Google announced a new feature for their online chat service Wednesday morning - not only can Gmail users make voice calls between personal computers, they can now make calls to regular phone lines. Calls made to US and Canada numbers are free, and per minute rates apply to other countries. These rates range from two to nineteen cents per minute, depending on country or line type.

The outdialing service integrates with Google Voice, and those using the service will display their GV number when making calls. Talk and Voice already are closely integrated with Android phones and Wired’s Ryan Singer predicts there will also be a Chrome extension. The same article reports on this service, previously available for users of Google-acquisition Gizmo5, a former Skype competitor.

Singer opines that because dialing out will encourage even more time spent on Gmail and Talk, the service aims to compete not with Skype, but with Facebook. The workflow keeps Google Account holders within the network of its services for longer periods of time, which is how Facebook uses its features to keep users on its site.

Many responses, including CNET’s, have questioned how this new development will affect Skype. The release of this feature is predicted to result in a burst of Google Voice sign-ups, and Skype does charge for domestic calls, and nearly all of per minute charges exceed Google’s rates on their comparison chart.

The convenience of Google’s new functionality primes it to not only to be used often by millions of Gmail account holders, it will spur growth in connected services - Voice and Talk, as well as future updates for Chrome and Android. Another CNET post reports that Google plans to promote this new development by installing phone booths in select US airports and universities where people can make phone calls for free.

Facebook announced a geolocation feature on Wednesday evening called “Places.” The feature allows users to check themselves and their friends in on the mobile application or browser. Those familiar with location-based apps like Foursquare and GoWalla will be familiar with the procedure, but may be disappointed with the lack of in-game perks, such as mayorships, stickers, etc. earned in gameplay.

Upon check-in, the update will show up in the Recent Activity section on the page for that place, as well as in the friend feed. “People Here Now” is a section on the location page, which is visible only to people who are currently checked into that spot. When tagged by a friend, a member is either checked-in or updated, depending on privacy settings.

The friend check-in function in Places brings up privacy concerns, as do many new Facebook features. The first time that a friend tags someone on places, Facebook asks them to set their privacy preference. Places also has its own privacy setting for who can see these updates. Despite criticism that Places cannot be turned off covered by TechCrunch today, the settings do control sharing on Facebook, friend check-ins, and data accessible to applications.

The same coverage includes Facebook’s standing on residences. A primary privacy concern for other location apps is user practice of making private residences into places to check into. Publicly broadcasting addresses and when an individual is home or not home is a poor combination for privacy and safety. Facebook addresses this issue by enabling a complaint system to flag addresses that should be removed from Places.

Third-party applications will have access to Places users and their friends if the related privacy setting is not changed from its default enabled position.

The popular check-in apps Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown are being utilized by Places’ launch. Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley predicted yesterday on VentureBeat that Places will more likely complement than compete with his app. While Foursquare is a game, Places aims to only augment functionality on the already popular Facebook platform.

New technology from Senseg and Toshiba delivers texture and other forms of haptic feedback to any screen-type surface. Demonstrated at the Embedded Tech Systems Expo, their system is called E-Sense.  The tech is built upon a type of human-machine interface called electrotactile arrays, which apply very mild electrical current to the nerves of the skin. Electrotactile arrays can create texture or pressure without mechanical vibration, a more well-known type of touch-based feedback, as is explained by Travis Deyle in the robotics new portal Hizook.

This tech has been around for some time, Deyle continues, but has recently been embedded into a film that can cover an LCD screen on a tablet computer or mobile device. At the expo, demonstrations included sections of the screen that was rough (”like a brush”), uneven (”as if it has metal strips on it”), or like wood or stone. Since it is now being incorporated into autonomous small devices, more applications are possible.

Tactile interface technology company Senseg calls its E-Sense output system a “modulated attraction force,” or Coulomb force. Senseg claims that “virtually any surface can be made” to use E-Sense, from “handheld devices to wall-sized interactive displays… including transparent, flat or curved surfaces.”

Applications for this type of touch feedback have included many devices for sensory-impaired individuals, including the blind and those with damaged inner-ears. Additionally, non-visual displays for fighter pilots have also been developed. As Deyle explains, this technique has been around for years.

Coverage by Übergizmo from May predicts future possible applications in regular workflow, as well as video games and pornography.

A labyrinth is emerging surrounding the state of network neutrality today involving Google, Verizon and the Federal Communications Commission. Beginning in late June, reports claim that the FCC held meetings with numerous large Internet organizations regarding how service providers may privilege data transfer from paying companies over others.

Net neutrality is concerned with the equality of data flow on the Internet, and many disagreeing groups see the meetings as undermining that concept. To such people, the practice of privileging some data over others would interfere with independent sources, small organizations and free speech. Since the alleged talks have involved the subject of giving more bandwidth to companies that pay ISPs, it would effectively make it more difficult for Internet users to access sites and media from smaller content creators.

