Facebook gets a face lift

Facebook introduced new tools for the most popular influencers in the world to broadcast messages instantly and connect with the millions of people using Facebook each day.

Those who use Facebook’s new public profiles, currently called Facebook Pages, will be able to share all types of content with an unlimited number of users. Shared content can be brief messages or may include photos and videos and will soon appear in News Feed, Facebook’s popular service that streams what people you care about are doing, thinking, saying, watching, photographing and reading right now.

Facebook users can then easily make connections, comment on posted content and join the online conversations with the famous – just as they can with a family member, friend or colleague.

Apple iPhone controls 66 percent of total mobile browser share

Apple iPhone has a market share of 66 percent of total mobile browser share.

In second place was JavaME at 9 percent market share, followed by Windows Mobile at 7 percent and Symbian and Android at 6 percent.

The report was provided by Net Applications.

Healthy growth for smart phones in 2009 despite mobile meltdown

iSuppli Corp. predicted that smart phones remain a bright spot with global unit growth as high as 11.1 percent in 2009.

iSuppli’s optimistic forecast for global smart phone unit shipments calls for 192.3 million units in 2009, up 11.1 percent from 173.6 million in 2008. A more pessimistic outlook calls for growth of only 6 percent this year, reaching 183.9 million units.

RIM announces Blackberry App World

Research In Motion has announced that the mobile application store for their Blackberry smartphones would be called Blackberry App World. It would provide facilities similar to the Apple App Store for the owners of RIM Blackberry smartphones.

Apple has the App Store, Google has the Marketplace, Palm has the App Catalog and Microsoft has Skymarket.

Microsoft IE continue to lose market share

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser market share dropped to 67.44 percent, a continuing slow decline since the broswer hits its peak in 2003, at 95 percent market share. This according to new data from Net Applications.

Firefox continues to steal browser market share with 21.77 percent. Apple’s Safari settled at 8.02 percent. Google’s relatively new Chrome browser jumped over 1 percent to settle at 1.15 percent.