Why should the music industry care? Just as Apples iTunes App Store opened up new avenues to  deliver and monetize music, the Chrome Web Store will offers a new opportunity to reach a much larger set of potential customers – anyone with a computer or web enabled device.

For example, an artist or label could sell a web app with music plus bonus content. Another could sell access to a complete audio and video catalog or a regularly updated stream of content.  The possibilities are endless. Google has just provided a music bigger sandbox to experiment in and a much clearer path to monetization.

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As we talk about often it’s not even that Google is on top anymore. That’s a given. In fact, its dominance is what makes the uninformed cry monopoly. Once again market dominance doesn’t mean it’s the only game in town. People just like it better and use it more.

What is interesting is the drop in share of the next three biggest players. Google is up one percent but all three of the others are down 4%. There is no search ‘cannibalism” going on here where they are feeding off each other. Are people looking for other search options other than Yahoo, bing and Ask that are not named Google?

While this is always interesting it is certainly getting a bit mundane. I would love to see true competition for Google if only to stop the silly talk about Google’s dominance restricting others’ opportunity. I just don’t see it happening. Do you?

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You know the one. They play it a lot at NC State football games?

C’mon, you know it. “Boom, here comes the boom….”

No?

Forget it! I’ll Google it instead!

Yes, that’s it!

And, pretty soon, you’ll never have problems finding a song, artist, or album again–thanks to a new “Discover Music” onebox from Google.

Maybe you remember only the chorus — or maybe you remember who sang it, but you forgot the exact name of the song. If you’ve ever heard a catchy song in a car or cafe, but just can’t figure out the name of the song, you’ll know what I’m talking about. This search feature also helps you find many of those songs by entering a search containing a line or two of lyrics.

Cool, huh? Google has partnered with MySpace and Lala to source the results and Pandora, imeem, and Rhapsody are standing by to help you discover music related to your query. Not only does the Onebox show the result, but you can click the play button to activate the pop-up–and play the song!

**Time out! Google is allowing pop-ups now? That’s the topic for a another blog post!**

If you’re not seeing the results yet, Google has launched a music search site you can try out.

The only thing missing? Maybe a partnership with Shazam, so I can play music to Google and have it recognize it–without me knowing anything about the song. That would be cool!

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And last week friendfeed did something very important: made it a lot more possible to do powerful real-time web searches.

First, the problem with friendfeed is it is too geeky. But ignore that problem for a moment, because if they don’t get it right, or make it something that the mainstream wants, well, you’ll see the same kind of search show up on Facebook (which has been making moves lately to be much more open) or Twitter.

So, why is this stuff working?

Well, because it’s with your friends and THEIR behaviors. Your friends are a lot more trustworthy than anyone else. How do I know that? Because while I was in Davos George Colony, CEO of Forrester handed me the results of a report they did on Trust and they found that people you know are the most trusted. Far more than corporate or personal blogs. Yes, I know you don’t trust me that much. That’s OK. I don’t trust your blog much either.

But, if I know you (thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and friendfeed I have gotten to know thousands of you) I can build a much better recommendation engine.

Oh, and even more troubling for Google is that Facebook and friendfeed have a lot more metadata to study.

What is metadata? It is data about data. Well, in Google’s case, the metadata is the linking behavior of people in the web.

But look just on friendfeed. What’s the metadata there? Everytime I click “like,” something I’ve done more than 16,000 times now, I’m adding metadata. Everytime I add a comment, something I’ve done more than 8,000 times now, I’m adding metadata.

What other metadata is there? Well, they still can study linking behavior. I can link to my discussion of how cloud computing will change programmer behavior, for instance.

What else? Well, friendfeed knows how many of my friends also liked that item. They also know how many people clicked on that item (although they haven’t surfaced that information yet).

So, now, let’s look at search.

First, if I need to know who the best retailer is to buy, say, a Canon 5D Mark II, is it better to ask the people I know, like I did here on friendfeed, or go to Google and deal with the SEOs? Try doing that search over on Google. I did. Do you find a single retailer? I didn’t.

So, now, let’s get to friendfeed’s search.

Let’s do a search for anyone who has written about the Canon 5D MK II but lets constrain that to posts that have at least one like and at least four comments. Here’s the search. Note that the post I wrote just one minute ago is already in the results page. This is the real-time web.

Google won’t see that friendfeed item for hours and, even if Google’s spiders index it Google does not have enough metadata to study to let it do this kind of search.

Let’s keep going.

How is this for searching news? Well, right now Australia is burning. So, let’s search for “Australia fires” but lets constrain that search to anything that has five or more likes and five or more comments. Note the quality of the conversation that comes back.

How am I doing this? With friendfeed’s advanced search.

But it gets better than that.

How about we search for all Tweets that talk about the Australian Fires? We can do that.

“But can’t search.twitter.com do that better?” Well, yes, but can it also just show you all the Google Reader items people have shared? Like friendfeed can? No.

Can Google search show you all the Upcoming.org events that mention SXSW? No, but friendfeed search can.

Can you easily see all the YouTube videos that have the word Grammy in them? Probably over on YouTube you could do that. But can you now constrain the videos to the ones that have gotten some comments? With friendfeed you can.

Now, keep in mind that there aren’t many people on friendfeed yet. The numbers of comments there are not even close to enough to make all searches satisfying. But, look at friendfeed’s competitor Facebook. They have more than 150 million users already. What if Facebook were to get a search like friendfeeds?

Now do you start to see why I’m using Google less and less?

Lew Moorman is right.

Oh, and I got lots of answers to my Camera question before I was even done with writing this post.

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