That the iPhone is a massive source of online traffic isn’t a surprise – that’s been apparent since the week it launched. What’s interesting here is Android’s rise, which is dramatically quickening, already accounting for a fifth of mobile traffic in the US, when the real marketing push for the OS, starting with the MyTouch ads and the massive Droid launch, is only recently starting in earnest.

The stats, from mobile advertising firm AdMob, are a little less spectacular worldwide, mainly because Symbian’s established, but waning, 40 per cent smartphone market share helps it snatch about 25 per cent of mobile web traffic. Still though, two things are clear: Android and the iPhone are who mobile web developers are going to have to cater to, and WebKit, which Symbian uses in its browser too, is basically it.

And how about a bonus chart! Ever wondered how common the different Android handsets are, which is most popular, and which don’t register? Well hello, extra pie on the right.

The G1 is the predictable star here, but the Droid is moving fast, or else its users surf a lot of web. [AdMob via Techcrunch]

The download is live in the App Market – just download the newest version of Maps, and it’s hidden in there – and Google’s free turn-by-turn navigation software is mostly identical to the version found on the Droid. Almost:

Some features of Android 2.0 are not available on Android 1.6, for example, the ability to use the “navigate to” voice command as shown in our demo video. However, you can still create a shortcut that will allow you to launch Navigation and start getting directions to a specific place from your current location with just a single touch from your home screen. For example, you can create a “Home” shortcut to quickly navigate home, no matter where you are. Just use the “Add” menu item from the home screen, then choose “Shortcuts”, then “Directions”. Please visit our forum to give us feedback, or our Help centre to get help using Google Maps Navigation.

Still though, free turn-by-turn for all, unless you have a Hero or one of Samsung’s ditties, or outside of the United States, for which you are permitted to make one extremely sad face. [Google]

This started when Microsoft and Google paid for access to Twitter’s millions of tweets and Bing paid Facebook and Twitter for access to their pages. Think about this perspective, if you ran Fox the WSJ and other major content makers, wouldn’t you think that your content is worth more than all those 140 character posts? Right, you would. And if those sites are charging hundreds of millions for their content, wouldn’t you ask for a lot more? You probably would, and if you’re Murdoch, the most powerful man in media, you’d probably get what you want and then set a nasty precedent for the rest of the short tail of mega media companies to get a lot of Google’s cash. Maybe a lot of these companies value Google’s help in promoting their stuff, but it never hurts to ask for money, especially when media and publishing are super duper hard up on cash these days, in general. I’m not an investor in big media or any tech companies, so its not a problem for me necessarily in that way. But it is a problem for me as a guy who lives and works through search engines.

Microsoft is just being evil again. Now, this isn’t typical Microsoft bashing – someone has to fight Google. And in a way, you have to hand it to Microsoft. They’re the underdog here fighting a Google that grows in power every day, and their Facebook content deal won’t likely be matched by Google any time soon. But this is so typically Bad Microsoft, because they’ve cleverly shortcut the straightforward fight for market share by features and gone for a deal-based solution to the problem. Like the PC and OS fight in the ’80s they’re competing with business tactics instead of quality. (And Bing is great, so I’m not making a complete 1:1 comparison to Windows.) We’re sort of left with – instead of a David and Goliath – a Clash of the Titans situation with pieces of rock and lighting falling from the sky and crushing us. Microsoft fails to see/care that the fragmentation that Microsoft is trying to achieve is not only going to hurt Google – it is going to hurt YOU AND ME.

This is the Microsoft we know from the last century, before great underdog products like Xbox and Zune. This is from a company whose CEO recently told us that sales are more important than critical acclaim, preferring profit over better product. And this is a company that gets in its anticompetitive digs when it can: For example, in Internet Explorer, it’s really hard to set Google as your default browser, not being listed in the alternative choices to Bing. Yet, in Google Chrome, it’s easy to set Bing as the default search.

Again, imagine that half of the top 500 media companies are delisted from Google. And imagine that Google stoops to this strategy and buys out the other half of that 500. Now imagine you have to search for something and now have to type it in twice because who the f—k is going to remember (no-one) which search engine covers which content?

People, I’m telling you, this is bad news. People talk about net neutrality like it’s only about the data’s prioritisation over the pipes. But what good is equivalence in data speed and prioritisation if you can’t find it in the first place?

Google, asked how on earth this slow-motion, oddly-planned scenario would play out, gives mixed responses. The official PR line, when asked about the merger:

[W]e’re reaching a perfect storm of converging trends where computers are behaving more like mobile devices, and phones are behaving more like small computers. Having two open source operating systems from Google provides both users and device manufacturers with more choice and helps contribute a wealth of new code to the open source community.

