After the emergence of Google Plus this year, many people were wondering if Facebook had finally met its match. Maybe that's so, but Facebook has upped the ante over the past couple of weeks. It has significantly scaled up the amount of information it tracks about you – and many millions of other people. The once humble status update field has been expanded to include 5 types of "life events." You now automatically share data about what you're reading or listening to. There are more ways to follow and filter people. Those are just a few of the changes.

The big Facebook re-design has caused a predictable user backlash and media frenzy. To help you get a handle on what has changed, in this post we’ll summarize the new Facebook and explore the major implications.

Here’s a quick summary of what’s changed:

• A new Subscribe button, allowing you to follow people you aren’t friends with, plus filter the amount of information you get from current friends.
• Improved friends lists – easier way to group people into lists, including via semi-automated "smart lists."
• A News Ticker that streams a constant flow of user updates in a sidebar (on top of your chat bar).
• A newspaper-like relevancy filter for your Facebook homepage.
• Instant sharing of what you read, listen to and watch.
• A new Timeline profile (a colorful history of you and your "life events").

What does all of this mean? We won’t fully know until all of the changes are rolled out on a mass scale. Some of the above isn’t yet available to all (the Timeline is in a developer preview until later this week) and some of it is restricted (e.g. the music sharing appears to be geo-restricted). But here are three things you ought to know now.

1. The Noise Just Exponentially Multiplied.

The News Ticker has already become a constantly streaming list of updates from your friends and people you subscribe to. However it’s about to get a lot busier, as more and more Facebook users have their reading, listening and watching activity automatically shared (more on that below).

What this means to you, as a Facebook user, is that you’ll need better ways to filter out the noise. Do you really want to get a song-by-song update as I listen to WHAM!’s Greatest Hits on a Friday afternoon? I didn’t think so.

This is the reason behind Facebook’s newspaper-like design on your Facebook homepage. It’s attempting to present just relevant updates from your friends and who you subscribe to. So far, this feature has probably gotten the most negative feedback from users – many of whom say it misses a lot of updates they’d actually like to see. So Facebook clearly has some work to do to improve the homepage relevancy.

2. Instant Sharing Means You Should Be Wary.

This new feature will send an instant update to your Facebook News Feed every time you click through to a news story of a Facebook media partner (Washington Post and The Guardian are two early examples, but many more media companies will follow). It will also update your News Feed every time you listen to a song on a partner app, such as Spotify, Rdio and MOG. The ‘watch’ partners include Hulu and Netflix.

The implications for you, the user, are clear: watch out that you’re not accidentally sharing things you’d rather not. For example, maybe you don’t want your social network to know that you like reading stories about Glenn Beck. Or that you listen to WHAM!’s Greatest Hits every Friday.

3. Facebook Now Knows a Heck of a Lot More About YOU.

You probably don’t want more noise in Facebook or the risk of over-sharing. Tough cookies, because for Facebook all of that data is a gold mine. As Chris Saad noted, "the more information you have the more ability you have to find patterns and surface them in relevant places."

Make no mistake, this is extremely valuable data to Facebook. They will be able to use it to sell highly targeted ads and maybe even sell anonymized data to corporations and governments. There are plenty of privacy measures in place to protect you, but as a user perhaps a more relevant question is: do I want a single corporation to know so much about me? Or, as John Battelle put it, do I want the “story of my life” under the control of Facebook?

Let us know your thoughts on Facebook’s big re-design – are you mostly excited or concerned by it?

In today’s world of real-time status updates, search is evolving to account for the social nature of the web. Facebook is pushing forward in this direction with on-site search functionality that now displays search results — for Facebook and web content — based on “Likes” and shares.

Facebook appears to have quietly rolled out the beefed-up search offering some time over the past few days; it was first spotted by All Facebook.

From the looks of it, Facebook is ranking results based on how users engage with content via its social plugins. It’s unclear how Facebook is defining its formula — the formula seems to account for shares and Likes from a member’s friends as well as shares and Likes from everyone else to determine an item’s placement.

Just recently, Facebook was awarded a search patent for “ranking search results based on the frequency of clicks on the search results by members of a social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation.”

The company has yet to officially announce the new search functionality or explain how it works. We’ve reached out to Facebook for more information and will update this post when we know more.

For the time being, consider this yet another small step in Facebook’s designs to capture search share and harness the abundance of data available around their social plugins.

Update: Facebook responded to our inquiry explaining, “We launched the ability to see articles shared by your direct friends in the search typeahead. For instance, if your friend is on a news site and clicks “Like” under one of the articles (which will then go into News Feed), when you go to search for that article on Facebook, it will surface in the dropdown.”

