With Google revising its search engine to include personalized Google+ results, you might wonder how other social networks are reacting. Do they see it as the start of a search engine revolution they can participate in, or the unfair promotion of a competitor over their own services? If you’re leaning towards the latter, your cynicism’s well-earned.

While Facebook has declined to comment on the change (though remember, Facebook is already partnered with Google competitor Bing), Twitter has released a statement saying it’s “concerned” about Google’s ‘Search plus Your World’ functionality, because it worried that the changes would make finding Twitter results — something it called “a vital source of … real-time information” — ”much harder for everyone [and] we think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.” The company pointed out that people “have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet,” and suggest that introducing a more social search will lessen the relevance not only of Twitter, but Google search overall.

It’ll be interesting to see how — if at all — Google responds to this criticism, in part because it’s not altogether accurate. Not only is there the option to shut off personalized searches for all users, but the personalized results don’t replace the “regular” search results; they’re shown in addition to the results you would have turned up before Search plus The World launched yesterday. Whether Twitter’s reaction is based upon a misunderstanding or not, it highlights the need for better elucidation of what Search plus The World is and isn’t, and how it will impact both users and those who’ve benefited from Google’s search results in the past.

A best case scenario here is that Twitter partners with Google to add its own content to Search plus The World, although that may be impossible without fully integrating with Google+. In any case, surely personalized search — especially if it’s controllable by the user — is the future of Internet search, in which case…isn’t it better to join rather than hope to beat them?

Prepare for a war of words (and tech blogs) as Google picks up Twitter’s implied “is what Google’s doing anti-competitive?” gauntlet and tosses it back with a nonplussed one-liner suggesting the whole kerfuffle’s actually Twitter’s fault.

If you’re just tuning in, Google launched something called “Search plus Your World” yesterday, basically a way of folding Google+ social networking content (shared with you) into your Google search results. Twitter, who had to know this was coming, reacted immediately with a prepared statement, saying in so many words that Search plus Your World is el major problem-o because it surfaces Google’s social networking content before competitors’ data. (Facebook’s keeping mum, for the moment.)

Here’s what Twitter wrote in full:

For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.

Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.

We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.

Google responded last night with a single sentence and a link highlighting Twitter’s decision to remove itself from the search equation.

We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.

As you can see, Twitter elected not to renew an agreement it had with Google to include Twitter updates in its search results. That agreement ran from October 2009 to July 2, 2011. To date, no one’s entirely sure why Twitter opted out of its partnership with Google (Google had been paying Twitter for access to its tweet firehose, so money was probably a factor) but I’m assuming it had something to do with Google+ (launched on June 28, 2011), and Twitter’s competitive concerns about freely providing Google a motherlode of easily mineable social networking data.

So there’s reason to be sympathetic with Google’s position here — they can’t integrate results they’ve been forbidden access to — but Google’s (feigned?) surprise also seems disingenuous. Between Google search and Google+, Google holds both the spigot and the cup. It’s in many ways analogous to the relationship Microsoft Windows has with Microsoft Office, where one company controls both the underlying platform (or one of the biggest slices) while simultaneously competing with others at the applications level. If Google search is the predominant Internet search mechanism (it is), and that search mechanism surfaces Google+ content before any other social network’s, I’d call that a clear conflict of interest.

But! Google’s Amit Singhal claims the company is “open” to integrating Facebook, Twitter and other services, telling Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan:

“Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service … Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

The trouble with Google’s “open” position here, if I’ve surmised Twitter’s original reason for opting out of Google search correctly, is that it affords Google access to massive pools of ostensibly valuable data that Twitter, Facebook and the like wouldn’t have about Google+. Google+ allows Google to paddle around in the social networking pool with everyone else, while Google search (with Twitter, Facebook et al. fully integrated) would give Google access to a bird’s eye view of usage patterns its competitors lack.

There’s no easy solution here. If Google pays Twitter gobs of money to aggregate the social networking site’s content, there’s still Google’s ability to view how that data’s accessed (via Google search) in ways Twitter can’t, giving Google a competitive leg up. And if Google and Twitter remain unpaired, Google+ stands to benefit enormously if Search plus Your World takes off, at which point Google’s holding both the spigot and cup.

Every so often, Tom’s Hardware runs what it calls a “Web Browser Grand Prix,” putting the latest browsers through a battery of grueling benchmarks. The last throwdown took place in August, and was notable for its inclusion of a “hackintosh” computer, except that wasn’t enough for Mac-heads, who worried the results might be biased for lack of an authentic Mac in the mix.

