ReadWriteWeb

A friend recently admitted a favorite past time of his - watching plane crashes on YouTube. Planes crashing, helicopters twirling out of control, boats sinking - all are fair game. For a lot of people, this has been the story of the iPad over the past few days. While some of us take the higher ground, others revel in off-color jokes and nitpicking the different ways the iPad will be Apple's biggest mistake ever.

TweetFeel, a sentiment analysis tool that uses tweets as its data set, offers us a snapshot of this darker side of the iPad.

Google has just launched a new program aimed at improving security for its new Web browser, Google Chrome. Developers who find a bug in either Chrome or Chromium, the open source codebase used as the testing grounds for Chrome, will receive anywhere from $500 to $1,337 for reporting the issue. The amount of the reward will vary depending on the severity of the security hole discovered, says Google. Those bugs deemed "particularly severe or particularly clever" will receive the higher amount.

If you woke up today thinking this would finally be the day you would leak that top-secret document, you might want to hold off for another day. Wikileaks, the Internet home for whistleblowers world-wide, has temporarily shut its doors to concentrate on fundraising.

"We protect the world", it now says on the front page, "--but will you protect us?"

A regional development firm in the UK is the first to announce a development fund for the Apple iPad, offering up to £40,000 ($64,500) for iPad application ideas. The introduction of this fund comes less than 24 hours after Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs demoed the company's highly anticipated touchscreen tablet computer on stage at an event in San Francisco. Although this fund is limited to developers in the UK, there's little doubt that this firm will soon be one of many offering similar incentives to developers in order to encourage the creation of an entirely new ecosystem of applications tailored specifically for this unique handheld device.

"I still can't believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! ... I want something new! I want them to think differently! Why oh why would they do this?! It's so wrong! It's so stupid!"

Sound familiar? That wasn't a reaction to yesterday's Apple iPad launch, that was a MacRumors commenter in 2001 reacting to the launch of the iPod. The iPod, the device that symbolized personal electronics more than any other product in the last decade, was widely criticized when it was unveiled. It was "just another MP3 player."

Today is the 3rd annual international Data Privacy Day and a whole bunch of companies are listed on the organization's website as participants. Google, Microsoft, even Walmart. Facebook is not listed as a participant and has stirred up a lot of controversy with changes to its privacy policy lately.

Why are these corporations singing out loud about protecting our personal privacy? According to the website, "Data Privacy Day is an international celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information." More than dignity, this is about building trust with consumers so that these companies can do things with our personal data. Some of those are things we might like, a lot. Aggregate data analysis and personal recommendation could be the foundation of the next step of the internet. Unfortunately, Facebook's recent privacy policy changes put that future at risk by burning the trust of hundreds of millions of mainstream users.

So far, the reaction to Apple's iPad has been very mixed. For some, the absence of a camera is a deal breaker, while others bemoan that Apple still doesn't allow multitasking on its iPhone OS and that Safari still doesn't support Flash. Others, however, are excited about the iPad's potential as an e-book reader and gaming device. Here at ReadWriteWeb, opinions are still mixed as well. Reactions among our writers range from advising people to wait for the iPad 2.0 to giddy excitement about the prospect of a better couch-surfing device.

Been living under a rock these days? There's this hip new tablet device from Apple called the iPad. Most are in agreement that the new toy is pretty slick, but they also agree on where the iPad fails - there's no camera. iPod Touch fans were disappointed last year when Apple announced that the iPod Nano would be getting the much coveted camera, and now fans of a different sort are feeling the same dejected feelings.

Augmented reality is a technology that allows 2D and 3D objects to be placed onto a live video feed, creating unique user experiences. AR applications entered the mainstream with a few advertisements and installations for automobiles in 2008. Since then the technology has found its way onto our home computers with things like the GE Smart Grid campaign, and onto our cell phones with mobile AR browsers like Layar and Wikitude.

Yesterday afternoon, just before President Obama's first State of the Union address, the websites of the House of Representatives and those of multiple congressional members were defaced with anti-Obama messages. Among the defaced sites were those of Democratic Representative Charlie Gonzalez of Texas, and Republican representatives Spencer Bachus of Alabama, and Joe Wilson of South Carolina. These sites are currently down for maintenance.

We're really excited to announce the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app! The reading and sharing experience was key for us, so we kept the functionality smart and simple. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. We've integrated with Read it Later and Instapaper, so that you can mark things to read later. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app.

We invite you to find out more details about the ReadWriteWeb iPhone app and download it now from iTunes.