Google on Tuesday finally released a beta version of its Chrome browser for Mac OSX and Linux after not officially supporting operating systems for two years.

Not much about this announcement has directly to do with Microsoft; Chrome competes with Internet Explorer, and Mac OSX and Linux compete with Windows, but the announcement is about a non-Microsoft browser working on non-Microsoft OSes. Nevertheless, I thought it was significant enough to mention here in a few sentences.

As Google said on its Mac announcement page, "It's about time."

Microsoft and two media companies have partnered to launch a lifestyle-centric Web site aimed at advertisers' most valuable audience: women aged 25 to 49.

The digitally dynamic site, which has yet to be named, will focus on style, beauty, relationships and home decor. The effort comes from MSN, BermanBraun Interactive and Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., and is set to launch during the first half of 2010.

MSN will handle advertising sales along with help from HFM U.S., which publishes the popular Elle, Elle Decor and Woman's Day magazines. Online content will come from both HFM U.S. and BermanBraun, which produces the TV shows "Mercy" (NBC), "Accidentally on Purpose" (CBS) and "Is She Really Going out with Him?" (MTV).

You may remember BermanBraun from its part in Wonderwall, a celebrity news and gossip site MSN launched in February to compete with Yahoo's omg! and AOL's TMZ.

"Lifestyle is one of our top priorities because of its growing popularity and strong appeal to the adult female audience and advertisers that wish to reach them," Scott Moore, the U.S. executive producer of MSN, said in a Microsoft announcement. "We see a great opportunity to expand on our current lifestyle offering by delivering a new experience that is unique to the broader lifestyle category."

Microsoft said the online lifestyle category reaches about 100 million people every month – more than half the total U.S. Web audience. MSN's lifestyle section averages 7.3 million unique users each month, the company said.

Microsoft is searching for a developer-evangelist to work out of Boston with start-up tech companies, according to a job listing.

Dodge

Wait. That was exactly the job of Don Dodge, the well-liked startup evangelist Microsoft laid off in November along with 800 other employees.

Industry followers balked at the layoff. And Dodge promptly was offered a job at Google, where he is now helping developers and startups use Google products – instead of Microsoft ones.

Smooth move, Microsoft.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, who followed Dodge's brief unemployment, spotted the job listing Monday at jobserve.us.

"This is very nearly an exact description of Dodge's job, although it may be a more junior role," Arrington wrote. "The job is also based in Boston – Don was based there, too. Did Microsoft let Dodge go to hire someone younger and cheaper? Seems like a penny wise and pound foolish decision to me. Startups loved Dodge."

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Ever tried creating a Wikipedia entry for yourself only to have it promptly deleted because you're not famous? Well, on Microsoft Research's beta EntityCube site, everyone is famous.

The site, developed by Microsoft Research Asia, gathers people's information from all over the Web and organizes it into Wikipedia-like entries. Search EntityCube for "Steve Ballmer" and there it all is: the Microsoft CEO's birthplace, height, recent news mentions, (fake) Twitter accounts, colleagues and more. Plus graphical representations of online hype and personal connections. Cool.

But try searching for someone not famous – such as me, "Nick Eaton" – and it's clear EntityCube isn't a finished product. The only things EntityCube gets right about me are some out-of-date biographical information (taken off of my YouTube profile) and a few blog posts I've written.

And if you try EntityCube's name disambiguation, I'm not even one of the eight people EntityCube finds named Nick Eaton. Considering my relatively high presence on the Internet, since I work for Web-only seattlepi.com and have been involved with digital mainstream media for a number of years, the results are surprisingly inaccurate. True, I used to work for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, but I don't anymore. And I am not an assistant director at Alexander Howden Marine & Energy Ltd. in the United Kingdom.

"EntityCube is an entity search and summarization engine," the MSR project site states, "which automatically summarizes the Web for the long tail, not just celebrities!"

"Not just celebrities" my butt.

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Microsoft Bing's click-through rate, which measures what percentage of users click on a search engine's paid-search ads, still leads the big three after six months of growth, according to an industry study.

Bing's CTR was about 77 percent higher than Google's during the two weeks bridging October and November, according to search-marketer Chitika. That means, proportionate to traffic, Microsoft's search engine performs better at getting people to click on the ads companies pay to have placed in search results.

Back in July, a month after Bing officially launched, I reported a Chitika report that said Bing's CTR was 50 percent better than Google's. Apparently, Microsoft still is doing the best job out of the big three – Google, Yahoo and Bing – at getting its users to click on ads.

However, both Ask.com and AOL search had higher click-through rates than Bing. Ask's CTR was 79 percent better and AOL's was 154 percent better than Google's, according to Chitika.

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As promised, Google introduced some new features Monday, including real-time search results and a renewed focus on mobile search.

The integration of real-time Twitter updates into Google search is potentially huge. It ads a wealth of information to the world's most popular search engine, for better or for worse.

Both Microsoft and Google announced partnerships with Twitter on Oct. 21, within hours of each other, but Google is first at fully integrating tweets into search results.

Or so we were told by Google Fellow Amit Singhal, at the company's unveiling event Monday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Real-time search results went live for some people, but I'm not seeing them yet.

Here's a preview of Google's Latest Results revamp, complete with epic music:

Google also showed off its new Google Goggles search-by-photo service, by which users can snap a photo with their mobile device and put it through Google. "We take an image as input, and using several image recognition backends (object recognition, OCR, face matching, etc), we return relevant search results," Google's Goggle page states.

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Last week, Microsoft unveiled major updates to Bing Maps, including the inclusion – finally – of street-level photos, a la Google Maps Street View. On Bing Maps, they're called Streetside photos.

