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I feel like all I’ve written about the past few weeks is Facebook’s need for a new social dynamic. Specifically, I want Facebook to break their social graph into two: those people who you are friends with, and those who you follow — for sharing purposes. It seems that Facebook may be testing something like that out — well sort of, maybe.

Facebook appears to be testing out a new feature called “Subscribe.” A source who supposedly has it enabled, tells All Facebook that “by subscribing you don’t miss any updates from people you subscribe to.” While on the face of it, this would seem to be a lot like the idea of “follow” it’s not clear from that wording if you actually already need to be friends with a person in order to follow them.

In other words, this may just be another mechanism to ensure you see updates from people you really care about. But if that’s the case, this just adds more confusion to Facebook’s social graph because you can already create lists for that purpose. Though, as All Facebook points out, these update will apparently appear in the notifications drop down.

Instead, what I’m hoping is that this is a proper follow feature that allows you to see other users public updates even if you’re not subscribed to them. And vice versa, obviously. I would love to allow people to subscribe to stuff I share publicly (and have it appear in their stream), but have the option to still share stuff with my actual friends.

But still, maybe that is in the works as well. Baby steps are probably wise here for Facebook so their users don’t lose their minds and scream bloody murder — which will happen anyway.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on this to try and get more clarity on the feature. They’re currently “looking into it.”

Egypt has created a special security department to monitor Facebook. Allegedly, the "main task of this group is to monitor Facebook content like groups, pages and chat and to publish reports countering online criticism of current Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak or his son Gamal." But it's extremely unlikely that the secret police powering it will not collect user information, as well as seek out and punish those who use the social network for free speech and political reasons.

Egypt's relationship to Facebook is extensive. Very popular for several years prior, on April 6, 2008, students and others used it to stage a protest against the Egyptian government's precipitous raising of bread prices. This protest gave birth to the the April 6 Movement. But the protest was brutally put down and the leadership of April 6, whose goal is an open discussion of issues of importance to their country, have been harassed ever since.

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India adds Google, others to censorship efforts. Censorship efforts grow like mold. Earlier efforts against Blackberry by Saudia Arabia and the United Arab Emirates grew to infect India. India's efforts to force Blackberry to decrypt user information has now expanded to include, well, everyone. India is demanding that "all companies that provide encrypted communications...install servers in the country to make it easier for the government to obtain users' data." Web and social media companies have not been brave in general, and Blackberry has already started to yield.

Attorney sues crowdsourced rating site. A Florida attorney filed a complaint alleging that a rating site for lawyers "defamed him and other lawyers by misrepresenting public information and using 'punitive, coercive and manipulative practices' against attorneys who try to correct their listings." MLRC is a great blog to keep track of lawsuits filed against bloggers and the users of other social media in the U.S.

Chinese scientist and blogger attacked. Fang Zhouzi, scientist, blogger and anti-fraud campaigner was attacked by two men after a television interview in a tea house near his apartment. Politicians and bosses in China, like Egypt, often uses thugs to prosecute violence against opponents.

Jordan adjusts its Internet censorship law. The anti-free speech law that Jordan implemented last month has been ameliorated somewhat. Prosecutor's offices do not have unlimited discretion on whom to prosecute and the defamation elements have been limited. But you can still be sent to forced labor for blogging. And "immoral" content is still illegal. (That means "any" content is illegal if the wrong person decides he doesn't like you.)

Israeli and Palestinian chauvinists duel on Wikipedia. Right-wing Israeli groups are teaching courses on how to edit Wikipedia entries to give them a Zionist slant and now Palestinian journalists are doing the same in reverse. Nothing like a true believer to put you off your lunch, is there?

Imprisoned Iranian blogger receives press award. Kouhyar Goudarzi, one of 17 prisoners on a hunger strike to protest horrifying conditions in Tehran's Evin prison, has been awarded this year's Aubuchon Freedom of the Press Award by the National Press Club.

Activist gets parole revoked for Facebook. Rod Coronado, who served time in prison for arson after burning down research facilities at the Michigan State University, and who has been arrested several times since, has had his parole revoked. One of the violations was "associating" with a proscribed type of person, an environmental activist who had expressed approval of illegal actions for protest. Coronado accepted a Facebook friend request from Greenpeace co-founder Mike Roselle. The other probation violation was accessing a computer outside his home. The conditions come from two different convictions.

Discuss

It was only a matter of time before this app came out. The folks over at Hot or Not have launched a location-based free iPhone app that will show you the hottest ladies and gents that are close to you.

If you aren’t familiar with Hot or Not, the site allows you to rate pictures of girls or a guys (depending on your taste) on a scale of 1 to 10. It’s a mindless site and game which has managed to gather a fairly massive user base.

