After a few weeks of mysterious adverts promising a better alternative to iPhone, Motorola’s $200 Droid phone finally hit the shelves in Verizon wireless stores on Friday. Unsurprisingly, the launch failed to attract anything like the frenzy of an iPhone launch, which had people camping out for days at its peak.

Still, all the advertising, and the positive reviews from bloggers and gadget gurus including David Pogue and Walt Mossberg, did help to lure some customers to Verizon stores.

Tech website Cnet’s Marguerite Reardon said that she found about 100 enthusiasts lining up for Verizon’s special midnight opening in New York under what could hardly be described as balmy weather conditions. This morning, in a follow up story, her headline read “Slow start for the Motorola Droid?”.

In a research note entitled “Droid is no iPhone, not even Storm,” Jefferies analyst Bill Choi said the launch didn’t compare well with Verizon’s launch of the  much criticized BlackBerry Storm last year.

But Choi noted that store traffic was higher than usual in the locations he checked out and he said “anywhere between 5-7 people huddled around the Droid station at any given time.”

While some of the Droid phones being sold today are HTC’s new cheaper device, dubbed Droid Eris, Choi noted that all stores were reporting far better demand for Motorola Droid than that of HTC.

The “Motorola brand is helping and people really like the keyboard” said Choi who estimated that Verizon could sell as many as 750,000 of the Motorola Droid devices by year end.

That’s no iPhone, but it’s somethign, especially for Motorola’s Sanjay Jha who is betting the future of the entire company on Google’s Android system.

(Reuters Photo of Motorola’s Droid)

Google doesn’t want you to be afraid of the cloud.

The company announced a new feature on Thursday that lets people view all the personal information they’ve entered into Google’s sundry Web-based products over the years.

The information in Google’s new Dashboard covers everything from your personal account information for email and other Google services, to your viewing history on YouTube and the photos you’ve uploaded to Picasa. It’s information that was always accessible in the past, but Google is now making it viewable in one, all-inclusive snapshot.

Privacy advocates have long warned that Google is accumulating too much information about people through its broad menu of Web-based services and not providing enough insight into how the information is being used.

Whether Google’s Dashboard will appease them remains to be seen.

Google said it will begin by incorporating information from 23 Google products in the dashboard, with more to come in the weeks ahead.

Of course, the dashboard also has the benefit of reminding consumers about all the Google services they signed up for in the past and may forgotten about - a reminder that just could lead someone to start using a product again.

For Google, transparency has its benefits

Three years is a long time to go without having an analyst day, and it seems Yahoo decided to make up for lost time with a marathon seven-plus-hour briefing to Wall Street’s number-crunchers on Wednesday.

Perhaps having gotten a little rusty from non-practice, Yahoo dispensed with some of the customs of the analyst day ritual. Members of the press were barred from the event, and forced to watch the proceedings over a Webcast, with all the attendant technical difficulties and indignities.

Yahoo’s plug for analysts was simple enough: Yahoo got boring and slow-footed over the years, but the company still commands a massive online audience that’s extremely valuable to advertisers.

But the company’s delivery of the message did not always follow the standard analyst day script.

Specific financial targets were few and far between (Yahoo’s promise of 15 percent to 20 percent operating margins by 2012 was the meatiest nugget).

And one slide, during a presentation on advertising yield-optimization, seemed more suited to a blackboard at MIT than a briefing with financial analysts.

Questions?

Before this week’s dueling Google and Microsoft search licensing deals with Twitter, a recurring rumor in Silicon Valley had Google trying to buy Twitter outright.

So when Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a surprise appearance at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Thursday, the stage was set to finally put the record straight.

Showing that ten years in the media spotlight have not been wasted on him however, Brin displayed a deft command of language to duck the question.

Web 2.0 organizer John Battelle: Did you try to buy Twitter?

Brin: I did not try to buy Twitter.

Brin then added, “But if companies approach us we definitely consider any opportunities to buy.” But the resultant ambiguity about whether Brin was speaking about himself personally, or Google, effectively left the question unanswered. Nicely played.

Meanwhile, the list of Internet giants partnering with Twitter came close to growing to three companies, after AOL CEO Tim Armstrong opined about the role of real time data at AOL during his talk.

“I think those guys have done something very impactful,” Armstrong said of Twitter. “And if it works with our platforms and we can leverage it, I think we would be happy to do that.”

Armstrong offered a couple of other interesting tidbits, saying that AOL was in a good position to proceed with its plan to eject from the Time Warner mothership and saying that a guaranteed AOL spin-off was not a precondition of him taking the job at AOL.

