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Last.fm, one of the truly great online music sites, has an iPhone app, but I find it somewhat lacking. It seems to have most of the features it needs, but for whatever reason the app just doesn’t flow well. Loading time seems to be a constant issue and site navigation is clumsy.

That looks to change with new version of the application, as you can see in the video below leaked out by Digg founder Kevin Rose onto Twitter. (He claims it’s version 2.0 but it’s clearly labeled in the video version 1.1 — the current version is 1.0.2.) It’s not clear when this version will be out, but when it is, it’ll likely compete with Pandora and AOL Radio for my online music time with the iPhone.

LastFM2 from MG Siegler on Vimeo.

Google has become almost ubiquitous with online advertising at this point. But it doesn’t control all facets. Specifically, in terms of display ads, Google is neither running many on its sites or buying much to promote its brand. But some of its rivals are, according to comScore’s new June numbers.

Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft all place ahead of Google on the top ad publisher list. These are the sites that run the most display ads. The search giant controls just 1.5 percent on the display ad share, while Yahoo, for example, controls 10.5 percent.

Of course, it has to be noted that by far the top publisher on the list is Fox Interactive Media — which includes the social network MySpace, which has an advertising deal with Google. It controls 15.9 percent of the display ad market.

Meanwhile, Microsoft controlled the top online display advertisers list. That is, it buys the most display advertising online. This was mostly due to a huge online advertising campaign for Windows Live Search during June, according to comScore.

When Google invested $1 billion in AOL back in 2005, the move was met with mixed reaction. On one hand, the fast growing Internet giant was basically blocking Microsoft from taking away one of its larger online ad and search deals. On the other hand, it was AOL; an empire built on dial-up Internet in a world quickly completing the transition to broadband.

Turns out those in the latter camp may have been right, as Google acknowledged today.

In a quarterly report filed with the SEC, Google admitted that its five percent stake in AOL as a result of the $1 billion deal “may be impaired,” the AP reports. Basically, that means that Google is acknowledging that AOL is worth significantly less now than the $20 billion market value its investment implied. Unless AOL turns things around, Google will have to take an impairment charge on the investment, as Silicon Alley Insider notes.

But what’s interesting is that Google apparently thinks AOL will be able to turn things around and get back up at least to that $20 billion valuation. So it’s not ready to acknowledge that impairment just yet.

Why Google believes a turnaround of that proportion will happen isn’t entirely clear. In fact, it may have never thought AOL was worth $20 billion to begin with, it was simply a defensive investment, as PaidContent, I think, correctly notes.

Maybe Google thinks Microsoft or Yahoo will be quick to make a move to buy up AOL’s Internet operations, thus bolstering the investment. (AOL parent Time Warner recently announced it would spin off AOL’s dial-up business from the rest of the company — and is likely trying to sell both.) Or maybe Google just doesn’t want to eat the costs at this time. Or maybe it’s thinking about buying AOL at a premium just to avoid the fees.

Okay, that last one is a joke. Any charges Google is assessed for the bad investment would likely be relatively insignificant for the company. Still, any time a company is being looked at for purchase by Yahoo and Microsoft, you have to throw Google’s name into the ring as well — especially when it already owns five percent of that company.

[photo: flickr/nieve44]

Toyota working on Segway killer — The transportation robot is called Winglet and comes in three sizes. See screenshot, via ZDnet.

Network storage company Agami shuts down — The Sunnyvale, Calif. company raised $85 million and competed against companies that went public, including 3Par. The shut-down was sudden, catching employees by surprise — apparently, a major debt-holder wanted its money back.

Illinois mandates online cancellation for game subscriptions — An Illinois family found it difficult to cancel a recurring online game subscription fee — by phone so they talked to their politician friends…. The state just signed a law into being that mandates online game companies include an option to cancel online.

Amazon buys rare-book site AbeBooks — AbeBooks is a marketplace that offers more than 110 million used or rare titles, and it has been bought by online book giant Amazon. AbeBooks is itself a minority owner in reading list sharing site LibraryThing, a competitor to Amazon-backed Shelfari.

