Thanks to the recent proliferation of do-it-yourself iPhone app services, the next big thing in Apple's App Store might just be vanity apps. Take, for example, Appsfire's Ouriel Ohayon, who just announced the launch of his own iPhone app. Ohayon used Odiogo Apps to create this personalized app. Odiogo , which mostly focuses on providing text-to-speech services for news sites and blogs, allows users to add RSS feeds, Twitter updates and photos from Flickr to its apps. Sponsor Odiogo's apps also feature the company's text-to-speech services, offline access and advertising support. For now, though, potential users still have to contact the company's sales department to get their own apps and the price of these customized apps isn't clear. More Clutter or a Great Opportunity? As the barrier of entry for creating customized iPhone apps continues to fall, chances are that we will see more and more vanity apps in the App Store. On the one hand, this could clutter the store with relatively useless apps. On the other hand, it could also provide a new source of income for independent bloggers who could use the apps to sell more advertising inventory or even charge a small fee for the app itself. Even bloggers with a small fanbase could reap the benefits of having their own iPhone apps. The question, however, is if users are actually interested in installing a single-purpose iPhone app that only gives them access to the content of one blogger. In the end, these apps are less flexible than a good mobile RSS reader. Apps like this probably make more sense for large multi-author blogs that publish a lot of content every day. On the other hand, the idea of being able to point their friends to their iPhone apps will surely prove to be irresistible for many people. Discuss

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Vanity Apps: The Next Big Thing For the iPhone?

Just as many of us are getting used to augmented reality applications for cellphones and digital cameras, Babak Amir Parviz and his University of Washington students are taking it one step further. The group is working on a human machine interface where LEDs are embedded into contact lenses in order to display information to the wearer. You heard right, in a few years your cyborg eye will talk to you. In an article with the IEEE Spectrum , Parviz relays the challenges of custom-building semi-transparent circuitry into a polymer lens roughly 1.2 millimeters in diameter. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Says Parviz, "We're starting with a simple product, a contact lens with a single light source, and we aim to work up to more sophisticated lenses that can superimpose computer-generated high-resolution color graphics on a user's real field of vision." For now, Parviz mentions that single pixel visual cues for gamers and the hearing impaired are already quite possible with the lens prototypes. The group has also experimented with non-invasive biomonitoring including checking glucose levels for diabetics. Some of the obvious challenges of building an augmented reality contact lens include: 1. The Need for Custom Parts: Regular circuitry and LEDs are incompatible with regular contact lenses. Every piece of this project must be fabricated from scratch. 2. Physical Constraints: The group must attempt to fit transistors, radio chips, antennas, diffusion resistors, LEDs and photodetectors onto a minuscule polymer disc. Additionally, the team is required to control lens position and light intensity relative to the pupil. And finally, because the lens is so close to the corneal surface, the group must project images away from the cornea using either micro-lenses or lasers. 3. User Safety: In addition to protecting the eye against chemicals, heat and toxins, the lens components must be semi-transparent in order for the wearer to view their surroundings. "We already see a future in which the humble contact lens becomes a real platform, like the iPhone is today, with lots of developers contributing their ideas and inventions. As far as we're concerned, the possibilities extend as far as the eye can see." And you thought the iPhone SDK was a tough nut to crack. For Parviz's complete seven-page article, check out the IEEE Spectrum's Biomedical page. Discuss

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Your Cyborg Eye Will Talk to You

Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments. The new app looks like a less elegant version of the Facebook iPhone app, but it's less customizable. There are a variety of useful new features, from faster invite sending to importing contact info to your phone, but the app remains based on the company's mistaken desire of late to be your all-in-one social media messaging platform. It also fails to deliver the features that would make it most useful. If you're looking for good news about new features, you can find it in the self-flattering company blog post . Here are the three things that disappoint me most about this new app; hopefully it's a work in progress and will improve soon. Sponsor What's The Most Important Kind of LinkedIn Update? People Getting New Jobs! For some reason LinkedIn will not deliver you a simple feed of the new jobs that contacts of yours have taken. Not by email, not by RSS, not through its fancy new API and not on this new iPhone app. Update feeds are cluttered with imported ephemera from Twitter and all too often job changes are obscured behind the phrase "contact X has updated their profile." They have? How did they update it? It's maddening. LinkedIn says it's working on solving this problem, but it doesn't seem to be a very high priority. Prompting users to click more and engage with a wider variety of message types seem more in line with LinkedIn's strategy. The company clearly wants to be Facebook and Twitter for the business world - not just a place where we all go to find out essential work information that we use while doing other forms of social networking on other sites better suited for things like short, trivial messages. Importing Contacts to Your Phone is Rudimentary Perhaps LinkedIn isn't to blame for this, but the ability to import LinkedIn contacts' info onto your phone is rendered a whole lot less useful by the inability to merge that info with existing contacts. Say you've got someone's name and phone number on your phone already - it's a headache to pull in a person's LinkedIn profile info and then merge the two manually. Of course your phone number isn't an optional field you can fill out on LinkedIn, so all those imported contacts will be people you're unable to call. You won't even be able to look them up on LinkedIn again from your phone's contact list - peoples' LinkedIn profile page URLs aren't included in the contact info that gets imported. There's No Push Notifications This is a professional application that people use on the iPhone - shouldn't it include push notifications? LinkedIn is used by tons of sales people, for example - you know they'd like to get some of these updates pushed to them. As a writer, I would too. Look at it this way. Last month my LinkedIn contact Tara Hunt changed her profile to show that she's founded a new company called Shwowp . I want to know that, preferably right away. But I don't know about it until a month later because I didn't want to fish through a bunch of cross-posted Twitter updates inside LinkedIn to catch Tara's news and I didn't want to click through 3 screens starting with the bland "Tara Hunt has updated her profile" in order to see if she's happened to change jobs or just noted a new personal interest on her profile page. When someone who has accepted my contact request changes jobs, I want a push notification about what the new job is and the option to call them on the phone immediately to discuss it. That doesn't seem like too much to ask and that's when I'll know that LinkedIn is really serving my professional life. Update: LinkedIn's Adam Nash, author of the company's announcement blog post, responded on Twitter saying: "we've discussed all three of these enhancements internally. Some are harder than others. All in the queue...Rest assured, we wouldn't have broken out profile updates into its own module if we didn't have big plans for it. " Discuss

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LinkedIn's New iPhone App: The 3 Worst Things About It

