Author: Mike Melanson

For websites that find themselves stuck in the middle of the ongoing feud between Apple and Adobe, there might be another way out of the mess – Ripcode. According to the company, its latest product is a server-side solution for websites that want to get their Flash-based content onto Apple’s iPad and iPhone.

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The somewhat futuristic sounding “TransAct Transcoder V6 can intercept Adobe Flash-based file or live video” and translate the video into a format compatible with both the iPhone and the iPad. As the company points out in its blog post, Flash is used in a number of settings, especially live streaming of news and sports and other video content. And while HTML5 is one solution, it is not yet widely adopted. The company’s transcoding service offers an immediate and seamless solution.

The transcoder is a completely server-side solution, meaning it does not have to be installed by users or pass by Apple’s scrutiny to get into the app store. Instead, it runs on the website server and detects the requesting platform and transcodes the video as needed.

“The ‘Flash on iPad’ dilemma is really just the latest in a long line of speed bumps on the road towards ‘any-content, any-time, any-place, any-device’ that we all desire. Fortunately, our technology removes this barrier in a way that is attractive to content hosters, a key device manufacturer, a key video player provider, and the end user alike,” RipCode CEO Brendon Mills says in the company’s blog.

The best part of this solution, as far as it relates to both Apple and Adobe, is that it has nothing to do with either. And rather than having to swap out services and modify your whole website, a simple server-side install handles the issue entirely, outputting the appropriate video format for whatever the device.

The service supports a number of formats and will be demonstrated this week at the NAB 2010 in Las Vegas.

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As Google has worked to add more and more real-time search capabilities by adding content from sites like Facebook, MySpace, Buzz and Twitter, we’ve been able to see more and more what people are talking about online. Google’s latest feature, which it is announcing today, takes real-time data and puts it into a perspective we can work with – the past.

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Rather than letting all of this real-time data simply stream past and evaporate into thin air, Google is rolling out a “replay” feature, that lets you look at real-time data – in this case tweets – at any specific time in the past.

The feature offers a timeline of tweets, showing the volume of tweets containing relevant search terms, broken down according to scale. After playing with it for a few minutes, we were able to see that it even gets as narrow as a minute-by-minute breakdown of tweets on a topic. It will be available by clicking on “Show Options” on the left side of the Google search results screen and then “Updates”.

For now, Google says that it will offer tweets going back to February 11, 2010 but will soon extend back to March 21, 2006. The company says that the feature is currently rolling out and should be available globally in English within the next few days, but you can give it a whirl before then.

As Google points out, the “replay” feature may be a great way to explore “how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens’ retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run? These are the kinds of things you can explore with the new updates mode.”

We’re looking forward to seeing what this sort of interaction with real-time data, in the aggregate, will bring to the table. It might not only be an invaluable reporting tool, but a great way to find out when a local restaurant is at its busiest.

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URL shortener bit.ly has announced some simple user interface changes for its standard users and a whole series of new features for paid users, including custom domain names and statistics.

While the standard user interface changes are neat, it’s the “end-to-end branding” that we’re actually looking forward to, as it should take a bit of that mystery meat feel out of our day to day online lives.

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The biggest changes standard bit.ly users will see is the searchable history, which allows users to search through URLS they have added. Bit.ly has also tried to make it easier to manage the links you’ve added by adding a specific “Manage” section, which will show all the links with basic statistics on each, such as Twitter conversations and clicks. And all of a user’s shared links will be available in RSS format.

As for the bit.ly’s pro users, the service will begin offering a traffic dashboard, short domain redirection, unlimited API calls and, most importantly, a full “end-to-end branding”. End-to-end branding means that if someone goes to shorten a New York Times URL, for example, they will end up with a link containing the nyti.ms short link instead of a standard bit.ly link. This will happen for all users, whether they shorten the link through the bit.ly website or through third-party Twitter clients such as TweetDeck, Twitterfeed and ÜberTwitter.

