Developers can now harness the power of Quova's complex IP geolocation technology within SimpleGeo's framework for creating location apps. Quova announced the partnership today at Where 2.0 in San Jose, and said it will broaden its customer base and provide new contexts for its data. In return, SimpleGeo wins by giving developers a more complete solution for geolocation.

SimpleGeo is a cloud-based geodata company that has been building its geolocation services since May 2009. The company, founded by Joe Stump and Matt Galligan, is unique in its focus on location-based services. It announced the availability of a data storage service, an iTunes-like data marketplace, and an API to developers today at Where 2.0. These offerings are described by SimpleGeo as a "ready-to-use platform that makes it easy to store, scale and discover geodata for use on the Web and in applications."

"After discovering Quova¹s offerings, it became obvious that we needed to include their IP Geolocation data in our ready-to-use location infrastructure," said Matt Galligan, cofounder and CEO of SimpleGeo. "Quova's data will enable developers using SimpleGeo to locate their users easily, regardless of access to GPS or WiFi data. The partnership just made sense."

Essentially, the partnership creates a geolocation "failover" system for developers. Applications and services can select the best available source for location data. The level of accuracy ranges from GPS smartphones, at the high end, to Wi-Fi data from SkyHooks SpotRank, and finally to the IP address locations from Quova.

Quova benefits by increasing the flexibility of its data and broadening its market. Developers can use IP locations alongside check in data from sources including Twitter, Foursquare, or Gowalla. Access to multiple data sources adds value and creates a richer digital neighborhood for applications. SimpleGEO helps smaller developers to focus on delivering apps to end users and wraps geolocation in a simple API.

With geolocation as the current must-have technology it will be interesting to watch Quova and SimpleGeo this week at Where 2.0. If successful, the partnership will lower the threshold for developers to break into the geolocation app market.

The White House announced the release of a new White House iPhone app via a late-night blog post on WhiteHouse.gov. Included in the mobile application are features like news items, photos, blog posts, videos, and even live video streaming. That's right - live video. According to White House blogger Dave Cole, the app lets users watch public events like speeches and press briefings in real time using their mobile device. Next week's State of the Union address by President Obama will kick off this effort, delivering live video of the speech to anyone running the free application on their Apple iPhone or iPod Touch.

This downloadable mobile application (iTunes link) is the first of its kind to be released by the current administration... that is, unless you count the Obama campaign's iPhone application, which offered mobilized access to campaign news, media and events prior to the election. The Obama administration is notable for the way it's embraced technology, using everything from YouTube for weekly "fireside chats" to wikis for recruiting purposes. They even licensed the transition site Change.gov using Creative Commons, which allowed a company called Cerado the ability to translate the site into a Web-based iPhone application.

What's most interesting about this new mobile effort is the fact that the iPhone application was launched prior to the mobile-ready version of WhiteHouse.gov's website. While that effort is "coming soon," says the blog post, it won't be available in time for Obama's next presidential address, and there are no details as to whether or not it will offer any sort of video features, much less live streaming.

Of course it's important that the government's efforts aren't iPhone-only, but it's clear that the Apple platform is an important part of the administration's efforts to reach its constituents - especially the young, tech-savvy mobile users who some say helped Obama win the election.

Mobile Web's Explosive Growth

Also of interest: The White House states that mobile Web use has grown over 100% in the last year in the U.S., and higher worldwide. That's putting it mildly. Over the past year, we've heard from numerous companies and analyst firms regarding the explosive growth of the mobile web. For example, in spring of 2009, Opera reported a 157% increase in usage of their Opera Mini web browser and a 319% increase in year-over-year data traffic. AdMob released a report in October revealing a 19% increase year-over-year in iPhone/iPod Touch data traffic alone, and last month, analyst firm IDC predicted over a billion mobile web users by 2010. Ignoring the mobile masses at this point would be a mistake and it's clear that the White House understands that. Notes the blog post: "this is just the first step for WhiteHouse.gov's mobile platform."

