Lately, we've started to see a new class of app emerge just for managing these tasks across their various apps. The idea of apps for our apps sounds ridiculous, but some of them are neat, and some are downright lifesavers. Here's a round-up of apps you should use if you want to bring your many social networks into one dedicated place.

A photo app called Pixable exists just to pull the photos from your Facebook and Twitter feeds into one attractive place. It allows further sorting of the photos into all kinds of categories, but its reach across social networks is what stands out. Pixable announced today that it reached a million downloads on iOS, and it also has a mobile Web version for users of other platforms.

Hopefully the creators will roll Instagram, Google+ and a few other services into this app. Then we'd only have to launch one app to see all our photos.

Videos

For viewing all the videos in your various social networks, Showyou is amazing. It brings any video from your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Vimeo and Vodpod accounts into one sleek, sliding touchscreen theater (Vodpod is a video curation site by Remixation, the company that makes Showyou). Apple people can even AirPlay the videos over to their Apple TV from the iPhone or iPad version.

Showyou is available for iOS devices and the Kindle Fire. If this app appeals to you, stay tuned, because we heard through the grapevine that Showyou has something to announce pretty soon.

Files

If you need to find files that could be anywhere, Greplin can help. It logs into your Dropbox, Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar, Facebook, Twitter and more, and it lets you search all of them for the thing you need. Check out our guide to Greplin for more details.

It's available for the iPhone as well as on the Web at Greplin.com.

Places

If you're like most Americans, you might not get the point of location apps. The point should be to find cool stuff going on around you. But there are so many of these location apps, it's impossible to know which one to use. That's where Localscope comes in.

It's a browser for the real world. It lets you search or browse across pretty much every Web service that shares public location data, and the interface is easy. You just click side to side between Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Bing and more.

You can get Localscope for the iPhone or webOS.

Do you use any other apps for dealing with too many apps? Share them in the comments.

That was the first in a series of so-called "platform support" payments believed to eventually total billions of dollars. To date, Microsoft and Nokia have been quiet about the deal's specifics, perhaps because it appears as if Microsoft is paying Nokia significantly less than its paying other cellphone manufacturers.

Slashgear's Chris Davies is suggesting Microsoft's Nokia arrangement is less than that it has struck with other cellphone makers. LTE, for example, is reportedly paying about $27 for each phone it sells with Windows Phone.

"Over the life of the agreement both the platform support payments and the minimum software royalty commitments are expected to measure in the billions of U.S. dollars," Nokia said.

Windows Phone has gotten rave reviews, but Microsoft could struggle to get developers to create apps for the phone. By some estimates, Windows Phone could pass Apple's iOS in market share by 2015.

It gets worse: the more times you check your smartphone, the higher your stress levels. The study also suggested people who are used to getting lots of text messages and push notifications on their phones will feel stress levels rise if they hit a stretch where their phones are silent. In the worst cases, study subjects experienced "phantom" vibrations when, in fact, they had not received an alert.

Balding, the study's author, recommended that companies help employees address the problem.

"Smartphone use is increasing at a rapid rate and we are likely to see an associated increase in stress from social networking," he told the British Psychological Society's Division of Occupational Psychology Conference in Chester, England last week. "Organisations will not flourish if their employees are stressed, irrespective of the source of stress, so it is in their interest to encourage their employees to switch their phones off; cut the number of work emails sent out of hours, reduce people's temptation to check their devices."

While other researchers stressed more studies are needed, they agreed the advice that Balding and other experts give is reasonable.

"Now, certainly it's good to keep connected," Balding told USA Today. "But everyone needs a break. Some time on your own. Otherwise there's a risk that the stress and tension that builds up from keeping engaged can end up having a negative impact on relationships."

The Internet and mobile technology are beginning to have an equally significant impact on the creation of music itself. Extremely powerful recording, DJing and sequencing software is making its way from laptops to tablets and smartphones, for example. Now, the way people learn to play music in the first place is changing as well.

These days, instead of traveling across town to attend music lessons, many people are using tools like Skype to learn from a distance, just as they can do things like attend meetings and take academic courses regardless of their physical location. The new model allows for more flexible learning and in many cases improves the regularity of lessons since it avoids things like traffic jams and bad weather.