While this type of service is not only great for the website, its useful for the users too, because you don’t have to blindly click on a shortened link. It keeps everything short and sweet for our Twitter character limit while giving us, the user, some clue of where we’re going.

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When we first looked at the conviction of three Google employees by an Italian judge in late February, we agreed with Google’s stance that the conviction attacked the very ideals of the Internet as we know it.

The comments in reaction to this article were many and varied, often speculating on the reasoning behind the conviction. Today, a CNet article identifies profit as the judge’s reasoning behind the decision.

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As Google stated when the convictions were first handed down, the case was concerned with a video of “students at a school in Turin, Italy [who] filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police.”

According to the Associated Press translation of the court document (PDF), the judge said Google’s profiting off of the video was the reason behind the conviction.

“In simple words, it is not the writing on the wall that constitutes a crime for the owner of the wall, but its commercial exploitation can,” wrote Judge Oscar Magi, continuing to say that the Internet was no longer an “unlimited prairie where everything is permitted and nothing can be prohibited”.

Profit, especially that profit which is made from completely automated advertising systems, seems like an odd reasoning to hold a content provider responsible for the content uploaded by its users. The oft-quoted statistic to keep in mind here is that YouTube has more than 20 hours of video uploaded every minute to the service. Judge Magi, however, argues that “the overwhelming speed of technical progress will allow, sooner or later, ever more stringent controls on uploaded data on the part of Web site managers”.

Google gave CNET the following statement in response to the news:

“We are reading the full 111-page document from the judge. But as we said when the verdict was announced, this conviction attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. If these principles are swept aside, then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear. These are important points of principle, which is why we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision.”

We have to say, we still agree with Google on this one, as far as the spirit of the conviction goes. Holding the content host, YouTube in this case, liable for the content of its users attacks the very foundation of the Web. If, as some claim, Google knowingly allowed the content to stay on the site, then its a different story. But if the company immediately responded to official requests to remove the video, it should not be held responsible for its users’ content.

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Twitter is asking you, its users, if you have 140 seconds to answer seven simple questions about its service. Now, in calmer times, a simple user survey might just pass by unnoticed, but with all the hubbub over the past week about Twitter buying Tweetie, Fred Wilson’s over-analyzed blog post and the unveiling of Twitter’s ad platform, everyone’s looking for clues as to Twitter’s next move.

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The survey wants to know what third-party clients you’ve used in the past, what ones you would recommend, what types of people you follow on Twitter, what types you want to find more of, and your primary (and secondary) reason for using the service.

The immediate conclusion to jump to, from these questions, is that Twitter is eyeballing other apps, either to buy outright or to work with on its ad platform. It still remains to be seen how Twitter ads will play out in third-party clients and Twitter could be getting some market data for precisely that reason. Another way to look at it is, we get to see what third-party clients and services are on Twitter’s radar and exactly how the company sees itself.

For example, when the survey asks who you follow, you can choose between actors, celebs, coworkers, industry experts, family, friends, local businesses, musicians and news sources. What about government agencies and political figures? The hundreds if not thousands of absolutely hilarious joke, humor accounts, like Shit My Dad Says and Drunk Hulk?

In the end, we’re just as interested in the answers to these questions as Twitter is and we’re hoping the company releases the data to the public at some point. Not likely, but we can hope, right?

One final note, if you do fill out the survey you have the option of giving your Twitter name and an email address to possibly be added to testing of new products in the future – for that reason alone, I’m willing to tell Twitter what my favorite clients are.

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Last night, Opera announced that its mobile browser, Opera Mini, had been accepted into the iTunes AppStore after being submitted just under three weeks ago. So, now that the iPhone finally has a browser alternative, how does it fare in comparison? Is it worth running out and getting or should we just stick with the safe old Safari and move on with our day?

If you’ve used Opera Mini for other mobile platforms, such as Blackberry or Android, then its pretty much the same. But, for those of you like myself that haven’t, here’s what we have to say about it.

