IE6 still holds a 20% market share on web browser activity, but it’s likely that that number will drop in the extremely near future. A number of sites and anti-IE6 campaigns have popped up in the past year, though none have made quite the impact that Google’s recent announcement likely will.

In an announcement made yesterday, Google’s Apps team stated that they would no longer support IE6, choosing instead to phase the browser out of commission over the course of 2010.

Rajen Sheth and his Apps team didn’t offer too much of an explanation for the decision; they didn’t need to. All he provided was that there existed a new guard of browsers – “Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above” – that would much better fit your security, JavaScript processing, and HTML5 needs. He goes on:

Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.

So the question turns to those 20% of Internet users still using what’s just been deemed an artifact: is it time to phase out IE6? Is this decision from Google all that surprising? And something else to consider: do you think that with the advent and development of Google Chrome that we’ll see Google begin to abandon their support of more and more external browsers?

For the most part, these questions stem from a lack of clarity concerning the iPad’s flexibility as an operating device. There are a lot of people out there, myself included, who had hopes that the iPad would be the product to replace laptops to some degree. Obviously we forgot the fact that Steve Jobs is a master when it comes to product separation.

The iPad has just enough specs and features to make it valuable to those who need more than what an iPhone or iPod touch has to offer but lacks the necessary features to suffice in lieu of a laptop. Among those features:

• Flash capabilities
• A working camera, still frame or video
• Non-Internet phone functionality

That first one is the biggie. The iPad’s lack of flash capabilities may be the omission that singlehandedly restricts Apple’s new toy from rendering the laptop non-essential, but Jobs likes it that way. In restricting users from using such flash-powered sites as Hulu.com, Jobs is forcing the user’s hand and requiring that they buy movies and television shows from the iTunes store. Smart move on his part. This way he can price the Pad somewhere between an iPhone and a MacPro, picking up extra revenue through movie and TV show sales.

All this is to basically say that the preconceived notion (according to Apple) that flash slowed operations down too much to put on the iPod Touch and iPhone was straight fabrication.

There are, of course, other less-obvious features that Apple has left off the iPad that will further force users to iTunes. Though it’s available on iPhones, Apple is holding out on the iPad implementation of Microsoft Silverlight, which allows Netflix users to watch their instant movies on their devices. It’s not exactly a monopoly; just a really smart way of thinning your wallets.

Much of the reason for Firefox’s vulnerability has to do with the plug-ins that the browser allows. The browser has made a number of moves this year to boost plug-in security, but the efforts have for the most part proven futile. According to Lars Ewe, CTO of Cenzic, the company that produced the vulnerability report, Firefox’s plug-ins are somewhat of a catch 22.

“The plug-in architecture that they have is a selling fact for the browser and one of the reasons why I love using it,” Ewe told internetnews.com. They can’t control security aspects of all the plug-ins and the vulnerabilities are a side effect of that.”

Cenzic reported that Opera had the lowest vulnerability rating (6%).

These figures are obviously telling, but it goes without saying that they’re a little skewed. Aside from their plug-in use, Firefox’s traction has grown significantly in recent years. They’re a much more popular site than they used to be, and it’s starting to show in adverse ways. With hackers and virus makers around, it’s usually the case that the more popular you get, the more defense you’ve got to play.

Rupert Murdoch’s worldwide news empire is teetering on the edge of inevitable irrelevancy these days, threatening to withdraw its pages from SERPs – to which Google has said “Be our guest” – and laying out preliminary plans to start charging for content across the board. That means paying for The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in America, and 33 different periodicals (including The Sun, The Times, and The Australian) in English speaking countries around the world.

A pretty tall task, but it actually wouldn’t be that difficult. All Murdoch would need to do would be to put a short, little text request into his code and his enterprise could disappear from Google forever. The challenge then would be twofold.

First, News Corp would have to find a way to maintain the steady flow of traffic they currently experience in part because sites like wsj.com and the Daily Telegraph in Australia currently have a strong presence on Google news searches.

Second, Murdoch would have to find a way to convince all those who get to his sites to fill out all the necessary forms and pay up for something that’s free only a few clicks of the mouse over.

