The iTunes U website carries the bold title "Learn anything, anywhere, anytime." That's an overstatement for sure, with 500,000 assets it's more like learn something about many things. But it's great either way. I spent the weekend neglecting other duties to play with iTunes U and below are some thoughts, positive and negative. It's not perfect, but I am really excited about it and I know I'm not alone in that. I'd love to know your thoughts about it too.

Learn anything, anywhere, anytime? It was certainly feeling that way in the first few hours I was glued to iTunes U.

I found that in the business management section, much of the content isn't classroom lectures. Much of it is short-form video content made by non-traditional educational institutions. I listened to all of Jill Geisler's What Great Bosses Know segments, each about 5 minutes long, some I listened to twice. I'll probably go back and listen again. It's really just a podcast though, from Geisler who is associated with the Poynter Institute.

Geisler's content is heavily book-ended by promotions for her forthcoming book with the same title. I hope to buy the book. That experience was not like transporting into a college classroom though.

The Cranfield University collection on Leadership is similar, but in video with black backdrop and awesome, knowledgable, 50-year olds with British accents. It's great, but it's more like curated video podcasting than traditional educational content.

There are full, traditional classroom courses available though and I've subscribed to a few. I haven't worked through a full one yet and I haven't tried interacting with any of the worksheets or PDFs. I did jailbreak my iPad this weekend and turn the bottom right of my screen into a hot corner I can swipe from and pop up iTunes U immediately whenever I want. (Top right is Al Jazeera, if you were wondering, bottom left Twitter, swipe the title bar to launch the Sonos controller. It's a lot of fun.)

There's a lot of science and a good amount of humanities on iTunes U. Can you learn about anything? I watched an interesting video about a pizza place and there's plenty of content about beans, but search for Oregon and it's a real stretch. Transgender history (something my university in Oregon was great at teaching) is not a search query that brings much in the way of results.

Existentialism looks OK, psychedelics are a wasteland, rodentia is touched upon but birthday parties as a query is a bust. So it's a mixed bag! That was my whirlwind tour through brick and mortar university and I don't know that iTunes U can compete, but now that I'm a boring old 35 year old with a job, I love what Apple's put together so far.

Former RWW writer and leading education technology blogger Audrey Watters has criticized iTunes U for lacking in the social interactivity that so characterizes the rest of the web today and that delivers so much value elsewhere. At first I thought she was looking a gift horse in the mouth, but in time I've grown annoyed by that as well. Please, Apple, would you at least let people post comments on the videos, let other people vote comments up and down, and let us view either all comments or just those from our friends on Facebook, Twitter or...Ping? OK, so maybe it's not so hard to imagine why Apple skipped the social this time around. It sure would be nice if I could post a link to iTunes U content out to the web, though.

It is a walled garden, it's part of the iTunes Empire of Blah and there are other problems with it, but great content overcomes many things.

Witness the story of Jeremy Gleick (via), for example, a young man who has spent one hour per day learning something new, over nearly 1,000 hours now, often from iTunes U.

"Maybe you don't become an expert," Mr. Gleick says, "but you can get really good at something."

Maybe.

"What iTunes U is missing," argues web commenter Brian Crumley, "is a way to show you the steps needed to master a subject. We can all learn physics 101 but without a simple and easy way to find 102 and beyond it can get frustrating. Also the quality of many of the recorded lectures is not all that good."

Indeed, some of the lecture series aren't even in the right order in the app.

"Even though I am complaining here I still think it's an awesome service and hope it expands to anyone, not just schools," says Crumley. "If I have knowledge let me teach it to anyone in the world."

That sounds great, and it is in fact the world that is consuming the content that's here already. Estimates before the release of iTunes U on mobile were that 60% of the service's traffic comes from outside the United States.

The courses and content available on iTunes U are expanding the minds and lives of people all over the world, for only the price of an expensive machine to consume the free content. It's the only thing I've been interested in listening to when taking my dogs out lately (sorry HuffDuffer) and I'll be interested to see if I can take the time to work through some of the full courses it makes available.

Anybody that even claims to help me learn anything, any time, anywhere starts out in my good favor.

The Roku Streaming Stick is intended to give users all the functionality of a Smart TV without any boxes or cables. It can be controlled by a TV remote and offer most (but not all) of the features that a Roku player can offer. Internet TV is going to be a maturing market vertical in 2012 and on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week, we are starting to see how the space will evolve in the new year.

