Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook

Facebook announced the opening up of their news stream to developers today, allowing for all sorts of new, fancy whizbang desktop clients to be developed using the Facebook API. The immediate impact of this annoucement is that existing applications such as Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck, Adobe Air apps which already have rudimentary access to the Facebook firehose, will now gain even greater functionality, and possibly have some very cool applications and advancements in the very near future. Mobile apps will also likely see a huge boost. Imagine a full fledged iPhone/Palm Pre/Blackberry application, integrating the Facebook news feed into a stream with other services, such as Twitter and FriendFeed.

Of course, this comes with a caveat. The stream of data which developers can access can be mixed around, messed with, and generally tossed around, but in the end, this information can only be displayed BACK to the original user. So, really, in the end you’re getting the same old Facebook news stream you had before, simply displayed back to you in an altered form. While this is still pretty cool, it doesn’t offer the same type of openness and coolness that Twitter and similar platforms offers.

Another aspect of the newly opened up Facebook is how applications and their access will be treated in the future. Will Facebook applications move into the desktop, and run as web apps within the applications developed? Will current games and applications integrate the Facebook news stream more tightly to the processes? Potentially, Facebook could become a unified social profile and identity, when combined with Facebook connect, that other services such as Disqus (which we use as our commenting engine here at Geek Troika!) are attempting to do.

The annoucement by Facebook represents a pretty big step forward, since the service has always been pretty dramatically closed and shut off. What the future holds for Facebook beyond a social service will be part of what defines it as a larger aspect of our social and Internet lives.

CommentsArticles API, applications, apps, desktop, desktop applications, developers, Facebook, mobile, mobile applications, News, news feed, news stream, posting, profile, social, social graph, social profile

Today, the Apple App Store surpassed 1,000,000,000 app downloads. It reached this milestone after a little more than nine months in existence. It is significant, auspicious, and whatever other hyperbolic adjectives you’d care to stick into this sentence. It bears reflection, discussion, and outlook onto what this means for the mobile device space.

The iPhone app store came into being following the clamor for applications by the iPhone/iPod touch community. Weeks after the iPhone was released, developers found ways to crack into the firmware of the device, access APIs and create hardware driven apps for the device. Demand for a sanctioned SDK supported by Apple built up to near impossible levels. Finally, Apple relented and released an SDK, and announced the opening of the App Store with the release of the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 2.0 software update.

The App Store was met with a skeptical eye by many, including yours truly. After all, with no background applications allowed, and many Jailbroken apps doing at least what the Apple sanctioned apps could do, why would people go to the App Store? And, how could Apple’s method succeed where others (Palm, Nokia, the app distribution methods created by the carriers) had failed? Well, people went to the App Store, and they went in droves.

The App Store took something which is patently not an original concept - applications built for a mobile device - and made them easy to access and purchase. Rather than going to a developers site, downloading a package, hooking your device up to your computer, transferring the files, setting up the package on your phone, configuring the settings and finally using the app, the App Store stripped out all of the processes and made it dead simple to use an app. Open the App Store, find the app you want, hit install, confirm your password, and the app installs and configures itself right there on your phone. Seamless, fast and easy. Better yet, in many cases the applications were reasonably cheap, making it trivial to pile up pages and pages (and pages and pages…) of apps. Apple succeeded by doing what they do best: taking an idea floating around there, refining it down to the simplest and most effective form.

Now that Apple has sold the billionth application from the App Store, what is in store for the future of the platform? Well, using the past nine months as an indicator, plenty of smooth times ahead. Apple has managed to capture the majority of the developer share for the mobile market, despite the sizable headstarts which Windows Mobile and Blackberry held over the App Store. With the release of iPhone OS 3.0, there are more API and tools available for developers to tool around with, and with the install base of the iPhone and iPod touch growing every day, there doesn’t seem to be an end to the massive success of the App Store.

Kudos, Apple, for taking my money. I look forward to paying you for an app to monitor my liver while racing 3D go karts against my friends.

CommentsArticles app store, Apple, applications, apps, iPhone, iPod touch, microtransactions, mobile, money, one billion, steve jobs

OK, perhaps I’m being a little too melodramatic with that title. But, it has be said, the Palm Pre has generated the kind of buzz Palm probably wanted for CES. In a year when big tech advancements have stagnated, Palm came in and reasserated themselves as a force in the mobile world. Now, I’ll admit, I possess a certain bias against the Pre. This is based on the fact that I haven’t gotten the chance to get my grubby little mits on the device.

