Originally, designer Billy May conceived of a dynamic OLED keyboard to improve the BlackBerry Storm, with a shifting set of symbols that appear on the actual keys. He threw out some other ideas - "How about a volume wheel that gets harder to turn the louder it gets?" - and opened the discussion up for comments.

A year and a half later, May has pulled his concept into a cohesive next-generation phone, nicknamed the Mozilla Seabird. Seabird is part of Mozilla's Concept Series, a project that encourages, shapes and promotes ideas about the future of the Web.

Mozilla's developer community is collectively exploring product and design ideas and turning them into proof-of-concept mock-ups and prototypes that can stimulate real product innovation.

May, with help from the developer community, has imagined a phone designed for ultimate interactivity. A detachable dongle is a Bluetooth headset and a sort of remote mouse that uses infrared tracking and touch feedback technology to precisely manipulate a pointer on the phone's screen.

The phone also has dual Pico projectors that project a keyboard and track pad as well as an image of the screen - input as well as output.

While we're dreaming, it can also be wirelessly charged.

You can also watch this in 3D.

Sadly, Mozilla has no plans to develop this phone. The Mozilla Seabird is a "community-driven exploration" meant to "push the boundaries of the Web and the browser." The browser wasn't really emphasized in this demonstration, but it's a peek at how hardware and the mobile Web experience will keep evolving.

That's a problem, advocates say, because the law is now completely outdated. The law currently gives more protection to data you store locally and less to data kept in the cloud - an obvious problem in the age of Gmail, Facebook and Amazon Web Services.

Cloud computing haunted by privacy concerns

Technology companies and privacy advocates have been calling for Congress to update the legislation for years (see Coalition of Tech Companies Wants to Give You Digital Due Process). The law leaves consumers unprotected, they argue, and dampens the cloud computing sector's economic prospects.

As the law stands, providers can do little to assure users that their data will remain protected if someone in law enforcement or government wants to look at it. In many cases, law enforcement can compel providers to disclose information without a search warrant.

Google recently disclosed that it had received 3,580 requests for user data from U.S. law enforcement in the second half of 2009. The number of requests Google rose to 4,287 in the first half of 2010.

An urgent need

"Prompt action by Congress to strengthen federal laws safeguarding the privacy of information stored in the cloud is growing more important by the day as Americans become ever more reliant on cloud computing in all aspects of life," a group of advocates wrote in a statement submitted to House Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties during its hearing on ECPA today.

In the absence of laws guaranteeing the protection of data in the cloud, some providers are letting users store encrypted data without handing over the key. Encryption is less desirable because it eliminates the advertising subsidy for some services (Gmail ads wouldn't work if emails were encrypted), adds the cost of encrypting the data and can slows services down. "In many ways, therefore, ECPA's failure to protect our digital communications and documents amounts to a "tax" on Americans," the group wrote.

The group proposed that law enforcement must obtain a search warrant from a judge based on probable cause in order to have access to digital data and communications.

Google, Microsoft back reform

The reform is backed by a number of high-profile companies including Google, Microsoft and AT&T as well as the American Civil Liberties Union.

Microsoft lawyer Brad Smith had an especially good line during today's hearing. "E-mail in someone's in-box should not be subject to a different standard than e-mail in your sent-box," Smith said. "The reality today is that ECPA increasingly falls short of a common-sense test."

[photo via Brynn_Avon]

Groupon's cofounder and 30% owner Eric Lefkofsky also made Forbes' list of 400 almost-billionaires to watch, with an estimated net worth of $750 million.

Groupon's concept - one monster discount a day as long as a minimum number of people pledge to buy it - is so drop dead simple that it's easy to see why it took off. But the simplicity also induces head-scratching. How can investors bet so heavily on a company with such an easily implementable idea? And how did it take until 2008 for someone to think of something so obvious?

