The Great Tablet War Of 2012

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via businessinsider.com

Make no mistake: There’s a full-blown battle on for the future of computing.

Forget all the fragmentary skirmishes for your pocket, for your set-top, for your living room, and for your desk.

It’s become increasingly clear that the tablet is the defining device of the next couple decades of computing, as the PC was in the ’80s.

Handheld touchscreen devices are the key way we’ll consume content and buy things.

So that’s extremely interesting to anyone who makes devices, serves up content, or sells things.

Native apps vs. web apps: The martial epic has found its end

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he burning debate between native apps and web apps that became the present-day martial epic – seemingly neverending – has finally found its end.
Fred Cavazza said “it’s complicated“. Matthew Baxter-Reynolds said that HTML5 might replace native apps. Brad Frost said “native vs web is total bullshit” and that we should “embrace the advantages of both native and web to create more holistic mobile experiences”. Cavazza added to the heat of the debate and provided an inspirational mobile strategy. Reynolds made it a little HTML5 oriented. Frost averred that this shouldn’t be a debate at all and perhaps suggested that we should move towards hybrid apps – which encompass the features of both web and native apps. All of them have solid points, I enjoyed reading them and you must go through them once as well.
This post is not about taking you a decade ahead and predicting the winner, but it’s designed to give you a good overview of native apps and web apps so that you can write your own ending to this martial epic and call off this (apparently age-old) debate – right here, right now!

The Social Network Olympics - Infographic

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We love the Olympics, but an international social media showdown is a little more our speed.

Ignite Social Media is back with the 2012 Social Network Analysis Report, breaking down demographic, geographic and search data that shows which networks are the underdogs and which are mounting the winners’ podium.

Here at Mashable, we can’t get enough GIFs and hashtags. We’re excited to see that this type of digital currency is gaining value — Twitter and Tumblr are among the top five networks with the strongest rate of growth. Pinterest, Reddit and LinkedIn round out the pack.

Launched just over a year ago, Google+ was included in the report for the first time this year but is notably absent from the list of fastest growing platforms. And while Facebook is actively continuing its quest for world domination, it’s hard to improve your growth rate when practically everyone’s already joined the club.

Facebook And Yahoo Just Declared War On Twitter

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Forget that little patent contretemps between Facebook and Yahoo. Water under the bridge. Now the companies can turn their attention to the real threat: Twitter.

Buried in the press release announcing the settlement of Yahoo’s big patent-infringement lawsuit was this interesting nugget:

Yahoo and Facebook will also work together to bring Yahoo’s large media event coverage to Facebook users by collaborating on social integrations on the Yahoo site.

Large media event coverage: Where have we heard that before?

Smackdown: Google Voice Search vs. Apple’s Siri (video)

via mashable.com

With Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, Google is taking a shot at iPhone digital assistant Siri.

The next-generation Android OS, announced this week at Google I/O, offers the ability to search for and find information about anything you can imagine by simply asking.

Using the power of Google, the company has incorporated its Knowledge Graph into searches, making its answers more informative than Apple’s digital assistant in some cases.

In other cases, the Android-based voice search not so hot.

Twitter Cuts Ties with LinkedIn

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via businessinsider.com

According to a LinkedIn blog post, Twitter is dropping a two-and-a-half-year-old partnership with LinkedIn that allowed users of the professional social network to publish tweets to their LinkedIn profiles.

Twitter consumer product chief Michael Sippey wrote in a post on Twitter’s developer blog that the changes were part of a move to deliver a “core Twitter consumption experience through a consistent set of products and tools.”

Twitter has been gradually moving to push out partners who display tweets on their websites, but those efforts have been primarily focused on mobile clients, where Twitter’s been emphasizing its own offerings.

Google Maps vs. Apple Maps: A Side-By-Side Comparison

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The biggest change—among many—in iOS 6 will undoubtedly be Apple’s new Maps app. And though its turn-by-turn directions, Flyover and oh so sweet Siri look promising, the real question is how Apple’s maps will compare to Google’s.

Here’s a side by side comparison of the two, so you can see for yourself. It may have you wishing Apple hadn’t gone it alone quite yet.
It’s admittedly a little unfair to judge Apple Maps since it hasn’t even passed beta yet, but it doesn’t change the fact that Apple’s offering has to be great to not be a failure. And it’s also worth noting that Siri proved Apple’s not afraid to put an incomplete feature on an iPhone.

No iPhone user wanted to kill Google Maps. It makes me uneasy to even think about a phone without it. If you’re replacing something as ubiquitous and functional as Google Maps, you had better be just as good. Or as a wise man from the streets once said, “If you come at the king, you best not miss.”