There, perfect: acknowledge that your boss’s sentiment is true, but deny any specific plans. But what about when CNET asks Schmidt directly? Observe:

The future will unfold as it does.

There it is! When these guys are talking about Chrome and Android merging, they’re not talking about any kind of roadmap, they’re just speaking in obvious, unusually long-term truisms, like they’ve been doing an awful lot lately: Two Linux-based operating systems from one company are bound to develop similarities; eventually, our computing usage will be totally centred around the web; in a decade, our notebooks and mobile phones will probably be one device; the future is awesome; etcetera.

This Zen futurism is charming and all, but Chrome OS and Android aren’t uncontrollable entities – they don’t need to be crudely estimated, or attributed some kind of autonomy, especially by the people that make them. Specifically, they need to be planned. [CNET via Download Squad via Engadget]

The Financial Times reports that both companies have discussed the idea, though talks are still at an early stage. It’s also hard to imagine Bing becoming the exclusive place to search for News Corp content – like the Wall Street Journal – any time soon. As soon as a smaller blog links to a News Corp story, it’ll be straight back on Google. The “new” search wars have well and truly begun. [Financial Times via Business Insider]

Finance director for the company, Alexandre de Rochefort, says that even a company that’s done extremely well on the iPhone can have trouble breaking even on Google phones:

We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like … many others … [The Android Market] is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue.

That’s the essence of the App Effect: High volume, customer pressure and nudging from Apple drive iPhone app prices down break-even levels, which gives app developers two options. They can either charge higher prices for equivalent apps on Android, for which they will be crucified by customers, or they can match their prices and hope that enough of Android’s comparatively small, fragmented user base just happens to stumble across said app in the barely navigable App Market. An attractive business proposition, I say!

So what needs to happen? Either Android adoption grows (which it’s doing), the App Market gets much easier to navigate (a desktop app, maybe?), or you know, both. [Reuters]

The news comes from the COO of Syabas, the company that makes the Popcorn Hour set-top box. Up until now they’d had a loose agreement with the ‘Tube: They can stream video from YouTube for free, but YouTube can change the terms of the deal whenever they want. Which they did!:

YouTube has always retained the right to change its terms of service in the future should it ever wish to do so. As a result of Google’s decision, Syabas is no longer allowed to access YouTube through its APIs. To be clear, Syabas is not being singled out. With the exception of a few strategic partners Google has chosen to work with, the company has informed Syabas they are asking all over-the-top device makers that are currently connecting to YouTube content through its APIs to take down the service.

To quote every set-top box manufacturer in the world, probably: “Shit.” YouTube access had become the kind of thing you take for granted in a connected box or Blu-ray player, and it was nice to have. Now, it’ll be limited to devices like the PS3, Wii and TiVo — backed by the kinds of players who have the clout to pressure Google, or the money to pay them — leaving everyone else to search for some kind of hacky workaround.

I understand that Google wants to squeeze some ad revenue out of YouTube, and that letting anyone and everyone access raw, ad-free content through the back end probably isn’t the best business plan, but this isn’t Hulu — it’s not like they have many powerful content providers to appease, just a bunch of teenagers with webcams. Set-top box folks: Watch your free video cornucopia dissolve on December 2.

UPDATE: YouTube’s statement:

Since July of 2008, YouTube’s Terms of Service has restricted implementations for televisions based on our APIs. YouTube has been in active discussions with various developers on how best to implement YouTube on set top boxes and TVs. There are several companies, however, that have deployed solutions, like video scraping technology, to circumvent the rules and violate YouTube’s Terms of Service. Companies that have negotiated agreements to use our APIs, like TiVo, Sony, Panasonic and Sony’s PS3 are not impacted.

So, companies like Syabas have been in violation of YouTube’s terms of service for some time now and knew this was going to happen. The question remains, though: Why couldn’t they just comply and get a deal like TiVo or Sony? Does it cost anything? Is YouTube selective? Does it just take awhile? [Syabas via Engadget via Lifehacker]

Because the speech-recognition technology is still a work in progress, Google is launching the automatic captioning service on the YouTube channels of just a handful of partners, including PBS, National Geographic and a few big universities. But the company promises that the technology will improve over time — and it hopes for a much broader rollout.

In the meantime, Google is adding a new “auto-timing” feature to its existing manual captioning service to make it easier to use. Video creators will now simply have to create a text file with all the words spoken in a video and Google’s speech recognition technology will take it from there — matching the text to the words as they are spoken. Google hopes this will encourage more users to add captions to their videos.

[AP]

[Style14 via Engadget]

He’s a classy one, Mr Brin. Like our own Brian Lam. [CrunchGear, Ryan Block]