I can think of an answer to the second question (Facebook!) but the first is a bit dodgier. There are plenty of Groupon imitators and Groupon, with its 50% cut of sales, has left plenty of room to be beaten on price. Groupon's had some bad press recently due to fraud and disgruntled customers (see Competitors Seize on Groupon's Recent Slipups). "There are a million ways we could fail," CEO Andrew Mason wrote in a comment on TechCrunch.

On the other hand, the $1.35 billion company's slip-ups were miniscule next to its staggering successes, and it's possible the hordes of imitators are actually working for Groupon by splitting the rest of the market. Groupon is now the 219th-largest Web property in the U.S., according to comScore.

What do you think - how long can Groupon keep up this rapid growth? Is the company overhyped?

But the agency is committed to upgrading its technology under the leadership of Microsoft veteran Steven VanRoekel. The FCC has been beefing up its developer offerings and it announced today that the new website will be built using the open source content management system Drupal.

"This decision is a significant step towards modernizing our own underlying online infrastructure -- a key stage in redesigning and rebuilding FCC.gov," VanRoekel said.

The old website, designed ten years ago, had become a sprawling mess of information due to a "Web 1.0" mentality, VanRoekel said. The changes at the FCC are driven by the desire to engage the community and make the FCC's data more available, officials at the agency said.

"As we think about FCC.gov reimagined, one of the things I harken back to is really thinking of "dot gov" like a "dot com where we equated citizens as both our customer and our shareholder," VanRoekel said at the Gov 2.0 Summit two weeks ago.

He went on to talk about how the technology on the website should taken into account customer service, market innovation and agility. Apparently the agency decided that Drupal, which is known for its robust developer community, would be the best platform to encourage innovation and move the government website in a new direction.

The FCC is the latest government website to use Drupal, which already powers the White House website as well as the Department of Commerce's Commerce.gov and the Department of Education's Ed.gov.

"We understand that citizen shareholders deserve a government that moves quickly to deliver information, facilitate transactions, and inform and engage Americans. As we continue to reimagine what FCC.gov can -- and will -- be, we're excited to do so alongside the Drupal community," VanRoekel said.

Another way to say it: DeHood is similar to Foursquare but new updates make it more like the popular mobile social game MyTown. A cool app, yes, but a major location player - probably not.

The app's main functions appear to be local check-ins, local deals, and broadcasting messages, news and photos to other DeHood users. The users I ran into in DeHood say they to use it to meet up with strangers and friends in their neighborhoods.

There are loads of other things to do in DeHood, included the less-trafficked Questions, Tips and Reviews sections. You can also map nearby businesses and send private messages. You can also "friend" someone in DeHood, invite your friends to join and see a check-in leaderboard.

The app's new update introduced a point system called Hood Bucks, which you can use to become King or Queen, Prince or Princess, a Noble or a Joker of a city or neighborhood. You get points for checking in, posting messages and reviews, or buying Hood Bucks at $.99 for 25.

Dehood is a fun app that people seem to like. Its biggest problem is that it's bogged down with buttons, icons, options and stuff you can do, and everything takes about three seconds to load. The app would benefit from a less busy interface and a tutorial for new users.

Right now DeHood is home to tweet-like broadcasts, super-friendly overtures from anonymous users, confused new users trying to figure out how to use the app, a hodgepodge of photos and a smattering of reviews. For now, people will find Yelp more helpful for tips and reviews and FourSquare better for making life into a game.

But DeHood could potentially become a great place for hyperlocal news and neighborly relations, such as finding lost pets, borrowing cups of sugar, meeting new neighbors or organizing meal deliveries for a neighbor in need.

DeHood says it's working on a "wide range" of Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, that will let developers build their own location-based applications using DeHood's data. But as a location-aware app that's heavy on functionality and light on users, DeHood doesn't look like a location platform yet.

It's undeniable that apps are in vogue. But does that mean the open Web - the one we access through a browser - is dead? Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg really hopes not.

Is it bad if the Web dies?