Security company McAfee buys Reconnex — Mountain View, Calif.-based Reconnex provides business data loss prevention software; McAfee purchased for $46 million in cash. Reconnex raised $36 million.

Third time not the charm for SpaceX’s latest launch — The privately-funded space rocket startup was attempting to launch three satellites into space, but the rocket blew up minutes into the flight. That was the third launch attempt, but a fourth is slated for later this year — the company says its determined not to give up.

AOL buys Friendfeed competitor SocialThing — When it comes to services that let you share what you’re doing on various web sites within in a single interface — “lifestreaming”, if you will — I prefer Friendfeed and Facebook. AOL, meanwhile, has bought smaller Friendfeed rival Socialthing.

Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake joins stealthy startup Hunch — Fake talks about her move here, you can sign up for Hunch here.

Tacoda, the well-known ad network company which offers relatively high rates to publishers to place advertisements automatically on their Web pages, is officially shutting down.

The entity, recently bought by AOL, is instead being folded into AOL’s Ad.com/Platform A division. This is a shocking move for some, because Ad.com doesn’t target much at all, and offers ads of $1 or less per a thousand views — and is generally considered a “bottom-feeder” by some in the industry. The company apparently hasn’t communicated very well about what sort of targeting technology Ad.com will offer to the affected customers (see memo below).

[Update: We found it difficult Friday to reach someone at AOL for comment, but PaidContent's David Kaplan has reached Platform A's Lynda Clarizo, and she says Ad.com will be using Tacoda's technology. She says Ad.com was targeting the same way Tacoda was, and thus the implication is that Ad.com was paying as much. But that's not what we've heard from sources. Only time will tell.]

Tacoda became popular because it offered an industry high rate of $2 to $6 per a thousand views (CPM). True, other advertisers often offer far more than that, but not without selling to a Web publisher’s more expensive display ad space — and requiring interactions with live sales people. Tacoda, all automated, paid rates well above other comparable “remnant” networks. It did so by working hard to target behavior of Web users. By knowing what pages users visited online, Tacoda’s technology allowed advertisers to fork out more money, in the knowledge that their ads were reaching the right people.

Valueclick, another player in the area that is similar to Ad.com, announced anemic flat growth yesterday, its shares fell by up to 11 percent as it became clear customers are spending less. Aside from the economic downturn, the pressure may also be due to the realization that low-end ad networks don’t offer a very differentiated product anymore.

The shuttering of Tacoda comes after another move by AOL that raised eyebrows: AOL bought Bebo $850 million, a price many observers considered to be twice or three times what it was really worth, and then let the founder Michael Birch leave — though some considered him one of the company’s crown jewels.

The action is also significant because AOL has been the second largest online advertising player, behind Google.

From what we hear, the Tacoda transition isn’t going very smoothly. Only 35 employees remain at Tacoda’s division, down from 97, apparently because some sales people were unhappy about moving to Ad.com. A letter sent out by Tacoda today suggests publishers will have to sign new contracts, and will have to change tags on their web pages. Letter below.

AOL plans to shutter a bunch of businesses: Among the businesses on the chopping block are Bluestring, Xdrive, and AOL Pictures.

Apple is testing update for iPhone software: Apple is testing version 2.1 of its iPhone firmware. It includes improved location features.

Vonage getting new CEO? The Wall Street Journal reported that Vonage Holdings Corp. CEO Jeffrey Citron will step down next week and appoint a new CEO. The VoIP phone service company also said it has signed a letter with Silver Point Finance setting the terms and conditions for up to $215 million in private debt financing of which Silver Point has committed to provide $125 million.

Solar firm to build more: First Solar, which has designed efficient thin-film solar cells, announced plans to build another solar cell production plant in Nevada.

Sprint Nextel offloads its towers to reduce debt: The struggling U.S. mobile carrier agreed to sell nearly all its cellphone towers to a private-equity-backed firm called TowerCo in a deal that will generate about $670 million in cash.

Microsoft debuts robotic receptionist: Chief Strategy Officer Craig Mundie showed off a virtual robot receptionist that could recognize speech and see objects so that it could perform rudimentary greeting services for a company.

