For the longest time, the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi has been the most widely used camera on Flickr. With a 10.1 MP Lens, an image sensor vibration cleaning system, 9-point auto focus, and a mid-range price point, it’s easy to see why the Canon camera has been so popular with the photography enthusiasts on Yahoo’s photo-sharing website.

But while Canon has dominated, there’s another camera that’s been zipping up the Flickr charts. Actually, camera phone would be more precise, because we’re talking about the iPhone.

That smartphone, with its weak 2 MP camera and its lack of zoom, is now set to overtake Canon Rebel XTi as the #1 camera on Flickr. This is according to Flickr’s Camera Finder graphs. Actually, as the LA Times has already caught, the iPhone has already passed the Rebel XTi on a few occasions as the two duke it out for the top spot.

So what does this development mean? First, it’s a reflection of the intense popularity of mobile smartphones and specifically the rise of the iPhone. You always have a camera in your pocket (and with the 3GS, a camcorder too). Just as important is that it’s easy to upload your pictures directly from your mobile phone to your Flickr account. That’s something most digital cameras can’t do, since they aren’t connected to 3G or Wifi connections.

This doesn’t mean people prefer lower quality images over the higher resolution photos that can be captured with cameras of the Rbel XTi’s quality. Instead, it’s a sign that the world is becoming a more mobile place. Being able to get your photos to all of your friends while on-the-go is part of that mobile revolution.

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Google keeps on adding and testing new features for its Chrome browser. Things like extensions and Chrome for Mac are still missing, although available if you are adventurous and install Chromium, the open-source project for Google Chrome. Chromium has beta and development features that Google is testing before adding to the Chrome browswer.

Chromium got a new feature, as it occassionally does, but this one definitely caught our eye. The Chromium team announced the addition of bookmark syncing in the developer’s build of Chromium. The new feature will let you keep the same set of bookmarks on multiple machines as well as store them in your Google Docs. This is not unlike the very popular Firefox extension Xmarks.

Here’s how Google explained the new addition, as well as how to implement it:

As of today’s dev channel build, we’re adding a brand new feature to Google Chrome: bookmark sync. Many users have several machines, one at home and one at work for example. This new feature makes it easy to keep the same set of bookmarks on all your machines, and stores them alongside your Google Docs for easy web access.

To activate this feature, launch Google Chrome with the –enable-sync command-line flag. Once you set up sync from the Tools menu, Chrome will then upload and store your bookmarks in your Google Account. Anytime you add or change a bookmark, your changes will be sent to the cloud and immediately broadcast to all other computers for which you’ve activated bookmark sync (using the same XMPP technology as Google Talk).

A note: the Chromium Dev version is the least stable of the Chromium browsers. Windows can crash, new features can need tweaks, and we may never see bookmark syncing ever reach Google Chrome itself. However, this new feature still tickles our fancy, so if you’re brave, subscribe to the dev channel and get the update.

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When you are well known and have some cash in the bank, you’re probably going to get sued at least once in your life. When you are Facebook and you have 250+ million users, increase the amount of lawsuits by a factor of 10 or so. Yes, Facebook has been sued once again, this time for allegedly misleading members on the use of their personal information and for violating California privacy laws.

The Orange County lawsuit was filed on behalf of five Facebook users, according to the AP – a photographer, an actress, two children under 13 (despite needing to be 13 or older to legally use Facebook) and a “user of the original Facebook.” It seeks monetary damages, attorney’s fees, and a trial by jury.

As you’d expect, Facebook believes that there is “no merit to this suit” and intends to fight it. We could go on and on about past Facebook lawsuits, many of them similar to this one. There was the lawsuit seeking $70.50 in damages, the text messaging lawsuit, the iKimbo patent, a class-action lawsuit for Facebook Beacon, the famous ConnectU debacle, and most recently, Power.com suing Facebook over data ownership. We’re pretty sure this list is nowhere near comprehensive.

Look: Facebook faces these types of suits all the time, and most of the time they are either dismissed or settled. Yes, Facebook’s had some thorny affairs with privacy, but recently they’ve been moving in the right direction with Facebook Democracy. Allowing users to vote on their own Terms of Service and letting them vote on changes is more than most sites offer. Besides, this lawsuit complains about common practices being illegal, such as changing the Terms of Service. It essentially rails against Facebook for 40 pages on practically every one of its featurse.