The app is fairly simple in what it does: it uses the iPhone’s built-in GPS technology to map out the hottest guys or girls registered on HotOrNot.com that are close to your location. Currently the site draws from a database of 4.8 million members.

Hot or Not says that the app received more than 2,000 sign-ups its first day in the App Store. Last year, the startup also launched Hot Or Not War, which we covered here. Hot Or Not was bought by Avid Life Media in 2008.

As we pointed out earlier, today is Google Chrome’s second birthday. Since it launched in beta on September 2, 2008, it has come a long way (it’s already 6 versions deep). Back then, it was Windows-only, with official Mac and Linux support only coming late last year. But now it’s on the verge of another milestone: becoming the top browser coming to this site.

I’ve checked out our logs over the past few years to see how well Chrome has been doing compared to its rival browsers. The numbers are shockingly strong for such a new entry — particularly in the past year. Obviously, TechCrunch has a tech-centric audience, but I don’t think it’s off-base to say that you’re also a leading audience of early adopters that often point to where the general public will be in the future.

The numbers are clear: Firefox is in trouble. It has been the top browser since we began using Google Analytics to record stats back in 2007. By 2008, it was nearly 25 percentage points ahead of the next closest rival, Internet Explorer. As of yesterday, it stood just 3 percentage points ahead of the next closest rival, Chrome.

Here are the numbers. In August 2010 (the month that just ended):

• Firefox: 33.98%
• Chrome: 26.22%
• Safari: 18.40%
• IE: 13.23%
• Mozilla Compatible Agent: 5.46%

One year ago, in August 2009 (right before Chrome’s first birthday), the numbers looked like this:

• Firefox: 45.91%
• IE: 20.61%
• Safari: 18.85%
• Chrome: 10.09%
• Mozilla Compatible Anent: 1.83%

Two years ago, in August 2008 (right before Chrome launched), the numbers looked like this:

• Firefox: 55.63%
• IE: 31.21%
• Safari 9.76%
• Opera: 2.23%
• Mozilla: 0.62%

By September 2008, the month Chrome launched in beta, it had an immediate impact. But remember, it was Windows-only at the time:

• Firefox: 52.36%
• IE: 28.55%
• Safari: 9.18%
• Chrome: 6.58%
• Opera: 2.05%

And just for fun, let’s go back three full years, to August 2007.

• Firefox: 48.81%
• IE: 40.61%
• Safari: 6.59%
• Opera: 2.29%
• Mozilla: 0.72%

Chrome has clearly taken a bite out of Firefox, IE, and even Opera’s already small share. Safari is up big over the past couple of years as well, but its growth has seemingly stalled over the past year — despite iPad browser usage (in terms of visits to TechCrunch) exploding.

Of course, overall traffic to TechCrunch is also way up over these past few years. It just appears that more and more people who are visiting are now doing so via Chrome.

Let’s look at the numbers from yesterday:

• Firefox: 34.68%
• Chrome: 31.09%
• Safari: 15.65%
• IE: 12.77%
• Mozilla Compatible Agent: 3.48%

Yes, it’s just a matter of time before Chrome is on top.

As a humorous aside, IE with Chrome Frame, the plug-in Google made to make IE behave like Chrome, is now a bigger source of traffic to TechCrunch than Opera Mini or BlackBerry. While still tiny, it too is growing.

CrunchBase InformationGoogle ChromeFirefoxTechCrunchInformation provided by CrunchBase

If you don’t count the ol’ iPod Classic, Apple completely revamped the iPod line yesterday at its annual music event. The shuffle saw the return of buttons, while the nano is a miniature multi-touch marvel that can apparently double as a fancy watch in a pinch. Then there’s the iPod touch, which is now the most popular iPod model of all, thanks to support for apps and web browsing. On the surface, it looks like the new touch is everything one would want in a contract-free iPhone 4 without cellular voice support. I would say that it’s close, but not quite.

I will give Apple credit, as it found a way to cram more iPhone 4 features into the new touch, even as it kept price points the same. The new touch enjoys the 960 x 640 “retina display,” an Apple A4 chip and two cameras, both of which support Apple’s FaceTime video calling feature. That said, however, there are still three missing features that make the new touch close to, but not on par with, a contract-free iPhone 4.

Location, location, location! There’s still no GPS chip in the iPod touch. Instead, the device will use available Wi-Fi networks to triangulate a location, just as it does on the iPad Wi-Fi model I own. That method actually works reasonably well, but of course, requires the touch to be connected to a hotspot. So much for check-ins on Foursquare or finding local points-of-interest if there’s no Wi-Fi to be found.

Just give me data. Unlike the iPad, Apple chose not to offer a 3G radio option in the touch, likely to keep the device thin. To be as mobile as the iPhone, features such a radio and a microSIM slot would have been a nice offer. Data plans could have been month-to-month for those that want them, although an option like this would surely boost the price of the device; it’s a $130 option in the iPad, for example. The touch has always been limited to Wi-Fi, so this is nothing new, but again, it’s a key difference between the touch and the iPhone.