The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.

Now that the iPhone 4 press conference has wrapped up and we’re all going to get free iPhone cases, it’s time to decompress and look at the big picture for Apple and the iPhone 4.

In the nearly 90-minute presentation and Q&A;, Steve Jobs provided a compelling and mostly frank defense of his company’s device, which he said is “perhaps the best product we have ever built.” He admitted that there was a problem but put it in the context of other competitive smartphones, which he said have similar issues. He addressed the concerns of unhappy customers with an offer of free cases and an option for users to return their iPhones. Above all, he admitted that Apple “is not perfect.”

Was it enough to quiet the critics, though? What’s next for the world’s most valuable technology company and its crown jewel?

The Storm Has Passed

On Wednesday, I wrote a post entitled What Apple Must Do to Stop the Bleeding. In it, I provided five suggestions for recovering from this most recent PR nightmare:

1. Acknowledge That the Antenna Problem Is Real

2. Go into the Technical Details

3. Roll Out the Software Update

4. Make the Bumpers Free

5. No Matter What, Don’t Issue an iPhone 4 Recall

Apple implemented all of these things to a reasonable degree. It acknowledged that the antenna problem is real, and the company even created a website detailing the specific issues. It went into specific data on dropped calls, user complaints and attenuation. It rolled out iOS 4.0.1. It made the bumpers free. And finally, it avoided a costly recall.

Yes, Jobs dodged an apology to unhappy customers. Yes, Apple kept on pointing to the antenna issue as an industry-wide one. However, Apple’s actions are likely more than enough for the vast majority of its customers. The rest will either get a free case or return their mobile devices.

By addressing the media, Apple has effectively weathered this storm. The worst is behind them.

But the Damage Is Done

Apple didn’t come out of this unscathed, though. They had to take a beating from the media first. It doesn’t matter whether “antennagate” was overblown or not anymore: The damage has been done.

1. There will be financial damage (but not much). The free cases, free bumpers and iPhone returns will cost the company some revenue. However, we predict that the damage will be minimal in the face of overall profits. Expect record quarters – just not as high as they could have potentially been.

2. Apple is no longer perfect. That’s not to say that they ever were, but most people blamed AT&T; for many of the iPhone’s problems rather than blaming the Apple team. Now, the door is open to criticism of Apple and its future products after Jobs’ admission of imperfection.

3. Future products will undergo more scrutiny. The media is just going to be more critical of Apple, at least for a while.

Consumers will likely remember “antennagate” when they purchase their next iPhone or iPad, and this episode might make them more cautious when they consider buying their next Apple product.

What’s Next?

Apple is moving on from this fiasco. It’s tough to tell now whether the antenna issues and resulting PR problems will be a quickly healing scratch or a long-lasting scar on Apple’s public face, but at least for now the company will turn its attention toward new products. The media will be on the lookout for the next opening though – and there will be one. When this happens again, many people – media moguls and end users alike – will be less likely to look past Apple’s imperfections.

However, consumers are almost certain to stay loyal to Apple. The explanation will be satisfactory to the vast majority of iPhone owners. Plus, who wants to give up their Retina Display and iPhone apps? I love Android (I own a Droid and an iPhone 4), but it doesn’t provide the iPhone experience. Anyone who’s become hooked on Apple products isn’t going to ditch them over “antennagate.”

The only thing Apple can is do is keep building products that enthrall millions of customers worldwide as users, media and Apple’s competitors watch ever more closely from the sidelines. Oh, and Android will continue to gain ground, providing more pressure on Apple to get as close to perfection as possible with its next few product launches.

It’s the morning after the big Chrome OS event where Google executives and engineers revealed a myriad of details about the company’s first attempt at creating their own operating system. The highly anticipated news conference was tracked all over the web, liveblogged by technology sites, and Twittered so much that it’s still listed as a “trending topic” as of this morning.

But now that the news is out, has Chrome OS lost its shine? People had high expectations for Google’s new operating system but the end result doesn’t look like the revolutionary, “change the world” product many had hoped for.

Yes, Chrome OS is Different

Don’t get us wrong – Google’s OS is different than whatever Windows, Mac, or Linux build you have running on your computer today. The new OS does away with desktop applications entirely – everything you use on Google Chrome OS runs on the web. Of course, the company hopes you’ll use a lot of Google products like Gmail and YouTube, but it doesn’t limit you to just Google-branded services. In the built-in applications area, there are also links to other web apps like the online TV streaming service Hulu.com and music sites Lala and Pandora. To be fair, Chrome OS even links to Yahoo and Microsoft’s webmail offerings right out of the box.