Mr. Murdoch has obviously proven himself a pretty fluid businessman over the years, but something about this screams out-of-touch. Murdoch has the right idea that there will come a day when the general public will need to pay for their news, but it looks like the Aussie’s jumping the gun. Yes, 78-year-olds like him still enjoy picking up the paper every day, but, as Gawker explains, news is picked up these days by “stick[ing] a hot, throbbing search query into Google.” All the cool kids are doing it these days.

On September 27th, 2006, GrandCentral founders Craig Walker and Vincent Pacquet unleashed their company’s vision at the Fall DEMO conference in front of a crowd of eager investors. Their basic principle was simple: your phone number shouldn’t be tied to a device or a location, it should be tied to you.

Chapter 1: One Number for All Your Phones Forever

Mr. Walker then enumerated the implications of this simple idea:

• No matter how many phones you have, you will only have one phone number and it will never change.
• Because of this, you will check all voicemail in one place.
• You will be able to customize everything about this phone – from voicemail to what phones ring and when – from the web.

“Never miss a call you want to take,” he stated, “and never take a call you want to miss.”

Although there were reservations about the quality of the still-very-beta service, the idea behind it was revolutionary and the web management of its features very well thought-out. Plus, GrandCentral was willing to issue you a new phone number FOR FREE and let you connect all of your existing phone numbers to it.

But there was even more the service could offer. Customization allowed incoming phone calls to ring to different phones depending on the caller, calls could be easily transferred from one phone to another, and, at any point, a portion of a call could be recorded live by simply pressing the number four on your phone’s keypad.

The features with voicemail were just as impressive. At the onset of any call, users could listen to voicemail messages being recorded in real time by callers and jump in with the click of a button. Via the online customization, users could also set rules to let certain callers here different, personalized voicemail messages. Finally voicemails were stored indefinitely, could be listened to with a single click, and replied to with another – by calling both the user’s phone and the phone number of the person they wished to speak with.

Needless to say, Craig Walker and Vincent Pacquet walked away from DEMO Fall 2006 with rave reviews of their company and a blogger buzz to fuel the fire.

Chapter 2: The Initial Stumbling Blocks and then….BAM! You’re part of Google

In spite of its promise, GrandCentral came out of private beta in early March of 2007 – only six months later – and was met with some broad disapproval from its users. There was always the initial hurdle of getting other people to use your new GrandCentral number, but now people were complaining that the service itself didn’t work properly. Phone calls were sometimes never received and people whose numbers were actually “whitelisted” and were supposed to go through right to the caller were often halted and made to leave a message before the caller could pick up.

One consumer even commented on a Techcrunch blog about GrandCentral that he was “amazed that people are OK with the call quality… Try having somebody call your GrandCentral number from a cellphone and then answer the call from a cellphone. It’s like talking on a walkie talkie from the 70’s!”

The main benefit of the service also became one of the largest reasons to abandon it. If you were going to put a great deal of time and effort into getting people to only call one number for you from now on, and that number was never going to change, then you’d better be damn sure the service was going to work the way it’s supposed to. At least for the time being, that wasn’t the case.

As Craig Walker promised, however, improvements we’re in the works. And only a month after coming out of private beta, Grand Central launched the mobile version of its service. A lightweight rendition of its standard version, the mobile service had all the same basic functionality of the web-based software and also allowed you to access your address book and make changes to your account settings and call routing. Voicemails, however, were recorded in mp3 format, so your phone needed an mp3 player if you wanted to listen to your messages. Finally, and almost as a hint of things to come, GrandCentral mobile also provided users with “Visual Voicemail” – the ability to see voicemails from certain people and delete them without listening to them – which was to be a feature of the then-upcoming iPhone.

All of this commotion quickly grabbed the attention of Google, who, no less than two months later bought Grand Central for a cool $50+ million. Many believed they would use the technology to challenge companies like Skype in web-based communications software.

Problems that Google fixed and how:

Although they kept Craig Walker as part of the new Google team, the company remained virtually unheard of for 21 months after its acquisition. Several critical problems with the service were addressed during this time, and just after its re-launch as Google Voice in March 2009, several new features were announced.