From the parts that we’ve read, we suspect that this California lawsuit doesn’t worry Facebook very much at all.

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Earlier this week, Delicious launched a new redesign of its homepage and some new search features. Yesterday they showed off the details of the search features, which included time filters, a trends graph, tag filters, enhanced results, and suggestions.

Today they are elaborating on the new sharing features. Instead of copying and pasting URLs, you can now email or tweet bookmarks directly from Delicious. To do this, just add recipients in the new Send field when you save or edit bookmarks. Then click the Send field and you’ll see the Send tab with social network options.

Delicious highlights the types of recipients you can add in the send field:

- Email address. Enter any valid email address. We’ve included an auto-complete feature for email addresses you’ve previously entered to make sending emails easier.

- Delicious user name Enter any valid user name. We’ve include an auto-complete feature for Delicious users in your network.

- Twitter. Type Twitter to share the bookmark on your Twitter feed. Associate a Twitter account by logging into Twitter under the Twitter panel in the Send tab.

Twitter users can associate a Twitter account and send all saved bookmarks to Twitter by selecting “Tweet all bookmarks unless private” when adding the account. Users can also attach a 116 character message with them.

More information on the new sharing features as well as some on Delicious shortened URLs can be found here. Read this article for more about the redesign.

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Earlier this year, Apple submitted a spec to the IETF for live streaming multimedia content over HTTP, leading some to suspect that a live video protocol would soon be making its way to iPhone and iPod devices. With the new 3.0 version of the iPhone OS, that HTTP live streaming protocol became a reality, and while there were already a handful of live video apps on the iPhone, they’re presumably now a lot better.

This list is a round up of some of the live TV options available on the iPhone. Most of these apps work best over wifi (and a few won’t work at all over 3G), and generally live streaming is a big drain on battery life. Still, being able to catch up with live television or out-of-market broadcasts when you’re not near your TV is a great option for iPhone owners to have.

Entertainment

netTV (Free/$2.99)

Available in both free and paid options, netTV offers live streaming access to over 200 channels from around the world, including a larger-than-usual number of channels from the US. The quality is generally pretty good, though I did experience some issues when first connecting to a channel, and of course it varies from channel to channel (depending on the source of the video stream).

TVUPlayer (Free/$4.99)

TVUPlayer plays live TV for over 300 channels, though only a handful of channels broadcast at the right bandwidth to play well. Some of the video feeds come in choppy or with audio syncing issues (I actually couldn’t get audio to work at all), a result of the iPhone’s hardware limitations according to the developers. Still, the app offers an impressive line up of live international television channels, even if many of them are strange.

WorldView Live ($2.99)

WorldView Live isn’t exactly TV, but it is live streaming video. The app provides access to thousands of live web cams from around the world. Only a handful (about 60, according to the developer) are actually live video, but the app does offer an interesting, if voyeuristic, view of the world for armchair travelers.

BONUS: Television ($2.99)

The $2.99 Television application isn’t live TV, but it offers access to an impressive line up of television video catch-up services. The app, which only works over wifi, lets users watch on-demand video from HBO, ESPN, NBC, FOX, CBS, Comedy Central, CNN, Sky and more.

News

FRANCE 24 LIVE (Free)

The live application from France’s channel 24 news offers live, video-on-demand streaming from the network in French, English, and Arabic over wifi, 3G, and even Edge! Of course, the video will be pretty choppy and low quality over Edge, but it’s unique among live video applications for even offering that option at all.

Al Jazeera English Live ($2.99)

Al Jazeera’s iPhone app, from Livestation, has 24/7 live streaming of its English-language news channel over wifi and 3G. The quality is very impressive and the app is under active development — so bugs don’t stay unsquashed for very long. If you are streaming over 3G, though, be aware that every 10 minutes you watch takes about 7.2mb of bandwidth, which is important to know if you’re not on an unlimited data plan.

BBC World News Live (€3.99)

Livestation offers a live streaming video app for BBC World News, as well, but the €3.99 application is only available in the UK (so I wasn’t able to try it out).

