Forget Glass, self-driving cars or a smartwatch. Developers, not physical consumer products, were Google's darlings at the company's annual I/O conference this week.

Google beat Apple to the music subscription service punch this week, perhaps the doing of record labels who wanted to put Apple in its place, an analyst said

In another sign that music listening is expanding beyond the limits of CDs and digital purchases, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced on Thursday that it would recognize music and music videos streamed from on-demand services as part of its Gold & Platinum award program. These services include Mog, Muve Music, Rdio, Rhapsody, Slacker, Spotify, and Xbox Music, as well as video streaming services such as MTV.com, Vevo, Yahoo Music, and YouTube. This is the first time that the program has recognized tracks in a non-sales format.

A Dutch startup has launched a service that studies data from social networks to quickly identify online service outages -- sometimes, it says, before the service providers know about the outages themselves.

You don't have to look further than the uprisings across the Arab world to recognize the power of social tools, and this transformative power applies to business as well. But for an enterprise social network (ESN) to be genuinely useful, it needs to go beyond the "Facebook for enterprise" model.

Twitter today unveiled a music service that uses activity on the microblog to help users share and discover new music. The songs shared via the service are currently sourced from Spotify, iTunes or Rdio.

Tweets may soon have beats. Twitter appears to be readying its own music application designed to let users discover new artists and songs based on trending activity on the site.

In the run up to Valentine’s Day, Lionel Richies’ “Endless Love” is the most popular love song on Spotify's Australian playlists.

At Google I/O on Wednesday, Google unveiled a streaming music service that will compete directly with the likes of Pandora and Spotify -- in what is said to be a growing market, however.

The arrival of Apple's iCloud and iTunes Match this month, coupled with Spotify's October drop of its invite-only requirement, seem to have shaken the online music world.