With all this talk of a cloud-based Chrome OS, it’s time to take a cold hard look at what “apps” in this brave new world will look like. I recall a time, not long ago, when Apple was about to change the world with Dashboards and before that Windows users had their own “widget economy.” Then Yahoo! added widgets to the web and then Samsung added widgets to their TVs.

I’ve always thought ZocDoc is a great idea in theory, but somehow until today I had never actually tried to use it. There is something about a lifetime of calling for doctor’s appointments, waiting on hold, being told I can’t come in for a week even though I have a fever now , and searching through a health insurance booklet to find another doctor that has convinced me on some deep, visceral level that booking a doctor’s appointment can’t be as easy as, say, booking a flight, a rental car or a table online. Guess what

With the launch of Places, Facebook began allowing businesses to merge their Page with a Place they’ve claimed. While there are some advantages for businesses focusing on generating foot traffic to a single physical location, merging has important disadvantages including lost functionality (at least for now)

If your product is selling well, you brag about it. If it isn’t, you don’t

For the past few months, probably something close to half of my tweets have been links that take you off of the site. My bad.

Over the last week I’ve gotten several pitches from companies taking a new twist on OpenTable’s business. One of two things has happened: Either there’s a new flurry of activity around the restaurant reservation/recommendation/lead generation space or having groused about OpenTable and recently posed a question on whether they should be disrupted, I’ve just become the go-to target for anyone launching a business in this space. Either way if you’re a restauranteur looking for a better way, watch this space, because the topic will keep coming up

You can get TweetDeck , the popular realtime stream reader, as a desktop client, on your iPhone and iPad, or Android phone. But up until now, there was no Web browser version (unlike Seesmic , which is best known as a browser-based app). Today, TweetDeck released its first Web client as a Chrome app in the new Chrome Webstore .

Groupon barely paused to reject Google’s $6 billion offer before continuing on its way towards becoming an online local advertising juggernaut. It introduced self-serve Groupon Stores last week and is striking distribution partnerships left and right (with Yahoo , eBay , Ning , and newspaper sites). Groupon’s latest distribution deal, we’ve learned, is with WiFi and mobile ad network JiWire , and is part of a strategy known internally as “Groupon Everywhere.” With JiWire, Groupon will be able to offer deals at the hyper-local level—not just by city, but by neighborhood

We spent yesterday at Salesforce’s first ever hackathon, called Cloudstock, which aimed to spur innovative uses of cloud-based APIs. Developers were given a choice of over 20 different platforms they could build off of including; Force.com, Twilio, LinkedIn, Amazon Web Services, Google, and more. Hacks ranged from an image resizing tool for Salesforce apps to an SMS-based contact manager to a mashup of LinkedIn contacts with Yahoo job listings.

Some of you (hopefully all of you) have been following the UCSF drive to build a children’t hospital in San Francisco. We are enthusiastically supporting the project , as are countless other businesses, blogs and individuals.