TechnoCloud

Google News is taking on Twitter by trialling a real-time news trends service. In the trial, a list of trending key words appears beneath the ‘Top Stories’ tab, in addition to a personalised news box, that allows users to add topics of interests. It’s still at the trial stage, so only certain users will see it until Google decides whether to add it to the default feature set.

Earlier this month Google began adding a personalised news tracking service, which allows users to star a story so they can keep track of updates to the story.

You might be surprised to hear that the second biggest app store after Apple’s App Store is in fact, Getjar, a cross-platform aggregator of apps. It has over 50k apps on offer across 97% of phones and has had close to 1bn downloads of free and paid apps. It benefits from confusion over app availability and discovery and makes its money through referral fees from the app publisher.

Over 70% of its downloads are Java apps, with Nokia’s Symbian second with 12%.

Facebook is fast catching Yahoo and Google as US web users’ home on the web, having already overtaken MySpace and Microsoft in the past year. It has doubled in the past 6 months to nearly 30 billion total minutes usage, against Yahoo’s 40bn and Google’s just over 35bn.

And why? Mobile access is certainly a factor, but isn’t it just human psychology in that news is interesting, news about your friends even more so. Indeed perhaps it’s news about ’strangers’ that is a big factor in MySpace’s fall from 17.5bn to 8bn in a year.

Nielsen claims that the time spent on social media sites rose 82% in 2009 across the US, UK, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy, with consumers spending more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009. Facebook accounted for an impressive 67% of social media users.

And with mobile access making it easier than ever to stay connected this trend is going to continue, in turn making social gaming an increasingly interesting opportunity with the right model. Balance against this Facebook reducing the visibility of most apps on their platform to combat abuse of the notification system.