For some of you, your brand new iPhone 3GS came with the newest OS 3.1.3. For others, you unknowingly upgraded your OS without realizing what it would mean. Either way, we know that you’ve been stuck obediantly following the terms of your license agreement and running only authorized apps. Well, those days are finally over.

A new jailbreak called Spirit just been released and works on the latest iPhone and iPad operating systems.

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The latest jailbreak was announced late last night on the iPhone Dev-Team blog.

The Spirit jailbreak is now out! Congratulations to @comex for the first userland jailbreak since the 1.x days.

Spirit provides an untethered jaibreak on those newer devices which used to require a computer nearby to finish the boot process. Spirit is able to do this because it doesn’t actually kick in until after the kernel is running.

Spirit is an “untethered” jailbreak for any iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch running firmware 3.1.2, 3.1.3 or 3.2. Untethered means that the user does not need to plug the device into their computer every time they reboot it, as opposed to “tethered”, which requires this.

This latest jailbreak works on both Mac and PC and is available free for download. The Reddit discussion of the new jailbreak indicates that Spirit works on the 3GS with the latest software updates, but as with anything of this sort, a full backup would be strongly advisable.

Spirit is not a “carrier unlock”, which allows the iPhone to be used with carriers other than AT&T, but a “jailbreak”, which allows users to run unauthorized software. If you’re wondering why you would want to jailbreak your iPhone, give Sarah Perez’s article, “Why You Have To Jailbreak the iPhone” a quick read.

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The news broke yesterday about the Microsoft General Manager who said that that the “future of the Web is HTML 5.”

But it’s important enough for us to write about even if in the long run it still does not solve the issues with earlier versions of the Internet Explorer browser.

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The news came from Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s general manager, for Internet Explore. Of note:

“Today, video on the web is predominantly Flash-based. While video may be available in other formats, the ease of accessing video using just a browser on a particular website without using Flash is a challenge for typical consumers. Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance. We work closely with engineers at Adobe, sharing information about the issues we know of in ongoing technical discussions. Despite these issues, Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today’s web.”

It’s this kind of development that will give more developers the confidence to build HTML 5 apps. But does it really matter that much? IE has been hands off in how it deals with support for HTML 5 on its existing browsers. Further, full support for HTML 5 is nonexistent across Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox and IE. We have no release schedule for IE 9 but it will support HTML 5.

HTML 5 is very cool. But IE’s market share is not to be taken lightly.

From Psyked:

“You can’t ignore 40-60% of your users because they use a browser that isn’t up to the same standard as its competitors. I’d dearly like too, but I can’t. Which means everything has to be developed without HTML5 & CSS 3, either using browser targeting and using multiple styles and coding options, or developed to the lowest common denominator – IE.

You might say that things will eventually catch up – but considering IE6 is still at 10% market share, you’re always going to be developing something for IE6, or IE7, or IE8. None of which have very much HTML5 support at all. IE9 isn’t going to be available for users on Windows XP, which means the best they’ll ever get is IE8, which means… argh, this really isn’t going to work.”

Microsoft’s acknowledgement should be viewed as a positive one for developers. HTML 5 can be used universally on any device. Google thinks that’s important. It’s good to see Microsoft showing that sentiment, too.

But still, let’s not give this too much credence, either. Microsoft’s first allegiance is to Silverlight. That’s not going to change.

We referenced a Forrester viewpoint post last week that illustrates the reality of the situation:

“Will HTML 5 make rich Internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash/Flex and Microsoft Silverlight obsolete? For at least the next five years, the answer is a definite “no”; inconsistent implementations of the draft HTML 5 specification and immature tooling make building HTML 5 apps that work consistently across browsers and operating systems a real challenge. Furthermore, this “either/ or” scenario is driven only by vendor politics, not by developer realities. Ultimately, HTML 5 and RIA platforms will be complementary technologies, and enterprise development shops will need to invest in both approaches to deliver expressive applications that combine reach and richness.”

Well, vendor politics will always be rich in themselves. In the meantime, HTML 5 sure is sexy. Unfortunately, it may be a while before we see how beautiful it really is.

