If Facebook’s future is mobile, it may not be enough for it to merely secure a piece of the mobile ad market: It might need to make the mobile ad industry figure out how to work with Facebook.

Berg Insight calculated that global spending on mobile advertising was $3.4 billion in 2010. And while it’s growing at rate of 37 percent per year, Facebook’s total revenues in 2011 were $3.7 billion, of which $3.1 billion came from ads. Meanwhile more than half of its 845 million monthly active users accessed the social network through mobile apps or its mobile website, both of which sport no ads.

Of course, most customers are using both platforms, not one or the other, so Facebook doesn’t need to build a $3 billion mobile ad business overnight. But even if Facebook were to replicate a fraction of its Web-based ad business on mobile, it would account for a large portion of the money currently being spent on mobile ads.

Mobile hasn’t been unkind to Facebook

Facebook isn’t losing money on mobile today. Far from it. EMarketer principal analyst Noah Elkin pointed out that 90 percent of Facebook’s customers are crossing between platforms, meaning they’re generating ad revenue in one way or another. They may not see any ads when they’re accessing the network from their phones, but they’re certainly seeing them when they log in from their Web browsers. One of the reasons those customers remain active and loyal to Facebook is because they have the flexibility to network socially from anywhere, so you could argue that mobile drives more ad views, not less.

It’s the remaining 10 percent, or 83 million users, that Facebook is worried about, Elkin said. Facebook doesn’t make a dime in ad sales off them, and while they may be a small segment of Facebook’s customers now, they’re its fastest-growing segment, as they are coming from the developing markets where Facebook’s future growth lies.

“The big concern is the mobile-only audience is growing faster than the multi-channel or desktop only audience,” Elkin said. “The long-term concern is that the mobile-only audience will come to dominate the social network.”

Enter the sponsored story

Facebook’s answer isn’t the display or search advertising responsible for the lion’s share of the mobile ad market today but the sponsored story, which it only recently introduced on the desktop interface and now plans to migrate to mobile. The format is so nascent that it’s not even really factoring into eMarketer’s current ad spend figures for traditional online spending, to say nothing of mobile.

Elkin said the format is promising not only because Facebook can use it to tailor ad content specifically to its users’ interests — which it knows a lot about — but also because it could factor in location and presence data unique to mobile. That means more value for advertisers and more revenue per ad. Ultimately that could overcome the limitations of mobile, where a small screen gets cluttered pretty easily. But it’s also an untried advertising format, and as my colleague Mathew Ingram points out, not even Facebook is convinced sponsored stories will work.

“If Facebook is successful, one of the impacts will be that it will grow mobile advertising overall,” Elkin said. Google, Apple and Millennial Marketing wouldn’t stop growing in the mobile ad space, but Facebook’s mobile ad revenue would be additive. In fact, one of the reasons eMarketer is projecting such huge growth in U.S. mobile advertising — jumping from $1.45 billion in 2011 to $10.8 billion in 2016 — is because it projects Facebook will precipitate a surge in new ads starting in 2014. If Facebook flops, then eMarketer will have to revisit its growth numbers, Elkin said.

Don’t piss off your future customers

Facebook faces some daunting tasks. It can’t just build a mobile ad business. It has to build the mother of all mobile ad businesses. And it has to do so with an ad format that’s still unproven.

Ultimately, its entrenched customers will cut Facebook some slack. They might gripe about ads crowding the limited real estate of their phones, but they’re not likely to abandon Facebook, considering how much of their online lives are embodied in the social network. But then again, those aren’t the customers Facebook is losing money on.

It’s the mobile-only users just discovering Facebook in India and other far-flung countries across the globe that the company needs to please. For many of them their first and only experiences with Facebook will be through mobile phones. If that experience isn’t engaging (and as my colleague Kevin Tofel writes, the Facebook mobile app experience is often subpar) then customers may abandon the social network entirely.