Even if one doesn't get one-on-one lessons via Skype, the Web is loaded with music education resources for all skill levels. When a few friends and I started a band last year, I decided to brush up some more advanced drumming techniques, since it had been a few years since I last played. Much like Lynda.com and Tuts+offer video tutorials for software and coding, there a number of sites out there who do the same for drummers and other musicians. I found one in particular that published a free video podcast, enabling me to download the lessons to my phone or iPad and bring a virtual teacher down into the basement with me.

Online music lessons range from having the structure of a college course to being as loose and on-your-own-time as a series of YouTube searches. On YouTube, the quality of the material may vary, but there are quite a few dedicated sites with legitimate, high-quality video lessons available, sometimes for free.

For those who are especially serious and have the money to spend, the Berklee College of Music offers online-only courses and certifications through a website called BerkleeMusic. The courses don't come cheap, but enrolling and paying for them is a straight-forward, Web-based process.

Learning Music Goes Mobile

The explosion of smartphones and tablets has impacted countless aspects of daily life for millions of people, and budding musicians are no exception. Not only can you watch video tutorials on your iPad or Android phone, but there's a growing selection of educational apps that allow for casual learning from any location.

Some of the numerous mini-piano and keyboard apps for the iOS and Android, for example, come with built-in guides to musical notation, with some of them going into more depth about music theory. Other apps drill down further into music theory, such as Wolfram Alpha's Music Theory Course Assistant app for iOS.

There's a wide selection of instrument-specific learning apps for iOS alone, such as GuitarLab and Gibson Learn and Master Guitar or Piano Tutor and Virtuoso Piano.

Like with any learning process, the effectiveness of mobile apps and Web tutorials like these will depend somewhat on one's approach and level of motivation. Ultimately, in-person music lessons may still work best for some. There will likely always be a place for one-on-one, in-the-flesh education, but these new tools and methods open things up to a wider group of people with virtually no restrictions on time and place.

As it turned out, the Path experience wasn't only compelling to me because I'm a professional nerd. Over the holidays, I showed Path to a bunch of my best friends, and they all fell in love with it. Now that I have close people there, Path has become important to me. It's on my home screen, and Facebook is not. Path is not on the Web; it's a place in itself, and that's why it matters.

All this closeness has apparently rubbed some the wrong way. It's attracting vibes of A-list exclusivity, a trope familiar from its version 1.0 days.

Rabble-rousing in rabble-free Path app, I'd link to my post there about app's elite community, but links aren't allowed.Should blog about it

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) January 8, 2012

The 150-friend limit (which used to be 50) reinforces this feeling. At the bottom of your friends list on Path, there's a gentle yet firm warning: "Share your Path with close friends." Since connections are scarce, Path has built into it a subtle tone of rejection.

You can't be friends with everyone on Path, and you might have to turn people down. You might get turned down. I really hope that doesn't hurt your feelings. If it does, I'm afraid the Internet has screwed up your mind.

Facebook people always say they're serious about the word "friend," but its interface constantly harasses you about adding more "friends," and makes it nearly impossible to say "no." When Facebook changed the button for rejecting a friend request to say "Not Now," I simultaneously laughed and barfed.

Path is not conducive to networking or discovering people. Twitter and Facebook are great for that. Google+ can dump thousands of new people on you without even asking. We don't need another place to network. What we need is a place for intimacy and trust that is still enhanced by the sharing power of the mobile Web. That's why my friends and I love Path.

@marshallk The only community on Path is the one each user makes for herself/himself.

— Jon Mitchell (@JonMwords) January 8, 2012

@marshallk Me, too. I use different apps for that.

— Jon Mitchell (@JonMwords) January 8, 2012

Marshall and I had the above conversation in public, on Twitter. That's what I love about Twitter. Sometimes people's conversations, even about little things, are useful, interesting or amusing to others. Twitter feels personal, but it's not intimate because other people are watching.