Until today: TH just published one of its multipage, exhaustive benchmark features, pitting Chrome 16, Firefox 9, Internet Explorer 9, Opera 11 and Safari 5 against each other. The test machine? An 11-inch MacBook Air with a 1.8GHz Intel Core i7 processor running OS X Lion and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit (via Apple’s Boot Camp) — about as apples-to-apples as you’ll get in cross-platform Mac/Windows testing.

The results are fascinating if you have time to comb through them, derived from what TH calls “core, observation, dated, and quarantine” tests, each keyed and weighted to reflect TH’s experience with the benchmarks and how trustworthy their results are. The tests consist of routine activities, ranging from startup times and cached or uncached page loads to each browser’s chops running stuff like Java, Silverlight, Flash and HTML5.

And the winners: On Windows 7, Firefox 9 (Safari took last place) and on OS X, Safari 5 (Firefox took last place). But here’s the interesting bound-to-be-contentious part — the overall winner was Firefox 9 on Windows 7. TH writes:

The red bars that occasionally appear in our charts denote when an OS X-based browser beats all of the Windows 7-based competition. We use the word occasionally because we only had to switch the Mac OS X green bars to red four times. That’s four out of 35 eligible charts, as opposed to the 10 out of 29 OS X earned on the Hackintosh system we used in Web Browser Grand Prix VI: Firefox 6, Chrome 13, Mac OS X Lion. While many Mac fans expected to see OS X really hammer Windows 7 on a genuine Mac, the home court advantage didn’t do Apple any favors.

One thing TH’s benchmarks can’t measure: stability. Safari 5 for OS X Lion crashes routinely for me, no matter the number of clean OS X Lion rebuilds, a dearth of browser extensions (read: zero), my diligence in keeping all plugins updated (e.g. Flash) or my relatively spartan applications load. For some reason, once I have half a dozen tabs open in Safari 5, working mostly in WordPress, I have to deal with occasional (as in a few times a week) “the page isn’t responding, force reload?” error messages, which basically reboot the entire browser, wiping any volatile data, clearing my cache, and forcing me to log back into the five or six services I use to work daily.

And so I’ve been using Chrome, which seems more responsive than Safari to me (I would have argued, not scientifically mind you, that it was the faster browser until seeing TH’s benchmarks). So much for psychological objectivity!

Siri for Android is here! At least that’s what more than a 1,000 Android owners thought as they downloaded the app from the Android Market.

In reality the app is simply a shortcut to launch Google’s Voice Actions, which comes pre-installed on every Android phone. The fact that the publisher is named “Official App” probably hasn’t helped.

Official App, while obviously trying to profit from the popularity of Siri, does give fair warning that its product isn’t the real deal:

Siri, now for your Android device!

This application is a Siri icon that opens “Google’s Voice Actions” app.

Google Voice Actions is a powerful app that comes with every Android device. It supports many different voice commands and Google is constantly working to make it even more powerful. Show your iPhone friends your Android phone can do what Siri does!

Your friends with iPhones will be so jealous that you have an app that pretends to be an app they already have! Despite its fraudulent nature, seven of Siri for Android’s 21 reviews are positive, which means either there are people out there who don’t really know what Siri does or the publisher has a lot of friends.

Yes, developers love Android Market’s open, approval-free policy, but it’s hard to see how something like this would ever happen on Apple’s App Store. The price you pay for freedom, I suppose.

Security researchers from Kaspersky Lab have detected a massive DNS poisoning attack, affecting Brazilian ISPs.

Upon attempting to visit a legitimate web site such as www.google.com.br for instance, users are exposed to malicious file downloads, next to client-side exploits, CVE-2010-4452 in particular.

Kaspersky’s Fabio Assolini comments:

Brazil has some big ISPs. Official statistics suggest the country has 73 million computers connected to the Internet, and the major ISPs average 3 or 4 million customers each. If a cybercriminal can change the DNS cache in just one server, the number of potential victims is huge.

Last week Brazil’s web forums were alive with desperate cries for help from users who faced malicious redirections when trying to access websites such as YouTube, Gmail and Hotmail, as well as local market leaders including Uol, Terra and Globo. In all cases, users were asked to run a malicious file as soon as the website opened.