In addition to the Roku Streaming Stick, the company also announced today that it is partnering with video cloud content provider Brightcove to bring content from Showtime to the service. Essentially, Roku is making it easier for Brightcove customers to deliver content to Smart TVs powered by Roku. This will help cut down on creating user interfaces and design elements for adapting Internet content for televisions.

The Showtime app will feature HD-quality promotional content from shows like Shameless and House Of Lies. It does not appear that full Showtime content will appear on the Roku but rather clips, highlights, Web shows and interviews.

Roku Not The Only Game In Town

Everybody is waiting to see what Apple does with the TV space. Really, it is a natural vertical for Cupertino to move into. At this point the only product the company produces is Apple TV, the external box that can stream content and set up AirPlay that puts the content of your iPhone or iPad onto your television. There is also one of the original companies in this space, Boxee, which will likely iterate a new product this year.

One of the more interesting developments in the Internet TV space is being brought to bear by Myriad and Broadcom. Myriad is and Android development company that has introduced Davlik to the ecosystem with the intention of porting Android functionality everywhere. Myriad announced Alien Vue last month with the specific intention of putting Android apps and content on TV screens. Myriad is partnering with semiconductor company Broadcom to create set top boxes that will bring this product to life. The companies will be showing off the new product at CES.

What do you want from a Smart TV? Should it run apps from iOS and Android? Is streaming from Netflix and Hulu Plus mandatory? Let us know in the comments.

Fusion Garage is also the maker of the Grid 10 tablet, an Android slate that was released to terrible reviews and poor sales. As of Monday morning, a Grid 10 tablet was not available through the company's website. Fusion Garage appears to be on its way to a shallow grave, its path to demise lined with broken promises and bad products.

Make no mistake, Fusion Garage's woes are progress. The tablet market can only withstand so many suppliers and the low end of the ecosystem already has established bottom feeders Acer and Asus cranking out cheap slates that most consumers will pass over.

With the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Nook providing cheap tablets that consumers actually want to buy, the squeeze is being put on the rest of the Android tablet market (or, really, the non-iPad market). The weak companies are going to start to die off if they don't find a strategy that actually makes money. Hewlett-Packard was probably smart to discontinue the HP TouchPad. Get out of the market before it collapses entirely and new products make your efforts look poor in comparison.

Another thing that hobbled Fusion Garage is the fact that they were never seen as playing fair. TechCrunch founder and now venture capitalist Michael Arrington has had a very public feud over the tablet that become the JooJoo. The project was originally supposed to be called the CrunchPad and would have pre-dated the release of the first iPad by months. Fusion Garage eventually cut ties with Arrington, released the JooJoo independently and were subsequently sued for fraud and breach of contract. That case is still ongoing, with AOL now representing TechCrunch's interests. Arrington posted to his personal blog this weekend that Fusion Garage's attorney has filed to be taken off the case because the company has not paid him and the relationship had become strained beyond repair.

Fusion Garage public relations company, McGrath/Power, dropped Fusion Garage earlier this year.

The signs are pretty clear: everybody involved with Fusion Garage is running away, the company is embroiled in lawsuits, the brand name is tarnished beyond repair and the one thing that could save it, the product, is insufficient.

The old guard of TechCrunch employees are reveling in Fusion Garage's woes. Arrington said, "Fusion Garage finally destroying itself certainly makes me happy. The fact that Quinn Emanuel and PR firm McGrath Power, who advised Fusion Garage on the right way to execute on the fraud, are left with unpaid bills also makes me happy. I'm sorry to the customers who tried to pre-order these things and may never see their money again. But, really, what were you thinking?"

At this point, there is probably nothing Fusion Garage can do to avoid the inevitable collapse. Call it progress, call it revenge, call it whatever you like. In 10 years, Fusion Garage, the CrunchPad/JooJoo/Grid 10 will be the answer to a trivia question that only a select group of geeks will be able to answer.

In the mobile realm, the debate rages on: Web or Native? The difference between the two is beginning to blur as HTML5 standards evolve. We examine what happened in HTML5 in this year in our third installment of 2011's top trends. Check out the rest of the series, starting with John Paul Titlow's music trends and Alicia Eler's mobile commerce trends.