2003 called and wants its camera back. Yes, the new touch has a front-facing VGA camera and a sensor on the back too. That rear camera even shoots high-definition, 720p video, just like the iPhone, but don’t even think to compare the rear shooter to that of the 5 megapixel camera on the iPhone 4. Stills from the iPod touch are a lowly 960 x 720, which works out to just under 0.7 megapixels. A solid shot like the one to the right taken by my son with his iPhone 4 isn’t happening on the new touch. Pics will look fine from the touch for posting on social networking sites and such, but blowing them up is going to be a painful experience, as details will lose definition faster than you can say “one more thing.”

I raised these kinds of points prior to Apple’s new product announcement, saying that the touch will never have all of the same features as an iPhone because the phone bits allow Apple to enjoy a $600 average selling price per handset. The phone costs less than half that to manufacture and consumers in the U.S. pay $199 or $299 for the device. Apple receives a carrier subsidy to make up the difference between the ASP and the price a customer pays.  What incentive then, does Apple have to make an iPod touch equal to an iPhone — minus cellular voice, that is — when it will earn less profit per device? As long as we’re on a subsidy model for handsets, Apple has no incentive to do so.

Having said that, the new iPod touch is close enough to an iPhone 4 for me personally, and probably many others who already have a smartphone. I’ve pre-ordered a 32 GB model that I’ll carry with my Google Android phone. My phone has a 5 megapixel camera for better stills and I’ll use the free Wi-Fi hotspot feature to get my iPod touch online during my travels. Looks like Apple is making money from me, even though it still doesn’t offer a contract-free iPhone 4 in the touch!

Related GigaOM Pro Content:

10 Mobile Predictions for 2010

The Internet was in flames last week as popular social news curation site Digg.com launched the latest iteration of its platform, unleashing a groundswell of outrage and protest from a majority of the site's loyal users. A week later, Digg has begun to respond to its passionate community, making rapid changes and bug fixes as its exhausted back-end infrastructure struggles to keep up. Today I spoke with Digg's VP of Product Keval Desai about the launch, the company's reaction to the negativity from its community and how it intends to move forward into the future.

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"We recognize that the launch was not as smooth as we would have hoped," Desai told ReadWriteWeb. Perhaps that is a bit of an understatement.

"We had a game plan and clearly it did not go smoothly. In hindsight, there are several things that could have been done better."
- Keval DesaiStumbling Off the Starting Blocks

For last Wednesday's relaunch, Digg migrated all of its traffic over to an entirely new back-end infrastructure built from the ground up over the course of 18 months. The new system had been tested in beta for almost two months, but the preparations the site conducted for the public release apparently fell short of what was needed to handle last week's traffic surge.

"Hindsight is 20/20. We made a calculated decision to test the site in beta and then launch," Desai says. "We had a game plan and clearly it did not go smoothly. In hindsight, there are several things that could have been done better."

A few of those "several things" include a slower roll-out and a better explanation of the site's rationale, admits Desai. With many Internet sites, he explains, features are more continually released to the public, not all at once as was the case with Digg 4. Part of the reason for rewriting the back-end of the site was to allow for easier and more frequent product iterations - a practice Digg intends to implement in the future.

Turning Negative into Positive

As for the backlash from frustrated Digg users, Desai says the company is thankful for their passion.

"It's better than having no reaction," he says. "They have a right to say what they want to say, and for us it's all good feedback. We would rather not have users be frustrated, that was not a goal of ours, but we are reacting to those frustrations and making changes where they make sense while keeping our broader mission in mind."

Going Forward

That "broader mission," Desai says, includes continuing to grow the platform to provide for publishers, both large and small, as well as its users that make the site what it is. Since launching v4, Digg has seen traffic at equal or higher numbers each day, and the My News section has helped send registration numbers through the roof.

But as Desai admits, "it is still early going," and if Digg wants to continue to leverage its recent growth, it will need to more carefully and more stably iterate its product in the future.

Discuss

Twice an hour, an animated version of Google CEO Eric Schmidt can currently be seen giving away free ice cream to little kids in return for their private information on a 540 square foot screen hovering over New York's Times Square. The cartoon was produced by a "Inside Google," a project of the non-partisan Consumer Watchdog group, that wants to draw attention to what it perceives as Google CEO Eric Schmidt's "lack of regard for our online privacy."

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Eric Schmidt is "Out of Control"

The reason for this? According to "Inside Google," Eric Schmidt is "out of control. When questioned about privacy, he has said, 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Recently, he suggested children could change their names when they got older if they wanted to escape what was embarrassing and public in their online lives.'"

