Microsoft could unveil a stand-alone Skype application for Windows Phone as soon as this month's Mobile Phone Congress, and Skype is expected to be standard on the mobile operating system when the company launches Windows Phone 8.

Skype was acquired by Microsoft in 2011 and a Skype client for Windows Phone had been promised by the end of last year. So far, Microsoft and its Skype unit have been quiet about the integration, but the Verge is reporting that company employees can now download a test version of Skype from the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Meanwhile, an internal Microsoft video that had been intended for executives at Nokia, is fueling more speculation about what features will be added to Windows Phone 8. Known by the codename Apollo, Windows Phone 8 is expected to be released sometime after the release of the Tango operating system, which is also expected at the Mobile Phone Congress.

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The video, obtained by the smartphone review site PocketNow, will have better integration with Microsoft desktop clients which should allow developers to reuse much of their code. While Windows Phone has been mostly lauded by crtics, a chief complaint has been a lack of apps.

Windows Phone 8 is also being upgraded to work on a wider range of hardware, and will include support for NFC radios.

Microsoft also said it expects 100,000 apps to be available for Windows Phone by the time Apollo is launched, which is currently rumored to be sometime in the fourth quarter.

"Overall, we're looking at a lot of changes and additions here, all of which seem designed to either bring Windows Phone in line with other platforms, feature-wise, or make it more closely identical to the desktop version of Windows," Evan Blass wrote on PocketNow. "It's probably safe to say that the jump from Mango/Tango to Apollo will be nearly as significant as the transition from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone, and this preview certainly gives us a lot to look forward to."

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Richard MacManus explores the characteristics of great user experience design. Alicia Eler explains what Pinterest is doing that Facebook should emulate. David Strom notes the decline of corporate blogging. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

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5 Signs of a Great User Experience

Great user experience is the result of thoughtful design. Richard explores 5 signs of great user experience, including examples from Path, Pinterest, Rdio and Fitbit. While he explains that great user experience isn't the deciding factor for success, it plays an important role and just may help a company gain initial attention and widespread adoption.

What Pinterest is Doing That Facebook Isn't

News of Facebook's IPO had many tongues wagging this week, but Alicia Eler focused on something Pinterest is doing that Facebook isn't: impacting purchases. While Facebook has tried to make social commerce work, Pinterest is delivering traffic that results in sales. Facebook conflates the social graph with the interest graph, and Alicia says that's a mistake.

Blogging Declines Across the Inc. 500

A new study indicates the number of corporate blogs amongst the Inc. 500 has significantly dropped in the past year. Conversely, the number has stayed virtually the same for the Fortune 500. Instead, of blogging, the Inc. 500 seems to be focusing on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

From the comments:

Lorne Pike - "I can't help but feel that any conclusions being drawn about blogging having peaked because of one year's change are very premature. We know the Inc. 500 is a volatile and ever-changing group of companies. Many of the names on the list will change from one year to the next. How many of the companies that at first glance seem to have "stopped" blogging simply weren't on the list last year?

The chart also shows that just a year ago we saw a considerable rise. Should we have concluded from that that the best days for blogging were still ahead? Blogging has many benefits, as do the other channels shown. To me, while it may be an early sign of things to come, the numbers shown here are hardly a sign that blogging is dead or dying or even has a slight cold. It's just changing, like marketing always has and always will."

More Top Posts:

Amazon S3 Reports Staggering Growth in 2011

Amazon Web Services just reported jaw-dropping growth in the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 year over year.

"As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times," AWS Evangelist Jeff Bar wrote on the company's blog tonight. The company reported 262 billion objects in storage in Q4 of 2010. More

Anti-Patterns for Technical Leaders

What's the difference between a CTO and a vice-president of engineering (VPoE)? According to Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, the lines are blurry. At the Monki Gras conference in London on February 1st, Hoffman (CTO) and Cantrill (VPoE), shared the stage and talked about the differences in their roles. More

How To Pimp Your LinkedIn Profile

I like using Twitter. I tolerate Facebook because I have to. And I'm on Google+ because everyone says I should be.