3 Billion in Apple App Sales? Not Exactly

While we're sure the general trend is correct as far as the growth of mobile application stores and Apple's position as the market leader, we have to agree with the note that John Gruber recently made on his blog regarding these figures. He quotes a portion of the report where analyst Chris Foresman says:

Earlier this month, Apple announced that sales had topped 3 billion; that means iPhone users downloaded 2.5 billion apps in 2009 alone. Gartner's figures show another 16 million apps that could come from other platform's recently opened app stores, giving Apple at least 99.4 percent of all mobile apps sold for the year.

Gruber notes that Apple didn't actually announce 3 billion in sales, they announced 3 billion downloads. In fact, you can see the original press release making this announcement here. Not only that, but another Gartner analyst Miguel Fontanez told us earlier this month that Apple, as a rule, does not disclose App Store revenues as a separate line item in their revenue reporting. That means that any estimation of Apple's App Store sales are just that - an estimation.

Last week, in speaking with Peter Farago of Flurry analytics to calculate App Store piracy numbers, we determined that Apple had generated approximately $750 million in sales to date. That's 3 billion downloads over the lifetime of the App Store with roughly 25% of them being paid downloads. In other words, if Gartner used the 3 billion to determine Apple's position as the market share leader in sales, then their calculations would be off.

However, as Gruber also notes, if Gartner's calculations are accurate regarding the other mobile platforms (16 million in app sales, they claim), then it's clear that Apple still has the app store to beat... even if they don't account for 99.4% of the market.

We don't expect Apple's dominant position to change anytime soon - the company has momentum. In November 2009, Apple announced they offer over 100,000 applications and by now that number has likely grown even more. However, other mobile application stores are growing quickly, too. Google's Android marketplace, for example, with its open nature unhampered by any sort of bogged-down app review process, has now topped 20,000 applications as of December. The Android mobile operating system is growing in popularity, too (usage increased 3% over the past three months), meaning it will soon be a contender for a hefty slice of that the app store pie in years to come.

The Defriended app gives you an easy way to track these defriending events since Facebook itself doesn't provide this feature - or at least that's what the app did until Facebook blocked its operation. Apparently, the social network thinks defriending should be a private matter. As of now, the app is no longer available for download in the App Store.

Unfortunately, the little side project created by an i-Doodz developer was in violation of Facebook's platform developer agreement. In section 2, Facebook warns developers that they may not circumvent the company's "intended limitations" on core Facebook features. Specifically, it reads: "you must not notify a user that someone has removed the user as a friend." In other words, Facebook doesn't want you to know who doesn't want to be your friend.

Today, a message on the i-Doodz site states:

Last week our developer was bored one evening, had an idea, and a few hours later uploaded the "defriended" iPhone app. it unexpectedly got a lot of attention, then subsequently Facebook blocked the app, causing it to stop working. We will be looking at how feasible it is to make the app work without a corresponding facebook app, but in the meantime if you've bought the app you should ask apple for a refund - and please do...we don't really want to get money for an app you paid for and that doesn't work. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Tracking Defriending Events - A Bad Idea

We suppose that if you were notified every time someone removed you as a friend, you might get angry or hurt - feelings Facebook wouldn't want you to associate with their site. After all, social networking is supposed to be about making connections, not ending them... or is it? Even worse, you might contact the person doing the defriending and ask them, "Why?" This may force them to re-add you out of social politeness when really they had no longer wanted to retain the connection.

Although it seems like a petty move to block Defriender from operating, it makes sense. Social networking connections are meant to mirror our real life friendships... at least that's what Facebook thinks. As two people go their separate ways in life, friendships fade. They're meant to. Very few people maintain a meaningful relationship with everyone they've ever met and became friends with throughout their life. In fact, if you tried to do so, it would be overwhelming. So while it may be nice to catch up with your best friend from junior high or your old college roommate via Facebook, after some time - and very little interaction after the first "How have you been?" - those connections should be able to fade away again just like they did in real life.

Even though Facebook doesn't alert users now when they've be defriended, the decision to thin the list is still a bit uncomfortable for some people. What if they notice?! Chances are, if you haven't communicated with the person in months on end, they won't. We promise. Still, to avoid the whole messy defriending situation in the first place, the best method is to simply not accept the friend request to begin with. That's what the "ignore" button is for.

