Google just launched an "extensions" gallery for Google Wave. The gallery offers tools and add-ons that have been created by the developer community to add additional functionality to Google's its real-time communications product. "It's good to see development work continue on this innovative, if somewhat confusing, real-time tool," writes ReadWriteWeb. Either way, Wave could really use a boost. While specific estimates vary, traffic to the tool has been declining significantly since late last year. "It's clear that Wave has been abandoned by many of its earliest adopters -- users who were once clamoring for invites in ways …

The New York Times takes a close look at real-time bidding, which lets advertisers examine site visitors, and then bid to serve them ads in near-real time. "The biggest problem with advertising was that decisions about what ads to show were made way in advance of when they actually appear," Brian O'Kelley, head of real-time bidding tech provider AppNexus tells The Times. "There are a lot of reasons you want to make those decisions as close to when the ads run as possible." Real-time technology has actually been around for a few years, but has only recently …

Sold on the potential power of mobile apps, Hearst Corp. is getting into the business of developing such software in a big way. Hoping to eventually offer thousands of apps -- which will deliver all matter of niche content -- the "traditional" publisher already sells about 70 applications on Apple's iTunes for 99 cents and up. According to Hearst executives, the mobile sphere offers a do-over for media companies, which were complicit in conditioning consumers to expect everything on the "traditional" Web to be free. "Unlike the Web, we've always trained people that everything on …

New York City-based technology incubator Betaworks Studios has raised $20 million in new venture funding. Intel Capital and previous investor RRE Ventures led the current round, which included Softbank, Founders Collective, DFJ Growth, AOL Ventures and the New York Times. The company had previously raised $8 million. Dreamed up by former AOL executives John Borthwick and Andrew Weisman, Betaworks has positioned itself as a sort of holding company that both invests in and operates Internet and digital media companies. Last January, for instance, it led a financing round worth $300,000 for popular Twitter client TweetDeck.

As a self-described "defender of full RSS feeds," Reuters' Felix Salmon is wondering why Gawker Media just truncated its feeds. Gawker head Nick Denton said in a blog comment that "this was a commercial decision," and that, "Gawker Media is an ad-supported company ... RSS ads have never realized their potential ... it is in our interest for people to click through if enticed by an excerpt." Still, according to Salmon, "There's no evidence at all that truncating your RSS feeds results in higher traffic, and indeed there's quite a strong case to be made that it works the …

Kevin Rose, cofounder of content ranking site Digg, is big on Foursquare, which recently emerged as a leader in location-based social networking. "Foursquare felt very much like Twitter did a few years ago," says Rose -- who also happens to be a Foursquare investor. Writing in The Telegraph (UK), Rose envisions a world where "eventually my children will look back at my Foursquare data and say: 'This is Kevin's history -- this is where he was on his birthday 10 years ago, and this was his favourite place to eat.'" Heavy. In Foursquare, Rose might also see …

Facebook is threatening to sue The Daily Mail (UK) for damages after the British tabloid claimed that 14-year-old girls who create profiles on the site could be approached "within seconds" by older men who "wanted to perform a sex act" in front of them. The paper has since apologized in print and online for the error. But, according to Facebook, the paper didn't act fast enough to change the story's headline online. The top social site, which has 23 million users in the UK alone, is presently looking into the "brand damage that has been done," according …

Just 1-in-5 Twitter users are actually "active," according to a new study from security firm Barracuda Labs (using a very generous definition of "active"). The study tracked roughly 19 million Twitter accounts, and deemed active, or "True," all those that had at least 10 followers, followed at least 10 people, and had tweeted at least 10 times. What's more, only 26% of Twitter users had 10 followers or more by December 2009, while only 40% were following 10 people or more. A majority of Twitter users, 51%, were following less than five people. Meanwhile, 34% of Twitter users …

Two years after dropping $850 million on Bebo, might AOL be better off just scrapping the social network? That's what some corporate tax experts are saying. "Complicated corporate tax rules will let Aol write off the full purchase price of Bebo if they declare it worthless and abandon the asset," it writes. "With Aol's effective tax rate of around 45%, that's $380 million and change in their pocket in taxes that they'd be able to avoid." Granted, the UK-based site has fallen from 22 million monthly unique visitors when it was …

Google's share of the domestic search market increased slightly, just 0.1% between January and February 2010, according to new statistics from comScore. However, the percentage still accounts for less market share than the Mountain View giant had at the start of 2009 in the US. Bing, meanwhile, was up almost 1% in February, compared with the numbers at the start of 2009. Silicon Alley Insider -- which cites comScore data from a JP Morgan analyst's report -- reports that Google owned 65.5% of the US search market in February 2010, having grown from 65.4% the previous month.