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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.

Thanksgiving is generally a horrible day for air travel, but tradition and the sweet smell of Thanksgiving turkey still makes millions of Americans forget the potential horror of being stuck in an airport. If you are one of them, or even if you are just heading to the airport to pick somebody up, here are some mobile applications and web sites than can help you make your Thanksgiving travel less stressful.

Apple today announced that a total of 2 billion apps have now been downloaded from the App Store. There are now over 85,000 apps in the store, up from 65,000 on July 14, and the number of developers has grown from 100,000 in July to around 125,000 today. iPhone and iPod touch users now download close to 6.6 million apps every day and this number continues to grow.

Facebook used Nokia World, the mobile conference taking place now in Stuttgart Germany, to make a major announcement about the expansion of their Facebook Connect platform. According to Henri Moissinac, head of Facebook's mobile operations, the company is launching a new program called "Facebook Connect For Mobile Web." The Connect platform, which originally launched in 2008, is already available for traditional websites as well as Apple's iPhone. With this update, it can now exist for any mobile platform, too.

Producteev is a very well-designed online task management and collaboration service for individuals and small groups. Producteev started out as a task management system, but today, the company is adding a number of interesting collaboration features as well. If Producteev only offered yet anther task management service, this wouldn't be a very exciting product (how many online task managers do we really need, after all?). What makes Producteev stand out is that it is nicely integrated with Twitter, Facebook, and a large number of online productivity apps. The company also offers mobile apps for virtually every popular platform. We are giving away 10 pro accounts for Producteev. Read on to find out how you can get yours.

AdMob just released some data about how iPhone users discover new apps in the App Store and how they use them once they have downloaded them. According to AdMob, most users download apps from the App Store directly from their phones. Only 7% go through iTunes to download apps. To find new apps, 62% of all respondents searched for a specific app and 60% looked through the lists of top selling apps in the store. AdMob also found that the majority of users (62%) install between 1 and 6 new apps per month and 22% of all iPhone users download more than 11 apps per month.

By the end of this year, Apple's App Store will carry more than 100,000 apps. According to Flurry, which specializes in providing real-time analytics to mobile app developers on the iPhone, Android, JavaME, and Blackberry, new project starts among iPhone developers show no sign of slowing down. Flurry, however, also noticed that a growing number of developers have started to work on Android applications - maybe in reaction to Apple's erratic App Store approval process. Over the past six months, the number of new Android apps that have integrated Flurry's analytics doubled and the pipeline for new Android apps is also filling up quickly.

During the city of Washington, D.C.'s crowdsourced Apps for Democracy 2 project, one of the top requested apps was a GPS notification system for public transportation.

For those of you who've not had the pleasure of residing in our nation's capital and the outlying cities and suburbs of Virginia and Maryland, public transpo is a large part of commuter culture. So, based on the Apps for Democracy feedback, the D.C. Department of Transportation got together with the Office of Planning and the office of the city's CTO to develop Where's My Bus? It's a mobile application (that works on the web, as well) for getting users real-time GPS information on buses along the five-route D.C. Circulator system.

The Android platform might still be in its infancy, but AdMob, one of the world's largest mobile advertising marketplaces, launched its first dedicated advertising unit for Android applications today. Even though the Android platform was developed by Google, Google itself has yet to release a dedicated advertising service for Android applications. While the iPhone and iPod touch now dominate AdMob's business, the company is clearly hoping for the Android platform to gain some market share in the near future.

Cell phone providers hold a wealth of information about your real-world social network in their records that you can theoretically access through their cumbersome web interfaces. None of the cell phone companies we are aware of do a good job at presenting this information in a meaningful way, however. This is where Skydeck comes in. Skydeck, which released a major update to its service this morning, can access your provider's call data, as well as your text messages and voicemail. For a fee, Skydeck will also transcribe your voicemails and allow you to make calls directly from Skydeck's web interface.