Sports

MLB.com At Bat 2009 ($9.99)

Major League Baseball’s MLB.com At Bat 2009 application may be pricey at $9.99, but it’s well worth it for die-hard fans that want to keep up with their team or out-of-market teams on the road. The app offers live audio broadcasts of every game to all owners of the app, and two games are offered over live video each night. For MLB.tv subscribers, however, every game can be watched live via the iPhone app (excepting those blacked out due to local market restrictions). The quality of the video streamed by the app is very impressive, especially over wifi.

PGA Championship ($1.99)

The last of the pro golf tour’s yearly majors, the PGA Championship, is next week at Hazeltine National Golf Club and the Professional Golf Association is making sure everyone can watch the tournament no matter where they are. The app gives users access to live video streams of four marquee groups (think big name players like Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and Padraig Harrington) on Thursday and Friday, and two more groups on the weekend. You can also watch the entire field play through the course’s par 3 holes during the whole tournament.

This is actually the third live video app the PGA has put out this year. They also had iPhone apps for tracking the Masters tournament and the US Open, and in March, CBS put out a March Madness application with live video of the year-end NCAA college basketball tournament. We’d expect both organizations to do the same in 2010.

TV 2 Sporten (Free)

If you like Norwegian football, then the free TV 2 Sporten app is for you. Jam-packed with live news and score updates, the app also has a live video section with goals and other game highlights. Of course, it will all make a lot more sense if you speak Norwegian.

More iPhone resources from Mashable:

- 14 iPhone Apps With Push Notification for Productivity
- 10 Fantastic iPhone Apps That Use Facebook Connect
- 7 iPhone Apps That Can Save Lives
- 15 iPhone Apps to Tame the Kids
- Data Visualizations: 5 Amazing iPhone Visualization Videos

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File sharing services are not as popular today as they were four years ago. It’s not that people are sharing any less. Rather, they just found easier ways to do it. Would you upload a funny video from a friend’s email to any of those services or would you search for it on Youtube and share only the link? Would you upload an MP3 file in order to share with whomever, or would you search for it online, grab the link and then share it? And finally, would you use a file-sharing app just to share a picture on Facebook when you can do it directly from your desktop to your Facebook profile? Of course, you wouldn’t!

So why would you use an file-sharing app anyway? Actually for many reasons: for larger files, for privacy, multiple files, file format support, and more.

In this post, I compare 16 file-sharing services.  I took three main issues under consideration when creating the comprehensive app list below: Free, Fast, and Useful . . .

Most of the services suggested require no registration. None of them will ask you to download anything to your computer, and all of them are easy to use, and worth using. It is actually great to see services, such as Yousendit, MailBigFile, and Rapidshare, that are still relevant and are good choices, but if I had to pick one it would be Mediafire.

Don’t get confused now.  This is not a list of services that let you store all your files in the cloud, organizes them, or allows you to collaborate with friends. It’s more focused on file-sharing only, in the richest capacity—well, okay, you be the judge of that.

Box.net is probably the most commonly-known site featured here. But I couldn’t keep it from the list because it’s really a good one and despite all its features, it’s actually simple to use. The light version is not so attractive though. Here’s what you get: File uploads up to 25MB/file (OK, that’s pretty lame). 5 collaboration folders, 1GB storage, mobile access, public file sharing, folder widget, and a few more options. The other plans are far richer, but for personal use, the free one is enough (except for the lame file uploads limit). One thing that bothered me is that you can’t upload a file without signing up. That’s the old fashion way, don’t you think?

Rapidshare is lacking in features & design, but if you’re looking for a one-click file host, you came to the right place. Founded in 2006, the service is the twelfth most visited homepage in the world. With Rapidshare, users can upload big files (200MB) in one step and subsequently make them available to friends and family via the download link. Premium accounts offer additional convenience, through TrafficShare that provides the option to make files available for direct downloading. The recipient of the file can access it instantaneously even if he/she is not a premium account member of RapidShare. A file can be downloaded 10 times, and will be deleted after 90 days.

I always liked drop.io and even now with much more usage than before, it is still simple to  understand. No need to sign up in order to quickly send a private link with your file(s). Maximum file upload is 100MB, but there are three different packages that will give you a whole lot more. Back to the free service; you can share, collaborate, and present music, videos, documents, audio, in a private drop, through email, web, phone, fax, and more. Additionally, you’ll be able to privately chat with the people you share a file with, in real-time.

