Google Wave

27 days and counting. That’s how long it is until September 30th, when Google will start sending 100,000 invites for the early test of Google Wave.

The real-time communication platform has captured the imagination of countless communication, social media, and tech enthusiasts that want to get their hands on its game-changing features. It can import Twitter, provide real-time chat, play back past conversations, and even allows for drag-and-drop file uploads.

There are a lot of features, but it is unlike any other web product yet and thus takes time to learn. That’s why in July we asked an important question: is the world ready for Google Wave? Will there be widespread adoption, or will the ambitious project fall short of expectations? Will developers jump on the Wave bandwagon and build apps for it like they do for Twitter (Twitter) and Facebook (Facebook)?

via Google Wave Arrives This Month: Are You Ready?.

iPhone - Now with MMS from 2002!

AT&T has just announced that MMS — a much-ballyhooed feature of iPhone OS 3.0 — will finally be hitting AT&T on September 25. There’s still no date for tethering, though the company is holding the line that it’ll be offered “in the future.” Expanding on the logic behind the tethering delay, they’re saying that “by its nature, this function could exponentially increase traffic on the network, and we need to ensure that some of our current upgrades are in place before we can deliver the expanded functionality with the excellent performance that customers expect.”

We’re no network engineers, but “exponentially increase traffic” and “AT&T” are two things we don’t typically like to hear in the same sentence — let’s hope the 850MHz, 7.2Mbps, and backhaul upgrades they’re cranking on right now go a long way toward sorting that out. As for MMS, they’re acknowledging that the release “does indeed fall a few days past the official end of summer,” arguing that their support of more iPhone customers than any other carrier in the world made a positive launch experience a bit of a challenge.

Of course, virtually every other phone AT&T sells (and has sold for the past several years) supports the same tech, so this feels like a pretty active admission that iPhone users blaze through data-rich features at a pace that the carrier has been ill-equipped to handle.

Grab a Mac... any Mac!

Have you ever thought about just how much stuff is on display in an Apple store? Those Macbook, iPhones, and iPods are probably worth hundred of thousands of dollars. Apple products aren’t cheap, after all.

Maybe that’s why these crooks targeted an Apple store in Marlton, New Jersey for a seemingly well-plan heist. The result was that five men were able to nab 23 Macbook Pros, 14 iPhones, and 9 iPod Touches. The kicker? The thieves were able to steal all of this stuff in exactly 31 seconds.

View the video: VIDEO: Thieves Clean Out an Apple Store in 31 Seconds.

Hayley Jones changed her Facebook status to single shortly before her death

A man killed his girlfriend after becoming suspicious of her activity on Facebook, a court has heard.

Hayley Jones changed her Facebook status to single shortly before her death

Brian Lewis, 31, denies strangling his partner Hayley Jones to death at the home they shared with their four children in Phillipstown, New Tredegar, south Wales.

The youngsters found their mother’s lifeless body in the living room after Lewis fled the scene during the early hours of March 12, Cardiff Crown Court was told.

Jurors heard that cracks began to appear in the couple’s relationship when Lewis lost his job and Ms Jones, 26, found work as a care assistant.

Prosecutor Mark Evans QC said: “Hayley had at the same time started to expand her social horizons.

(continue reading…)

Facebook’s Reach Worldwide

Everyone knows that Facebook has become absolutely massive, but it’s easy to lose sight of just how big a number like 250 million is. Buzzpoint, a social media marketing firm based out of Los Angeles, has put together an impressive visualization that shows off just how large Facebook has grown. The company has estimated the current and past Facebook usage statistics using available data and plotted a number of graphs tracking its progress over the last three years.

Among the more interesting stats: as of July 15 2009, Facebook had 250 million active users, which would make it the fourth most popular country in the world. Facebook’s top two traffic contributors are the US (by a large margin) and the UK, but in third is Turkey, which didn’t even have a localized version until last year (though English is fairly common there).

via A Look At Facebook’s Reach Worldwide.

Zipcar

Those living in urban environments probably know all about car-sharing service Zipcar. For the rest of the world, Zipcar made its global splash by demoing its upcoming iPhone app during the keynote at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The impressive demo not only stood out to numerous iPhone-owning Zipcar customers—it generated a flurry of curiosity among the geek crowd about what Zipcar is and how the technology behind the service works. After entertaining a few discussions here at the Orbiting HQ as well as numerous reader questions, we decided to take a peek behind the curtain at Zipcar to learn more about the system, learning that it’s more complex—and cooler—than we originally thought.

via GSM, black boxes, and iPhones: the tech that drives Zipcar – Ars Technica.

The rise of social gaming is happening more quietly than one might think given the statistics. Today we’re hearing about another potential milestone: Facebook (facebook) application FarmVille claims to be the fastest growing social game in history, reaching an impressive 11 million daily users in a little over two months.

To put than in perspective, World of Warcraft is the largest massively multiplayer game that dominates MMO marketshare with at last report 11.5 million active subscribers. Its publisher Blizzard hasn’t revealed any new population statistics since the end of last year, but assures the press that its figures are still growing. It took WoW four years to reach that many subscribers after its launch in late 2004.

Compare that to FarmVille, which only launched June 19 of this year. If its daily active stats are accurate, that would mean FarmVille is close to rivaling industry-leading World of Warcraft’s player numbers in only a little more than two months. Perhaps it has already eclipsed the elephant in the social gaming room if you look at its monthly stats, which boast 30 million active users.

via 11 Million Facebook Users Flock to Virtual Farming Daily.

A recent simplification of Facebook’s user privacy controls wasn’t enough for some policymakers.

On Thursday, in conjunction with the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, Facebook announced a new set of modifications to its user privacy controls as well as its developer API, and the targets of these changes are the thousands of third-party applications built on Facebook’s developer platform. That means there may be major implications for developers–some of whom rely almost exclusively on Facebook activity as a revenue source.

The Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s office released a set of recommendations for Facebook last month, specifically highlighting concerns that third-party applications could access a significant amount of users’ personal data. “It’s clear that privacy issues are top of mind for Facebook, and yet we found serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates,” commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said in a release at the time. (continue reading…)

Mac OS X Snow Leopard

If you’re wondering why there’s all this talk about bits, especially with the upcoming introduction of Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, you’re not alone. Everyone seems to be tossing around the term 64-bit, and it can get confusing. The terms “64-bit processor” and “64-bit operating system” get tossed around quite a bit, but the exact definition isn’t exactly clear. Let’s try to tear apart this mess.

Processor

The processor is the brain of your computer, and best deals with information in chunks which are, as you may have guessed, a certain number of bits in length. Let’s start with a simple example, the 6502 in the first Apple ][ computers. This processor had 8-bit registers, and had a 16 bit memory address space.

This means registers could represent 256 (2^8) values, and there are 64K (2^16) memory locations, each of which holds an 8-bit byte. Fast forward to the latest Core 2 Duo processors, whose registers can represent 2^64 values, and can address up to 2^64 bytes of (virtual) memory. (continue reading…)

Some of the members of this list are heavyweights in their own right you may have heard of. But others are a bit farther off the beaten path, and we encourage you to experiment with a few and let us know what you think.

Are there contenders in this list to subvert the web browsing paradigm? What browser(s) do you use and why? Let us know in the comments!

via 14 Alternative Browsers That Are Not Internet Explorer 6.