So that has left little time to give love to my profile on LinkedIn, which is, depending on how you look at it, either the biggest niche social network or the smallest of the big, all-encompassing social networks. Some people will tell you that sooner or later, all of our networking, social and professional, will be centrally located on Facebook. More

Red Hat Quietly Joins the OpenStack Effort

Word is that Red Hat refused to sign on to OpenStack when it was announced, because it didn't like the governance model. Red Hat also has its own cloud management software projects. But the company that once dismissed OpenStack seems to be coming around. Look closely at the OpenStack community and you'll find quite a few Red Hat engineers, including some that have become core contributors to OpenStack projects. More

How Lanyrd Uses HTML5 for a Great Mobile Web App

When it comes to HTML5 mobile Web app development, a lot of developers are waiting for a blue print of success to follow before jumping into the deep end. Sure, HTML5 mobile Web apps have the potential to change the entire mobile app ecosystem, but right now native apps are a tried and true channel that developers have come to trust. It will take several prominent and successful HTML5 mobile Web apps before the rest of the ecosystem jumps on the bandwagon. More

[Infographic] Google Apps Has Some Big Paying Clients

SaaS backup provider Backupify has recently examined its own customer sample to do some demographic profiling of Google Apps users. The results are somewhat intriguing, as you can see in the infographic below. If you remove .edu domains, Google Apps still has nearly 40% of all of its seats used by businesses with more than 10,000 employees. The company surveyed their customers who have at least 30 users. More

Twitter Upgrades Will Include Analytical Tools

Twitter will unveil a series of new tools in the next few months, including sophisticated analytical tools, according to Erica Anderson, Twitter's manager for news and journalism.

Anderson said the analytical tools will better help publishers track the reach of tweets sent through the microblogging service. She made her comments Saturday at Columbia University's social media weekend in New York. More

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A while ago, I posted about one of the classic blunders in response to online criticism: deleting negative comments.

Let's add another mistake to that list: silence.

I'm not sure there's a force on earth that could have saved Susan G. Komen for the Cure from the social media firestorm that engulfed the organization this week. But lord knows their communications strategy didn't do them a lot of favors - starting with their initial silence.

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Whether the rationale is "Let's hope it blows over" or "We can't get internal consensus on a message, so let's not say anything" or "Legal suggests we shut up", silence does nothing to stop an online juggernaut from building. All it does is reinforce the impression of an organization's critics that it's out of touch with their concerns.

Back when the main communication vehicles were things like ads and news media, you could often take a good long time before pushing out a news release or sending a spokesperson out for a scrum. Not any more.

Two things can help if you find yourself in the Komen situation - especially if you need some time to gather the facts, reflect on your position and decide on your next move.

First, a crisis communication plan. Thinking about possible scenarios and developing a strategy for each one - including who responds, how and in what channel - means you don't have to do that thinking when your fight-or-flight mechanism is competing with your higher reasoning functions for attention.

And second, an honest temporizing response. Replying to people that you understand how important the issue is to them, and promising them a more complete response within a few hours or days, and then delivering on that promise with a sincere and direct reply, can give you and your colleagues the time to move beyond a reactive, defensive response to a more effective one.

What won't work is wishful thinking. Planning based on the assumption that nobody will notice what you've done - or that when they do, they'll give you the benefit of the doubt - is some of the best fuel a firestorm could ask for.

Find more fuel for your next social media firestorm at the complete Noise to Signal cartoon archive.

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Sleep, sex and...Twitter?

A new study suggests that people are more likely to give into the urge to check email and their Twitter account than they are to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol. While the study headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School was limited in size, covering just 205 people between the ages of 18 and 85, it seems to confirm what many of us have suspected for years.

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"Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not 'cost much' to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist," Hofmann told the Guardian.