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Opera Mini is a full-featured browser that brings some things to the table but falls short on others. While we enjoy the tabbed browsing in comparison to Safari, the zoom feature is not our favorite. We’re not quite sure if you actually have to do the pinch gesture to zoom or if a double finger tab does it – the mechanics of it are a bit off. And if, like myself, you have some stubby nubs for fingers then the inability to zoom in as much as you want can be a problem for tightly packed UIs.

A main hitch in using Opera on the iPhone, however, is the inability to set it as your default browser. Opening up links in your Twitter client will still bring you back to Safari, as will opening up PDF files in Opera. You’re constantly reminded that Opera is number two in line and, even if you place it in the dock at the bottom of your screen, Safari is never far behind.

We asked Opera if the iPhone version would be able to take advantage of HTML5 and Javascript and were told that, while Javascript works “surprisingly well”, a spokesperson could not say that Opera Mini “takes full advantage of HTML5”. Opera also told us that the iPhone version will generally work with bookmarklets for services like InstaPaper and ReadItLater.

In all, Opera seems like a viable alternative to Safari on the iPhone, but we’re not sure that it can take over the number one spot. It has some bells and whistles, like the frequently-visited page startup page, but without being able to set it as the default browser, it will likely remain a second class citizen.

What do you think? Will you be switching over to Opera for the iPhone, to whatever extent that you can?

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Yahoo announced this afternoon a “Yahoo! Updates Firehose service” that will provide a stream of activity gathered from various Web services, from Flickr uploads to YouTube favorites to blog comments and more.

The firehose will provide a stream of real-time data from Yahoo’s index, which will also include Twitter data, as part of a deal the two companies made last February.

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According to Yahoo, the firehose will include “a real-time feed of every public action taken on our network and elsewhere around the Web that users have authorized Yahoo! to make available.” This data will consist of “status updates, ratings and reviews, comments on stories, Buzz votes, Flickr uploads, Delicious bookmarking, tweets, Open App activity, YouTube favoriting, and Last.fm listening, among many others.”

Developers will be able to access the data using Yahoo Query Language, a “SQL-like query language”, and parse this information by a number of criteria, from language to location to all updates associated with a specific URL.

While companies like Twitter have already offered a firehose of its data, and Facebook is expected to release its in the very near future (likely at the F8 conference), there are few, if any, firehoses of large swaths of data such as this. The closest we came up with at the moment was Gnip, which provides a single API to connect with dozens of other Web services and their APIs.

According to the company, the firehose will provide access to more than 150,000 ratings, 8,000 reviews and 750,000 comments a day.

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Opera announced today that its browsers are now used by more than 100 million people worldwide, saying that the distribution between mobile and desktop users is a nearly even split at 50 million a piece.

While 50 million desktop users means just a tiny fraction of the browser market for home users, 50 million mobile users actually represents a dominance in the mobile browser market.

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According to the latest numbers by StatCounter, Opera for the desktop comes in fifth (essentially last) place, behind Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Opera accounts for just under 2% of the browser market, while IE holds 53% of the market share, and Firefox comes in around 32%. Safari, Opera’s nearest competitor (and default Mac browser) accounts for twice as many users as Opera.

Looking at the mobile browser numbers, on the other hand, we see Opera Mini with 28% and iPhone’s native browser following with just under 20%. And all of that could change, of course, if Apple would just accept Opera Mini into the AppStore. Opera submitted its mobile browser just under three weeks ago at the time of this writing, but has a policy that prevents other browsers from operating on the iPhone.

While the numbers seem to say that Opera just isn’t cutting it on the desktop, Opera Mini has been holding the lead as far as mobile browsing goes and we’d sure love to see it on the iPhone sometime in the near future.

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Apparently Steve Jobs has gone and answered another customer email, this time sending shockwaves through the tech world with two words – “Sorry, no.” According to a Mac rumors blog, a German user emailed Jobs asking if Apple was planning on “supporting/updating the iPhone 2G in the Future” and that was Jobs’ answer.

We know it’s only been a couple of years since the iPhone was originally released, but is this all that surprising?