• You used to have to give everyone your Google voice number and ask that everyone call that number from now on. To fix this, Google introduced “Number Portability” – (Edit: This is actually a future release. Stay tuned for it.) – allowing you to port your existing number to your Google Voice number, so that every time someone called your cell phone number your Google voice number would actually be the number dialed.
• Even with this number portability, outbound calls used to show the number of the cell phone you were calling from, not your Google voice number.
• Google fixed this issue by creating Smartphone apps for the Blackberry, iPhone and android phones that actually rerouted all outbound calls through your Google Voice number. A similar problem existed for outbound SMS messages, but Google cleared this up in a similar fashion.

Chapter 3: Apple and Google’s Ugly Split

That’s when the levees broke. Apple removed third party Google Voice apps from the app store and – although they denied doing so in their letter to the FCC 3 weeks later – flat out rejected the Google Voice Mobile app for the iPhone. The resulting fallout over these decisions and the growing belief that it was AT&T that was behind them prompted the FCC to send letters to all three companies to clear up exactly what happened.

Apple claimed that it had not “rejected” the official Google Voice Mobile app for the iPhone but rather “was still considering it.” Nevertheless, they did mention that this app “duplicated” certain core iPhone features such as Visual Voicemail and the native dialer, and this was the primary reason why the app had not yet been accepted into the app store.

AT&T insisted that it was not them who was behind Apple’s decision making, and Google’s statements to the FCC we’re redacted for public consideration.

Then, despite their declaration that they didn’t have anything to do with banning Google Voice from the iPhone, AT&T sent a complaint letter to the FCC saying that Google – through Google Voice – was guilty of violating Net Neutrality standards set forth by the FCC: proof in itself that AT&T had a problem with Google Voice.  What made this more bizarre was that AT&T had openly opposed Net Neutraility standards for mobile carriers. Now they were being accused of carrying out a double standard on the issue.

You could say Google’s playing a bit of a double standard as well, blocking certain calls made to and from AT&T carrier phones. Just last week they were brought under the microscope again for suggesting they “be let off the hook because [they've] cut back on the calls [they] block” to iPhones.

But for now, the beat goes on. We can only hope that the two sides start to play nice, because I like Googling things on my iPhone. And I’d hate to lose that commodity when the dust finally, eventually, hopefully settles on the ballad of Google and Apple.

New FTC rules mandate that any blogger who offers an endorsement in their postings must disclose any payments received for the acknowledgement. Failure to do so could lead to a penalty of up to $11,000. Pretty steep, right? The FTC tells The Washington Post that it’s only trying to keep up with the times.

“Given that social media has become such a significant player in the advertising area, we thought it was necessary to address social media as well,” said Richard Cleland, assistant director for the division of advertising practices at the FTC.

The amendment should appease consumer interest groups (who had long griped over the FTC’s outdated regulations) but frustrate bloggers, many of whom are worried that they’ll come under scrutiny even if they offer the smallest of endorsements. Others, like Technologizer’s Harry McCracken, suggest that the real trouble lies in the vast amount of grey area wherein bloggers operate.

“I don’t mind being held to a high standard. But I’m still scratching my head over exactly how to make the FTC happy. The “material connections” are especially mystifying-since most of Technologizer’s revenue is derived from advertising, and most of our advertisers are technology companies, many of whom we cover in articles, we have “material connections” all over the place. Does the FTC want Technologizer to run a disclosure each time we mention a product from a company who’s advertised on this site? I’m not sure.”

Don’t worry too much though, bloggers. Keeping track of the blogosphere is something that will likely prove next to impossible for the FTC. In fact, Cleland has already admitted to certain concessions from the initial reports, one such being that advertisers must be aware of the blogger receiving a freebie for the blogger to be found liable. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, fines won’t be handed out on a one-and-done basis. As Deborah Yao and Emoiy Fredrix reported, a blogger would have to run a “’substantial’ operation that violates FTC rules and already [have] received a warning” to be at risk.

And while the blogosphere has been all abuzz the past two days with criticism of the policy, the truth is that the FTC’s intentions should be lauded. Blogs are a blessing and a curse in the world of advocacy. With so many different voices floating around, it’s easy to get caught up in a piece of support that may not be appropriately accurate. Say there’s a food blogger who gets free meals in return for positive reviews. Without disclosing that information, that blogger would be giving potentially false information to the public. The FTC’s new standards mandate that you let the public know what’s a gift exchange and what’s a proper review.

