“The move marks a major step towards solving app discoverability in the desktop browser. The feature will be rolled out to all members of the Conduit network over the next few weeks,” a spokesperson for Conduit tells WebProNews. “For example, when searching for ‘Groupon app,’ Bing returns organic and sponsored links to the Groupon site, as well as the official Groupon App powered by Conduit. Results will appear based on relevancy.”

Conduit entered a partnership with Microsoft back in December. As a result, Conduit publishers can provide their customers direct access to Bing. Now, the deal appears to be more beneficial to Conduit app publishers as well.

“Our relationship with Microsoft has enabled our publishers to offer an even greater experience to their customers and will add more fuel to the already impressive growth of Conduit’s massive network,” said Conduit President Adam Boyden. “The inclusion of Conduit-powered apps in Bing not only represents a step forward in app discoverability, but also an opportunity for any publisher who monetizes via content, traffic or engaging their users.”

“The inclusion of Conduit-powered apps in Bing search results is one more way that we are providing people with information to help make their everyday lives easier,” said Chris Nelson, Sr. Director, Strategic Partnerships for Bing.

Yesterday, Bing announced some new Action Buttons in search results, which allow users to take part in specific tasks on sites right from the search results page. This includes things like downloading software, renting a car, and checking a flight status.

“Nine months ago, we launched the Chrome Web Store in the United States,” says product manager Rahul Roy-Chowdhury. “Since then, the store has gained a lot of momentum and is now home to an ever increasing selection of apps, extensions and themes.”

The new countries are:

• Argentina
• Austria
• Belgium
• Brazil
• Czech Republic
• Denmark
• Finland, France
• Germany
• Hong Kong
• India
• Israel
• Italy
• Japan
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Poland
• Portugal
• Russia
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• United Kingdom

“If you are based in these initial 24 countries, you’ll find it much easier to discover and add new apps, extensions, and themes to Chrome, across a variety of categories—from games to news to productivity tools,” says Roy-Chowdhury. “In most countries, for apps that require a fee, you’ll now be able to complete the entire transaction in your local currency. Starting today, you’ll also be able to access a range of new applications from international developers and publishers.”

The company is working with Mozilla to unify this along with a similar project it is working on. The goal is to create a single API. Mozilla released the OpenWebApps add-on for Firefox about a month ago. It’s all about linking apps together.

“For example, if you use Flickr to share photos, then the Flickr Web App should let you easily share and integrate your Flickr photos with other Web Apps,” said Ben Adida, Tech Lead for Identity at Mozilla. “If you use Twitter to share links with your friends, then other Web Apps should allow you to easily share via Twitter.”

The Web Intents, which Google speaks of, is described as a framework for client-side service discovery and inter-application communication. “Services register their intention to be able to handle an action on the user’s behalf,” explains WebIntents.org. “Applications request to start an Action of a certain verb (share, edit, view, pick etc) and the system will find the appropriate Services for the user to use based on the user’s preference.”

Google software engineer James Hawkins explains, “In today’s browser ecosystem, web apps are completely disconnected or require the use of complicated APIs in order to make use of a third-party service, e.g., posting a comment to Twitter from your custom publishing domain. What if we could give sites the ability to leverage these services without any knowledge of the chosen service, except that it provides some set of predefined functionality?”

“Android OS addresses this problem with Intents, a facility for late run-time binding between components in the same or different applications,” he continues. “In the Intents system, the client application requests a generic action, e.g. share, and specifies the data to pass to the selected service application. The user is given a list of applications which have registered that they can handle the requested intent. The user-selected application is created in a new context and passed the data sent from the client, the format of which is predefined for each specific intent type.”

He says the API will provide the same benefits of Android Intents, but better suited for web apps. Suffice it to say that web apps should be getting more interesting and useful.

This should help Google’s Chrome Web Store and Chrome OS.

It’s good news because the old twitter.com mobile site was a bit clunky. For example, in order to access search or to get to your own profile, you had to scroll down to the bottom of your timeline.

Twitter promises that the new web app is better, faster, stronger -

The app is fast – you can quickly scroll through your timeline, move between tabs and compose Tweets. It’s rich – it takes advantage of capabilities that high-end device browsers offer, such as touch gestures and a large screen. And it’s simple – it’s easy-to-use and has the features you’d expect from a Twitter application, including your timeline, @mentions, messages that you can read in conversation view, search, trending topics, lists, and more.