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It has been nearly two years since the iPhone 2G was available for sale, though you can still find plenty of them on Ebay, but the same can be said for other old beasts.

Should we really expect Apple to continue releasing updates for outdated hardware? As it is, the iPhone OS 4.0 isn’t going to support the iPhone 3G for half of its functionality – what are we looking for with iPhone 2G support then? After all, with Apple’s infamously closed platform, are we looking for much in the way of bug fixes and security holes?

Now, if only Microsoft would do the same for Internet Explorer 6, we could all move on with our lives.

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In a move foreshadowed by Twitter board member Fred Wilson’s blog post earlier this week, Twitter has announced that it bought third-party Twitter client Tweetie.

According to the company, Twitter has entered into an agreement with Atebits and will be renaming the app “Twitter for iPhone”, which will be available for free, instead of $2.99, in the iTunes AppStore.

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Just earlier today, Twitter also announced Twitter for Blackberry and Fred Wilson’s blog post earlier this week discussed precisely this direction – Twitter moving to fill in the gaps it had left for others to fill.

As part of this agreement, Atebits president Loren Brichter will join Twitter’s mobile team, helping to create “Twitter for iPad” as well.

With Apple’s announcement yesterday of its new mobile ad platform, iAd, we can see Twitter finally coming through with its own ad platform in the near future. Having its own native app for the iPhone is certainly a smart move in that direction – and it isn’t as if we haven’t been expecting Twitter to go in this direction.

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In the midst of the SXSW festival last month, we reviewed a mobile social network called LoKast. Our one lingering question about the app’s utility, at the time, was were we really going to run around town staring at our phone to see if someone else nearby was running the same app?

The answer was “no” then and is “no” now, but the difference now is that the iPhone OS 4.0 that was announced yesterday allows for background location multitasking. This opens up a whole new realm of experiences for the iPhone.

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First, LoKast. LoKast is a self-described “disposable” social network. That is, as you move about and come near other people running LoKast, you can quickly interact with them. Then, when you move ot of range, you may never see them again. It is social networking based on location, without a persistent friends listing.

So now, with background location monitoring, an app like LoKast is actually feasible. I can turn it on, leave it running and wander around town and perhaps have it notify me when I’m within range of someone.

As Kim-Mai Cutler notes, background location also brings up some “slightly creepy” privacy concerns relating not only to applications running in the background, but also location based advertising. But what if you think about location based advertising like you think of iTunes’ “Genius” function or all the other recommendation engine software you use?

It may be tough to realize that you are not quite the unique snowflake you thought you were and that, indeed, everyday around three you end up at the same coffeeshop, but wouldn’t it be nice for your iPhone to realize this and get you 20% off? Without you even having to lift a finger? Well, fine, maybe you have to lift an iPhone.

The list of ideas for background location are endless. Of course, we’ll have to see how quickly a battery gets drained with persistent GPS monitoring. Having the ability to let our phones deliver us information, as we move about the world, based on our location has some amazing potential.

Think of EveryBlock, the hyperlocal news aggregator that Marshall Kirkpatrick went ga-ga over when it arrived in Portland. The block-level delivery of news wouldn’t even need to wait for you to check it any more – it could simply deliver relevant information as you move about your day. Real-time rideshare services like Avego and Flinc suddenly become that much more feasible, in fast-paced, real-life situations.

We could go on, but we have another couple of months before the next version of the iPhone OS comes out and we’re already too excited as it is. What crazy, creepy or otherwise cool potential do you see with the new background location capabilities?

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For all the hype and all the discussion, the thousands of apps surrounding the service and our constant amazement at how fast or slow it grows, one point noted in a Twitter blog last night might bring us all back down to Earth for a moment – Twitter just became multilingual less than six months ago.

If you’re wondering, there are as many, if not more, Spanish speakers in the world as English. While Twitter is bragging about its expanding international audience, the next time you find yourself wondering why the service hasn’t absolutely exploded on the worldwide stage, look at its translation issues.