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What happens when the LBS-addicted leave the relative hustle and bustle of city life for the quiet of the countryside? Do you toss aside Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite and the like, only opening them when you venture into town and find a check-in? Or does the location-based game take on an entirely different meaning when you’ve entered the virgin territory, the land where no Gowalla geek has gone before?

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I did just that a month ago, moving from Austin, TX to a tent on the Quiet Valley Ranch, home of the Kerrville Folk Festival for the past 39 years, and immediately found myself wondering how else I might use what had become one of my favorite iPhone applications in my former, more urbanized life.

The town of Kerrville itself has places to check-in to on Gowalla like any other small city – restaurants, movie theaters, malls, doctors, and so on. But on average, I only make it into town once a week or so. What about the rest of the time?

To Tag Or Not To Tag, That Is The Question

The ranch is home to an 18-day-long festival that’s been happening every year since the early 70s and, as such, has a multitude of “places” scattered across its 26-something acres. Some are simple and obvious places to begin “geo-taggin” (as I’ve taken to calling it) – like the “KFF Campground Ticket Shack” or the “Kerrtry Store” – while others are more ethereal, like my friend’s so-called “Secret Camp“, which we both debated over tagging. After all, once it was tagged, would it be secret anymore? Another friend, who had an espresso machine at his camp, was quick to be the first to geo-tag his camp, naming it “Rainbow’s Espresso & More“.

Immediately, we were hit with questions of this sort – what to tag, what not to tag, and even if the can of worms should be opened up in the first place. Do we want all of these spots publicly tagged, with GPS coordinates, available for all to see on the Internet? The answer, however, quickly became clear to be an emphatic “yes”. After all, there is no real way to stop someone else from geo-tagging a location, as long as it’s publicly accessible and the people accessing that spot can bring their smartphone with them.

Geo-Tagging: A New, Yet Old, Form Of Control

In the rules of this new game, this interpretation of Gowalla or any other LBS that allows you to create new check-in points, the new way to “win” is to be the first to create that spot. Why, you may ask? Because in creating the check-in, you not only get the chance to control the name of that location, but also the description.

The “KFF Campground Ticket Shack”, for example, includes a description stating that it is “Where to buy wristbands when entering the campground at the Kerrville Folk Festival. May 27 to June 12 2010.” I didn’t mention it, but I run the volunteer ticket sales operation for the festival, so geo-tagging the ticket shack seemed like an important step. Not only do I get to control the name, the specific location and the description, but I make sure that it exists.

It felt like an act that more and more business owners will be including in their strategy in the very near future – exerting control not only over your online reputation and persona, but your geo-locational identity as well. Being first to tag your location gives you control over those factors and helps to insure that others will check-in to that location, rather than others or create their own. What could happen if someone else gets there first? They could misspell something, give wrong information or even offer a slanderous message and in many ways alter or hurt a business’ brand.

Moving Beyond Basic Uses

Outside of the business arena, entering this virgin territory also allowed for more creative uses of what, in the city, had become a more utilitarian app, one I most often used to find friends and tell others where I was. Here, I rarely stray beyond the fence-line of the ranch and even still, only one other person here has an iPhone, so who would I be notifying? Upon creating a new location, I would check-in and post it to my Facebook, where most of my real-life friends are. Many of them would comment and get a kick out of it, but the standard uses were quickly tossed out the window.

In addition to being a geo-tagging pioneer, of sorts, I soon realized that Gowalla could also be used to share experiences in relation to location. A bicycle ride one afternoon, for example, lead me to the top of a rather steep hill several miles south of the ranch. Upon reaching the top (I’d always wanted to ride to the top and considered it a challenge) I pulled out my iPhone, created a new location called “View From A Real Big Hill On 16” and snapped a picture. I was immediately able to share the experience in a number of ways, preserving it as something for others to experience in the future.

