Social review service Yelp has snuck the first Augmented Reality (AR) iPhone app specifically for the US into the iTunes App Store. The undisclosed new feature allows iPhone 3Gs owners to shake their phones three times to turn on a view called "the Monocle." This view uses the phone's GPS and compass to display markers for restaurants, bars and other nearby businesses on top of the camera's view.
Blogger Robert Scoble discovered the hidden feature and posted about it on FriendFeed today. A screenshot is below.
See also, from 1 hour later: The Wall Has Fallen: 3 Augmented Reality Apps Now Live in iPhone App Store
Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek must be ecstatic. The company's iPhone application has been approved for the App Store ahead of competitors Rhapsody and Grooveshark. PaidContent UK reports that Apple has notified Spotify that its app will appear in the store shortly. In late July there was fear that the Swedish site's iPhone service would be denied due to the fact that it was seen as a threat to iTunes. Since then, Apple has come under FCC investigation for its app approval process. The investigation could not have come at a better time for Spotify; the speedy approval is likely due to Apple's interest in deflecting accusations of anti-competitive tactics.
The story surrounding the infamous Obama Joker picture and how Yahoo's Flickr photo sharing service deleted it after it received a DMCA take-down notice is getting stranger by the day. According to photo blogger Thomas Hawk, who actually saw the name on the take-down notice that Flickr shared with the original poster, the name is likely "totally bogus." This is quite a disturbing development, especially because it has now become clear that Flickr does not verify the authenticity of the DMCA take-down notices it receives.
Augmented Reality, technology that superimposes a layer of data on top of a user's view of the real world, is one of the hottest things around these days. Is it for real or is it just hype? We took a poll of ReadWriteWeb readers over the last 24 hours. With more than 400 responses, only 11% of you said it is just hype. 61% said you think it is important, including 21% who think Augmented Reality is both important and hype.
Particularly interesting is that more than 50% of the respondents come from North America. Augmented Reality is far more closely watched so far in Europe and Asia. At least among RWW readers, it appears that North Americans are catching on!
Facebook announced today that after facing legal pressure from the Canadian government, it will begin working on ways for users to choose which parts of their full profile they are willing to expose to applications they add on Facebook.
Though the company talks about privacy all the time, the fact that it will take an estimated 12 months before this situation is resolved demonstrates how invested Facebook really is behind the scenes in a "let it all hang out" philosophy.
Even though baby boomers make up more than one quarter of all US Internet users, and even though the majority of this group spends over five hour per week online, a new survey by Burst Media found that only 14% of boomers feel that the content on the Internet is focused on people their age. An even smaller number of boomers (9.9%) thinks that Internet advertising is focused on their demographic. With regards to social networks, most boomers also think that these sites are not focused on people their age.
The Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has put together a campaign to raise awareness of privacy issues surrounding Facebook applications, in particular quizzes. According to this group, the millions of Facebook users taking quizzes are revealing far more personal information to application developers than they are aware of. This is mostly due to the fact that Facebook's default privacy settings allow access to all your profile information whether or not your profile is set to "private." Even worse, the ACLU reports that even if you shun quizzes yourself, your profile info is revealed when one of your friends takes a quiz. Want to see how bad the problem is? Just take the ACLU's Facebook Quiz and prepare to be shocked.
"Teens don't tweet." Over the past few weeks, this fact has been reported time and time again by analysts, bloggers, and even mainstream media. Why the obsession with the teenage crowd on Twitter? Perhaps it's simply because adults can't believe that they, not teens, for once are responsible for the birth of an Internet phenomenon. But before all you adults get too comfortable with your Twitter dominance, take a look at the recent data from comScore. It appears that the youngest Twitter users - those in the 12-24 bracket - are now the fastest-growing segment of Twitter's population. So the kids don't tweet? Looks like they may start soon if this new data is to be believed.
Earlier this week we looked at the top 50 web properties in the U.S., according to comScore, and analyzed the changes over the past year. The top 5 were almost the same, except for the entrance of Facebook at number 5. What really caught our eye though was the progress of several less glamorous brands up the comScore charts. We profiled one of them, Demand Media, yesterday. Today we look at a site that wasn't in the top 50 one year ago but is now ranked #26. The Answers.com site gets over 28 million unique visitors per month, according to comScore.
How has Answers.com achieved this stellar growth? The same way Demand Media has: sheer quantity of content.
UPDATE: Bob Rosenschein, CEO, Answers.com, left a comment on this post with some illuminating data points. He first notes that the majority of page views comes from WikiAnswers.com, which had 22M uniques in July '09 while Answers.com had 10M "with some overlap." What's more, he notes that "the growth in our traffic is almost entirely from our WikiAnswers site."
In the age of transparency, it appears some of us are embarrassed to be ourselves. Maybe you're a closet Perez Hilton fan, or you check Woot! at work, or perhaps as suggested by PC Pro, you like to bookmark your porn collection. In any case, a number of Firefox 3 users reverted back to version 2 due to the location bar's (awesome bar's) ability to search against browser history and bookmarks. A recent Mozilla blog post walks users through the privacy control enhancements of Firefox 3.5.
