Apple has announced the top iPhone apps of 2008 (App Store link). 

Here are the top iPhone apps for social networking:

Top Paid Social Networking:

1. MobileChat
2. BeejiveIM
3. Quip
4. Rooms – Your Mobile Chat Client
5. Twitterrific Premium
6. Flutter
7. Twittelator Pro
8. mBoxMail
9. Secrets
10. hiCard – Suite

Top Free Social Networking:

1. Facebook
2. AIM
3. Myspace Mobile
4. IM+ Lite
5. Loopt
6. Fring
7. Palringo IM
8. Earthscape
9. Twitterrific
10. Avatar

Notably absent is Linked In.

Let me know what you think of the list!

via MobileCrunch

YouTube today announced a variety of changes at the site that are designed to help you view content that’s relevant to you and avoid content that isn’t. While YouTube’s focus is on making it harder for uploaders to trick people, the changes they’ve made affect everyone. 

Here’s a rundown of the changes, from YouTube’s announcement:

• Stricter standard for mature content – While videos featuring pornographic images or sex acts are always removed from the site when they’re flagged, we’re tightening the standard for what is considered “sexually suggestive.” Videos with sexually suggestive (but not prohibited) content will be age-restricted, which means they’ll be available only to viewers who are 18 or older. To learn more about what constitutes “sexually suggestive” content, click here.
• Demotion of sexually suggestive content and profanity – Videos that are considered sexually suggestive, or that contain profanity, will be algorithmically demoted on our ‘Most Viewed,’ ‘Top Favorited,’ and other browse pages. The classification of these types of videos is based on a number of factors, including video content and descriptions. In testing, we’ve found that out of the thousands of videos on these pages, only several each day are automatically demoted for being too graphic or explicit. However, those videos are often the ones which end up being repeatedly flagged by the community as being inappropriate.
• Improved thumbnails – To make sure your thumbnail represents your video, your choices will now be selected algorithmically. You’ll still have three thumbnails to choose from, but they will no longer be auto-generated from the 25/50/75 points in the video index.
• More accurate video information – Our Community Guidelines have always prohibited folks from attempting to game view counts by entering misleading information in video descriptions, tags, titles, and other metadata. We remain serious about enforcing these rules. Remember, violations of these guidelines could result in removal of your video and repeated violations will lead to termination of your account.

The changes make it harder to game the system with tricks like editing your video to create sexy thumbnails.

But the changes will also pose some new challenges to all posters. It will be harder to optimize your video’s thumbnail, because you can’t control what YouTube chooses for your thumbnail options. And, if your video features content that others consider suggestive or profane, it’s more likely to be buried on the site than before. 

What do you think of the changes? Are the changes common sense – or censorship?

Microblogging service Pownce announced today that it has been acquired by Six Apart, the blogging software and hosting company behind Moveable Type, Vox, and TypePad.  Pownce will shut down two weeks from now, on December 15.  Buyer Six Apart says they are “very sorry the site will be closing.”

Founded by Digg’s Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka, along with Leah Culver, Pownce worked as a microblogging application like Twitter, but with the added ability to embed and share other content like audio, video, and photos with your micro-messages. Although Pownce was the application with more capabilities, it never caught on with legions of users as Twitter did.

Pownce developers Culver and Mike Malone will join the Six Apart staff, where they predict “we’ll come back with something much better in 2009.” Tech and social media bloggers seem divided as to whether the acquisition will mean that Pownce’s features will be incorporated into Six Apart’s varied offerings. Mashable thinks not, Stowe Boyd and ReadWriteWeb sound more hopeful.

Whatever the outcome, people will watch with interest what Malone and Culver, and the whole Six Apart group of blogging services, will be doing, given Six Apart’s recent announcement of an 8% reduction in staffing.

Pownce users can export their trove of past content with the tool here.

Podcasters Across Borders co-founder and organizer Mark Blevis sent word that registration for PAB2009 is opening today (December 1, 2008) at midnight Eastern Time. The three-day podcasting and new media conference is scheduled for June 19/20/21, 2009, in Kingston, Ontario (Canada). This is the fourth year of the event, which focuses on not just podcast creation, but also on “building and engaging communities, using social media dynamics, and honing the skills we use in all aspects of our online presence.”

Early registration cost is cdn$120, rising to $150 on January 1. Registration is limited to 120 participants.

This weekend, PAB organizers also issued a call for speakers and presenters:

“The theme for PAB2009, Outside-in: Learning from beyond the fishbowl, was selected to evolve the conversation to draw on skills, communications styles, experiences, innovations and people from outside of the social media and new media communities.  We want our program to energize, motivate and advance the community.”

The event features more structured 25-minute presentations (with Q&A afterward), and five-minute “Jolt” sessions. None of the sessions are used to promote specific businesses or services.

Last week, the UK Podcasters Association appointed Neil Fairbrother (of Pod3.tv) their new chairman. Previously the position was held by Dean Whitbread, one of the founders of the organization.