There isn't a mass exodus from Facebook over the privacy settings, but it is responding with messages like this sent to users to assuage their fears: "Worried about search engines? Your information is safe. There have been misleading rumors about Facebook indexing all your information on Google. This is not true..." Several thoughtful Web 2.0 users have blogged about their decision in the last week to leave Facebook and two different "suicide" sites exist. Sponsor This guest post was written by Kaliya Hamlin, also known as Identity Woman , who has been working on cultivating open standards for user-centric identity since 2004. She co-founded, co-produces and facilitates the Internet Identity Workshop , the primary venue for collaboration on identity standards amongst large Internet portals, large enterprise IT companies and small innovators. This thoughtful post written by Nick Barron , who is based in the Washington D.C. area, talks about meeting Facebook in college and falling in love and understanding this new form of communication in social networks would be transformative for people and business. He believed, "at the end of the day, that Facebook was here for you and me. It was our social network, and while technically being a large company, it was a company of people just like us who wanted a more advanced way of building and maintaining relationships. "I feel there are no good alternatives for me, except going along with whatever scraps of privacy Facebook is graciously willing to hand me from their table... Facebook has me by the balls. They have you, too, and they know it . They know you have too many friends and family, photos and videos, games and other applications on Facebook for you to leave now. And where would you go? Where would I go?... I am not committed to Facebook anymore. I am looking for a way out, while still being able to do my job. Can a social media pro leave Facebook? We may soon find out." Others are more blunt: "Simply put, I don't trust my information being on Facebook anymore. I have deleted the Facebook app from my iPhone and I will shut down the page in about a week." I'm Leaving Facebook by Steve Scherer. "I am not a privacy hawk, nor a fear-monger, nor a neo-luddite; in fact, those of you who know me well know that I am a technology enthusiast and a generally a booster of any technology related solutions that could potentially make our lives easier. In this instance I'm morally and intellectually opposed to Facebook's cavalier attitude with what amounts to, for some of us, data that relates to a significant portion of our (online) lives. See also: Why Facebook Changed Its Privacy Policies A visit to the privacy settings pages and FAQs reveals a great many soothing platitudes. While these may fulfil their legal obligations it is ultimately disingenuous for Facebook to suggest that anyone actually reads any of these when in reality the vast majority of users likely accept the default "Everyone" setting. " "Why I'm Hitting the "Delete" Key on Facebook" by Narain Jashanmal. Early adopter and tech journalist Dan Gilmor is among those who have committed "suicide." He started a new account with his old Facebook URL and checked out the new default privacy settings that he describes as "un-private." He highlights the conflict as, "What's in the corporate interest, however, doesn't necessarily match what's in my interest, or yours." If you want to commit "Facebook suicide" you have two options. One is Seppukoo.com, which likens the act of killing your digital self to: Discover what's after your Facebook life. We assist your virtual suicide. You are more then your virtual identity. Pass away and leave your ID behind. Seppukwho? Testimonials and Frinds. Discover who has committed seppukoo. Impress your friends, disconnect yourself. Join the world wide suicidal network. The site was created by Les Liens Invisibles , which creates playful 2.0-style media artworks. Two people make up this imaginary art group, Clemente Pestelli and Gionatan Quintini. You can see Gionatan's RIP memorial on the site ; it highlights friends that have joined him in the Facebook afterlife along with those still left. The process works like this: 1) you give the site your login credentials, 2) you create last works and a skin for your customized memorial page, 3) you enjoy your Sepppukoo - the platform will send all your friends your last words and customize your memorial page - and 4) you get a score - every friend you convince to Seuppukoo will increase your score on the site. This version of Facebook suicide is not permanent - you can just login to Facebook. Sepppukoo does have a cease and desist from Facebook , although dated Dec. 16. One of the main points is that they "collect Facebook's users' content or information using automated means such as scripts or scrapers without Facebook's permission" The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine offers "suicide" for Facebook, Myspace and Linkedin. It highlights its time saving nature taking just under one hour vs. over nine hours to go through the process manually with 1,000 Facebook friends. The tool lets you watch your "virtual suicide" as it happens. They have 134 people they say have committed suicide using their tools. You can see the list along with their last words and how many friends they lost. You can see a video by Moddr_ of it in action. "Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web 2.0 alterego." He say in the video, "my interent life is dying and my real life is starting," and closes with" Get your life back - sign-out forever" Their FAQs are great. If I start killing my 2.0-self, can I stop the process? No! If I start killing my 2.0-self, can YOU stop the process? No! What shall I do after I've killed myself with the Web 2.0 suicide machine? Try calling some friends, talk a walk in a park or buy a bottle of wine and start enjoying your real life again. Some Social Suiciders reported that their life has improved by an approximate average of 25%. Don't worry, if you feel empty right after you committed suicide. This is a normal reaction which will slowly fade away within the first 24-72 hours. Why do we think the Web 2.0 suicide machine is not unethical? Everyone should have the right to disconnect. Seamless connectivity and rich social experience offered by web2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom. Users are entraped in a high resolution panoptic prison without walls, accessible from anywhere in the world. Whatever you think about the bleak humor of a Facebook "suicide, those who've left - or are thinking about leaving - are talking about their decision in terms of freedom. "I made the decision yesterday to ditch Facebook. Their privacy options are too intrusive. Glad twitter isn't like that." @ReetaLuthra "I actually feel more wholesome after leaving Facebook. I didn't expect that." @sansian "I think it's the feeling of loss of control that I don't like, that something is set in such a way that I can't reset it myself, and thus info is getting out/posted online/is otherwise being used in such a way that I don't want. I'll have to think about it... I'm just tempted to take what seems to be the path of least resistance and just ditch Facebook entirely. I'll have to think about it... " Considering Leaving Facebook We even found a Muslim perspective ( translation ) on the virtues of leaving the virtual world for the real world. This recently popped up: Facebook is hiring for its Advertising Privacy Counsel to work on a "cross-section of fascinating legal issues". I am wondering if maybe they should have done more hiring before they changed privacy policies, which may have broken the law and and has lead the Electronic Privacy Information Center to file a complaint with the FTC . Face book photo by Massimo Barbieri . Discuss

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Fed Up With Facebook Privacy Issues? Here's How To End It All

App downloads on the iPhone and iPod Touch saw a huge spike this Christmas , especially on the Touch. I know I downloaded more games this weekend than I've ever used in my life, just to entertain kids I was visiting. With all this app downloading going on, though, which apps will prove to have staying power? What can you download today and expect to keep using throughout the next year? Below is my collection of the downloaded apps I used the most in 2009. I'd love to compare lists, so let me know in comments about any hidden gems that you've come back to again and again throughout the year. Sponsor RSS readers may be unable to view the embedded display in javascript but can click through to the full article to check out this collection. Those are the apps I kept coming back to all year, what about you? The app sharing widget above is from AppsFire , my favorite way to share single or groups of apps with other people by widget or email, and one of 5 app recommendation services we compared feature-by-feature last month . Discuss

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My Most-Used iPhone Apps of 2009

