Given the success Apple has seen this year with the launch of the iPad, they decided to single out the device to give it its own “App of the Year” award. The winner? Flipboard. The social magazine app launched in July with some glowing reviews and since then, a few small updates have made it even better. But the update they’re releasing today makes it a lot better. So much so that if Flipboard was already the app of 2010, they’ve got to be the early frontrunners to be the iPad app of 2011 as well.

First of all, Flipboard has added both Flickr and Google Reader integration to bring more content into the system. Users of those services can easily link up their accounts to create new areas to browse on their Flipboard.

But the bigger news is what they’ve added to the content options that have existed on Flipboard since the beginning: Twitter and Facebook. Both of these areas on Flipboard now feature support for various sections of the services. So on Facebook, you can browse items shared in the News Feed, on your Wall, on the various Pages you follow, or filter items by the Friend Lists you have. You can also filter the stream to show just pictures or just links. With Twitter, you can now choose between your standard Timeline, just your Tweets, your Favorites, your @Replies, or any of your Lists.

Despite the growing popularity of their mobile OS, Android users have a problem: the more apps crop up, the harder it becomes to keep track and discover the good ones. (Androlib, a site that gathers various statistics on the Android market, pegs the number of Android applications currently available in the store at around 190,000.)

But how can you separate signal from noise? Wading through countless apps to discover useful ones is (still) a nightmare in the Android market – as is search.

How an app called AndFriends solves this problem: after the break.

It’s no secret that Facebook’s Photo product is the most popular photo sharing service on the web by a huge margin. And one of the key features that made it so popular has been tagging, which lets you associate your friends with the photos they’re in — Facebook says that 100 million photo tags are added every day. Which is all the more amazing given that tagging is kind of a pain. Fortunately it’s getting better.

Back in October Facebook launched a feature that had some face detection built in — if someone appeared in multiple photos in the same album, Facebook would group them together and ask you who that person was, allowing you to tag them in one fell swoop. Now it’s improving on that by using face recognition technology to guess who the person is, using your network of friends as a reference.

As of today search engine Blekko has made search a little bit more social, letting users log in through Facebook and using Facebook API data to let you know what sites your friends have ‘Liked’ as well as search those sites. Just connect to Blekko through Facebook, wait a few minutes for your “Likes” to load and begin searching with the /Likes slashtag.

Unlike Bing’s Facebook ‘Like’ integration, Blekko’s new feature doesn’t just surface ‘Likes’ next to already existant result URLs. You can actually change the results you see based on what your friends have ‘Liked’ by searching and adding the /Likes slashtag to any search, for example TechCrunch /Likes.

The average time spent on the Internet by adults in the U.S. grew an estimated 6 percent in 2010 to 155 minutes a day, or about two and a half hours, according to new estimates from eMarketer. Compared to watching TV, which the average American adult does for 264 minutes a day (or four and a half hours), it still has a way to go in terms of becoming the media we spend our most time on. However, TV time declined about 1 percent.

More startling is that time spent on mobile devices is now the same as time spent reading print newspapers and magazines combined. The average American spends an estimated 50 minutes a day staring at his cell phone, versus 30 minutes reading a print newspaper and 20 minutes reading a magazine. Of course, much of that time staring at mobile screens is reading news online so maybe when all is said and done people are actually reading more. Although what they are reading—Tweets, email, and text messages, along with articles— is not always the same as in the offline world.

Kindles are fantastic devices, but they can’t live alone. They need cases, lights, and other  items to complete the experience. We’ve rounded up seven of the best around items that are must-have accessories and could be the perfect gift for the Kindle lover in your life. Best of all, they’re not all that expensive and if you act quick, Amazon should be able to get most of them to you before the holidays. If not, most are found within the walls of retail stores like Best Buy and Target anyway.

If nothing else, give the gift of a Kindle ebook. Even a $10 gift card is better than nothing. This of course applies to Nook owners as well. Just find out the make of the e-reader and seek out the relevant gift card for a great stocking stuffer. But for everything else, click through for seven amazing gifts perfect the Kindle owner in your life.