Malicious attackers often turn to alternative methods for abusing the infrastructure of a trusted web site, such as Google in this case, in cases where they cannot directly compromise this infrastructure. Whether it’s the modification of a particular site’s DNS records by social engineering their way in, to to direct DNS cache poisoning, their main objective remains the abuse of a high-trafficked web sites.

Affected users are advised to “update antivirus and all software in the computer (such as Java), also change the DNS configuration to other providers“.

Google announced a new social networking layer that may compete with Facebook but, at the same time, is utterly different. The Google+ project will do some of the same general things as Facebook, such as sending messages to friends, sharing links, chatting, and sharing pictures, but the big difference is that with Google+, you can choose who you want to share these things with. Unlike with Facebook where posting a link will show up on your profile for all of your 500 “friends” to see, Google+ lets you do things a little differently. Here’s how it works:

Circles
The concept of Circles is a major part of Google+. This is where you choose who you want in your contacts. You can have a family Circle, a BFF Circle, a co-workers Circle, and even an “Epic bros” Circle, as Google shows in the demo video below. One of the hardest things about Facebook becoming so popular is that everyone is on it and everyone is friends with you.

Most of us are friends with a lot of family members and colleagues on Facebook, and we enjoy seeing what they’re up to. However, we don’t always want to share everything with them. Google allows you to choose which people you want in what Circle. You then use those Circles for all of your Google+ activity, which we’ll get into more in depth below.

Sparks
Sparks is a feature that lets you select certain areas, hobbies, or interests that you particularly like. They’re the things you always ramble on and on about when someone brings it up at a party, like that new album by your favorite musician, or a new comic book. Google wants to keep people searching for content on its site, so Sparks helps by delivering a “field of highly contagious content from across the Internet” on any topic.

You can then share it with a particular group of friends who will appreciate the news of a new restaurant opening in your neighborhood, unlike the rest of your 495 friends who live in different neighborhoods and would otherwise be seeing it in your Facebook status.

Hangouts
Hangouts is one of the features I’m not quite sure will catch on, but it’s a cool concept nonetheless. Hangouts aims to bring a group of friends together sporadically by combining casual meetups with live multi-person video. I’m not sure how useful it will be when everyone’s just “hanging out” in different parts of the world, at different time, but the aim is to for people to just stop in when they have the time.

Mobile
In Q1 of this year, 36 percent of phones being sold were Android devices, so mobile is an important area to Google+, and its mobile features are pretty impressive. First, Google+ allows you to add your location to every post so you can share where you are with your Circles. You also have the option of not sharing, so it’s not a huge privacy issue.

The second feature is Instant Upload, which lets you take a photo and instantly upload it to a private album in the cloud. For those of us notorious for snapping photos throughout the day on our phones and then forgetting to upload them by the end of the day, this feature will come in handy. When you get back to your computer, you can simply flip through the photos you uploaded earlier and share them with your Circles.

Huddle
Maybe one of the best features of Google+ is Huddle, which lets you coordinate with friends and family in real-time. It’s especially useful on your phone when you’re trying to plan something out with a group of people. For example, when you’re trying to pick a place to meet, you don’t have to do the whole “I’ll call Jess and Jim and see if that’s okay and call you back” thing. You can just have a flowing conversation with the people you select in your Circle through text messages.

How to get Google+?
Google says Google+ is available today on the Android Market, but you actually have to wait for an invite since it’s still in active development. If want to make sure you are on the list, you can sign up here.

We’re waiting to get ours, and when we do, we’ll let you know how these features work hands-on. We’ll also let you know when Google+ is out of development and ready to go. Google says “it’s coming soon to the App Store.”

What do you think of Google+? Does it look like something you will use, or will you just stick to Facebook and Twitter to relay your updates to all your friends and followers?

Recently, HTC and Apple were involved in a lawsuit concerning a patent argument. Today, Bloomberg declared an exciting twist in the on-going patent argument flanked by Apple and Smartphone makers which supports Google’s Android OS.Bloomberg report says that HTC today filed a fresh patent lawsuit in opposition to Apple and customized a previous objection with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), using nine patents newly acquired from Google.

The five patents which are used in the latest lawsuit were originally owned by Motorola but were passed to Google last year only before being giving to HTC. Google is presently trying to attain Motorola Mobility.

The nine patents derived with Motorola, Openwave Systems Inc. and Palm Inc. with Google taking rights from the last year as per the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office evidences. Mountain View, California-based Google traced the passing of the patents to HTC on 1^st September as per the agency’s website.

