Apple approved the first update to the Facebook app on the iPhone in almost a year yesterday and it was a huge hit. The app was built by Joe Hewitt, whose previous work includes the co-creation of Firefox with Blake Ross. With 12 million downloads, Facebook's app was the 2nd most popular free app on the iPhone platform in 2008 behind Pandora.
I spoke with Hewitt yesterday on the BadHairDay podcast and the following are three three features he identified as next steps on the app's roadmap.
Bing Local Search has some interesting features you won't find in Google, so the prospect of seeing Bing listings appear on top of your iPhone's camera viewer when you point at a restaurant or business is intriguing. That's what forthcoming iPhone app RobotVision offers - and it displays a view of Tweets and Flickr photos published nearby wherever you are.
RobotVision is a new Augmented Reality (AR) app for the iPhone 3Gs. It's not available yet, but it will be as soon as AR apps are formally welcomed into the App Store by Apple, probably sometime next month. AR browsers "turn the world inside out" by exposing latent online information about your surroundings; there will soon be enough of them that they will compete based on user experience. RobotVision looks like it could be a good one.
Hardly a day went by this week without a major new announcement in the eBook and eReader arena. The wireless eReaders from Sony and the Irex/Barnes & Noble partnership were probably some of the most interesting announcements. In addition, Google also opened up its EPUB archive, which will give readers easy access to over 1 million free public-domain books for their eReaders. The only company that didn't have anything to announce this week was Amazon, which is now in danger of losing its early lead to Sony and Barnes & Noble.
Wikitude Drive from Austrian-based developers Mobilizy, is, at its core, a GPS navigation app. What makes the app stand out, however, is that instead of a map, you just see a real-time view of the street ahead of you and the navigation data is shown on top of this video. Wikitude Drive is currently under development and will run on Android phones. According to Mobilizy, the app will offer all the standard GPS navigation features that drivers have become accustomed to. In addition, though, the company also plans to offer "social navigational features" that will help users, for example, find their friends' locations.
July turned out to be the biggest month for watching Internet video yet. According to comScore, Internet users in the US watched 21.4 billion videos in July, up 88% from last year. Google's YouTube streamed 9 billion of these videos, followed by video sites from Viacom and Microsoft. In terms of unique users, YouTube gets only twice as many visitors as Microsoft's video sites. On YouTube, however, people watched an average of 74 videos in July, while they watched only around 10 videos on Microsoft's sites and 19 on Viacom's online video properties.
When summer movies like Sacha Baron Cohen's "Bruno" and "Funny People," the latest from comedic hit-maker Judd Apatow, tanked, for once people weren't blaming the quality of the films themselves. They were blaming Twitter. According to multiple reports, it was the early buzz on Twitter - much of it negative - that caused these movies to crash and burn. Similarly, when movies do well, as is the case now with the sci-fi thriller "District 9" and Brad Pitt's action-filled "Inglorious Basterds," credit is given to the powerful "Twitter effect" and its ability to make or break a movie. But is Twitter really having this big an impact on the movie industry?
This week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office revealed a patent filed by Apple for "Transitional Data Sets" - a technology that would update an iPhone's home screen based on your current physical location. Of course, as with all patents filed by major technology companies, a patent won't necessarily translate to an actual feature - it just represents intellectual property. For this reason, we don't typically report on every new patent application that comes through the U.S. PTO, but in this case, we couldn't help ourselves. The concept behind the location-aware home screen is one we want now. It represents everything a smartphone should be.
In an aside at yesterday's Bandwidth Music Conference, MOG CEO David Hyman mentioned closing a $5 million dollar round of funding with Menlo Ventures. The plucky editorial-based music network offers more than 6000 blog posts per week and an in-depth look at everything from indy to top 40 tracks. The service also offers Rhapsody music integration and a discovery interface with millions more of streaming tracks. ReadWriteWeb caught up with Hyman shortly after his panel to talk about his upcoming plans.
People who think that 'America's Funniest Home Videos' is a media phenomenon that peaked in the television era, may be disappointed to know that the same formula is becoming increasingly popular on the Web. As of July 2009, Break Media was ranked the 35th most popular site in the U.S. - one year ago it wasn't in the top 50. Break.com is an entertainment destination focused on "Funny Videos & Funny Pictures" (the company's words). It targets a young male audience and makes no bones about going for the lowest common denominator.
First Paris Metro, then Yelp, now London Buses. The newest is even selling database layers through in-app purchases.
It has been widely reported that the API required to display Augmented Reality (AR) layers of data on top of the camera view of a non-jailbroken iPhone 3Gs would not be publicly exposed until the launch of the next version of the iPhone Operating System, expected this Fall. Many developers are patiently waiting, but some have now found a way around the restriction. We just received word of the 3rd AR-enabled app hitting the iTunes store.
