According to Microsoft, 6 million iPhone users have downloaded the app so far (though, as usual, it's not clear how many active users there currently are). More importantly, though, the company also today announced that Photosynth is now available worldwide (iTunes link).

Also new in the latest version is a tighter integration with Twitter (via iOS5's built-in Twitter capabilities). 

In case you are unfamiliar with Photosynth, here is Microsoft's description of the app's capabilities:

Capture Full-Sphere Panoramas: Look and capture in all directions more easily than what most of us can do with DSLRs and point-and-shoot cameras.

View immediately: With fast On-Device Processing, you can see the final panorama in a few minutes, without requiring an internet connection or data plan.  Very handy for those impromptu panoramas and immediate gratification that you captured the perfect shot. 

Save locally and on the cloud:  Your panoramas saved on your phone can also be saved and viewed online at http://photosynth.net.

Share immediately:  Share your panorama immediately via Twitter, Facebook or Bing Maps.

View in browser or app: Zoom, pan, and rotate your panorama in any direction through the Photosynth app or through the mobile browser.

Windows 8 is a beautiful tablet operating system, but on a desktop – and especially with a multi-screen setup – it just constantly gets in your way. Thankfully, this is just a preview version and Microsoft still has a few months to iron out the kinks, but unless it makes some radical changes, I'm not sure I'll be able to recommend Windows 8 anytime soon. Microsoft says Windows 8 will offer the best of both worlds and in a way it does. It's just that these two worlds aren't meant to be squished into one single operating system.

The Split Personality of Windows 8

At least in this preview, Microsoft makes no attempt to hide the split personality of its new operating system. There's the metro interface, which you can't avoid, as it also now doubles as the new start menu, and then there is the traditional desktop, which can be best described as Windows 7.5. The two user interfaces have nothing in common with each other and try as you want, you can't just use Windows 8 like a Windows 7.5 because the tablet interface constantly intervenes. To launch applications from the traditional desktop, for example, you always have to go back to the Metro-style start menu, which features a great design for tablets, but makes utterly no sense when you use a mouse and keyboard.

Oh, and what about those two different versions of Internet Explorer? There's the Metro version, which doesn't support Flash and has a very stripped-down interface – and then there's the regular browser that runs in the desktop. How do you explain that to a mainstream user?

Got Two Screens? Windows 8 Wasn't Made for You

Worst of all, when you use a dual-screen setup right now, the second screen always shows the Windows 7.5 desktop and you can't even run two metro apps side-by-side on the two screens. To make matter worse, Windows 8 right now assumes that your primary screen is always the one with the task bar on it, so you can't even start any apps on the other screen while you are in Metro mode (unless you opt to show the same task bar on both screens, which also makes no sense whatsoever).

Great Tablet UI – Pointless on the Desktop

Microsoft has decided to privilege the tablet use case over the traditional desktop and productivity one. At times, this leads to non-sensical decisions like a login screen you have to drag up to get to the password prompt (okay – you can just hit enter twice, too, I think – but it's not like you will accidentally start your desktop or laptop in your pocket).

And what about trying to put your PC to sleep or turn it off? In Windows 8 right now, you have to first log out as a user, then pretend you want to log in again and the hunt for the shutdown button, which is hidden under your user icon (or you can try to bring up the "charm" that appears when you hit the right side of the screen with your mouse – but that's a bit hard  when your main screen is on the left side and your mouse just moves over to the right screen).

Maybe there is an alternative universe out there where this makes sense.

Then, of course, there is also the question of why you would want to run these full-screen apps on your desktop in the first place. Apple pushed the same concept with its full-screen mode and just like Microsoft, it totally forgot about dual-screen users. I don't think I've ever run an OS X app in full-screen mode, as it just makes switching between apps too much of a hassle.

There's Still Some Time to Fix This…

Hopefully, Microsoft will continue to polish the edges of Windows 8 to the point where this disjointed experience becomes somewhat less disorienting and maybe even feel natural. I admit, I doubt it. And that's a shame. Microsoft made some really smart decisions with the Metro interface (including, for example, the ability to run two applications side-by-side). My desktop, however, isn't a tablet and instead of making things easier for me, Windows 8 just constantly gets in the way. Windows 7 does its best to get out of my way – Windows 8 instead throws some giant tiles onto my screen.

In some way, the keynote felt like a huge middle finger to CES. It's almost as if Microsoft, which had already said that CES didn't quite fit into its rhythm of announcement anymore, wanted to drive this point home by announcing close to nothing. It's hard to imagine that anybody in the audience wasn't already familiar with Windows Phone and the Windows 8 interface, after all.

