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Appcelerator, the makers of the mobile development framework Titanium, announced a partnership with Ruby on Rails platform-as-a-service provider Engine Yard today. Engine Yard developers will be able to create cross-platform applications using Titanium while leaving their Rails backend environments virtually unchanged. Titanium developers will be able to take advantage of Engine Yard's scalable services for building backends.

According to the announcement, the two companies will "integrate and certify each other's technologies, jointly develop best practices, and create common architectural patterns to help developers build mobile applications using Appcelerator Titanium with Ruby on Rails backends developed and deployed on the Engine Yard platform."

Though Mountain View-based startup Appcelerator has been working together for roughly 3 years, it wasn't until this past March when the venture-backed company launched Titanium to the general public. Appcelerator's flagship product, Titanium offers a platform on which Web developers can build native mobile applications that are easily portable from one platform to another. Today Appcelerator announced the passing of several milestones as thousands of apps have been built by over 65,000 developers - including many well-known name-brand clients.

When taking a Web app to the mobile space, it's important for a startup to realize the tools and best practices available to make the transition smooth and easy. Earlier this week, social check-in startup GetGlue launched its mobile app on the Android platform after seeing unexpected growth from its iPhone app. Today I spoke with company CEO Alex Iskold about the ways in which GetGlue both did and did not prepare for the explosive growth it has seen from its mobile efforts.

StatusNet released today a cross-platform desktop client for its open-source microblogging platform - the same foundation that powers the Twitter alternative identi.ca. Windows, Mac, and Linux users can download it here. It features support for multiple StatusNet sites (including identi.ca), notifications, search and more.

More and more web developers are earning their mobile wings. Mountain View-based Appcelerator just announced their beta release of Titanium Mobile - an open source, open standards tool that lets developers build applications with native UI elements, code compilation, device storage and geo-location APIs on both the iPhone and Android.

With Appcelerator's new mobile offerings, web programmers can avoid the pitfalls of Objective-C or Java, and use basic Javascript, HTML, and CSS to build their apps.

Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog flipped the switch tonight on a major overhaul of user profile pages and now integrates activity data from other services around the web.

Less than a week after a small investment in the ex-Googler founded FriendFeed put lifestreaming on a lot of peoples' maps - the entry of a Yahoo! property could be a game changer in a market full of startups.