The redesign looks strikingly similar to the official Twitter app for iPhone, just inverted. The toolbar with links to the timeline, @mentions, messages, search and profile has been moved to the top of the screen.

The new web app is rolling out for some users today on iPhone and Android. Many will have to wait as they will launch it for everyone in the next couple of weeks. If you are a twitter.com user on your smartphone and are unlucky enough not to have the new app yet, Twitter would like to remind you that you can still use the existing version of twitter.com (duh).

Of course web apps do not need to be downloaded through the Apple app store, where Apple garners 30% of every app sold.  Herein lies the crux of some mobile web app developers’ arguments for sabotage.  The Register quotes one such anonymous web app developer who says, “Apple is basically using subtle defects to make web apps appear to be low quality – even when they claim HTML5 is a fully supported platform.”

What are these purported defects?  Well, it is a three-tiered problem.  First, the iOS 4.3 Safari browser runs on what is called the Nitro Java-Script engine.  This high-speed engine is not used when home screen web apps are launched.  Second, these web apps cannot use the HTML 5 application cache like official Apple apps can.  This means they cannot be used without an internet connection.  Lastly, they are not rendered with Apple’s new asynchronous mode, but with the older synchronous mode.  This lowers the quality of the web apps.

The Register quotes mobile app developer Alex Kessinger: “If it is conspiracy, it makes a lot of sense for Apple. If you ‘disallow’ home screen web apps, you prevent people, in a way, from bypassing the App Store.”

The conspiracy theory is not universally accepted, however.  Dissenters say that Apple has absolutely no incentives for any app to run poorly.  Dan Frommer at BusinessInsider reminds us that “Apple makes the vast majority of its iPhone revenue and profit from selling iPhones, not from selling apps. Therefore, Apple’s best interest is making web apps fly, not slowing them down in any way. That’s how Apple can sell more iPhones, and that is its main objective.”

If the problem does in fact exist, some say that it is a simple bug, and will be fixed.  Obviously, some believe in more sinister motivations.

Rackspace considers the move a way to better position itself in Silicon Valley, as Cloudkick was originally funded by Y Combinator, and its headquarters is in San Francisco, "making Cloudkick’s headquarters the latest outpost for delivering Fanatical Support and innovation in cloud computing," a representative for Rackspace tells WebProNews.

"Cloudkick serves more than 1,500 businesses from Fortune 500 enterprises to nimble startups — and has seen more than 1 million servers pass through its tools," she says. "Through this acquisition, Rackspace will deliver even better support through superior management tools that will be available directly to customers and also to the Rackers who serve them."

"Until now, the cloud has been about automating hardware and making it more agile and efficient," explains Rackspace Chief Strategy Officer Lew Moorman. "But as cloud computing has made it easier to launch servers, companies launch a lot more of them, and use many of them inefficiently — and even lose track of some.  Cloudkick brings order to that chaos and sprawl. It takes cloud computing to a new level: into automation of the work of system administrators. In addition to providing robust cloud health information, Cloudkick enables automation around deployment and scaling.  It makes cloud computing more powerful, with less expense."

Cloudkick, which launched two years ago has been working with Mozilla, Vimeo, ProPublica and National Instruments, and is a member of the OpenStack community, the open source cloud project founded by Rackspace itself. 

Financial terms of the acquisition have not been revealed.

A developer preview was made available in August, so developers could upload apps and experiment with packaging, installing, and integrating payments into them. Now the rest of us get to see the fruits of this project.

In September, it was revealed that any developers who wanted to use Chrome Web Store Payments would be required to have Google Checkout accounts, so the store may provide a huge boost for Google’s payments platform.

Google will start featuring the store prominently in the new tab page in Chrome. The goal, the company says, is to make sure developers can reach users of their apps more than they can with any other app store.

The store is rolling out today at chrome.google.com/webstore. It features 500 apps right off the bat, and that will no doubt grow quickly. Stay tuned for more on Chrome OS – Google’s new operating system.

It’s interesting because it aims to match apps to businesses based on their profile information. RackSpace tells WebProNews it will will "revolutionize business apps".

