ReadWriteWeb

One day in December I was visiting family and picked up my niece Xander from daycare. We had to leave before her balloon got turned into an animal. It was disappointing. So when we got back to her house, I pulled out my iPhone and showed her an app called Aardvark. We asked Aardvark how we could turn one long balloon into a balloon animal. My niece jumped up and down with excitement every time we got an iPhone push notification that someone out on the internet had an answer to offer. The first 3 people said "draw eyes on it and call it a snake." That was funny the first time. Then, someone came through with a great link to good instructions for making a balloon animal. We made one, we were happy and proud, and we'd become the kind of people who knew how to make balloon animals.

A month later, Xander was visiting my house and we gave her a package of balloons. She whipped up a giraffe, a horse and a princess crown in minutes. Her mom asked her how she did it and you know what she said? "The Aardvark taught me how to do it!" Google announced today that it bought the company that made that iPhone app. It feels like some closure on my past year of hunting the story of the Aardvark, both personally and professionally.

Yesterday, after spending some time with Google's latest social networking service, Google Buzz, we posted a handful of buzz tips and tricks for those wanting to better manage the buzz, play with its APIs or banish it altogether from their Gmail inbox. 

Today, we've come across more even more tips for working with Buzz, including how to add Buzz extensions to your web browser, new ways to subscribe to others' Buzz, and even ways to update Buzz via email. If you're becoming a regular Buzz user, then you'll want to read through this latest collection of tips to take your Buzz skills up another notch.

This morning, Google is announcing some exciting new features for two of its most popular applications.

Team Red, as we affectionately call ourselves, is present at the Googleplex in Mountain View, and we'll be live blogging the event, giving you, dear reader, a fascinating play-by-play. Stay tuned for updates!

Additional on-the-fly research and images from RWW journalist Frederic Lardinois.

Youth social networking researcher danah boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. "I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men," she says. "I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it's often hard to see beyond that."

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

The big news of the week was Facebook getting faster - read on for our extensive coverage and analysis of this news. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web, Internet of Things and Augmented Reality.

New! We've refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format.

The era of location-as-platform for software development is just beginning. No longer of interest only to uber-geeks, everyday people are now reporting their physical locations online, often through their phones. Geolocation services are hot and ever more prominent ones (like Facebook) are believed to be right around the corner.

This is a very exciting development for lovers of innovation. Today we asked some of our favorite web-heads why they are excited about geolocation and below you'll find their answers. We hope you'll share with us what you too, dear readers, think of this hot new trend online.

Mobile search company Taptu has released a detailed report showing that the future of the Mobile Web is likely to be dominated by cross-platform browser-based mobile web sites - rather than apps built specifically for iPhone, Android, or any other platform. Taptu calls the former "the Mobile Touch Web," which it defines as "Web sites created for mobile touchscreen devices, with finger-friendly layouts and lightweight pages that are fast to load over cellular networks."

Taptu estimates that there are 326,000 Mobile Touch Web sites worldwide, which they say compares to 148,000 iPhone apps in the App Store and 24,000 apps in the Android market. Taptu expects the browser-based mobile web market to grow much faster than the app market.

So, Facebook went and secretly rewrote PHP's runtime to be a lean, mean, C++ translated, g++ compiled piece of resource-friendly hotness.

If that sentence confused you, then you're not the target audience for this post. We want to know what our developer friends think of HipHop, the latest open-source code project to emerge from the deep, dark dungeons of Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters (ok, the HQ's actually quite pretty, but we like a good turn of phrase). Read these expert opinions (and by "expert," we mean Rasmus Lerdorf), and let us know in the comments what you think of the new PHP runtime.

Apple just announced the launch of the iPad, Apple's rumored tablet computer. Judging from what we have seen so far, the iPad is basically a very large iPod touch with a modified interface. According to Steve Jobs, the device will be far better than an iPhone or netbook for browsing the web. The iPad will also feature most of the standard apps we have become used to on the iPhone platform, including maps, contacts and a calendar. Apple also announced a new e-book store and a version of iWork for the iPad.

The mobile location "check-in" is fast becoming the hot new status message type online. It was only a matter of time until "where you are" became a platform to build added value on top of just like "who you know" has on social networking sites like Facebook.

Canadian newspaper chain Metro announced today that it has launched a deal with location-based social network Foursquare that will deliver location-specific editorial content from the paper's website to users' phones when they check-in near a spot Metro has written about before. The potential for services like this is huge. It's too bad Metro appears to be taking the easy way out and focusing on delivering restaurant reviews, but it's a start.