I caught up with Dean recently, and asked him to give me a rundown of the things he and the UKPA worked on, fought against, and/or celebrated during his tenure. Here is his list, which he titled
“10 Things In Two And A Half Years:”

1. WIPO Broadcast Treaty – kicked into touch 2006 (but now it’s BACK!)
2. MCPS-PRS – podcast license reformation 2006 – 2008
3. Seminars and speeches:
In the City, Manchester 2006
The Radio Festival, Cambridge June 2007
BPI (the UK’s RIAA) ACM 4th July 2007
Radio at the Edge November 2007
BECTU (TV /film technicians union) Digital Futures 2007 at BT HQ
BECTU @ BAFTA 2008
4. Sony Awards to include podcasting 11/06
5. Judged AOP award category podcasting mid-2007
6. Judged Sony Radio award category podcasting end-2007
7. Secured benefits for members including discount on the AIM podcast license 2007
8. Podcamp UK Sept 2007
9. Guardian, GCap join UKPA Jan – Feb 2008
10. Hosted seminar on music rights @Guardian with Open Rights Group, AIM, MCPS-PRS April 2008

Formed in 2006, in response to licensing and legislative concerns, the UKPA now represents more than one third of the “independent” podcasters in the United Kingdom and includes a broad range of independent podcast producers and major media organizations.

UKPA co founders Dean Whitbread, Mark Crook, and Paul Nicholls continue to serve as trustees of the organization.

iPhone application review site 148Apps reports that Apple’s App Store has hit a milestone, now offering more than 10,000 iPhone apps. 

Other interesting facts:

• Most iPhone apps sell for less than $2.00
• Games and Entertainment are the most popular categories for iPhone apps
• If you purchased every iPhone app, it would cost you over $31,000.

Joost has released a new app (App Store link) that brings the social video site to the iPhone. 

The app lets you find/watch videos in several ways:

• Browsing by category
• Select “most popular” videos
• Watch our favorites 
• Search for a specific video

While the idea behind this is great, the app only works on WiFi connections, and even with that the video is a bit jittery. 

If they could get decent quality streaming going over 3G, this could be something big. Because of the WiFi dependency, the Joost iPhone app is of limited usefulness.

Blubrry has announced that they’ve released version .5.0 of their Powerpress podcasting plugin for WordPress. The latest version incorporates a number of bug fixes as well as some minor enhancements. 

Here’s a summary of the changes:

• Options to report media duration and file size next to download links.
• Added and to header portion of podcast feeds by default.
• Added to post items by default.
• Quotes and extra spaces are no longer removed from from the fields.
• Player auto-play bug fixed when quicktime media mixed with non-quicktime media.
• Added option to ping iTunes in a new browser window in settings.
• Verify flash player check added. The check is only necessary if your in-page player no longer appears on your site after upgrading Blubrry Powerpress. (WordPress built in plugin update may corrupt the flash player. This bug in WordPress is fixed in the soon to be released version 2.7)
• Media URL now displays a warning if the URL contains characters which may cause problem for some applications.

The addition of the Media URL warning was in response to issues many podcasters have been having when they publish episodes with file names that contain spaces and other special characters. Spaces and special characters such as apostrophes, # and ? may prevent some web sites and podcasting applications from downloading the media. We recommend only using letters, numbers, dashes and underscores for your file names for maximum compatibility. Users may ignore the warning message if they so desire.

If you’re a PodPress user, let Todd and Angelo know what you think of it.

Vicoustic has introduced a budget solution for recording vocals, Flexi Screen Lite.

The £65.00 unit has a dual functionality, absorbing the singer’s energy on the inside to give a less ambient sound, while at the same time, partially absorbing scattered room reflections on the outside. According to Vicoustic, Flexi Screen Lite’s acoustic foam has optimum density and thickness, using a series of air cavities both to reinforce the absorption effect and add structural support to the joint mechanism.

The screen can be used with a range of microphones and can be adjusted either vertically or horizontally.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that Apple appears to be using the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to limit what iPod owners can do with their portable media players:

At the heart of this is the iTunesDB file, the index that the iPod operating system uses to keep track of what playable media is on the device. Unless an application can write new data to this file, it won’t be able to “sync” music or other content to an iPod. The iTunesDB file has never been encrypted and is relatively well understood.

In iPods released after September 2007, however, Apple introduced a checksum hash to make it difficult for applications other than iTunes to write new data to the iTunesDB file, thereby hindering an iPod owner’s ability to use alternative software (like gtkpod, Winamp, or Songbird) to manage the files on her iPod.

The original checksum hash was reverse engineered in less than 36 hours. Apple, however, has recently updated the hashing mechanism in the latest versions of the iPhone and iPod Touch. Those interested in using software other than iTunes to sync files to these new iPods will need to reverse engineer the hash again.

Discussions about that process were posted to the public bluwiki site. Although it doesn’t appear that the authors had yet figured out the new iTunesDB hashing mechanism, Apple’s lawyers nevertheless sent a nastygram to the wiki administrator, who took down the pages in question.

In a nutshell – Apple appears to be using the DMCA to limit you from using other software to manage your iTunes library. Even worse, Apple is trying to use the DMCA to limit your free speech and keep people from discussing how they can hack iTunes.

Apple may have some legitimate reasons – besides eliminating competition – to limit what apps can write to the iTunesDB file. It’s hard to imagine, though, a justification for Apple using the DMCA to censor what people discuss on the Internet.