Throughout the past year Groupon has been a media darling — trailblazing the local deal-a-day market, rejecting a $6 billion acquisition offer by Google, and filing for an IPO that could seek to raise as much as close to $1 billion at a valuation of about $20 billion.

But this has been a rough week for Groupon. First came the blog post from a small cafe owner who said Groupon was “the single worst decision“ she ever made as a business owner. Then a three-part TechCrunch series outlining how Groupon is poised for collapse.

Groupon buzz

Groupon chatter has spiked 8x over the course of the last year.

Groupon sentiment

Sentiment around Groupon is currently at its most negative point. The phrase “poised for collapse” is currently appearing in 11% of every Groupon mention on the Internet.

According to the TechCrunch article, some of the problems with Groupon are that businesses don’t know if the Groupon customers are already existing customers, and that buying a Groupon appears to be helping local businesses, but in many cases Groupon takes 50% or more of the money as a transaction fee.

Did TechCrunch help remove peoples’ rose-colored Groupon glasses?

Leading technology blog TechCrunch, which draws 33 million page views per month, posted statistics yesterday that Chrome passed Firefox as the browser most often used to visit www.techcrunch.com. For the month of November, Chrome was number one for the first time, edging out Firefox 27.80% to 27.67%.

According to StatCounter, Microsoft Internet Explorer is still the most used browser overall, followed by Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera. Data from November 2009 – November 2010 below shows a steady decline in Internet Explorer usage, and a steady rise in Chrome usage.

We used Social Radar to measure online conversation around each browser.

Since early 2009, Chrome has gone from nearly last to nearly first among the most discussed Web browsers.

Since early summer, Chrome only slightly trails Internet Explorer in overall chatter.

As discussed in the TechCrunch article, Mozilla is slated to launch Firefox 4 early next year and Microsoft is preparing to launch the initial release of IE9.

Google releases a new version of Chrome every six weeks and is preparing to launch a Chrome Web Store featuring downloadable apps. By the end of the year, Google will launch Chrome OS.

Meanwhile, Safari is the browser used on every iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch now, which helps boost Safari’s numbers.

How will increased mobile traffic and social browsers affect the numbers moving forward?

As TechCrunch reported, May 28 was supposed to be Microsoft Bing day. Everyone knew for months that Steve Ballmer would announce the new Microsoft Bing search engine during the All Things Digital conference in San Diego. Then minutes later, Google announced a stealth project 4+ years in the making called Wave at the Google IO conference in San Francisco.

So which generated more buzz: Microsoft’s new decision engine, or Google’s new communication platform integrating e-mail, IM, document sharing, search, publishing, Twitter (Twave) and more?

The spikes almost mirrored each other on the 28th, but today Google Wave is generating increasingly higher buzz. Instead of talking about Bing replacing Google search, everyone is talking about whether Google Wave will be the communication platform of the future.

Television host/Emmy Award winner/philanthropist/billionaire Oprah Winfrey @oprah has decided to send her first tweet during live TV today.

Ashton Kutcher @aplusk will be be Oprah’s guest, discussing today’s win in the race to a million followers over CNN @cnnbrk and Britney Spears @britneyspears.

What does it mean for the future of social media? TechCrunch wonders if soccer moms will take over the service.

Check out the trend chart below. Even someone with a reputation as established as Oprah’s — one of the most powerful people in the world — is trending up in chatter the last few days thanks to Twitter. Her buzz should continue to rise today after the show airs. The topic cloud below represents topics of conversation on the web related to Oprah over the last two days.

Social media is evolving. Kutcher gets it. “For one person to actually have the ability to broadcast to as many people as a major media network, sort of signifies the turning of the tide from tradition news outlets to social news outlets,” Kutcher said in a YouTube video.

It’s exciting news. As Brian Solis said in his blog, we participate in social media to express ourselves. We become media. We become influencers. Solis goes on to discuss the potential of social media to empower individuals moving forward.

What’s next? Googlezon may be here before 2014.