It’s no secret that one of the biggest issues Android has faced is fragmentation — there are many devices running older versions of the OS, and carriers are generally painfully slow about upgrading older phones (only around 30% of handsets are currently running the current version, Froyo). One way that Google has been working to mitigate this problem has been to decouple key Android applications from the core operating system, allowing it to update its apps more frequently, without having to worry about carriers getting around to distributing OS updates. And today, it’s put one of Android’s most essential applications on this fast track: Gmail

In two days, Zynga has hit the $500k mark in a charity campaign that launched late Sunday on FarmVille for the “L’Ecole de Choix,” a K-12 school the gaming giant is building in Mirebalais, Haiti. Farmville players can donate money directly by purchasing Sweet Seeds for a special beet that won’t wither.

As an Internet behemoth with properties that get visited a zillion times a day, life battling spammers must be pretty tough for Google. Sure, they invent new technologies to try and stop these jokers

Facebook introduced Community Pages in early April as an alternative to its regular Pages, with the main differences being that Community Pages don’t have owners, and are not able to publish to users’ news feeds, post videos and provide links to other sites, and do not include the discussion tab. While this product change is months old, the result is understandable but off-base cries of censorship today

Yesterday I was tipped off about a “secret meeting” between a group of “Super Angels” being held at Bin 38, a restaurant and bar in San Francisco.

After an analyst reported that Yahoo, Inc stock was worth “less than nothing” today, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz made an apparently unsuccessful case for her company’s value to Wall Street during a Q&A at the Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia Conference in New York. Paid Content’s Joseph Tartakoff outlined some of the highlights , including Bartz on hiring, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to my assistant and said, ‘Do you know who this person is,’ and they’re about six layers down.” Bartz on product engagement, “She blamed consumers who are increasingly sending short messages via Facebook instead of via e-mail and also a “pretty old” product.” And Bartz on China … “Bartz dismissed some of the recent coverage of the two companies’  [Yahoo, Inc & AliBaba] relationships as “commotion.” But she did acknowledge that the value of the company’s Asian assets “tower over the value of Yahoo Inc,” Tartakoff here referring to the fact  that while Yahoo’s stakes in China and Japan are the bulk of its value, Bartz has done the company no favors in terms of fortifying its Chinese relationships. Which lead PaidContent founder Rafat Al i to call for her head on Twitter (weirdly through a retweet of a Business Insider story and not Paidcontent’s), which was retweeted by the prolific Techmeme tipper Atul Arora with a “+1,” which was then retweeted by Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon with a “X10.” Bartz has not won any popularity contests during her two year stint as Yahoo, I c CEO.

TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco starts next Monday. The regular attendee ticket price is nearly $3,000

Adobe posted record revenue for its third quarter, seeing sales of $990.3 million, compared to $697.5 million reported for the third quarter of 2009 (revenue also increased from $943.0 million reported in the second quarter of 2010). Revenue jumped 42 percent from the previous year.

Tumblr CTO and notable blogger Marco Arment announced today that he would be leaving his position at Tumblr to focus on more independent projects.

Advertising network VideoEgg will acquire blogging and advertising network Six Apart , and the combined entity will be renamed Say Media. The companies will officially announce the transaction tomorrow