Yesterday, we named appMobi as our ReadWriteWeb Most Promising Company of 2012. As a startup, the company is doing interesting work on the fundamental goal of making HTML5 easy to use and ubiquitous with an emphasis on mobile first development. appMobi is carrying the torch for mobile first but it is a trend that is fast sweeping the development community as smartphones and tablet use explodes with data usage projected to increase by orders of magnitude in the next several years.

Fundamentally, the mobile first initiative revolves around the simple yet loaded questions of Webs apps versus Native apps.

This year we saw some large companies go to mobile first initiatives in regards to HTML5 design. The Financial Times pulled its native app iPad from the Apple App Store over its subscription and in-app revenue policies and has done very well with its Web app, designed with HTML5 with mobile devices in mind. Game developers, as discussed below, are leading the charge in creating dynamic mobile Web apps.

The trend of developing for the mobile Web first will continue into the new year with the explosion of smart devices coming to dominate computing, especially on the consumer/consumption side of the equation. To a certain extent, users do not really care what an app is written in, as long as it works like they expect it to. With some of the evolutions of HTML5 described below, the line of capabilities between Web apps and native apps is starting to blur.

2. Game Developers Take The Lead

We noted multiple times throughout the year that some of our favorite developers in the mobile realm were of the gaming variety. To a certain extent, game developers have the most to benefit from taking on HTML5 as a platform to avoid the 30% that Apple scrapes from paid games in the App Store and in-app purchases. Games are some of the hottest selling apps in all of mobile and a one reason that platforms like Android and Apple look so attractive to people looking to buy a smartphone or tablet. It is not just about reading email or making phone calls and texts. If that was so, Research In Motion would be doing a lot better with BlackBerry than it currently is.

A lot of game developers are being pushed along by the likes of Facebook and Zynga. The future of the Facebook app ecosystem is based on HTML5. Game developers, such as those working at MocoSpace or Moblyng are hard at work creating HTML5 versions of their publication library. As Stewart Putney, CEO of Moblyng, told me in August, "do you know how hard it is to make a Texas Hold'em game in HTML5?"

Games are not all about Web apps though. Through the magic of PhoneGap and HTML5 development through appMobi's XDK, Web app mobile games can be wrapped for easy integration into the native app stores. The approach is very similar to what Facebook does with its own mobile app. Based of the Web and browser but wrapped for native functionality.

We wrote about how game developers have taken the mantel of pushing the bounds of technology from the porn industry and it is true. Porn, an industry that once was the bellwether for technological adoption, has now fallen behind the times. We expect this trend to continue in the next couple of years as HTML5 matures as a platform.

3. Responsive Design & Handling Screen Sizes

There are fundamental advancements that need to happen before HTML5 truly changes the way that development is handled across platforms. One big step was taken this year with the evolution of what is called "responsive design." Essentially, responsive design will let content adapt to any screen size that it is on. The brightest example of responsive design this year was when the Boston Globe released BostonGlobe.com, its mobile-first Web application designed to work on any screen size, anywhere. We interviewed Filament Group, the developers behind the Globe's responsive design, in September and learned that responsive design is not actually an easy to figure out. Some basic concepts had to be built from scratch, such as the notion of RespondJS that handles media queries. Learning what to do with photos and ads from third-party sources also proved to be problematic.

"I think some facets of this could have been done in the past. I mean, HTML5 has a lot more APIs available for targeting features. Like, being able to check for touch support is technically part of HTML5 even though it is not HTML5 markup," Filament developer Mat Marquis said at the time. "So, that definitely allows us to do all of that conditional loading and such. In terms of the markup itself, we are doing a lot of HTML5 with additional semantic meaning, it could have been done in HTML4, just not meaningfully in terms of the markup."

Dealing with responsive design has a lot to do with understanding how content is going to react to a particular screen size. ZURB, a Silicon Valley design company, is also working on responsive design implementations. Responsive design is based off the concept of "fluid" design and is complete shift in how content has been handled on websites and mobile devices for much of the last 16 years or so. It is still a work in progress but HTML5 is finally making it possible.

Next page: Tools and standards emerge ...

4. Device Access

One of the biggest barriers of erasing the line between Web apps and native apps is the ability for browser-based applications to have access to some of the most fundamental aspects of mobile devices, like the camera, contacts lists, calendar, accelerometer etc. This is another area where appMobi is a leader in the HTML5 space, especially after it open-sourced all of its APIs the day after Thanksgiving. Mozilla has also been working hard on creating device access through the Fennec mobile browser project.