Earlier coverage tracks the FCC’s attempted role in these meetings. "We have called off this round of stakeholder discussions. It has been productive on several fronts, but has not generated a robust framework to preserve the openness and freedom of the Internet – one that drives innovation, investment, free speech, and consumer choice," Edward Lazarus, the FCC’s chief of staff, said in a statement quoted by PCMag today. "All options remain on the table as we continue to seek broad input on this vital issue."

This announcement was a response to rumors of a deal between Google and Verizon that was reported yesterday in the New York Times and elsewhere. The coverage speculated that the two media leviathans were "nearing an agreement that could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege." Responding to this article, Google’s public policy Twitter account posted this morning, "@NYTimes is wrong. We’ve not had any convos with VZN about paying for carriage of our traffic. We remain committed to an open internet."

While contradictory, this conversation needs more than better fact-checking. Corporations and public interest groups alike have much at stake in the Net Neutrality debate, and these incidents show the sensationalism that can arise on either side.

Americans spend over 900 hundred million hours on social networks and blogs per month, 43 percent more time than they did last year, according to Nielsen.

As you can tell from all the Zynga coverage, online gaming is another quickly growing category, rising in total usage time by 10 percent year-over-year. In fact, online gaming overtook email — which dropped several percentage points in use — to become the second most heavily used category.

More than one-third of internet time is spent on social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging services.

“Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the web, 40 percent of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities – social networking, playing games and emailing leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie,” said Nielsen analyst Dave Martin.

It would be nice if Nielsen were to stop putting social networking sites and blogs together in the same category. This categorization made sense a few years ago, but now the two are so totally different that it’s time to separate them, as it confuses the results of studies like these.

While Web 2.0 rules the fixed web, Web 1 is the king of the mobile internet. Almost half of mobile internet time is spent emailing (twenty-five minutes out of a total hour), and social networks and blogs are accessed only a quarter of this time, just a little over six minutes per hour.

Here are some of Nielsen’s other findings:

• Of the most heavily-used sectors, videos/movies was the only other to experience a significant growth in share of U.S. activity online. Its share of activity grew relatively by 12 percent from 3.5 to 3.9 percent. June 2010 was a major milestone for U.S. online video as the number of videos streamed passed the 10 billion mark. The average American consumer streaming online video spent 3 hours 15 minutes doing so during the month.

• Despite some predictions otherwise, the rise of social networking hasn’t pushed email and instant messaging into obscurity just yet. Although both saw double-digit declines in share of time, email remains as the third heaviest activity online (8.3 percent share of time) while instant messaging is fifth, accounting for four percent of Americans online time.

• Although the major portals also experienced a double digit decline in share, they remained as the fourth heaviest activity, accounting for 4.4 percent of U.S. time online.

When you live in Silicon Valley, there is one thing that you forget after a while: users here are on the cutting edge of innovation.

Massive check-ins on Foursquare, Twitter updates, Yelp stickers on every restaurant door, geeky events that attract thousands of people . . . it’s a long list of signs showing how people here have jumped into innovation. As a result, living in Silicon Valley is at the same time enlightening and blinding.

Start-ups are proposing new services and products meant for improving other start-ups’ products. (See: the vast Twitter 3rd-party ecosystem.)

Because Internet evangelization doesn’t seemed to be the priority of start-ups – it’s not their job, true – the Silicon Valley ecosystem appears to be a huge innovation marketplace massively dedicated to hyping geeky users.

Yesterday’s Forrester study about location-based services shows that only 4 percent of online American adults have ever used a location-based app on their phone, and less than 1 percent are using them more than once per week. Within this 1 percent of users, 80 percent are male and 70 percent are aged 19-35.

More people are active on microblogging sites than using location-based apps: one-fifth of U.S. Internet users are now on Twitter. They are mostly between 18 and 44 years old, are already using social networks (Facebook, MySpace). As for all social media, a very small number of users is creating the content for the vast majority of the others (10% of users are tweeting for the 90% others).

If there is one thing that marketers and entrepreneurs should never forget, it’s to always weigh the very large majority of Internet users that are staying at a simple level of utilization. Facebook is the first social media tool to be used so massively and it doesn’t mean that everybody is ready to plunge into the web tornado.

Touted as the first “social media magazine,” Flipboard for the Apple iPad launched yesterday and is currently available free on the iTunes store. Differentiating itself form standard social media and feed aggregators, the application connects to various networks like Facebook and Twitter, collects shared stories, images and videos, and reformats them into a magazine format.

In addition to pulling from friends and followers as media sources, the user can also specify popular news sources and curated categories from Flipboard itself for more content. These news categories are collections such as FlipStyle, FlipPhotos, FlipTech and the like. Though the media comes from disparate origins, the app creates an interface that seems consistent, with a page-flip navigation.