The nominations are pouring in and the excitement is building. We are pleased to announce the first handful of tickets to attend the Crunchies Awards celebrating the best tech accomplishments of 2010 are on sale now through Eventbrite. The Crunchies are to technology what the Oscars are to Hollywood, so come join us for an evening full of surprises, fun, great music, and even better food.

The 4th Annual Crunchies Awards will be held at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco on January 21, 2011 at 7:30 pm PST. Tickets are on sale now for $75. As always the cost of the ticket includes express pass tickets to our After Party with a fully-hosted bar, incredible hors d’oeuvres, a gaming room, and other special surprises. The After Party will be held at the Exploratorium from 9 pm to 11:30 pm PST. Come join us, with our co-hosts GigaOm and VentureBeat to celebrate and award the greatest tech accomplishments of this year.

The smoke has cleared and the Twitter bidding wars have finally ended, AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher reports that microblogging service Twitter has added another $200 million to its coffers and a $3.7 billion dollar valuation in a funding round led by Kleiner Perkins, as we also previously reported.

Along with more money Twitter has added two new members to its board, Flipboard’s Mike McCue and DoubleClick’s David Rosenblatt, it confirmed in a blog post it humorously headlined “Stocking Stuffer.” Twitter also confirmed the $200 million number in an email sent to TechCrunch earlier.

GateGuru, the iPhone app that’s been called the Yelp for Airports, is releasing a new version today, that makes it even more of a go-to destination for travelers.

For those of you that have’t heard of or used GateGuru, it essentially allows travelers to locate food, shopping and service options within any airport. The app developer’s community of around 90,000 monthly users have generated over 11,000 review and over 3,000 pictures of airport amenities.

Today Microsoft is holding a ‘Bing Search Summit’ in San Francisco, where it’s showcasing some of the latest addition to its search engine, as well as some new features for its mobile applications on iPhone and Android.

The overarching theme here has been to highlight numerous minor enhancements the Bing team has been making to help improve its search experience. The goal: boil search down to the tasks that most people are typically conducting on Bing.

Microsoft says that the vast majority of Bing queries fall under 155 query segments, which include things like Music (4.6% of searches), Consumer Electronics (1.6%), and Recipes (1.1%). Bing wants to take these segments and figure out which verbs they typically involve: music has “download songs” and “read lyrics”, electronics has “read reviews”, and so on.

You know you want to see Tron Legacy. I do. Is it me, or does that white-haired villain look a little much like Julian Assange? (Maybe it is him).

Come find out. If you live in New York City, catch the very first screening tomorrow night with about 500 other TechCrunch readers. We rented out two theaters, one in New York and one in San Francisco. The San Francisco screening is sold out, but there are still some tickets left in New York. You can get one here by donating $10 to a children’s hospital (we’ll cover the $17.50 ticket price).

eBay is on a bit of a holiday shopping spree. Weeks after announcing the acquisition of Milo, the e-commerce giant has just bought Critical Path Software.

The Portland-based mobile app developer has been helping eBay develop its mobile offerings, including its primary iPhone app, StubHub, eBay Classifieds and Shopping.com iPhone applications. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The other day, a reader emailed me asking what I use as a contact manager probably thinking I had one killer solution. But I told them that sadly I have to use a combination of Gmail, MobileMe, LinkedIn, and a few other services to get include all the people I may want to contact. And that’s especially a pain on my iPhone as it involves opening several different apps and/or websites to get to those contacts. But a new app coming out today for the iPhone and iPod touch goes a long way in easing that pain.

Friends is an app that allows you to easily manage your contacts across your phone’s address book, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Once you login to each of these accounts from within the app, your contacts are synced to provide you with one killer list of people you’re connected with. Just the Twitter and Facebook syncing alone makes this app well worth the $1.99 price.

If you were anywhere near Twitter this morning it was pretty hard to miss the news: As Facebook approaches 600 million users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been chosen as TIME Magazine’s “2010 Person of the Year.” Zuckerberg, who beat out People’s Choice Award Julian Assange for the honor, sat down with TIME managing editor Rick Stengel to talk about how Facebook shaped the world in 2010. We’ve embedded video of their discussion above.