Do Not Track Me List

The project advocates the creation of a "Do Not Track Me" list, similar to the National Do Not Call Registry that allows users to prevent telemarketers from calling their phones. Inside Google is being supported by the Rose Foundation.

It's worth noting that Google already allows consumers to opt out of personalized advertising and Google Analytics tracking.

What do You Think?

We can't help but think that the extreme caricature of Schmidt takes away from the overall message of the video. We're also not sure that the majority of people walking around on Times Square actually know who Schmidt is.

What do you think? Are you worried about Google knowing too much about you? Do you think this video is an effective means of alerting people to the potential privacy issues online? Or is Google being singled out unfairly and the video should really feature Mark Zuckerberg?

Tip of the hat to Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land for alerting us to this video.

Discuss

Prepare to get hit by a ton of Sammy marketing. The commercial embedded here is likely just the first wave of Samsung’s assault on the iPad. And it seems that they’re going about it the right way, too.

The commercial simply shows off the Galaxy Tab‘s capabilities in an Apple-ish sort of way. We’ve said all along that if any Android tablet has a chance to steal marketshare away from the iPad, it’s the Samsung Galaxy Tab and this commercial, along with our extensive hands-on, seems to confirm our thought. Now all we need is to know is its price tag and when it will hit stores.

Digg has had a hectic week. The company’s long-awaited relaunch didn’t exactly go as planned — it was fraught with technical problems and poorly received by many users. The Digg team has been working like crazy to fix the site. But Digg VP of product management Keval Desai finally got a chance to breathe today, and talk to GigaOM. He was able to put a positive spin on recent events, telling us that while the Digg team is not proud of the problems with the V4 launch it is excited that the new platform allows the company to iterate quickly. He said V4 has already been updated with new code and features more than 100 times in the last week, in comparison to the past where Digg would languish for months without change.

Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our conversation:

GigaOM: V4 had been in development since before you joined the company nine months ago and you’d invited tons of beta testers. So why wasn’t it ready for primetime?

Keval Desai: You’re right, it had been around for some time — over a year. A critique was that Digg was slow in launching things, so we wanted to get to a platform that we could launch quickly on. So we went from a SQL database to NoSQL, and did a lot of other things in the stack using open source and other technologies.

This is a massive platform that serves millions of people, where if I’m following you, and you Digg a story, it immediately pops up for me, and if I have 10 followers it goes to them as well, and it’s an instant nuclear reaction. That’s a feature that I don’t think most Internet companies are trying to attempt. I think we’re trying to attempt something very innovative and it carries some technical risk.

As you know we ran the product in beta for almost a couple of months, and it was running and in parallel to our existing platform. But the beta product was invitation-only so we didn’t have full load until launch. At launch, we saw higher traffic than on Digg.com on the previous version — from renewed interest or people who had never heard of us who came for the first time. The second thing that happened is that the entire technical stack, some of which was fairly new, finally felt the brunt of the traffic, and saw some stress points that we didn’t see in our load-testing. But every day the site gets more and more stable. We still have stability issues that I do want to acknowledge, but I think we are reacting. Since we launched we’ve had more than 100 incremental launches — bug fixes, stability patches — and that speaks to the capability of the new platform.

GigaOM: Do you think Digg users would have revolted against anything you launched?

Desai: I wouldn’t call what happened a revolt. I think the worst thing that could have happened is that we launched a product and nobody noticed. I think what we’re from hearing users and power users is good feedback. On balance, they understand that Digg needs to have a scalable platform, it needs diversity of content, and people want a personalized view of news.

It’s a human tendency to react to something that’s new and that’s fine. What’s happening right now is par for the course except for the stability aspect. A lot of sites launch features every week, and with Digg we hadn’t launched in a while. This will become an incremental revolution.

GigaOM: What’s the distribution on Digg between readers, power users, and new users? How does your product team think about designing for such different experiences?

Desai: With any community site, whether it’s Wikipedia, Digg or Facebook, I think the typical distribution is you have a lot many more readers than writers. On a high level that’s clearly the case with Digg as well. But one interesting thing with V4 is the number of daily registered users has exploded. We’re seeing very high engagement in terms of people logging into the site, so that’s good. We think that bond of knowing who’re you’re following and who’s following you will get people to be more active.

In terms of who we’re designing this for, we want this to be a platform for users with a variety of interests, politics, sports, technology, lifestyle. Readers of all ages, of all nationalities. More than half of our traffic comes from outside the United States. Imagine if we can localize this product; we clearly have latent demand. The vision is to provide a news platform that serves a variety of needs as daily habit. The percentage of repeat users in the last week for V4 is quite high, much higher than we were seeing in V3. I don’t want to take anything for granted, but I think the early findings are quite clear.

