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I think it's safe to say that the initial boost from the Bing launch is pretty much over, but as that pricey marketing campaign continues to run on televisions around the country, the number of unique Bing visitors (according to Compete) is rising steadily.

In only a month's time, Bing managed to jump up to more unique visitors than Digg, Twitter and CNN, as Mashable points out. Not bad considering it's only a month old and Twitter has been building its hype for a couple years.

However, you have to keep in mind that Live.com did already have some users, and that it's unique visitors were already well over those of Twitter. Live.com of course began redirecting to Bing when it launched.

Compete's data actually still shows Live.com as having more unique visitors, so apparently there are enough people out there still going to Live.com instead of Bing.com to make you wonder how effective this marketing really has been so far (though as Mashable notes, Microsoft does have other services, like hotmail, still running on the Live domain).

The Live.com and Bing.com lines are clearly well on their way to intersecting, but if Compete's numbers are accurate (as of 06/20 at least), Bing still has a bit to go just to get back to Live.com numbers. Where it goes from there will be where things really get interesting. Will that Bing line continue to rise so steadily?

The French Senate is considering a revised version of an Internet piracy law that was ruled unconstitutional last month, despite backing by President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Nicolas Sarkozy

The original law was set up as a three-strikes system for copyright violators, who would first receive an email warning, then a letter and finally lose their Internet access if they were caught a third time.

The Constitutional Court ruled that "free access to public communication services online" was a human right, and only a judge should have the power to deny a user access to the Internet.

The revised bill now has a provision that would allow a judge to decide if Internet access should be cut off from users. On the third strike a judge would either impose an Internet ban, a fine of up to $415,000 or a two-year jail sentence, under a fast-track ruling system.

Account holders found guilty of "negligence" for allowing a third party to pirate music or movies using their Internet connection, would face a $2,081 fine and a month-long suspension of service.

The original legislation was one of the toughest ever crafted against online piracy around the world. Supporters of the bill hoped it would encourage Internet users to visit legal download sites.

Critics warned the law could unfairly punish users if hackers used their accounts to download illegal files.

CoTweet is a Twitter app, which is described as a real-time business collaboration platform for Twitter. It has also just raised $1.1 million in venture funding.

The funding comes from Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Maples Investments and Freestyle Capital. CoTweet is used by brands like Whole Foods, Starbucks, Microsoft, JetBlue, Ford, Pepsi, Sprint, and Coca-Cola.

"Social media properties like Twitter give consumers incredible power to shape public perceptions of brands," said Steve Anderson, Founder of Baseline Ventures, who led the round and will join CoTweet’s Board of Directors. "CoTweet gives companies and their brands a set of tools to directly engage consumers and forge stronger bonds with them on the social networks they belong to, starting with Twitter."

Co-Tweet says companies can use its platform to:

- Engage people throughout your company — Share the job of being on duty. Tap the collective wisdom of people across functional areas like marketing, PR and customer service. Assign tasks and track follow-ups.

- Focus on the conversations that matter — Know when you need to jump in. Track your exchanges through simple case management. Schedule updates to make company announcements.

- Keep your brand human — Automatically include signatures in your updates to identify who's talking and keep conversations personal.

"Social networks, including Twitter, have ushered in a new era of social CRM for businesses," said Jesse Engle, CEO of CoTweet. "We’re thrilled have such a prestigious roster of financial backers, whose background in this space gives us a distinct advantage in setting a course for continued success."

It will be interesting to see where the new funding takes CoTweet.  Recently, Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone discussed the use of the word "Tweet," with regards to Twitter's copyright.

"We have applied to trademark Tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective but we have no intention of 'going after' the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter," he said. "In fact, we encourage the use of the word Tweet. However, if we come across a confusing or damaging project, the recourse to act responsibly to protect both users and our brand is important."

