ReadWriteWeb

Google Chrome released a new beta version today that takes the insurgent browser's instant and predictive features even further. The Instant Pages feature that pre-loads Web pages in the background as you search has been expanded to the omnibox, Chrome's combination address and search bar. If you're typing in a site you visit all the time, and the address auto-completes, Chrome will begin pre-rendering the page, reducing load time.

The new beta also improves Chrome's security against malware attacks. The Chrome team reports that malware attacks exploiting user-initiated processes are on the rise. The browser can now analyze executable files - such as ".exe" and ".msi" files - that you downloaded yourself. Chrome will warn users to delete suspicious files.

Worried about whether or not your favorite Web site is supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act? A new Chrome extension seeks to lift those fears.

After installing No SOPA, users get a warning message reading "SOPA Supporter! This company is a known supporter of the dangerous 'Stop Online Piracy Act'," every time they visit a SOPA-supporting Web site.

Google Chrome made a booboo, and now its own company is punishing it. Yesterday, the news broke that bloggers were being paid to use SEO spam tactics to boost the Google Chrome website's page ranking in search. Hundreds of paid articles, many of them totally incoherent, were used to promote Chrome. At least one of them violated Google's policy against paid links. As Google's search guru Matt Cutts wrote in 2009, "paid posts should not affect search engines."

So that was awkward. Fortunately for Google, the infraction could be blamed on Unruly Media, the third-party company Google hired to promote Chrome. Links from the paid posts were supposed to use the rel="nofollow" tag, so they wouldn't affect page rank. At least one blogger didn't, even though Unruly "advised" them to. In order for Google to get out of this mess, it would have to punish itself as it has done to others. Sure enough, Google says it will reduce Chrome's page rank.

Ahead of the Iowa Caucuses, Google has launched its U.S. elections hub. The site features news, calendars, maps and videos, as well as online tools campaigns, organizers and reporters can use. The Google Politics & Elections Google+ page will share the latest updates.

The Google.com/elections site's navigation allows browsing by candidate or issue. It also features a "Trends" browser, showing how candidates are doing in Google search, Google News mentions and YouTube views, and an 'On the Ground' viewer showing stories overlaid on a map.

Out with the old, in with the new. One of the “old” ways of thinking that finally kicked the bucket in 2011? That users could get a free ride on Web services with no catch. As Robert Heinlein famously said, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL). This realization isn’t new for some, but the realization should finally be kicking in for mainstream users as well.

The combination of Google’s housecleaning spree, relentless Facebook redesigns and privacy gaffes, and popular services being bought, being ruined or just going dark, users should be getting the hint: The free ride is over and the bill is due.

Final update: Three months after ReadWriteWeb first described these plans in detail, Google announces Google Circles as part of a larger social initiative. It is as we reported it.

We believe that Google will preview a major new social service called Google Circles at South by Southwest Interactive today. Update: Google has now officially denied that Circles will launch here, but not that it exists. See final update below, as of afternoon Texas time Google does now deny that Circles exists. If what we've heard is correct, the service will offer photo, video and status message sharing. Everything users share on Circles will be shared only with the most appropriate circle of social contacts in their lives, not with all your contacts in bulk. Circles may be shown off at an event co-hosted tonight by the ACLU, an organization focused on privacy and the liberties it affords. It may not be a big public launch yet, but it's clear that this is a major product in the works at the very least. Please see below the fold for what I hope will be the final update on this for now.

The service has been developed with extensive participation by Chris Messina, the co-creator of numerous successful social and software phenomena online, from BarCamp to Hashtags and much more. Messina declined to comment for this story. Jonathan Sposato, CEO of the photo editing service Piknik that Google acquired last year, is working on Circles as well. Sposato may be the only entrepreneur to have sold not one but two startups to Google - having founded Phatbits, a service that was acquired by Google in 2005 and became Google Gadgets. These are heavy hitting tech leaders and the service should be very interesting.

Chris Poole delivered the most powerful 10 minutes of Web philosophy of the afternoon at Web 2.0. The man formerly known as moot - founder of anonymous image sharing den 4chan and its new, better-lit cousin, Canvas, gave us a rousing and principled picture of what the big players get wrong about online identity.

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror," he said, "but in fact, we're more like diamonds." - multi-faceted. It was an appeal reminiscent of the one he gave at SXSW earlier this year, but it hit harder. Google Plus has since arrived, and Poole says it's even worse than Facebook for the future of online identity.

Since 1955, the North American Aerospace Defense Command has tracked Santa Claus like a Soviet missile. Back in the day, it was CONAD - the Continental Air Defense Command. When Canada joined the defense grid in 1958, offering access to Santa's Arctic airspace, it became NORAD. To this day, NORAD staff, family and friends volunteer to track this bogey across the Yuletide sky.

These days, NORAD and Google work together to track Santa. Now that the private sector is so good at tracking things, Google can let citizens track Santa Claus themselves. For the 2011 NORAD Santa exercise, anyone with a smartphone can search 'Santa' on Google Maps for mobile and get a Santa target lock in the palm of their hand.

Last week, Google released it's Zeitgeist 2011 report, offering insights into how the world searched. The top searches overall are predictable - Rebecca Black, iPhone 5, Casey Anthony - but drilling down into specific categories reveals some pertinent trends in what interested Web searchers this year.

Sentiment analysis firm General Sentiment looked at some of these trends through a different lens. Using over 60 million sources across the Web, General Sentiment analyzed how Web users felt about these top terms. It produced side-by-side comparisons of how popular a term was on Google versus how often it was mentioned on the Web overall. It also noted how positive or negative overall sentiment was. Google searches are clearly not the only judge of a topic's importance on the Web.

Google Books has had trouble on the content side. Google's approach has been too gung-ho, trying to "digitize the world's books" before publishers were ready for it. It also doesn't have the hardware reach that Amazon and Apple have. The only Android tablets taking off are the ones custom-built by Amazon and Barnes & Noble, who obviously prefer their own book businesses.

But Google's game is information. That's how Google Books is positioned - not as a content business or a hardware business, but as an information business. Google wants knowledge to be accessible. The Kindle service might be the best integrated with devices, and iBooks might look great on the demo floor of an Apple Store. But as a set of features for an e-book service, I'm rooting for Google Books.