Bing and Yahoo have already released their lists of the most popular search terms of 2009, and now it’s time for the undisputed, heavyweight champion of search — Google, in the red trunks — to announce its rundown.

In their annual Zeitgeist report, Google crowns “Michael Jackson” as the fastest rising search term, followed by “Facebook” in second place and “Twitter” in fourth, with Spanish Facebook “Tuenti” coming in third.

As far as the fastest falling search terms go, unsurprisingly the heaviest hitters of old, such as “Euro 2008″ and “Beijing 2008,” have decreased in relevance, and certain Internet giants, such as Bebo and eMule, have obviously lost their luster.

The full list is below:

Fastest Rising Search Terms (Global):

1. michael jackson
2. facebook
3. tuenti
4. twitter
5. sanalika
6. new moon
7. lady gaga
8. windows 7
9. dantri.com.vn
10. torpedo gratis

Fastest Falling Search Terms (Global)

1. beijing 2008
2. euro 2008
3. heath ledger
4. barack obama
5. amy winehouse
6. kraloyun
7. dailymotion
8. bebo
9. wii
10. emule

Check out the rest of the report, including the US-only data, over at the official Zeitgeist site.

In a rare open letter, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced a series of privacy changes, starting with the removal of regional networks.

Since its inception, Facebook has been based on networks. First, it was your college and university, then it was your city or region, and now it’s a combination of those, plus companies and institutions. However, Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook will be removing regional networks in the next few weeks, but will ask all users to review their privacy settings before the change occurs.

Zuckerberg states in his letter that Facebook has concluded that regional networks are “no longer the best way for you to control your privacy.” However, we’re still unclear as to whether this only refers to locations (i.e. San Francisco) or also refers to colleges and universities. We’ve asked Facebook to clarify.

Facebook has been unloading a wave of new privacy features. In fact, the social networking service has already started removing regional networks several months ago. But now those changes will affect privacy settings, and it seems that Zuckerberg and Co. want to be sure that nobody is taken by surprise. We know what happens when you take Facebook users by surprise.

Here’s the letter in its entirety,

Zuckerberg’s Open Letter to Facebook’s Users

“It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we’ve built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.”

Mark Zuckerberg

Microsoft has decided to capitalize on the popularity of Windows Live Messenger in China, launching a new service called MSN Juku, which they call a “local innovation developed by MSN China.”

The service, however, is a lot like Twitter: It lets users connect with their other Live Messenger contacts and post 140-character messages. There’re a couple of important visual differences between this service and Twitter; old messages scroll to the right, for example, just like in another Twitter clone, Plurk. But it’s still a microblogging service, and one local media report actually called it a knock-off of Plurk, which is also quite popular in Asia.

Juku, which is currently in beta, brings several other innovations to the table; it lets users play games and win prizes, something that sounds like science fiction when it comes to the traditionally feature-shy Twitter. However, at this point, Microsoft hasn’t announced any plans to internationalize the service and perhaps position it as a direct competitor to Twitter.

TechGuruHere Team is giving away google wave invites to his visitors. Don’t worry invites will be given to all those who are active readers of our blog. Daily around 50 invites will be give away to our readers. For getting invite please post your email ids in the comments section. We will be giving them as per we will get free time

Proof:

Thanks for Your Cooperation

TechGuruHere Team

14 Invites Left For Today

With more than 350 million users, Facebook is winning the social networking race by a landslide. But another area they’re winning big (in large part due to that growth) is in portable identity, where their Facebook Connect platform competes with offerings from Google, Twitter and MySpace.

Today, Facebook is getting a massive new partner for Connect: Yahoo. The #2 search engine, which is also one of the world’s most visited Web sites, announced that it will be rolling out Facebook Connect on numerous Yahoo properties that in the aggregate represent tens of millions of users worldwide.

Yahoo says that Connect will be integrated on its Mail, News, Sports, and Finance sites, as well as Flickr, allowing users to do things like leave comments, share news stories, and view friends’ feeds by using their Facebook account on Yahoo. Like any Connect-powered service, Yahoo benefits by that activity being shared back on the Facebook news feed, which in turn drives traffic to Yahoo.

This is a no-brainer for Yahoo, who has been trying for years to make its services more social on its own. Now, they’ll start to see some of the benefits that smaller publishers have seen from Facebook Connect (more comments, extra traffic from Facebook, etc.) on a massive scale. The new features are expected to launch next year.