Facebook and Google+ allow "selective sharing," but it doesn't feel special. The interactions happen in the same old place with the same old crap-ridden interface, you've just chosen a different option from a drop-down menu. Facebook Groups are a bit better, but they're still not far removed from the cacophony of the Facebook feed. All these services want to be something for everybody, and they want to be everything for as many people as possible.

Path is not everything. For example, it's not the Web. People on the Web can see things you share on Path if you post them to Twitter or Facebook, but you can't use Path itself from anything other than the app on your phone. That's my why my dear friend Randall won't accept my request:

I'm sorry, I would (maybe), but I can't be your friend on @Path since @Path hates the web.

— Randall Leeds (@tilgovi) January 6, 2012

You also can't link to the Web from Path. URLs don't work. That's an intentional decision by the Path team, and a bold one. On all the everything-networks, linking to the Web is part of the experience. Google+ may suck at it, Facebook may kidnap your links and keep them inside its walls, and Twitter may butcher your URLs, but, in their weird ways, they let you bring in all the signal and noise of the Web. Path does not. That's one of Marshall's gripes:

@JonMwords well, don't try to share links there. Or copy & paste anything

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) January 8, 2012

Let this be okay. Path is its own place. It is constrained on purpose. It's smartphone-only because that's the computer you have with you when you're out living life away from the Web. It only allows 150 friends because it wants you to think carefully about what you share and with whom you share it.

It lets you share thoughts, photos, videos, songs, places, the people with you, when you go to sleep and when you wake up. It lets you live real life with people, even if they're far away. My best friend from back in the day is on a work trip to Liberia right now. Path lets him share some of that with me. He could share it on Facebook, too. Yes. But it would be swept up in a sea of other noise. Instead, it happens alongside the lives of several other dear friends of mine.

This same friend also told me the other day that Path is making him a better person. It's keeping him "on the path," as it were. Because sharing to Path means that one's trusted, close friends will see something, it makes one carefully consider what matters to them. Thinking about sharing his life with us makes my friend plan each day more deliberately.

I don't credit Path with that. I credit our friendship. But when Path uses the word "friend," I don't barf. I may laugh, but it's no "LOL." It's actual joy.

So when I opened Yobongo on Friday, my first thought was, There must be a Web app in here somewhere. My second thought was, Oh, wow! Global Yobongo chat and private rooms are open to everyone! So that's the news. You can now use Yobongo no matter where you are, although the location-specific rooms are still only in select cities. But there's more. As Caleb told me coyly, "iPhone is just the start" for Yobongo. "We want to help people communicate more efficiently," Elston says, and that means everybody.

The Transition From Texting

I'm home in Atlanta for the holidays, and, fortunately, so are tons of my friends. Now that I finally could, I decided to beta test Yobongo with them. When Elston contacted me, I was on my way to see those friends at the time, and a great many of them have iPhones. So I created a private chat room for us, invited them all via a Web link in an SMS message, and told them what Yobongo does.

"It's a live, persistent chat room," I told them. "There are public rooms and private rooms." I was improvising based on the new version. "There's a global room now, and soon, there will be local, neighborhood-based rooms, so you can meet people around you. We can use this private room I made, and it also has direct messages." They got the idea.

We already used Apple's native iMessage for this, but group texting is annoying. It's hard to tell who sent the message, some people don't have group messaging turned on, et cetera. The new Yobongo features made the transition easy. It just used the contacts on my phone. I could send them invitations via SMS or email, and when they clicked on the link and downloaded the free app, they were in.

A Sense of Place

My friends are geeks in that they are the kind of people who have smartphones. But they aren't geek geeks. They consider my obsession with the details and minute improvements of applications to be somewhat embarrassing. For my part, I think that makes them perfect beta testers.

I brought in a Web designer, a pro photographer, a third-year medical student, a senior congressional staffer and an Interscope-signed rock drummer. That's a pretty good range of the geek spectrum, and only one is as OCD about apps as I am.

To my delight, the adoption was instantaneous. Everyone remarked on how the faces and simple bios, as well as the graceful, in-line photos, created a feeling of being together. When I explained that the goal Yobongo declared at launch was to bring new people together based on location, they understood. You could meet people here and then keep in touch with them, as well as bring your outside friends into the conversation.