Apps are increasingly popular with users because, well, they just work better. Apps are built to do a few things really well, whereas the Web is written in a language originally conceived for documents and accessed with a single browser that tries to accommodate all the myriad things users and developers want to do. Apps are also popular because they're more more monetizable with advertising, in-app purchases and by simply charging users to download them.

The concern is that the rise of apps could mean an outward migration of quality developers and users to the protected walls of various app stores, leaving the open Web to... well, not die, but fill up with lower quality content and malware. This would be bad because the open Web is also the free Web, where you don't need to buy an app or a fancy mobile device to use it and the barrier to entry is low if you have an idea for something like Facebook.com.

Why it's bad for Facebook if the Web dies

But Facebook's founder seems to think apps, and specifically mobile apps, are where things are headed.

"Mobile... will eventually get to a larger scale than the web. The Web is only at one and a half billion people, whereas everyone is going to have a phone and all the phones are going to be smartphones. So our strategy is that we want to go wherever people are building apps so we can make all of those apps social if they want that," Zuckerberg said today in an interview with TechCrunch about the rumored "Facebook phone."

But Zuck misses the Web, and his reasons for it may be why the Web will never die. Even a billion-dollar corporation like Facebook can't build an app for everything.

"When I was coding Facebook there was no question in my mind like what I was going to build for. It was, you're clearly going to build for the web. I'm not going to build software and I'm not going to build for a phone...

"And that clarity was so valuable whereas today it's like, okay, we want to go build an app. Even a new product that we launch. We're working on Questions, and it's like okay. So we build Questions for the web, then we build the "m" site for Questions, then we build the Touch HTML5 version of Questions. Then we build the iPhone version of Questions, and then the Android version, and then maybe... the iPad stuff. And then we don't work on a RIM version and then a bunch of people are pissed because it's not available on their phone.

"It's kind of a disaster right now. I really hope that the direction that this stuff goes in is one where there's more of a standard."

Why the Web is not going to die

That standard is HTML5, which Facebook plans to push very hard. If HTML5 can deliever a wide range of functions with a good user experience, then Facebook can develop one HTML5 version for every new product it launches and "that would be awesome," Zuckerberg said. And HTML5 could combate the problem of unfair access raised by the great App Migration.

Already Facebook has launched a special mobile site for people in developing countries (and some developed ones). 0.facebook lets users access a speedy, data charge-free version of Facebook with a mobile browser from any basic phone even in parts of the world with poor infrastructure.

Until the devices that people use to access the internet are completely standardized, the Web will never die.

But imagine what will happen to mobile streaming video as the next generation of high-speed wireless networks and devices become the norm.

But wireless infrastructure is about to take a leap forward as two so-called 4G technologies - LTE (Long Term Evolutions) and WiMAX - roll out. Sprint and its partner Clearwire plan to cover 120 million customers with high speed, Internet-anywhere WiMAX access by 2010, a technology that with upgrades could rival LTE speeds.

Mobile Web use mirrors fixed Web use, said Joel Brand, VP of product management at Bytemobile. About 75% of 3G Web users are connecting with laptops and netbooks, he said, with the rest accessing on smartphones. A full third of video on these devices is delivered by YouTube, he said, another third is from adult content sites and the last third comes from a broad mix of sources.

Next generation networks will certainly encourage the popularity of video, but it will probably also change the way we watch. For short, expedient, low-definition videos, YouTube is king. But higher mobile Web speeds will encourage users to seek longer, high-definition videos from services like Netflix and Hulu.

Higher speeds also mean live-streaming services like Ustream, Justin.tv, Livestream and Qik become more a lot more usable. Faster speeds will encourage individual users to stream more video, made even easier because so many users accessing via laptops or with Apple devices that have front-facing cameras. Livestreaming sites will also see huge opportunities for broadcasting live events like concerts, sports games or newscasts to users who can't watch at home in front of their TVs.

The next generation of wireless networks will surely see more users accessing video - but it's likely that a lower percentage of it will be from YouTube. Do you stream video on your phone? How do you see yourself using video as mobile wireless speeds get faster?