Since first discovering these new approaches to using Gowalla and other such LBS games, several of us here on the ranch have discussed other uses. Gowalla’s “trips”, for example, would be a great way to guide the more technologically advanced festival goers to key locations on the ranch. Or all the prime, public and legal swimming spots in the area could be marked out and shared. In the end, my encounter with the unnamed, uncharted and unspecified geo-locational Gowalla frontier proved to me that the future of LBS is not in the trading of virtual mocha lattes, but in the very real interaction with place and time that services such as these can provide.

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So rarely do I install an actual application on my computer these days, when I run across a download dialog I have to consider whether or not I’ll actually open the program or if it will just clutter up my desktop and start menu. Such is the reason, silly as it may be, I have yet to install Google Earth onto my netbook.

As of yesterday, my Google Earth-less days are over, as Google has released its all-encompassing 3D view of the earth as a browser plugin, making sure I never have to stray far from my workaday path to peruse Peru or browse Belize.

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The install comes as an approximately 19 megabyte download that adds right onto your browser and brings Google Earth straight into the place your likely used to looking at maps the most – Google Maps.

Now, along the top of your Google Map, you will see a button next to Map and Satellite for Earth. Immediately, we noticed that Google Earth zooms in further and clearer than the Satellite view, at least out in the countryside, where the satellite view is often less detailed. And switching between views is quick and seemless. Some of the overlays that are available in Satellite view however, such as bicycling directions, were not available in Earth view.

Not only is Google Earth now more easily accessible (not to say it was hard before, as it had more than 600 million downloads) but now it can be embedded into other websites as well, using the Google Earth API. The Earth plugin is currently available and supported on most browsers for Mac and PC.

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It’s hard to keep up with all the newly released movies and music these days, but a lightweight social network with a whole lot of smarts under the hood says it can now offer you personalized recommendations of new releases that suit your very particular interests.

GetGlue is a semantic web browser plug-in that has, for years, been smart enough to recognize when you’re looking at the same musical group across different websites, be that on Last.fm, MySpace or elsewhere. The service recently added a stream of recommendations of music, movies, books, magazines, wikipedia articles and other things you might like. How can it tell what you’ll like when something is brand new, though? Today the service has launched a “new releases” section, where human editors rush to classify brand-new media. Then the semantic robots can serve it up to the right users, still hot out of the oven. It’s pretty cool.

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GetGlue founder Alex Iskold says he’s learned a lesson similar to what formerly automated tech news aggregator Techmeme has learned: algorithms and user generated content can take you a long way, but there comes a point when it’s good to hire some dedicated editors.

The service asks you to like or unlike a wide variety of things. It then uses that feedback to build a taste profile to compare against things it finds put into its database and find the stuff it thinks you’ll like. That’s harder with new releases, though.

“When something new is coming out, we don’t know what it’s like, so you need to have proffessionals tag it,” Iskold told us. “We have two editors on staff who look across the spectrum of new releases each week. They draw the similarities between things in a deep way – the tagging system we use will be unvieled later. We use really eclectic tags to characterize what kind of zombie or vampire movie something is. We also use tags brought in from other systems and our users find cool new things really fast.”

The end result is a nicely displayed stream of big icons for personally recommended newly released movies, music and books. You think you’re hip to your scene now? Wait until you’ve got a network of contacts, a semantic robot and real human editors all working together to bring you the freshest content in your weird little niche. To be honest, I’ve been testing it out today by switching from new album recommendations on Glue over to Apple’s Lala.com, where it’s easy to listen to full albums once for free. That’s not the way Glue wants you to use it, but that’s the way I like to use it so far.

The Down Side

It’s an incredible system, when it works. GetGlue knows though that there are some challenges in this kind of game though.

First, it’s not easy to present this kind of flow of data to users without either overwhelming them or boring them. Many of GetGlue’s latest changes are focused on making the user experience more pleasant: bigger images, collapsed bundles of shared items, etc.

Can the service find a balance between giving you strong-enough recommendations on one hand and regularly offering up new recommendations on the other? In past versions of the product, I’ve received too few recommendations to keep me coming back. Hopefully new releases will scratch that itch. Iskold also says that after “liking” only 15 musical artists, I’m actually much less active than most of the 400,000 registered users of the service.