He also hinted at a mysterious new content technology platform that he said AOL has been developing internally since this summer, and which would provide a “secret sauce” to the company’s variety of media properties.

“It’s a broader platform with more information around content and the creation of content,” Armstrong said.

Another answer with plenty of ambiguity, but in this case, more details will likely come soon.

Microsoft may be the only company with the wherewithal to challenge Google’s Internet search dominance head on, but a number of firms are trying to outflank Google with services that handle aspects of search not covered by Google’s index of Web pages.

Aardvark - a firm whose cofounders include two ex-Googlers - is pushing something it calls “social search.”

Instead of looking at Web pages to find answers to search queries, Aardvark’s service taps a person’s network of social contacts. Ask Aardvark for anything from restaurant recommendations to home improvement tips, and the service will relay the question to Facebook and Twitter friends who have identified themselves as “experts” on various topics.

The service, which has earned praise from the New York Times’ David Pogue and other tech bloggers, was launched as a beta version earlier this year but accessing Aardvark required using instant messaging software or an iPhone app.

On Wednesday, the company put the search box directly on a website - vark.com - making its social search service more accessible to a larger pool of people.

Like the so-called real time search engines popularized by Twitter, Collecta and OneRiot, Aardvark represents a still small, but potentially dangerous trend for Google: Much of the content that flows through these new types of search services is not necessarily accessible by Google’s search engine.

Google is trying to address the situation by reportedly licensing the Twitter data feed. As more newfangled forms of search emerge, Google may find itself having more such talks.

For two of the Web’s newest sensations, September was not a good month.

The robust growth that Twitter and Microsoft’s Bing search engine enjoyed in recent months appeared to come to an abrupt halt last month.

Twitter, the microblogging service cherished by everyone from Shaq to Al Gore, saw its growth stall in September — at least in terms of U.S. visitors to its Web site.

The number of unique visitors to Twitter’s site in the U.S. reached 20.89 million in September - virtually flat compared to the 20.83 million visitors the month before, according to the latest comScore data.

As the blog TechCrunch pointed out on Tuesday, Twitter’s flat September came as Facebook, the world’s No.1 Internet social network, lured more than 3 million additional unique visitors to its site that month.

Of course, Twitter’s growth is still up a whopping 1,703 percent on a year-over-year basis. And the comScore numbers don’t tell the whole story, since many Twitter users access the service through third-party applications and thus would not be counted as unique visitors to the Twitter site.

But in the wake of the $100 million funding that Twitter recently secured at a $1 billion valuation, the new data is sure to raise questions about whether the service has peaked.

Questions are also probably in the air at Microsoft, as the software giant’s efforts to take on Google in search appear to be losing steam.

After picking up decent market share every month since its June launch, Bing grew its share by a meagre 10 basis points last month. According to comScore, Bing’s share of the U.S. search market grew to 9.4 percent, versus 9.3 percent the month before.

Google widened its lead to 64.9 percent share, from 64.6 percent in August, while Yahoo fell to 18.8 percent from 19.3 percent the month before.

For Bing, gaining 10 basis points is better than losing ground, which is what StatCounter, another Web measurement service had claimed happened to Bing in September.

But after spending a reported $100 million to market Bing, Microsoft may now need to find new ways to pump up interest in its search engine.

YouTube, the video site, is celebrating the third anniversary since it was bought by Google with news that it now serves more than a billion views a day to users around the world.

In a blog by YouTube CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley, he reminisces about how he and co-founder/former CTO Steve Chen made a fun video declaring themselves the “burger kings of media”. How sweet.

But on the serious side of the media equation Hurley has some important points about the fast changing world of online video (You could also call it the ‘why we won’ manifesto).

Hurley says:

• Speed matters: Videos should load and play back quickly
• Clip culture is here to stay: Short clips are voraciously consumed and perfect for watching a wide variety of content
• Open platforms open up possibility: Content creation isn’t our business; it’s yours. We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an Internet connection can share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases they can make a living from doing so

Questions remain about the business model of YouTube, which is being built around the fledgling online video advertising sector. The company is yet to declare a profit. Yet with 40 percent of all online video viewing in the US, according to comScore, YouTube will have a lot of say in writing and re-writing the rules for Web video ads.

On a Credit Suisse call with investors this morning, some online advertising experts questioned whether YouTube has improved materially in their advertising mix though they acknowledged the hard work of the YouTube team to improve the advertising environment. One advertising executive on the call said YouTube has “improved year over year”.

Let the second-guessing, the mock horror, the disbelief, the crowing begin.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has acknowledged he realized upfront that he was overpaying to acquire YouTube, to the tune of $1 billion, judged by any conventional measures.