Google’s major goal with Chrome OS is to moving computing off our personal hard drives and into the cloud…the Google cloud. To accomplish such a feat, they’ve made the web browser the OS. Everything you need (in theory) is accessible through the included Google Chrome browser, the same browser the company currently offers to Windows users with Mac and Linux versions expected by the end of this year.

As exciting as that vision is, we have to wonder if people – especially the mainstream netbook users the OS is aimed at – are ready for this big of a switch. And more importantly, is the technology itself ready to make the change a comfortable and seamless experience?

…but is it Better?

After digesting yesterday’s news, some lingering questions remain. Was this the OS everyone was hoping for or has Google let us down?

You Can’t Just Install Chrome OS – You Have to Buy a New Netbook

To begin with, one of the more surprising reveals that came out of yesterday’s news is that the OS cannot be installed on your own computer. Oh sure, there are downloads available that use Google’s open-sourced code to create bootable builds tech-savvy users and developers can play with, but the official word from the search giant is that anyone wanting to use the “real” Google Chrome OS will have to purchase a new netbook to do so. You cannot simply download it from the web and install it on any machine.

Part of the reason for this restriction is driver support. Google is working with carefully selected manufacturers to offer a handful of netbooks running the OS in the coming year. By going this route, they don’t have to provide an entire ecosystem of drivers for every piece of hardware out there – they can pick and choose which ones to support. They’ll likely limit the number of peripherals supported, too. According to what was said yesterday, the company will support “mass storage devices” (think USB flash drives and digital cameras) but were cagey on how they plan on offering printing support. All they would say is that they’re planning on an “innovative approach” when it comes to printing, whatever that means. Hopefully, they’re planning to do something more than just integrating with Kinko’s and FedEx’s online document services, for example. Printing, (sorry Google) is not a web app just yet.

No Other Web Browsers Supported

Another big disappointment is the company’s decision to limit all web surfing to the one included browser, Google Chrome. Firefox and Safari users are out of luck – no other browsers will be supported. But before you cry out “antitrust!,” be warned – Google has this covered. The code base used to build the OS is open-source – that means anyone take the code and create their own version of Chrome OS. As was carefully – and haltingly – explained by Google’s VP of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, other browser makers can take the code and build their own OS if they want to. But let’s get real – Firefox Chrome OS? We don’t think so. The reality is that fans of other browsers are simply out of luck if they want to use this operating system.

Offline Access is Limited. Your New Netbook is Now a Brick.

One of the questions that got glossed over during the Q&A; session at the end of the event is how Google's OS plans to deal with offline access. The world is not blanketed in Wi-Fi yet, so what can this web-based OS do without the web? Surprisingly, the answer given didn't refer to any subsidized deals with cellular providers regarding deals to offer built-in 3G connectivity for the new netbooks. Instead, Pichai explained that the OS was built for use with Wi-Fi.

Of course, a handful of Google products use Google Gears, a technology that makes websites available offline. For example, Gmail uses Gears to create an offline version of your webmail inbox which you can use to read and respond to email until internet connectivity becomes available again. At that point, all the changes are synced back to Google’s servers. Although Google didn’t specifically refer to Gears when answering the question, there’s no reason to doubt that it will work in Chrome OS’s web browser the same as it does now in the standard Chrome browser.

However, Pichai did make note of Chrome OS’s support for HTML5, an upcoming revision to the core markup language used to build the web. In the new specification, a key feature is offline support for web apps. However, web application developers will have to rebuild their apps in order to use HTML5, so users will be dependent on each individual company to make this change. While it’s believed that one day this spec could make the whole web an offline app, the reality is that most developers have yet to implement this technology in their services yet. Even by Chrome OS’s launch next year, there’s no reason to believe the landscape will have changed significantly by then.

Do You Really Need an OS or Just the Chrome Web Browser?

Finally, the big question regarding Chrome OS is why? What can the OS do that any operating system running the Chrome browser cannot? Based on what was shown yesterday, the answer is very little. Chrome OS’s brand-new features consist of two things: application tabs and panels. The panels are persistent windows that pop-up in front of your web browser’s main window. For example, Google Chat, the company’s IM service, can live in a panel that stays on top no matter what window you’re viewing.

Application tabs, meanwhile, are special tabs that give you easy access to your most frequently used web apps from the browser. Any page tab can be made into an application tab with one click and the resulting “tab” is represented with the colorful icon for that site or service. While that’s certainly a cool feature, it alone isn’t a major selling point for the OS. That woul
d be like saying you have to buy Mac OS X because of the dock or Windows because of the taskbar. You need a million of these little features combined to add up to a compelling reason to buy an OS.

