Light-weight blogging platform Posterous has finally catch up with its competitor Tumblr by offering custom theming. You can now ditch the yellow-and-white Posterous theme. Five built-in themes are available for you to choose from, with color pickers to change the colors of your blog, and you can upload an image to customize the header.

For the more adventurous, you can overhaul the look with custom CSS and HTML. And the theme is Tumblr compatible, you can just drop your Tumblr theme codes into the theme editor. Click here to view the Custom Themes documentation.

Google has released version 3 of Chrome web browser, one year after its high-profile entry to the browser race. Mac version of Chrome will be available within months before the end of the year. Version 3.0 of Chrome for PCs brings improvements to the browser’s interface, including faster performance and “themes” that allow users to customize how the browser looks.

Google aims to achieve 10% market share 2 years from now. Google Chrome is now number 4 after Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Market research firm Net Applications puts Internet Explorer at roughly 67 percent of the worldwide browser market in August, Mozilla Firefox at 23 percent and Apple Safari browser had 4 percent.

“If at the two-year birthday we’re not at least 5 percent (market share), I will be exceptionally disappointed. And if at the three year birthday we’re not at 10 percent, I will be exceptionally disappointed,” Chrome Engineering Director Linus Upson said.

Chrome’s focus on performance has won it fans among the technologically savvy, but analysts say much needs to do to broaden Chrome’s appeal.

Via Reuters

Tumblr has revamped its Popular page with a feature called Tumblr Wire. Tumblr Wire pulls posts across Tumblr in realtime, and display them in a constantly-updating streaming of image or large font moving across a grid.

The Popular page also added Trending Tags across the page to show tags with increasing activity over the last 48 hours.

Check out Tumblr Popular page.

Facebook has been busy with three launches this week:

Facebook Lite

Facebook launched Facebook Lite, a stripped-down version of Facebook and you can access it via url lite.facebook.com. Intended for bandwidth limited developing countries, it strips the Facebook to its cores and sans applications. We find the lite version refreshing with its leaner and cleaner layout, and it probably will become our Facebook version of choice looking forward.

@Mentions

Not sure if it is inspired or threatened by Twitter, Facebook has introduced @mentions in status updates. When you type @ with your friend’s name in your status updates, it means a reply to your friend. This allows conversation and is one of Twitter’s strongest feature. Followed closely by recently launched real-time search and FriendFeed acquisition, we sure hope Facebook can have more originality.

Facebook Desktop Notifications for Mac

Facebook has released a Mac native app that when launched will sit on the OS X menu bar. It will alert you when there are new activities on your Facebook. Clicking on the app icon on the menu will drop down a menu where you can access easily update your status, compose message, view list of message in inbox etc. Download the app from Facebook.

Google Books announced in its blog post the availability of its over one million public domain books archive in EPUB format, in addition to existing PDF format.

By adding support for EPUB downloads, we’re hoping to make these books more accessible by helping people around the world to find and read them in more places. More people are turning to new reading devices to access digital books, and many such phones, netbooks, and e-ink readers have smaller screens that don’t readily render image-based PDF versions of the books we’ve scanned. EPUB is a lightweight text-based digital book format that allows the text to automatically conform (or “reflow”) to these smaller screens. And because EPUB is a free, open standard supported by a growing ecosystem of digital reading devices, works you download from Google Books as EPUBs won’t be tied to or locked into a particular device.

Visit Google Books or click here for the mobile version for iPhone.

Apparently one quadrillion is too much for Google’s calculator. Beside 999999999999997, you get the same 0 result if you minus with 999999999999998.