To mobile developers, device access is the most exciting innovation within the HTML5 set. It means that true Web apps can come to mobile, without the need of doing any PhoneGap-style wrapping. Game developers will be pleased because aspects previously locked to them, such as the accelerometer or the phone's read state, can be integrated into games. This opens a world of possibilities, such as better cloud integration (which can help with in-app purchases, push notifications etc.) and enhanced game play. Depending on the platform, apps are fundamentally built off Javascript, CSS3, HTML and other programming languages and given functionality through APIs, SDKs, cloud functionality and dozens of other moving parts. HTML5 did not allow for many of those functions but until recently. That is beginning to change and will be a development to watch in 2012.

5. Offline Caching

Hold, wait a minute here. You mean that my app can work even when I am not connected to the Internet? Well, I'll be a goat in a canoe on the River Thames. The concept of offline caching is fairly new and still one of the trickier aspects of HTML5 development for Web apps to master. This year, the prime example of offline caching to be deployed on a grand scale is the Kindle Cloud Reader, a Web app from Amazon that is supposed to give the Kindle sync functionality through the browser and remember everything in in a users Kindle library. It works in Firefox 6+, Chrome 11+, Safari 5+ and iOS 4+. There is so much that can be done with offline caching but the prime benefits, combined with device access, are to make Web apps work when not actually connected to the Web. That possibility is what many pundits think will eventually be the doom of native apps because overall deployment of Web apps will be frictionless, of every platform and no platform.

Mozilla is also working on offline caching with Fennec. Actually, name any particular trend in HTML5 development, and Mozilla has a hand in there somewhere. Check out Mozilla's mobile roadmap that we wrote about a few weeks ago to fully understand how the open-source organization plans on integrating HTML5 into its smart devices platform.

6. Maturation Of Developer Tools

In August we wrote that, "HTML5 Can Get the Job, But Can HTML5 Do the Job," a riff on a Pinch/Zoom blog post on the anatomy of an HTML5 Web app. In that post, Brian Fling said this about developers planning on HTML5:

• Allow for time. Assume it will take far longer than any other project you've previously done.
• Budget appropriately. This is not a website, and it will cost you a lot more.
• Make sure you have the right talent in-house. If these problems are hard for the most seasoned experts in the world that do it every day, assume they will be hard for your team, too.
• The "tools" are non-existent. More often than not, you will have to build your own tools.
• Consider all your options. A dogmatic approach to technology is a surefire way to spend money unnecessarily. There are no right or wrong answers in mobile. Keep an open mind and focus on what your customers need.

The fourth bullet point on tools is perhaps the most pertinent of all because it is the aspect that has changed the most from August until now. In addition to the tools that appMobi provides, framework and IDE providers Sencha and Appcelerator have gotten into the HTML5 development game, providing new ways for developers to create apps with the set of standards. At this point those tools are not yet as power or simple as some of the native Android and iOS developer frameworks and tools but in the next 12 months they will continue to evolve. Frameworks, IDEs, emulators, bug detectors and other basic functions that developers have come to rely on will roll out for HTML5 development and become more ingrained into the ecosystem. When developer lives' are easier, the more productive they can be and the more Web apps we will start seeing flood the market.

Conclusion

Other functions of HTML5, such as forms and new standards, continue to evolve. Fairly soon, HTML5 will probably be just HTML as the community and the W3C work to standardize the set. The leaders in HTML5 development will be companies like Sencha, Adobe, Appcelerator, appMobi along with the titans of the industry in Facebook, Amazon and Google.

It is an exciting time to be a developer whether you are working on new forms of video rendering such as Brightcove or trying to figure out the best implementations of HTML5 for audio the way SoundCloud is. From the desktop to the mobile Web, HTML5 is making the Web's one true killer app, the browser, the centerpiece of innovation.

There could be several books written about the battle for Flash against mobile. "Steve Jobs' Last Laugh" could probably be finished in time for the holiday shopping season. "How To Kill Flash For Dummies" would be an enlightening title as well. It is a bittersweet day for many. We want to know: how are you reacting to the passing of Flash for mobile? Take the poll below.

The fall of one platform is often correlated to the rise of another. Look at Android vs. Blackberry or Chrome vs. Firefox, Google vs. Yahoo, Internet Explorer vs. Netscape. The death of mobile Flash is seen as the ultimate validation of HTML5. The evolution of this battle on mobile will take place with native apps vs. Web apps though there is no clear indication yet what will ultimately be the winner in that sweepstakes.