The study was primarily focused on willpower as opposed to addiction, and the moments when people were forced to resist urges to partake in an activity or deal with conflicting urges, such as the urge to sleep and the urge to stay out socializing. Sleep and sex generally trumped other urges, but checking media and work were generally put ahead of socializing and shopping urges.

"Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success," Hofmann said.

The study found that resistance to all urges declined as the day wore on, and that people seem to do a better job of resisting the urge to smoke or drink than many may have thought, given the addictive nature of both.

"With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs - long-term as well as monetary - and the opportunity may not always be the right one," Hofmann said. "So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still 'steal' a lot of people's time."

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

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"The thing about memes is that through repetition, they create a shared language," says Professor Julie Levin Russo, an adjunct assistant professor at Brown's Modern Culture & Media Program. "If you understand the premise of the meme, you can communicate a lot very easily, with whatever twist you're putting on the meme structure."

On Jan 4, the "Shit Girls Say" meme was radically transformed. New York-based graphic designer & video blogger Franchesca Ramsey a.k.a. Chescaleigh unleashed "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls", and it blew up the Internet. In the video, Ramsey plays her blonde-haired white friend who she portrays as curiously confused, and innocently ignorant. "Why isn't there a white entertainment television? The Jews were slaves too, and you don't hear us complaining all the time," Chescaleigh as-white-girl asks the camera. She portrays her friend as at times confused ("Is this racist?") other times annoyed. Overall, her white friend is completely unaware of fundamental cultural and racial differences between her and her black friend. It's these awkward moments that fuel the humor of this viral video.

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When Franchesca appeared on Anderson Cooper a few days after the video blew up, Cooper asked *the question* that mainstream media was dying to know: Is the video racist?

"I don't think that talking about ignorance is racist," Franchesca tells Cooper. "And like I said, I'm not labeling anyone racist because that would infer that the statements were saying someone was better than another race - and that's not what any of the statements are doing." Shortly after her Anderson Cooper appearance, Franchesca produced a sequel, "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls Part 2."

Soon, more "Shit X Says to Y" versions of the meme began to appear. "Shit White Girls Say to Brown (Desi/Indian) Girls" features an Indian woman portraying her white girlfriend, who asks questions like "Do you want to go to 7-11? Oh oops, is that racist?" It is cutting, and points to some of the underlying racism that Indian-Americans experience regularly.

In "Shit White Guys Say to Asian Girls," actor/comedian Cindy Fang dresses in drag, playing a white dude and points out some of the obnoxious, arrogant statements that some white guys say to Asian women. "Sorry, I have a hard time telling Asians apart," she says, with a tone that conveys how the white guy she is portraying doesn't feel like trying to educate himself. He is blissful in his ignorance. And then, a blatantly racist statement: "Why do they call it Bangkok? They should call it Bang Pussy!!!" This video speaks to the painful sexism and racism that Asian women experience.

Of course, it's just comedy - and the talented Fang masterfully exaggerates these statements to hammer home the crass, yet serious joke. Moreso than "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls," "Shit White Guys Say to Asian Girls" is doubly as biting, taking swipes at sex and race relations. It's almost as upsetting as "Shit Asian Girls Say", another version of the original "Shit Girls Say" meme.

In Latoya Peterson's blog post "Exploring the Problematic and Subversive Shit People Say [Meme-ology]" on Racialicious, she notes that it isn't until "Shit Black Gays Say" (and part 2) and "Shit Southern Gay Guys Say" that the viewer starts to see the performer's subjective interpretation of themselves.

"It's notable that these videos are the principals representing themselves (as opposed to someone else's interpretation of them), perhaps since these groups are still so invisible in the public eye that no one else but them could speak to their experience," writes Peterson.

How "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls" Shifted the Conversation

"There's a way in which the meme format allows for a more granular renditions of identity than you often see in mass culture," says Professor Russo.

Chescaleigh's video shifted the focus from the narrator as subject to the narrator as a vehicle for social critique. Now X is saying something to Y. Previously, X was either speaking for themselves, or portraying the stereotypical subject, usually in drag.

