Google just officially announced that it will send out 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave tomorrow. These accounts will go to developers who are already in the developers preview and users who signed up for accounts at wave.google.com on a first-come, first-served basis. A select number of Google Apps users will also get access to Wave. Google first unveiled Wave in May and since then the team has focused almost exclusively on making the system more stable and scalable.
A 22-year-old iPhone application developer by the name of Red Daly is claiming that Apple rejected his new application from inclusion in the iTunes App Store due to its political nature. His app, iSinglePayer, was designed to educate its users on the benefits of a single-payer health care system, a hotly debated issue here in the U.S. In addition to data-filled bullet points, the app also taps into the phone's GPS to determine who the user's local congressperson is, how much money the health care sector donated to their campaign, and a "tap to call" button to connect app users with lawmakers.
According to Daly, an Apple representative spoke to him by phone to inform him that the rejection of the app was due to its "politically charged" nature. Well that, and the fact that Apple doesn't allow political apps from single developers.
When the Palm Pre debuted, one of its most useful features was its ability to sync with Apple's iTunes software. Unfortunately, how it went about doing this was a little bit underhanded: it pretended to be an iPhone. The most recent version of the hack - yes, there were several - was made possible by Palm's use of Apple's USB hardware vendor code provided by the USB Implementers Forum, an industry standards group. The Pre simply used Apple's code so that iTunes would see the Pre as an Apple device. Apple of course, was not happy, and purposefully broke this functionality in subsequent iTunes software updates. Palm responded by complaining to the Forum, but the group took Apple's side.
Now, finally, the Apple/Palm war seems to have ended. With the latest update to Palm Pre's webOS software, the company has come up with a new tactic altogether: forget about iTunes, use Amazon instead.
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Traditional news services once had a monopoly on breaking stories. Not anymore. Just as blogging seems to have displaced longer features in traditional media, micro-blogging sites such as Twitter are racing against (and often beating) news services to the scoop.
Does this make for better-informed citizens? Maybe.
Startup e-book publishing house Smashwords has sussed out a distribution agreement with Sony Electronics that will allow for user creation of publishing accounts and expedited publishing and distribution of books for the Sony Readers through their eBook Store.
Effective immediately, the Sony Publisher Portal is re-launched and open for business. Aspiring authors and independent publishers can upload Microsoft Word documents and have distro-ready e-books within hours.
Last week YouTube blogged that it is considering moving away from the familiar 5-star system of reviews. According to YouTube product manager Shiva Rajaraman, the stars system is being used bluntly by the majority of YouTube users - most give videos a perfect 5 star rating. Rajaraman noted that "when it comes to ratings it's pretty much all or nothing."
When you also consider that the wisdom of the crowds is often dominated by small, powerful groups, then the validity of user ratings is further called into question. So why not just get rid of explicit user ratings and use implicit recommendations instead?
Real-time web protocol PubSubHubbub's co-creator Brett Slatkin, an engineer at Google, gave a talk at Facebook headquarters today about how the new information delivery system works and how Facebook can support it.
He's published his deck on his blog and we've embedded it below as our Real-Time Web Article of the Day. If you're interested in making your content available in real time or more efficiently using real-time content syndicated from elsewhere, this presentation is a must-see.
Brion Vibber, CTO of Wikimedia and lead developer for Wikipedia and MediaWiki, announced today that he's leaving the company to work for StatusNet (formerly Laconica) as their chief architect.
StatusNet is the open-source microblogging platform that powers sites such as identi.ca, which impressed us from its inception as a "framework for a distributed network of federated microblogging services." Read on for more details on what Vibber will be doing there.
The creator of the very popular Twitter app Tweetie announced today that he hopes to submit the final version of Tweetie 2.0 to Apple this week. Loren Brichter detailed on his blog a mind boggling list of impressive new features have been built into the app. Tweetie 2.0 sounds like a heavy-duty tool for serious communication - in 140 characters of course.
Tweetie is already the mobile tweeting app of choice for geek rockstars like NY Times User Interface Specialist Nick Bilton, youth social networking analyst danah boyd, the TED conference's Leigh Ferreira and the Nonprofit Technology Network's Holly Ross. (Maybe you should try it too, if you haven't.) Below are ten forthcoming features that will make the new Tweetie knock your socks off.
Flickr just announced support for OpenStreetMap, the wiki-like mapping service that allows users to create and edit maps. Starting today, photos that are tagged with an OpenStreetMap node ID will include a link to OpenStreetMap (OSM) right underneath the photo. OSM assigns a random number to objects on its maps and Flickr can now read this number and also extract additional data about places from the OSM database. In addition, Flickr also announced that it will now support venue ID tags for the increasingly popular Foursquare service.