Taptu , a mobile search engine that specializes in indexing mobile-friendly websites, just launched a new version of its iPhone app. The new app now includes real-time search results, which are powered by OneRiot . In addition to including these real-time search results, Taptu also worked hard on improving the speed of the app and on providing more relevant search results. Taptu offers apps for the iPhone, iPod touch ( iTunes link ) and Android, as well as a mobile optimized website. Sponsor Taptu first integrated real-time search results from OneRiot in its mobile web interface and in its Android app last month . The mobile apps definitely provide a far superior way of using the service than the mobile site, however. There are two ways to access real-time search results in the app. The homepage now displays the hottest trending topics and a single click on one of these opens up OneRiot search results. In addition, you can also do a normal search and then select 'latest buzz' from the options menu right next to the search box. This same menu also allows you to restrict search to images, videos, blog or Wikipedia articles, as well as to sites and blogs about sports, news or apps. For a closer look at Taptu's feature set, also have a look at our review of the service's web app . Discuss

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Taptu Adds Real-Time Search to Its Mobile Apps

Every year the ReadWriteWeb team tries its hand at predicting the future. Looking back at our 2009 predictions , we got some wrong (I predicted that Facebook would sign up to OpenSocial) but others turned out to be on the money. I correctly guessed that the usual suspects would remain unacquired in '09 - Digg, Twitter, Technorati - but that FriendFeed would get bought. OK, so I guessed that Google would be the buyer. But close enough! Without further ado, here are our predictions for 2010. We'd love to read your predictions in the comments. Sponsor Richard MacManus, Founder & CEO 1. There will be a breakthrough consumer application for Internet of Things - involving the iPhone, RFID tags and a major consumer product such as books or groceries. In general Internet of Things will ramp up in 2010, with thousands more everyday objects becoming connected to the Internet. 2. Google will acquire PostRank and promptly consign it to the same graveyard Feedburner went to. 3. Microsoft will acquire Wolfram|Alpha and Bing will continue to make small gains in the search market. Google will be distracted by increasing consumer complaints about content farms polluting Google search results. 4. A price war will erupt in the eBook market and Amazon.com will offer the lowest prices, leading to it gaining a dominant position in the market with its Kindle eBook Reader. 5. Google will partner with a large PC manufacturer from Asia, who will launch an inexpensive netbook powered by Chrome OS in the U.S. market. It will become a hot consumer item among school kids and university students. Marshall Kirkpatrick, Lead Writer & VP Content Dev 1. Google Wave will win some respect back as people discover valuable uses for it and get used to the user experience. 2. Facebook will open aggregate user profile and social graph data for outside analysis. 3. Some serious user interface innovations will blow our minds. 4. Data portability will become more real, standard, expected and viable. 5. A new social network will rise to join the big ones. It may offer the privacy that Facebook is moving away from, it may be mobile and location-centric, it may focus on personal content recommendations. Sarah Perez, Feature Writer 1. MySpace doesn't quite make a comeback, but gets a fresh start of sorts with their music and entertainment offerings. The Gen Y/Gen Z demographic sees growth on the site but the network's overall numbers continue to decline. 2. Twitter launches ads. 3. TweetDeck finally launches a web version and becomes the number 1 Twitter client other than twitter.com. 4. Cloud computing heats up. AWS, Google, Microsoft and others begin price wars to compete for customers. 5. The iPhone still rules and grabs more mobile market share than ever before. 6. Meanwhile, Android becomes the #2 mobile platform by year-end. 7. iPhone App backlash begins. There are too many worthless apps and no decent way to find the good ones. Then Apple surprises us with a brand-new feature that improves greatly upon their "genius" offering to help us find new and useful apps via iTunes. 8. iTunes announces a web service, thanks to the Lala acquisition. 9. Spotify finally gets the green light in U.S. and people go nuts for it. 10. The netbook craze dies down. People start buying new "in-between" devices that are slightly larger and more powerful than today's netbooks - but smaller, more lightweight and cheaper than regular notebooks. Features like better processors, separate GPUs, and SSD HD options set these new "ultra portable" devices apart from the traditional netbook, but they're still often called "netbooks" because of their size. Market confusion ensues. Jolie O'Dell, Writer & Community Manager 1. MySpace relaunches as a content network, leveraging the bands and filmmakers they already have on board and dropping the emphasis on social networking. 2. Twitter will find a monetization model and launch things like ads and pro features. 3. Facebook will become the Borg. Its number of users will continue to climb until the network is as ubiquitous as Google and lay people confuse Facebook with “the Internet.” They’ll make more money and control more data than ever before. 4. iPhone’s exclusivity with AT&T will come to a breaking point and we’ll see network-agnostic iPhones. 