2008 was the year of free streaming music. When MySpace Music entered the fray a little over a year ago, it seemed like the music labels had finally relented, and were willing to experiment with free streaming music to users. The future looked bright.

2009 is the year of reckoning. The European launch of Spotify, which offers users free streaming music on demand, was an affirmation of the trend. Soon Spotify would launch in the U.S., too, the company said.

By MG Siegler

Market share is probably the easiest and most often used point of comparison between competing products. It makes sense: If something has a large share of the market, it’s probably doing well. But that doesn’t always mean that it’s doing better than something with less market share, especially from a business perspective.

Last month Skype was in talks to acquire VoIP startup Gizmo5. It was a perfect backup plan in case all that IP litigation didn’t work out. – Gizmo5’s SIP infrastructure could theoretically replace Skype’s proprietary P2P back end.

After the Skype settlement, though, Gizmo5’s strategic value to Skype sort of plummeted. In the meantime, Google (GOOG) bought them, say multiple sources with knowledge of the deal, for around $30 million in cash. The deal is done, say our sources, and will be announced shortly.

If you are a tech lover, there is nothing quite like the launch day of a much hyped new gadget. Expectations run high. And since those expectations are rarely satisfied once you have the special little device in hand, it’s a moment to savor. In the hours before you own it, that device is perfect in every way. It will make you happier, a better person. There are no bugs, there are only features. It is whatever you want it to be.

Launch day of a new cool gadget is the closest thing to being a kid again on Christmas day (or whatever your winter solstice holiday of choice). You’ve anticipated the day. You’ve called in sick to work. And you are standing out in the freezing cold at 7 in the morning, hoping your place in line assures you a device before the carefully-planned sell out occurs. You’ve worked yourself into…a Fever Pitch.

Want to be the head of Barnesandnoble.com’s international business? Because they’re definitely hiring a whole team, and they’re starting at the top.

Recruiting firm Russell Reynolds Associates is representing Barnes & Noble (BKS) in a search for the “head of their international business,” according to a source who was contacted about the position. The job entails building the international business for BN.com from scratch, hiring the team and “building the infrastructure outside the U.S.” They prefer the executive live in New York, but Europe is ok, too. Global e-commerce experience is preferred.

Now that the dust is settling on the newly launched Google Music (if you don’t yet have it in your normal Google search results, you can use it here) that integrates LaLa and iLike/MySpace streaming music, all I can think of is this: What were Facebook and Ticketmaster thinking when they passed up the opportunity to acquire iLike?

MySpace is the big lottery winner here. They bought iLike for $20 million in August. What they got: a talented (literally) team that is starting to fill the executive ranks at MySpace, the biggest music application on Facebook, and, it turns out, a deal with Google (GOOG) that is now sending massive traffic flow directly to MySpace Music.

If you weren’t sure about switching to an Android phone in the near future, this might put you over the edge. Google Maps Navigation is an absolutely killer app. And it is only available for Android 2.0 phones.

Today is Droid day, and for the most part Google (GOOG) is taking a backseat and letting their partners get most of the attention. But Droid is the first Android phone to run Android 2.0, and Google Maps Navigation is clearly the early trophy app for those devices.

Not wanting to be left completely behind, Yahoo (YHOO) will soon launch their own real time search engine too. But unlike Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG), they won’t be partnering with Twitter and Facebook directly for the data (perhaps memories of their ill-fated blog search engine from 2005 linger). Instead, we’ve heard, they’ll work with one of the existing real time search engines. If our source is correct, that partner is OneRiot, and the product will launch very soon.

There isn’t much more to say about this right now. We’ve reached out to both Yahoo and OneRiot for comment and await their reply. The look of the Yahoo search results may look similar to the OneRiot/WebMynd Firefox plugin that adds real time results to the side of normal Google search results – it certainly makes sense to keep the results separated. See image below.

Google Voice is a great way to manage phone hell by giving you a single phone number that automatically rings your mobile, home, work and other phones based on your choice of rules and settings (who’s calling, when, etc.). But people are still stuck with their legacy phone numbers, and moving completely away from them is difficult.

I solved the problem by simply porting my mobile number away from AT&T over to Google Voice, a feature that Google (GOOG) says will be launched more broadly eventually.

Microsoft (MSFT) will announce the integration of real time status updates from both Twitter and Facebook into Bing at the Web 2.0 Summit, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deals. The announcement will be made by Qi Lu, President of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, later this morning.

The deals will integrate real time updates from users of the services into search results. Google (GOOG) and Bing aren’t good at pulling in this real time data today because of the need to constantly index user pages, and the difficulty in knowing when those pages have been updated. Users have turned to Twitter Search and other real time search engines like Topsy and OneRiot to get this information.

Google (GOOG) will partner with iLike and LaLa for their new music service, we’ve learned. And the announcement date is Wednesday, October 28, 2009.

Google (GOOG) will soon launch a music service, we’ve heard from multiple sources, and the company has spent the last several weeks securing content for the launch of the service from the major music labels. One source has referred to the new service as Google Audio.

We’re still gathering details, but our understanding is the service will be very different to the Google China music download service that they launched in 2008. That service, which is only available in China, allows users to search for music and download it for free.

Lots more details are coming in on the Photobucket fire sale by MySpace/News Corp. (NWS). The sale is all but complete, say new sources. And the buyer is definitely Washington state based Ontela.

Ontela, a mobile photo upload and storage service, is backed by Disney’s Steamboat Ventures, among others.

Google (GOOG) continues to hit milestones with Google Apps – 2 million businesses and 20 million users in over 100 countries and 40 languages (up from 1.75 million businesses in June). And they aren’t slowing down the advertising, either.

The Going Google campaign, first launched in August (and spoofed within a day) with billboards that changed messages daily, is expanding.

Hewlett Packard (HPQ) refreshed their TouchSmart line of computers Monday. If you’re not familiar with these, imagine an iMac all in one computer that has a touch screen, and you’re most of the way there.

I really like the TouchSmart line, and use a second generation machine as my main Windows test computer. The touch interface is done via infrared, which is a very cost effective way of creating a touch interface on a large screen. Microsoft, in fact, uses it in their experimental TouchWall product that can make a touch screen of virtually any size wall (more TouchWall footage).

Don’t be fooled. Even though there hasn’t been any news on the various lawsuits around Skype’s intellectual property ownership, that doesn’t mean things aren’t happening behind the scenes.

Negotiations continue, say multiple sources, between eBay (EBAY), the new proposed Skype owner group, and the original founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, via their company Joltd, in what is turning into a very high stakes and very emotional game of poker.

I mean, seriously.

Apple’s (AAPL) chief complaint against the Google Voice application was “The application has not been approved because, as submitted for review, it appears to alter the iPhone’s distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls…”