As previously reported by SiliconAngle, Apple has recently released Ping, a social networking enhancement along with iTunes 10. And it looks like it’s already run into its first apparent snag, according to an article at Engadget, …the company was making a last-second change to its new Ping social-network-for-music: the removal of Facebook Connect for finding friends. Seriously -- although an option to find friends via Facebook was conspicuously present during Steve's keynote demos, it's not there anymore. Oddly, the option was there at the very beginning -- several Engadget staffers definitely saw a Facebook button when they signed up for Ping last night, and there's a whole thread on Apple's support site of people who also saw it and

While up until this point Twitter has been hands-off with the iPad they have decided to build a first-party app: Twitter for iPad. And it looks like it has all the trappings to become the Twitter iPad killer app. From the hands-on article at PCMag, The free Twitter for iPad app expands the functionality of previous iPhone Twitter clients by introducing "Panes," or fly-out panels that offer a spacious reading experience without blocking your feed.When you tap a tweet, a separate panel slides in from the right side of the screen, which displays a user's most recent update, bio, Web site link, number of followers, the number of people that person follows, and other typical Twitter information. The app also lists a handful of similar Twitte

Loren Feldman is the New York City based publisher of 1938Media.com, a fascinating, irreverent and funny critic of the West Coast tech scene. Loren used to be an insider, a close friend of the princes of the Web 2.0 world: Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Loic LeMeur, and others. But Loren has managed to upset all those people, and more; and so have I simply by retweeting some of his comic puppetry. (I've been blocked and called names because of my re-tweets of Loren's material but that won't stop me. It's a guy with a sock (puppet) on his hand -- people need to lighten up.) Loren's puppets are hilarious. He has puppets representing Robert Scoble, Loic LeMeur, Shel Israel, Peter Cashmore, Dave Winer, Mark Zuckerberg, Gary Vee, La

Broadcasting live video from your Android phone is now available with Justin.tv.  The live, video-streaming service has launched an Android app, bringing the service to Google's mobile platform.  Broadcasting live videos has never been so easy with this innovation for mobile phones.  Though Justin.tv might not be the first to market (Qik, etc.), it has some advantages in the form of hardware video encoding which enables it to drain less battery power and bitrate adjustment of videos uploaded to strengthen wireless connections. You can start broadcasting by downloading it on your Android and registering for a Justin.tv account. You will never have to go to a website. It’s easy to use with only three buttons:  record, share and chat.

The Twitter API will make a final change for third-party app developers this morning (8am Pacific time) that will drop Basic Auth for OAuth. Users of applications that haven’t kept up with Twitter news will find themselves suddenly out in the cold when Twitter starts rejecting their status updates. Fortunately, most popular Twitter apps--such as TweetDeck, Twitterrific, Seesmic, and Twitter for Android—have already done this. The move by Twitter, as explained by Joab Jackson form PCWorld, is to better secure Twitter consumers from spoofing and other identity hijacks. He writes, On a page explaining the reasons behind the change, Twitter gave several reasons that OAuth is superior to Basic Auth. The new protocol won't ask users to pr

TweetPhoto is expanding beyond Twitter, which is a smart move considering the current social networking environment. The massive changes to the service of course warrants a major name change, seeing as the company will no longer be pigeon-holed as a Twitter app. The new name is Plixi, which I found to be pretty darn cute. Turns out, that was the idea CEO and founder Sean Callahan had behind the name change, as nearly two-thirds of its user base is female (by the way, that's generally becoming the case for several social networking and media-sharing tools, particularly those that interact from a location-based, mobile vantage point). And what else do girls like to do? Socialize. While TweetPhoto already supported media-sharing

Another buy for Google, with the acquisition of SocialDeck, as announced on its homepage. Just last week, we posted an info-graphic about Google’s acquisition history. One of the revelations from this graphic happens to be Google’s recent foray into gaming—and while this buy is no exception, it also thrusts them further into the social media market. According to Chris Morrison at Inside Social Games, this could put Google head-to-head with Facebook as he writes, Google’s gaming interest is obviously with Android. But it’s also reportedly working on a social platform to rival Facebook; Google’s technology plans could be advanced by SocialDeck’s experience in extending the social experience across multiple devices. With tha

We're live!  The team at VMware and SiliconANGLE is rolling live, at VMworld.  We've got a great lineup of guests that are dropping by The CUBE, doing interviews with John Furrier and Dave Vellante.   Here's the schedule of VMworld 2010 Live "The Cube" powered by SiliconANGLE.com. John Troyer, VMware community manager and VMworld Live's executive producer, in conjunction with the SiliconANGLE team have put together a live video coverage program called #theCube at the VMworld 2010 blogger lounge. The VMworld blogger lounge and The Cube will be the center of all the social media action pumping out content (blog, live video, and images) as well as providing a place to check in and connect with friends and follower to share their ex

Tune in today (August 30)  as we kick off our wall-to-wall coverage of VMWorld 2010, live from SiliconAngle’s “The Cube” (see below) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.

Another visual-information graphic from Social Media Graphics shows us the current State of Location Based Services. This graphic is just a little bit harder to read than most, as it avoids naming names and instead relies on logos (fortunately there is a prominent legend.) It looks like, in population numbers, Loopt dominates with FourSquare and Booyah! not far behind. Facebook Places may not have the population, but it rivals everything, except Gowalla,  in interoperability (API and connections). I don't know why the CEOs got included in this, but their portraits are also featured next to the legend of their company logos. Localization is, of course, on of the biggest trends, converging social media, commerce, search and adv