That’s not to say that Chrome OS itself doesn’t have worthwhile features of its own – like its built-in security mechanisms or its auto-update system, it’s just that these aren’t the kinds of things that sell it to an end user. The questions consumers want answers to are what does it do that’s special? What does it look like? And for now, the answer is “it’s basically just a web browser.”

Revolution? Maybe Not Just Yet.

At the end of the day, Chrome OS is an exciting, but not fully realized, vision. Although it has potential, the world may not be ready for a web-based netbook right now. Also, the technology needed to make the Wi-Fi only netbook useful without an internet connection isn’t up to full speed either. At the end of the day, the netbook will be marginally more useful than an iPod Touch – when connected, it’s amazing. Offline, not so much.

While you might not rush right out to buy a Chrome OS netbook when they first launch, there could come a time – sooner than you think – when it becomes a reasonable choice. When the majority of apps work offline and you’ve fully transitioned away from desktop apps, a web-connected netbook, especially one that’s affordable, could easily become your everyday computer. That day hasn’t arrived yet. For now, Chrome OS is an exciting glimpse at the future of computing, but not a practical device for the majority of users.

Disclosure: Sarah Perez freelances for Microsoft’s Channel 10 blog, but is not a Microsoft employee. Her primary web browser is, in fact, Google Chrome which she uses exclusively.

Syncing your Zune in Mac OS X, running Word in Linux, giving Linux a go within Windows 7: just a few of the things you can do with virtual machines. And setting one up isn't just easy—it's free.

The word virtualization conjures images of the dank nerd lairs, populated by lonely network admins, scattered with miles of gray wire, grimy PC towers, processed food packaging and tiny tumbleweeds woven from human hair. It sounds like the domain of the software nerd, the Gentoo jockey, and most importantly, not you. Today, though, virtualization has become mainstream: modern software makes running virtualized operating systems amazingly easy, and undeniably useful.

Intimidating erminology aside, here’s what desktop virtualization means today: You can run just about any OS, Mac OS X excluded, inside any other OS. Ubuntu in Mac OS? Sure. Windows 7 within Windows XP? Why not? Windows ME within Snow Leopard? Nobody's going to stop you, I guess! And these aren't patchy, half-assed experiments we're talking about here—these are fully-functioning installations that'll connect to USB peripherals, access the internet, share files with your host OS, and run almost any software, short of 3D games. You can set up as many of these things as you want, and delete them in a matter of seconds. It's pretty great, is what I'm trying to say.

Best of all, virtualization is now something you can try—and stick with—for free, thanks to software like Sun's VirtualBox. It's a free download on any platform, and it does its job spectacularly. Here's how to get started.

What You’ll Need

Free hard drive space: VirtualBox is going to create a simulated hard drive (a hard drive image, to be specific) inside your current OS’s file system. In other words, you’ll need to have space handy to hold a standard OS install, plus whatever apps you’re planning on using on the host system. 10GB is enough to play around with in most cases.

Lots-o-RAM: As efficient as modern virtualization is, running one OS inside another isn't going to be easy on your hardware. The easiest way to ensure good VM performance is to have plenty of RAM, such that both OSes—your host and your guest—can have more than their minimum recommended amount of RAM.

VirtualBox: This is the virtual machine software, or the program in which all of your virtual OSes will run. You may’ve heard of clients like VMWare or Parallels, but these are either paid or have limited platform support. VirtualBox is a free, cross-platform alternative. Getting it is just a matter of downloading the correct version—there are Windows, Mac and Linux editions—and running an installation wizard.

A guest OS: Installing an OS as a virtual machine is almost exactly like installing an OS natively, albeit slightly easier. In other words, you'll need a full, licensed version of your OS, in whatever form you can get it. Downloaded ISO images will work right out of the box—this is how most Linux distributions will come packaged—while OSes on a CD will work too, including your Windows install discs. If applicable, you'll still need to enter license keys—as far as Microsoft is concerned, this is a fresh installation of an OS.

Installing Your Virtual Machine

I’ve chosen to install Windows 7 within OS X Snow Leopard for this guide, because this will be a common usage scenario, and because the processing of installing an OS in VirtualBox is nearly the same no matter what host/guest combo you’re. If you’re installing Ubuntu 9.04 within Windows XP, for example, you can still follow along. Anyway, here you go:

Installing Guest Additions

VirtualBox supports so-called “Guest Additions” in some OSes, which are essentially sets of tools and drivers that make the virtualization more seamless. If they’re available, you’ll want to install them: the guest OS will adjust to your screen resolution properly, your video performance will be smoother (and in Windows XP and Vista, possibly accelerated), filesharing will be simplified, copy and paste will work between OSes, and in some cases, you’ll even be able to run individual programs as native windows in your host OS

That's called "Seamless Mode," and if you're running Windows inside Mac OS or Linux, you may as well try it out. It's not quite perfect—the Start Menu stacked atop the Dock is a little awkward—but this way you don't have to switch between entire desktops just to switch from one app to another. It's a cool effect, at the very least.

