropped on August 3, the band teamed up with Vevo, YouTube and American Express to put on a
live-streamed show at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The stream attracted 3.7 million viewers, according to Google, and boasted a ton of interactive features: “Choose Your Cam,” which will let the audience control their viewing experience by switching between the director’s stream and the second camera, as well as a projection of fan-provided images, all depicting childhood suburbs. Also, bonus, Terry Gilliam — of Brazil fame — directed the live stream.

In addition to this show, Amazon also partnered with Merge records — the band’s indie, North Carolina-based label — to offer The Suburbs at a discounted price of $3.99 during the week of release, helping the band sell 156,000 copies in the U.S. by August 11, and score the number-one spot on Billboard’s album chart, according to
The New York Times. (The album is currently at
number seven on the Billboard chart.)

The live stream — as well as all the buzz around the album — soon attracted the attention of Twitter, who reached out to Merge and the band to ask if they’d like to participate in the micro-blogging service’s new
@earlybird program, a Twitter account designed to tweet out special deals from selected advertisers. Twitter launched the deal — a CD discounted to $7.99 — on August 12 to coincide with the band’s appearance on The Daily Show.

“We knew that Arcade Fire had a big Twitter following already and we’re always trying to get new followers, and Arcade Fire is one of our biggest bands, so we thought this was a great time to try to branch out our fan base and the band’s fan base,” says Lindsey Kronmiller, who does online/radio/video promotions for Merge.

Although the band (curiously enough) did not tweet about it, the record label garnered a pretty good amount of attention for the deal, which was Twitter’s first @EarlyBird promotion around a band. (Some criticized Merge for hawking CDs rather than records or MP3s, but given Merge’s free domestic shipping policy, records would have been extremely expensive to ship, and since Amazon had already had a digital deal, it seemed best to go with a physical product.)

Like
The National before them — who, despite
the leak of their new album High Violet, nabbed the number three spot on the Billboard Top 200 chart after one week of sales, thanks in part to a Vevo live stream — Arcade Fire has managed to catapult themselves into the public eye via the web.

Yes, they’re not exactly underground when it comes to popularity, but on a scale of your cousin’s ironic polka band to Lady Gaga, Arcade Fire are not exactly fameballs, either. Yes, the album has gained this level of attention because it was hotly anticipated and, well, good, but the band has managed to attract much more praise by tapping into relevant channels — channels where fans both new and old reside. Much like the now-fabled
Old Spice Guy campaign, Arcade Fire and Merge’s use of social media is sure to be a model for album releases to come.

Now, enough business talk — check out “The Wilderness Downtown” post haste.

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Ten things the Philippines bus siege police got wrong

A security analyst who has worked in counter-terrorism with the British Army and Scotland Yard, Charles Shoebridge, says the officers involved in Manila’s bus siege showed great courage – but they were not properly trained or equipped for the task.

Here are 10 areas where, in his view, they could have done better.

1. Determination

View original post on: BBC News
Excerpt

The latest version of Google’s 3D map application, Google Earth, now has the ability to display real-time rain and snow in certain parts of the world.To see it, you must first enable the clouds layer, and then zoom in to a location where it’s raining or snowing. Google Earth displays rain and snow only in certain parts of North America and Europe; to see where exactly the new feature is available, enable the radar layer.The weather simulation adds another layer of coolness to the already mesmerizing Google Earth application. Since it displays rain and snow in real time, the feature can actually be useful as a precise visualization of what weather is like in a certain place. It may, however, render all of those weather-related chats you have with friends and relatives over the phone even more meaningless.Unfortunately, there’s no word on when this feature might be enabled in other parts of the world.

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AT&T announced new data plans for mobile internet and smartphone tethering. While the company claims the new plans will make “mobile internet more affordable to more people,” there’s also a glaring downside to the new pricing: no unlimited data plan for iPad customers.

AT&T now offers two mobile data plans: DataPlus, which provides 200 MB of data for $15 per month (additional 200 MB chunks of data also cost $15), and DataPro, which provides 2 GB of data for $25 per month, with every additional GB costing $10. Furthermore, smartphone customers can enable tethering for an additional $20 per month, but only if they use the DataPro plan.