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Now, this wasn’t the main point of Twitter’s blog post, which tells us that more than 60% of Twitter accounts come from outside the U.S. But, it didn’t seem like a rather noteworthy point.

According to the company, the addition of a Spanish-language Twitter website saw an “immediate 50% boost in signups from Spanish-speaking countries.” After the earthquake in Chile, signups “spiked 1200% and nearly all of those were using Spanish as their language.”

The reason we make this comparison is to remind ourselves of how infantile Twitter really is. We compare it to Facebook all too often, and that much-repeated statistic of 400 million users, but we don’t bother to note that Facebook is also translated into more than 60 languages.

So, while Twitter is not only striving to reach mainstream America, it is still only offered in two languages and it’s a bit of a surprise that it’s become as international a service as it has. While the blog brags that Indian politicians have spurned a recent growth in India, the country is also host the second largest number of English speakers worldwide.

Jack Dorsey on Translation

When ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus recently spoke with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and artist, architectural designer, activist and blogger Ai Weiwei, the question of translating Twitter was a central theme of the discussion.

“Why don’t you provide a Chinese language access to Twitter? Once you have this, you will have 100 times more audience,” asked Ai Weiwei. “Is it possible for you to provide Chinese access to Twitter? I need a clear answer, yes or no.”

“I would say yes, its just a matter of time,” replied Dorsey. “It’s a matter of getting over techinical restraints.”

Dorsey explained that translation was an issue of scale and said that, just as was the case with Facebook, Twitter was being translated by its users. Dorsey admitted that if Twitter were translated into a local language, the people would immediately understand it, but that “it’s a major failing of the technology right now that it’s not.”

“The end goal,” Dorsey said “is end-to-end translation in every language.”

Our own Frederic Lardinois detailed Dorsey’s explanation of the translation setbacks on Twitter:

According to Dorsey, it is just a question of time and mostly a technological issue. Given Twitter’s problems with scaling the service, making it work for every character set creates some issues for Twitter because of the legacy framework that Twitter established in its early days. Currently, the company doesn’t really have the resources to devote to this. Doresey did, however, argue that users already know how the service is meant to work and understand the setup of the Twitter page.

We do have to ask – how hard is it to translate the little text we actually interact with on Twitter? Facebook, with all of its advertising pages, account pages, settings pages, and whatever else, is absolutely huge. Twitter, on the other hand, is rather small. We’re pretty sure Twitter would have no problem finding some Chinese speakers to translate the login page and the account settings and whatever else, pro bono. And, as noted in the conversation with MacManus, Ai Weiwei and Dorsey, the benefits of a more translated Twitter could be world-changing.

What say you, Twitter? We say get to it.

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Yesterday morning, social news and bookmarking site Reddit announced to its users that they were being drafted. For what, you might ask? The ongoing battle of sites like Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon against that ever-present foe, the spam submission.

Using crowdsourcing to combat spam submissions on an already trained populous that already votes on everything seems like a smart way to outsource an otherwise difficult task.

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As the site notes in its blog, this move comes after a number of other attempts at thwarting spam submissions, including adding moderators to handle spam. But at each turn, the site found that the traffic became overwhelming and false positives, that is, valid content that set off the filters but should not have, became an issue.

In addition to these problems, the site also found that the generally American make-up of the moderators left those of you in Australia, New Zealand and other parts of the future stuck with valid submissions sitting in spam boxes, as the moderators were fast asleep.

Thus, Reddit has “deputized” its users, enlisting them all in the battle against spam submissions by including a box that will appear “at the top of the front page every once in a while”.

Average Reddit users will have the ability to pitch in and say whether or not a specific submission is indeed spam or was inadvertantly flagged, much the way you can train your email program to detect spam.

We asked Jared Goralnick, founder of AwayFind, how this might differ from standard spam filters on email, to which he replied that the method itself was not novel, but “taking just a few of the messages (the quarantine) and making them very prominent (the the front page of the site) seems novel”.

The sort of filtering Reddit is employing, he said, elaborates on the old binary sort of spam filtering, where something is either spam or not spam, adding the quarantine as the third category. While this is not new, the method of dealing with that third category is interesting.