Filedropper aims to give the most basic file hosting service that enables you to share stuff quickly. Therefore, there’s nothing complicated here, just upload the file, and share it. Simple as that. Filedropper says you can upload up to 5GB per file, which looks a bit odd to me – after all, who needs that (unless you are transferring HD videos, I guess)? Very similar to Filedropper, is FileSavr, which offers you the same package completely, with a slight change: uploads up to 10GB per file…

I actually marked this one as a favorite: Wikisend – an elegant and simple interface that helps you share files quickly. Share files with your friends using email, social networks, your blog, forums and so on. You can also protect the file with a password and choose the range of the file’s lifetime up to 90 days (max)

You can use Driveway even without registration and send up to 500MB max for each upload.  Signing up for a free account offers several advantages: A registered user can upload up to 2 GB of data to the Driveway account. Additionally, you can upload, manage and create widgets for files and folders and search for files/folders within your account.

With the free plan of Send6, you can send files up to 100MB size, which you can store in your 250MB free space. Send6 also has a free plug-in for Outlook that allows you to send large files directly from your Desktop. Please note that you don’t need to register to send files to friends. Sharing is done via email only.

Zshare is mainly used to share files that are too big to be sent via e-mail. With Zshare you can host files, images, videos, audio and flash in the same place, and as long as they remain active they can be downloaded limitlessly. Zshare lets you upload files up to 1GB, and if you register for the service (still free), you’ll be able to share them privately. Premium members get faster downloads (like most of the services here) and the ability to upload up to 2GB per each upload. Multiple files are allowed in both free and premium lines.

Overall, 2large2email has a nice and comfortable email-like interface for sharing large files. How large? 100MB in the free plan. However, if you’re looking for something good and free, 2larg2email is not your answer. The service won’t give you any additional features but password protection, and your files can be downloaded up to 7 times, will be saved for only 7 days, and will expire after that. For more features, you’ll have to pay, or move and chose another service. BTW, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t pay for premium services, but if there are other services for personal use, that offer you more for less, you may want to check them out first.

For busy people, Senduit is the best choice there is! It’s a one-page platform that generates a private link from the file you upload (100MB Max) for easy sharing. You can send the link via email through Senduit’s page directly, or copy-paste the link to any other communication channel (IM, Social networks, etc.). You get to choose when the link will expire—from 30 min. to 1 week.

I couldn’t find the exact amount that you can upload per file to Flyupload, but the service looks great. Flyupload allows you to store, access, share and backup your digital documents, photographs, and music easily with complete privacy online. Registered users get extra features like 2GB space of files, Multi-uploads with an upload progress bar. You can also upload large files via FTP or create folders and keep track of files and Images. Additionally, Flyupload lets you share files from your database, to your Twitter account with a side tool called: Flyontwit.

If I had to choose one service only from this list, Mediafire would be it. The service has a good looking UI, with some great usability. It lets you share files even when you’re not logged in and gives you a set of tools to complete this experience. For individual use, you can freely share files up to 100MB with unlimited uploads, unlimited downloads, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited storage. This is why you might choose Mediafire over 2large2email, for example. When signing up, Mediafire enables you to organize your files in folders, search and view your files, and email/share/embed with others. It’s the best service that you can get for free.

I was surprised to see that underneath the new layout of DivShare is the same great service from three years ago. And, even more surprised to discover some files I had stored 3 years ago in the service are still there! DivShare is a file management service that not only lets you share files, but also saves them for later (for an unlimited period of time). The maximum size per file is 200MB and you have 5GB space for free to start. After the upload, you’ll be able to embed your videos, audio and slide shows on any web site or profile. Diveshare has an iPhone and Facebook applications, a Wordpress plug-in and an open API, if you want to build something yourself.

Back when I tried MailBigFile in 2005, I thought this was a great service that offered a convenient solution to sending larger files. I still think it’s a good service. You don’t need to sign up, but if you choose to this is the best pro account for your dollar. Even though, you can use the service for free and as long as you want to send up to 200MB per file via email (but with no additional features). MailBigFile has the best price for a pro account – $15/year with an impressive list of features.

Last but not least is good old Yousendit, which has never plummeted in its presence online. A reliable and secure service since 2004 that offers the ability to send free 100MB files with a maximum number of 100 downloads allowed per file. You use it just like an email, choose a recipient, send it directly to a person’s inbox, and you get a notification when your file is downloaded.

