ReadWriteWeb

Since Google Wave's launch, we've seen a slew of real-time, short-form collaboration tools.

From massively multiplayer Q&A app Quora to invite-only, group-scrapbooking tool TwitAlbums to developer-centric, code-coaching resource Squad, the web is rife with sites focused on making groups more communicative and more efficient. Teambox has popped up on our radar as "a Twitter-like project collaboration tool," and it fits right in with this trend.

As you probably know, Haiti was struck by a devastating earthquake last night. According to the latest estimates, over 100,000 people may have died and large parts of the island's infrastructure have been destroyed.

Here is a short list of things you can do right now to get help to Haiti. Just watch out for unsolicited emails. Quite a few scammers and spammers are trying to profit from this catastrophe and have set up fake donation sites and are running phishing scams.

More sources are now claiming the Chinese government is behind the recent cyberattacks against Google and 33 other Silicon Valley companies, reports security firm Verisign iDefense. The attacks, revealed yesterday via a posting on Google's official blog, were hacking attempts on the technology infrastructure of Google and other major corporations in sectors that included finance, technology, media and chemical, said Dave Girouard, president of Google Enterprise.

Although Google's politely-worded blog post doesn't come out and directly blame the Chinese government for these attacks, many have suspected that is the case, including, apparently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Now even more sources are coming out to confirm the Chinese government's involvement. According to Verisign, their sources within the defense-contracting and intelligence-consulting communities also believe "agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof" are to blame for these recent attacks.

According to Mplayit CEO Michael Powers, the size of a mobile platform's app store is now mostly irrelevant. Facebook-based mobile app store Mplayit took a close look at the most popular apps for Android, BlackBerry and the iPhone and found that the most popular apps on all three platforms tend to be very similar. As the popular app stores continue to grow, users on all the major platforms also drift towards the same known brands and hits like EverNote and Pandora.

Whatever Google's reason for threatening to leave China, the latest numbers from StatCounter, a free online stat service, show that it certainly isn't for lack of opportunity. Google has been steadily gaining ground on China's premier search service, Baidu, since last August.

The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation announced today the availability of its Real Time Congress iPhone app. The app displays an up-to-the-minute feed of updates from the House and Senate floors, Whip notices, hearings scheduled and key government documents as they are released.

Unfortunately all this information is displayed quite simply; there is as of yet no deep personalization as in Sunlight's years-old and fabulous OpenCongress project, there's no search and the app doesn't make use of the iPhone's push capabilities. It's not a bad start, but there is a lot of potential for an iPhone app to make Congressional activity a much more engaging part of peoples' day-to-day lives.

Just one week after Google launched the Nexus One, its entry into the smartphone field, the numbers are in and it doesn't look to be keeping up with the competition. We reviewed the iPhone-competitor the other day and see it as a formidable challenger, but sales numbers from its first week fall drastically short of those same numbers for other smartphones during their first week, according to statistics from mobile analytics firm Flurry.

Google has announced that Gmail will now operate using HTTPS, a secure connection between a browser and a server, by default. Previously, users could turn on HTTPS connections as the default in their settings, but the situation has now been reversed.

Google said that after taking a look at the trade-off between speed and security - the primary concern in this case - they decided that it was worth it to the end-user to automatically use a secure connection.

We began our Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things series yesterday with a look at barcode scanning. We wrote that smartphones are increasingly being deployed as readers for barcodes - in particular via apps available on iPhone and Android. These applications, such as RedLaser on iPhone and ShopSavvy on Android, allow you to scan a barcode on a product or object and get more information about it.

We noted however that RFID tags are more functional and flexible than barcodes. While barcodes are cheaper and getting traction in the U.S. with the QR format, the potential for RFID tags is even greater. Apple knows this and if rumors are to believed, RFID will be integrated into the iPhone 4G later this year.

As some of our readers know, I was clumsy enough to hack off a chunk of my finger while making dinner a couple nights ago. This incident has severely curtailed my blogging activity, but it's led to a fortunate inspiration, as well!

For those of you who are differently-abled - temporarily or otherwise - or for those of you who are simply too lazy to type, here are a handful of resources for hands-free Internet use, from blog posting to Twitter updates to straight-up voice-to-text transcription services. I hope you find these apps as useful as I have.