Some Compromises

I won't overlook the negatives. Some of the less native-feeling functionality had downsides that put a few bumps in the road. All my guinea pigs friends were frustrated by the app's tendency to refresh when launching instead of bringing you back to your last screen. This morning, I noticed that the performance was a bit faster, and I could leave the app briefly and get right back to where I was. It doesn't feel all the way native yet - though Elston assures me it is - but it's getting there.

Another feature we want is access to the address book on the front screen, so we can invite our friends straight into private messages. As it is, you have to invite them through a private room first, and then you can message them. Presumably, when the beta period is over, the prominent 'Feedback' button can be replaced with this. In the meantime, Yobongo feels like exactly what it is: a work in progress by creative people who are open to suggestions.

Beta, But Beautiful

The global Yobongo room is clearly labeled as a beta, and the local rooms for your location are still in the menu, even if they aren't open yet. So Yobongo currently feels like a sandbox. That is to say, it's childlike, a little messy, playful and fun. Meet people, mess around, take pictures of your burritos, who cares? Talking to strangers in IM is good practice for real life.

I met Elston for coffee in San Francisco last October, and we discussed awkwardness. That's the problem he was talking about solving with Yobongo. Awkwardness is in the mind, we agreed, and communication is the cure. Text messaging is awkward. It's hard to type with thumbs, auto-correct can be hilarious and embarrassing, and, with groups, it's hard to tell who said what. The little touches of Yobongo warm up the medium.

My friends and I planned our whole New Year's Eve in our Yobongo room. And now that we're starting to fly back to our respective new homes, we're still using it, sharing little updates and hanging out live with one another for a few minutes at a time. It's almost like we never left.

iPhone Is Just The Start

Thanks to Yobongo, Twitter, Instagram and a little bit of real life, I've gotten to know some of this team. The Yobongo people care about quality. They meditate in the office. They wouldn't make compromises without a reason. So I know there's something behind this functionality, the reconnecting on launch, the email and SMS invitations, things that the iPhone can do more natively, but Yobongo doesn't.

"I'm just going to ask this straight up," I said to Elston. "Is all this Web and email and SMS stuff setting the stage for a cross-platform adventure?"

"iPhone is just the start," he replied. He followed with the Yobongo mantra, "We want to help people communicate more efficiently," and then he changed the subject. "Standing in line for a burrito," he said, and he sent me a picture.

If you have an iPhone, visit the App Store and try out Yobongo with your iPhone-wielding friends. See if it's as natural for you as it was for me and mine. And non-iPhone folks should stay tuned, because that burrito pic was some serious sleight of hand.

How do you communicate with groups of friends at once?

Those were among the findings in a study released by Healthline Networks for the top searches on its health information site in 2011. Chlamydia was the number one query for mobile device users, while cancer was the top search from desktops and laptops.

The top 10 desktop and laptop searches are more straightforward and include such terms as pain, weight, diet and sleep.

The searches were conducted on the company's Healthline HealthWeb, a healthcare-specific site that links consumers to 50 destination sites including health information publishers, insurers, employers and traditional search engines.

"Personal phones are individually owned whereas desktop computers are usually shared (e.g. among families, co-workers) so people will opt for the search method that gives them the greatest sense of privacy," said Dr. Ash Nadkarni, resident physician in the Department of Psychiatry at Boston Medical Center and founder of Appguppy Mobile, an application creation service.

Among the other findings:

• People were five times more likely to search for diseases than symptoms.
• More mobile traffic andd searches were recorded in March than in any other month, which Healthline was a result of heightened concerns about radiation sickness following the Japanese earthquake.
• Most mobile health searches are made on Wednesday; very few health-related searches are made on weekends.
• The biggest spike in desktop and laptop searches was between Feb. 12 and Feb. 15 when the FDA pulled the breast cancer treatment Avastin and President Barack Obama was discussing the 2012 healthcare budget.

By visiting plus.google.com from a feature phone browser, users can now create a Gmail and Google+ account. This month, Google has extended features of the Web versions of Gmail and Google+ to allow free voice calls to any phone number. Building features for basic mobile phones helps Google extend its reach to a huge, untapped market for Web services.

