Microsoft announced the Bing Toolbox today, which is a new portal for webmasters, publishers, developers, and advertisers. Basically it is a resource for finding useful Bing-related tools. Here’s the official description:

The Toolbox is an organized set of tools for the entire Bing community. It’s a one-stop portal to all of the services you need to drive traffic and increase engagement with your site and applications.

As you may have read about by now, Google’s Matt Cutts participated in a fairly lengthy Q&A session at SMX Advanced in Seattle. One interesting question that Matt got was about how webmasters should deal with display:none and AJAX without being penalized by Google.

Cutts recommends making sure that whenever you write your own mouseover code that you don’t roll your own custom solution, which he says might do some really weird things that nobody else has done before.

Today Adobe announced the launch of some new beta releases for the Adobe Flash Platform. These are Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder), Flash Catalyst and the open source Flex 4 framework SDK.

Aside from announcing its new collaboration platform Google Wave today, Google has also introduced a set of real-time gadget APIs. These APIs allow Google gadgets hosted in different users’ browsers to communicate with each other.

Earlier today, a report pointed out that the revenue generated by Facebook apps is about equal to what the social networking site itself pulls in.  Both businesspeople and ordinary users may be interested to know, then, that 25 Facebook apps and Connect sites have been named fbFund 2009 finalists. 

Facebook is getting ready to open its stream up to third-party developers, which will allow for a ton of new Facebook-related applications, that won’t have to be used from within Facebook. According to the Wall Street Journal, developers will be able to access photos, videos, notes, and comments from the Facebook Stream with users’ permission.

Twitter recently released a product called "Sign in with Twitter," which is basically the social network’s answer to Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, etc.

It’s based on OAuth, but there’s a security problem with OAuth. In fact, Twitter and Yahoo have both disabled OAuth support temporarily. Biz Stone talks a little bit about it on the official Twitter Blog:

Although the popularity of some Facebook apps has been shaken up since the redesign, allowing for others to emerge, Facebook apps in general are still booming.

Google Update, which is now being referred to as Omaha, is a program that installs requested software and keeps it up to date. It comes with Google products like Google Chrome and Google Earth for Windows.

Some VIP-ish individuals and application developers are about to become a lot more popular.  In what seems like a pair of noncommercial moves, Facebook and MySpace are starting to direct users towards various profiles and apps. 

Yahoo Search BOSS just got a little more interesting.  Developers who want to build their own search services should now be able to play with three fresh tools related to personalized Delicious content, language filters, and news stories’ dates.

eBay has announced it is beta testing its subscription-based Selling Manager service platform that allows third party developers to embed their applications at My eBay where professional sellers manage their business.

The platform is used by 270,000 online sellers in the U.S. to manage their business. eBay says it will no longer charge for its Selling Manager service in an effort to attract third-party developers.

Update: More from the press release, which has since come out:

Documentation, example applications and code are now available at http://www.adobe.com/go/facebook for developers to get started building rich applications with Adobe Flash and Flex software, and Facebook Platform.

Google has begun implementing Portable Contacts, an open standard that aims to make it easier to access your contacts in a secure way when sites ask you to invite friends when you sign up.

Developers who specialize in mobile phone applications got a little heads up today from Microsoft.  The corporation released some potentially appetite-whetting details about the upcoming Windows Marketplace for Mobile. 

Facebook has launched the ability to let users chat within applications on Facebook. This keeps applications within the social network even more social.

If a developer uses the new fb:chat-invite FBML tag, they can display a list of users’ online friends and let them invite their friends to chat. Developers can also give users the freedom to choose which friends they want to appear in their chat lists within the apps.

In a Google support forum for the Android market, a user asked, "Does anyone know why Shazam and Calorie Counter are no longer available in the Android Market?"

"If you’re using an unlocked, developer phone, you’ll be unable to view any copy-protected application, including Shazam and Calorie Counter. This is a change that was made recently," responded Google Employee Ash.

Take it from a car guy: the people who are willing to spend time with you in a garage are some of the finest individuals you’ll ever know.  And so it seems Facebook has a new BFF, as Intel will sponsor some Facebook Developer Garages this year. 

Google announced pricing for the Google App Engine on Tuesday. It was released last April as a free service, but apps were limited to fixed resource usage quotas. There are still free quotas, but the following prices have been set up for going further:

YouTube has made helping users a priority lately. This tradition continues with a couple of announcements.

Users Helping Users

Get ready for Android to become a lot more popular with developers.  In a move that may have several other interesting ramifications, as well, Android Market has finally made room for applications that aren’t free.