The Newest Handphone: ReadWriteWeb Daily Recap

Kayak Launches Direct Hotel Booking Feature as It Preps for an IPO

Travel search company Kayak has just announced that it will begin handling hotel reservations itself, rather than just referring customers to its partner sites when they are ready to book a room. This marks Kayak's expansion beyond just aggregating travel information, so users can research and reserve their travel needs.

Kayak is introducing the "Book Now" feature in limited beta, but the simple booking process will be available on its website and mobile apps in the coming weeks. Customers will still have the option to book their hotel rooms elsewhere. But the move will help keep users on the Kayak site, rather than driving them elsewhere to complete their purchases.

Milestone: The Web (Finally) Surpasses Newspapers As Source for Americans' News

Although digital technologies have been changing the face of the news for at least the last decade, we have finally reached a important milestone: more people now get their news from online sources than they do from physical newspapers.

That's according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, which has just released its latest report on the "State of the Media." The study finds that "By several measures, the state of the American news media improved in 2010," but that improvement did not extend to one important sector - newspapers - which continued to see a decline in revenues, readership and newsroom jobs.

Launch Weekend Sales of Apple iPad 2 Attract New Customers to the Platform

As the iPad 2 wraps up its launch weekend, it sounds like analysts are revising their predictions about this being a successful launch to this being a very successful launch. No sales figures are in, although Apple was anticipated to sell half a million iPad 2s this weekend.

But the good news for Apple isn't just in the strong sales. It's who's buying these tablets. According to a survey of those in line for the iPad 2, researchers at Piper Jaffray found that 70% of customers were new to the iPad -- they weren't owners of the first generation device.

4chan Founder: Anonymity is Authenticity

As the creator of one of the Internet's most base, vile and creative websites, 4chan founder Chris Poole knows a little bit about the effects of user identity on user behavior. 4chan, a completely anonymous, real-time message forum, is the birthplace of many an Internet meme and user identity, or the lack thereof, can play a big part in this.

Poole spoke about the collaborative, creative process today in his keynote address at SXSW in Austin, Texas, spending some time on the topic of identity and authenticity. In this horserace, Poole unsurprisingly comes out on the side of anonymity.

Twitter Was Born 5 Years Ago Today, @Jack Tweets the Story

"5 years ago today we started programming Twitter ('twttr' for short). 8 days later the first tweet was sent: http://t.co/Vi5ii5A #twttr," Tweeted Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey this afternoon.

To mark the date, Dorsey is posting messages right now recounting the world-changing social network's origins. We've embedded his messages below. It's pretty heart warming.

Cartoon: Click (And Click, And Click) to Donate

In times of horrific disaster, we want to reach out and help. That's especially true if we've actually seen events unfold in front of us as they happened, whether it's on live TV or Twitter.

For the organizations and agencies that raise money to provide relief, this is a critical time. Potential donors are seized with the urgency of the situation - and are flocking to their websites.

Which means usability suddenly takes on even greater importance. Add one form field too many, program in an unnecessary intermediate step, put a button here instead of there, and you can lose those donors... and the money they might have given.

Check Out the Companies That Make ReadWriteWeb Possible

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Do We Really Want to Talk to Strangers Based on Our Location?

With SXSW well under way in Austin, Texas, the servers behind apps like Beluga, GroupMe, Kik and FastSociety must be working overtime. After all, people like talking to their friends, right?

In this same batch of apps, we've seen another phenomenon, though - apps that make it quicker an easier to talk to people you don't know - and we have one big question: Do people really want to talk to strangers?

Google to Launch Major New Social Network Called Circles, Possibly Today (Updated)

We believe that Google will preview a major new social service called Google Circles at South by Southwest Interactive today. Update: Google has now officially denied that Circles will launch here, but not that it exists. See final update below, as of afternoon Texas time Google does now deny that Circles exists. If what we've heard is correct, the service will offer photo, video and status message sharing. Everything users share on Circles will be shared only with the most appropriate circle of social contacts in their lives, not with all your contacts in bulk. Circles may be shown off at an event co-hosted tonight by the ACLU, an organization focused on privacy and the liberties it affords. It may not be a big public launch yet, but it's clear that this is a major product in the works at the very least. Please see below the fold for what I hope will be the final update on this for now.

The service has been developed with extensive participation by Chris Messina, the co-creator of numerous successful social and software phenomena online, from BarCamp to Hashtags and much more. Messina declined to comment for this story. Jonathan Sposato, CEO of the photo editing service Piknik that Google acquired last year, is working on Circles as well. Sposato may be the only entrepreneur to have sold not one but two startups to Google - having founded Phatbits, a service that was acquired by Google in 2005 and became Google Gadgets. These are heavy hitting tech leaders and the service should be very interesting.

SXSW: PathCrosser, an App for Comparing Facebook & Foursquare Checkins with Friends

Only a few weeks ago, when local discovery app WHERE launched a recommendation engine for sharing places with friends, I said I wished someone would build an app that used Facebook or Foursquare checkins instead. As it turns out, someone did just that. A new application called PathCrosser, launching right now in the iTunes App Store and Android Market is a mobile app that, like WHERE, uses Bump technology to compare your own personal local recommendations with your friends. With the Bump integration, you simply launch the app and tap phones with another person to make a connection. But unlike WHERE, it doesn't expect to use data housed only within its own service - it pulls data from the services you already use: Facebook and Foursquare.

If you're looking for a new app to try while waiting in line for some of those SXSW parties tonight, give PathCrosser a go and see what you think.

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