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AT&T is starting out with seven applications: security cameras; window/door sensors; smoke, carbon monoxide, motion and glass break detectors; remote door lock controls; remote thermostat access; moisture detection sensors; and remote home appliance controls. The devices all connect back to a home control hub through Wi-Fi or Z-Wave radios. The home broadband connection supplies the link back to AT&T’s security monitoring center and customers can access the connected home service through a Web portal or smartphone app.

Though AT&T is initially trialing the service in two of its U-Verse markets, Ma Bell said it would be ISP agnostic. AT&T also won’t require customers to sign up for it’s mobile service to use the smartphone and tablet apps (it didn’t say which smartphone platforms would be supported).

AT&T certainly isn’t the only company looking to tap into the home automation trend, and not even the first operator. Verizon started a smart home pilot with Z-Wave last year, launching the service commercially in June. Time Warner Cable and Comcast have their own home-energy management services as well. AT&T’s smart home plans seem particular ambitious, though. Instead of reselling M2M devices and providing raw connectivity, AT&T is trying to tie all of these disparate sensors and devices together to create a more intelligent connected home platform.

At Mobile World Congress, AT&T first demoed Digital Life’s capabilities, showing off the ability to create home profiles that could group automation functions together. For instance, when the front door is unlocked the thermostat could immediately turn on and the blinds automatically open. Or if an oven warning sensor goes off, the platform not only ships an SMS warning message to the homeowner’s smartphone but a link to a live video feed from the kitchen camera.

AT&T also made the odd move of licensing its smart home technology to other operators internationally before it started offering it to its own customers back home. AT&T apparently isn’t just content to just sell smart home service. It wants to compete with iControl and other platform providers in connected home management as well.

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It has only been a few months since Facebook employees began occupying what used to be known as “Sun Quentin,” a self-contained cluster of office buildings on the shore of San Francisco Bay in the shadow of the Dumbarton Bridge, but the company is already starting to think of itself as an industry leader that can shift the debate within the computing revolution of our time: the transition to mobile. It invited reporters last week from several tech-oriented news organizations — Techcrunch, VentureBeat, PandoDaily, and yours truly, among others — down to its new headquarters to discuss the plans Facebook unveiled at Mobile World Congress in February to help advance HTML5 as a mobile development standard.

James Pearce, Facebook’s head of mobile developer relations, thinks that Facebook has the heft and developer relationships to be a unifying force around HTML5 through the Mobile W3C Community Group, introduced two months ago. The linchpin of the so-called “mobile Web,” HTML5 is a collection of technology specifications that has been endlessly debated by the five major Web browser companies — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera — yet implemented piecemeal before the final standard has been agreed upon, leading to all kinds of developer confusion.

“It’s possible that browser vendors don’t know the demand” for mobile Web applications, said Pearce. “This group is kind of like a product-management process in a way.”

The Web is the way

Facebook wants to accelerate the development of a set of common standards and test suites that app developers can use to ensure their apps meet minimum requirements. It also wants to nudge HTML5 standards-makers into deciding on technology for the most crucial features.

HTML5 is extremely promising as a platform that will allow mobile developers to stop worrying about Apple’s App Store approval process and Android’s fragmentation issues, but building a mobile app entirely in HTML5 is a non-starter for many developers because they need to access things like a smartphone’s camera or graphics hardware: areas that HTML5 standards have yet to address.

Still, even Facebook–perhaps as broad an indicator of Internet activity as there is outside of Google search–sees more activity through the mobile Web than it does through iOS and Android combined, Pearce said. He thinks developers just need someone with a little clout to show them the ways of the mobile Web and force browser makers to get their act together on things like camera access.

Facebook’s real intentions are much broader. Apple and Google are notably absent from its group, although Pearce said they were invited to join. Both companies at times have invoked the promise of the mobile Web — Apple in banning Flash from iOS devices, Google in projects such as Chrome OS — but both have significant interests in native application development for iOS and Android.

