Well, isn’t this just the biggest surprise in the world?

Images and details about Apple’s iPad Tablet have been leaked for weeks now, but that doesn’t mean that Steve Jobs can’t draw a packed house crowd at Apple’s Press Conference 2010. Engadget’s been there liveblogging the scene all day. Check it out.

According to Engadget’s Joshua Topolski, some of the iPad’s best features include a refined Maps application, the msot advanced iTunes yet, a new look to the calendar, and a touchpad keyboard that’s “a dream to type on.” More iPad specs, as told by Engadget’s Nilay Patel, include the following:

It’s a half-inch thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds, with a 9.7-inch capacitive touchscreen IPS LCD display, and it’s running a custom 1GHz Apple “A4″ chip developed by P.A. Semi, with a 10-hour battery life.. It’ll come in 16, 32, and 64GB sizes, and it’s got the expected connectivity: very little. There’s a 30-pin Dock connector, a speaker, a microphone, Bluetooth, and 802.11n WiFi. As expected, it can run iPhone apps — either pixel-for-pixel in a window, or pixel-doubled fullscreen.

And thus begins the rush to your nearest apple store. The only question that truly remains is, how much is  this bad boy gonna cost?

unfriending is the word of the year

Can it be the word of the year if only half of those in the know use it? “Unfriended,” undoubtedly ripped from the lexicon of Facebook users worldwide, is this year’s Word of the Year, at least according to the New Oxford English Dictionary. But not according to me.

I’ve been using Facebook for almost three years now, and in that time I’ve only had to sever friendship ties with two people – someone I didn’t like very much in the first place and a musician who would not stop filling my inbox with invites to concerts. But I’ve never “unfriended” anyone. I “defriended” them, and I’m gonna stick to “defriending” no matter what the New Oxford English Dictionary has to say about it.

When you really think about it though, isn’t “unfriending” kind of a morbid pick for Word of the Year? Or isn’t it at least a little strange? Are that many social network users really cutting ties with friends that this has become the word of the year?

Sure, it was one thing to go with “podcasting” in 2005, but “podcasting” was all the rage back then. Can the same be said about “unfriending?” I can’t imagine that to be the case.

Either way, I’m standing firm in my commitment to “defriended” over “unfriended.” Rolls off the tongue much better my way.

See the other words up for the honorable distinction of being this year’s New Oxford English Dictionary word of the year. We wish they’d gone with “funemployed,” but what are you gonna do?

Meanwhile, we’re appreciative of the feedback from people who are using WhoLinksToMe.com in its beta to help drive the direction of the services. Please keep exploring the site and giving us your feedback.

Stay tuned - Phase 2 is coming!

Here’s a ‘top 10 anchor texts’ — which will give you a quick insight into the most common phrases people are using to link to your site.

Top 10 Anchor Texts

This one shows you what TLD(Top Level Domains) your links originate from(i.e. com, net, org, co.uk, etc)

Top Level Domains

Here’s one that shows you what countries your links are originating from.

Countries Linking to You

We are shooting for releasing the new platform with all kinds of new features at the end of next week. We just don’t want to let it out with bugs, and are working hard to get it ready! Thanks for all of your support and feedback on how to make this a revolutionary research tool — keep it coming!

As you may have noticed, we have had some downtime this week. We didn’t anticipate such a large response and our database and server structure was not up to snuff. We’ve been working behind the scenes to make the service more stable and are very close to what we believe will be a better solution in terms of stability, accessibility and load time.

With that said, if you have been unable to access your account statistics in the meantime, please be patient with us. We are probably looking at another week of sporadic in-and-out accessibility issues. We will send everyone an update when the new platform is live and also work in some interface updates and improvements with that release.

Thanks for the support, this thing is really looking up!

All you have to do is register for a free account and upload our tracking code to verify that you own the site.

Note: The data will not be populated immediately. It will go into a queue of sites to analyze. As of now, data should be populated within the first 24 hours.

As always, we love feedback. Please report any problems to us.

We are continually adding new features and functionality, so if you have an idea that would make Who Links To Me better — let us know!

Thanks for the feedback from everyone — it’s helped us quickly identify and correct a laundry list of things in just the first three days.

Good news — we have activated keyword phrase searches. If you want to search for obama, for example, just type it into the search box at the top of the page and it will give you a breakdown of the top 10 sites in Google, Yahoo & MSN.

We are currently working on site validation to give site owners more detailed statistics about their backlinks. It’s almost ready, and we may even get it done in time for the weekend.

I have to say we didn’t anticipate this much interest and excitement so quickly. We are glad to see everyone is as excited about this project as we are. One note — we do actually read every piece of feedback that we receive. Please keep sending us ideas, feature requests and bug reports.

The next announcement will let you validate your site and get more detailed reports — so stay tuned.

Who Links To Me now has some functionality of our private, in-house tools for free.
Functionality includes:

• Google PageRank Check
• Google Backlinks Check
• Yahoo Backlinks Check
• Related Websites (Sort of. This is still a crude algorithm and we are working to refine it.)
• Technorati BackLinks Check
• Pages Indexed by Google
• Scrubbed List of Keywords to Monitor (We don’t want our index getting filled with junk and/or offensive queries. All queries that are shown here meet certain criteria for volume, relevancy and topics. If you find offensive content, please report it.)
• Ranking cross-data
• Elementary relational data for keywords and domains (We wanted something up before we took off for the new year. It’s not perfect yet, but it is a decent start)

We will be adding functionality and features over the coming months. If there is something you would like to see that you don’t, let us know. We like feedback.
We also put up links to some SEO Tools that we think are valuable. This will be an ongoing and growing list, so feel free to mention any good ones that we left out.