The many critics of Google's $1.65 billion deal to acquire the video-sharing site three years ago will claim this confirms everything they have always said about the deal. Not quite.

In fact, not really at all.

Schmidt came clean in a deposition by lawyers in the Viacom copyright lawsuit that there was very little revenue coming into YouTube to justify the price his company paid.

No surprises here. There were intangibles to consider:

1. YouTube's popularity was sky-rocketing, making it the runaway market leader among video-sharing sites.
2. It was crushing his company's own site, Google Video.
3. YouTube was up for auction and would be sold to a competitor unless Google jumped first.
4. Google overbid to ensure YouTube didn't fall into rival hands.

The Google CEO said he told his company's board of directors that the 18-month-old video-sharing site was worth $600 million to $700 million, according to CNet, which obtained a transcript of his testimony. Of course, he fails to mention the potential costs of copyright lawsuits that already loomed for YouTube.

"In the deal dynamics, the price, remember, is not set by my judgment or by financial model or discounted cash flow. It's set by what people are willing to pay," Schmidt says.

So the real justification for the 150 percent premium Google paid was in derailing, or at least delaying, the rise of a potential competitor. Of course, Google has faced a long struggle to find ways to make advertising work on the site in order to pay the costs of free video. Only last quarter could Google say YouTube would be profitable in the "not long, not-too-distant future."

Of course, all the fuss over YouTube's valuation is not really Google's problem. The real issue is the extrapolation of valuations of all the Web 2.0 companies since then which have used the YouTube price as the benchmark for all the other-worldly valuations of their unproven business models.

Here are the relevant excerpts from Schmidt's deposition by Viacom lawyers, via CNet:

Viacom attorney Stuart Jay Baskin: And what was management's valuation?

Eric Schmidt: Much lower than we paid for it.

Baskin: And how was that communicated to the board?

Schmidt: I told them.

Baskin: So why don't you tell us what you remember telling the board in connection with the valuation?

Schmidt: I believe YouTube was worth somewhere around $600 million to $700 million.

...
Baskin: What methodology did you use to come up with that number?

John P. Mancini, an attorney working for Google, objects.

Schmidt: My judgment.

Baskin: Was it based on cash flow analysis? Comparable companies? What were you using as the basis for your judgment?

Mancini objects.

Schmidt: It's just my judgment. I've been doing this a long time.

...
Baskin: I'm not very good at math, but I think that would be $1 billion or so more than you thought the company was, in fact, worth.

Mancini objects.

Schmidt: That is correct.

(Photo credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

Although the company isn’t saying anything, it appears as if Apple has purchased a small Web mapping service called Placebase.

The loose ends were tied together Wednesday in a Computerworld blog post.  When asked to confirm whether it had indeed purchased the company, an Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.

Word of the buy cropped up briefly back in July but failed to attract much notice. But Computerworld noted that the LinkedIn pages for both the founder and the CTO of Placebase now show them as Apple employees.

Placebase, which was said to have generated a few million dollars in revenue, designed a platform called PushPin that allowed users to build maps and customize them by adding layers and other data. It’s product was a competitor to services such as Google Maps.

Given all the drama lately between Apple and Google, many in the blogosphere are speculating that Apple wants to use Placebase to supply mapping technology for the iPhone, a move that would supplant Google, which currently provides the technology.

Google has yet to outline a gameplan to respond to the search world’s latest phenomenon: real time search.

But the Internet company clearly recognizes the importance of fresh search results.

On Thursday Google announced a new feature that lets Web surfers view only search results that have been indexed by its Web crawlers within the past hour.

The update was one of several new features that Google has unveiled over the past week as it seeks to refine the tool used by two out of every three people searching the Web.

Google also introduced a feature that lets users specify whether they want results that are heavier on shopping-oriented Web pages, such as retail sites with products and pricing information, or results that are less commercial in nature.

The shopping option comes as Microsoft tries to lure people to its revamped Bing search engine by highlighting Bing’s strength in shopping and travel searches.

Meanwhile, Twitter’s real time search engine is becoming the Internet’s go-to place for finding the most current information on world events, from earthquakes to political protests.

Google officials said the new search features are not responses to the competition.

Previously, Google let users narrow search results to items posted in the past week or 24 hours.

According to Google officials, the introduction of up-to-the-hour searches doesn’t represent a change in the way Google crawls the Web - the same results were previously available in Google’s index, there just wasn’t a way for someone to only view the really fresh stuff.

Of course serving up results from the past hour is hardly the same as the up-to-the-minute information provided by real time search.

But until Google figures out how it wants to play the real time search game, the company is moving to make its flagship search engine more au courrant.