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Leave it to Steve Jobs to upstage his own products. Rumored by some analysts to be a nonevent, Apple’s invitation-only music gathering today is already proving quite eventful. Audience members expecting Apple exec Phil Schiller to quarterback today’s proceedings were given a welcome surprise when CEO Steve Jobs took the stage in his first public appearance since his liver transplant surgery.

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Online ad spending in the Middle East is expected to increase between 35 and 45 percent this year. Little wonder then that Yahoo is pushing hard into the market there. This morning, the company said it is acquiring Maktoob.com, an Arabic online portal that boasts some 16 million users.

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According to a recent study by Nielsen Online, Twitter’s audience-retention rate is currently about 40 percent. Which means that about 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users end up abandoning the service after a month. Why is Twitter struggling with low retention rates? Perhaps, because so many tweets are utter nonsense.

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Palm’s Pre may compete with Apple’s iPhone on a feature-to-feature basis, but judging from the latest search stats from comScore, the Pre has some way to go before it matches the iPhone in mindshare. According to the research house, Palm Pre search activity, which more than doubled in late May thanks to Sprint’s “Now Network” advertising campaign, suffered a significant decline in mid-June, right around the debut of the new iPhone.

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Just as the mobile Web and the wired Web are converging, so too are their audiences, which are destined to reach parity in size–and sooner, rather than later. According to the latest metrics from comScore, day-to-day mobile Internet usage in the states doubled over the last year.

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After a week of bleeding purple, a heavily bandaged Yahoo has regrouped to roll out its vaunted Open Strategy. At an event in San Francisco today, the company introduced “socialized” upgrades to Yahoo Mail, Toolbar, My Yahoo, Yahoo TV and Yahoo Music. Each service now features social enhancements that essentially transform the experience of using them into one more akin to social networking.

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It’s been two years since the $1.65 billion acquisition and Google has yet to truly monetize YouTube. And while Google CEO Eric Schmidt insists the company has the “luxury of time” as it searches for ways to recoup its investment in the popular video site, it’s clear the issue is gradually becoming more pressing. “We’re waiting for the innovations,” he said recently. “The innovation will come. We know it will come. We know it’s there.” Could the “it” to which Schmidt refers be the new e-commerce platform YouTube is launching?

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With a 4.8 percent share of the search market, according to comScore, Ask has long been the inveterate fourth-place contestant in a sector overwhelmingly dominated by Google. And try as it might–with both redesigns and ad campaigns–the company just can’t seem to build any audience beyond that. So there’s little reason to believe that Ask’s latest redesign–its third in as many years and the 11th since it first launched–won’t be as ineffective as those that have gone before it.

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