However, if you slipped up and have contaminated your News Feed with these non-friends, it's time to remove them. An article in the New York Times from January 2009 suggested that proper Facebook friend etiquette involves culling your friend list once per year to remove "total strangers and other hangers-on." (We think heavy Facebook users may need to do that a little more often.) The article, an examination of our new social morals, shows how the act of defriending is just as much a part of social networking as the initial friending request is. Tracking these events via an iPhone app or any other service would be an unnecessary - and potentially painful - process. Let's let the defriending continue quietly... the way it was intended to be.

(Image credit: geek.com)

As has been noted in many iPhone/Droid sudden-death-round comparisons, the latter languishes in quality and quantity of available applications. Perhaps in an effort to increase Droid's competitiveness in the market, the powers that be have created a new section of resources for Android developers. Let the games (and other apps) begin!

The list of sample code now includes:

• API Demos
• Bluetooth Chat
• Contact Manager
• Home
• JetBoy
• Lunar Lander
• Multiple Resolutions
• Note Pad
• Searchable Dictionary
• Snake
• Soft Keyboard
• Wiktionary
• Wiktionary (Simplified)

The Android dev team has also taken their most popular developer blog posts and turned them into a series of technical articles ranging in scope from backward compatibility issues and future-proofing apps to layout tricks and text-to-speech uses.

Currently, around 10,000 applications exist in the Android Market as compared to the (roughly) eleventy bajillion apps in the Apple App Store. Hopefully, these resources will help this open-source mobile development platform take off, allowing Android's available applications to become a selling point for Android-powered devices rather than a point ceded to Apple in the smartphone wars.

They'll also be unable to change their applications, change marketing materials or download sales reports during much of this time. iTunes Connect, the interface that allows developers to manage all their applications in the App Store, will be unavailable from December 23 - December 28, 2009.

"I guess iTunes Connect [team members] want a break too," wrote one developer, "but come on, closed for the holidays when people have a lot of time on their hands to buy apps ?"

Another dev shop, Bottle Rocket, wrote, "Apple is taking the next 4 days off. Good for them. So, should we take the hint and lower the shades on Bottle Rocket for at least a few days? The answer is, well, no comment."

Here's a graph showing the kind of traffic and sales pattern app developers can expect to see right around Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and the ensuing week or so. This is a visualization of data from iPod Touch devices last December:

So, once again, during what may be some app developers' biggest sales spike of the entire year, they will not have access to information on sales performance or other metrics, and they won't be able to tweak their marketing materials or create new incentives as the year's biggest gift-giving holiday approaches.

In the interest of maintaining our holiday spirit, we will refrain from comment on whether or not this is a lame move and instead caution our application developer friends to get their ducks in a row before iTunes Connect is out of commission.

Real-Time View of App Creation

With the next generation of the product, Sweb Apps 2.0, some of the original concerns about the - well, let's say it - rather boring user interface of the Sweb-built apps have begun to be addressed. Whereas before you could only customize the background color and upload your own buttons, today you can customize the background to be an image instead. And if you don't have one of your own, Sweb Apps provides an online library of images to choose from. That's a step in the right direction, even if some of the backgrounds are reminiscent of early GeoCities Web pages or Windows 98 wallpapers... after all, you have to crawl before you can run.

As you build your app's landing page, you're provided with a real-time view of your app in progress, which makes it much easier to tell whether your images, buttons and colors look good together or not. That's a handy feature for SMB owners, who may be creating their app on their own without the aid of a professional designer. The app builder also uses drag-and-drop functionality to make the process even more painless for the inexperienced end user.

Mobile Storefronts

However, one of the most interesting developments in the 2.0 version of Sweb Apps' online service is the new "store" functionality. Now, as easy as it is to build an app, you can essentially build a mobile storefront for your business. This feature, still in beta, allows you to categorize, sub-categorize, itemize and write descriptions for your products. You can manage and maintain your inventory through Sweb's CMS, and your mobile customers can "check out" via the included PayPal integration.