The Only Real Piece of News: Kinect for PC is Coming Feb. 1st

Only after the first hour was over did Microsoft give us something new: a launch date for Kinect for PC: February 1st. Of course, we already knew it was coming to the PC – we just didn't know the date.

All of the PCs and phones shown in the demos were already announced, the Windows Phone and Windows 8 demos were slick – but probably because the presenters had a chance to hone their skills over the last few months of giving virtually the same presentation over and over again.

And Here's Xbox – And a Tiny Little Bit of News

At one point during the Xbox demo, which included two other minor snippets of news – a partnership with News Corp. and a Sesame Street app – Microsoft decided that it was about time to show that you can play music videos on the Xbox… and to make it clear that this was really a music video, we got to see all of it (or at least the audience in the keynote hall did – the livestream cut out at that point because of copyright concerns). 

Maybe the oddest moment of the show, though, was an appearance of the "Tweet Choir." Writing this a good hour after their appearance, I'm still not sure what they were singing about…

Even Ryan Seacrest seemed to be getting impatient towards the end of the show: "Steve, you know something we don't know yet. What's coming next?" Ballmer's answer: "Windows 8." You can't make this stuff up…

Sinofksy: “Windows 8 reimagines Windows for a new generation of computing devices”

As Sinofsky notes, Microsoft wants to use this blog to have an “open dialog with those […] who will be trying out the pre-release version over the coming months.” It’s widely expected that Microsoft will make an early beta version of Windows 8 available to its developers at its Windows-centric BUILD conference next month.

There isn’t too much that is new in Sinofsky’s blog post. He mostly reiterates what Microsoft has already publicly stated about Windows 8. Here are some of the highlights:

• Microsoft is “100% committed to running the software and supporting the hardware that is compatible with over 400 million Windows 7 licenses already sold and all the Windows 7 yet to be sold.”
• “Computing is much more focused on applications and on people than on the operating system itself or the data. These changes in the landscape motivate the most significant changes to Windows, from the chips to the experience”
• “In the next weeks we will just start talking specifics of features, since there is no obvious place to start given the varying perspectives. From fundamentals, to user interface, to hardware support, and more, if something is important to you, we promise we’ll get to it in some form or another.”
• “Our focus on performance, reliability, compatibility, security, and quality is now baked into our engineering process even as we change Windows for a new generation. With these changes come new ways of doing work on Windows PCs as well as continual investments in hardware, software, and peripherals.”

Still, it’s good to see that Microsoft is ready to talk more openly about Windows 8 now. This will help it to keep rumors in check and potentially build some excitement around Windows 8. The early glimpse at the UI we got earlier this year was promising, but also still felt more like a skin on top of Windows 7 than a new operating system. This early demo also focused strongly on the touch screen experience and barely touched upon what the regular interface would look like on a mainstream desktop.

After the launch of Windows 7, Microsoft was widely criticized for soliciting feedback from users during the beta phase without taking a lot of it into account. Hopefully, things will be a bit different this time around.

When it comes to taking professionally looking photos, most advanced photographers with large DSLR cameras opt to save their images as raw, uncompressed – and hence very large – files. These files contain every piece of information the camera sensor recorded, while most consumer cameras today save images as compressed JPEG files and perform at least some kind of basic “enhancements” on those files. Users who want access to the raw data can sometimes enable this function in their point-and-shoot cameras, but virtually all DSLRs allow access to the raw data. Sadly, though, not every mainstream image editor can use these files and as DSLRs slowly become more mainstream, that’s becoming an issue. While Apple iPhoto is able to import raw files from some cameras, Microsoft’s iPhoto counterpart Photo Gallery did not have this ability.

Today, however, Microsoft announced the releases of a codec pack for Windows 7 and Vista that brings support for more than 120 cameras to Photo Gallery and Windows Explorer (for previews). There are, of course, plenty of camera manufacturers who offer their own codecs and raw editors for Windows systems, but until now, you couldn’t just take these images and use them like a JPEG file in the Windows Explorer and Photo Gallery.

As for editing raw images, Photo Gallery will, according to Microsoft, always preserve the original image and save edits as JPEGs or in the newer JPEG-XR format (aka HD Photo). Microsoft stresses that it never makes any changes to the raw file.

You can check if your camera is supported by this codec pack and download both 32bit and 64bit Windows versions of the pack here.

With this SDK, developers will get access to virtually all of the Kinect’s advanced hardware, including raw sensor streams, skeletal tracking for up to two people and access to the device’s audio which can be integrated with Microsoft’s speech recognition API.