GigaOM: Some changes you’ve made are not bug fixes or stability issues, but rather bringing back features from V3 that you had decided to take out. How do you make those decisions about relenting to user demands for old features (even though there may be more nostalgia around them than actual use — for instance, Kevin Rose said the Upcoming page had only 0.4% of views)?

Desai: In both the cases so far, Upcoming and giving users the choice to make top news default, these were things we wanted to add — but not on Day 1. What we wanted to do was get user reaction and react to it, rather than allowing feature creep to delay the launch of the platform.

GigaOM: Your bio on your Digg profile says “my job is to let the inmates run the asylum here and get out of their way.” What do you mean by that?

Desai: I think the philosophy behind that is when you’re at a job as a manager especially at entrepreneurial companies you need to be a coach rather than a micromanager. I want to hire the best and most brilliant people, then let them do what the came here to do: think of innovative ideas for millions of users, take some risks, launch, get feedback and react.

GigaOM: So the “inmates” are your coworkers, not the users?

Desai: Yes!

See also: New Digg CEO Must Grab the Reins and Go

Skype announced today that the latest beta version of Skype 5.0 would up the ante in terms of group video chat, as well as introduce a more stable and sleeker experience for its Windows users.

When the company first introduced group chat in May, it limited the number of participants to five, but now it has doubled that number to 10.

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This limitation was one of the primary things we focused on when we looked at the new feature, which we immediately compared to free, Web-based services like Tiny Chat. As we noted then, Tiny Chat offered more than double the number of live video/audio streams, with 12 users per room, but now Skype barely lags behind. The Skype blog offers words of warning on how to use Skype's video chat feature with your friends and family:

Note that everyone in a group video call now needs to be running this version, so if your friends, family or colleagues are using Beta 1, they'll have to upgrade before you can include them in group video calls.

In addition to the increased video chat features, the second beta of Skype 5.0 brings a "refreshed user interface" along with a Skype Home "where you can follow your contacts' mood messages, set your profile picture and mood message, receive account notifications and learn more about using Skype."

While the company says it has fixed some stability issues, it notes that this is still a beta version so some bugs are to be expected. The second beta version of Skype 5.0 is available for download now.

Discuss

We've all been there. You want to isolate an issue with a server running on a port but want something quick and easy to verify if it is a host firewall problem or something else. Perhaps you are dealing with someone on the other end of the network that says it is a firewall problem. How you prove otherwise?

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Luckily, there is socat. While there are other network Swiss army knives out there such as Ncat and Netcat, you might find socat worth a try. Socat is available for most Linux and BSD distributions and there are binaries available for Windows.

Sock It To Me

In this example, we have a service running on a high port (6000) on a machine "tom" and we want to prove that the firewall rule is indeed allowing traffic from the outside world from another machine "jerry".

In this very simple example, we are logged into tom and start by confirming that socat is installed on tom. Here we simply install the socat package via yum on tom. Next, we'll make sure that the firewall rules on tom are correct. Finally, we issue the socat one liner to listen on the port we want to test for the firewall allowing incoming traffic on port 6000 and we save our results on tom to /tmp.

Now that we have a service listening on tom it's time to login to jerry and telnet to the tom on the specified port. We'll simply type in "Hello world" and then escape from our telnet session.

At this point we can review the file on tom:/tmp to see if our testing was fruitful. Success! Now, time to tell the other end that the problem isn't with the firewall on your end!

There a huge number of socat one liners out there and the socat documentation is detailed. You can imagine the possibilities if in this example both tom and jerry both have access to socat.

Again, this is a very simple example but the power of socat is how quickly and easily you can verify and solve problems. Of course, socat use cases don't end there and you can quickly find socat being an indispensable tool for getting things done.

If you already know and love socat, what are some of your favorite one liners?

Discuss

UPDATED: For months at length, Fremont, Calif.-based storage company, 3PAR could barely get above $10 a share. And then a couple of weeks ago, Dell changed that with a $18 a share offer to buy the company. Now, HP is offering $33 a share.

I often point to my first post on Twitter, the day it launched in 2006. Why? Mostly because of how wrong I was. Best line: “I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.” I also love that original vowel-free logo.

The first couple of comments to that post are classic as well:

I do not understand the utility of adding the SMS messages to a public webpage or making messages from my network public. I would have to pass on that type of offering. The ability to make messages private should be added asap.

and

i do not want to be woken up at 4 a.m. because my friend got drunk and decided to text Twttr with “asdl im at barasdf sooo drunksalkfjs”…i find it interesting such an annoying feature is supposedly causing viral growth…i’m done developing social software if the key to success is to be intrusive

and

So is it pronounced twitter or twatter?

With the benefit of hindsight it’s clear that I was…a bit off on how Twitter would play out. As were most of the commenters, although commenters are often negative just to be negative. And the most wrong of all? The Odeo investors who elected to take their money back rather than port it over to Twitter.