SanDisk has just introduced what could be the fastest 32GB SDHC card on the market. The card was announced in June but has taken quite a while getting out. The 32GB SanDisk Extreme SDHC card at up to 30 MB/s read and write speeds combines industry-leading performance with large storage capacity, which should help digital photography enthusiasts utilize the advanced features of today’s DSLR cameras.

“The market for entry to mid-level DSLR cameras is growing, and SDHC is becoming the de-facto card format for these devices,” said Susan Park, director, retail product marketing, SanDisk. “Our card’s 32GB of storage and up to 30MB/s read & write speeds enable DSLR users to shoot without worrying about storage or speed limitations.SanDisk Extreme SDHC cards provide consumers with a more enjoyable user experience, letting them focus on what is really important – the images that they are capturing.”

The 32GB SanDisk Extreme SDHC card adheres to the SD Association’s new Class 10 specification, which exceeds requirement for today’s high definition (AVCHD) video recording. The card offers a sustained write speed that should be fast enough to ensure high-definition video recording and capacity capable of storing 160 minutes of full HD 1920×1080 pixels at 24Mb/s data transfer rate.

SanDisk Extreme SDHC cards guarantee operation at extended temperatures ranging from minus 13 F (minus 25 C) to 185 F (85 C). They are fully compatible with any camera, card reader or other device that supports SDHC cards.

The SanDisk Extreme SDHC 32GB cards will be shipping worldwide to major retailers. The MRP of the card will be Rs. 16,999. The current 4GB, 8GB and16GB capacitySanDisk Extreme SDHC cards will also be upgraded from Class 6 to Class 10.

The term Jailbreaking has become quite synonymous with Apple’s iPhone or iPod Touch. For every update that Apple releases upgrading the firmware of the devices there’s been a Jailbreak tool available. The 3GS hasn’t even hit all markets yet, and by that I mean ours of course, and a jailbreak “blacksn0w,” is already out.

This is all great for iPhone and iPod Touch users, but Apple obviously has issues. In fact according to a report, the company has in fact posted a listing for a job opening under the designation – iPhone OS Platform Security Manager. Quite a ‘high profile’ job you might say.

Whoever the new guy will be will have a lot to contend with. Could this be the end of the jailbreak hack? Or just a speed bump in the road? We’ll just have to wait and see.

The NPD Group has some figures now from the Windows 7 launch, and are reporting that the new Microsoft operating system is selling well — or at least, much better than Vista did at its launch. In the first few days of sales, Windows 7 units in the U.S. moved 234 percent faster than Vista did in its equivalent launch window.

Of course, in many ways the bar wasn’t set too high. Still, Microsoft must be feeling relieved at the good sales clip for what is still, after all, its core business.

Unfortunately, thanks to pre-sales discounts and general lack of promotional effort behind the Ultimate version, revenue growth wasn’t quite as impressive. Looking strictly at dollar sales, Windows 7 is up 82% over than the equivalent time period for Vista.

The NPD reported the top-selling versions of the software and their average prices for the week ending October 24 as follows:

1. Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade / $76
2. Windows 7 Pro Upgrade / $147
3. Windows 7 Home Premium Family Pack 3 User Upgrade / $149

In a tough economic time for packaged software, Windows 7 appears to be faring fairly well. The PC hardware sales picture wasn’t nearly as rosy, however. Although total PC sales were up 49 percent in year-over-year sales and a full 95 percent over the previous week, the overall growth rate was not as high as during the Vista launch window, which saw a 68% jump in year-over-year and 170% gain over the week prior to Vista’s launch. Vista had a slight advantage with its January release however, which typically shows a larger PC sales footprint than the month of October.

Both Firefox and Chrome have a new version out, fixing mostly stability issues and a couple of minor security vulnerabilities.

Firefox 3.5.5 brings several stability fixes, most importantly the notorious GIF decoder bug which sometimes caused the browser to crash. You can find a complete list of changes in this version here.

Chrome has a bit more important update, bringing its (awkwardly long) version number to 3.0.195.32. The new version includes five stability fixes and several security issues. Among other things, Chrome should now behave better with Acrobat Reader 9.2, Google Maps, and AAC files. Read the details on these fixes here.