Facebook, with 850 million users around the world, does not want to be tied down to either platform, especially now that Google is competing directly against it with Google+. Hence the interest in turning HTML5 into a reality: a development platform that no one company truly controls, but that may depend on Facebook’s ecosystem in order to attract users and advertisers en masse. Pearce said HTML5 developers face huge challenges around application discoverability and monetization, areas in which Facebook — with a huge user base and its own payments system — would be all too willing to help.

Widespread rumors have surfaced over the last several years about Facebook’s desire for mobile independence. The company has been said to be working on its own phone, similar to how Amazon used a basic version of Android to build a tablet designed completely around its services. It has also been reportedly interested in building a version of Facebook in HTML5 that is just as functional as native versions of the app for iOS or Android.

Facebook has been quite successful enticing developers to build applications within the desktop version of Facebook, with Zynga’s runaway growth as perhaps the best example of the opportunities it has provided to developers. Now it’s trying to see if it can extend that influence to mobile, a space currently dominated by the big kids on the Silicon Valley block; Apple and Google.

Friends wanted

“The industry was ready for this to happen, and we think of ourselves as good industry citizens,” Pearce said Thursday. He is, of course, referring to “the industry” in terms of the legions of mobile developers, as compared to the established smartphone players. Those developers might be frustrated by the experience provided by Apple and Google, but they have no other alternative to reach mobile users, given the lack of sophistication around the HTML5 standard and the degree to which we’ve all become obsessed with mobile apps since the App Store made its debut in 2008.

In order for its vision to happen, however, Facebook will have to lure a new collection of mobile-oriented companies — several of whom have been in business longer than CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been legally able to drive–into its orbit, away from Apple and Google. Prominent carriers such as AT&T and Verizon are on board as well as handset makers like Samsung and Nokia, but collaborative industry groups come and go in the technology world without ever having done much to change the conversation.

As the company’s already-legendary IPO approaches, Facebook is increasingly interested in defining its mobile strategy on its own terms, courting the tech media (“We’re trying something new,” read the invitation) in order to present its own vision for the future of mobile computing.

Facebook employees are all too aware of the fate that befell Sun, a pioneering company eventually done in by its inability to change along with a changing industry. With its social-media domination seemingly well in hand, Facebook is looking ahead to its next challenge: ensuring it can remain a destination for consumers and developers without having to toe Apple or Google’s line.

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In case you missed it, Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president for Internet Explorer, posted at what first glance Monday appeared to be another alarming expose of Google’s disregard for user privacy: “Google Bypassing User Privacy Settings.” Hachamovitch charged that Google was trying to pull the same trick on IE users that it shamefully employed to install third-party cookies on the computers of Safari users, but the reality wasn’t quite as damning as the headline.

IE uses a privacy protocol called P3P, a well-meaning but ill-fated attempt by the World Wide Web Consortium to introduce common privacy standards into Web browsers. The idea was to give users more control over how they were tracked by Web sites by asking those sites to declare their data-collection intentions in machine language (known as CPs) that could be understood by the browser and dealt with according to the user’s preferences.

But IE is the only browser that has implemented P3P, and the Web page for the standard itself hasn’t been updated since 2007. Also, P3P was designed before the time of the “Like” or “+1″ buttons, meaning it doesn’t know how to deal with the concept of one Web page needing to understand that you’re logged into another Web site in order to provide you with the ability to share content through Facebook and Google, among others.

As a result, Google and Facebook simply don’t participate, substituting the code strings outlined in the P3P specifications for real text and a link to their P3P policies. As noted in Microsoft’s blog post, Google sends this message:

P3P: CP=”This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more info.”

This confuses IE, since it is looking for a set of three and four-letter code strings in order to enforce the P3P privacy policy, not actual words and links. That means Google’s third-party cookies will be installed on the machines of IE users.

But Microsoft protests way too much in flagging Google for this behavior.

For one thing, Google had already disclosed that it didn’t honor the aging standard. Facebook, a close partner of Microsoft’s and the recipient of $240 million in investment from Microsoft, has also confirmed to ZDNet (and previously disclosed) that it doesn’t follow the P3P guidelines for many of the same reasons as Google. Microsoft refused to comment to ZDNet regarding Facebook’s similar treatment of the P3P standard.