Well if you add a ‘1′ digit in front of the number, you get the 0 result early, starting from 1999999999999994:

1999999999999999 - 1999999999999994 = 0

1999999999999999 - 1999999999999995 = 0

1999999999999999 - 1999999999999996 = 0

1999999999999999 - 1999999999999997 = 0

1999999999999999 - 1999999999999998 = 0

If you increase the number further, you get the 0 result earlier further:

2999999999999999 - 2999999999999991 = 0

2999999999999999 - 2999999999999992 = 0

2999999999999999 - 2999999999999993 = 0

2999999999999999 - 2999999999999994 = 0

2999999999999999 - 2999999999999995 = 0

2999999999999999 - 2999999999999996 = 0

2999999999999999 - 2999999999999997 = 0

2999999999999999 - 2999999999999998 = 0

For ‘3 series’, the 0 result starts with 3999999999999988 and for ‘4 series’ it is 4999999999999985.

Interesting if someone could reveal the algorithm used for this faulty calculator. Hope Google can correct it asap.

Google has optimized its Google Latitude for the Safari browser in iPhone and iPod touch. Google Latitude is a web application and requires iPhone OS 3.0 as the mobile Safari browser in this version of iPhone OS can feed back the device’s location to web application.

For the iPhone version of Google Latitude, you get basic Search and Directions functionality. However you need to fire up Google Latitude to keep your location updated to Google’s backend server since Google Latitude can not run in the background, just as any other non-Apple apps.

Unfortunately, since there is no mechanism for applications to run in the background on iPhone (which applies to browser-based web apps as well), we’re not able to provide continuous background location updates in the same way that we can for Latitude users on Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Window Mobile. Nevertheless, your location is updated every time you fire up the app and then continuously updated while the app is running in the foreground. And, of course, you can check in on where your friends are, so we think there’s plenty of fun to be had with Latitude.

Google is launching Latitude for iPhone in US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand at the moment, with more countries coming soon.

To visit Google Latitude, point your Safari browser on your iPhone or iPod touch to google.com/latitude.

Yahoo! has launched its new home page design starting with US users. The revamp is expected to roll out to all Yahoo! home page around the world.

Yahoo! old home page:

Yahoo! new home page:

The main change to the redesign is the links column on the left. It used to contain links to Yahoo! services. This column is now called “My Favorites” and users can customize it with widgets and apps by Yahoo! and third parties. Example third party widgets/apps are Facebook and New York Times, allowing you to access the services without leaving Yahoo! home page.

By adding this “My Favorites” feature, Yahoo! is expecting more users will make Yahoo! their default home page. This is certainly appealing to existing users who uses a number of Yahoo! services such as mail and Flickr. However for users who rely heavily on services such as Facebook, Twitter, last.fm etc, nothing beats using the services directly on respective websites.

Yahoo! is working to let users sync this customizations between the website and the mobile versions of Yahoo!.

Visit Yahoo! to take a look!

If you want to create a community driven blog, Tumblr has make it easy with its Submissions feature.

Visit your Tumblr blog’s Customize page under Advanced menu to enable this feature.

Once you enabled Submissions, your readers are able to submit their posts via web or email. Let say your Tumblr URL is at http://mysite.tumblr.com, the web address then for your readers to submit their post is at http://mysite.tumblr.com/submit. And the email address for their submission is mysite@tumblr.com.

Each submission is queued for approval. You visit your blog’s submission page to approve the post for it to go live. The url to submission page is displayed at the right-hand menu on Tumblr’s main page. Or you can use the URL http://mysite.tumblr.com/submissions.

Some examples of community-driven blogs:

• Eat Sleep Draw

• This is why you’re fat

• Cute overload

This is big news and will have lasting impact for sure. Google has announced its plan for a Google operating system in its blog post, branding it Chrome OS.

Here’s the summaries of the announcement:

• Google Chrome OS is open source.
• It will initially target the netbooks market.
• Designed to be fast and lightweight, start up in few seconds.
• Build for simplicity with minimal user interface for the desktop.
• Complete redesigned security architecture to do away with viruses, malware and security updates.
• Netbooks with Chrome OS will appear second half 2010.
• Runs on both x86 and ARM chips.
• Chrome OS is basically Chrome browser running in a new windowing system on top of Linux kernel.
• The standard web is the application platform for Chrome OS developer.
• Chrome OS is separate from Android OS.

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.