Sweb Apps tells us that they envision this sort of feature being used by restaurants, boutiques and small retailers. That's easy to imagine. For example: wish you had picked up a t-shirt from that seafood place where you dined on vacation? In theory, you could now, even if you were halfway home, thanks to these new mobile storefronts. In a way, the mobile stores are even better than having the same functionality via an online store on the "real" Web, mainly because not everyone brings their laptop around with them 24/7. But their iPhones? People don't leave home without them.

And More...

Other features being introduced today include podcasts, audio streams and YouTube integration, all of which streams audio or video within the app itself, as opposed to launching an external program such as the iPhone's own built-in YouTube app. Also new is the ability for users to manage multiple applications from one account.

Sweb Apps says they've seen good results since their August 2009 launch, with a 400% increase in sales, but won't share actual numbers. That doesn't really tell us much about the service's adoption by the SMB market. Since the company isn't touting any high-profile clients or case studies in their PR though, we have to imagine that they're flying a bit under the radar on the business front at this point. Still, it's very early in the game, and services like this can take a while to catch on and gain popularity.

The pricing for Sweb Apps remains the same despite the new features. The company offers four-, six- and eight-button packages, which all include a one-time set-up fee of $50 per button. Then there is a $25 monthly hosting fee applied to every application going forward.

While Hewitt admits that the Facebook app's video feature is a last minute incorporation, it will be interesting to see if the decision to add it will cut into the user base of existing Twitter video apps.

To keep an eye on the Facebook for iPhone application process or to discuss the app, follow Joe Hewitt on Twitter (@joehewitt)or check out the Facebook for iPhone page for new photos.

This sort of ease-of-use is exactly why Spotify already celebrates an estimated 5 million member user base despite only being available in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Spain, France and Finland. The company already has European licensing deals with Universal, Sony, Warner and EMI and it solidified an American licensing agreement with the Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA) last week. The recent deal brings Spotify's catalogue to well over 7 million files. The company plans to launch in the US before the end of the year.

But sometimes there's an issue with displaying the raw, unfiltered tweets in this way: they can be disruptive. All it takes is one Twitter user trying to be funny - or, worse, a troll saying something rude - to take the discussion off course. Now there's a new solution to deal with this problem: Paratweet.

Using Paratweet

After signing up for a Paratweet account, you create a new event, set up some keywords or hashtags to monitor, and you can even enter an onscreen question for the audience to respond to, if desired.

As the tweets begin to stream in, you simply approve or reject them by clicking the green plus sign or red X as necessary. If you don't want to manually moderate tweets, you can choose to auto approve them instead. After you have a few tweets approved, you hit the button marked "Live Display Control" to start streaming the approved tweets to the "Live Display Application."

This "Live Display Application" is an Adobe AIR app designed just for Paratweet and it's meant to be run on the computer connected to the projector, LCD, or CCTV. Also, because you log in to the AIR app with your Paratweet account to pull the relevant tweets, you don't have to perform the moderation on the same PC as the one being used for display, although you certainly could.

Why Paratweet?

Paratweet isn't the first application to deliver Twitter moderation functionality - Twubs, for example, also offers a live events app with this capability. However, Paratweet offers a couple of extra features which gives it an edge.

For one, it includes a profanity filter which you can turn on or off as desired - an item that was definitely on the wish list of pastors who wanted to use Twitter during their sermons or other church events, like youth group meetings. It also links the moderation app and display app via a secret code for extra security in order to make sure no one but those approved to do so can moderate the tweets. The code is unique to each event.

Unlike using search.twitter.com, Paratweet lets you track multiple search terms or hashtags at once. As the tweets come in, you can optionally play or pause the stream - helpful if the speaker wants to respond to something on the screen without the distraction of more tweets streaming by.

Unfortunately, all this Twitter goodness doesn't come cheap. Paratweet offers two pricing plans: $299 for 6 months and one event (which you can use over and over) or $599 for 6 months and 3 separate events. The $599 plan also includes the onscreen question feature, something unfortunately not found in the less expensive plan. Alternately, you can save by purchasing a yearly license for $999.