See more feature phone screenshots from Mohamed Fouad on Google+.

Other additions are catching up with WordPress for iOS, but they're welcome. The post editor now has a formatting toolbar above the keyboard, and the app now has a tablet view. The app also adds post uploading in the background and gets a few other fixes. This is an open-source app, and it's the best mobile blogging interface I've seen yet. What's up with everybody else?

WordPress for iOS is fine. Our Marshall Kirkpatrick finds it to be a knock-out, but that may be Stockholm syndrome. I use it, too, and it works, but it's awfully hard to use compared to this new Android version. The Action Bar and Dashboard should become the standard. I love that it's the result of open-source collaboration.

So, what's up, blogging platforms? The world is mobile now, and helping us blog while we're out is a surefire way to keep users engaged. WordPress for Android has pivoted back toward the light, but most of the pivots in this area have been toward social networking and away from writing posts.

Do you blog from mobile devices? What service do you use?

According to an analysis of 65,000+ mobile subscribers' phone bills, U.S. teens have tripled their data usage. In the third quarter of 2011, teens aged 13-17 averaged 320 MB of data per month. This number has increased 256% over the last year, and not surprisingly teens are are consuming data faster than any other age group. But when it comes to data usage, boys are consuming 382 MB per month while girls only use 266 MB. This is not the case when it comes to texting.

Teens are not very interested in making calls from their mobile devices, with voice usage down from 685 to 572 minutes per month. Overall, teens see texts as faster, easier and a lot more fun.

Nielsen issued a similar report last year, and discovered pretty much the same thing: That parents better get their teenagers an unlimited data plan, stat! Results from this past study showed that teens sent out more than six messages per waking hour. This is one less text per hour than the 2011 report.

The previous report also showed app usage on the rise, with 94% of teens saying they used the Internet, messaging, multimedia, gaming and apps on their phones.

Yet despite all this news about texting, teen sexting might actually be more of a myth. NPR recently reported that only 1% of teens have actually created and shared sexually explicit images.

The app is nicely designed and integrates a wide variety of features, some of which are available for free. It's both cool and very frustrating. Why aren't more apps like this? Why is the paper of record paywalling its best content about a subject of such great public importance?

I can hear that - but there's something that makes me feel uncomfortable about paywalling information about an election. It feels like something that oil barrons would do with secret dastardly newsletters they trade among themselves.

What's Inside

What's included in the app? Free users can access a selection of top election-related Times stories. "Six news stories for free," is how Raju Narisetti, Managing Editor of the Washington Post, summarizes the whole app on Twitter. Each story is appended by related Twitter messages, which is a unique feature. I'd love to know how they figured out what tweets to put on those pages - it seems to be automated and of moderate relevance.

Free users can also navigate to the election coverage of other publications through the Times app. The Washington Post, WSJ, MSNBC, Politico, Fox News and others all have prominent links in the app. That's a great move, even if it is very simple in execution. How many other major media outlets send their readers pro-actively to the content of competitors?

Unfortunately, that's where the free content ends. Everything else requires that you pay for either a $15 monthly subscription to access the NYTimes.com web content, the basic smartphone apps and presumably this app. Or you can pay an extra $20 each month to access the iPad app too. I like the Times iPad app but I'll read the WSJ or Al Jazeera or the Guardian or Flipboard or watch Newsy or read the Bloomberg app before I'm likely to pay $20 every month for the Times iPad app. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing; I would hate it if the New York Times wasn't around in 100 more years.

For those who do subscribe (and a lot of people do) other parts of the app are then unlocked. They include access to Times political blogs, an opinion section and a big election guide full of resources. Those include a Primary Calendar of the Republican nominating contests, a section of polls, updates on Republican candidates, stats by state and a calendar of debates. Finally, there's a big selection of videos by the Times video crew. These are great videos, I'm sure, and I am a little jealous that I can't watch them here.

So this is cool - and the participation of stats master Nate Silver of political research blog Five Thirty Eight is getting this thing closer to going over the line where I'd pay for it.

