| Creator of Facebook iPhone App Leaves to Build Mobile & HTML5 Creative Tools Joe Hewitt helped build Firefox, he built the wildly popular developers' tool Firebug and then he single-handedly created one of the world's most widely used iPhone apps: the Facebook app. Today he announced on his blog that he's leaving Facebook and going independent. What's he going to do? Build tools. "[T]ools for writers, designers, programmers, whatever," he writes. "Wherever people are using computers to turn their ideas into reality, I want to help." That sounds awesome.
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Disqus Adds @mentions To Bring The Users Back If you're familiar with Twitter (or even Facebook these days), then you might recognize the new feature just released by real-time comment system Disqus: @mentions. Originally started on Twitter, the @ symbol has quickly become the character of choice for directing comments toward a certain recipient. Now, the symbol has made its way to the popular commenting service, allowing users to mention others in the conversation and even pull other people into the conversation.
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iOS SDK for Bing Maps Released Microsoft announced today a new software developer kit for Bing Maps on iOS. The SDK will give developers a set of C classes to create iPhone and iPad applications within xCode, according to a blog post by Bing. The Bing SDK map control will sport Bing's road, aerial and hybrid aerial map styles. It will be able to access user location through GPS and locate the iOS device on the map as well as be able to add pushpins to maps.
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Facebook Quietly Fixes its Original Privacy Problem, 5 Years Later (Updated) Facebook has quietly enabled a new privacy feature that allows users to hide certain types of updates from their walls and from the newsfeeds of friends. Make a new friend? Planning on going to an event? Now you can do those things on Facebook but be discrete about it, thanks to the new Hide All These button. That type of posting will never show up on your wall - or in your friends' newsfeeds - again. Update: After publishing this story it has become clear that readers are seeing a variety of results from clicking this button and that it does not always result in updates of that type being hidden from the newsfeeds of friends. Facebook analyst Josh Constine theorizes that it may decrease the likelihood of the updates appearing and in some but not all cases remove them. I apologize for incorrectly reporting that the results of the button were simple and consistent; as a large and complicated service, things on Facebook rarely are. Facebook ought to hide update types when users click a button that says hide update types, but apparently it can only be relied upon to do so from a user's wall, not the newsfeed of friends.
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Federal Lawmakers Join the Wave of Do-Not-Track Legislation Tracking is a big word right now. iPhones were found to be tracking your location and storing it, prompting Apple to release a quick fix. Google's offices in Seoul, South Korea were raided over AdMob tracking. Any way your electronic activity can be traced and stored, there are several companies trying to figure out how to monetize that data. Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W.Va) will introduce a "Do Not Track" bill that would allow consumers to opt-out of online tracking and block websites and marketers from tracing their Internet activities. The "Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2011" would build on recommendations by the Federal Trade Commission which would govern enforcement of the act, according to the Washington Post.
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Hackapalooza: Lollapalooza Launches an API I don't know about you, but when I hear the word "Lollapalooza," I think about beer, grunge rock and application programming interfaces. Wait, what? Okay, so maybe an API isn't exactly what comes to mind, but this year, the rock festival that once helped propel bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam is looking to launch something else entirely: an open API chock-full of real-time scheduling data, stage geolocation and more.
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