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After being saturated with blog posts from every blogger, tech pundit and average Joe about Apple's newest entry into the tablet PC game, the iPad, we finally decided to seek out the opinions of those who know best (well, sometimes, that is): the tech analysts. Numerous sites have quoted from this analyst or that and a few have even done round-ups of their own, but we never found a comprehensive resource providing all the analyst opinions in one post. So we made our own.

A friend recently admitted a favorite past time of his - watching plane crashes on YouTube. Planes crashing, helicopters twirling out of control, boats sinking - all are fair game. For a lot of people, this has been the story of the iPad over the past few days. While some of us take the higher ground, others revel in off-color jokes and nitpicking the different ways the iPad will be Apple's biggest mistake ever.

TweetFeel, a sentiment analysis tool that uses tweets as its data set, offers us a snapshot of this darker side of the iPad.

With yesterday's reveal of the iPad now past, we can finally put myth and speculation behind us and focus on the reality that is Apple's entry into the tablet PC business. Whether the iPad is revolutionary or evolutionary is still hotly debated, but what we do know is that the computer, despite its elegance and blazing fast speed, is a decidedly first-generation device. Although one day after the product's announcement may be too soon to discuss what's coming in the next version of the iPad, we've already come across several reasons to wait... and some of those reasons are hidden away in the new iPad SDK (software development kit) itself.

UPDATE, March 2, 2011. Version 2 of the iPad arrived just over 13 months after we published this post. Click here to check it out: All the Details on Apple's iPad 2: Specs, Pricing, Release Date

Whether we're tweeting the minutiae of our daily lives from our cell phones, checking out the latest band pages on Myspace, chatting with friends on Facebook, looking up old high school buddies on Classmates or networking with colleagues on LinkedIn, we're spending more and more time on social networking sites than ever before. Leading the pack, of course, are the usual suspects: Facebook and Twitter.

As a matter of fact, according to Nielsen, we're spending 82% more time on social networking sites than we did just a year earlier.

It's the morning after the big Chrome OS event where Google executives and engineers revealed a myriad of details about the company's first attempt at creating their own operating system. The highly anticipated news conference was tracked all over the web, liveblogged by technology sites, and Twittered so much that it's still listed as a "trending topic" as of this morning.

But now that the news is out, has Chrome OS lost its shine? People had high expectations for Google's new operating system but the end result doesn't look like the revolutionary, "change the world" product many had hoped for.

The problem with most analytics platforms is that we can't see the forest for the trees. Instead of looking for daily spikes in a traffic rating, it's more important for us to know what trends are spiking over time. From there we can make decisions to improve our businesses. In an effort to make a more useful analytics dashboard, the makers of database tool Dabble DB created Trendly.

Research firm Gartner has just put out a list of the top ten mobile applications of the future. Well, not the distant future, but the far off year of 2012. Nothing on the list is all that surprising or, in many cases, even all that new. Instead, the list includes the sorts of technologies that are just now coming into their own and haven't yet seen widespread adoption as well as the already common technologies that are still experiencing growth.

Yesterday, amid all the news of Twitter's arrival into both Microsoft's Bing and the Google search engine, another major announcement was being made. MySpace is giving up on trying to be a major social network. According to MySpace CEO, Owen Van Natta, Facebook is no longer their competition. "We're focused on a different space," he says.

That "different space," as it turns out, is music...and it really isn't all that different, especially considering MySpace's roots. If anything, this major overhaul of the social network is an attempt to return the site to becoming the popular entertainment hub it once was.

Google Website Optimizer, a powerful tool that allows website owners to split traffic and test the effectiveness and conversion rates for an array of variables, has traditionally required a lot of back-and-forth between any given site and the Website Optimizer interface.

With the release of a new API, announced today, Google is allowing site owners to conduct multivariate and A/B testing from their own platforms. Part of Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer (GWO) is a free tool that "handles splitting a website's traffic, serving different variations and crunching the numbers to find statistical significance." For site owners, these minute variations can widen conversion funnels and lead to exponentially greater engagement and profit if changes are executed correctly.

ContextSense is a newly launched sentiment extraction technology from Wingify, a company focused on website optimization solutions. As a part of their core product which helps website owners identify visitor demographics and behavior, target ads, and optimize landing pages, ContextSense demonstrates how Wingify's contextual targeting technology works. To use the tool, you simply enter in a URL or a piece of text, and it will then reveal the overall sentiment of the website (positive or negative), relevant tags, concepts, categories, and contextually similar links. The end result is a quick glimpse into what a site is all about.