According to CoTweet's press release, Twitter is actually among the companies that use CoTweet, so I guess they're safe.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard that Google announced that it would be releasing a new operating system called Google Chrome OS this week. One mysterious blog entry popped up soon after, claiming to have snagged some screenshots of the OS as Google demoed the product to Acer.

Here's an excerpt from that post:

Hi there. I work for a company (Sorry to be secretive, but what I am about to post could get me in big trouble) that supplies parts for Acer laptops. Today, a Google Rep visited the Acer team to install and quickly show off some of the features of the Google OS in development.

I was invited by Acer to come and view the demo.

I can say and give only what I know and have.

...

After roughly 12 hours, the person who posted this posted the following video, pretty much laughing at the tech media industry for jumping on board and linking to the screenshots.

The video lists all of the sites that linked to it, and shows all of the diggs and tweets that got these fake screenshots a nice bit of attention. To be fair though, at least some of the publications/blogs that mentioned the screenshots were quick to acknowledge that they could indeed be fakes.

It is interesting to see how quickly false information can spread though, and that is clearly the point this person was trying to make. What do you think of his/her little prank? Share your thoughts.

Meanwhile, Google has released some more details about Chrome OS.

In late May, Larry Page stated at a conference that he believes real-time search is a necessity.  He also referenced Twitter.  Now, Marissa Mayer's performed a sort of follow-up on both counts, and this might indicate an official corporate interest.

An on-the-fly response to a question from Loic Le Meur is one thing, after all.  Rehearsed, repeated speeches constitute quite another - think products in development or acquisition talks.  So let's move on to Mayer's statement to let you judge for yourself.

Mayer told Charles Arthur, "We think the real-time search is incredibly important and the real-time data that's coming online can be super-useful in terms of us finding out something like, you know, is this conference today any good?  Is it warmer in San Francisco than it is in Silicon Valley?  You can actually look at tweets and see those sorts of patterns, so there's a lot of useful information about real time and your actions that we think ultimately will reinvent search."

She later added, "I can't comment on any discussions that we may or may not be having between the companies.  I can say that we think that real-time search is very interesting."

There you have it, then.  Although there may be one more thing worth noting: since Bing entered the real-time search arena last week, this increases the pressure for Google to act.

The initial announcement about Google Chrome OS was, while exciting, extremely lacking in details.  Now, Google's decided to share a bit more info, and the facts paint an interesting picture about the state of the operating system's development. 

Is it nearly finished?  Not even started?  Here's the evidence supporting that first idea: according to a FAQ post on the Google Chrome Blog, the Google Chrome OS team is working with an impressive list of computer products corporations including Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.

So it might be that the operating system's already getting stuck in various ready-to-buy boxes.

On the other hand, the post states, "If you are interested in a full time position as a software engineer please visit the jobs pages for the following offices and indicate that you are interested in Chrome."  Then the cities of Aarhus, Kirkland, London, Montreal, Mountain View, Reston, San Francisco, Santa Monica, St. Petersburg, and Tokyo are named.

So apparently the Google Chrome OS team is far shy of full strength.

Both pieces of information point to an intensive, global effort, however, which is worth recognizing.

Also, with regards to the FAQ, the Google Chrome Blog post promised, "We'll be sure to add more to this list as popular questions come in," so even more details may soon be shared.

Google Image Search has caught up to - and gone beyond - Yahoo's offering in the same arena.  Users of Google Image Search can now filter results according to usage rights, meaning they can more easily determine what pictures can be reproduced without the creator objecting.

About a month and a half ago, Yahoo made a similar move, but the key drawback in that case is that Yahoo's Creative Commons license filter only returns results from Flickr.  If someone wants a photo from elsewhere, they're still stuck reading the fine print or contacting the image's owners.

Google, for its part, has skipped any Picasa-only promotion and is letting users apply its four filter options - "labeled for reuse," "labeled for commercial reuse," "labeled for reuse with modification," and "labeled for commercial reuse with modification" - to everything on the Web.