And even Microsoft once recommended that Web sites feed invalid P3P code to browsers, as shown in a 2010 study on P3P by Carnegie Mellon that was distributed by Google after Microsoft published its “findings.”

“Even if the CPs were valid, Microsoft’s recommendation undermines the purpose of P3P since it encourages web administrators to use CPs that do not represent their actual data practices,” the authors wrote in Section 5 of their long report.

In a statement distributed Monday, Google said “Today the Microsoft policy is widely non-operational. … The reality is that consumers don’t, by and large, use the P3P framework to make decisions about personal information disclosure.” Instead, they use clearer options in browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari regarding how Web sites set cookies on their machine.

This situation is far different from Google’s approach to Safari privacy standards, in which it bypassed cookie restrictions without disclosure by tricking the browser into thinking an ad was a form submission and was deservedly chastised. We can all agree that a common privacy standard for Web browsers is a nice idea, but modern Web services operating in 2012 can’t be expected to adhere to privacy policies abandoned by their creators in 2007.

You have to wonder what Microsoft was thinking: it’s quite similar to the 2011 blog post in which Google whined about Microsoft’s patent-licensing policies, which are completely legal even if some of the patents themselves might be questionable.

Microsoft would probably be better served by just sitting back and letting Google continue to make mistakes rather than lobbing a petty attack while giving another company following the exact same policy (a company that stands to return a nice chunk of change to Microsoft’s coffers in a few months) a free pass.

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Google (NSDQ: GOOG) continues to find itself in compromising positions in 2012, the latest coming after an investigation by The Wall Street Journal (NSDQ: NWS) found that the company was tricking Apple’s Safari browsers on the iPhone and the Mac into dropping their ad-tracking protections in order to promote Google+.

The report shows that Google inserted code into display ads shown by its DoubleClick subsidiary that got around the default setting in Safari that prevents cookies—the basic building block of Web advertising—from being installed on computers and letting ad companies track your movements across the Internet in order to show you ads they believe are relevant to your interests. Safari makes an exception for Web sites that ask you to submit a form, allowing them to install cookies. Google simply added code to certain ads that mimicked a form submission in order to determine whether Safari browsers were also logged into Google+ so that those users could “+1” ads and share them with their Google+ contacts.

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Uberpaper founder Dmitry Shapiro

“In a world full of algorithms, we can get a skewed sense of the world when it comes to news,” Shapiro, the tech executive known for founding Veoh and most recently for serving as the CTO of MySpace Music, said in a phone conversation Thursday. “News is an extremely important part of how we experience the world around us. If news has been overly processed by personalization algorithms that essentially pander to us, we can start to believe that the world is a certain way, when it really isn’t that way at all.”

News that’s purposefully impersonal

That problem is exactly what Shapiro’s latest project Uberpaper was built to combat. Uberpaper, which launched to the public this week, pulls all the news from Yahoo News’ API and presents it in a way that manages to be both clean and image-rich: Imagine Flipboard meets Pinterest, but all in a liquid user interface design that works in any web browser. The only social elements to the site come in the form of a simple “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down” button that users are meant to use to show how well-reported or relevant a story was, as well as the ability to comment.

Users can choose to view Uberpaper in 10 different languages, and sort the news according to topics such as World, US, Business, Technology, Sports, Politics, and so on — just like an old fashioned newspaper. In fact, the experience of finding out what’s happening in the world by reading a traditional physical paper is a big thing Uberpaper is trying to replicate. Shapiro put it this way:

“With technology, I think we threw the baby out with bathwater when it came to newspapers. Online news sites today show their content very much like search does — it’s kind of database-y, and formatted in a very linear way. We wanted to bring back the aesthetic of a newspaper, and the serendipity that comes with scanning the news that way.”