On Monday, Microsoft and Chicago-based Navteq announced a "new chapter" – as Erik Jorgensen, Microsoft's corporate vice president for MSN, put it – in their business relationship. Navteq has long provided Microsoft with navigation data for its online maps service.

So what is this exciting renewal of the companies' partnership? Microsoft now is strapping cameras onto Navteq's research cars for capturing Streetside photos. Revolutionary!

"You see, while Navteq is out there collecting the best of breed road information inclusive of speed limits, bridge heights, turn restrictions, one way streets (you know, important information so you don't get killed navigating with their data) we figured it prudent to strap a few cameras on their vehicles to record some photos," Chris Pendleton wrote on the Bing Community Blog. "How's that for scaling out?"

Way cool. And way underwhelming, considering Google launched Street View two-and-a-half years ago.

I praised Microsoft last week for the Bing Maps Beta. Seriously, the Silverlight-powered prototype is beautiful. But while the Bing team stole the show last week, they should know when to stop. Trumpeting the fact they are long behind Google in street-level imaging seems a little foolish to me.

Just in time for the holidays, Microsoft has stopped offering the Windows 7 Family Pack, which allows users to upgrade three PCs to Windows 7 Home Premium for $150. That's considerably less than it would cost to buy three Windows 7 upgrade licenses at $120 each.

Naturally, the world's largest software company has started to take heat for its decision to stop offering the discount. It's the holidays, we're in a recession and Windows 7 has been selling well.

"The Windows 7 Family Pack was introduced as a limited time offer while supplies last in select geographies," a Microsoft spokesperson told seattlepi.com. "Response has been very positive and in some cases, the offer has sold out."

OK, so supplies have dried up in the U.S. Supplies of an easily duplicated product that doesn't exist in the physical world, in the traditional sense. Besides, Microsoft doesn't sell Windows 7, it sells licenses to install and use Windows 7.

I guess you can't blame a company, which exists for the sole purpose of making money, for discontinuing a limited product when sales hit that limit. But I guess you also can't blame consumers, largely strapped for cash this shopping season, for balking at Microsoft's timing.

Courtesy of Microsoft

In true online fashion, second-hand copies of the Windows 7 Family Pack are now being sold, on Amazon for example, for a big mark-up. But $280 for three Windows 7 licenses is still less than the full $360.

ZDNet's Mary-Jo Foley wonders whether Microsoft's mantra in marketing Windows 7 – "Windows 7 was my idea" – will factor into an about-face on this discontinuation. "Throughout the development of the product, the Windows 7 management also has been emphasizing 'we're listening to our users,'" Foley wrote.

Ed Bott comes right out and calls Microsoft a Grinch. What do you think of Microsoft's timing?

By James Temple
San Francisco Chronicle

Two bright young men transformed an idea into the era's dominant technology company by outmaneuvering lumbering giants in the field. As the upstart blossomed into a titan in its own right, its behavior sparked allegations of monopolistic practices and drew the eye of the Justice Department.

If it were late 1999, this would be a story about Microsoft Corp. A decade later, it's a strikingly similar tale about Google.

The Mountain View Internet company built a $100 billion brand and seized control of the search industry by delivering superior tools and convincing the world it took its "Don't Be Evil" motto seriously.

But as the company extends its influence in advertising, media, mobile and dozens of other areas, that perception is increasingly called into question.

The most fervent have dubbed it "the new Evil Empire." Others say it's simply becoming another big company focused on the bottom line. Either is a change for a company that cultivated a reputation for trying to improve the world.

"The perception has shifted dramatically," said Rob Enderle, technology analyst with the Enderle Group. "Google has become incredibly heavy-handed."

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This commercial makes you wonder why we're so obsessed with e-readers and tablet computers these days. A simpler solution has existed for hundreds of years.

Then again, it doesn't do video or support hyperlink navigation.

Google is planning an event Monday to unveil a number of new features after Microsoft stole the show this past week with a slew of Bing updates.

Google on Friday sent media an invitation to the event, promising "there'll be a lot of news," according to Kara Swisher of All Things Digital. This week, Microsoft announced a beautifully revamped and Silverlight-powered Bing Maps, plus a few other features.

On Friday, it was announced that Google has purchased AppJet, whose EtherPad application allows users to simultaneously edit documents online. This technology, built by former Google employees, ostensibly could be used in Google Docs.

This week, Google also formally launched its new simpler home page, on which additional links fade in after a few seconds. The company added real-time news streaming to Google Finance. And it quietly rolled out Google Dictionary.

Additionally, Google announced Thursday that it has gotten into the Domain Name System business. People can change their network settings to use Google DNS for navigating to URLs.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also announced Friday that it has opened up Personalized Search to users who are not signed into Google.

Stay tuned Monday for the announcements.

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Clarification: DNS is used for navigating to all URLs, not just unknown ones.

Hearst Corp. announced Friday that it is developing an e-reader and accompanying service to deliver its books, newspaper, magazine and online content to users wirelessly via the Web.

The Skiff e-reader, due out sometime in 2010, will focus on content beyond the plain-text offerings of similar devices such as Amazon's Kindle. The Skiff device will deliver "visually appealing layouts, high-resolution graphics, rich typography and dynamic updates," according to a Hearst news release.

I wonder if it will be as fancy as the still-rumored Apple tablet.

"Skiff's goal is to connect publishers and marketers with consumers," Skiff President Gilbert Fuchsberg said in the announcement. "We will accomplish this by delivering engaging reading experiences that consumers will value and a business model that respects publishers' needs."

Good luck.

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