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Facebook recently launched a marketing campaign around their 500 million users milestone, called Facebook Stories, which is a collection of tales from members that used the social network to find love, happiness and more. Google followed suit, launching Google Stories, which is essentially the same thing, except the search giant collects stories from users sharing tales about how Google effected their lives. Today, Twitter is launching a similar marketing campaign, called Twitter Tales, that showcases ways in which users interact with the microblogging platform.

Twitter Tales range from and Indian member who uses Twitter as a form of self therapy to the Caltrain account, that notifies users of delays around the commuter train service. Tales will be posted as Tales.Twitter.com, and you can email Twitter to submit your own Tale to be featured on the site.

Last year, Twitter launched a business destination which includes case studies of organizations and companies that have used Twitter as a social media and marketing tool. Tales seems to take a for consumer focus

Considering that we now have Facebook, Google and now Twitter spreading stories as a marketing tool, I’m sure we can expect other tech giants to start encouraging consumers to share their own “tales” of use. Who’s up next? Zynga? Foursquare?

It’s a deal a month for Zynga, which announced its fourth acquisition in as many months today. They’ve acquired Boston-based Conduit Labs.

Conduit Labs has raised $8.5 million in venture capital from Charles River Ventures and Prism VentureWorks. The size of the deal isn’t being disclosed, so we don’t know how well the investors did. Their recent acquisition of Challenge Games wasn’t much of a payday for investors, we heard. They also acquired XPD Media back in May, and Unoh earlier this month.

Press release below:

ZYNGA ACQUIRES CONDUIT LABS

SAN FRANCISCO – Aug. 17, 2010 – Zynga today announced it has acquired Boston-based social games company Conduit Labs. Effective immediately, the Conduit Labs office will become Zynga Boston, a new game studio focused on new product development. Today’s announcement expands Zynga’s studio operations adding to locations already in San Francisco, Austin, Baltimore, Bangalore, Beijing and Los Angeles. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Conduit Labs’ CEO, Nabeel Hyatt, will become head of the new Boston studio. The Conduit Labs team will be immediately integrated into Zynga’s workforce. Conduit Labs, founded in 2007 and funded by Charles River Ventures and Prism VentureWorks, has developed several free-to-play social games for the web.

“Boston is an epicenter for technology and has a strong talent market, making it an ideal location for us to expand operations,” said Mike Verdu, senior vice president of games at Zynga. “As one of the most prominent social game companies in Boston, the Conduit team shares a similar culture and drive with Zynga, and together we anticipate great successes from our new studio.”

Today’s acquisition, along with the recently announced joint venture with SoftBank for the launch of Zynga Japan, continues to extend the company’s footprint worldwide, creating more opportunities for Zynga to connect the world through games.

About Zynga
Zynga is the world’s largest social game developer. More than 215 million monthly active users play its games. Zynga’s games include FarmVille, Treasure Isle, Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars, YoVille, Café World, FishVille, PetVille and FrontierVille. Zynga games are available on Facebook, MySpace and the iPhone. Through Zynga.org, Zynga players have raised more than $3 million for world social causes. Zynga is headquartered in San Francisco. For more information, visit www.Zynga.com or www.Zynga.org.

.ORG, The Public Interest Registry this morning released the results of its bi-annual domain name report, “The Dashboard” (PDF), detailing the accelerating growth of the world’s third largest generic Top Level Domain (after .com and .net).

In the first half of this year, the .ORG domain grew by 7.6 percent, more than doubling last year’s first six months gain of 3.2 percent. This increase in registrations has brought the organization’s total domains under management to over 8.5 million.

On a sidenote: as you can deduce from the image above, the first .ORG domain name was registered back in July 1985 (!) so it took quite a while to get to 8.5 million.

Nevertheless, the TLD appears to be far from hitting the ceiling.

In fact, the reported 7.6 percent growth rate in the first half of 2010 surpasses that of the two largest domains, .com and .net, which says something about the growing popularity of .ORG worldwide. That or the fact that it’s still becoming increasingly difficult to register decent new .com or .net domain names, of course.

Do you own / operate a .ORG domain name? Why (not)?

Yahoo is getting ready to turn over search results on Yahoo Search to Bing later this week (it only took a year). There are some changes Yahoo announced today. It is shutting down SearchMonkey on October 1, as well as MyBlogLog, and Yahoo BOSS will no longer be free. MyBlogLog has long been one of Yahoo’s walking dead, but SearchMonkey and Boss were still loved by developers.