Both Walt Mossberg (subscription required) and David Pogue panned Apple’s MobileMe service: Apple’s new productivity synchronization service got low marks from its biggest fans as columnists at both the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times panned the product for spotty performance.

Samsung’s financials disappoint: The Korean electronics giant failed to meet second-quarter expectations as results suffered from a weak memory chip market and falling margins on flat-screen TVs.

Microsoft shows off fake Mojave operating system: As a gimmick to show that Windows Vista isn’t so bad, Microsoft played a trick on focus groups with people who were fans of Windows XP. It showed them a faux new operating system prototype, code-named Mojave — which was in fact Windows Vista — and came back with a 90-percent favorable result.

Digg, the social voting news aggregator that is perhaps the web startup most dogged by sale rumors in all of Silicon Valley, is close to selling to Google for “around $200 million,” according to TechCrunch.

Sale rumors have followed the company for years, and the company finally went out and hired dealmaking investment bank Allen & Co. to try to help sell it, last December. The price we heard then was $300 million, so maybe Digg has a depreciating shelf life? Or maybe it met the reality of the market value of news aggregators? Indeed, this is the third time that a Google purchase rumor has surfaced within this past year.

But maybe it has a lot of potential for Google. More on that, below.

First, the latest data from comScore about June social networking traffic shows that Digg has some major competitors. Most prominently, Yahoo! Buzz, which uses a slightly different method of calculating a news article’s popularity, brought in more than 9.2 million unique US visitors last month versus Digg’s 6.2 million. Digg grew 42 percent from 4.4 million the previous June — but that was before Yahoo! Buzz even launched.

Also, this past year, AOL re-launched a news aggregator site, Propeller, which it had previously launched as a Digg competitor housed at netscape.com. Today, in fact, Propeller just introduced a new look and feel that is strongly reminiscent of Yahoo! Buzz. Considering that AOL has, according to the June comScore numbers cited above, managed to grow its Community site and its AIM profiles by integrating those features with its large, existing user base, this seems like the right call.

Just as Buzz integrates top stories into its homepage — which helps promote Buzz to the Yahoo masses — so too does the new version of Propeller integrate into AOL’s homepage.

Which then begs the question: If Yahoo and AOL can build their own news aggregator properties, why can’t Google refine its own Google News site — where Digg may or may not be integrated with — or start its own Digg clone rather than buy Digg in the first place? Presumably, Yahoo! Buzz is worth more than Digg if one looks only at traffic numbers. And Propeller could very well be headed for success, as well.

However, as the TechCrunch piece notes, Digg’s voting system seems to have fascinated Google. Is Google more interested in Digg’s algorithm than its name?

Google has been quite interested in “social search” for months — broadly defined as the use of social data like you and your friends preferences, to help determine search results. It has more recently been experimenting with letting its search users vote on the quality of rankings, similar to how Digg users vote on stories. Just maybe, Digg could teach Google something about social search.

Another interesting angle to this story is that Digg currently has an advertising deal with Microsoft. If Google does buy Digg, don’t expect that to last long. After losing out of Yahoo search advertising to Google, could Microsoft really stand to lose another revenue stream to its main rival? Maybe we’ll see a counter-offer?

[MG Siegler contributed to this story.]

Facebook gained nearly two million new US users from May to June of this year, while MySpace lost about a million, according to the latest data from comScore. MySpace is still nearly twice the size, though, at 72.8 million national users versus Facebook’s 37.4 million. Facebook has, meanwhile, grown 34 percent since June 2007, while MySpace has grown only two percent. A range of smaller, niche social networks — and related social web sites — are also seeing solid growth.

One blog platform, Google’s Blogger, has grown from being slightly larger in the US than Facebook last year, to nearly 45 million users last month; another, Wordpress, has more than doubled its user community to nearly 19 million; another, Six Apart and its various sites, has actually dropped by two percent. Six Apart, however, sold its Live Journal blog service this past year, which likely counterbalanced any growth it has seen on Typepad and other properties.

