ReadWriteWeb

After months of work, social trip planner Stay.com is getting ready to unshutter and launch a much more robust Version 2.0.

"Basically, we created 2.0 by filling in all the blanks other sites like Expedia, TripIt, TripAdvisor, NileGuide, and all the others left undone," said Phil Butler, PR rep for the company.

Despite the rollback on some of Facebook's heavily-debated privacy changes, the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary still has questions for Facebook's CEO. On Friday, Representative John Conyers (D-MI) sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter requesting additional information on Facebook's privacy activities.

"(W)e would appreciate a detailed explanation of the information about Facebook users that your company has provided to third parties without the knowledge of the account holders -- particularly in circumstances in which the user did not expressly opt for this type of information sharing."

Links - are they a net negative for readers online? That's the idea being deliberately explored by a number of publishers, says writer Nicholas Carr today.

The iconoclastic author says that he has grown sympathetic to the thinking of Steve Gillmor, the almost incomprehensibly future-bound sage tech journalist who has argued for years that "links are dead." Links within articles are a distraction and imply that the reader ought to leave what they are reading to read something else, Carr says. Placing links at the end of articles is more respectful of a person's intentions and concentration. Do you think that's true? I'll skip putting links in this post, until the end, and you can let me know how it feels.

Amazon's audio book provider Audible.com is testing an app for the Android platform. With a target date of "Summer 2010" the company will likely land its popular service on Android before it does on the iPhone. The app will allow subscribers to participate in the Audible ecosystem beyond simply listening to the audio files; a lightweight social network, accomplishment badges, analytics concerning your listening habits and text content all appear to be supported. It might seem unnecessary for the company to build a dedicated Audible app - but there's actually some very good reasons to.

Breon Nagy gained beta tester access to the app and posted screenshots today on his site DroidDog.

Augmented reality (AR) developers Mobilizy, makers of the Wikitude World Browser, are close to releasing their latest creation, Wikitude Drive, an app that combines AR technology with turn-by-turn driving directions. The app works by taking live video of the road captured by a smartphone mounted on the dashboard or windshield and super imposing the direction data onto it. The company announced late last week that beta testing with 2,000 volunteers had been concluded, signaling that the company may be close to publicly launching the app on the Android marketplace.

Location-based applications are all the rage right now, but anyone who uses them knows that current GPS technology only allows for a certain amount of accuracy. If you pull up Foursquare, Gowalla or any other social check-in app while in a dense business area, chances are the place you're looking for is not at the top of the list. This is because current GPS chips and satellites are only accurate to roughly 20 feet at best, but this number could shrink significantly with the recent launch of the first of several new GPS satellites.

The iPad has passed $1 billion in sales, according to simple multiplication of the company's 2 million announced-sales of the product after a mere two months of availability.

Earlier this month, Yankee Group analyst Carl Howe predicted that the iPad would become the fastest consumer product in history to hit the $1 billion mark. While that's a tough call to make definitively, it is undeniable that the iPad has surpassed mere hype and made at least a commercial splash. Some analysts believe it is changing the nature of personal computing, too. What do you think?

What if Chris Dixon and John Borthwick were sitting at the same table as you, ready to have a real conversation about what's next for the real-time Web? Would you like to sit across from Marshall Kirkpatrick and Richard MacManus and have a straight-shooting conversation about real-time online media? If so, then the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit is for you. And thanks to its unconference format, the day will be like participating in a think tank - you and a group of tech luminaries collaborating on the future of the Web.

One of the key aspects of the emerging Internet of Things - where real-world objects are connected to the Internet - is the massive amount of new data on the Web that will result. As more and more "things" in the world are connected to the Internet, it follows that more data will be uploaded to and downloaded from the cloud. And this is in addition to the burgeoning amount of user-generated content - which has increased 15-fold over the past few years, according to a presentation that Google VP Marissa Mayer made last August at Xerox PARC. Mayer said during her presentation that this "data explosion is bigger than Moore's law."

During my visit to Hewlett Packard Labs earlier this month, I spoke to Parthasarathy Ranganathan - a Distinguished Technologist at HP Labs - about this large influx of data onto the Web.