Flipboard has launched with much support - as reported by Mashable, the Palo Alto-based startup received $10.5 million in a Series A round with “including KPCB, Index Ventures, The Chernin Group, Jack Dorsey (Twitter’s creator), Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook’s co-founder) and Aston Kutcher.” Additionally, it acquired real-time Web intelligence startup Ellerdale. The co-founder of this company is now Flipboard’s CTO. Ellerdale’s semantic analysis technology was employed upon large-stream data to extract relevant and valuable information which will now be used as a relevancy engine for Flipboard.

With its release has come scaling issues, as CEO Mike McCue’s update letter explains. While users can download and use the app, browsing material that Flipboard has linked to. But due to maxed-out capacity, users are not able to setup their social networking connections. As of this morning, users are being invited in waves to connect their Facebook, etc. as the service becomes available.

While Facebook and Twitter are the only currently supported social networks, McCue does mention that they plan on incorporating Flickr and LinkedIn in the future on Kara Swisher’s BoomTown interview

Facebook ranks even lower in customer satisfaction than IRS e-filers, according to a report by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, produced in partnership with ForeSee Results (pdf). Facebook ranks in the bottom 5 percent of all measured private-sector companies, at the same level as airline and cable companies.

“Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers,” said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results.

“At the same time, our research shows that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the website, and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience,” Freed said. “Compare that to Wikipedia, which is a non-profit that has had the same user interface for years, and it’s clear that while innovation is critical, sometimes consumers prefer evolution to revolution.”

This is the first year that social media was rated by the ASCI. Wikipedia leads the category at 77, followed by YouTube at 73, Facebook at 64 and MySpace at 63. Twitter wasn’t rated because of the amount of people who access it via 3rd party tools.

The media complains about Facebook, and some individual users complain about it as well, but among mainstream audiences, Facebook continues to grow, and not even looking at the numbers it’s easy to argue that user engagement is higher than ever, unless you don’t trust observation.

What the findings do indicate is that if there were another service that would come along that replaced Facebook’s popular functionalities without having the privacy and PR issues, some users may jump ship.

At this point, it’s obvious that removing Zuckerberg would be the fastest and easiest way to improve brand image. Investigations into Zuckerberg’s ethics and motivations are damaging the company and threaten to put it into continual crisis mode.

In other tech categories, Google dropped 7 percent, but continued to lead search. At 80 percent satisfaction, Google scored only three points better than second-place Bing.

“Bing’s first measure is impressive and could put some pressure on Google. The new search engine is already making gains in market share and using clever marketing and advertising to distinguish itself from the market leader.”

It’s obvious that the internet is everywhere: on our laptops of course, but also on mobile phones, on netbooks and tablets, on portable game consoles, personal navigation devices…

And cars?

For a lot of drivers, it would be a dream to prepare their route at their desk and send it directly to their car, without having to print paper directions or lose time typing it in their GPS.

Actually, this kind of connectivity between cars and computers is already available; Google has been working on this functionality for a long time. That’s it has partnered with the automotive industry to bring services like Local Search into cars.

For example, three years ago, Google launched, in partnership with with BMW, a new service named “Send To-Car.” It’s a feature which allows users to send a business listing or address found on Google Maps directly to their car; drivers can then set the information as the destination for the in-car navigation system. On Google Maps, users just need to tap their desired destination and send it to their cars via a dedicated pop-up window. When they are in their car, a “virtual adviser” shows them the route.

More recently, (in the beginning of this year), The Mountain View company and Audi brought Google Earth directly into the new A8 (the Audi limo), allowing drivers to enjoy 3D satellite imagery and geo information relevant to their current location.

Recently, the Google Automotive teams have extended the partner base to more than 20 car brands worldwide, including GM, Lincoln, Mercury, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and Pontiac.

The service now works in 19 countries.

For more information…

Earlier in the year, we spoke with VirtuOZ’s Mark Gaydos about the company’s customer-service avatars. What was most striking about the conversation was the high amount of customer engagement with the avatars, something that spoke to the underlying psychology of humans interacting with human-skinned technology.

At the time there weren’t any metrics to confirm this psychological attachment, but now there are findings that explain the psychological mechanisms behind it. Researchers at Concordia University, led by Dr. H. Onur Bodur, studied Second Life to find out what factors led to people’s identification with avatars.

“Members of the community use particular avatar traits or visual cues, such as attractiveness, gender, stylish hair, or expression (“babyfaceness” is associated with cooperation), to form impressions or opinions about the human behind the avatar,” the researchers write.

“Well-known psychological principles such as Social Response Theory (SRT) and anthropomorphism come into play at this stage of discovery and discernment,” the researchers write. “[The] study finds that these impressions, based solely on fairly limited or superficial traits of the avatar, may accurately match the true personality of the real person behind the avatar.”

It is predicted that 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies will have an avatar or presence in a virtual community by 2011. France’s fnac, one of the first major companies to use an avatar as a customer-service agent, had to deal with a consumer protest when they removed the avatar – Clara – from the site, a protest that would not have occurred if the help tool had not been anthropomorphized.