Non-Commerical Only – For Now

For now, the SDK only allows for non-commerical usage. This means you won’t see Kinect-enabled PC games or gesture-based interface for sale anytime soon. Microsoft is currently aiming the SDK at academics and students who want to use the SDK for research and classroom teaching and those who want to simply explore the possibilities of using the Kinect for building new natural user interfaces.

While the SDK only allows for these non-commerical uses, though, Microsoft explicitly notes that developers can distribute their demos, though users who just want to test these apps will have to install the SDK as well.

Microsoft also plans to allow for commercial uses of the SDK soon, but hasn’t disclosed a timeline yet. Talking to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft Research Distinguished Scientist Anoop Gupta said that he expects to see Kinect-based apps for “telepresence/teleconferencing, manufacturing, retail billboard, automotive and lots of other categories to be big among Kinect developers as the SDK moves from non-commercial to commercial.”

Until now, every search engine offered its own way of doing something like this. Google had its Rich Snippets, for example, while Yahoo had SearchMonkey. It’s also worth noting that there have long been formats like RDF and microformats that allowed website owners to offer structured data to search engines. Most search engines already understand this data, but as Microsoft points out in its announcement, the company feels “strongly that by partnering with Google and Yahoo! on standard schemas webmasters can be more efficient with the time they invest.” That doesn’t quite explain why these three companies didn’t decide to work with one of the existing standards, though.

This new version of Streetside started its life as a Microsoft Research project called Streetslide and is currently available in 56 major cities in the U.S. and Canada (though this new version doesn’t seem to be available in all locations yet). Given that Microsoft is clearly emphasizing this product now, though, chances are that we will see additional cities in the near future. We also know that Microsoft’s Streetside cars have been on the road in Europe, so keep an eye out for the European version of this feature as well.

Microsoft notes that the old, Streetview-like style made “it difficult for you to get a sense for a larger area like a city block. Moreover, it’s hard to pick out storefronts farther away since you really only see the ones directly perpendicular to your viewpoint with great clarity.” Now, when you use Microsoft’s version of the pegman, you’ll be taken to the new Streetslide-based version of Streetside. Without saying so directly, this is obviously also a critique of Google’s Streetview approach.

To give it a try, head to Bing Maps, click on the blue pegman at the top of the map.

Here is a map that shows the areas where Streetside is currently available:

While Google is able to pull in data from Twitter and a number of other services (including its own recently launched +1 and public Facebook fan pages), Microsoft is the only major search engine with access to Facebook’s firehose. Thanks to this, Bing now shows you whenever a friend has ‘liked’ a site that appears on your search results page and pushes these results to the top of the page, too.

Collective IQ

In addition to these highly personalized results, Bing now also takes aggregate ‘like’ data into account while ranking search results. Thanks to this, Bing will now surface recipes on cooking sites that were ‘liked’ by a certain number of other Facebook users or which books on Amazon are currently popular.

Besides these major additions, Bing also launched a number of other features, including the ability to build a “travel wish list” that also shows you which of your friends live or have lived in a given city and the ability to receive notifications of flight deals when you ‘like’ a Bing flight search result.

Like vs. +1 and the Twitter Firehose

With the millions of ‘like’ buttons on the Web today, there can be little doubt that having access to this data firehose allows Bing to present more relevant data to mainstream users than Google currently can with its Twitter integration (there are, after all, far more users on Facebook than on Twitter). Google simply doesn’t have access to this data, which is likely one of the reasons why it started its +1 initiative. With +1, though, Google is far behind Facebook. Indeed, +1 is still just a labs product and the company will only launch +1 buttons for third-party sites in the next few weeks.

It’s worth noting that Yahoo UK still powers its own search engine and – unlike the Yahoo mothership in the U.S. – doesn’t get its search data from Bing yet. The timetable for Bing’s integration into the UK version of Yahoo isn’t clear yet, but the total share of searches for a combined Bing/Yahoo would currently be just under 8%. Year-to-year, Bing was the only major search service in the UK that gained market share.

The biggest loser in the UK is Google, however, which lost 0.61% of the share of searches in March when compared to last year and 0.66% compared to February.

The deals feature allows business owners to create discount coupons and advertise promotions (by one, got one free etc.) and enter a description of the deal (including images).

It’s worth noting that Google is offering a similar service on its Place Pages.

The new platform also allows small businesses to update their listings with up-to-date menus, for example, and links to their other web properties, including their Facebook and Twitter profiles.

In between these two, though, is a surprise: Microsoft Messenger with close to 14.5 million users yesterday according to AppData’s stats, Messenger, an app that most early adopters never think about, allows its users to easily chat with both their Messenger and Facebook friends. Looking at the daily user numbers, Messenger is currently the most popular app on Facebook that is not a game.