"Do you know the guy at the liquor store? I mean, I assume you guys all know each other," says the Arab girl portraying her white friend in "Shit White Girls Say...to Arab Girls". "I've never met one of you before! I mean, I've seen Arabs on TV...on the news. Was 9/11 your fault?"

"Friendly Prejuidice"

Writing for The Guardian, Thea Lim points out that the statements in all of these videos imply a sort of "friendly prejudice":

What's friendly prejudice? The most common defence of racism is: "But I didn't intend to be racist." This response relies on the idea that if we didn't intend to offend someone, then their feelings can't possibly be hurt. The Shit X Says to Y videos are delightfully validating because they show that those with the genuinely lovely intentions of being your friend and seeking commonality with you can still be rude and hurtful.

A commenter on the NPR story that questioned if Franchesca's video was "racist" tried the good ol' "role reversal" trick (that always fails), which attempts to deny the existence of white privilege. "If the roles were reversed...Jesse [Jackson] & [Al] Sharpton, would be involved, lawsuits filed, perhaps riots...". Says Lim:

The reason why relationships between white and non-white people, or straight people and gay people are fraught, is because of our history - long gone, recent or ongoing. Racist, homophobic or simply thoughtless comments are insulting not just in and of themselves, but because they are a bilious reminder of the times when straight, white people have dehumanised and denied other groups their human rights. Of course, non-white and gay people can say nasty or even prejudicial things to white and straight people, but those things don't deliver the sting that comes from decades of being on the wrong end of an unequal relationship. Where Do We Go From Here?

I have watched my friends react to these videos with anger and sadness. I have seen others shout "That's me! That totally happened to me." Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The most important aspect of these videos, however, is that people are actually reacting to them. They're easy conversation starters, a segway into sharing experiences past and present.

Looking at our own biased perspectives and cultural baggage is not easy, but it is necessary. The "Shit X Says to Y" iteration of the "Shit People Say" meme forces viewers to actually think about what they've said to their friends, and what their friends say to them. Humor helps us in those strange, uncomfortable moments.

But are we ready to deal with this?

In her post on Racialicous, Peterson points out that, still, "Shit Girls Say" and "Shit Black Girls Say" received a lot more views than their "Shit X Says to Y" social commentary videos. "Maybe that's because, as a culture, we are accustomed to laughing at stereotypes," writes Peterson, "but we aren't prepared to unpack how we perpetuate them."

After a few weeks of Internet madness, the noise died down. By the end of January, conversations about this meme were starting to feel stale. So the Internet chilled out and went back to its usual, easy humor. I started seeing these videos on my Facebook news feed: "Shit New Yorkers Say," "Shit Chicagoans Say." But it's only a matter of time until the currents shift again.

Image via Chescaleigh's Facebook page.

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This year's Super Bowl will be more social than ever before.

With the rise of social TV and the first-ever 2,800-square-foot social media command center, fans who have trekked down to Indianapolis and people at Super Bowl parties across the country can now opt to have a super-connected experience.

This marks the first time that the NFL has partnered with a Super Bowl host city. Like a Midwestern truck stop that's got a restaurant, convenience store, bathrooms, random coin-operated claw games (that you can't ever win) and gas, the Super Bowl social media command center seeks to be all things to all football fans. Receive mobile updates about navigating the city. The Super Bowl Social Media Command center will answer your Twitter (@superbowl2012) and Facebook questions. Follow the blog here. It's the customer service center of your Friday Night Lights dreams.

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Tons of fans are already busy on social media. According to research from Nielsen and NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company, the Patriots' website is beating the Giants' website in terms of unique visitors. Giants fans, however, tend to spend more time on their team's site - and they also view more pages. Giants fans are also talking more on social media about their quarterback, Tom Brady.

The Super Bowl is a Social TV Event

Various social TV apps are already available for Facebook. Entertainment social network GetGlue gives users an opportunity to check-in to sports events. ConnecTV is another free social platform that serves as a "second screen," which means users can talk to friends while watching the Super Bowl. Users can sync shows, and then watch them with their friends while chatting in real-time.