My point here is that you never know which startups will make it and which won’t. As a blogger I say it like I see it, but I’m wrong a lot. It’s why I’m not a venture capitalist, where wrong decisions tend to have real consequences. And this is also a reason for us all to give startups a little breathing room when they’re finding their space in the world. Startups evolve. The world evolves (things have changed a lot since 2006).

That dumb startup that’s just a rehash of that other thing from before, with a twist, just may turn out to be something special. Perhaps world-changing special. It’s why I like The Man In The Arena so much, and why I’m an eternal champion of the entrepreneur.

CrunchBase InformationTwitterInformation provided by CrunchBase

Lately, the discussion about texting has mostly focused on teenagers, who now often send hundreds of text messages per day. While voice calling is still the primary use of cell phones for adults, almost three quarters of all adults in the U.S. now send and receive text messages. According to a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the average adult texter sends and receives 10 messages per day, but a minority (4%) now sends more than 200 messages every day.

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About 50% of all adults who use text messaging send between 1 and 10 messages, 25% send between 11 and 50 messages a day, 10% send between 50 and 200 messages. How does this compare to teenagers? According to an earlier Pew report, a smaller percentage of teenagers uses text messages (54%) than adults, but those that do use it tend to use it far more often than adults. About half of all teens in the U.S. send 50 or more text messages a day and one in three sends more than 100 messages a day.

The number of adults who use text messaging has gone up steadily over the last few years. While 65% of adults in the U.S. were sending and receiving text messages in 2009, this number is now up to 72%.

A lot of Texting is About Location Sharing

When adults use text messaging, they mostly do so to say hello and chat (34%) and to report where they are and where someone else is (24%). Given how important location is for a lot of these usage patterns, we would think that there has to be a big market for location services (like EchoEcho) that make private location sharing between cell phones easy.

More Statistics about Adult Cell Phone Usage

• 82% of adults in the U.S. own a cell phone (83% of all men, 81% of all women)
• women make slightly fewer calls with their cell phones than men
• 65% of adults say they have ever slept with their cell phone on or right next to their bed (and 90% of younger adults - who probably also use their phones as alarm clocks - say they have done so)
• 42% feel irritated when a call or text interrupts them
• 57% of adults with cell phones say that they have received unwanted or spam text messages (what exactly constitutes an "unwanted" text message isn't clear in Pew's question, however)

Logo used courtesy of Flickr user Dan Zen.

Discuss

There seems to be some confusion out there right now about iTunes Ping, Apple’s new music social network, and Facebook. Some people seem to think it was never a part of iTunes, that Apple decided against connecting; while other reports say they think it was at one point integrated, but that it wasn’t working and has since been removed. I can tell you for sure that yesterday Facebook Connect was a part of Ping — because I used it.

When I first loaded iTunes 10 yesterday and started up Ping, connecting with Facebook was the first thing I did to find friends. At first, I will say that it didn’t work. I hit the Connect button, entered my credentials, and nothing happened. But I tried again and it worked perfectly. I found a handful of Facebook friends who had just started using Ping as well and connected with them.

Further, looking at my Facebook account, I’m still connected to Apple’s Ping app there. And so are 27 of my Facebook friends, currently. Apple has removed the implementation from iTunes for right now, but the app is still live and connected on Facebook.

I also spoke with some Apple representatives at the event yesterday, and they confirmed that the Facebook Connect implementation was only for pulling your friends in to Ping. No other data was being transferred, I was told.

The app page on Facebook seems to confirm this:

This application makes it easy to find and follow any of your Facebook friends who also use iTunes Ping.

So why did Apple remove it? Who knows. It could have been buggy (as I said, it was yesterday), or maybe Facebook didn’t like some aspect of the implementation and asked iTunes to rework it. So far, neither side is talking.

I do think that Ping has a nice and simple social model which lets users follow, friend, or lurk. Compare that to Facebook, which is a mess or privacy settings.

But again, the connection between the two was definitely working yesterday. But it only about finding friends, no other data was being transfered over.

Update — Here’s Facebook canned statement on the matter:

Facebook believes in connecting people with their interests and we’ve partnered with innovative developers around the world who share this vision. Facebook and Apple have cooperated successfully in the past to offer people great social experiences and look forward to doing so in the future.

CrunchBase InformationiTunesAppleFacebookInformation provided by CrunchBase

Fora.TV has always been playing a dangerous game—trying to sell long-form online video about intellectual ideas. That’s like trying to sell sunblock to the cast of Jersey Shore. Fora calls itself Hulu for “the Thinking Man’s Web.” (There’s a Thinking Man’s Web?)

