It is easy to understand why Google has been able to stay on top since so many manufacturers are able to use Android on their phones, but since the new iPhone 4S has hit the market Apple has been making up some of the difference, and now looks like it may be able to not only have the best selling smartphone, but also able to gain the top spot in terms of phones running its iOS operating system.

Before the iPhone 4S launched, Android controlled around 60% of the market, with the iPhone capturing a respectable, yet distant, second place with 26% of the market. That has drastically changed, and now iOS has 43% of the market, with Android sitting at 47%.  An impressive jump to say the least for Apple.

iPhone sales continue to dominate the market, and in November it held the top 3 spots with the iPhone 4S, 4, and 3GS.

Whether or not Apple is able to get the top spot in terms of operating systems remains to be seen. Based on the strong estimates for the number of phones it is expected to have sold during the holiday season, it could easily gain the top spot when December numbers are made available.

As you can also see, it has really become a two dog race in this highly competitive market. With two out of every three phones being sold today being iPhones, it is an important market to dominate. Research in Motion (RIMM) continues to suffer, with its market share falling down to just 6%, a far cry from a few years ago when it was the biggest player in the market.

Netflix reported its third quarter results last night, which were actually above analyst estimates, but shares are tradign down over 35% in premarket trading as investors react to news of such a massive drop in the company’s subscribers, its first in years.

Earnings for the quarter were $1.16 per share, on revenues of $822 million. Analysts had been expecting to see the company report earnings of $0.96 per share, on revenues of $812.5 million.

Typically when a company reports such strong earnings and revenues its stock trades sharply higher, but investors feel as though the subscriber drop that Netflix saw during the quarter may not be over just yet. Netflix has historically been very good at understanding what its customers want, and that is the reason why it became the leader in DVD rental and streaming video, but a couple big blunders earlier this year have left its subscribers, and investors scratching their heads and wondering if Netflix has lost its ability to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to giving its subscribers what they want.

Netflix’s first big mistake was to raise its monthly fees. While this did result in a new record for revenues, the company paid for that with few subscribers, and in its highly competitive insdustry, subcriber numbers are the key to success. Following the decision to raise its rates, it made an even more dramatic blunder in its decision to split its streaming and DVD rental business. It later changed its mind and reversed the decision to split to the 2 businesses, but the impact the decision had on its customers was not so easy to reverse.

Has Netflix lost touch with its customers? It definitely did earlier this year, and while it has tried to correct its mistakes, you have to wonder if / when the next big mistake will come from the company’s management. Netflix still has a solid business model, but once a company loses its customers confidence, it is very hard to regain it, and we will just have to see if Netflix is able to get back on track, or if customers will continue to look for other ways to get their streaming media.

The stock is down 37%, or $44.00 in premarket trading to $74.77

Google sees a potential market in users that buy a new computer and are just content to use the browser that comes with their new computer, unaware that they can download a new browser for free.

The similarities between one of Google’s ads, and Apple (AAPL)’s ad for its FaceTime are definitely apparent.

In one of its ads, Google shows a father following his daughters life on Google Chrome.

In it’s second ad, Google got a bit more racy, dealing with the pressures that gay teens encounter, calling this their “It Gets Better” campaign.

Here is the one of Google’s new television advertisements:

When Google (GOOG) released Android there had been several other mobile operating systems that had tried and failed to compete against Apple’s popular iPhone, but Google has a hit on their hand, and Android powered smartphones represent a clear and present danger to the iPhone’s mobile market dominance.

A clear indicator to Android’s popularity is the speed of which developers have been creating and release apps for Android powered phones.

A report today shows that there are now more free apps available in the Android marketplace than Apple’s App Store, and in addition it is expected that the total number of apps will surpass what is available in the app store by the end of the summer.

What may be surprising, is that despite the rise in apps, the prices have not fallen as you may expect, but instead have been steadily rising. The average app price for iPad users is now $5.36, up from $4.34 when the app store first launched.

Apple stock is trading down 0.9% on the day, while Google is is trading down 0.1%.

As widespread as twitter has become, it is hard to remember that the twitter was lost just 4 years ago. It has come a long way in the past 4 years, and now twitter is trying hard to change its image from a start up internet company to one of the big internet companies.

It announced a couple new features that will improve user experience including geo-location services, a database of places and additional metadata for posts.

For the first time, twitter also released information on its size, stating that it currently has 106 million registered users, and its picks up a pretty impressive 300,000 new users each day. That is some pretty impressive growth.

Its users currently post approximately 55 million posts each day, and that number is rising.