Personally, I’m more drawn to the Wikipedia recommendations on GetGlue than anything else. The new releases in music might be roughly in the same sub-genres I usually listen to, but that doesn’t mean they are any good.

Finally, all this “liking” obviously begs the Facebook question. Writing as an ostensible Facebook competitor about that giant network’s radical innovations unveiled last week, Iskold wrote the following in a widely-read article here at ReadWriteWeb about Facebook’s Open Graph:
“Time will tell where we land, but my gut is that positive things will come out of this. If nothing else, let’s give Facebook credit for innovation and re-imagination the Web.”

Today he emphasized in speaking with me that Facebook is new to what it’s just begun to do, but his company has been doing it for years. There’s no guarantee that Facebook will get it right, he said.

It’s hard to say for sure that GetGlue has got it right, either. But as a work in progress, it’s pretty darned good and today’s new additions are very interesting.

Discuss

Facebook just shook the tech world by announcing several major initiatives that collectively constitute an aggressive move to weave the social net on top of the existing Web.The rumors were that the leading social network would launch a “Like” button for the entire Web. Instead, Zuckerberg & Co. unveiled a bold and visionary new platform that cannot be ignored.

The bits of this platform bring together the visions of a social, personalized and semantic Web that have been discussed since del.icio.us pioneered Web 2.0 back in 2004. Facebook’s vision is both minimalistic and encompassing – but its ambition is to kill off its competition and use 500 million users to take over entire Web.

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Whether we like it (pun intended) or not, we have to understand what this move means. It impacts users, publishers, competitors and, of course, Facebook itself. In this post, we summarize what Facebook announced and ponder the impact this will have on everyone.

Facebook Open Graph: Publisher Plugins

The Open Graph is a set combination of publisher plugins, semantic markup and a developer API.

Login with Faces & Facepile: The simpler publisher plugins enhance Facebook Connect. They makes it easy and compelling to sign in by leveraging Facebook cookies and showing faces of Facebook friends who are already members of the service.

Like Button and Like Box: These plugins add the liking feature to any content, typically the whole page. Both can be enhanced with semantic markup, described below. But the very basic intent for these is to get users to Like on the site and post a link to Facebook, which is then permanently stored on a user’s profile and points back to the original site.

Activity Feed and Live Stream: These plugins show static and dynamic activity on the site. Activity Feed lists recent likes and comments from the site, while Live Stream shows a real-time view of activity on the site and is intended for interactive events.

Recommendations: This plugin surfaces personalized recommendations for the user based on what friends and everyone else is liking on the site. It is intended to drive the users to other pages on the site.

Facebook Open Graph: Semantic Markup

Facebook announced simple, RDF-based markup to make the plugins smarter. In a nutshell, the markup enables publishers to say what object is on the page – a movie, a book, a recording artist, an event, a sports team, etc. This automatically enables semantics, that is, an understanding that the user is not just interacting with a webpage, but that he or she is liking a specific kind of thing. Semantics then leads to bucketing of the objects into categories like books, movies, music, etc., and gives rise to all sort of applications, including personalized recommendations.

Perhaps even more importantly, the markup helps Facebook connect the users across common interests across different websites. For example, if both Pandora and Last.fm annotate a page about The Beatles using Facebook’s markup, then users will be able to see their friends, who like the Beatles across different sites. This is very significant, because the data around friends is sparse and scattered around the sites. Previously, Facebook would surface this data in the stream without persisting it. Now, the information about a friend’s likes of movies, music, books, recording artists, events, sports team, etc. will be permanent on Facebook profiles and readily available in context around the Web.

Facebook Open Graph: New API

The new Facebook API is elegant and streamlined. It makes it easy to access user information (with permission of course) such as profile, friends, etc. All of the calls are REST based and return JSON objects. For example, my profile information can be fetched like this: http://graph.facebook.com/alexiskold. The authentication is based on OAuth 2.0 protocol and makes it simple not only to connect, but to also prompt for permissions to access user information.

This new API turns Facebook into a read/write storage of users’ tastes. And not just one user – all Facebook users.