Adobe will now focus on HTML5 development and tools that can be used to help developers. The company's recent acquisition of PhoneGap maker Nitobi will help ease the pain in Adobe's mobile development cycles and should not be overlooked as a major factor in this decision to kill mobile Flash.

The pages of ReadWriteWeb have been filled with Flash news for the last four years. Like so many things in the last decade, the argument was created by our generation's largest tech luminary, Steve Jobs. A lot of pundits and tech insiders took Jobs' words for gospel and that fueled the bashing of Flash that has led to this point. On the other hand, there have been a lot of hardworking people (with a lot of money) that have tried to fix the problems Flash had on mobile devices for the last several years. This cannot be a good day for them as something they have been working on for years has been obsoleted overnight.

Take a look at some of the highlights of our Flash coverage from the last couple of years and take the poll below to let us know how you feel.

ReadWriteWeb's Notable Flash Coverage:

• Steve Jobs Wins: Adobe to Give Up Mobile Flash for HTML5
• Steve Jobs Speaks: Why We Don't Allow Flash on iPhones and iPads
• On Mobile Flash, Apple Stands Alone
• Does HTML5 Really Beat Flash? The Surprising Results of New Tests
• EU May Force Flash Onto Apple Products
• Adobe Releases Flash to HTML5 Conversion Tool
• HTML5 Scores a Point as SlideShare Ditches Flash Entirely
• Adobe: Flash is an Exception to Windows 8's 'Plug-in Free' Rule
• Adobe Flash Player 10.2 Ready For Honeycomb; Honeycomb Not Ready For Anything
• Farewell Flash? Adobe Launches HTML5 Web Animations Tool "Adobe Edge"
• Google Swiffy Converts Flash to HTML5
• B&N's Nook Color Gets Apps, Flash & More in Major Update
• Flash Video Comes to the iPhone, iPad with Skyfire
• How to Install Flash on your iPhone (The Easy Way)
• Apple Approved: iSwifter Lets You Play Popular Flash Games on the iPad
• Worried About Flash on the iPad? Apple Tries to Ease Your Fears
• No Flash? No Worries: Majority of Online Video Now Available in HTML5
• YouTube: Flash Still Beats HTML5
• Flash Now Importable to HTML5 Canvas
• Death to Flash: 3 Great HTML 5 Demos
• Adobe Celebrates, But Will Flash Developers Return to Apple?
• Proof of Concept Brings Flash to the iPhone
• MobiUs Accelerates Mobile HTML5 Development, Aims to Kill Mobile Flash

Using HTML5 for video also satisfies that little open Web standards advocate in all of us. In addition to all that, it enables a new level of interactivity and allows video content to be integrated with, and enhanced by, outside data sources using APIs.

One Millionth Tower is a documentary film about high rise apartment building in Canada and how its inhabitants envision the future of their community. It uses the Popcorn.js toolkit, along with WebGL graphics and other JavaScript frameworks to create a dynamic, interactive video that pulls in data from various Web APIs and controls camera movement in the video.

As an example of what this technology can do, scenes in One Millionth Tower can reflect the current weather in Toronto, where the film is based, thanks to Popcorn's ability to integrate with live data from Yahoo's Weather API.

It can also be used to grab data from the likes of Flickr, Wikipedia, Google Maps and other popular Web services, allowing the video to be augmented with relevant Web content at timely intervals throughout the video.

The possibilities are only as limited as the Web itself. The Popcorn website has a collection of live demos that show how the framework has been used to enhance Web video and audio content.

We got one of our our first glances at the possibilities HTML5 brings to interactive Web video last summer when Google launched a browser-based music video for the band Arcade Fire. That "Chrome Experiment" as they called it utilized the 3D graphics rendering capability of HTML5, along with the ability to commandeer multiple browser widows at a time.

One Millionth Tower can be watched in most modern browsers, but the interactive portion of the project requires Firefox or Chrome.

The deal, which covers such popular film series as Shrek and Madagascar is expected to net DreamWorks Animation $30 million per movie for the duration of the agreement. What makes this deal significant isn't so much its price tag or the content involved. Its significance lies in the fact that this is the first time such a major Hollywood content provider has inked a deal that skips over pay TV distribution in favor of the Web.