"But no interactivity?" asks Richard Robbins VP and Digital Strategist at the giant PR firm MWW Group, on Twitter. "Big miss. Suggestion for v2!!" Brooklyn designer Douglas Back asks on Twitter if there will be a web app version of the Election app content - and he probably wants it all for free, too!

You can't please all of the people all of the time and sometimes you've got to focus on the people who are paying you. Given the topic of this app, I feel a little uncomfortable about it - but maybe I need to get over it.

At the very least, the publishing experiment with high quality coverage of important matters, on mobile, is worthy of commendation.

Despite a violent crackdown on the protests, the rabble rousers just won't quit, and they're using their smartphones to keep in touch and get around your stringent controls on freedom of the press. What ever do you do?

Why the iPhone? It's not the only mobile device being used by Syrian protestors, but it's a significant one. Activists have been using at least one iPhone-specific app to disseminate information about the uprising and spread sometimes gory photos illustrating the government's violent response.

Technology Poses a Threat to Dictators, But This is Silly

Syria's government knows all too well how dangerous mobile technology and the Web can be to its existence. While these revolutions are spurred by real-life, on-the-ground circumstances and grievances, increasingly technology is providing some grease for the wheels.

With this move, we can't help but be reminded of the time the Egyptian government shut off Internet access in the country amidst the uprising there earlier this year. Of course, not two weeks later, Hosni Mubarak resigned.

In this case, the crackdown seems even more short-sighted, even putting aside the absurdity of logistically trying to enforce such a law. If you ban iPhones, people can still use a wide range of other devices to stay in touch and connect to the Web. If Internet access goes away, people can still use SMS as an organizing tool. Of course, in a country like Syria, shutting down mobile service all together is not a difficult task.

We're all awash in a sea of data, we have been for some time, but as we meet that data we learn that it is made of people. We've met the data tsunami and it is us. That's bound to make a lot of people uncomfortable. If a future based on that data unfolds in the wrong way, it could end up a major hindrance to the quality of human life.

What is Carrier IQ? It's software that delivers data about peoples' cell phone use to the cellular network carriers. Dropped calls and call quality people can understand, when it comes down to app usage patterns and individual keystrokes, as it discovered last week the company is tracking and transmitting, that's data many people feel very uncomfortable with.

Apple says it's stopped using Carrier IQ, but millions of Android phones continue to use it. Senator Al Franken has started asking questions.

"Don't Track Me, Bro!"

It's easy to understand why all of this makes people uneasy. I was just thinking about how cool the apparently semi-functional Jawbone Go personal data bracelets were last week when I thought, "but I don't need some futuristic Logan's Run style tracking fashion object around my wrist everywhere I go!" Then I looked down at the hand holding my beloved iPhone.

The future is already here. Our phones pump geo-tagged transaction data into the network at a rate that's 7,000 times the volume of all the blathering in the Twitter Firehose. Data is being understood, according to some leading analysts, as an economic input of equivalent importance to capital and labor. My phone lights up whenever I'm within 50 yards of a historically significant place off-line.

It's awesome and it's terrifying, both.

What's Black, White and Read All Over?

If the future of data is built well, though, then the upside for all of us is huge. The controversy around Carrier IQ, runs the risk of throwing a very precious baby out with the bathwater we're uneasily coming to understand. The ultimate question is not whether or not this data will be collected and used - the question is who will control that process? Will it be us, or will it be mysterious corporations we never knew existed?

It's your phone, it's your cloud tablet, it's the invisible framework that keeps the internet accessible and fast - our activities in the networked digital realm are almost always inherently measured and transmitted as a matter of course in delivering the services we love.

But that doesn't mean that all tracking is done right. "It's astounding that a company thinks they can still get away with these always-connected devices," says Scott Kveton (right), CEO of mobile push notification infrastructure and mobile analytics service Urban Airship. "You have to always do the right thing when it comes to your product and services; thinking you can dupe or work outside of the regular rules of engagement is just plain nuts. Do you really need to do key logging to get network performance information? C'mon!"

