ReadWriteWeb

Three months after being promised the feature at Google I/O, owners of Google's Chromebook netbook can now stream movies and television shows from Netflix.

The Samsung Series 5, Acer AC700 and CR-48 Chromebooks can access Netflix, according to a Google Plus post by Chrome OS Community Manager Melissa Daniels.

Just in the nick of time, the Google Books Ngram Viewer has graduated from Google Labs to become a full-fledged part of Google Books. The Ngram Viewer allows users to see how often a word or phrase has been used in books across history. Google Books contains millions of books dating back to the year 1400; "over 10% of all books ever published," according to the Ngram Viewer announcement.

Last month, Google announced that Google Labs, which allowed Google developers and users to "field test" experimental Web projects, will be phased out. Many Labs experiments will be sidelined, but the Ngram Viewer made it.

Facebook is evolving its mobile messaging system. The company announced this afternoon a new mobile application called Messenger that stands alone from its original platform app. It will be available for Android and iOS and is a dynamic shift away from how Facebook has approached its mobile products, keeping everything within its dedicated platform app. Facebook is now stepping into the territory of Talk for Android and BlackBerry Messenger and is getting closer to having a true unified communications platform.

Messenger is fairly simple. If you have used BlackBerry Messenger before then you should be able to understand Facebook's newest offering (without the confusing PIN system of BlackBerry). Messenger can also do group chat, which puts it in competition with the Google Plus Huddle function in its mobile app on iOS and Android. What do you think of Facebook's new Messenger initiative? Is it something you plan on using?

Kindle Profiles is a social service that was quietly launched by Amazon in March of this year. Its existence was little known, probably because it wasn't very useful as a social tool until Amazon recently added connections to Twitter and Facebook. I myself only discovered the service after VC Fred Wilson blogged about it the over the weekend. Kindle Profiles appears to be gaining some early traction now, thanks largely to Kindle Profile users auto-following people in their Twitter and Facebook networks. As Wired pointed out, this is a somewhat dodgy tactic, because the user cannot turn off this auto-follow behavior.

Regardless, what's of most interest to me is how Amazon is actively trialing a social reading service connected to the Kindle brand. While Amazon owns the social reading service Shelfari, which it acquired three years ago, it hasn't integrated Shelfari in a deep way into Kindle. In this post, we review the features of Kindle Profiles and ask whether you'd want to use this over competing services like Goodreads or Library Thing.

Digg, the social news site that was once the darling of tech-loving web users everywhere, has faced a rapid decline in interest as the rest of the Web grew up and it remained relatively slow and impersonal.

Today the site added a big new feature it thinks could help: a highly customizable, real time Newswire. Want to see the freshest videos about technology that have been validated enough to get 10 or more Diggs but aren't so popular that they've been dugg more than 50 times? Text posts about business with more than 50 Diggs? Those kinds of views are now easy to set up and read in real time. That's just one of several several big new features that went live on the site this morning.

Facebook announced two new safety features for its mobile platforms today intended to make interacting with the platform easier and more secure. Facebook is bringing its "social reporting" feature to mobile browsers as well as mobile password reset. As 250 million users interact with Facebook through mobile devices, look for more features that started on the Web to make their way to smartphones and tablets.

Social reporting was rolled out by Facebook in March. It is designed to let users alert members of the community and Facebook itself when they see content they do not like. No, that does not mean a "Dislike" button, but rather a way for Facebook to let its users police the ecosystem.

The endlessly-hyped music streaming service Spotify has only been live in the United States for less than four weeks, but is already boasting 1.4 million American users, according to AllThingsD.

About 175,000 of those users are paying for the service, which is a conversion rate of 12.5%. There was no word on the break-down of those paid subcriptions between Spotify's $4.99 unlimited Web streaming plan and its $9.99 premium plan, which includes mobile access.

Get Ready for a Twitter vs. Google Plus Fight for Developer Love

Like to hack on Twitter feeds, streams and APIs? Then there's good news for you this morning. Twitter has acquired a small startup company called Bagcheck, but the real score in the deal was bringing co-founder Sam Pullara onto the team. Pullara was previously the Chief Technologist at Yahoo where he lead many of the best programs at that beleaguered but technically awesome company.

Yahoo Pipes, Yahoo Query Language, Yahoo Search BOSS and other inspiring technologies that enabled hackers all around the web to roll out sophisticated mashups powered by Yahoo's backend were championed for years by Pullara. Not everyone liked him, but people who love to experiment with data have got to be excited about his coming to Twitter, the world's most promising stream of publicly available, semi-structured, real-time social data. Twitter's relationship with developers has been troubled at times, but Pullara's joining the team is the latest step the company has taken to make amends with its developer ecosystem.

New data from Searchmetrics indicate that Google is making precise adjustments to their search result algorithms that, at least in some cases, help drive traffic to Google's own Web properties. There's not enough evidence to imply causation, but the noticeable increases in video and image results, both of which are dominated by Google properties, would fit with a pattern of accusations that Google's search results favor its own sites.

The data show sharp increases in the number of image and video results, with video now returning for 60% or more of all searches. The number 1 sites for video and image results are YouTube and Blogger respectively, both of which are Google properties. Google also dominates maps and shopping results.

House committee sees spying bill pass. The House Judiciary Committee passed a bill through to the House that would mandate American Internet providers retain their users' information for 12 months, according to EFF. H.R. 1821 would require ISPs to keep "personal information that could be used to identify what Web sites you visit and what content you post online."

This bill was opposed by politicians from both parties, as well as 30 privacy groups. That didn't stop the Judiciary committee from voting for it, 19 to 10. See ReadWriteWeb's coverage of the bill in terms of its possible violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.