ReadWriteWeb

Twitter slipped a new option into users' settings earlier today that hinted the service may soon display images and video inline with users' 140-character updates, much like Facebook does in its News Feed. Moments after it was seen and reported on, it was gone again.

With Twitter keeping mum, questions abound: What will this feature look like? Will it slow Twitter's already-taxed servers? And will people use it?

The Library of Congress added a number of ambitious new exceptions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act's prohibition of breaking copyright technologies today, most notably concerning iPhone jailbreaking and unlocking. The Library adds and renews exceptions every 3 years and as Sarah Perez argued this morning, these ones go well beyond the iPhone.

I'd like to take this opportunity to celebrate "fair use," the general principle that copyrighted materials can legitimately be used by other parties, without payment, within reasonable limits. It's not just legally acceptable, it's a paradigm that could provide a foundation for a richer, fairer, better future for everyone.

Tim O'Reilly was recently at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), talking about the kinds of things that could be done "if we could use medicare data like Google uses clickstream data." The response was a very cautious one.

Big organizations have a lot of fear concerning peoples' privacy, but book publisher, event organizer and industry luminary Tim O'Reilly thinks it's time to reconsider our beliefs concerning personal information. "The old model of privacy isn't taking into account any of the trade offs, and clearly people are willing to make those trade offs," he says. "Google maps on your phone sends your location to someone else's server every time you look something up, for example." O'Reilly's position on privacy is a very important one, at this point in history when the future of privacy is being debated.

Foursquare says it's in talks with all the major search engines to index the startup's location data. We're hearing that Google in particular may be in talks with all the major players in the location-based social networking market. What would a big search engine do with a little startup's check-ins and annotations about locations? Here are some ideas.

The paid partnerships between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and more that were launched last Fall could provide a model, but location provides new opportunities, as well. Isn't it amazing that on a Web so dependent on Google, there are emergent new kinds of websites so valuable they can charge giant search engines for their content? Here are some things Google might do with that content.

Twitter launched its first sponsored promotion on @earlybird today, the official e-commerce account that ReadWriteWeb first reported on earlier this month. Followers of the account got a link retweeted for buy one get one free tickets to Disney's new movie Sorcerer's Apprentice.

The contrast between this launch and the launch of Twitter's other new advertising product, sponsored trending topics, is remarkable. It seems to send a clear message about @earlybird promotions: They are for weaker products that can't handle the open public conversation of trending topics. That's ok, it's a good idea in fact - but that's what seems to be happening.

Google has announced the pending availability of App Inventor, a visual development software for the Android platform. Depending on your perspective, Android is the most or second most exciting mobile operating system on the market - and an easy and popular platform for everyday people to make apps is big, big news.

What does it mean? Where will this go? There are five specific questions we'd like to ask about this potential game changer.

Augmented Reality, Internet of Things & the Interplanetary Web

Vint Cerf was one of the key engineers in the development of the Internet, email and more. Since 2005 he has worked at Google as the company's Chief Internet Evangelist. This Spring Cerf gave a talk inside Google called Reimagining the Internet. His entire 80 minute talk is worth watching, but below we've excerpted the 10 minutes we expect would be most interesting to ReadWriteWeb readers. Think some of these ideas are crazy? Vint Cerf thinks they could be the future.

Update: The previous version can still be accessed at news.google.ca (Thanks Bob!).

Earlier in this week we covered the new version of Google News. It's normal to see a backlash against a redesign (see the reaction to Facebook redesigns for instance), but reaction to Google News' new layout has been resoundingly harsh. So far, Google isn't offering an option to revert back to the old version, unlike it did with its last major Gmail update. It seems Google's attempt to balance personalization and serendipity left fans of both unhappy.

You may feel like all the tech press has talked about this week is Apple's new iPhone 4. If you thought that was literally the case, though, you'd be wrong. We did some counting and dividing and looked at the number of headlines containing the words Apple or iPhone across a number of online news outlets this week: Techmeme, Google News, Digg and the finest tech blog in the land, ReadWriteWeb.

Our conclusion? The media is talking about plenty of other things! There were also some surprises in the numbers. We also spoke with Gabe Rivera, founder of tech news blog aggregator Techmeme, whom we caught red-handed being more Apple-centric than any of these other sources. Even his site talks less about Apple than we expected, though.

Shopping giant Amazon bought online auction phenomenon Woot today, and given the relative sizes of the companies, it can only be a move made with long-term Amazon strategy in mind. Earlier this afternoon we wrote about the deal as a victory for freaks and a marriage of light- and heavy-weight supply chains, but there's something else going on here, too.

Woot is bringing real-time social shopping to Amazon. We pinged ReadWriteWeb reader Michael Vorel, the CEO of commerce, Internet marketing and consulting company Vastplanet for a brief comment, and he argued that this was a competitive move against the coming media convergence that will pit Amazon against TV shopping networks.