"The so-called pay TV window is one of the entertainment industry's most important business tools. In the past, HBO has paid steep licensing fees of about $20 million per picture for exclusive rights a few months after films arrive on DVD. But Netflix - capitalizing on a consumer shift to streaming content on computers, tablets and Internet-connected televisions - has been making similar deals, albeit mostly with smaller suppliers."

The two companies are touting the deal as a major achievement, but not everybody is convinced. CNet's Greg Sandoval wonders whether Netflix is "desperate to generate positive news" after several weeks of customer and shareholder disappointment.

The company has had a rocky September, which it kicked off by implementing a highly unpopular increase in their subscription fees. In the weeks that followed, more customer frustration followed as they spun off their DVD business into a service that's entirely separate from their streaming business. Meanwhile, the company is now expected to lose 1 million customers and has seen its stock price tumble.

What was less clear before today's press conference was exactly what the details would be. Those are now revealed, and as it turns out, what Dish and Blockbuster have planned is hardly the "Netflix killer" many predicted.

The offering Dish unveiled today is not a stand-alone video streaming and DVD rent-by-mail service like Netflix, but rather it's a $10 add-on for Dish subscribers. This might be a really nice added value for existing subscribers, but it doesn't look as attractive to other consumers.

What turns a lot of people off from cable and satellite TV subscriptions is their price and the fact that providers bundle together a ton of content that they're not necessarily interested in. A growing number of people instead look toward Web-based, on-demand video content from the likes of Hulu, Netflix and others. This is especially true of younger consumers, who are moving fewer TV sets into their dorm rooms this Fall and instead packing merely their laptops.

Blockbuster Movie Pass may have its perks for Dish's 14 million pay TV subscribers, but for everybody else, it simply chains them to the old model of paying for and consuming content.

Even With Their Price Hike, Netflix is Still Cheaper

In this morning's presentation, Dish touted the price point of Blockbuster Movie Pass as one of its advantages over "the competition," an obvious reference to Netflix, whose pricing model they cited specifically. While it's true that $10 is less expensive than the $16 that Netflix customers must now begrudgingly pay for the DVD-and-streaming combo, Blockbuster Movie Pass ends up being more expensive in the end becaue it's tethered to Dish.

Blockbuster Movie Pass doesn't launch until October 1, and the prices listed on the Dish website now say that plans "start at" $19.99, a price that only appears to only be in effect for 12 months (and requires a two year contract). If the new service is an extra $10, then consumers will be paying a minimum of $30 per month.

Granted, this package gets you more than what Netflix offers, including all that satellite TV content and a DVR functionality, so the price comparison isn't apples-to-apples.

You Think Netflix's Streaming Selection Stinks? This is Worse.

People have long complained that the content available to stream on-demand from Netflix is limited. That's improved over time, but may take a major hit if the company can't manage to salvage its deal with Starz Entertainment.

Even so, the site has 20,000 titles available to stream instantly, whereas Blockbuster Movie Pass will start with only 4,000 that are available to stream to desktops. Interestingly, only 3,000 will be able to be streamed directly to TV sets.

Blockbuster Movie Pass may prove to be an attractive option for those already interested in traditional pay TV subscriptions, but for people looking for an alternative to Netflix, this probably isn't the way to go.

Blockbuster photo by yapsnaps.

If you believe the F8 conference hype, on Sept. 29 when Timeline opens to the public, Facebook is the place where every single inch of your life can be displayed, from the time you were born, to the time you die. It's also going to be the place where every single piece of media you share and consume will be distributed to everyone you know.

First, timeline will be like your live-streaming baby album, stretched from your birth until whenever you kick it. It will basically allow you to reach back in time, before Facebook, and post those pictures and information. Dust off that scanner.

Media will be the main engine of developer growth. Basically, app distribution will run on the backbone of the meaningful and colorful media you typically enjoy on TV, at the movies, or on other sites like Hulu or Netflix.

We're talking apps that stream music, movies, tv shows and any kind of media known to man, which will spur people to share and connect with people. That's 800 million people streaming media to, potentially, each of their friends.

But wait, there's more! There will be no app store for Facebook, according to Bret Taylor, the network's CTO.

The apps will basically run on people's profiles, as if they are channel, only sourced from non-proprietary third party platforms.

Taylor also said the Open Graph API is strongly leaning towards mobile.