Implications for the Users

With this release, Facebook asks users if they are willing to trade off privacy for personalization. To be clear, no personalization is ever possible without users telling a system about their tastes. What Facebook is asking for is necessary in order to then create personalized Web experience. Whether users want this sort of thing is a different question, but assuming that you want to know more about your friends you will.

Friends’ interests around entertainment, sports, travel, etc. will be categorized and available. It will be easy to figure out what your friends are into both on Facebook and around the Web. In addition, Facebook is going to be using its own engine to bring you recommendations for related content. This will further accelerate the discovery and cross linking between friends. This will likely further impact the amount of search people do around the Web. As Fred Wilson pointed out – passed links replace search.

Yet, the crux of user implications is neither of the above, but one single issue: privacy. It is unclear at this point that this issue is a concern for actual Facebook users, but it is clear that tech world is raising its eyebrows: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis and many others expressed their concerns. People are saying that not only Facebook will know too much about us (because Google is already there today), but that it will be able to control too much.

Personally, I am skeptical that the average Facebook user is going to care all that much. People are notoriously naive about being watched on the Web, and this is likely to be no exception. More likely than not, Facebook users will enjoy the personalization aspects of the new platform and won’t think much about it – until Facebook starts openly targeting them.

This was not been part of f8 of course, but Facebook is likely to use the information for targeting. After all, advertising is a major part of its monetization already so why won’t it make it even better? If this targeting is too spot on, lots of users will probably get annoyed. Facebook is likely to sooth them via Facebook credits and heavy discounts, negotiated because of their massive volume.

How exactly users react remains to be seen, but they will probably like the new Facebook more because of increased relevancy and interaction with friends around the Web.

Next page:Implications for Publishers

Despite the now infamous absence of Adboe’s Flash, video aggregator MeFeedia says that video on the iPad is a flourishing and growing trend according to the data the company has collected over the past three weeks.

The company offers a few stats and postulates that, among other reasons, the “lack of distractions mean people watch more video, for longer.”

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MeFeedia added HTML5 video support earlier this month – one of several alternatives available for video on the iPad – and says that its internal numbers show the iPad to clearly be a media consumption device, moreso than other users.

The company offers the following observations on its blog, noting that the “iPad was only launched a few weeks ago & this sample is for MeFeedia and MeFeedia Network only.”

• iPad is now the 5th most popular mobile device*
  *In terms of unique users, trailing only iPhone, iPod Touch, SymbianOS, and Android (in that order)
• iPad users consume 3X as many videos as web users (up from the 2.5X number that we first reported a few weeks ago)
• iPad users spend 4X as long watching videos as web users (up from 3X)
• iPad users consume 5X as many videos as iPhone users (up from 3X)

We think that the lack of multitasking as a reason for people to watch more video, longer, is likely a fair point. And, as we’ve previously argued, the iPad makes a great media consumption (rather than creation) device.

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Facebook today announced that application developers will be allowed to store user data for more than 24 hours, removing a major restriction that the company had imposed on its ecosystem for years. Competitors like Twitter and MySpace had no such restrictions and now Facebook is in the same boat. Founder Mark Zukerberg used to say that the rule against storing data was essential to protect users and their privacy.

Where are those now? Privacy, Zuckerberg told me in a March 2008 interview, “is the vector around which Facebook operates.” Two years later, not so much. In a December 2009 interview, Zuckerberg said that Facebook’s new public-by-default privacy settings reflected how he would build the site if he were to do it again from scratch today. Compare below what Zuckerberg said in 2008 and what today’s new Developer Terms of Service say about holding on to user data now.

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I believe that the Facebook policy change on storing user data is a net win for the web: it will enable all kinds of new innovation. It was that kind of innovation that I was asking about two years ago when I got the following answer about privacy that just doesn’t sound right anymore today.