Photo by Giorgio Montersino

"Developers can now remotely access the location of over 250MM mobile phones in the U.S. through a single cloud-based API (Application Programming Interface)," according to the press release.

The service can locate all types of devices, including smartphones and non-smartphones, and it allows developers to locate them in real-time. Developers can use this information to build apps that run in the background and push location-based alerts to users. Called this tactic is used in automated check-ins and for marketing, tracking and social situations. It is especially helpful for monetizing mobile apps (see Is Geofencing the Next Evolution for Location Apps? Location Labs Thinks So).

The location data comes from national carriers Sprint-Nextel, T-Mobile and AT&T. Verizon, which announced 20 location APIs today, was the last carrier to sign on (see Verizon Storms the App Castle: Launches Wave of Location, Push Notification & Messaging APIs). Getting location data from carriers can be preferable for developers because it doesn't require users to download an app.

Location Labs has been beefing up its offerings lately. A week ago, the company announced a partnership with the parent company of directory CitySearch to provide detailed information for 15 million businesses.

To learn more about the ULS platform or to get started building location-based apps, visit the Location Labs developer portal to register for a free developer account, access the SDKs and developer guide, and begin testing the APIs free of charge. Location Labs says more than 2,000 developers have signed up.

The app was launched to complement Currency, a website that features financial advice for young people. The app adds a social and gaming component to the site.

"Social Currency is the app that lets you shop with all your friends, whether they're down the street or across the country. Tell them what you're buying, where you're finding it, how much you're spending, and what you want. Even better-find out what your friends are buying, too," according to a press release.

The Currency site features a Social Currency leaderboard for users with the most check-ins. Social Currency users can get "offers badges like "Thrifty Spender" and "Super Shutterbug," which the site says will soon show up on users' Foursquare badges list (UPDATE: The site originally said badges would soon show up in Foursquare; it has been changed to say they will only be viewable in Social Currency. The badges look very similar to Foursquare badges).

This new app represents another A-list brand bagged by Foursquare. American Express and its partners (disclaimer: Federated Media sells ads on ReadWriteWeb) chose the Foursquare platform over Twitter or Facebook, even though both have more users and the latter offers location check-ins.

The companies were clearly interested in Foursquare's game mechanics in addition to its social network. Users "play" Social Currency with their friends and every action results in points and "unlocking" badges.

There are arguably better apps for shopping check-ins, tracking your purchases and making shopping social. But the Social Currency app is well-made, looks just like Foursquare and includes some neat features, like adding a photo of an item you "want" to a "birthday" or "Christmas" list, and being able to comment on your friends' actions. By collaborating with Foursquare, American Express took a boring effort to "extend personal finance education" and made it social and fresh.

What do you think? Would you use this app?

Opening the gates has not resulted in a flood of registrations. It appears that Quora's user base grew 27% in the six weeks after the change, down from an increase of almost 43% over four weeks prior to the change.

The site had 30,719 users on July 11, 43,925 users on August 11, and 55,930 users on September 19, according to user IDs recorded by the Quora community. The site opened up to search engines on August 6 (see Q&A Site Quora Opens Up To Search Engines Tomorrow).

Traffic is up, Quora says

Quora founder Adam D'Angelo declined to confirm the numbers, but said Quora was not expecting a huge increase in users because of search engines. The site has started getting "a lot" of traffic from search engines.

"No one ever gets a big increase in traffic when they open up to search engines," he said, noting that it takes a while to get indexed. "It slowly builds over time. That's what we're seeing and we're happy with it."

Little impact seen from Googlers

Quora is unique for its well-executed social integration (all users sign up with their Twitter or Facebook accounts), granular recommendation system and the number of high-profile people who are active on the site.

Some users were concerned that opening the site up would lead to the same notoriously inane queries that stream through Yahoo! Answers. Quora's community had a similar reaction when the site stopped being invite-only.