Meanwhile, Yahoo-owned photo sharing site Flickr has grown 66 percent over the last year to 16 million users — and that’s not the only Yahoo property to stay on the up and up. Yahoo’s new news aggregator, Yahoo Buzz, has passed the nine million user mark since launching less than a year ago. That growth was no doubt driven by users coming from the monster-sized traffic on Yahoo’s homepage that Buzz features are integrated into. It’s clear why Propeller would want to shift gears towards a Yahoo Buzz-style site leveraging its connection with AOL.com.

And, let’s not forget staid old social network Reunion.com, which has doubled from nearly six million users in June, 2007 to nearly twelve million this past June.

There are some smaller sites also seeing notable growth, but comScore won’t let me republish more than just the top ten in table format. So here they are:

Digg has grown from 4.4 million to 6.2 million — meaning Yahoo Buzz has managed to get way bigger, way faster.

Buzznet, a music-sharing site, has grown by around 1.5 million to reach nearly 7 million users. A younger music site, imeem, now has nearly 6.5 million users.

LinkedIn, a business networking site, has grown 141 percent from 1.7 million users to 4.2 million in June. Still not huge, but its users are typically businesspeople with money to spend, so it may be easier to monetize than many of these other sites.

Shopping site Kaboodle has grown 83 percent to slightly more than four million.

And finally, there’s not all bad news for maligned old web conglomerate AOL in the report. Sure, its AOL Hometown site has dropped 34 percent to 5.3 million users, but check this out: Its new AIM instant message profiles have grown from zero to 7.5 million, and its AOL Community site has grown 8,703 percent to 3.6 million users.

Final note: As always, you have to take third-party data analysis with a grain of salt, as each firm’s measurement methodologies may differ from companies’ internal numbers. For example, while comScore reported that Facebook had 123 million worldwide users last May, Facebook itself has more recently claimed only around 80 million.

I have a confession to make: I haven’t listened to the radio in months. I’m fine with that, I have plenty of music on my various mp3 players, but it becomes problematic when I’m in the mood for new music. There are great online tools for this such as Muxtape and even iTunes music recommendations, but I often feel like something new when I’m on the go.

Enter two new brilliant apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Pandora and AOL Radio. Both services, available for free through Apple’s new App Store, take music discovery on mobile devices to the next level. While services have been around for a while that will tell you an artist’s name and track title, none do it quite as easily as these two apps do all on one device. Sure, some satellite radio receivers offer this, but you pay for that privilege.

I’ve long been a huge fan of Pandora, a service that asks you to input music you like and gives you new recommendations based on technology it calls its “music genome project.” The problem with Pandora is that you had to be chained to a computer to use it. Not anymore.

This is the early frontrunner for my favorite iPhone app. You simply sign in and if you’re a previous user of the site, it has all the stations you’ve created right there. Simply click on one to start playing new music just as you would on the desktop. If you’re a new user or wish to create a new music channel, that is just as easy. Simply enter an artist, song or composer and it will build a new station for you.

My favorite feature is “QuickMix,” which lets you shuffle through random samplings from all of your stations.

Just as with the web version, you can give “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” ratings to songs, which will help determine what music Pandora should play for you. The app also lets you bookmark artists or songs so you can recall them later.

And those users who are aesthetically inclined will be happy to know that album artwork is available as well. In fact, the app looks a lot like the iPod app on the iPhone itself.

AOL Radio, made in partnership with CBS Radio, isn’t quite as pretty as Pandora, but it’s arguably easier to use. Simply download the app, pick a genre of music and load up one of their insane amount of radio stations from both the internet and across the country.

Just as with Pandora, you’ll get the artist and song name for every track you play. This information is saved under “Recents,” so you can find songs you had liked and you can bookmark these songs as well. You can also favorite certain stations.

What’s great about this app is that sports and talk radio are included as well. Unfortunately, commercials are included just as with regular radio.

One of the killer features (at least for Apple) of both of these apps is that you can, with the touch of one button, find the music you are listening to on iTunes. It launches directly into the iPhone/iPod Touch iTunes app and takes you to that song/artist.