Zuckerberg on Data Portability, March 10th 2008 interview with ReadWriteWeb:

“If you export your friends list, does their contact information come with that? What if they change their privacy settings later? Right now if you take an action that gets published to your friends’ news feeds, but then if you change your privacy settings later to be more restrictive – then those events disappear from the news feeds. If that data is published off-site, then there’s no longer any control over the data for users.” (emphasis added)

And today, on the new Developers’ Terms of Service:

You must give users control over their data by posting a privacy policy that explains what data you collect, and how you will use, store, and/or transfer their data….You may cache data you receive from the Facebook API in order to improve your application’s user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date…You will delete all data you receive from us concerning a user if the user asks you to do so, and will provide a mechanism for users to make such a request. (emphasis added)

One thing that remains the same? “You cannot use a user’s friend list outside of your application, even if a user consents to such use.” Facebook doesn’t want you taking your data out of the Facebook ecosystem, to other competing services, but it doesn’t insist that 3rd parties under its shadow check in with you daily anymore, either. It’s hard not to feel a little cynical about that.

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Facebook says that people who actively share updates and messages on Facebook score higher on happiness tests than people who passively consume updates on the site. The company shared findings today of a user survey cross referenced with historical data about respondents’ use of the site.

“The results were clear,” the company said. “The more people use Facebook, the better they feel. They have higher levels of both kinds of social capital, and feel less lonely…Regardless of how much time people in the study spent on Facebook, how many friends they had, and how many News Feed stories they read, those directly interacting with their friends scored higher levels of well-being.”

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Of course there isn’t a causal relationship that can be proven here, just a correlation. People who are already unusually happy might be more likely to share actively on Facebook – it hasn’t yet been proven that sharing on Facebook makes you happier.

More sophisticated analysis could be done by a whole world of researchers, if Facebook would open up its data. Failing to do so, data black markets are sure to fill the demand from unscrupulous companies online.

The Value of Data

Analysis of Facebook user data is something we’ve been calling a huge opportunity for years. Unfortunately, access to that data remains limited to the company’s own internal research team and a very select group of collaborators. The data isn’t shared publicly, only occasional results of analysis are.

We spoke with a social science researcher at one large technology company this month who told us that Facebook used to hand over user data for study whenever it was asked. These days, now that Facebook is much bigger, not so much – presumably because of legal concerns.

In 2008 Facebook analyzed its users conversations to demonstrate that it could accurately predict changes in Presidential opinion polls. Outsiders have on occasion demonstrated some really interesting observations about the state of the world based on spidered and scraped Facebook data, but the company uses legal pressure to shut down public sharing of bulk Facebook data by outsiders.

Twitter has been similarly reticent about letting outsiders grab large quantities of historical data for analysis. This week that company donated its entire historical archive to the Library of Congress, but upon seeing the details of the arrangement it appears doubtful that outsiders will be able to access the data programmatically for serious number crunching and sociological insight.

Black Markets

We’re hearing people whisper about black market stores of Facebook and Twitter data, but each time an above-board party seeks to make such data available, even if only to the academic research community, they get shut down. Meanwhile, unscrupulous companies presumably have the money to buy whatever data they want and do all the privacy-violating, spammy things these networks fear would happen if they made the data available legally. Comparing this to prohibition may be a fair analogy, but it isn’t one that Facebook, at least, has been willing to comment on to us.

The net result is that you get the crime and dangerous moonshine of prohibition, because you’re concerned about the consequences of legal fine wine and microbrews. Except in this case it isn’t a drink we’re talking about, it’s social self-awareness on an unprecedented level.

Imagine the insight that could be gleaned from analyzing the discussions and connections that happen on Facebook, cross referenced with any number of other data sets. The company says it’s concerned about user privacy, but several major initiatives underway indicate otherwise.

These days what gets shared publicly are conclusions of the company’s internal analysis – and it’s always good news: Facebook is good for you, for example. Kind of a cheap buzz.

That’s why we hope that Facebook really does open up a Firehose of user activity data at its developer conference next week. The schedule for the event was just posted and it will be live streamed online.

Each time Facebook demonstrates that it can glean meaningful insights from bulk analysis of its user data and cross referencing that data against other data (like a survey) – it’s just all the more evidence that the outside world ought to be allowed to analyze the data as well. Some people probably are. Why not give the good guys a shot?