The topics still seem to be dominated by the techies who were on the site before it became visible to non-users. This may be part of the reason that search engines haven't brought an influx of new users.The content already on the site was crawled by search engines and potentially discovered by users looking for the same thing. Since the questions on Quora were already heavily weighted toward the tech industry, the site may not have reached many general interest searchers yet.

"I don't know why everyone thought it was a big deal when we opened up to search engines," he said. "We didn't really think it was a big deal, we thought it was a natural step... we did it and now we get a lot of traffic from search engines but we don't really see it affecting quality at all."

Quora continues to enrich its content and make the platform attractive for users

Quora rolled out a new feature tonight - "posts" - which lets users post a text bulletin to their followers. The feature is meant for non-question messages such as the announcement of a new Quora topic. The feature gives users a way to message their Quora followers without violating the policy for questions, which prohibits some content include classified ads-type queries.

"From the beginning, we've been focused on knowledge-sharing and we think this is part of that," D'Angelo said. "There is a lot of knowledge that doesn't really fit into the Q-and-A format and we wanted to give people a way to share that."

Do you use Quora? Have you noticed a difference in the content or community since Quora opened up to Google and other search engines?

The practice recently gained attention after some first person accounts of the cost-saving wonders of Netflix showed up in a library trade publication and on a blog.

Apparently, letting faculty members rent DVDs to show in the classroom and allowing students to watch streaming video from a library Netflix account can save a school library thousands of dollars.

Scheele Memorial Library Concordia College in New York saved around $3,000 by buying two Netflix subscriptions, which gave the library 16 rentals at a time in addition to being able to stream content online.

"The streaming movies have been a great success; instead of students waiting for the one DVD on reserve, they can go to the computer or into the library's film viewing room, where we have a Roku player set up, and watch the movies on our flat screen TV. The amount we save just having the instant play is significant; it's almost like having multiple copies of the movie on reserve," librarian Rebecca Fitzgerald said.

The Netflix subscription takes care of popular titles that students want so the library can spend its budget on "more acadamic materials," she said.

Netflix isn't thrilled about this. The films are protected by copyright against anything but "personal and non-commercial use," and Netflix does not offer institutional subscriptions, a representative told the Chronicle of Higher Education. (To get around this, one library got its own credit card.)

The librarians seem to know what they were doing was not completely kosher, although some argue that the law is open to interpretation on this point.

Netflix "frowns upon" this type of use, said Steve Swasey, Netflix' vice president of corporate communications, but indicated no plans to enforce the rules. "We just don't want to be pursuing libraries," he said. "We appreciate libraries and we value them, but we expect that they follow the terms of agreement."

But the libraries turning to Netflix are not just at small schools. The University of Washington, which has more than 47,000 students, is among schools advertising their Netflix subscriptions on library websites, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported (the page has since been taken down). With so many schools stuck for funding in the current recession, Netflix may feel pressured to act more aggressively to keep this from becoming a widespread trend - and that could end up costing libraries dearly.

That shift hasn't happened yet, according to an analyst at Conductor, a company that provides search engine optimization tools to marketers. "It doesn't appear to be having a significant impact on how users search," Conductor concluded. But that's not quite what the data show.

Length of queries hasn't changed - but that doesn't mean much

Conductor looked at more than 880,000 visits to ten "high traffic" websites in the week before and after the launch of Google Instant. Conductor grouped searches by the number of words in the query and concluded that "the distribution of traffic is identical week over week."

The researchers conclude this means Google Instant has has "not much" impact on user search behavior. But the fact that queries contain the same number of words doesn't mean user behavior is the same. This metric doesn't reveal anything about whether searchers are using different words, spending more time refining their queries or performing fewer searches because they're finding what they need faster.

SEO may need to change, whether SEO experts want to or not

"User behavior could have changed in other ways but the big shift people seemed to be talking about was around the length of queries changing because instant would cause changes in the way people search," said Nathan Safran, senior researcher at Conductor.