That noise Apple hears is “cha-ching.”

Check out MobileBeat2008, VentureBeat’s conference on July 24.

The borders between media are porous. WorldWinner, an online skill-based game company, proved that today when it announced that its “CATCH 21″ game will become a TV show on the GSN channel shown in 68 million homes.

GSN airs only game shows and is jointly owned by Sony and Liberty Media, which bought WorldWinner’s parent company last year. The show will be broadcast on weekdays starting Monday July 21 at 7:30pm Eastern time. The series is expected to go for at least 40 episodes.

“We thought this would be a great way to make TV viewers into contestants and game players into TV watchers,” said Peter Blacklow, president of WorldWinner (pictured below).

The TV version of CATCH 21 was created by Merrill Heatter, who has created game shows such as “The Hollywood Squares,” and Scott Sternberg, whose credits include “The Gong Show.” Actor Alfonso Ribeiro will the game show host. The game is a variant of BlackJack where three contestants compete by speeding through a deck of cards to get as many “21″ hands within a time limit. They can make their opponents weaker by passing them bad cards.

The game debuted in 2000 as one of WorldWinner’s original skill-based online games. In such games, players compete against each other for prizes or in tournaments. Since the games involve skill, and not chance as in gambling, the prize-based gaming is considered legal. The game still draws considerable traffic in the hundreds of thousands and is available on GSN.com, where players can download it and play along with the show, competing for cash and prizes. CATCH 21 also available on mobile phones through Cellufun and on AOL’s Games.com site.

With cross-media promotion, WorldWinner is going to be tough to beat.  That’s why I said last week that German challenger GameDuell may have a hard time coming into the U.S. market to compete with Worldwinner and its other rival, King.com.

Yesterday came word that Microsoft was talking to Time Warner and News Corp. about potential deals to help it acquire Yahoo. So naturally today comes word that Yahoo is talking to those very same companies about doing similar deals — just without Microsoft, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The whole thing is just ridiculous. We’re back to where we were in February — everyone is talking merger with everyone else.

Time Warner is talking with Yahoo about combining its AOL property with the Internet company. This is the scenario most often brought up and makes at least some semblance of sense. The problem is that Time Warner may now be concerned about Yahoo’s value, which has diminished since the two last talked about this scenario.

Meanwhile, News Corp. is said to be trying to get some sense of what is going on in the Yahoo camp as it mulls over an idea by Microsoft that it join in any takeover and merge MySpace with Yahoo. Microsoft would then take Yahoo’s search business. Tax hits that Yahoo would face over selling off its search business may halt that one.

Microsoft also may just take AOL off of Time Warner’s hands itself.

I wonder if and when any of these deals actually take place, if any of the companies involved are actually going to remember who is getting what.

The Yahoo annual shareholder meeting is set for August 1st. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn will launch his hostile takeover bid at that time. That should at least be good theater.

Already, Yahoo’s leadership is said to be willing to hand over two seats on its board to Icahn — but he wants four, according to BoomTown’s Kara Swisher. If that isn’t emblematic of this whole situation, I’m not sure what is.

Obama takes flack for telecom reversal — Barack Obama is about as smart as politicians get when it comes to technology, and even plans to name a chief technologist for the country if elected. But he has finally managed to offend the devoted, by changing his opinion on telecom immunity for Bush-era wiretapping and endorsing a bill that would expand the government’s power for domestic spying and protect telecommunication companies that assisted the Bush Administration. Some 7,000 of Obama’s followers have converged on his website to protest, according to the NYT.

AOL possibly up for sale — Sources within AOL say that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes is giving off the impression AOL is on the auction block, according to Silicon Alley Insider. Other sources disagree. Our take: Bewkes was elected CEO this year to clean house at Time Warner, and AOL has historically been a huge mess. If a good offer comes up, look for AOL to switch owners.

Thin-film solar to surge ahead by 2012 — The various forms of thin-film solar cells will take 28 percent of the market and reach $19.7 billion in sales by 2012, up from less than 10 percent of the market now, according to a report from Lux Research. Solar concentrator systems, by contrasted, are expected to “disappoint” for the immediate future, and organic and Grätzel photovoltaics will take longer than five years to mature at all.