Sharing files, large or small, should be a simple act, in my opinion—not something that should require a major effort or thought process on your behalf or make you create a complicated profile/account to use it. The options I listed here will help you explore the diverse file-sharing opportunities currently available. Whether you need to send a file privately or publicly, small or big, temporary or permanent, the options are all in this list, you just need to find the best match for your needs.

(Folder graphic by Photoxpress)

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In contrast to a ban on US Marines from using Twitter and Facebook on the military network, Britain’s Ministry of Defence has told troops they’re free to use social media tools and should apply “common sense” when deciding what to share online.

What’s more, the MOD has said it will sponsor soldiers who want to use blogs and Twitter to share stories of military life with the outside world.

The unclassified memo is available online, and reads, in part:

1. Service and MOD civilian personnel are encouraged to talk about what they do, but within certain limits to protect security, reputation and privacy. An increasingly important channel for this engagement, and to keep in touch with family and friends is social media (such as social networking sites, blogs and other internet self-publishing). Personnel may make full use of these but must:

Follow the same high standards of conduct and behaviour online as would be expected elsewhere;
Always maintain personal, information and operational security and be careful about the information they share online;
Get authorisation from their chain of command when appropriate (see para 2 below);

2. Service and MOD civilian personnel do not need to seek clearance when talking online about factual, unclassified, uncontroversial non-operational matters, but should seek authorisation from their chain of command before publishing any wider information relating to their work which:

Relates to operations or deployments;
Offers opinions on wider Defence and Armed Forces activity, or on third parties without their permission; or
Attempts to speak, or could be interpreted as speaking, on behalf of your Service or the MOD; or,
Relates to controversial, sensitive or political matters.

Online Presences “Encouraged”

In fact, the wording of the document is wildly opposite to the US Marines’ order issued this week, which essentially ruled out the use of all social media tools on the DOD network. The MOD memo instead focuses on the need to “harness new and emerging technologies, new unofficial online channels, and new unofficial online content in order to communicate and disseminate defence and Service messages and build defence and Service reputation”.

It’s a policy that’s likely to earn praise from bloggers, and could foster a positive brand image for the British military. What’s more, starting online conversations about military life might also help with recruitment to the armed forces.

The MOD maintains an official Twitter account and their Armed Forces Day Facebook page has accrued over 178,000 fans. For the icing on the cake, the MOD even Tweeted about their new guidelines with the hashtag #whentwitterwasdown:

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The term “e-commerce” still lacks a universally valid definition, but even if you just bundle B2B and B2C transactions under it, it’s a multi-trillion dollar business globally. Last year, Nielsen found [PDF] 86% of the global web population made an online purchase already (North America: 92%). For the US alone, B2C sales are expected to grow from $130 billion this year to over $200 billion by 2013 (excluding travel).

In North America, Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla in the B2C arena – by very, very far. After the US launch in 1995, the company quickly established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, and Japan. But although Amazon wins in Canada and Europe, things are not going as well in Asia. In China (where Amazon started offering a localized site in 2004), it practically gets destroyed by local player Taobao [CN]. Traffic-wise, Amazon gets dwarfed by a local e-commerce site in Japan, too: Rakuten [JP].

Amazon is active in Japan for a good reason: In its last report [JP, PDF], the Japanese government said the country’s online B2C sector grew by 21.7% to over $55 billion in 2007 on a year-on-year basis. (Note: Statistics from different sources can vary widely because of totally different methods of measurement. The Japanese numbers, for examples, do include travel.)

Now it seems Rakuten wants to take its global plans (laid out numerous times in the past) to the next level, with CEO Hiroshi Mikitani saying just this weekend he wants to see his company generating $1 million in daily sales outside Japan by the end of this year.

This short case study tries to shed light on Rakuten’s background and key success factors, why they win against Amazon in Japan and what efforts they make to go global.

1. Rakuten vs. Amazon Japan
With 47 million members (1 in 3 Japanese is registered), Rakuten Ichiba (Rakuten Marketplace) is a household name in this country. The biggest difference to Amazon is that Rakuten was founded as a B2B2C company without a warehousing function. It’s a platform for individual merchants to sell their products to individual customers online.

