Google launches Government Requests tool. Google is now making public information on the requests it receives from government agents to remove content from its search results or reveal private user data. The Government Requests tool currently displays the number and type of requests by country for the last six months of 2009. In a bit [...]

A roundup of happenings that bear on the issues in The Future of the Internet – Canadian Android Carrier Forcing Firmware Update. A Canadian carrier wanted users to download a firmware upgrade that fixed a glitch prohibiting users from dialing 911, so it made the upgrade mandatory. Seems reasonable. But it bundled in an update [...]

AppMakr Transforms App Store Landscape, Enables Anyone To Make Their Own iPhone App. Gagan Biyani raves about AppMakr, a product that allows anyone to make a simple RSS-based iPhone app for $199. The company will even submit the app to the App Store. (So, for instance, Biyani put together an app that aggregates all of [...]

Thanks for all the great comments (here, and in replies directly to JZ on FB and Twitter) on why Facebook apps haven’t taken off the way, say, iPhone apps have. I thought I’d try to summarize some of the dominant themes to think about whether the problem is inherent or created by Facebook itself. 1. [...]

CIO.com offers a fascinating article on the Facebook economy and how much app use has plummeted since a Facebook user interface redesign de-emphasized outside apps. I’d noticed that, too, and wondered what Facebook was thinking in stripping the site down so much (or Twitterizing itself, depending on how you look at it). The article does [...]

Here’s a copy of Monday’s NYT op-ed about cloud computing.  The Kindle/Orwell incident broke about ten minutes before the piece closed.  (The original new hook, somewhat oddly, was the announcement of the Google Chrome OS — not at all bad in itself, but a milestone on our progression from PC to cloud.)

Some Herdict Updates: * Here is a new video with Prof. Z navigating the screen and explaining how to use Herdict. * Helping us get the word of Herdict out to the herd-at-large, Shep has taken on some impressive language skills (and more impressive gender changes) to promote Herdict in a number of different languages [...]

Some thoughts on the Facebook terms of service privacy storm: Facebook and other social networks have an especially tricky time in this zone, since so much user data is relational.  You upload a photo of you and me; I tag it with your name.  I leave Facebook — does your name disappear from the photo [...]

Apple continues to exercise its control over the iPhone platform, recently rejecting an app for using too much bandwidth. CastCatcher was a radio streaming app, which had been approved in several previous versions; the latest update was rejected for violating the TOS provision limiting bandwidth use. The developers are upset—they say the updated version didn’t [...]

document.domain = “futureoftheinternet.org”;The makers of Scrabulous have apparently relaunched it as “Wordscraper,” a word game that can support a variety of rules, and whose tiles no longer look so much like Scrabble’s. Players can themselves set the rules to simulate a Scrabble game — but that would make the infringement that of the users rather [...]