5. On the bright side, 2010 will signal the death of the login. Third-party authentications will become the norm, and user data will be entrusted to a discrete handful of online properties. Users will pitch a hissyfit if ever they’re asked to create a username and password and upload an avatar. After all, doesn’t the Internet know they have a Facebook? 6. File-sharing will continue to be shut down around the world; by 2011, we’ll all be downloading via Tor and the U.S. will have instituted a lame 3-strikes-no-Internet policy. 7. Cybercrime will be more of an issue than ever. Expect to see a major governmental security breach in 2010, as the government continues to adopt 2.0 tech without strong and permanent infosec personnel and procedures in place. Dana Oshiro, ReadWriteStart Writer 1. AR: Geo-locational games and AR will come together in 2010. We’re going to see strange behavior from those playing zombie shooter games on their commutes. 2. Agree with Sarah: Netbooks and gadgets like the PsiXpda are going to gain ground. 3. Mobile Music: Offline music caching will be expected of all streaming music apps. 4. The browser really will be the new OS. 5. Payment Systems: Between Square, PayPal X and advances in internet TV, we’re going to see payment options integrated in unlikely places. Alex Williams, ReadWriteEnterprise Writer 1. Cloud computing will go through a shake-out. There are just too many companies out there for the market to sustain. The big players will go on a buying spree. The consolidation will deeply affect users. Some companies will fold overnight. Users will lose access to their data, leading to a whole new wave of skepticism about cloud computing. But it won’t be enough to slow down the move to cloud computing. More companies will consider the security risks as less of a factor, compared to the cost benefits and potential for innovation. Cloud computing technology will become more of a commodity. The business applications for cloud computing will take center stage. 2. The big players will come back strong. IBM , SAP and Microsoft will innovate just enough to show big gains with customers. 3. Consumer based social networks will make big efforts to gain wider access to the enterprise, as more companies seek to open up to the social Web. The information architecture of social networks will change to accommodate the greater degrees of control that the enterprise requires. This will bring on the rise of “social middleware,” services that act as a layer between social networks and the enterprise. 4. A new breed of social networks will emerge that act as one-stop shops for applications and services. These will look more like marketplaces than social hubs for conversations around the proverbial virtual water cooler. SaaS leaders will face off for this growing market. 5. iPhone, Android or the Blackberry? I expect the Android to be the talk of the enterprise, especially if the Google Phone does make it to market. Such a phone would eliminate carrier costs and break down walled gardens that have limited application development. Sean Ammirati, COO 1. Facebook will go public & the IPO will be a huge financial success. 2. Hyperlocal advertising will heat up, delivering another nail in the traditional newspaper industry’s coffin. (Very similar to one of my 2008 predictions, but this time focused on the advertising aspects.) Specifically, it will be more common for a local establishment to pay marketing dollars to Yelp or FourSquare, for example, then their local newspaper. 3. Apple will release an “iTablet” and the world will be a better place for it. Ok, more accurately we’ll all think the world is a better place for it. 4. Agree with Jolie regarding “the death of the login.” I'm hoping for open distributed alternatives along with Facebook and a handful of others. 5. Between Boxee’s continued development and a new AppleTV (hopefully synched with their iTablet), it will become much more common to enjoy the Internet on a TV. Elyssa Pallai, Marketing & Experience Manager 1. Skype becomes increasingly pervasive, as the younger generations force their parents to get online and consumers find new and interesting ways to cut costs and save money. 2. Software as service becomes ever more popular, as businesses and governments choose to focus on their core business and realize the benefits of lightweight technologies in the cloud - including rapid deployment and the low cost of switching. 3. The online user experience has a renaissance, as web browsers and hardware become more sophisticated and designers / developers take advantage of that. 4. The growth of Internet of Things continues, RFID tags in everything. The initial bugs will make funny things happen all around us. 5. iPhones and other smartphones become the purchasing tool of choice. 6. Consumers bypass carriers and create open wifi networks for all (which is already happening but not en mass). Jared Smith, Webmaster 1. Backlash against the App Store causes more and more developers to defect to Android and competing platforms. 2. Google Chrome’s market share increases at Firefox’s expense. Internet Explorer continues to lose ground as more rich, HTML5 -aware Web apps spring up on the scene. 3. Opera begins to struggle, as WebKit becomes the rendering engine of choice on mobile devices. 4. Social analytics features explode onto the scene in 2010. Twitter opens Pro accounts, including analytics and an API to access them. Google strikes a deal to integrate Twitter analytics with its Google Analytics product. Discuss

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2010 Predictions