And although this may seem like a minor edge, to people who spend a significant part of their day looking for pictures (think artists, designers, etc.), it's probably enough to make them pick Google Image Search over Yahoo Image Search again (assuming they ever made the switch in the first place).

Credit goes to Alex Chitu for noticing the change.  It should be interesting to see if Yahoo responds in the near future.

Back in March, WebProNews looked at how Facebook was driving more traffic to some websites than even Google was. While, that was certainly not the case for everybody, it was still fascinating to see.

We also looked at how the lines between Facebook and Google were getting closer together in terms of unique visitors. Well, it's July now, and they have gotten even closer. The latest data from Compete shows the numbers up until June 20. Compete has Google.com at 145,948,025 and Facebook.com at 122,559,672 on that date.

Luckily for Google, the lines getting closer together is not so much a product of people going to Google.com less. They're just going to Facebook.com more. It looks like Google use has remained relatively flat, as Facebook use just continues to grow tremendously.

For most sites, a lack of significant growth wouldn't be looked upon as incredibly favorable, but how much further can Google really go up in terms of search market share. Google is already so far ahead of the game, the company should be happy that it's not losing an incredible amount. Bing has edged up a bit since its launch, but it has a long way to go before it crowds Google.

The competition is there, and Google knows it, but even overlap between Google and Bing use has remained relatively steady since the initial Bing hype wore down.

But back to Google and Facebook. Google.com and Facebook.com serve very different purposes. People go to Google to find information. They go to Facebook to hang out. The threat to Google here is really more about what people are spending their online time doing. As it stands right now, it appears that people are just spending more time online in general (especially kids). This leaves plenty of room for Google searches and Facebook socializing.

Of course there are plenty of variables to consider as well. These are just two homepages. This doesn’t include search boxes in web browsers, things like Facebook Connect, or any other products from either company.

Google Maps just keeps getting more interesting.  Today, two fresh features came to light, and together, they'll make it a lot easier for users to get their bearings in unfamiliar territory and plan multiple-stop outings wherever they may be.

Let's start with My Location.  For some time, this feature has allowed mobile users of Google Maps to have a small blue circle automatically show their location.  But now it's come to the regular version of Google Maps, so people with laptops who move around (or people who somehow wind up in front of unfamiliar desktops) can more easily determine their position and what's around them.

Note: We couldn't get My Location to work, but a post on the LatLong Blog states, "Currently, you can use My Location in Google Maps if you use Google Chrome, Firefox 3.5 or any other web browser with Gears installed.  We hope to support other browsers soon too."

Then there's an apparently as-yet-unnamed feature (found by Alex Chitu) that allows users to overlay different maps from their recent search history.  Efficiency experts should love it; if, for example, you want to get coffee, go shopping, see a movie, and grab pizza on the way home, you can search for all four different things, check a few boxes, and easily figure out waste the least amount of gas and time.

So if you're doing a bit of traveling or just trying to save yourself some trouble, head over to Google Maps and check out the new offerings.

Facebook has added a feature, which allows users to add events and invite people to them right from the publisher box. Now creating an event is pretty much as simple as sharing a link.

To add an event, just push the "more" arrow button on the publisher box, and you will find events. Once you fill out the form, it will be posted to you news feed, and you can invite guests from there.

When you click "invite guests" you will be able to go through your Facebook Friends and choose who you want to invite.

"You might wonder why you wouldn't just invite friends to an event using a status update," says Facebook's Bo Hong Deng. "Creating an event in the Publisher helps you better organize the event details, and your friends can RSVP immediately when they see it in their News Feeds. This is more structured than a status update and also takes full advantage of the Events application. You can easily find out which of your friends are coming, and of course, they can comment on the event's wall, share photos and use other Events features."

It is important to note that once you create an event in the news feed, anyone will be able to join and invite others to join. You can change this in the app and make it closed or secret if you wish.