Uberpaper screenshot (click to enlarge)

Keeping social in its place

However, Shapiro is quick to point out that he is personally a big fan of social media sites, telling me, “I love Facebook and Twitter, and I’m on those sites all day long. They’re wonderful places to share news, and I don’t think Uberpaper is competitive in any way to them.” Rather, he says, Uberpaper is meant to be a place where people can find fresh news to ultimately go back and share with their friends on Facebook and Twitter — to bring something new to the table, rather than re-sharing stuff that’s already been discovered.

For now, Uberpaper only pulls in news through Yahoo News’ API, which was chosen because it has a very broad base of news sources and topics. More news sources will be folded into Uberpaper in the future, but the expansion process will be very well-considered, Shapiro said. “We’re going to be really cautious as we add additionally sources. We very much want to make sure that we’re not slanting the news in partisan ways, or toward any kind of topic, really — it should be broad and generic.”

Uberpaper was built by the same team led by Shapiro that built Anybeat, the social network that encourages people to use pseudonyms that launched this past autumn. Anybeat, which has $1 million in funding, is still in operation, but right now it and Uberpaper are being run as separate products. Uberpaper doesn’t make any revenue right now, but down the line advertising could be brought in to run alongside the news.

A long shot that’s worth taking

In all, I think Uberpaper is great: Simple, straightforward, and clean, while perpetually brimming with new content. It’s certainly coming out in a tough space — many people already feel like they have more than enough sources of news — but I could see Uberpaper becoming a much-frequented bookmark for news junkies. And in my opinion, any service that’s aiming to put an end to the echo chamber is fighting the good fight.

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The software update, version 6.2.1, is available for download directly from Amazon here. Using the Kindle Fire’s web browser to navigate there, you’ll see a Download link. Tap the link to download the 182 MB file to your Fire, which will place it in the Downloads folder. Unfortunately, the update file needs to be in the KindleUpdates folder on the device; that’s where a file explorer application comes in handy.

Using Amazon’s AppStore on the Kindle, search for “file explorer” to see what third-party apps might help in this situation. I chose AndroXplorer, which was free, and installed it. With this app, or any other comparable file explorer software, it’s simply a matter of copying the update file from the Downloads folder to the KindleUpdates folder on the Fire. Note that both of these are actually sub-folders of the sdcard folder.

Once you’ve copied the downloaded update file to the appropriate folder, go into the Settings of your Kindle Fire. Tap the Device option, and you should now see the “Update your Kindle” button lit up. Tap it to update your Kindle Fire software, which should only take a few minutes. After the device reboots, you’re all set!

As far as the update itself, it addresses several of issues found in the Kindle Fire. For starters, the device is noticeably more responsive and easier to use with the carousel interface: icons snap into place much faster. You can also customize which icons appear in the carousel. And there’s a new password lock function that secures the device so kids and others can’t easily purchase items from your Kindle Fire. I’ve only just begun using the new software update, but so far, I think most Kindle Fire owners will see this update as an early holiday present.

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This specific situation isn’t new; it was first reported on Reddit back on Nov. 22, not long after the Kindle Fire began shipping. I only just heard about it this weekend via TheVerge and I tested our Kindle Fire to verify the reports. The browser does redirect any Android Market requests to the Kindle app store; even if you turn off the accelerated browsing feature that routes traffic through Amazon’s servers. That means this hijacking isn’t done via the cloud, but instead is hard-coded into every Kindle Fire. TheVerge reports a file called MarketIntentProxy.apk is the culprit.

Who owns “your” mobile device?

I have several concerns. First is the idea of limiting what a consumer can or can’t do on a device he or she has purchased. I’ve seen this situation before with smartphones and tablets sold through carriers. Some examples include the blocking or removal of tethering applications and more recently, Verizon’s insistence not to have Google Wallet installed on its Galaxy Nexus model.

