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At the same time as Facebook announced their Open Stream API technology, the company also released a desktop application built with Adobe AIR as a way to demonstrate the sorts of things that the new technology makes possible. With the app, you're able to interact with your stream just as you would on Facebook, but without the browser. You can even comment and "like" your friends' stories. But is the new app actually worth installing?

A company called Sopods, makers of the Full-Screen Web Browser application for the Apple iPhone, have just implemented new ground-breaking anti-piracy measures for the iPhone platform. After pirated copies of the company's application began to surface in the wild, the application's developer, angry about the lost income, came up with a way to detect the cracked apps and then turn them back into "demoware." With this process, the cracked apps will still work, but a message will appear after 10 runs encouraging the owner to purchase the legal copy in the iTunes store or exit the application

Are any application developers making money on Facebook? Not really, but they could be. According to Bruce Richardson of AMR Research, less than 2% of Facebook developers make any "real" money. Part of the problem is that Facebook has not had any decent e-commerce engine for monetizing applications - until now, that is. Instead, developers have had to rely on the advertising model, which isn't always a good fit for their type of application, nor is it all that effective. Z-Commerce, a new service launching today at DEMO 09, aims to address this problem. But the big question is this: are there any Facebook applications worth paying for?

Hint: They're Using iPhone Apps

The newspaper industry is in a downward death spiral, having been severely impacted by new technologies, the ubiquity of internet access, and a rise in citizen journalism. Here in the U.S., some papers are filing for bankruptcy, others are close to doing the same, and there's even a proposal to give the newspaper industry a bailout plan of its own. Elsewhere in the world, it's more of the same. In Japan though, the country's high population of elderly citizens is keeping the papers afloat...for now, at least. But like everywhere else, they will soon have to face the future: young people don't do newsprint.

Netflix lovers out there, rejoice! You can now manage your Netflix queue right from your desktop using a new Adobe AIR application called Queued. Created as a demonstration of how AIR and the Dojo Toolkit can be used together to create rich hybrid applications, Queued is open-source, BSD-licensed software. Although the point for Queued's existence may have be to demo different types of technology, the end result is definitely something we all can enjoy.