The company realizes that its service is not the easiest thing in the world for new users to understand, and is trying to change that. Its chief executive, Evan Williams, stated that “It’s amazing it’s grown so fast given how hard it is to use.”

It also has introduced “promotional tweets” that will act just like any other tweet, but will be actual promotions that vendors supply to twitter. The tweets that have the most resonance will remain, and those tweets that do not will go away.

It is one solid way that twitter plans to add to its bottom line as it continues to develop its revenue model.

For its first quarter the company showed that earnings were $0.37 EPS on $7.4 Billion in revenues. This fell short of the $0.48 EPS that analysts had been expecting, but it did surpass the $7.2 Billion revenue figure that Wall Street had been looking to see.

Alcoa was the first Dow 30 company to report earnings for the first quarter, and the company noted that its sales had dropped by a pretty heavy $6.7 million in the quarter, at $7.38 million, down from $7.91 million in the same period last year. Is this a trend that we will continue to see as the rest of the Dow components line up to report first quarter numbers? Time will tell, but it is definitely going to be a rough earnings period, and should give us a better idea of just how tough things really are out there.

Alcoa shares fell 4.0% in yesterday’s action, and following its earnings report the stock has dropped another 0.6% in extended hours trading.

The reason for the current controversy comes from a recent report from comScore Inc. which states that Google’s click through rates have slowed to a crawl this year. Looking at the February numbers, comScore Inc. reports that the company saw just a 3% increase from February 2007. If that sounds bad, the company also reports that January saw ZERO growth from January of last year.

These are not exactly the sort of numbers that Google investors are used to seeing. Consider that only a few months earlier the search engine giant was seeing growth rates in the upper 20 to 30% range. Definitely a large slowdown, assuming you can trust the comScore Inc. report.

Google itself announced last quarter that its click through rates had been falling, and that has led to the stock selling off pretty sharply over the past 3 months.

The company used to be the unstoppable Wall Street phenomenon, but that has clearly changed recently and now the analysts are turning against their once beloved high flying stock. Lehman has lowered their price target from $644 to $580 (Google stock closed yesterday at $444, so at least even though their lowered their price target, they still see some more upside potential). The main reason for the price target adjustment was blamed on the recent click through declines. Piper Jaffray used the same justification in their forecast that Google will miss earnings for the current period.

While many are debating that the current slow down is due to advertising trimming their budgets, not everyone is buying that. Some analysts debate that the reason for the drop is more a result that advertisers are typically buying sales, and not clicks, so if Google can improve the value per click the ad revenue will shoot higher very quickly.

Rob Sanderson, an analyst with American Technology Research stated that the comScore Inc. have a wide margin of error, and investor’s would be wise not to assume that the recent report will lead to a poor earnings report from the company. Only time will tell.

Google will next be reporting earnings on April 17, and you can be sure that we will see a big move one way or the other once traders get to se just how bad things have gotten over the past few months.

related: Google remains the king of search engine traffic

The company is fighting against rising drilling costs and costs of engineering in its battle to locate new oil reserves.

Last year the company spent $21 billion on exploration and development, and this year it plans to boost that investment up to somewhere between $25 and $30 billion. Looking into the future, the company expects to maintain that level of capital expenditure through the year 2012.

These changes were (in summary):

1. Increased final selling fees
2. Allowing PayPal to hold certain payments up to 21 days
3. Removing the option for for sellers to leave negative feedback on sellers

The eBay boycott was supposed to last a week, but was extended to last 2 weeks, and the impacts of the strike are still up for debate. While eBay is denying that the strike had any impact on its business, sellers are furious and accusing the site of padding it’s listings in order to create the false allusion that the strike was of little or no success.

There have been several posts on the eBay forum with users posting what they consider to be viable proof of eBay’s shady practices, and one user has gone so far as to post a video on YouTube illustrating what he considers to be the fraudulent listings.

For now, eBay is claiming that it had a bug in its system which resulted in some fake item listings, but has denied any intentional wrong doing.

You can be sure that we have not heard the end of this saga!

Ford Motor

Citigroup cited several reasons for the downgrade, and in addition lowered its price target on the stock from $7.00 down to $5.50.

Here a few of the reasons for the downgrade:

• low chance that the company is going to be able to maintain market share in 2008
• continued weak housing market will apply additional pressure to the company’s heavy-duty truck lineup
• worsening credit crunch in America to apply more pressure on the Ford Credit’s earnings stream

In the premarket, shares of Ford have not been beaten up too bad, with shares dropping 1.3%, down to $6.43. We will see just how hard Wall Street punishes the company once trading gets under way shortly.