To try Paratweet for yourself, you can sign up here.

Just login with your AppUseful account or with Facebook Connect, and you're magically transformed from a disgruntled social media fanatic to a pithy tech reviewer with a vengeance. Remember that time in 2008 when you couldn't get a beta invite for that one startup? Here's your chance to let it all out.

Here's why we find this interesting: There's an awful lot of back-channel chatter and blog pontification about any social media app. Gauging overall public response is a matter of either guesswork or metrics analytics, neither of which are our particular specialty. For startups, for journalists, and for users, it's helpful to know what people are saying without having to troll all around the Internet to find out.

As an aside to the AppUseful creators: Since the site is new and there's not a lot of UGC for the time being, how about fleshing it out with quotes from and links to bloggers' reviews for the time being?

Second, AppUseful is a catalog of the social web that can direct users to new apps they might find, well, useful. E.g., I want to know more about how musicians can market themselves online. AppUseful has a music category. I already knew about Last.fm and Pandora, but what about Grooveshark? If the word in the user review is that it's more useful and flexible and allows indie musicians to sell tracks, then it's right up my alley. And I might not have heard of it otherwise.

With featured (Bing, Wolfram Alpha), recent (Google Wave), and popular (Gmail, Digg) sections, user-oriented discovery and review of apps is simple and fun. Also, it takes a lot less time than trolling tech blogs and flaming the comments because a particular beta app didn't work for you.

There's a great amount of data available on the Web in APIs or even straight HTML. It's all there for the parsing - and parsed data from social media in particular is held to be a goldmine. But traditionally, it's the heavy lifting (the broad variety of programming languages used in APIs, the challenges presented by complicated authentications, the occasional need for massive pipes) that has made accessing and sorting data into useful applications a laborious process.

Yahoo!, chiefly to serve the needs of its own engineers, has been developing a sophisticated solution that is agnostic across all Internet platforms and that lowers both the burden of labor and the barriers to entry for social and other web application developers, many of whom are already singing the praises of the newly released YQL Execute.

"YQL Execute allows you to build tables of data from other sources online, using Javascript as a programming language and run it on Yahoo's servers, so the infrastructure needs are very small."

In the slightly more technical language presented on the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog, "The Execute element can contain arbitrary developer code that the YQL data engine runs during the processing of a YQL statement."

It also handles authentication for third party sites.

Is there anything like it currently on the market?

"Nothing... It's pretty awesome," said Cannon-Brooks.

Yahoo! Query Language

Although YQL looks a lot like SQL, it treats the info on the web as a virtual table that developers can manipulate in a standardized way, regardless of the API that data came from. Developers only had to know how to use YQL to quickly create simple mashups.

Open Data Tables

YQL was used to support a broad range of APIs, almost anything publicly available online, from FriendFeed and Google Reader to the Guardian newspaper. "No one has yet pointed out an API they can't figure out how to map," said Pullara.

However, some data could not be accessed without authentication, such as Google Calendar or Netflix. Those APIs were very often very sophisticated and even complicated for the end developer. For these APIs, Yahoo! rolled out YQL Execute on April 29.

YQL Execute

YQL Execute also allows developers to access multiple services and get a single result back. For example, an app developer could call up New York Times articles with specific tags AND Flickr photos with related tags; YQL Execute would return a combined result with both articles and related photographs. Another benefit for developers is the use of the massive Yahoo! infrastructure, as all the heavy lifting of data is done on Yahoo! servers.

And because of the speed, simplicity, and scope of these tools, implications now range much farther than simple mashups. With access to authenticated and private data, more sophisticated applications can be written quickly and easily.

The Dark Side

The above quotation is from Scott D. Reinhart, who has been eyeball-deep in application development longer than many "social media gurus" have been out of high school.

Right alongside the generally held social media dictum that a rich data stream is inherently bankable, there is the hotly debated issue of data ownership. Especially when data is made more valuable by having been parsed, organized, and compared, and most especially when someone creates a revenue stream from previously unmonetizable data, questions of ownership and copyright flare up around the social web.