Eighteen months after closing its $6 million series A round and long time magazine editor Blaise Zerega took over as CEO, Fora seems to be grinding it out. The traffic has tripled and it’s now streaming about three million videos per month, mostly captured from conferences and high-level events. Those aren’t close to YouTube numbers, but considering the intellectually demanding content– think Timothy Geithner talking for an hour about the best ways to stimulate the economy—it’s impressive.

Despite its limited size, Fora has a few high-brow sponsors like Mercedes Benz who want to reach its rarefied audience. Conferences love it, because it gives them a sophisticated way to broadcast content to people who can’t attend. Anything they make is money that would have been left on the table otherwise. For instance, 150 people attended a talk by Stanford’s director of design earlier this year, but 500 people watched it live over Fora. Thirty days later more than 325,000 watched it. And this was just a talk about how some students set up an incubator at Stanford. It may not be a YouTube-sized business, but there’s clearly something there.

And, as of today, Fora has a new $5/month subscription to watch and download most of the videos without ads. The site still offers pay-per-view pricing for specific talks, too. Think of the business model like cable TV, Zerega says. There are basic packages and premium packages and stuff you pay for individually ala On Demand. Think of their content like the Discovery Channel. No doubt when it launched, media executives were saying, “People aren’t going to watch long form non-fiction content on cable! Shark week? Who cares about sharks?”

Everyone wants to post live video of their events these days, but it’s incredibly hard, expensive and time consuming to do well—something we’ve all learned getting TechCrunchTV up and running this summer. What gives Fora an edge is that it can do everything from filming a conference’s content to writing headlines and speaker bios to cutting the film into watchable DVD chapters and three-minute teasers to writing transcripts. And increasingly, Fora is working on distribution, trying to get that content available on as many platforms as possible. Already Fora is on Boxee and Comcast.

There are so many wonky, technical, tedious details in that process that most think-tank or university conferences just don’t have the staff or know-how to tackle. Put another way—maybe Fora doesn’t solve an obvious problem for millions of viewers (I have an hour to kill…..where can I find a lecture on free market economics?) but it does solve a big problem for thousands of conferences and event planners, who in turn will push that content to their constituents.

It’s no surprise Zerega was the managing editor of Wired during its “Long Tail” days.

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"...a tablet is, crucially, a more shareable computer. A laptop, with its fragile hinge-ware and space-gobbling keyboard, is just not comfy to share. A tablet is easier to bring to the caf�, easier to hand across the table or along the sofa, easier to seize in the heat of the moment, easier to hold up in triumph, easier to set aside when you need to meet someone's eyes.

How big a market is that? Anyone who says they know is lying."

-Google's Tim Bray, co-creator of XML and now Android Developer Advocate, discussing the new Samsung Galaxy Tab, and tablet computers in general. The Galaxy Tab has a 7" screen (almost 30% smaller than the iPad screen) and runs Android 2.2 (Froyo).

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That was certainly our experience from the beginning with the iPad. Sarah Perez noted when her arrived that it was Easter weekend and took it to a holiday gathering. You can read about the eye-opening experience she had in her post iPad: The First Real Family Computer.

I just handed my visiting niece our iPad as soon as she woke up. Her four year-old sister greeted me on my last trip to her house with a shout of "Hi Uncle Marshall! Did you bring that iPad??"

Discuss

You know things are bad when AOL’s search business looks better than yours. That’s the position in which Yahoo finds itself. The company said in a securities filing yesterday that it has lost a lucrative search-advertising deal with South Korea’s largest search engine, which some analysts say could carve as much as 10 percent off Yahoo’s gross revenue. Meanwhile, AOL today signed a deal with Google to extend its existing search partnership for five years, and the new arrangement will also expand the services — and potentially the revenue — that it gets from the search giant.

In addition to search and keyword-related advertising, the new AOL-Google deal includes a mobile partnership for the first time, and AOL has agreed to distribute its video content through YouTube, as Ryan noted in a post at NewTeeVee. There was some speculation that AOL might look elsewhere for a search partner after its arrangement with Google expired, which it was scheduled to do in December. AOL originally signed the deal with Google in 2002, after the search company agreed to invest $1 billion in the former Time Warner entity in return for a 5-percent stake. The extension involves no further investment by Google (which wrote off most of the previous investment).

The fact that AOL’s chief executive, Tim Armstrong, helped negotiate the previous deal while he was at Google (he’s the former head of U.S. sales at the company) probably helped cement the new partnership. Armstrong told PaidContent in an interview that the new deal should make the portal’s search traffic more lucrative — something the company desperately needs, since the volume of that traffic is declining as the service continues to lose subscribers, and AOL’s overall revenue declines along with it.