Kaliya "Identity Woman" Hamlin (left, CC Doc Searls), Founder Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, puts it this way.

I think all of this is a huge opportunity for the personal data ecosystem. Because clearly there is value in this data...but you can't get to it if you do it the way Carrier IQ appears to be getting it.

For one thing, it is totally out of alignement with European privacy law. In Europe they have purpose binding so you can collect data for 'a purpose' and you have to tell the user what it is and then keep the purpose with the data. It is illegal to store data with without the purpose binding.

The point is though, the data has value. It could be accessed ethically in new market places, oriented around people's control and management - not just this 'opt-in' to us stalking you. Put it in your personal data locker/store/vault/bank and use it as you see fit. Where the user can choose wehre they store it who can help them get value from it and how they are protected from others seeing and poking at it or manipulating and using it for things the user doesn't want.

This is also where accountability frameworks will start to come in - because right now there are really none asserted by people or anyone - but it is reasonable for a carrier to have data on where calls are dropping. So can you have 'frameworks' where that kind of data is available but not the Personally Identifiable Information and tracking bits...and can we audit this?

We want these systems and networks to get better...but 'trust us' isn't really going to work.

Messy, Secret, Private Freedom

Beyond the value of improved network performances and application features, Hamlin also emphasizes the need for people to control their own data and share it selectively in order for us to have the freedom to express different parts of ourselves in different contexts. If our whole lives are thrown into one big data bucket being peered into by robots from all over, that's going to constrict our freedom of movement and action.

Hamlin says that companies in this space are identifying your email, street adress, real name and from that are able to "look you up in the databases in the cloud that are tracking everyone and know all about you...without 1) having to ask you 2) respecting your different contexts you may not want linked 3) then they decide they know things about you that are 'inferred' from all that data...(the My TiVo thinks I'm gay problem writ large) and 4) has no sense of decency or relationship that is 'human'."

That all makes sense to me. I know I want the freedom to make decisions without robots lumping all the decisions I've ever made into one giant bucket without my permission. I'll happily share a lot of my data with people I trust and who deliver value to me. But it's not really Carrier IQ's world I live in, this is my life.

This is a key move for Google's mobile business, which up until now could only take you to the front door of the place for which you were searching. Google Maps on the desktop recently got 3D photo tours of small locations, an extension of Street View, but this is a bigger step. When Google Maps goes inside, Google can take you all the way from searching for something to holding it in your hand, advertising and data-gathering all the way.

This is currently only available on the native Android version of Google Maps, but that's where it makes the most sense. At your desk, a photo tour is all you need. This location-based technology is a mobile innovation for once you're actually there. Google Maps is now an end-to-end service, and that means Google has your eyeballs every step of the way.

Maps & Mobile Platforms

Location services are the heart of any mobile platform, and mapping is the most fundamental interface for them. Naturally, Android users (with the latest versions of everything) will get this powerful new service straight from Google. What about other mobile platforms?

The iPhone uses Google for mapping, too, at least for now. Based on the way Apple and Google are butting heads on mobile and location tools, that partnership can't be long for this world. When iPhone 4S users ask Siri about local businesses, she skips Google and goes to Yelp, even though Google is likely to be the place a user would go first if given the choice. Apple is clearly trying to squeeze Google out of this picture. It recently bought a 3D mapping company of its own. This stand-off is why Google Maps and Siri were head to head in our Top 10 Consumer Web Products of 2011.

Interestingly, Bing Maps got interior mapping on its mobile Web version this August, but it didn't make much of a splash.

Mapping The Inside World

Interiors are the last frontier of location services, and Google is looking to annex it. It's the next big thing for Google's business.

This is interesting news for startups working on this problem. Meridian, a Portland, Ore.-based company, just took $1 million in funding to make interior mapping into a platform. It provides its partner businesses with an interface to turn a 3D map of their building into an interactive, standalone application. That's a competing vision for how mapping the inside world should work.

How will Apple's mobile location interface be different? What will Bing Maps do? It's go-time for location services right now, and Google has a very strong hand.

Read more about Google Maps 6.0 for Android on the Google LatLong blog.

How do you use your mobile devices to navigate the inside world?