"Public APIs allow you to easily develop using mature platforms," said Reinhart, "but they [large IT and social media companies] usually have a hidden intention. In this case they advocate putting your database layer onto their systems... So let's say I use the Yahoo! data layer, I use BizSpark to get my development tools, and I am making MySpace (Open Social) and Facebook apps using jQuery - who owns my code? Technically, they own everything. They can claim I just made a mashup.

"I would, as someone approaching these systems, stop drinking the Kool-Aid and read the terms of use. Check what it says about ownership."

Yahoo! Servers for YQL Developers

"If you create an open data table, there's no requirement to upload it to Yahoo! We do cache data that we pull from APIs and the web to make it faster, but we don't store that data. It passes through without being collected for permanent storage."

By contrast, with other services such as Google or Amazon Web Services, developers are required to upload their data, which is stored and executed on the company's systems. In using Yahoo! YQL, a developer's data has "a very transient experience and expires from the cache," said Pullara. "It's a convenience, not a requirement in any way."

The Price of Free

"We want to enable rather than discourage more useage ," said Pullara. "And while people don't want to pay, they do want to know they're a customer and have a relationship with Yahoo!"

Currently, Yahoo! has set certain limits on use of their infrastructure. App developers are limited to 100,000 calls per day, per IP address. If the application runs in a browser (hence, on many different IPs), it's a non-issue. Pullara said, "The limit targets those who would abuse the platform... people who might spin up DoS attacks. You have to have controls in place to make sure that doesn't happen."

Many developers are enthusiastic about the legitimate and value-adding implementations of the technologies. "The YQL improvements are just sex on legs," said Cannon-Brooks via Twitter. "The most exciting, least talked about 'tech of now' is YQL."

With today's current crop of social networking applications like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, the decisions about who you "friend" are made consciously, based on a number of criteria unique to the individual. Often, these networks become crowded with people who you barely know, but find interesting. That's a social network, yes, but it's not one that reflects your real-life relationships. Even Facebook, the current social darling, has moved away from being about real-life friendships. With the ability to friend public figures and brands and the ability to sort friends into lists, the push is on to expand your network beyond close, personal connections.

Similar issues face the mobile social networks emerging now. Applications like Loopt and Brightkite still require you to add friends which leads to, again, networks that consist of acquaintances and other folks you only know marginally well.

How Friendlee is Different

Because there really isn't a network that taps into your real world relationships, the HP researchers decided to build one. In Friendlee, the social graph is automatically constructed with minimal input required from the user since the software tracks the call and messaging history to determine your connections.

In addition, Friendlee introduces a set of "ambient awareness" indicators that provide useful information about your friends' statuses. For example, indicators will include current location, time spent at that location, local time, weather, a status message, and even your friend's phone's status: busy, phone on hold, engaged, silent, or vibrate. Imagine how useful it would be to know if your friend's phone was busy or turned to silent before you even dialed it!

Friendlee isn't just a contacts-replacement application, though. It is a network. The app actually lets you see your immediate contacts, of course, but it lets you see your friends' contacts as well. These lists are sorted by the strength of the connections, something that's determined by the frequency and duration of the interactions.

Because not everyone would be comfortable sharing their contact information with a social network, intimate or not, Friendlee includes privacy controls that let you configure who gets to see what. That way, you could configure anyone in the "Family" category to see everything, but other groups would have access to less information.

Friendlee consists of three components: the phone-based client, a web interface where you can interact with the data, and a backend server that stores a copy of all the information in a database. The client would sync with the server several times per minute, updating the system with call history, location, time, and other information.

Still a Prototype Only (Boo!)

At the moment, Friendlee is in prototype form for both the Android and Windows Mobile operating systems, so you can only drool over it now. The prototypes will be put into field testing while improvements are made before it ever becomes publicly available.

We normally wouldn't post about an application which you can't even try out yet (we hate to tease!), but this one sounded downright revolutionary. We were just too excited not to share the news with you.

Note: we requested more information about Friendlee's public availability but have not heard back yet from HP.