Panoramic photos of streets are now standard in online and mobile maps, with Google Street View being the most well-known example. Bing has its own version of 3D streetside photos layered on top of maps, but soon it will start adding the ability to go inside buildings and look around thanks to a partnership with EveryScape. The feature will be called “Interior Views” and it will allow people to visually explore local businesses and other buildings. It will appear as an option next to local search results when available. You can check out an example of what the technology looks like for this mall in San Francisco.

EveryScape has been working on the technology for years and raised $6 million last February to pursue go after the interior photo mapping space more aggressively. EveryScape charges local businesses to photograph their interiors and put them on a map. Now that will be an easier sell with the Bing Map partnership.

I’m addicted to browser tabs. I probably open several hundred of them each day during my regular web browsing. And today brings good news: Google wants to reward me for that.

Well technically, Google wants to reward charities on my behalf for my obsessive web browsing. A new initiative today called “Chrome for a Cause” asks you to download a Google-made Chrome extension that will note your tab opening activity and allow you to donate to one of five charities at the end of each day based on your usage. Yep, just browse the web, and donate to charity.

Over the last several months, Facebook has been slowly ramping up its Instant Personalization program, which allows select third-party sites to access your public Facebook data as soon as you visit them, without having to ‘Connect’ to Facebook. Done right, it can be a pretty slick experience, and today Facebook is announcing that it’s adding one more site to the program: Clicker, one of the web’s best resources for finding TV shows and movies online.

It’s a logical integration, and it should help users sift through the vast amount of video content that’s been indexed by the site. After logging in, Clicker told me that I’d probably be interested in the latest episode of Glee, based on ‘Likes’ from 9 of my friends. Good job, Clicker — I happen to be a Glee fan, though the plot lines sometimes me make want to throw my remote across the room (breathe, Jason, breathe). The site is also recommending Terriers based on one ‘Like’ from a friend of mine, which sounds interesting. I’m not sure what to make of the suggestion to rate the ‘Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas to You’ special.

In September 2009, we wrote about something very interesting that Google was doing in order to penetrate the business market: they were essentially turning IE into Chrome. Chrome Frame was a plugin for Microsoft’s browser that would recreate the Chrome browsing experience inside of IE. The reason Google did this is that they realized that many users at work were not able to install Chrome because their computers were on lockdown by their IT department. Well today, Google has announced a more straightforward way to get Chrome at work: an MSI installer — aka, a standard Windows installer for businesses.

“Today, we’re announcing that Chrome offers controls that enable IT administrators to easily configure and deploy the browser on Windows, Mac, and Linux according to their business requirements,” Google writes on the Chrome blog. This new installer allows businesses that use standard deployment tools to install Chrome for all their managed users, the company says. Google has also outlined some policies to show what Chrome will respect with regard to security and settings that can be set by admins.

When we heard about Google’s plan to deploy 1 gigabit-per-second broadband to homes across the U.S., we started drooling. But Google was quick to temper expectations, noting that their initial trial deployment would cover only around 50,000 homes (though they left the door open to the possibility of 500,000 homes). And to decide where they should first deploy it, they decided to ask communities to apply. Many did. In weird ways. Google was supposed to pick a winner by the end of the year. That isn’t going to happen.

As they’ve announced in an update on their blog this morning, “we’re not quite ready to make that announcement.” The reason? Google says they want to take more time to make sure they get it right. “To be clear, we’re not re-opening our selection process—we simply need more time to decide than we’d anticipated,” they note.

Giving how the web has transformed photo sharing, it’s a little odd that it hasn’t done much to the tangible photo space. Sure, just about all of the major sites allow you to order prints, and many allow you to create fairly simple photobooks, but those are essentially the same products they’ve always been — they’re just slightly easier to make. Keepsy wants to change things up.

The new startup founded by Peter Weck and Blake Williams, focuses on creating “more than a photo album.” Essentially, they use the social dynamics of the web to crowdsource the creation of photo albums amongst friends. So instead of me making a photo album for you filled with the pictures I have with the two of us in them, a group of friends bring all their pictures together to make the book.