There is a reason that Facebook delayed its developers' conference until the fall this year, after having hosted it in the spring or early summer previously. Simply, Facebook has been busy. It will have been nearly a year-and-a-half since Facebook last held a major event (Skype calls do not really count) and that is a long time for the platform to decide and then implement and announce where it is going next. We will learn exactly what the path is at f8 on Thursday.

So, what are we looking for? Facebook's recent release strategy provides a good road map. Since the release of Google Plus, almost all of Facebook's new features have been to counter Google's push into its territory. Those are just reactionary moves, blips in the road. Content is going to be heavily featured at f8 and the true ground shaking updates will be announced this week.

How To Use The New Facebook Lists (And Why You Should)

Facebook's Subscribe Button & Public Social Networking

Facebook Releases Smart Friend Lists to Counter Google+ Circles

Does Facebook's Subscribe Button Betray What the Company Was Built On?

Read, Watch, Listen: 3 Major Implications of Facebook's Media Sharing Platform

Facebook's "Needs Review" Prompts Users to Strengthen the Social Graph

The Billion Dollar Boxing Match

There has been a trend recently where the major tech companies, while innovating at breakneck speed, are also taking their time with their major updates. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are in a billion dollar boxing match. As any big puncher will tell you, there are only so many opportunities during a bout where you can attempt to land a stunning blow. The rest of the time is duck, dive, dodge, duck. Land a few jabs and wait your turn.

These jabs are what keep the tech media busy during the year. In Facebook's case, they have spent the summer catching up with some of the features in Google Plus (jab, jab, jab) and are now ready to deliver the Web a left hook to the jaw.

Facebook has been readying content partnerships all year to get ready for the announcements coming Thursday. The theme of f8 is "Read, Watch, Listen." Facebook is readying itself to become the hub for content sharing across the Web. TechCrunch reported that there will be buttons specifically for read, watch and listen on the platform and perhaps as buttons across the entire Web Let's take a look at what to expect.

Read

The "Read" portion of Facebook's announcement is perhaps the most mysterious. Yet, it has the most precedent in what Facebook has rolled out in previous years and may be tied closely with the platform's social graph. We imagine that "Read" buttons will somehow be tied to content partnerships with major news purveyors like Yahoo and AOL or e-books from Amazon.

Part of Facebook's rollout of the concept of the social graph was the "Like" button and sharing across the Web. It would not be a surprise if Facebook is copying services like ReadItLater (or just partnering with it, perhaps). The idea would be to make it easy to share what you are reading and have articles and books shared through a "Read" button that gets sent to a vertical section within Facebook itself.

Watch

Think of it this way: is it a coincidence that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is on the Facebook board of directors? Or that Hulu and Facebook started a major content sharing platform earlier this year?

Facebook is already one of the top destinations for video on the Web. Most of that is shared content from the likes of YouTube, Vimeo and local news. This is going to be rolled out even further and it will likely to two-pronged - content sharing from outside of Facebook and consumption from within.

Facebook's relationship with Hulu and Netflix could be a sign of things to come. With Hulu, Facebook users can share links to what they are watching and Hulu generates clips (that can be commented on) from the shows that get embedded into Facebook. For instance, if you are watching the Two and a Half Men season premier on Hulu the next day and think that Ashton Kutcher's line at the 10:30 mark of the show is (stupid, hilarious, intriguing), you tag that spot and share it with Facebook. We could see similar sharing capabilities with Netflix.

There is also the notion that you will be able to rent shows and movies within Facebook itself, a la iTunes. Think of a content store tied to your social graph. That has big implications if Facebook could pull it off with its partners.

Listen

While we do not know the specific details of the "Listen" products, we have clues. The primary indicators are MOG, Rdio and Spotify, all of which have been tied to Facebook over the summer. "Facebook Music" will likely be a conglomeration with MOG, Rdio and Spotify that will allow users to use Facebook as an iTunes-like streaming platform. In this way it becomes a conduit of content without having to go into the messy business of actually licensing music through the major music labels.

Profile Redesign

What does this all point to? Well, a major profile redesign could possibly be in the works to feature all of this new content. Mashable is reporting that Facebook will announce a redesign at f8 and the idea is to become "stickier." There are scant details on what the design will look like, but imagine that content will be featured prominently on your Facebook landing page, embedded into the news feed and contained within different silos (for Read, Watch and Listen). Facebook could be the functional consumption hub of media on the Web along with the primary sharing tool and message board.