Safran was referring to speculation that searches would start typing longer queries, leading them to lower-traffic sites in the Internet's "long tail." This could present a challenge to website owners and those in the search engine optimization field, who tailor websites to attract more traffic from specific queries.

"Somebody stop the Google Instant SEO is dead/crippled/forever changed hysteria train, I'd like to get off," Safran wrote in a blog post about the research.

It may be in Conductor's interests to say that user behavior is exactly the same after one of the biggest changes Google has ever made to its search engine. But there are lots of ways user search behavior could have changed. Google estimated Instant would save users between two and five seconds per search. That's not because the results page no longer has to load, it's because users are using Google differently. But changes in behavior - and ways SEO professionals might want to consider changing their methods - wouldn't necessarily have been reflected in this data.

Too early to tell

It's also been just 12 days since Google Instant came out, and I still catch myself pressing enter when I could be letting Google remix my results. Instant is a much different way of searching, and we're betting that the full impacts on user behavior won't be known until people get used to it.

Google Instant has inspired a rash of copycats, instantizing search for everything from Twitter and YouTube to iTunes. The art of SEO will be necessary as long as search engines are a major driver of Web traffic. But we're betting that the field is going to have to adapt to post-Instant world (see How Will Google Instant Affect Your Company's SEO?).

Google's words on the subject: "Our most important advice to webmasters remains the same: Users want to visit pages with compelling content and a great user experience."

Has Google Instant changed the way you search? Do you think it will impact the ability to optimize for Google?

Newsweek has been struggling financially and The Washington Post Company sold the magazine for a small fee and its debt in August. The buyer was Sidney Harman, a businessman and philanthropist.

But there has been an exodus of talent since the company changed hands. The editor in chief resigned, and reporters fled to Time, The National Journal, Yahoo! Finance and other ventures.

But some of Newsweek's old media veterans are finding a place in the new media world. Mark Coatney, a senior editor and manager of Newsweek's social media presence on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, was one of Newsweek's more high-profile staffers to leave.

The Newsweek Tumblr was praised for its conversational tone and quickly gained a following. But Coatney left Newsweek around the time of the sale to take a position at... Tumblr. He's now their media liaison, working with publications to make their content social (see Newsweek Editor Jumps Ship to New, New Media; Joins Tumblr).

Fineman said he decided to go to The Huffington Post because the Web is "where the action is." "The chance to dive headlong into the future is one that I don't think anyone could pass up," he told The New York Times Media Decoder blog.

Sounds like a major change for a career reporter at a weekly glossy to suddenly find himself at an online-only publication. The hire is also a bit of a breach for The Huffington Post, which relies on a younger staff and unpaid guest bloggers. But cross-pollination between new and old media is something we're starting to see more of as bloggers get hired at newspapers, newspaper reporters get hired at blogs and bloggers get called on during White House press briefings.

Hans Scharler's thermostat keeps dibs on his location, the outside temperature and the temperature inside the house, and decides when to kick on the air conditioning or heat.

'0
Scharler is a developer at ioBridge, which makes software and hardware to remotely control or monitor everything from fish tanks to toaster. His thermostat is connected to a controller that adjusts the settings based on location data from Google Latitude and temperature data from Google Weather, WeatherBug, inside the house.

We've written about ioBridge (see Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009) and ioBridge implementation before (see Automate Your Home Using ioBridge and Twitter).

Scharler wrote the project in Perl, which he said is "perfect for parsing lots of data, pushing data into databases, and connecting services together." He can also manually control the thermostat using an ioBridge Application Programming Interface, or API, that sends commands to the thermostat controller.

Now that the system is functional, Scharler said he's had "a flood of ideas" for location-aware apps mashed with Internet-connected objects. Your house could come alive when you pull into the driveway - thermostat clicks on, garage door opens, coffee starts brewing, your burglar alarm deactivates.

What applications do you see coming out of location awareness and networked things? Do you think these applications are neat, or is Scharler's project a Rube Goldberg machine, performing a simple task with an impressive but overly-complicated mechanism?