To some, this is a grey area because the operator has an asset to protect — its network — and also because of the hardware subsidy model. If there’s a mobile application pinging servers too much, carriers should have recourse and processes to let the offending app maker know, fix the problem or be pulled from an app store. This exact scenario recently happened with YouMail and T-Mobile, for example. In terms of subsidized hardware, when does a consumer actually “own” their device? Carriers can pay for some of the costs, so do they “own” the device as well over the life of a network contract and does that allow them to have control?

Regardless of where your opinion lies on these two particular angles, these arguments shouldn’t apply to the Kindle Fire. Why? Because even though Amazon is reportedly selling the Fire at a small loss, consumers are paying the full price for the hardware. There’s no subsidy for Amazon to pay in order to get people to buy or use a Kindle Fire. And with no subsidy, there’s no contract for network service.

In fact, the Kindle Fire can’t even use a mobile broadband network because it only has a Wi-Fi radio. So consumers are buying the device outright and supplying or finding their own network connection. I’d say the owner should have full control over their device in this situation, with the understanding that technical support is limited or not provided when using the device outside of its intended use.

Redirecting specific web requests is bad karma

My second concern is: where does it end? By routing a specific web request away from the intended site on the Internet, Amazon has set a dangerous precedent here. We collectively debate open vs closed ecosystems, net neutrality and other related themes, but if I had to pick one app to consider “sacred” in these discussions it would be the browser. That’s not the case for this particular web request on a Kindle Fire and once millions of these are in consumer hands, who or what could stop Amazon from adding other URLs to a list of redirects?

You’d think a Kindle Fire owner could simply install a third-party browser — Dolphin Browser HD on a Fire can access Google’s web-based Market, for example — but guess what? There are no third-party browsers in the Kindle AppStore save for Maxthon. But that the browser is our window to the web and that window should not have smears or streaks obscuring our view because a company says so.

I understand Amazon sells the Fire in order to sell apps, movies, TV shows, magazines, books and physical goods. And the company built its tablet upon Google’s open-source Android platform. I think that was a smart strategy.

But Amazon’s tablet relies heavily on Google’s platform; it’s not like the Fire is a standalone platform of its own because standard Android apps can and do run on the device. You simply have to know how to access them and install them. Most people don’t, so I don’t think Amazon should worry. And blocking one of the easiest ways to get standard Amazon apps on the Fire — via the Android Market website — isn’t a long-term answer because the company could suffer through the tag of “web censorship.”

Perhaps I’m being too hard on Amazon here, since many apps require hardware such as a GPS or microphone, which the Kindle Fire doesn’t have. But when I think about this situation in a different light, it doesn’t sound like I am. For instance, if you decided to purchase a new car and after you bought it, the dealership told you it could only be driven on certain roadways, how would you feel? Maybe that’s too extreme of an example, but all I know is this: I want to ride in whatever lane of the information superhighway with my browser that I see fit.

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Sleipnir, for those not versed in Norse mythology, was the eight-legged horse of the god Odin. It’s also the name of an iOS browser that has a reputation for doing things a little differently. Sleipnir developer Fenrir is now bringing it to the Mac with the release of a new beta. Since it’s highly unusual for a browser to be released for iOS before OS X, we thought we’d take a look at the things Sleipnir does differently from other browsers on the Mac.

Interface

Sleipnir really differentiates itself with its interface. Contrary to Chrome, Sleipnir de-emphasizes the URL bar, making it a small button in the titlebar. Clicking it slides the URL bar out to fill the titlebar, which is pretty slick. Since most people find websites via search rather than entering the URL, de-emphasizing the URL bar makes sense. It also allows Sleipnir’s interface to take up significantly less space, as the tab bar can be placed where the URL bar is found in other browsers.

Speaking of the tab bar, it’s easily the most striking aspect of Sleipnir’s interface. As with its iOS counterpart, tabs are displayed with miniature previews instead of traditional text labels in Sleipnir. The current tab is highlighted by a hovering triangle, and inactive tabs are grayed-out. The advantage of this layout is that it doesn’t take up much space, and tabs are easier to pick out, since our brains can recognize images faster than text. The disadvantage, of course, is that it can be harder to tell some websites apart without a label, say if you have several Google searches going, as pictured below.

