Apple's new subscription rules requiring publishers to fork over 30% of revenue generated from apps in the iTunes Store have claimed their biggest victim to date. As of last night, the iPhone and iPad apps for the Financial Times went missing from the App Store.
The new rules have not thrilled publishers, but reactions have been mixed. Some media companies, like Hulu and the New York Times, have decided to play along with Apple and offer a significant cut of their subscription revenue to the tech giant in exchange for access to millions of iTunes customers. Others, like Amazon, have opted to build HTML5 Web apps as a way to circumvent the new rules.
Engineers at Twitter are busy plugging away at the microblogging service's latest outage, which appears to be preventing many users from seeing replies and mentions from others.
Twitter's support team confirmed the issue at 11:42am EST, but have not updated since, leaving many users frustrated and unsure of why they can't see replies. Among the flustered is American actress Felicia Day, whose tweet about the outage garnered a number of replies that she, ironically enough, cannot see.
Flickr will announce a new feature this morning called Geofences, forward- and backward-looking place-specific privacy settings for the location data of the geotagged photos you upload. The feature is live right now and is really well implemented - this is something that every social network ought to enable.
Geofencing is a term typically used to refer to the drawing of a line on a map where some kind of pre-determined action is triggered, it's most established in the business of transporting goods in trucks and triggering tracking actions when those trucks enter into certain geographic zones. Flickr's new privacy geofences are something everyone is likely to enjoy using though. I, for example, have already set up a geofence around my house prohibiting anyone but my approved contacts from seeing the photos I upload from home. Thanks, Flickr! Update: Turns out I got that wrong, the photos are subject to my previous privacy setting - it's just the location of my house that's now more private due to the geofence. That's cool too!
If you've ever felt underwhelmed by the Web browsing experience on the iPhone, perhaps MoboTap can help. The company just launched an iOS version of its Dolphin Browser, a third party mobile Web browser popular among Android users.
In addition to touting a very Chrome-esque tabbed browsing interface, Dolphin has re-imagined the way that sites and pages are called up and explored within a mobile browser. Its "Speed Dial" feature allows you to designate a page as a favorite, much like you can do with your phone's contacts. This is in addition to standard bookmarks, which Dolphin also has.
Facebook changed its privacy policy and sharing options last week to make it easier for users to customize how they share their information. It is a process that has been in the works for most of 201, after Facebook proposed a simpler format for its privacy policy in February. Now, Facebook is looking for comments to its changes.
The Facebook Site Governance page outlines all the major privacy changes that the site has made. It is requesting comment by this Friday, Sept. 2 at 5:00 p.m. PDT. What do you think of Facebook's new sharing options? Do you have concerns or issues that you would like to share with the company?
In April, social media startup Kosmix was acquired for $300 million by retailing giant Walmart. Kosmix had built a Semantic Web platform called the Social Genome, which organized social media data. The platform powered 3 products: TweetBeat, a real-time social media filter for live events; Kosmix.com, a topic-based search engine; and RightHealth, a health search portal. The URLs for TweetBeat and Kosmix now re-direct to a new site called @WalmartLabs.
The tagline of @WalmartLabs is "Social + Mobile + Retail" and it's an indicator of where Walmart wants to go with the technology it acquired. Walmart wants to tap into social data - for example from Twitter - and entice mobile phone toting customers to its stores. Walmart also wants to beef up its online operations, traditionally a laggard compared to Amazon.com.
We have long been anticipating the Amazon tablet. Apparently, so has research firm Forrester, which released a report today on the business logistics of an Amazon tablet in a market dominated by Apple's iPad. If Amazon can come in at a price point below $300 and can withstand demand, Forrester sees the company selling 3 to 5 million tablets in the fourth quarter.
If Amazon pull off those sales, consumers and OEMs will flock to it as the legitimate No. 2 tablet behind the iPad, a position as yet unclaimed by the likes of Motorola, Samsung, HTC or Research in Motion. Yet, is that feasible in a market where so many others have failed?
Unedited versions of the United States diplomatic cables that Wikileaks has released over the last year have gone public, exposing sources around the world to possible recriminations.
According to German news magazine, Der Spiegel, based on an original report in Der Freitag, a convergence of screw-ups involving the group's former German spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg and an external contact of Wikileaks leader Julian Assange wound up throwing the doors open to the full, unedited materials.
Updated with response from OpenLeaks after the jump.
Klout, the startup that's attempting to create a social media credit agency, quietly added two new features to its platform last night. Answering calls for bulkier lists and more social graph measurement, Klout now lets users import Twitter lists and it finally links up accounts to Facebook Fan Pages.
The Twitter list feature is good, but the Facebook Fan Pages should excite people manning the desks at brands and agencies. They've been clamoring for more functionality - and legitimacy - with Klout.
For the first time ever, 50% of all American adults are using social networking sites, according to new data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Of active Internet users in particular, 65% are social networking users, a number that continues to climb. To put things in perspective, only 29% of adult American Internet users reported using social networking tools in 2008.