And they’ve been very successful with it, even though Amazon launched their Japanese site as early as 2000. Look at the table below for a head-to-head and a Google Trends traffic comparison chart:

2. Rakuten’s success factors: Aggressive pricing and wide diversification
The idea and main success factor for Rakuten was helping Japanese brick and mortar businesses that wanted to set up customized online storefronts by themselves. As early as around the end of the 1990s, CEO Mikitani began systematically undercutting prices of existing hosting services by several hundred percent and combined this with an aggressive sales and consulting model. As a trade-off for cutting out middlemen, merchants had to pay upfront, which made it possible for Rakuten to maintain a positive cash flow. Until today, the site offers its merchants a number of services to make their lives easier (real-world seminars, a monthly merchant-only magazine, phone support etc.). In return, Rakuten pockets fixed “virtual real estate” fees from the 28,000+ merchants currently registered on the site, in addition to commission payments (2.6% of each retailer’s sales revenue).

In parallel, the company stepped away from its original B2B2C roots in the last years, quickly turning into a gigantic web conglomerate. And the company transformed more radically than Amazon did in the US: Rakuten acquired popular online portal Infoseek (Alexa Japan rank: 20) to drive traffic to the main site, established an auction service (now Japan’s third largest), provides online securities brokerage, bought an online travel service (Rakuten Travel is now Japan’s biggest hotel reservation site) and offers a blogging platform (the No. 3 in blogging-crazy Japan). In addition, there is a Rakuten credit card (nearly 2 million Japanese own one), a personal consumer credit service, an e-bank (Japan’s biggest), a ticket sales service, a real-world Rakuten soccer team, a popular golf court reservation sub-site etc. etc. You get the picture.

3. Rakuten Marketplace: 35 million items from $1 to $100,000
But despite the rapid diversification in recent years, Rakuten is still known mainly as an online shopping site for the Japanese. And in contrast to Amazon, they can get anything on Rakuten, from used $70,000 four ton-trucks, Gucci handbags, digital content (Amazon Japan doesn’t offer downloads), down to apples and oranges directly offered by regional farmers.

The price level is relatively low for many items, as many shops offer identical products and the collected setting allows for users to quickly compare prices. Shipping is generally free on all books, DVDs, CDs and similar media. Another difference to Amazon Japan: Rakuten has the so-called “Super Points” system in place, a reward program for members (you are not required to register to buy on the site).

Here is the translated version of Rakuten Ichiba’s massive top page (click to enlarge):

4. Amazon Japan’s strong position
Seeing this cluttered top page (which isn’t regarded unusual in Japan at all), it’s interesting to notice Amazon resists the urge to change their globally uniform design approach to accommodate Japanese tastes (Amazon’s US site basically serves as a design blueprint for all their sites worldwide).

But Amazon isn’t doing business as usual in Japan, making additional investments in its subsidiary instead. Next month, the company will set up a new distribution center just outside Osaka (it will be Amazon’s biggest in Japan). In the last weeks, three new categories with some 130,000 items were added to the site. And it’s possible for Japanese retailers to open an online shop on Amazon since 2006 already.

Overall, Amazon has positioned itself very well in Japan, proving that foreign web companies can enter this country successfully. And they also show that being inferior in traffic doesn’t always translate to being (proportionally) inferior in sales. Amazon’s parent company doesn’t break down sales figures on a country level, but some sources [JP] estimate the Japanese subsidiary rakes in roughly 10% of Amazon’s total sales and income. Assuming this is true, this would bring sales in this country to around $1.9 billion and operating income to a handsome $84 million (even though just yesterday, Japanese tax authorities reportedly demanded back $119 million in taxes from the company for unreported income).

5. Rakuten’s internationalization efforts and English services
Rakuten has been talking about going international for years now, and they’re already testing waters in a handful of countries. In the US, Rakuten acquired New York-based e-commerce company LinkShare for $425 million four years ago (Rakuten USA itself is headquartered in Boston). Rakuten Taiwan and Rakuten Europe (in Luxembourg) were established last year. Rakuten Travel has expanded to Korea, Guam, Thailand and China.

International customers can already book hotels in many Asian countries through Rakuten Travel’s English interface (which is on Rakuten Japan and works very well). About a fourth of all items available for Japanese customers can be ordered from selected countries through a service called Rakuten International Shipping Services. Non-Japanese users can access Google-translated item pages (24 languages are currently supported), place an order, pay via credit card and then wait for direct delivery from Japan (it’s even possible for foreigners to collect Super Points).

