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Millions of new iPhones and Androids got activated during and after Christmas this year — and what have people done with their new devices? They’ve downloaded Facebook’s mobile apps, of course.

I’ve been watching this trend for a few years, and the past week has been the biggest yet, based on the numbers visible in the AppData app tracking service. Facebook’s iPhone app grew by 4.1 million monthly active users and 1.7 million daily actives, which was beat out by its Android app, which gained 5.2 million MAU and 2.2 million DAU. Previous years have shown gains in the hundreds of thousands or lower millions.

inthe last 2011 saw many interesting developments in the virtualization of goods. The growth of app stores continued unabated, aided by huge sales of iOS devices and Android handsets, and media of all kinds continued the move to a totally non-physical state for the end user: Netflix, Spotify, and other services make the idea of storing your things, whether on your hard drive or in stacks by the TV, seem very… 2010. Widespread adoption of non-physical media is sparking new industries and setting fire to old ones.

[Update 12/29/2011 5:20pm: Facebook tells me it has now made the Messenger for Windows download link publicly available in its Help Center. Users can also learn details about the client there. Still no sign of a Mac version, though.]

The test group for “Facebook Messenger for Windows” just got a whole lot bigger. Israeli blog TechIT has leaked a Facebook CDN download link for the desktop chat client Facebook began testing with a small number of users last month. The client includes notifications and the Ticker which link back to Facebook.com, and therefore could drive engagement with the website. Messenger could also pull market share away from other desktop chat clients like AOL Instant Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.

There has always been a tension on the Internet between humans and algorithms. In the early days, Yahoo was a human-curated index, remember? But humans couldn’t keep up, and the algorithms took over. Today, the human factor is rising in importance once again with Facebook, Twitter, and countless mobile applications like Instagram. Everything is social. The tension today is between social and search—humans versus computers. Except that it isn’t so simple.

Siri and IBM’s Watson are starting to be applied to medical questions. They’ll assist with diagnostics and decision support for both patients and clinicians. Through the cloud, any device will be able to access powerful medical AI.

For example, an X-ray gun in remote africa could send shots to the cloud where an artificial intelligence augmented physician could analyze them. Pap smears and some mammograms are already read with some AI or elements of pattern recognition.