Social media is the one job sector in which recent college grads are having luck, reports Newsweek, and universities are adding social media classes in response.

The number of social-media job postings on the job site Indeed.com has increased by more than 600 percent since 2005, according to a report by SocialMediaInfluence.com, which tracks social media trends.

Universities have started adding social media classes such as the Internet marketing class, "Social Media" at Columbia or the second-year elective course at Harvard, "Competing with Social Networks." Birmingham City University even offers a one year master's degree in social media.

In recent history, companies were so desperate for help understanding the social Web that they seemed ready to hire anyone who could string buzzwords together. The term "social media guru" - a euphemism for person who knows how to tweet - became somewhat of a joke.

But at least the field has gotten more defined. "Gurus" have stratified into analysts, community managers, editors, product developers, marketers and even social media executives (although there are still plenty of companies hiring for gurus).

Social media jobs don't pay as well as similar positions in public relations, according to SocialMediaInfluence.com. But it's nice to hear that those recent graduates have some options when it comes to a job. A liberal arts major who graduated in 2010 may not have many prospects in business, government, education, and so on - but she definitely knows how to use Facebook.

But Groupon is getting so big that it's bound to make a few missteps, and it was hit by two doozies today. A photographer posted a completely fraudulent offer and a cafe owner wrote a scathing blog post about Groupon's sales team, service and customers.

Many were harmed, irked or otherwise inconvenienced by these slipups. But at least some were happy - Groupon's competitors.

A representative for Mobile Spinach, a free service that shares discounts with its members, reached out to us with a link to the blog post written by the owner of Posie's Cafe in Portland, Ore. This business owner tried Groupon for the first time, but the deal ended up costing her money when she was overwhelmed with more than 1,000 bargain-seeking customers.

"Entering into a deal with Groupon caused them serious financial problems - basically put them on the brink of bankruptcy," Mobile Spinach's rep said in an email. "Mobile Spinach is a mobile deal platform that is similar in nature to Groupon, but the owners actually used to be small business owners themselves, and they set up Mobile Spinach to make sure deals appeal to customers AND merchants, and that the merchants actually get real customers with lifetime value, not just deal jumpers."

Groupon's bad news also came at a great time for LivingSocial, a site that features one deeply discounted deal per day to members, which becomes free for those who get three or more friends to buy. LivingSocial launched in 25 new markets today in Canada, the U.S. and U.K. Its family edition, featuring deals for family-friendly activities ilke zoos, is launching Monday.

No doubt Mobile Spinach, LivingSocial and Groupon's other competitors are enjoying some schadenfraude as commenters and the media pile onto Groupon, which is left trying to make nice with the cafe owner.

What do you think - does Groupon's bad press make you think twice about the golden coupon service?

Footprint Feed is a mobile app that lets you set up feeds to share your location with people you know through Facebook, Twitter, RSS or specific people via text message or email. "Death to the check in," said Director Rob Cleghorn. "Set-up some feeds and forget about it."

Footprint Feed works with Google Latitude, which runs in the background on your phone to constantly monitor your location. Instruct Footprint Feed where you want to "check in" ahead of time, and who you want to know about it. You can have a text message sent to your parents when you land safely at the airport, or tweet when you visit a new city, or update Facebook that you're at the library (or the bar). You can also "check out" the same way you check in, so your friends know you've left the party as Latitude detects that you've moved on.

"We've tried to keep it as open as possible, from a bus that you can follow on Twitter to see which stop it's at to that text message you always forget to send your mum to let her know you got home okay," Cleghorn said. "We're all about setting up some feeds, running Latitude on your phone and keeping everyone you choose updated with your movements, automatically."

It's refreshing to see a geofencing app that isn't about advertising (see our recent post, For Advertisers, Location-Based Services "Blew Up Overnight"). Footprint Feed isn't even ad-supported - it's a freemium model that offers most features for free, but for $4.70 a month you get unlimited email notifications and 50 text messages a month.