To install Guest Additions, click “Install Guest Additions” under the “Machine” menu while running your virtual machine. Guest Additions should appear in your guest OS as an optical disc, which should contain an installer. Run it, then restart your virtual machine. Once Guest Additions are installed, you can access Seamless Mode from the VirtualBox menu, under “Machine.”

Shared Directories

Copy and paste will often work between the host and guest OS, but if you're planning on using your guest OS for productivity or downloading any kind of media, a shared folder is the only real solution. In the bottom right corner of a running virtual machine, you should see a small folder icon. Clicking it will bring up a shared folder creation dialog. Select where on your host OS your shared folder should be—it can be an existing directory, like your "Music" folder—and check the box to make it "Permanent." On your guest machine, the shared folder will show up as a VirtualBox shared directory in your local network.

Connecting USB Devices

One of the most common reasons for installing a virtual machine is to circumvent some kind of driver incompatibility. VirtualBox recognized most of your computer’s inbuilt components, like sound cards, extra storage or webcams, and can use them automatically. For most USB devices, though, you’ll need to tell it when to take control.

In most cases, this just means making sure your device isn’t in use by your host OS (a flash drive will need to be unmounted, for examp
le), and clicking the small USB plug icon in the bottom right corner of the screen. This will bring up a list of available connected devices; simply click the one you want, and you’re good to go.

Odds and Ends

Virtualizing isn't just a good way to get around some kind of nagging compatibility problem, it's a fun way to wile away a few hours experimenting with weird new OSes. Setup is just about the same no matter what you're installing, so there's really no reason not to try some of the more esoteric software out there—anything with an ISO available for download will do. For a taste, try the Haiku Project—a revival of the long-dead BeOS, or see what the hell FreeBSD is.

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy virtualizing, folks.

Sharein, the new bookmarklet-based service for link sharing which launched earlier this summer, has just today introduced some new features which further solidify this up-and-comer as the new must-have tool for sharing links on the web. The service, already an easy way to share to Twitter, Facebook, and via email, is most notable for its ability to track statistics like views on the backend, a feature that should appeal to marketers looking for hard data on their social media efforts.

Today, the analytics feature has been enhanced to provide even more data than before, this time with a specific focus on Facebook shares. Also new today is the integration of Tweetmeme and Digg data into shares as well as YouTube stats for video shares. For anyone using Facebook to promote their content, Sharein has just made itself indispensible.

The concept of a browser bookmarklet for link sharing isn’t either new or revolutionary. Many people have become comfortable using services like TwitThis and others for some time. However, Sharein goes beyond just being a simple timesaver for sharing links and integrates the sort of analytics which marketers crave into its backend.

Better Analytics for Facebook Shares

Today, in addition to seeing the the views, reach, and re-shares for links shared on Twitter and Facebook, Sharein is now capturing data on Facebook “likes” and comments. In fact, it’s even pulling in the comments’ text itself so you can use the service as a one-stop-shop for tracking the popularity of items on Facebook.

And as before, the aggregate data tracked using the service is further analyzed on your main “Shares” page where you can see the most popular links for the past week, month, or year. You’ll also be able to tell who your most popular sharers are so you can better engage with your core fans or customers.

New Features Help Increase Clickthroughs on Facebook

The way your shared links appear on Facebook has also been revamped as of today. Sharein is (at last!) generating a thumbnail to accompany an article, just like how native link shares using Facebook’s own tool display. The shares now also feature data on the number of tweets courtesy of Tweetmeme and the number of diggs on the social news website Digg.com. This extra information can help generate more interest in the shared link as visitors will be able to see at a glance how popular the article is on other social networks.

For video shares, extra information has been added here, too. When sharing YouTube videos, the ratings info and total views are now displayed. Again, this is to help increase clickthoughs by highlighting the popularity of the content.

Try it Now!

With all the features being offered by this tool, we’re surprised that more people aren’t talking about or using the service. However, that may be because Sharein is still so new, few have heard of it yet. We’re sure that once Facebook and Twitter marketers, businesses, and any others who want to track their shares on social networks get wind of what Sharein can do, its popularity will increase dramatically. If you haven’t tried Sharein yet, you can set up an account today from the company homepage.