Yahoo — which recently signed a partnership deal with Microsoft to use its Bing search as the default for Yahoo’s properties — may be doing better than AOL when it comes to overall revenues, but its search-advertising business will take a hit with the loss of the contract with South Korea’s NHN, which has 65 percent of the search market in that country. According to UBS Securities analyst Brian Pitz, the loss of the South Korean search-ad deal could cut Yahoo’s gross revenue by about 8 percent, while another securities analyst estimated gross revenues could be chopped by as much as 10 percent.

The Yahoo-Microsoft partnership took another hit earlier this year when Yahoo Japan — which is partially owned by the U.S. web portal — dropped Microsoft and signed a search deal with Google. While it may not be strictly apples and oranges to compare Yahoo’s loss of the South Korean arrangement with AOL’s partnership with Google, one thing seems fairly obvious: at least in the short term, search revenue at Yahoo looks to be going down, while AOL’s search business looks to be getting better — or at least to be slowing its gradual decline.

Related GigaOM Pro Content (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Graham Hills

CrowdConf: 1st Annual Conference on the Future of Distributed Work
Oct. 4, 2010, San Francisco, Calif. at the St. Regis Hotel We bring together researchers, technologists, outsourcing experts, legal scholars, and artists to discuss the rapidly democratizing and flattening of the global labor market. The event includes a series of peer-reviewed presentation tracks, posters, technology demonstrations as well as invited keynote addresses from leaders in crowdsourcing.

GigaOM readers receive 15% on tickets.  Register here http://crowdconf.eventbrite.com/ with code gigom.

The Event:

CrowdConf brings together researchers, technologists, outsourcing experts, legal scholars, and artists to discuss the rapidly democratizing and flattening of the global labor market. The event includes a series of peer-reviewed presentation tracks, posters, technology demonstrations as well as invited keynote addresses from leaders in crowdsourcing.

Confirmed Speakers:

• Sharon Chirella, 
VP, 
Amazon Mechanical Turk
• Tim Ferriss , Author, 
The 4-Hour Work Week
• David Alan Grier , Author, 
When Computers Were Human
• Barney Pell , Partner, Strategist and Evangelist, 
Microsoft
• Maynard Webb, 
CEO, 
LiveOps
• Jonathan Zittrain , Professor, 
Harvard
  

Topics:

• Past, present, and future of crowdsourcing
• Quality assurance and metrics
• Social and economic implications of crowdsourcing
• Task design/Worker incentives
• Innovative projects, experiments, and applications

We are inviting submissions on all topics regarding crowdsourcing, including:

• Past, present, and future of crowdsourcing
• Quality assurance and metrics
• Social and economic implications of crowdsourcing
• Task design/Worker incentives
• Innovative projects, experiments, and applications

Contacts:

Sponsorships/Registration:
Mollie Allick
events@crowdflower.com

Media/PR:
Julie Crabill
press@crowdflower.com

Speaker/Program Ideas:
Aaron Shaw
papers@crowdflower.com

The announcement of Google's Gmail Priority Inbox likely made more than a few enterprise knowledge workers stuck with Microsoft Outlook and drowning in e-mail quite envious of Gmail. That is, if they weren't envious already. Marshall also took a look at a few plugins and services that are turning e-mail into a platform, including the incredible Rapportive.

Lucky for Outlook users, there are actually several plugins to extend Outlook's functionality and ease that Gmail envy. E-mail addons have been heating up for a while now. Here are five plugins you should check out, whether you have Gmail envy or not.

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ClearContext

If you're looking for something similar to Priority Inbox, give ClearContext a shot. ClearContext analyzes your e-mail and searches for patterns of behavior. It then prioritizes incoming e-mail and can offer suggestions on where to file particular e-mails. It's not perfect - I wouldn't rely on it to never miss important e-mails - but it can help cut through the clutter.

It's designed to work well with the Getting Things Done workflow and uses folders as "projects" and enables you to create tasks easily from any e-mail.

Xobni

If you're more focused on search instead of filing, Xobni, which we've covered several times offers a powerful search functionality.

And if you're suffering from Rapportive envy, Xobni also brings social network profiles right into your inbox.

And for those really interested in "e-mail as a platform" Xobni has a development platform for both Outlook and Gmail.

Outlook Social Connector

If you just want a plugin that brings social networking into Outlook, Microsoft has its own free plugin that does just that.

Lookeen

On the other hand, if you're only interested in search and don't want the social networking features, Xobni competitor Lookeen is worth a look.

Baydin

Baydin has its own quirky search ideas, which we've covered here. Its flagship "unsearch" product is still forthcoming. In the meantime, some might find its Boomberang tool useful: you can specify a time you want an e-mail to be sent to you. (Baydin also has a Gmail version is beta.)

How Do You Deal with E-Mail Overload in Outlook

Do you use any plugins to manage the e-mail firehose in Outlook? Or do you have any special strategies for coping with your mail? Let us know!

Discuss