Footprint Feed was developed by Cleghorn's Footprint Labs, a small location-based services startup in London that created the Facebook app Footprint History, a sort of precurser to Facebook Places complete with an application programming interface or API. Footprint History was retired after Facebook restricted access to profiles by third-party apps.

Footprint Labs just announced SMS support, and is working on support for Facebook Places, Google Buzz and LinkedIn.

A useful app, or would you rather your geofencing came with coupons? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Tech companies dominated the list, but not exclusively. Other companies in the top 25 include Amazon.com, Best Buy, Apple, Williams-Sonoma, Gap, Electronic Arts, Pulte Homes, and Walt Disney, which has fallen to #25 from the #5 spot since the last time the report was done in May. Goldman Sachs was #50.

Most of the corporations on the list were either very large, consumer-facing brands like Target or were related to the high tech industry.

Click to see full size.

The NetProspex report measured social media activity across industries, job titles, geographic region and specific corporations. Employees in the "Search Engines - Online Portals," media, banking and marketing industries were most active in social media. Other surprises in the list were "Cleaning Products" (#11) and "Home Appliances" (#16).

Click to see full size.

The industries with the least social employees were "Trucking, Moving & Storage," "Laundry & Dry Cleaning Services" and "Funeral Homes & Funeral-Related Services." The report also concluded that employees at funeral homes and in the tobacco industry "don't tweet."

Infegy looked at a 10,000 post sample from the past 30 days to determine how the top music sites stacked up against each other.

A topic cloud of words from posts about Apple's Ping.

Ping has been criticized as a half-baked social network where the real goal is to sell more songs on iTunes. An agreement with Facebook that would have made it more social fell through before the release. The service was quickly overrun with spam. All in all, it has not caught on with the fire of some of Apple's other products, and people simply are not talking about it. "With the exception of a huge spike on the day of its release, Ping chatter has been surprisingly low," Infegy said.

Graph of the amount of talk around social music sites.

So who do users like? The streaming site Rdio registered a distant last in terms of conversation generated, but 87% of the conversation it generated was positive despite the fact that it just launched last month and costs $4.99 per month. Rdio was founded by creators of Skype and the file-sharing service KaZaA, is integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm and iTunes.

Blip.fm, the streaming service that revolves around user-created playlists, was the most talked-about service, and 80% of the conversation was positive. Pandora, the streaming music recommendation engine, generated the second-most buzz, 81% of which was positive.

The real winner may be the free streaming service Spotify, which is integrated with Facebook and generates about as much conversation as Ping even though it is not available yet in the U.S. Spotify is available in seven European countries, but its launch in the U.S. has been delayed by legal negotiations. Spotify has faced negotiation delays but is aiming to launch in the U.S. in 2011. Conversation about Spotify was 82% positive, 14% negative and 3% mixed.

Do you use Ping or Blip.fm? Which social music sites do you prefer?

Google is not known for smooth design, but it seems to be trying harder to give users a pleasurable experience. "This simple and intuitive online album experience makes it easier to explore all the wonderful photographs of places all over the world," the company wrote on its Lat Long blog.

Today Google rolled out a better design for browsing photos of landmarks and businesses from Google Maps or Place Pages.

Google Images got a similar makeover for the better this summer, introducing a new interface with search results tiled down a single page that can display up to 1,000 photos and a prettier way to enlarge any photo you want to see better in a lightbox displayed over the source page.

Google is making photo-viewing better, but that's not all it's done. Users can flip easily through high resolution photos that they can click on to get to relevant sites on the Web.

Users of Panoramio, Google's photo-sharing site that emphasizes geo-tagging, or Google Places can upload and geo-tag photos. Google also pulls from around the Web for the photos it displays on Place Pages.

Google's push for a better user experience comes as Microsoft presents well-designed products like Bing and Street Slide that directly compete with Google services, and as Apple continues to introduce more people to its religion of good design.

Which Google products do you think are well-designed?