Oh no! The iPhone doesn't deliver? Businesses take heed? Well, that's what it sounds like. Except there's just one small problem here: Papa John's doesn't have an iPhone app - they have a mobile website.

In fact, if you read through the article, the doom-and-gloom story of the Papa John's iPhone app disaster may have you wondering if iPhone apps for businesses are even worthwhile.

After reading through the article, although confused as to the supposed app's failure, on a personal level I was excited. I didn't even know that Papa John's had an iPhone application, but I was definitely interested in downloading it. You see, where I live, Papa John's is the only pizza place that delivers. I've been eagerly awaiting an iPhone application like this since our household tends to order Papa John's pizza about once a month (well, if we aren't on diets). I immediately hopped over to iTunes and did a search. Query: "Papa John's" - no Papa John's apps found. Query: "Papa Johns" - still, no go. What gives? They were talking about an iPhone application, right?

Apparently not.

Actually, what Papa John's has is a mobile website at mobile.papajohns.com/iphone, which offers a store locator and shortcuts that take you to the main mobile ordering system - a system that sees 50% of its traffic from iPhones, by the way. And that's what McDonnell was referring to: a mobile website.

Say what you want, but a mobile site is NOT an app. If it were, then the Papa John's app could do nifty things like tap into the iPhone's GPS to display the nearest stores to the user's current location and offer those stores' current specials. It could store user account information in its settings so that every time the app was launched, it would remember your latest order... maybe even have a button that let you reorder with one click. And so much more.

But all it does is let you order from a mobile website and locate a store... you know, manually.

Given its limited nature, it wouldn't be surprising if Papa John's was only having moderate success with this "app"/mobile site. But the thing is, they are. According to McDonnell, the "app" has driven $1 million in revenue to the company. Um, that's actually kind of good. Now imagine what a REAL app could do. Unfortunately, McDonnel says Papa John's just isn't ready - they're only "dipping their toe in the pond" now and don't want to spend money on an honest-to-goodness iPhone application yet, much less start developing for other platforms.

Well, that's a shame because they haven't really even dipped their toe into the iPhone platform yet.

Papa John's, let us know when you actually launch an iPhone application, then you can tell us how well it works for you.

Installing Facebook for Adobe AIR

Installing the Facebook AIR application is pretty straightforward. After downloading and clicking "install" to get it started, you have to enter in your account information for a one-time authentication process with Facebook.

You then have to give the app permission to access your News Feed and Wall. (You should probably say "Allow Access" to this question since that's the whole purpose of the app!)

For the last step, you have to click "Allow Publishing" in order for your posts and comments to be published without prompting you.

Using the Application

Now that the application is installed, you can start enjoying it. It's a really basic application - no bells and whistles here. It's just the stream, nothing more, nothing less. You can't search for friends or filter the list to display only your friends in a particular pre-defined list.  In fact, you can't do much of anything but "like" and comment on the posts that stream by. You also can't force it to refresh on your own, but it will refresh automatically as your friends post new updates.

A box at the top asks "what's on your mind?" and you can answer by posting a new status message and then clicking "Share." However, unlike the status update box on Facebook.com, you can't include a link, photos, or video - just text. Again, very basic stuff here.

But Is it Worth Using?

The short answer for those reading this blog is probably going to be a "no."

You see, whether or not you're going to find this application useful is going to depend on how you use Facebook. If you've been careful only to add the people whose updates you really care about to your Friend list, it's possible that you might enjoy what seems like a more personal, quieter version of your usual Twitter application - and one that includes your "real" friends - you know, those guys who say they "just don't get Twitter?"

But in all honesty, it's exactly those folks (the Twitter-avoiders) who are more likely to enjoy an application such as this. It's simple to the point of being almost too basic. That's why among the tech elite and early adopters, the standalone Facebook AIR app probably won't gain much traction. Especially when we already have applications that combine the Facebook stream with our Twitter streams. Apps like Seesmic and TweetDeck do this, but they also let us do a lot more advanced configurations, view manipulation, filtering, and searches, too.

For us, we'll stick with our fancy tools, but we wouldn't be surprised if this basic app gained a little popularity outside the tech elite bubble.