What do you want to see come out of f8? What are your thoughts of Facebook as the center of your media universe? Let us know in the comments.

On Canvas, users can upload images, edit directly in the browser and add captions. Once published, they can be remixed and commented on by other users. The site employs a badge-like system of stickers, which can be applied to images as a way of casting a vote. Drag the "LOL" sticker onto an image you thought was funny. Or you can give a cookie sticker to images that "need a little condescending acknowledgement." Stickers contribute to aggregate totals and help determine each image's overall popularity and placement.

The interface is highly interactive and easy to use. Voting for (or against) images is done via dragging and dropping icons, as is the assigning of stickers. The images themselves can be modified within the browser using basic image-editing interface that even includes a Photoshop-style "clone" tool.

Unlike 4chan, Canvas's content will be archived indefinitely. Images are grouped into categories, such as politics, photography, cute and funny. There's even a tab dedicated entirely to animated GIFs.

Canvas has received funding from a few notable sources, including Union Square Ventures, SV Angel and Andreeson Horowitz.

For example, during President Obama's inauguration, content delivery network Akamai delivered 7 million simultaneous streams of video, with traffic surpassing two terabytes per second (Tbps), which broke records. The next year, Akamai's network traffic peaked at about 3.45 Tbps.

This growth is not guaranteed to be smooth, either.

"Because of the limited capacity at the Internet's various bottlenecks, even an extremely well-provisioned and well-connected data center can only expect to have no more than a few hundred Gbps of real throughput to end users," the report reads. "This means that a CDN or other network with even 50 well-provisioned, highly connected data centers still falls well short of achieving the 100 Tbps needed to support video's near-term growth."

Not surprisingly, the paper's touts Akamai's technology as a potential solution to any issues this may present. The report, a PDF of which can be viewed here, is rich in technical detail about how Akamai, content delivery and the Internet in general work and makes for a pretty interesting read over all.

via New TeeVee. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Design By Zouny

Its appeal for children goes beyond the strictly kid-centric content. Its interface is more simplified than the standard, all-ages UI, focusing more on the cover art for shows and movies and less navigational elements.

"In addition to being VP of product innovation at Netflix, I'm a dad of a five and seven-year-old who love to watch characters," explained Todd Yellin in a post on the company's blog.

The "Just For Kids" tab is now available on the Netflix Website and should be integrated into other platforms like iPad and Nintendo Wii soon.

The Samsung Series 5, Acer AC700 and CR-48 Chromebooks can access Netflix, according to a Google Plus post by Chrome OS Community Manager Melissa Daniels.

Netflix should now work on Chromebooks running the latest version of Chrome OS. Instructions on upgrading and running Netflix can be found here.

After a beta testing period, the first Chromebook was officially released in May, at which point our own Richard MacManus pondered the device's usefulness and commercial viability. We also took a look at why the device isn't quite ready to replace your PC, a fact underscored by Audrey Watters' one-day experiment using only a Chromebook.

The product is now out. It is called Flixster Collections and it is a desktop application intended to be movie aficionados' everything - directory, film and show information (like IMDb), social sharing channel, viewing habit and history aggregator, new content explorer and download center. It is certainly an ambitious undertaking by Warner. The problem with Flixster Collections beta is that it is a cumbersome and probably unnecessary addition as a desktop application.

Collections does not appear to have any streaming options yet. Content acquisition appears to still be in the "buy" or "download" dichotomy. That could change when UltraViolet, the digital rights management, content ownerships and streaming project being worked on by the film and tech industries is ready for public adoption later this year.

Collections can connect to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Flixster accounts, as well as import what you have downloaded through iTunes. It does not appear to let users actually watch content through any of the streaming services so the likely product of linking those accounts is for the purpose of sharing.

Flixster Collections has bolted Facebook into its platform. You can share what you have watched or movies that you have added to your "collection" to your Facebook wall. It is not like the way Hulu has integrated Facebook, which allows users to share and comment on specific moments of a show with a video clip in the Facebook news feed. It is less intuitive and interactive as you can "publish" your activity to your wall.

Overall, Flixster Collections feels like some talented designers were physically forced to add a glut of features into a template designed by a clueless movie executive. As a pure desktop application, Collections will probably be a niche product used by the most devoted of Warner Bros. or Flixster fans. Otherwise, there are other services on the Web or mobile applications (such as the dedicated Hulu, Netflix, Flixster, IMDb apps) that do the same thing, just better.