Monster.com founder won’t even let newspapers have death — Before Craigslist, the first thing we all thought of for jobs was Monster.com. And before Monster, it was newspapers. In fact, Monster is often blamed for starting the landslide of listings away from newspapers, hastening their demise. Not content to let his old foes rest, Monster founder Jeff Taylor has started Tributes.com to add obituaries, one of the last revenue monopolies for newspapers, to the world of Web 2.0.

Publishers and analytics on the mobile web – That’s the subject for a free evening event, Mobile Monday, held at the San Francisco Microsoft campus next week, with companies in attendance including Admob and Opera, and a panel moderated by our own Matt Marshall. Keep in mind that our own MobileBeat2008 conference is coming up on July 24th.

McAfee returns results of S.P.A.M experiment — Ever wonder what would happen if you answered all your spam emails? Just to find out (and get some press), anti-virus software maker McAfee launched the Spammed Persistently All Month, or S.P.A.M., project with 50 volunteers. In a single month, the five US participants got 23,333 messages, not including junk mail arriving at their homes, leaving one, a realtor and housewife, “horrified”.

EBay fines $63.2M by French courts — In a decision only a capitalist-unfriendly European could come to, a French court has ordered eBay to pay several luxury brands $63.2 million for sales of fake goods by some users. But perhaps they were right to — any fool could tell from the stitching on that Louis Vuitton bag that it’s a fake.

Tesla supplying Mercedes-Benz with batteries — The electric car manufacturer will have an extra revenue stream from battery sales to Mercedes-Benz, according to Leftlane (via TechCrunch).

If I told you that Microsoft was talking about buying Yahoo and asked you to pick a month that this discussion was taking place, would you pick: a) January 2007 b) January 2008 c) May 2008 or d) Right now?

Wrong. The correct answer is e) All of the above.

Yes, shockingly enough, Microsoft is still trying to buy at least a piece of Yahoo. It is now said to be seeking other partners to make a deal work, according to the Wall Street Journal.

If you’re sick of hearing about this, I feel for you, I really do. I think everyone is sick of hearing about it at this point — including Microsoft and Yahoo. They’re like two boxers in the final round of a 12-round fight that can barely lift their arms anymore, let alone give anyone a good show.

The latest round involves Microsoft talking with Time Warner and News Corp., among others about breaking off pieces of Yahoo to make this work. Presumably, Microsoft would take Yahoo’s search business while Time Warner or News Corp. would combine one of its entities with the rest of Yahoo to form — well, something.

Yahoo’s stock is tanking; almost back to the sub-$20 pre-original Microsoft offer levels. Its executives are leaving at a pace that can nicely be described as ‘brisk,’ but perhaps more accurately as ‘rapid.’

Remember when Yahoo was the promising Internet company of the future? Writing all of this now I just feel dirty.

I suppose Microsoft could take Yahoo Search while striking a deal with Time Warner to merge AOL and Yahoo. Time Warner is thought to be trying to sell AOL as we speak. But just about any way you slice it, all of these dealings are a mess.

Let’s just say out loud what we all know: One way or another, eventually, Microsoft is going to end up with Yahoo Search. It may have to carve up Yahoo with the help of Carl Icahn and others in the process, but it’s going to happen.

Microsoft wants to be relevant in the search business, and while buying a company like Powerset may help it a little bit longer term, if it doesn’t make a move to buy the only other major player, Yahoo, chief rival Google is going to devour them.

The Wall Street Journal piece on this ordeal comes highly recommended. It includes great soap operatic tidbits such as:

“We’re done,” he told Mr. Yang, according to a person who was present. At first it wasn’t clear whether Mr. Ballmer meant they had accepted the $37 offer or rejected it.

When Mr. Ballmer explained that Microsoft was withdrawing its offer, Mr. Yang’s face fell, according to a person who was present.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, now without founder Bill Gates who officially retired last week, may feel even more pressure to get this deal done. Gates’ company has been left in his hands. Watch Ballmer’s heartfelt goodbye to his friend below.