“In short, the technology behind their decision has a deep history…” he said, “…they’ve always been very community-oriented and this seems like a good next step.”

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So before the purists go off the deep end, fuming about the iPhone OS 4.0 announcement today, let’s just concede one point – it isn’t truly multitasking. Apple announced “Multitasking” with seven key points, one of them being “Fast App Switching”, and this is what they meant for much of multitasking.

But here’s the thing. For some of the most exciting multitasking-oriented things we’ve wanted to do with our iPhones, the new OS will indeed offer true multitasking – and for that we’re fairly excited, to say the least.

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Multitasking, for the most part, is handled by a double click on the home button, which pulls up a screen showing icons of all the apps currently hanging out in the background. Some, like Skype or Pandora, will actually be running, while others will simply be in a frozen state.

The multitasking feature will be available for iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 2nd Generation starting this summer and Apple is guaranteeing that it will not only keep your device moving quickly but will work to conserve battery life. In this effort, the company has released 7 APIs to handle the “multitasking”.

Instead of allowing the application to continue running a full instance in the background, potentially clogging up the system and draining power, the OS will handle background operations for several specific processes.

[Image courtesy of GDGT.]

For other applications not using these specific background services, switching out of the app will simply freeze it in its current state for the user to return to later. Otherwise, Apple certainly nailed it as far as the types of services we were hoping to run in the background.

You want music to keep streaming through Pandora while you catch up with reading on Read It Later? You got it. How about keeping track of your bike ride across town with Map My Ride and being able to look up directions on the way? Sure! Keep Skype running in the background and get phone calls and chat notifications? Indeed. The iPhone will even complete tasks, such as uploading photos and videos, in the background – a feature sounds rather like “true” multitasking to us.

We admit, “true” multitasking or not, this fulfills many of our wishes and we’re quite excited.

The only thing we’ll have to hope for now is that the apps we want to multitask implement these new APIs. By doing multitasking this way, Apple has tried to assure that it can control the quality of the experience, but we’ll have to hope for companies to follow along and release updated versions.

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Next time you hear about your city council looking to pass a law, make sure to check out their blog, Twitter and Facebook accounts. The Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum yesterday that should make it easier for government agencies to both communicate with citizens and receive feedback by way of the Internet and social media.

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The memo, entitled “Social Media, Web-Based Interactive Technologies, and the Paperwork Reduction Act” addresses the bounds of the Paperwork Reduction Act, a law first passed in 1980, and again in 1995, that regulates the ways in which government agencies can collect information. Yesterday’s memo identifies a number of online activities, according to some rather specific criteria, that can now be considered outside the realm of the PRA – and therefore allowable without prior authorization by the OMB, something that could take several months.

This Memorandum identifies a series of other activities that, consistent with the text and purposes of the PRA, OMB has determined may be excluded from its purview. Such activities include many uses of wikis, the posting of comments, the conduct of certain contests, and the rating and ranking of posts or comments by website users.
This Memorandum applies whether agency interactions are occurring on a .gov website or on a third-party platform.

The memo is in response to a January 21, 2009 memorandum by President Obama, which called for the establishment of “a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration.”

The memo notes that government “agencies are increasingly using web-based technologies, such as blogs, wikis, and social networks, as a means of ‘publishing’ solicitations for public comment and for conducting virtual public meetings” and that “certain uses of social media and web-based interactive technologies will be treated as equivalent to activities that are currently excluded from the PRA”.

Online media that simply “facilitate interaction”, such as wikis and simple communication via social media, are likely to be excluded from PRA regulations, which requires government agencies to submit authorization requests to the OMB. The memo also states, however, that “if an agency takes the opportunity of a public meeting to distribute a survey, or to ask identical questions of 10 or more attendees, the questions count as an information collection” and will be held to PRA requirements. The memo goes on to list several distinctions between simple interaction and information collection and more structured information collection, the latter of which falls under PRA jurisdiction.

