Happy Friday everyone. As the week comes to a close, we have some wonderful SEO  links for you all to contemplate over the weekend (and if you’re in Chicago like us, check out the fabulous entertainment guides from a nearby community of Chicago apartments - yes, one of our writers compiles those).

From Read  Write Web, the HowCast Iphone application has surpassed 500,000 downloads.

How cast is a series of short instructional videos that are extremely useful for people looking to learn new things on the go. It is always nice to see helpful and educational tools succeed on the on the web, whether it is on a mobile platform or otherwise.

The blog at the Blog World 2009 Expo site reports that  Ashton Kutcher has  threatened to stop tweeting. While he may have close to 2 million followers, I won’t be heartbroken. Will you? Will twitter suffer? I don’t think so…

Carrie Hill at Search Engine Watch addresses a common SEO question: “I have meta tags but I’m not ranking”. She provides an in depth analysis that proves that meta tags aren’t the be all end all of online marketing.

Lastly, the biggest Internet story of the week. Google has given the first preview of “wave”, its upcoming new communications platform that combines real time chat, email, and photo sharing. This new platform may also provide a space for google to compete in the real time social networking realm. This is definitely an exciting story. For a preview, check it out here.

Also, be on the lookout for Microsoft’s launch of a new search engine, bing in the coming weeks. We’ll see if it will give Microsoft a larger share of the search market.

Enjoy your weekend!