This is just a makeshift solution, sure, but way better than what many other Japanese online retailers offer.

6. Conclusion
Rakuten says sales outside Japan currently account for less than 10% of total sales, and overseas sales are currently growing at an average of about 20% monthly. Mikitani regularly mentions Asia (China in particular) as the next big market for his company.

But the current economic crisis has triggered what seems to become a trend among online giants: selective internationalization. MySpace decimated non-US staff just recently, Facebook is rumored to have second thoughts about China and Germany-based business social network Xing last week decided to shelve expansion plans for the US and China.

That’s why my guess is Rakuten will avoid battling it out with Amazon in their core markets and focus on untapped countries or niche segments instead – despite those aggressive announcements of the past. (In January last year, for example, the company said it will make inroads into 27 different countries by 2013. Mikitani regularly claims his final aim is to build the world’s biggest Internet company.)

Things are going quite well in Japan, but on a global level, Rakuten will have a tough time. The big competitors will certainly not cede markets such as Latin America, Africa or South East Asia to them standing by and doing nothing. In the US and core markets in Europe, Amazon dominates. In China, Taobao already established itself with 120 million users.

For the time being, there shouldn’t be a realistic chance for external players to win these markets over. This is true even for a conglomerate like Rakuten and its charismatic leader (who, in addition, still has to deal with a pretty strong service called Amazon domestically).

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Twitter has started linking hashtags in tweets to Twitter searches. A few other Twitterers have started to notice as well:

The move makes sense, considering that the hashtag phenomenon has reach tremendous popularity. They often appear in the trending topics.

The move also illustrates a greater emphasis being placed on Twitter Search, which only this year has become a focus of the company. It wasn’t that long ago that it was added to the Twitter home page, and it is already sparking big interest in real-time search throughout the entire search industry.

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There were unknown lifeforms, #moonfruit, Firefox 3.5, and the sale of The Pirate Bay making social media news this week. From the shocking $7.8 million sale of the web’s pirating hub to the release of Firefox 3.5 and its killer features, social media events kept rolling in.

There were also some insightful and useful resources that got people’s attention this week. If you’re interested in gorgeous Twitter visualizations or how to get retweeted on Twitter, social media provided the answer. Here are this week’s top 11 social media stories:

1. 6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations – Stan Schroeder takes a close look at six of the most beautiful Twitter visualization apps around.

2. Sneak Peek: What’s On Tap for Firefox in 2010 – While Firefox 3.5 may have come out this week, Mozilla’s already hard at work on version 3.6. Josh Catone explores what’s coming for the popular browser.

3. The Pirate Bay Sold For $7.8 Million – Global Gaming Factory X AB shocked the technology world this week when it announced its acquisition of The Pirate Bay. Why did they sell? And what’s next for the controversial peer-to-peer website?

4. Unknown Lifeform in North Carolina Sewer: A Monstrous YouTube Hit – It’s the breakout YouTube hit of the week, and nobody’s quite sure what it is. What is this thing that has piqued the web’s curiosity?

5. Twitter Promotion Done Right: #moonfruit – There’s a new hashtag-based marketing campaign making buzz on Twitter. Learn how they got right what #squarespace got wrong.

6. HOW TO: Get Retweeted on Twitter – Pete Cashmore explores some interesting data on retweets, and how that can apply to getting retweeted more often.

7. Top 5 Killer Features in Firefox 3.5 – Firefox 3.5 is a huge upgrade over its predecessor. Find out what sets this new version apart as a browser.

8. Facebook Page Frenzy Due Today: URLs Available to All – While Facebook opened up vanity URLs for profiles earlier this month, it left smaller Facebook fan pages to wait until this week to claim their usernames. Pete Cashmore explains the details.

9. Twitter Increases API Limit – Twitter has upped the API call limit by 50% this week, making your favorite Twitter apps a lot more useful. Learn why this is important.

10. 10 Ways to Find People on Twitter – Josh Catone discusses 10 different ways to find new friends and people on Twitter.

11. Michael Jackson Died in 2007, Says Google – With the world turning to Google and the web for information on Michael Jackson, some information was a bit…off.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, AndrewJohnson

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