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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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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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The company that dominates the online search and advertising sector – and dabbles in photo-sharing, solar energy, and all other sorts of stuff – may soon improve its audio communication offering in a major way.  Google has reportedly taken a significant step towards making Google Voice more of a Skype competitor.

Michael Arrington wrote late yesterday, "[W]e’ve confirmed that they have now built a Google Voice desktop application to make and receive calls.  From a user perspective, this will let Google Voice users take calls right from their desktop."

Of course, the product isn’t out yet, or you’d be hearing about it through more official channels.  But Arrington continued, "When will the new application launch?  Possibly soon.  Earlier this week Google started testing the application internally."

This development stems from Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5, which occurred back in November.  And as you may remember, there was a fairly tight bond between the two companies even before the purchase (two recent Gizmo5 blog posts were titled "Introducing GizmoVoice – A Free Phone Line Using Google & Gizmo5" and "Add Gizmo5 Calling Directly To Gmail!").

Expect the Google Voice upgrade to exhibit a fairly high degree of polish, then, and as Arrington implied, bet on it debuting sooner rather than later.

Now that we’ve finally embarked on a future of tablet computing (didn’t we do that ten years ago?) with the iPad, we immediately got to wondering: What does iPad adoption look like across the country? Luckily, online ad network Chitika has offered some numbers on what its seeing for iPads broken down over time and state by state.

Chitika took a look at where and when it was seeing hits from iPads and built a real-time page to show you what’s going on with the release of the latest and greatest in Internet gadgetry.

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According to Chitika, there are just around 300,000 iPads now in the wild, a number that jives pretty well with Apple’s own estimate. Of those, 22% were first seen by Chitika today, with just under 100,000 hitting the open Internet on Saturday, the iPad’s release date.

Looking at the map of iPad adoption, the company quickly declares that “it looks like California is running away with the title of ‘iPadest State in America,’ with more than double the iPads of any other single state” but we content that the District of Columbia has the highest concentration of iPads by far, with one iPad for every 2,019 people. Following the District of Columbia are Hawaii, with one for every 2,785, and Nevada, with one for every 2,901. Rounding out the very bottom of the list are Iowa, with one for every 29,489, and Montana, with one for every 27,857 people.

Looking purely at the number of iPads, however, California leads with nearly 20%, New York follows with 8%, Texas with just under 8% and Florida with 6%.

Again, on percentages, the three states where you are least likely to see an iPad in the wild? Wyoming, North Dakota and Montana, all with less than 2% of all iPads combined.

To keep track of how the iPad dispersion plays out, check out Chitika’s real-time numbers. The company’s methodology is detailed in its blog.

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Twitter turned on its new “popular” tweets feature in its search page last night, bubbling the three most popular tweets to the top of any search result. Previously, search results were only offered according to time, not any form of relevancy.

In addition to the search feature showing up on search.twitter.com, the functionality has been turned on in Twitter’s search API, so we’re likely to see this sort of thing showing up in third-party clients soon, as well.

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Don’t be confused if popular search results aren’t showing up when you search directly from the Twitter homepage – you need to specifically go to search.twitter.com for these new results to come up. For some reason, searching from the right-hand sidebar gives only results ordered by time.

From the Twitter API Google Group on how tweets will be ordered:

With this new project, we want to make real-time search even more valuable by surfacing the best tweets about a particular topic, by considering recency, but also the interactions on a tweet. This means analyzing the author’s profile, as well as the number times the tweet has been retweeted, favorited, replied, and more. It’s an evolving algorithm that we’ll be iterating on & tuning until practically the end of time.

While the Twitter search returns only three results, the API should return more if desired. The API is opt-in, as we wrote last time, and offers the ability to get only new results, only popular results, or a mix.

We’re immediately wondering how this might be used with the geocoding variable. Will we see similar functionality to the location trending on Foursquare or Gowalla? What does mean to identify tweets as singular hubs of conversation, like we see with Techmeme? Trending topics are just that – topics surrounded by many tweets. This makes the focus center not around many people talking about a topic, but instead a few tweets that many people are centering around. We know we’ve seen similar implementations with the likes of TweetMeme, but now that it’s in the API, what will we see next?

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