Rackspace says it aims to do for business applications what online matchmaking sites do for singles – "transforming the process of finding that perfect application match through automation and sophisticated targeting."

"Going through app stores online has been frustrating and time consuming to sort through app after app that isn’t even relevant just to find the one that is," a spokesperson tells us. "AppMatcher is about to change all that by taking the winning formula for another industry to the business app world."

Users answer four questions about their company size, industry, department and title, then AppMatcher identifies apps it thinks best meet the user’s specs, often including several that the user may not have known existed. There is a feature called AppMatcher Locker, which lets users organize and review all of their apps, and introduce apps to others in different departments within their organization. 

Users can connect their lockers with co-workers turning the feature into "an online collaboration environment where the reviews and opinions of all application subscribers at the users’ firm are centrally located," the company explains. As new apps match a user’s profile, they will appear in their locker as a suggested app. 

If you’re wondering what kind of social media integration AppMatcher has, Andy Schroepfer, VP of Enterprise Strategy for Rackspace tells us, "The site will immediately have links and ties into feeds out to twitter and Facebook. These will only get more deep and more prevalent over time."

"For example, when you find a matching app on AppMatcher, it can be posted to your twitter or Facebook feed similar to the way Farmville activities are published," he adds. 

That could certainly be useful for exposing useful apps to employees and co-workers. We’re wondering if social media profile information will one day be integrated into the matching process itself. We didn’t really get an answer one way or the other about that, but it didn’t appear to be ruled out. 

With the rate of new available business apps increasing rapidly, Rackspace may be onto something here.

The company has announced that its network has grown to over 250,000 app publishers & 170 million users, with adoption of apps by end-users increasing 233% between last July and last month.

"While most of the buzz in the media is about mobile apps, the reality of the situation is that 118 million more people use Conduit-powered apps than iPhone and Droid apps combined," says Conduit president Adam Boyden. "In fact, the Conduit Network of app publishers and users is so large that we are able to identify unique trends about web app usage."

Some of these trends? According to Conduit:

- 60 million end users consume apps from the Conduit App Marketplace every day.

- Since August of 2009, the number of web publishers that have more than one million users has grown from 1 to more than 40

- Over 8 million people got the Coke Zero-Avatar App last December in the first 10 days after launch. After the success of that app, digital agency Mediatronica built another and the recently launched Coke Zero SWAT App, already has 2.5 million users.

- The Pitsi mini-game app generated more than 66 million engagements during the first 10 weeks of 2010.

"Conduit is doing for web apps, what iPhone did for mobile apps and in a bigger market – the browser," says Boyden.

"The last year has been phenomenal for Conduit not only because we have worked with some of the best brands in the world, but also, more importantly because we have leveled the playing field for small publishers and developers to give them exposure and distribution comparable to huge companies," he adds.

According to Conduit, entertainment apps are the largest segment (no surprise there), but news apps and social media apps are also quite popular. In fact, the social media category has been the fastest growing one of the past year.

The app network serves apps with content from brands like Amazon, Coke Zero, eBay, Facebook, Fox News, Hulu, Skype, YouTube, and Zynga, to name a few.

The reason Mozilla says it decided to start this directory is simply because there isn’t one like it. "There’s no central index of these tools," the company says in a blog post.

"As we’ve explored different tools we could create here as part of the Developer Tools Lab, we’ve come to the opinion that in addition to creating new tools, one of the best things we could do is help developers understand the broad universe of tools that already exist and expose some of the fantastic and amazing work that’s being done," says Mozilla’s Ben Galbraith of the Developer Tools Team.

With the Open Web Tools Directory, you can search through the following categories:

- Design
- Code
- Debug
- Test
- Deploy
- Docs

To view the directory, a modern browser with canvas is required. Galbraith suggests Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 2, or Opera 9.

Of course to truly build a comprehensive directory of open web tools, Mozilla needs help from developers, and is calling for submissions. Submissions will be reviewed on a regular basis. They will not go live immediately.

The directory is clearly a work in progress, not just in terms of its contents, but also interface. Mozilla says it is working to add social elements that will allow users to comment and vote on the tools they like best. They are also working on a more accessible version that does not require a browser with canvas support.