Kickball, a third-party Foursquare iPhone app/client now available in the App Store, is trying to be a slicker and more complete social location app than we’ve seen so far.
Currently built with using the Foursquare API and GeoAPI (curiously not using SimpleGeo as GeoAPI was acquired by Twitter), Kickball has plans future plans to integrate Gowalla and Brightkite, and according to their press release will also have, “Quick Check-in, enhanced Twitter integration with photos, new badges, and ‘King of the Hood”‘ (whatever that is…we’re guessing it’s a pan-mayorship kind of thing).
According to the Wall Street Journal, two new iPhones are coming out this year, and one of them might be headed for Verizon.
This would solve the largest lingering problem that the iPhone has, its beholden status to AT&T, a carrier that many in the United States find to be lacking in both reliability and speed.
The end of AT&T iPhone exclusivity would be a massive bump for the iPhone ecosystem as a whole, especially in its cut throat war with Android.
Of course, what upgrades we are to see in the new generation is up for debate. Everyone has their own personal favorite horse in the feature race, and we are all hoping that our own choice makes it.
Following up on a complaint letter sent by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) to the FTC, eleven members of the House of Representatives have written to John Leibowitz, chairman of the FTC, over Google’s rule as a potential curator of private data.
The main point of the complaint is over what we all were all railing about when Buzz launched: it was opt-in, not opt-out, it auto-followed people for you, and more importantly, using Buzz disclosed your email on a very public scale.
In their letter, the Representatives in question write that Buzz “could inadvertently reveal a journalist’s confidential sources or disclose information about a consumer’s medical history, political views, or whereabouts.
Pip.io is a product on the up and up, building in a fistful of upgrades in the two months. The last time we talked about Pip.io, they had just left beta with a bare-bones build of their social platform.
Fleshless no more, Pip.io is gunning for the top slot on your social app usage chart. In what ways? In nearly every way it turns out. Pip.io has created excellent Twitter and Facebook applications, a must for any modern social startup, but has also taken the time to build a village of other capabilities around those two core functions.
Pip.io also has a YouTube app built into its refreshed interface that brings slick video search and viewing into the product. But the best part of Pip.io is its new post box. What you may ask, could be so much fun in a box for posting? Pip.io now supports private, public, targeted, and broadcast publishing. You are now in full, complete control over where you updates go and who gets them.
Google announced today via the Google Talk blog that the next big feature to grace the Gchat instant messaging service available to Gmail users will be the ability to send files.
I tested this out, and sure enough, on the iGoogle page, I can choose to send files to other people using Gchat. However, this feature only works with Orkut and iGoogle, and that means on both ends.
For example, right now if you try to send a file from iGoogle to someone using Gchat through the Gmail web interface, you’ll get an error message saying that the other person isn’t using a supported client.
A new visualization mashup of social location service check-ins just launched last night called Checkinmania.
Checkinmania right now displays recent check-in data from Foursquare and Gowalla (looks like Brightkite and Yelp data is coming soon too), and does it in a smart way – around a point that you choose on a Google Map. This is smart as proximity really matters, and smart apps such as Instant Tweetup are focusing proximity.
Because you know that you just have to get your hands into the thick of it, check out the source code the for the much praised Windows Phone 7 Series Foursquare application.
The company behind the app, Touchality, calls it emphatically an alpha release, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. However, the application has some of the best Foursquare data usage (heatmaps are amazing) on any mobile device that we have seen. Alpha or not, we like it.
You can grab the code here. Screenshots in case you missed them after the jump.
When we first covered Qrobe.it (pronounced “krobe it”), we liked its fresh design and excellent combination of Bing and Google results. What it lacked, however, was features.
The team has knuckled down over the past weeks and has upgraded Qrobe.it into my favorite search experience.
Qrobe.it, being a metasearch engine, fuses results from other search engines to bring a more complete view of what is the best result sheet for any search term. Bing and Google, being far and away the two best search engines today, are combined by Qrobe.it, with special adjustments, for a fair and balanced (wink) look at the internet and its vast information.
The reports are true; Microsoft’s hotly anticipated Project Natal will release in October.
Confirmation of UK talk show host Jonathan Ross’ tweets came in the form of a leaked release list from UK videogame retailer GAME. The document has the release date of a game called Yoga Natal for Xbox 360 pegged for October 2010. Another hastily deleted preorder page for the game on Amazon.co.uk has the game’s release date set for October 29th.
This leak has provided three useful pieces of information about Microsoft’s strategy for the Xbox in the ongoing console wars.
Still in very limited beta, Check.in, a new app from the creators of Brightkite, aspires to be the “checkin to rule them all”, and while it shows lots of promise, it also unintentionally exposes why this kind of service might not catch on as well as others have predicted.
Check.in was developed with the aim of eliminating the need to check into numerous social location services at every new stop when out and about. While not a perfect cross-section of humanity, during a panel on location at SXSW, we stood up and asked the audience how many people used two or even three check-in apps, and a very high percentage of hands went up, so there is potentially some demand among the early adopter set for this kind of app.
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