Now, before the cries of “of course! You crazy iPhone users will do anything to trash this device!” Hold your horses, nellie. I was just as jazzed by the iPhone when I first saw as I was by the Pre. There are some extremely interesting and innovative concepts to be considered from the early demonstrations of the Pre. The whole deck of cards concept is a very intuitive way to handle app switching and management. The universal search throughout the device is a brilliant idea from the limited use which was demonstrated. But, that’s the point that I’m trying to get across: everything we’ve seen with the Pre has been LIMITED. LOCKED DOWN to the extreme. Let me do that again. Ahem…EXTREME!!!%

My decision to purchase an iPhone came after 7 intensive months of using the iPod touch. 7 months of exploring every UI tweak and quirk, learning ways to manage battery life, becoming acclimated to the environment. By the time I got my hands on the iPhone this past summer, I had clearly determined that the iPhone was the best mobile experience for me. That’s the issue which Palm faces with the Pre and their new webOS: everything looks nice and smooth during a keynote presentation in the hands of a man who has spent the better part of two years with the device and operating system. The situation will change dramatically in the hands of an everyday user running multiple applications who has their own concept of how actions on their phone should operate.

My first impressions, based on the Palm keynote, will probably end up sounding pretty similar to the first impressions I had in early 2007 about the iPhone, and in late 2008 about the G1: the hardware is nice, the software looks pretty enough, but until it gets out into the real world, everything is moot. What we can say about the Pre is that the first impression is better than what we initially got from the G1 and Android, but perhaps slightly worse than the iPhone. A lot of what I saw in the Palm keynote echoed a lot of what Apple did, from the UI tweaks (the “rubberbanding” bounce when scrolling through contacts, multi-touch zooming, accelerometer movement, etc.) are things basically lifted from the iPhone. Which abolutely makes sense, since John Rubenstein came from Apple, and a cadre of Apple developers who worked on the iPhone now are at Palm developing the webOS.

The unique things which the Pre does, which I have to give Palm above anyone else out there, is intuitively merging and sorting through contact information from multiple sources and organzing it in a well thought out, easy to navigate manner. Taking information from Outlook, Gmail and Facebook, combining it into one contact card and letting you view data from all of them together? Genius. I lust after this for my phone. The iPhone kicked down the door for devices and operating systems which Palm is putting out, and the company is taking full advantage of the opportunity and pushing the market even further forward. As a moble geek, and someone who’s always looking for the next best phone to put in his pocket, I have to admit, I’m really excited by what the future holds.

CommentsArticles Apple, CES, cloud, device, iPhone, John Rubenstein, keynote, mobile, multitouch, palm, palmpre, pre, sprint, touchscreen, webOS

It’s Wednesday, so you folks know what that means: another episode of Geek Troika! This week, we’re sans Matt and Mike is hosting, so there should be plenty of horrible banter without control to listen to…

This intro music for this week is brought to you by the letters G and T for Girl Talk, who provided “In Step”, this week’s Ode to Creative Commons from Geek Troika! Hmm, GT Hearts GT? I like it! You can find more of Girl Talk at http://www.myspace.com/girltalk

Extra Links: http://www.kleptones.com - http://www.twitter.com/schrodingercat/ - http://xkcd.com/353/

• Jon reveals that Google uses tons of bandwidth, and only pays pennies to peanut butter for it! The group debates, along with some interesting side conversation on peanut butter and Jawas…
• Mattie has an interesting insight into the fact that online journalists are being jailed at higher rates than other journalists. A conversation involving deep soul searching and debate ensues…
• Mike wraps up this week’s show by putting on his hate as the Czar of Mobile and explaining to us why Nokia’s new N97 is a big slab of suck.

Our picks of the week:

Jon - Mr. Tweet: http://mrtweet.net/

Mattie - Topixz http://www.topixz.com/

Mike - Small Basic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

Jon’s Twitter | Mattie’s Twitter | Mike’s Twitter | Geek Troika’s Twitter

Without further ado, here’s the link to download episode 8!

Download

CommentsPodcast Amalga-Man, bandwidth, blogosphere, Czar of Mobile, Girl Talk, google, jailed journalists, mobile, Mr. Tweet, Small Basic, Topixz