10 days ago, Facebook developer Joe Hewitt rocked the iPhone development world when he announced that he would stop making iPhone apps because he was fed up with the way Apple is running the App Store. This is significant since Hewitt was pretty much solely responsible for one of the most popular (and best) iPhone apps out there: Facebook’s. And now, just a little over a week later, we may be seeing the downside of Hewitt’s decision.

The Facebook iPhone app is broken [updates below, it appears to be an API problem], and has been for a while now. Every single user profile page contains zero updates or posts. Instead, each loads a stream that reads “USER has no recent posts.” Judging from Twitter searches, tips coming in, and a Facebook thread, this has been the case since at least yesterday, and possibly before that.

To be clear, Facebook’s main News Feed is still being populated with updated items, but if you want to see elements from any individual user, you’re out of luck. And that’s bad when one key feature of the iPhone app is the ability to pin friends’ profiles to your main screen in order to more easily access such information. And it’s really bad when, again, this is one of the most popular apps that there is.

After Hewitt’s decision to stop iPhone development, Facebook’s VP of Communications Elliot Schrage left us a comment reaffirming Facebook’s commitment to Apple and, in particular, their iPhone app. He wrote that Facebook “has a great team of engineers taking over iPhone related development.”

So a full team has replaced Hewitt, but they can’t seem to keep the app from breaking. And I’m not sure they even realize it is broken. But plenty of users do.

Read Full Story about “Facebook’s iPhone App Is Broken. Who Will Fix It?”

Article Source: TechRadar

Digg is to finally get its own iPhone app, after co-founder of the website Kevin Rose unwittingly let details slip.

Rose was a speaker at last week’s FOWA (Future of Web Apps) conference in London, and while he said nothing about the application in his guest speech, he did mention the app to two bloggers in an interview afterwards.

Nobody knows about that

An eagle-eyed Arnt Eriksen and Thomas Moen spotted Rose playing with the application on his iPhone before the podcast interview started and quizzed him about it when the video was running.

His response: “I cannot show that off yet. You’re not even supposed to know about that… nobody knows about that.” He then sheepishly allowed them to keep the segment in their podcast.

Currently, Digg has its own mobile version of the site, but it has yet to get an official iPhone app.

Category level

Also in the interview, Rose mentioned that Digg is to change the way it aggregates articles on the web, saying that multiple homepages could be in the running.

He explained to Eriksen and Moen: “We have always had this universal homepage which we are promoting stories too, but now we are going to start promoting it at a category level to get more longer tail content. It’s completely redesigned for us.”

If you want to see the full iPhone revelation, then check out the video below:

Via ReadWriteWeb and Arnteriksen.com

The surge of new technologies and social media innovations is altering the media landscape. Convergence is everywhere. It’s easier than ever to reach a large audience, but harden than ever to really connect with it. These changes are affecting the way people behave.

Are you ready for the future?

Well over 1,000,000 books are published worldwide every year, where Google Book Search scanner can digitize 1,000 pages every hour.

This year, traditional advertising is in steep decline. Meanwhile digital advertising is growing rapidly. 47% of broadcast television viewers say they’d “pay for ad-less” programming. NBC, ABC, CBS had been airing new content (video) 24/7/365 since 1948 (which was when ABC started broadcasting) but more video was uploaded to YouTube in the last 2 months. NBC, ABC, CBS get 10 Million unique visitors every month, collectively. These businesses have been around for a combined 200 years.
The number of unique visitors on YouTube, MySpace and Facebook is 250 Million, collectively and is growing every day. None of these sites existed 6 years ago.

Facts:

• Wikipedia launched in 2001. It now features over 13 million articles in more than 200 languages.
• Nokia manufactures 13 cell phones every second.
• Dell claims to earn 3 Million via twitter posts since 2007.
• In February 2008, John McCain raised $11 million for his U.S presidential bid. That same month, Barack Obama attended no campaign fundraisers. Instead, Obama leveraged online social networks to raise $55 million in those 29 days.
• Twitter played an unprecedented role in sharing information during the 2009 Iranian presidential elections.

So how are you using social networking sites?

The mobile device will be the world’s primary connection tool to the Internet in 2020.

“The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper
and a thousand times more powerful
and about a hundred thousand times small
[than the one computer at MIT in 1965]…”

“ So what used to fit in a building
now fits in your pocket,
what fits in your pocket now
will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.”

Now that’s convergence and now you know.

Credits & Sources:
Written by: XPLANE, The Economist, Scott McLeod, Karl Fisch, Laura Bestler
Designed by: XPLANE | The visual thinking company www.xplane.com