Also, for Website owners who want to make sure Yahoo, Bing, or whoever is in charge is still picking up changes to their sites, that raises a question about which webmaster tool to use: Yahoo’s Site Explorer or Bing’s Webmaster Central. These are the tools webmasters can use to make sure the respective search engines are indexing their sites correctly.

Yahoo wants webmasters to keep using its tool, Site Explorer, at least for now. As part of the partnership with Bing, updates to Site Explorer will be passed along to Bing. And since only the U.S. and Canada are switching over this week, if a webmaster simply switches over to Bing’s tool now, then all international searches on Yahoo won’t benefit from any updates.

International markets are not going to transition until 2012. Once that happens, then you can drop Site Explorer for good.

Yup, this transition to Bing search is already going smoothly for everyone involved.

Update: I just spoke with Shashi Seth, senior VP of Yahoo search products. He says that existing SearchMonkey apps will still continue to work and be indexed by Yahoo, but the SearchMonkey developer tools will no longer be available. He also says that Yahoo BOSS, which is “our most successful API in search,” will continue to be available (as expected), but not for free. Developers who use Yahoo’s customizable search API will have to show ads or perhaps pay for the data. Details of the new model will be made public in the next 30 days. In terms of Site Explorer, he says Yahoo will continue to invest in it and add analytics for Yahoo properties beyond search.

Over the weekend it was reported that Apple hired Benjamin Vigier, an expert in near field communication (NFC), a short range wireless protocol most synonymous with contactless payments. This key Apple hire is perhaps the strongest public signal yet of Apple’s intent to use NFC to build on its micropayments franchise and disrupt traditional point of sale using a mobile commerce model.

There is no doubt that Apple wants to enable native support for mobile payments and authentication—its myriad of patents and installed base of 100M active iTunes accounts with credit cards on file make this a no-brainer.

But I’ve learned of an even more revealing sign that Apple will integrate the technology—sources tell me that Apple has built NFC-enabled iPhone prototypes using hardware from NXP Semiconductor, and is testing mobile payments today (NXP is the market leader in NFC and just hired Goldman Sachs to run its IPO).

The existence of prototypes would almost surely suggest that Apple will include NFC in iPhone 5, or whatever Apple decides to call its next iPhone. Nokia is also slated to include it on all 2011 smartphones, and NXP recently announced an Android-based reference platform and open-source SDK to facilitate payments.

Short range wireless also has compelling use-cases beyond commerce, and it’s clear Apple is thinking of integrating NFC into its Apple TV and MacBook lines to transfer data between devices at high speeds. Imagine freshly-snapped photos from an iPhone 5 transferred instantaneously to a new iTV device by placing the devices close together for a few seconds.

In fact, Apple’s patents say a lot about its “hardware network-effects” strategy and how NFC could accelerate sales for Apple—iPhone 5 users would be more likely to buy an iTV and vice versa. In this way, this strategy mirrors what FaceTime has done as a selling point for iPhone 4.

FaceTime can only be “unlocked” when both callers have an iPhone 4, and therefore becomes a feature which spurs people to upgrade. This perfectly exemplifies how Apple could leverage creative proximity-based applications to promote synergies between product families and accelerate new hardware adoption.

Proximity-based integration with iAd is another potential gold mine for Apple. Think of the power of serving ads, coupons and loyalty awards based on presence. Shopkick recently announced plans for localized promotions and engagement (likely using proprietary point to point Wi-Fi). NFC would enable a standardized contactless method for merchants to promote consumer engagement, and it’s clear Apple wants in on this market.

And though my sources say Apple is currently testing NFC chipsets from NXP, it’s highly possible that Apple chooses technology from Broadcom, who currently supplies Wi-Fi and GPS on iPhone 4 and who recently acquired an NFC company to make multi-function chipsets combining all of these technologies.

It’s pretty clear Apple is aligning all the pieces to include NFC in iPhone 5. But non-core components aren’t locked up this far in advance of a product release, and iPhone 5 has a ways to go until device verification test (DVT) and pre-production, the stage at which the Verizon-based iPhone appears to be, as indicated by Apple’s orders for millions of CDMA chipsets.

Nonetheless, it appears increasingly likely that iPhone 5 will usher in a whole new world of mobile commerce and short range wireless applications, which makes perfect sense based on Apple’s highly converging hardware, software and platform strategy.