The Super Bowl seems to be making up for the lack of social media at the London 2012 Olympics. In fact, not one of the Olympic volunteers can make a comment about the games without permission, according to Sysomos. At Super Bowl 2012, expect the exact opposite.

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This is old (as in 2007 old). The kid in the video is now seven years old and undoubtably jailbreaks his iPhone and programs Arduino boards. But five years ago he was just a toddler with a bottle, and this was the first time he was on the Web and Fleek-ler!, as he called it, on his own. It was "the moment" - the moment when you first realize that moving the cursor and clicking the trackpad leads to discovery, and that discovery is a whole lot of fun.

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My son discovered Flickr today from Paul Mayne on Vimeo.

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StumbleUpon is one of those sites we've had on our radar for quite sometime. We covered the company's redesign last year, which re-focused the site on topic features. So when StumbleUpon snuck in a strange change the other day without telling anyone, we were shocked. This update made it impossible to get direct links for the pages one is stumbling unless they choose to not sign-in to the service.

The entire point of StumbleUpon, for the user, is to build up a taste graph that will better deliver stories that the user would like. But many sites depend on referral traffic from StumbleUpon, which is something outside of the StumbleUpon user's direct stumbling experience.

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"As part of redesign that spawns user experience that you write about, we look a lot at how users are using our service," said StumbleUpon's VP of Business Development and Marketing Marc Leibowitz. "We have some things in mind to address this concern."

StumbleUpon's response is that, well, they were "just trying to improve the user experience." And besides, they told us, two-thirds of users use the Web bar.

What a great solution. Truly. Not only will StumbleUpon not be able to get an idea of that user's taste graph, that user will miss out on the entire community aspect of the site. "Signed-in users, when they're encountering the Web bar it is about their stumbling," Leibowitz said. "Visitors can easily close the Web bar."

In other words, if you do want to see direct links, just don't sign in.

What a great solution. Truly. Not only will StumbleUpon not be able to get an idea of that user's taste graph, that user will miss out on the entire community aspect of the site.

Leibowitz cited accidental clicks on the "X" button of the Web bar as StumbleUpon's main reason for getting rid of the Web bar entirely.

"People would accidentally click the button - they don't have an extension such as Chrome or Firefox extensions, so they can't go back to their Stumbling unless they go directly to StumbleUpon.com."

This sounds like a complicated solution for a pretty easy problem. It would it have been pretty easy for StumbleUpon to just add a box that pops up when the user clicks "X." It could say something simple like: "Are you sure you want to close this page and leave StumbleUpon?" Instead, StumbleUpon says, it is thinking only of the users - not the people who receive tons of referral traffic from the StumbleUpon discovery engine.

"The trade off is that we have to make some concessions around the way we show the URL," Leibowitz tells us. "There's no way we can change the way the URL is displayed in the address bar, but there are some ways we can make it easier to copy and paste the source code."

For StumbleUpon users who are still looking for a way to see the direct URL, try using a StumbleUpon Firefox add-on or Chrome extension.

What Will Happen to StumbleUpon Referral Traffic? "My website used to get 70-80% of referral traffic from StumbleUpon," writes ReadWriteWeb commenter Jeffrey Davis. "After the redesign, that percentage dropped to 40%. I suspect now that it will drop even further...especially since SU is now hijacking the pageview." Unfortunately for sites who depend on StumbleUpon for referral traffic, there aren't too many alternatives.

"My website used to get 70-80% of referral traffic from StumbleUpon," writes ReadWriteWeb commenter Jeffrey Davis. "After the redesign, that percentage dropped to 40%. I suspect now that it will drop even further...especially since SU is now hijacking the pageview."

Pinterest is now Davis' number two referrer.

This is only one isolated case, but it's telling. Perhaps it's time for marketers to start shifting their strategy from StumbleUpon to Pinterest. Because it doesn't look like StumbleUpon will be backpedaling on its latest decision anytime soon.