HTC now has more ammunition in its battle to fend off several patent-contravention alleges lodged by Apple that compete Smartphone operating on Google’s Android OS replica the iPhone. Google’s participation in helping HTC shows a new face in a business wide clash over Smartphone technology that has also fascinated Samsung Electronics, Barnes & Noble Inc. and Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. Android users.

In adding up, the other 5 patents which were included to the previous ITC complaint were initially created at Openwave Systems and Palm before the patents were attained by Google. Google then shifted those patents to HTC last week only. Apple has however yet to file an official complaint against Google concerning the patent but does have a continuing violation case awaiting against Motorola Mobility on the issue.

This patent dispute appears to get more exciting by the day!

With the release of Google+, you possibly groaned, saying you didn’t need another social network. Google entered a very saturated market, and given its likeness to the very dominant Facebook, people have questioned its place on the Web–can it really fill any niche that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc. haven’t covered?

Google thinks so. The company designed the site with other social networks in mind, looking at what these other companies did wrong, explains Google+ designer Andy Hertzfeld to Fast Company‘s John Pavlus. He gives the following four reasons why Google+ differentiates itself, besting any other social site out there.

• Circles are fun

A big issue Hertztfeld takes with other networks is that they’re difficult to set up. Finding friends or adding followers takes too much effort, which really puts a damper on the social part of things. So, instead of making the set-up part all boring and stuff, Google created a fun way to add your friends: circles. Sure, to some, dragging a face into a “circle” might seem tedious, but Hertzfeld argues it is a “delightful experience that rewards people — we wanted to make it feel addicting… Categorization can easily become tedious, and fun animations help add a twinkle in the eye, some whimsy to the process.”

He likens the experience to a video game, “a highly visual and physical process: you drag photos of people you know onto large, friendly-looking blue rings, which offer up springy, slot-machine-like animations when you let the mouse button go. (A tiny “+1″ even pops out of the Circle and hovers in midair above it like a 1-UP in Super Mario Bros.)”

• Webcams aren’t creepy

No other site integrates video like Google+. Google sees videochatting less like a phone call and more like a group hang. The “Hangouts,” Google+’s videochat feature, makes virtually chilling with your friends more informal, explains Hertztfeld. “The starting point for [designing] Hangouts is basic human nature: People love contact but they’re shy about initiating it, especially with video.” Before you know it you will be playing charades with your pals over Google+ in no time.

• People love instant gratification

Sometimes, when you take a really awesome photo of your crew at the pool, you want to share how much fun you’re having without all of your other friends as fast as possible. With Facebook, you need to take a moment and upload your memories; Google+ streamlines that process. Its mobile app has a feature called “Instant Upload,” which, true to its moniker, puts your photo on Google+ as soon as its taken. “Larry [Page, Google's co-founder and CEO] was a big proponent of streamlining that experience,” explains Hertztfeld.

• For the Internet, Google+ is big on privacy

The Library of Congress saves all of your Tweets. Facebook has murky privacy settings, which they constantly amend. Google+, Hertzfeld declares, has privacy controls galore. You can choose to whom you share what, using those super fun circles and you can also see what others choose to share with you. “We want to appeal to the mainstream user who has a low tolerance for complexity,” Hertzfeld says, “and at the same time we have to respect privacy as strongly as possible. So every feature has privacy implications that we thought out.”

Google chief Larry Page said Thursday that the Internet giant’s freshly launched Google+ social network already has more than 10 million members.

“Over 10 million people have joined Google-Plus,” Page said during a quarterly earnings conference call. “That is a great achievement for the team.”

He added that more than a billion items are shared daily at Google+.

Google launched its rival to Facebook on June 28, with membership limited to invitation-only while the service remains in a test phase.

“Online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it,” Google’s senior vice president for engineering Vic Gundotra said in a blog post about the social-networking initiative.

Unveiling Google+, Gundotra stressed the ability it gives users to separate online friends and family into different “Circles,” or networks, and to share information only with members of a particular circle.

“We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software,” he said.

One of the criticisms of Facebook is that updates are shared with all of one’s friends unless a user has gone through a relatively complicated process to create separate Facebook Groups.

“Not all relationships are created equal,” Gundotra said. “So in life we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents, and almost nothing with our boss.

Google+ is located at plus.google.com.