In essence, it’s moving blog credibility one step closer to that of traditional media outlets. And maybe we don’t read them as often as we used to, but it’s those traditional media outlets we still recognize as the most authoritative and honest sources around.

The move marks another turn in the ever-so-evolving landscape of Razorfish, a company that’s been on one helluva bumpy ride since its stock topped out of value at $57 per share in February of 2000.

Let’s take a look at Razorfish over the years:

1994: Childhood friends Jeffrey Dachis and Craig Kanarick reunite on a street corner in Manhattan and head upstairs to Dachis’ apartment to map out a spur-of-the-moment business plan built around “some technology, some business modeling, some one-on-one direct marketing communications, and some branding and visual identity.”

1995: After six months Razorfish is able to move out of Dachis’ apartment and into a swanky SoHo loft thanks to Omnicom, a New York ad organization that played the role of investor.

1996: Razorfish grosses $1.2 million dollars in its second year, netting $300,000.

1997: Razorfish claims CBS, IBM, America Online, Charles Schwab and Sony as its clients. They post sales of $3.6 million.

1998: In an effort to grow effectively, Razorfish merges with Avalanche Systems, who were doing work for Cosmopolitan, Warner Music Group and Carnegie Hall. In doing so, Razorfish’s staff grows to 150 and the company sees net gains of 400 percent. The company also acquires interactive ad agency Plastic, thus giving it a presence around the Bay Area.

1999: With offices now in Stockholm, Germany and clear across the United States, Razorfish goes public and posts sales of $170 million, though because of rapid growth loses $14.5 million on the year.

2000: Razorfish’s reputation starts to spoil. Potential clients are turned away by their reported arrogance and failure to meet deadlines. Still, the company continued to grow. It opened offices in Australia and Italy then acquired German e-business company Medialab.

2003: SBI Group purchases Razorfish, thus turning the eight-year-old company into SBI.Razorfish. This soon-after turns into Avenue A/Razorfish when SBI.Razorfish gets acquired by aQuantitative in 2004.

2007: Microsoft makes heads itch across the country when they purchase Razorfish, putting the not-so-conventional company in the hands of some very conventional individuals.

2008: Razorfish cleans up at the Webbys, picking up 7 different awards.

This isn’t the only major merger we’ve seen recently, though. Just recently Amazon picked up Zappos, and Facebook made waves this morning when they announced they were acquiring Friendfeed.

Squidoo’s recent – and self-proclaimed “significant” – changes to their Terms of Services and operating policies will probably rub a good lot of users the wrong way, but few can deny that the modifications were necessary. Squidoo had become somewhat of a haven for spammers recently, and there’s no reason to think that a little clean-up can’t do wonders for Squidoo’s community.

Let’s review the changes. Remember, none of this goes into effect until mid-July, so you’ve got plenty of time to make the necessary moves heading into the next generation of Squid-do-ing.

The Days of Spamming Are Over

• You’re probably thinking you’ve heard this one before, right? Squidoo’s long been trying to curb the amount of spam on the site, but they’re stepping up their game this time. New plans are set to lock up accounts if holders make any attempt to spam up blog comments, twitter pages or emails, a move that should finally help to curb all the junk that’s always showing up where you don’t want it.

Porn Gets Shown the Exit Door

• Good thing, too. Listen, we’re not going to get too into detail with this one for obvious reasons, but the bottom line is that pornography as an entity is a pretty shady operation and attracts a just-as-shady crowd. Getting porn out of the house will have a resounding effect on the amount of junk that passes through.

Promotion Becomes a No-No

• Well, not completely. Squidoo’s new plan is to make it such that you’ll have to be more selective in the promotions you advertise. It’s a good decision – those promotional lenses are like gateway drugs to junk ads and spam posts. Anything they can do to cut down on those suckers is welcomed over here.

So there you have it. Remember, you have until July 20 to make your moves and –if you aren’t already – start complying with Squidoo’s new style. In the meantime, read up on these 4 Things You Can Do To Get Ready for the change, as suggested by Squidoo’s own brain trust.