I first took a look at the state of Messenger on Facebook last November and called its arrival in the Facebook top 3 (by daily active users) a “surprise.” Since then, though, Messenger has settled in the #2 spot nicely and continues to grow rapidly.

Messenger’s daily user numbers are up by over 300,000 over the last week. CityVille, on the other hand, lost 600,000 daily users over the same period, while FarmVille lost almost 500,000. With regards to fans on Facebook, Messenger only trails CityVille by just about 250,000 (9.8 million vs. 1.05 million likes)

Microsoft, of course, has also integrated Facebook into its desktop version of the Messenger app, which is likely a factor behind how well Messenger is doing on Facebook. Over 18 million Messenger users have already connected their chat accounts to Facebook. Facebook, of course, is all about communication at its core, so it makes sense that an app like Messenger would do well there, but given the might of Zynga’s social gaming empire, it’s still quite a surprise to see Microsoft in this group.

As I’ve said before, though, I also think that this speaks to how the mindset at Microsoft has changed over the last few years. Instead of building its own Facebook clone (and likely failing badly at it), the company has embraced working with market leaders in other areas, be that integrating other social networks deeply into Microsoft Live or working with Kayak to integrate better flight data into Bing.

It’s worth noting that the IE9 beta saw 2 million downloads within the first two days after it launched. The difference here, though, is that the first beta also marked the first time Microsoft showed the IE9 interface to the public. Many users likely just downloaded it just to see what the new interface looked like. The beta release was also heavily covered in mainstream media outlets.

One of the reasons to be interested in the IE9 release candidate is the fact that this the first version of IE9 to include Microsoft’s interpretation of a “do not track” feature. This allows Internet users to tell online advertisers and search engines that they want to opt out of behavioral tracking. Mozilla and Google have also launched their own versions of this feature in the last few weeks. For the time being, though, none of these systems are compatible with each other.

Related links:

• Internet Explorer 9 RC released: Everything you need to know (downloadsquad.switched.com)

Localized search results are, of course, nothing new and Google has been offering this feature for quite a while now and continues to make local search a major focus of its engineering efforts. Bing, too, has been offering a local search feature for a while, but this was a separate feature in a separate tab and not integrated into the default search results page.

Now, your location will also influence the results you see on the default search results page. Providing more local search results is a major step forward for Bing, given that local search is becoming increasingly important and provides a way for the search engine to offer more relevant search results to its users. Today, according to the Bing team, “76% of people users use search engines to plan trips, events or social gatherings.”

The new personalization feature, too, will help Bing provide more relevant results. The search engine’s algorithms will now look at your search history and remember which sites you usually click on. As the Bing team notes, users “commonly re-issue such navigational queries and the intent of that user rarely changes.” So whenever Bing thinks a user is trying to “re-find” a site, it will give more weight to the link you clicked on before. If you often search for “spiegel,” for example, and usually click on the link to the German news magazine and not the fashion store, Bing will realize this and push the German link further up to the top.

So what happened? According to Search Engine Land, Google noticed that some of Bing’s search results looked more and more like Google’s over the last few months. In order to test this theory, Google set up a sting operation. Starting in mid-December, Google engineers used laptops that ran Internet Explorer and with both the Suggested Sites and Bing Toolbar turned on to search for around 100 terms that were either made up or barely ever searched for. Among these terms were nonsense words like hiybbprqag, indoswiftjobinproduction and mbzrxpgjys. Most of these returned either none or very poor results on Google and none on Bing.

Google then set up fake search results for these terms that were accessible over the Internet but, given the nature of the search terms, would never be seen by real users. After just two weeks of running this experiment on these laptops with the Bing toolbar and IE’s Suggested Sites feature turned on, Bing started to return the exact same results for the terms used in Google’s honeypot sting. It’s important to note that this only happened for 7 out of the 100 terms Google experimented with.

Using IE, Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar to Copy Google Search Results

How did this happen? The likely explanation for this is that Bing uses the signals it gets from users who use the Bing Toolbar and Suggested Sites features to enhance its own search results. So whenever somebody who has these tools installed searches on Google, Bing gets this information. As Sullivan points out, this is perfectly within the realm of Microsoft’s privacy policy, but most users are likely not aware of it. Basically, Bing looks at what Internet Explorer users are clicking on when they use Google and then molds its own search results accordingly.

While that’s oddly clever and likely benefits Bing’s users, it also doesn’t feel right at all. The evidence, as presented by Google, is clearly damning for Bing. We expect to hear more from Microsoft about this over the course of the day and will update this post as warranted.