The rise of Facebook has seen an explosion of social gaming, and Google has decided it wants a piece of the pie. Currently in talks with social game developers like Playdom, Playfish and the Zynga Game Network, Google hopes to build a rival to Facebook's developer network.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quick to point out that the service wouldn't follow completely in the footsteps of Facebook, saying "the world doesn't need a copy of the same thing."

Google's experiments in the social realm have been hit or miss. Orkut, the companies social network, is popular in Brazil and India, but it's tough to find anyone who has even heard of it in the U.S. And while Google Wave created a lot of talk, it failed to make a ripple in the social scene.

But maybe the ace up Google's sleeve is a gaming network where you don't have to read through updates on games you don't play?

HTML 5's time is quickly arriving. Last year, HTML 5 was something only web designers and web geeks knew much about, but the arrival of the iPad earlier this year was a catalyst for major websites to make their videos available in HTML 5 format rather than the non-iPad-supported Flash. And now, YouTube is testing new embed codes that would allow their videos to choose the appropriate version based on the browser's capabilities, which means YouTube's selection of HTML 5 videos will leap off YouTube and onto the web at large.

Flash is still the default, mainly because it allows YouTube to embed advertisements within the video. But for those browsing the blogosphere with their iPads, be prepared for more video goodness.

Have you ever wanted to flip through Facebook and Twitter like they were magazines? OK, you've probably never even thought of doing something like that. Me neither. But it turns out to be a pretty neat way to check out what's happening amongst your friends and followers.

Flipboard is like a customizable start page for the iPad. Think MyYahoo or iGoogle becoming a full-fledged iPad app and add in a slice of iBooks pie as a convenient way to turn the pages of your social life.

But don't think Flipboard is just about social media. In addition to browsing Facebook and Twitter, you can get access to many different locations on the web from Photo of the Day to GigaOM to a whole host of mini-magazines put together by the Flipboard team. You can even create a section devoted to America's finest news source, The Onion. Or, if you have a particular Twitter account that you love to follow, you can create a section for it.

Undecided on what to look at? Just slide your finger across the main home screen and Flipboard will start flipping through all of the sections you've created.

Unfortunately, the app is still rough around the edges. It's currently pulling a Twitter and being over capacity for logging in to Twitter and Facebook. There also doesn't seem to be any way to re-arrange the icons, though they can be easily removed through the edit button.

But the future looks up for Flipboard, which recently acquired Ellerdale, a real-time web startup that will help Flipboard gather and aggregate content from the real-time web.

Let's face it: Microsoft has never been the greatest technology company. They may have been the most powerful technology company for a couple of decades, and they still may be in the top five of that category, but it's been business sense rather than technology that drove them to the top.

They licensed MS-DOS from a company named Seattle Computer Products. When Microsoft Windows didn't do well in stores, they leveraged MS-DOS's dominance to force manufacturers to preinstall it on computers. They defeated Netscape by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and frowning on manufacturers adding the Netscape icon to the desktop, a tactic that won them a day in court, but not before they won the first browser wars.

This isn't to say Microsoft's products are bad. Many of them are quite good. They simply aren't always the best. And Microsoft's dominance has been based more on how they've used those products rather than how those products were used by us, the consumers.

So after Windows Mobile has fallen by the wayside in a mobile smartphone war that seems dominated by Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and RIM's Blackberry, is it possible for Windows to rise form the ashes like the mythical Phoenix?

Possibly. And if early previews are any indication, Microsoft might actually be headed down the right track. Greg Kumparak of TechCrunch got his hands on a pre-release Windows phone and, while its far from perfect, it's got enough of a combination between substance and glitz that it has him looking forward to the actual release with "restrained hope."

Read his full preview of the Windows Phone