ReadWriteWeb

Facebook announced this morning that it will welcome its 200 millionth user today. That's a whole lot of people. Just three months ago the company announced it was starting the year out with 150 million users. That kind of growth could make a person's brain hurt. People want to connect with each other and Facebook is clearly a very compelling way to do that these days.

Just how hot is it though? For context, we looked up some other activities and offer below a list of things that are less popular these days than being a registered user at Facebook. Bowling, for example, appears to be headed the way of MySpace - there are now twice as many Facebook users as there are people who play ten pin bowling around the world.

Freely moving from one service to the next is clearly part of the nature of the Internet today. On Twitter, Twhirl was the de-facto standard desktop client just a few short months ago, but now, TweetDeck has taken this position. The last version of TweetDeck, however, had some serious memory leaks, which led a lot of users to look for alternatives. Now, in its latest version, TweetDeck has rectified this problem. In addition, TweetDeck has also  brought support for Facebook messaging to the stable version of its application, as well as a number of smaller updates.

This new version comes just in time, as Seesmic, the company behind Twhirl, unveiled its TweetDeck inspired Seesmic Desktop yesterday.

Since Google introduced "Gmail Labs" to the users of their popular, web-based email application, they've been adding new features constantly, all of which you can enable or disable with the click of a button. Some of those Labs features are "gadgets" - aka small widgets that you can add to your Gmail sidebar. A few of the top gadgets in Labs include things like Tasks, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. But did you know that there are a ton of other gadgets you can add, too? It's true, but you won't find them in Labs - you have to add them yourself by URL.

Tweecious is a new Firefox plugin that automates the conversion of Twitter links to Delicious bookmarks. Once installed, the plugin checks to make sure you're logged into both services and then parses your tweets in order to post the links you tweet to your Delicious account. What's great about this particular add-on is not only how well it works, but that it doesn't require your passwords in order to do so.

In 2006, this this video about BumpTop became a hit on YouTube. The video showed a physics driven 3D desktop environment with an innovative menu system. Today, a bit more than two and a half years later, after numerous closed alpha and beta versions, and after adding a number of cool features, BumpTop's developer Anand Agarawala and his team are finally ready to open up BumpTop to everybody (Windows only for now). BumpTop will come in two versions: a free, somewhat restricted version, and a fully-featured 'pro' version.

BumpTop has given us 200 free pro versions to give away to our readers. You can find details about how to claim yours at the end of this post.

Google announced a new and improved Gmail web site specifically for mobile browsers that supports the latest Web standards, namely the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android platforms. Speed and responsiveness are improved, especially in bad or non-existent network situations. Thanks to aggressive caching, opening recently read messages and composing new email will still work fine.

iPhone and iPod Touch devices have to be upgraded to firmware version 2.2.1 to get the new code, but all Android phones will benefit immediately. The service leverages such technologies as HTML5 and Gears to work its magic.

PostRank today announced a new feature to its website called the Discovery Engine. This leverages the power of its existing automatic ranking algorithms to recommend new information sources to visitors. Along with this new tool comes a completely revamped web page layout that focuses more on the user experience on the site.

This morning my home wifi was having trouble and I posted a message to Twitter saying, "My wife has decided to start the day with a call to Comcast customer service, I should have offered to poke her in the eye with a spoon. Would have been more fun for her." Within minutes a man named Bill (@ComcastBill, really) publicly replied to ask if he could help.

I didn't think much of it, I assumed he was camped on a search.twitter results page for the word "Comcast" or maybe had subscribed to an RSS feed for the search. It turns out though, that far more than that was happening behind the scenes. An extensive machinery of tracking, delegation and analysis stood between Bill and my little Tweet. Maybe it has to be that way, maybe it's a good thing - but there's something deeply disturbing about it too.

Information Architect firm iA is at the final stages of its latest 'Web Trend Map', an annual visualization that shows prominent Internet trends, products, companies and people.

This year ReadWriteWeb gets a spot in the map, which we're all very proud of here in the RWW virtual office. You can see a full blow up of the image on Flickr and a zoomable version on zoomorama.com.

As of this moment, Yahoo! has no less than 4 iPhone-native applications in the iTunes app store. The latest is Yahoo! Messenger, which already was spotted on the original Yahoo iPhone application (our review here) as well as their mobile-optimized web site. This latest offering, though, is much more of a fully featured IM client for the Yahoo service.