_________________________

Contributor Steve Cheney is an entrepreneur and formerly an engineer & programmer specializing in web and mobile technologies.

Telecom giant China Unicom, which exclusively carries the iPhone in China today, will be selling Apple’s iPad in the world’s largest mobile market starting very soon, an unnamed company insider told Chinese media company Caixin.

That is in line with earlier reports, which foresaw an August launch for the tablet computer in China, although admittedly a definitive launch date for the iPad in China has not been announced yet.

According to Caixin’s source, China Unicom will be the sole distributor of Apple’s iPad in China, which had a total of 776.9 million mobile subscribers at the end of March 2010, the largest number of any country on the planet.

The carrier is also reportedly scheduled to carry a WiFi-enabled model of the iPhone 4 in early September, although no definitive launch date was detailed either.

China Unicom, which services a staggering 315 million subscribers, has the exclusive right to distribute the iPhone in China, where it is the second-largest carrier after China Mobile. Just recently, the carrier kicked off sales of the WiFi-enabled iPhone 3GS in the country, which is unequivocally a major growth area for Apple.

Until recently, the Chinese government did not allow the sale of WiFi products altogether in an effort to promote an alternative WAPI wireless networking standard, but recently decided to lift said restrictions.

In related news, Apple’s South Korean distributor KT Corporation earlier this week said it would start taking pre-orders for the iPhone 4 in the next couple of days, before its official launch next month. Apple has sold more than 850,000 iPhones in South Korea since its introduction in the local market nine months ago.

It will be interesting to see how big of a deal its sales efforts in the Asia-Pacific region will become for Apple’s bottom line, but my educated guess is that it won’t be negligible.

Marin Software, a startup that creates search engine management software for advertisers and agencies, is now offering advanced applications for advertising on Facebook.

Marin’s Search Marketer platform now offers advertisers and agencies the ability to manage Facebook Ads alongside paid search programs on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Advanced solutions for Facebook include algorithmic bidding, audience segmentation, and ad rotation features. Campaigns on Facebook can be segmented by gender, age, geography, or even likes and interests of audiences.

Entrepreneurship is getting younger – even in France ! I just learned that a 17-year-old French high school student, Andrés Talavera, is developing a TechCrunch mobile app for the Windows Phone 7 competition hosted by Microsoft France.

Andrés is going into his final year of high school in Strasbourg, France, where he’s currently specializing in information systems. Apparently, he’s been passionnate about everything Microsoft since the age of 14. As a Microsoft Student Partner since October 2009, he’s also been in the process of puting together his own startup, Crésus. The website, www.cresus.net, should go live on September 1st and the company will most likely be a service provider and distributor for various Microsoft products. Go figure.

The Web is dead, or at least in decline, declares Wired editor Chris Anderson in the magazine’s September cover story. The article is anchored by the startling infographic above, which shows the proportion of different types of traffic on the Internet. The Web, HTML traffic visible though a browser, is only about a quarter (23%) of the overall traffic, down from about half a decade ago. It’s been pushed down by peer-to-peer (23%), video (51%), and other types of apps which use the Internet for transport but are not browser-based. It’s not clear what exactly Wired is counting as video, but presumably it is not all of the Flash video on YouTube which is very much part of the Web.

Setting aside whether Wired massaged the numbers to make its chart look pretty, Anderson’s larger point is that increasingly we are consuming information via apps other than the browser. He writes:

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen).

That may be true for now, but don’t count the browser out just yet. These shifts happen in waves. First the browser took over everything, then developers wanted more options and moved to apps (desktop and mobile), but the browser will eventually absorb those features, and so the leapfrogging continues. The ubiquity of the browser overcomes most of its technical deficiencies. Even in mobile, people will become overwhelmed by apps and the browser will make a comeback.

Update: Wired had the wrong timeline on its initial graphic. I’ve replaced with a corrected version above. The data comes from Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, and as I suspected, YouTube videos are not included as part of the Web, they’ve confirmed with me, but rather are lumped into “video” with Skype video calls and Netflix streaming movies. I think that is misleading. Anything you can watch in a browser (like YouTube clips or Netflix movies) should be considered part of the Web, even if it is through a Flash player. The Skype video calls, however, I would count separately since those are watched and transmitted through a separate P2P desktop client. I am sure if you included all of the Web video as part of the Web traffic in the chart, the Web would not look like it is declining at all. That’s right, the Web lives!