Has referral traffic to your site suffered since the StumbleUpon redesign? Tell us about it in the comments.

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If you didn't make it to London for Monki Gras, the follow on conference to Monktoberfest, you missed out on quite a lot of great content and beer.

The conference is organized by RedMonk, an unusual analyst firm. Their conferences, reflecting the analysts at RedMonk, are unusual as well. The Portland, Maine event was primarily organized by RedMonk co-founder Stephen O'Grady, who resides in Maine. This time around, the event was primarily organized by RedMonk co-founder James Governor.

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Conference as a Joke

Some industry events have a very serious air about them. Things like VMworld or the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) have a very button-down feel about them, and tend to be highly skewed towards sponsor-driven content. Read: sponsors get speaking slots, and it shows. Many of the talks are little more than extended commercials, and tend to be about as interesting and informative as reading sales brochures.

James Governor paces the stage at Monki Gras

The RedMonk conferences, on the other hand, started as a joke. When the RedMonk folks joked about combining a beer and developer conference, though, they found that people weren't laughing. They were asking "when," "where" and "how much"?

The price for a two-day conference, which included catered lunch and dinner with a generous and interesting selection of beer? The tickets ranged from

Space sucks. Literally. The void of space is one perpetual vacuum that would suck the brain out of any exposed human through their ears. In space there is also unfiltered radiation, extreme temperatures and a multitude of other ways that humans can be harmed outside of low-Earth orbit. Learning how to mitigate radiation and improve space crews' health are two of 16 recommendations made by the National Research Council to NASA for the agency's technological focus in the next five years.

Researchers announced yesterday that they have discovered a new potential "Goldilocks" planet in a different solar system. A "Goldilocks" planet is one found within the habitable zone in orbit around a star - not too hot, not to cold - that could potentially support life. In hundreds of years, after humanity has exhausted all of Earth's natural resources, we may need to migrate to one of these planets. So, NASA should hurry up and get cracking on the NRC's recommendations. Best to be prepared in the face of an uncertain future.

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Near-Term Space Travel

The NRC's recommendations come in three objectives. See the chart below.

The study was sponsored by NASA. It states, " NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT) should establish a rigorous process to select among competing technologies at appropriate milestones in order to ensure that the most promising ones receive sufficient attention and resources."

The study focuses on the near term goals for NASA's space flight program and recommends that the foundation for the goals be implemented in the next five years. NASA works on 20-30 year windows of technological innovation. Within that window, it is hoped, that humans will return to the Moon and maybe make a venture towards Earth's irascible sister planet, Mars. Near and long terms goals in our solar system are to identify alien sources of water and determine if life ever existed outside of our little blue orb.

Goldilocks and A Dwarf

The most recent Goldilocks planet, dubbed GJ 667Cc, is found in the constellation Scorpio, 22 light years away from Earth. It orbits a dwarf star in a system with two other dwarf stars. It has a 28-day solar cycle, meaning its "years" are very quick. The planet is much closer to its star than Earth but researchers believe it receives as much energy from its star because of the weakness of the dwarf.

This is the fourth Goldilocks planet found as scientists become more proficient at finding smaller objects orbiting distant stars. Researchers did not expect to find a planet around the star because the system does not have a lot of metal-based material such as iron in comparison with our own solar system. Yet, the discovery shows that Earth-like planets can exist in a variety of conditions in the universe, greatly increasing the likelihood that another planet much like our own exists somewhere.

"This was expected to be a rather unlikely star to host planets. Yet there they are, around a very nearby, metal-poor example of the most common type of star in our galaxy," said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz, in a release. "The detection of this planet, this nearby and this soon, implies that our galaxy must be teeming with billions of potentially habitable rocky planets."

Now that humanity is getting better at identifying extra-solar planets, NASA and the international space community needs to take the steps we will need to eventually reach out to them. The first steps to inter-galactic dominance start with the decisions makers in Washington, D.C.

Top image: UC Santa Cruz

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