Existing iPad customers, who already have the $29.99 unlimited monthly plan can choose to keep it, or switch to the DataPro plan.

New pricing is good news for smartphone customers, who won’t go bankrupt if they exceed their monthly data limit. But from the iPad user’s perspective, AT&T’s new pricing is a big letdown compared to the previous, unlimited data plan. Even the most active iPhone users won’t burn through more than a couple of gigabytes every month, but iPad is a far more demanding device traffic-wise, and activities such as Netflix streaming will quickly exceed the limit in AT&T’s DataPro plan. 2 gigabytes per month is just not enough data for a device such as the iPad, and we sense that many users will feel let down by AT&T’s new data plans.

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Tags: apple, att, ipad

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Excerpt

When Google Maps‘ walking directions instructed Lauren Rosenberg to walk along a very busy highway with no pedestrian walkway, she followed the directions exactly. Unfortunately, she was hit by a car in the process. Now she’s suing Google for damages, Search Engine Land reports.

The walking directions from 96 Daly Ave to 1710 Prospector Ave in Park City, Utah told Rosenberg to walk just over one half of a mile along Deer Valley Dr, also known as highway 224. The highway did not have sidewalks or any other pedestrian-friendly amenities, and Rosenberg was struck by a car driven by a man named Patrick Harwood.

Rosenberg filed suit against both Harwood and Google, claiming both carried responsibility in her injury. Her lawyers claim that Google is liable because it did not warn her that the route would not offer a safe place for a pedestrian to walk. Note that the Google Maps website actually does do that, as pictured here.

However, Rosenberg says she used Google Maps on her BlackBerry, which did not show that warning, so she’s suing for more than $100,000. She should have probably realized upon arrival that it was an unsafe place to walk, though — but isn’t that how these lawsuits always go?

Anyway, we’ve embedded the dangerous Google Maps route below in case you want to check it out.
View Larger Map

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Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr appeared on Russian TV network RT’s debate show, CrossTalk, yesterday to discuss internet privacy and the user backlash leading up to Facebook’s revised privacy controls.

In the interview, Parr says that technology has changed the way the world thinks about privacy. He also gets into a somewhat heated debate with fellow guest Ann Cavoukian on the nature of societal attitudes toward privacy.

The panel of guests also debates whether or not governments should regulate Facebook and other social networking sites, and discusses whether privacy should ultimately be Facebook’s responsibility or the user’s responsibility.

The full interview is an interesting discussion on Facebook and online content sharing in general. You can check it out in its entirety below.

For more perspective on Facebook and the new privacy controls, watch what Mashable Founder and CEO Pete Cashmore had to say yesterday on PBS.

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Already moonlighting on Chatroulette, the beloved Travelocity Roaming Gnome has decided to participate in the location-sharing movement as well, and will be updating followers about his exotic whereabouts on Foursquare.

The move rounds out the Gnome’s social media portfolio — which, in addition to Chatroulette, includes a very active presence on Facebook and Twitter.

Fans can look for the gnome to check in at various locations across London over the course of the weekend, says Travelocity representative Joel Frey.

Frey also tells us that the Gnome’s foray into Foursquare was timed with Virgin Atlantic’s first seasonal flight from Chicago to London yesterday. In fact, Gnome lovers can check out photos from the glamorous first-class trip on his Facebook Page.

Which brings us to the bigger picture. Location-sharing isn’t exactly an activity that can be completed behind a desk. I asked Frey whether or not the Gnome would be open to meeting up with fans during his worldly treks, to which he replied, “We’d love to run into Fousquare friends and will also being do a tweetup on Tuesday evening.”

“To have an icon like the Gnome at our disposal to engage with travelers on all of these new communication channels is an amazing opportunity and we’d be foolish not to play,” Frey concluded.

We tend to agree and find social media to be the perfect vehicle for the Gnome to spread the Travelocity message. Bon voyage!

[img credits: Travelocity]

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