[photo: flickr/webhamster]

Some keen-eyed code diggers have uncovered clues seeming to suggest that Apple’s online syncing service .Mac will undergo a name change shortly. We’ll probably see a revamp, too, since it’s unlikely that Apple would change the service’s name without a complete overhaul (which it is due for).

A .Mac revamp was on my recent list of possibilities for wild card announcements we could see beyond the 3G iPhone at Apple’s upcoming Worldwide Developer’s Conference.

As Daring Fireball notes, prior to the recent OS X 10.5.3 operating system update, Apple had hard-coded the name .Mac into its code. That name has now been replaced with a placeholder (”%@”), and the Russian site Deep Apple found the following commented-out statement in the code:

/* Label of the .Mac button in iCal’s General preferences. %@ is the new name of Apple’s online service (was .Mac) (remove -XX02) */

There’s speculation by way of old Apple patent filings that the new name could be “Mobile Me” — which sounds pretty lame to me, but still better than .Mac.

.Mac is Apple’s online syncing service that allows users to store data on its servers for both backup purposes and to sync files between multiple computers. It’s a great idea in theory and very easy to use in practice; unfortunately the service has a history of being underpowered and overpriced.

The service currently costs $99 to use for one year, which gives you 10 gigabytes of storage. (Before an update last summer, the service only gave users one gigabyte.) By comparison, AOL’s Xdrive and Microsoft’s Windows Live SkyDrive offer five gigabytes of storage for free. A similar free service code-named “Platypus” or “Gdrive” has been rumored to be in the works from Google as well.

Some have wondered if the next version of the iPhone software (to be launched at WWDC) wouldn’t have support for this service built-in. As Daring Fireball also notes, that would seem to make sense given that we know push syncing is coming with the iPhone 2.0 software update — why not just revamp the entire wireless sync system in the process?

One rumor that’s always fun to trot out when talking about .Mac is the thought that Apple could team up with Google to launch some kind of ultimate cloud-based syncing service.

Update: Blogging Robots has uncovered further evidence that the new name of .Mac could in fact be Mobile Me. There are references to the name in the iPhone 2.0 SDK, and the domain name was taken over by Apple last year.

Perhaps you saw the writing on the wall yesterday with news that Microsoft is now basically paying users to use its search engine — yes, Google search share rose again in April.

Google now controls 61.6 percent of all U.S. searches, according to comScore. This represents a 1.8 percent increase from its March 2008 share of 59.8 percent. While that may not seem like much of an increase, consider this: Every other search engine in the top five lost market share in the same time period. Yahoo was the worst, down 0.9 percent, Microsoft was down 0.3 percent and AOL was down 0.2 percent.

Also consider that the only other service with a market share in the double digits is Yahoo with 20.4 percent. Incredibly, if Microsoft were to be successful in buying Yahoo’s search business, their two market shares combined would still be less than half of Google’s (29.5 percent versus 61.6 percent)!

Perhaps Microsoft should buy Yahoo’s search business, start paying users to use its own AND buy AOL’s search business. At least then they’d be over halfway to Google’s market share.

AOL execs add oddly, allege examiners — Eight AOL executives are facing fraud charges at the conclusion of a six-year long investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into alleged revenue overstatement of $1 billion during the company’s merger with Time Warner. Four of the men have already settled. Given the company’s historic performance, it’s surprising the remaining four haven’t gotten away with pleading incompetence. More at the WSJ.

MetroFi municipal WiFi throws in the towel — It’s the end of the road for MetroFi, one of several startups that envisioned free municipal WiFi around the nation. The company is looking for a buyer in the nine cities in which it still operates networks. The company had raised some $15 million from August Capital, Sevin Rosen Funds, Western Technology and individual investors.

Mobile fingerprint companies point fingers at each other — Following a suit brought by AuthenTec (NASDAQ: AUTH) alleging patent infringement, Atrua Technologies has turned around and counter-sued, with one exec telling VentureWire, “Some information came to light that it was a f