So, if you find that you can’t ever make it down to the City Hall for those public hearings, we’d advise getting on Facebook, Twitter and whatever else you can and find your local government on there. It’s likely they will begin soliciting public input in a more informal manner on these sites in the near future.

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If you thought Google’s Street View was ambitious, or even Google Earth, then the companies latest efforts to “fill in the ‘blue’ part of the planet” on Google Earth puts the rest to shame. That “blue part”, after all, comprises more than 70% of the planet’s surface.

Google started mapping the ocean last year and today is announcing that the ocean layer “will become part of the default set of annotations seen by all Earth users”.

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Over the past year, the company has worked with more than 100 partners adding hundreds of placemarks to more than 20 ocean layers. Google has worked with National Geographic, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, as well as the Mission Blue Foundation.

The Mission Blue Foundation is working to create a series of protected marine areas called Hope Spots, all of which will be included in today’s release.

Google is also offering a “narrated tour” of eight of the proposed locations for “Hope Spots”.

While we support the efforts of Google Earth to increase awareness, we have to chuckle, ever so slightly, at one phrase in today’s announcement:

One of the greatest things about Earth is that it allows everyone to see and experience the fullness of their planet, from revisiting places they know well to venturing out to formerly unknown mountain peaks, desert vistas, and increasingly, the blue heart of life on Earth.

We know, for some of you out there, for whatever valid reason, you might not be able to get out there and see the world, but for the rest of you, get off your duff and go climb a mountain in person. Go get you some woods, don’t let Google do it for you “via satellite”.

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One of the best ways to find out who to follow on Twitter is to find someone you really find interesting, look at who they follow, and go from there. Taking that same idea, Twitter app store OneForty, which we dubbed one of the top ten startups of 2009, will start offering today Twitter application “toolkits”.

The toolkits are user created lists of their most used, favorite apps that either manipulate, add on, hover around or otherwise interact with Twitter in some fashion.

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OneForty currently has 2623 different Twitter tools in 23 different categories – we’re talking anything from third-party software client TweetDeck to picture hosting site TwitPic to online coupon finder Cheap Tweets.

The site just launched last fall and has since doubled the number of applications listed. And already, the website offers a Yelp-like atmosphere for users to find the apps they need, offering peer reviews and lists of user favorites. This latest feature will take it one step further.

While the site already does something to point out the top apps in their categories, sometimes there’s nothing better than learning from those you admire – and thus, OneForty’s Twitter Toolkits. Today’s launch features tool kits by startup guru Guy Kawasaki, Drew Olanoff, the social media consultant whose cancer we can blame for everything, Steve Rubel, one of the leading public relations bloggers on the Web, and Beth Kanter, the leading nonprofit technology consultant in the country, and more.

The feature seems like a simple, if not obvious step for the Twitter app store to take, but it falls in line with what we’ve seen of Twitter already. Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick, for example, wrote last February how he subscribes to an RSS feed of certain people he follows to find out who else he should be following. In the Twittersphere, it really is all about who you know, and not what you know, and we imagine this would hold true when sifting through nearly 3,000 Twitter-based applications.

OneForty sent us the following list of featured toolkits available on the site today:

Toolkits to be Spotlighted at launch include:

* Twitter Indispensable Tools by Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki)
* Essential PR Tools by Edelman’s Steve Rubel (@Steverubel)
* Cancer Killing Chemo Toolkit by Drew Olanoff (@thatdrew)
* Brand New to Twitter? by Twitter for Dummies (@dummies)
* Starter Apps for Nonprofits on Twitter by Beth Kanter (@kanter)
* Must-Haves for Startups by Greenhorn Connect (@greenhornconnect)

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“Son, no one gives a sh*t about all the things your cell phone does. You didn’t invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that.”

Such is the wisdom that the Sh*t My Dad Says Twitter account has been bringing us since last August. The popular feed of quotations from creator Justin Halpern’s 74-year-old father just announced, however, that it will be moving its home base to StatusNet.