TiledTab

TiledTab is a tab-grouping feature similar to Firefox’s aptly named Tab Groups, but prettier and more user-friendly. Accessed via a button in the tab bar, it shows your current tabs as previews against the familiar linen background, with groups appearing as color-coded sections at the bottom. You can swipe between groups with a two-finger gesture. The TiledTab button also changes color to reflect which group you’re in, so you don’t feel lost. You don’t have as many options for managing tabs as you do in Firefox’s Tab Groups (you can’t close them, and you’re limited to six groups), but TiledTab makes managing tabs in this way seem like less of a chore.

Bookmarks

Sleipnir also takes a different approach to bookmarks. The Bookmarks window has an “Inbox,” which is where unsorted bookmarks go. To add a bookmark to the bookmarks bar, you simply “ribbon” it. Labels allow you to group bookmarks together by tagging them, and act as folders in the bookmarks bar. You can color-code labels as well. And then there are the actual folders, which perform the same basic function as labels, except they aren’t accessible from the bookmarks bar.

Sleipnir can sync your bookmarks with a service called Fenrir Pass. Setting up an account is easy: Go to Sleipnir’s settings and click the button to create a new account in the Sync tab. Syncing across Mac and iOS works relatively well, but it’s a little confusing, as ribboned bookmarks in Sleipnir for Mac don’t automatically appear in the iOS version’s bookmarks bar.

I’m really excited for the full release of Sleipnir for Mac, and I can’t wait to see the final version. But what do you think of Sleipnir? Do you have room for another Mac browser?

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I for one have not given up on Rockmelt; It is a simpler and better way of using Facebook Chat, which is Facebook’s most important feature for me — plus,it also overcomes the inherently slow speed of Facebook pages. Since it is based on Chromium, it is also pretty standards-compliant. The new updates to the browser use Chromium 9, which puts it on par with other browser offerings based on that engine.

The new updates also fix a lot of bugs -– about 70 of them — and increase the speed of the browser. One of the new features enables Mac users to now import Chrome bookmarks, and RockMelt has also made memory use more efficient.

That’s all good, but the real news to me is a cool little YouTube app RockMelt has developed for the platform. This is a big step for the little company. They also allow you to add RSS feeds to the browser –- for instance, once you add a GigaOM feed, it shows up as a button on the right-hand side and a simple click on the icon helps you scan headlines.

Rockmelt is basically turning web services into apps, which have their own unique experiences. I am an online video junkie — why else would I start NewTeeVee? –  and I watch an inordinate amount of videos, especially music videos, which are now part of my playlists and often are playing in the background.

According to Rockmelt CEO Eric Vishria, I am not alone: There are millions of folks who create their playlists on YouTube and listen to music that way. Vishria and Tim Howes co-founded the company, which is based in Mountain View, Calif.

“What we’re trying to do with the YouTube App is make it super easy for users to consume their video content,” Vishria added. “This is where people are spending a lot of their time, so we’re just cutting out all of the middle stuff of them having to go to YouTube and search for their videos or playlists.” In other words, it is making it easy for the folks to do things they like to do on YouTube -– like viewing videos and managing their playlists.

The RockMelt YouTube app is one way of turning those Playlists into a television station –- a bespoke MTV channel, so to speak. In addition to allowing you to watch one-off videos, the YouTube app allows you to play videos continuously, which I think is pretty cool.

“The YouTube App is just the beginning of what we envision for the browser as we continue to add more non-feed, interactive apps that support way people use the Web,” Vishria added.

How it works?

Under the gear icon, you can choose to login.  If you sign in with your YouTube account, you can also load playlists, add videos to playlists loop and shuffle videos in playlists, and save videos to watch later. In addition to watching your favorite videos, the YouTube App also lets you:

• Play videos continuously
• Search while playing videos
• Share and rate videos quickly
• See your recent video searches

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