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StatusNet, the open-source microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, announced the launch of the Shit My Dad Says website yesterday afternoon. The site will run on the service’s SatusNet Cloud Service, which also powers a community-driven microblog for the Mozille Foundation.

According to StatusNet CEO Evan Prodromou, the main point to move a service like SMDS to StatusNet is that the site owner can take control of advertising revenue, while still being able to send out content to other services.

“Other value includes being able to put the site under your own domain, to control the namespace, to control the look and feel, and to associate the site more strongly with other Web properties,” said Prodromou this morning in an email. “With StatusNet, a publisher like Justin Halpern can push their updates into multiple channels — Twitter, Facebook, and any PubSubHubbub-enabled service — but the data has its ‘home’ at their own site. You may notice, for example, that the latest shitmydadsays posts now say, ‘via shitmydadsays.com’, with a link.”

For publishers who use the StatusNet Cloud Service, the single-user option like SMDS is a flat fee charge per month, while others are doing revenue share, Prodromou told us. At the sign-up page we also see an option for a “secure network for your company”, which our own Alex Williams detailed early last month.

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In a battle that’s been ongoing since the fall of 2007, Comcast just won the latest round against the Federal Communications Commission. A federal appeals court announced its decision this morning to grant ComCast a petition for review, vacating the order by the FCC, which imposed a “net neutrality” on the nation’s largest cable company.

The decision appears to focus on the FCC’s legal authority to enforce net neutrality and not on the legality of net neutrality itself.

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The case began when “several subscribers to Comcast’s high-speed Internet service discovered that the company was interfering with their use of peer-to-peer networking applications,” the decision reads. Comcast argued that its move to block p2p file-sharing was “necessary to manage scarce network capacity”, but the FCC found differently, ruling that the company had “significantly impeded consumers’ ability to access the content and use the applications of their choice”.

When we last looked at this issue, the FCC had ruled against ComCast, enforcing a key tenet in the Net Neutrality debate – that ISPs have an obligation to serve up content regardless of type or method of delivery. The ISP should not have the power to discriminate according to source, destination or other such factors. Until now, the FCC’s decision had backed this, but now the appeals court has ruled that the FCC was acting outside of its powers.

According to Cecilia Kang at the Washington Post this decision could affect the FCC going forward:

The so-called net neutrality rule, imposed by former FCC chairman Kevin Martin, comes just days before the agency accepts final comments on a separate open Internet regulatory effort this Thursday. And the agency will be faced with a steep legal challenge going forward as it attempts to convert itself from a broadcast- and phone-era agency into one that draws new rules for the Internet era.

The decision could also be a stumbling block in the FCC’s plan to implement a national broadband network.

The full text of the report is available in .pdf.

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Last week, we were very excited about all the possiblities offered by adding OAuth with IMAP/SMTP to Gmail, but as we noted then, don’t let those acronyms cause your eyes to glaze over. What sounds like complicated, techie stuff really means simply useful additions to your email experience and this time, we’re talking about Yahoo Mail, still the leading webmail provider.

As Programmable Web pointed out this morning, it looks like Yahoo actually implemented OAuth several days before Gmail got around to it.

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OAuth access to your email means that you can give simple, one-click authorization to external applications to have full access to your emails. This also means you can have seemless access to the information in your email account, from the contents of the emails themselves to your contact list, on other websites.

If you think of going to a website and finding all the people you know on there by using Twitter, you’re most likely already familiar with OAuth – it’s that window that pops up that you click “Allow” on.

From the Yahoo! Mail Developer Community group on March 25:

Today we’re super exited to announce our OAuth API for Yahoo Mail! Not only have we moved to a much cleaner authentication technology, but we have removed all the restrictions limiting message access of “free” accounts. That means that you can now use the full API for all Yahoo Mail users regardless of their free/premium status, accessing full message contents if your application needs it. Cool, eh?

For those of you out there using Yahoo Mail, which is still a majority, expect to see some cool new add-ons for the age old email service to be released soon. At least, that’s what we’re hoping for.

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