Apple this week launched Ping , a new social network that runs within the iTunes software. Ping takes the “activity stream” format popularized by Twitter and Facebook and applies it to the music your friends are “talking about, listening to, and downloading”. In theory, this should take us beyond mainstream hits and further down the so-called “long tail” of lesser known artists. It’s here that Ping fails to deliver: The network is currently just another way to follow Lady Gaga

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iTunes Ping: The Missing Thing

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Alanna Francis is a SEO Specialist and Grammar Enthusiast at the website design company Blue Fountain Media , where she specializes in e-commerce marketing. She writes for the company’s web design and SEO trends blog and you can follow her on Twitter @AlannaFrancis . We’re thrilled that the Associated Press has recently released an updated set of style rules specifically tailored to web and social media terms. But given how quickly new sites and their accompanying terms gain popularity, it can be difficult to keep up. Such is the case for geolocation services like Facebook Places , Foursquare , Gowalla , and Brightkite

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Social Media Grammar: The “Checkin” Conundrum

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iTunes Ping is apparently full of spam, yet another hiccup in Apple’s road to establishing a legitimate social network. As Sophos notes on its blog, a barrage of spam links are hitting the music-themed social network. Many of these links are to offers promising free iPad, iPhone or iPod touch devices. Apple released iTunes 10 and iTunes Ping earlier this week and the rollout has been a little bit rocky.

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iTunes Ping’s Latest Problem: Spam

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If you’re anything like me (too impatient to boil water), you hate waiting to be seated at restaurants — those blinking, vibrating beeper things really are instruments of the devil, no? Well, The Onion ’s A.V. Club has come up with a solution for you: a crowdsourced iPhone app that lets you know about wait times at local eateries. According to The A.V. Club’s website , the idea was inspired by popular Chicago hot dog maker, Hot Doug.

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Determine Restaurant Wait Times Before You Leave the House [APPS]

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Buried in last night’s update on skyrocketing mobile usage , Twitter CEO Evan Williams revealed that the company now has more than 145 million registered users. The last time Twitter went on the record with member registrations, it was touting 105 million registered users . That stat came just four months ago, which makes last night’s reveal quite significant and proves that Twitter is adding nearly 300,000 new users per day, as previously disclosed. Of course, mobile plays a huge role in Twitter’s growth. Sixteen percent of new Twitter users now join via mobile device, as opposed to signing up on the web

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Twitter Surpasses 145 Million Registered Users

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Each month, our partner Visible Measures compiles a list of the top 10 most popular web video series , and we share those results with you and provide analysis. Visible Measures tracks views, comments and other data on web video. If you’re looking for some video entertainment to watch online during your lunch break, this chart is a great place to start.

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The Top 10 Most Watched Web Series, July 2010

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We’ve partnered with SANYO to give away 20 newly released SANYO Dual HD PD2 cameras. From today until next Friday, we’ll be giving two readers a camera each day, with six winners on the final day. So how do you win? Simple.

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Mashable Giveaway: Win A SANYO Dual HD Camera

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Ekaterina Walter is a social media strategist at Intel. She is a part of Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence and is responsible for company-wide social media enablement and corporate social networking strategy. You have created a Facebook Fan Page.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Insights

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According to the latest numbers from Net Applications, iOS is the third most popular platform on the Internet, surpassing Linux and Android combined. In August 2010, Android had a 0.20% market share, Linux was at 0.85%, while iOS devices – the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad – had a 1.13% market share. Net Applications’ figures do not include device sales – they merely show which devices are being used to access the web. “It’s something to take note of when a mobile operating system passes something that’s been around forever

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iOS Bigger than Linux and Android Combined [STATS]

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This series is brought to you by HTC EVO 4G , America’s first 4G phone. Only from Sprint. The “First to Know” series keeps you in the know on what’s happening now in the world of social media and technology. Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world.

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Morning Brief: Ubuntu 10.10 Beta, Plex Partners with LG, Verizon Prepaid Plans

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Google Wave was once one of Google’s hottest projects, promising a new way of communication that might even replace e-mail. Alas, it was not to be, and Google shut it down soon after public launch due to lack of user adoption — but not completely. Wave still draws interest from users, although it turned out to be more of a niche product than a massively disruptive tool. Recently, Google promised to keep Wave alive, at least until the end of the year , and to open source some parts of it.

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Google Wave to Rise Again on Its Own

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If you’ve seen Danny Boyle’s movie Sunshine , you may be a little disappointed: NASA’s mission to visit the Earth’s Sun won’t include sending people up there. But it will be sending a spacecraft into the Sun’s atmosphere, approximately four million miles from its surface. The project, called Solar Probe Plus , is slated to launch sometime before 2018. Four million miles doesn’t sound very close, but it’s still very exciting, since this is a region no other spacecraft (created by us) has ever encountered.

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NASA Plans to Visit the Sun

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We’ve just gotten an email from Twitter stating that staffers are testing push notifications amongst themselves and the company will be rolling this feature out to all users soon. Push notifications would enable users to get instant, real-time updates for certain types of tweets — probably DMs and @replies and perhaps other kinds of tweets, as well. A few lucky users accidentally got the new feature with the Twitter for iPad application which was recently released. “When we launched Twitter for iPad, there was a configuration error that caused us to offer push messages to a small set of users,” wrote a Twitter spokesperson

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Twitter for iPhone/iPad Getting Push Notifications Soon

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It’s something you’d expect to hear from your mother, not your government, but New York’s newest laws are all about exercising common sense when looking for love online. Sounding like something between a schoolteacher and a public service announcement, the Internet safety act will require online dating websites to warn their users about the potential perils of web-based romance. The caveats seem like the kind of best practices any mindful Internet user would have internalized years ago. Things like not giving out your physical address and providing your own transportation on initial dates, for example, are no-brainers.

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New York’s Newest Law Aims to Protect Online Daters

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Since Twitter acquired Tweetie and rolled out an official iPhone client, the company has focused more and more on improving the mobile experience across all smartphone platforms. Twitter CEO Ev Williams wrote just now on the company blog that mobile usage of the site is up 62% since in just over four months, and 16% of all new Twitter users are starting out on mobile devices as opposed to web signups (this number is up from just 5% earlier this year). In the days before Twitter started issuing official apps on a platform-by-platform basis, the company wasn’t seeing the kind of mobile adoption it had hoped for. Williams wrote, “Even though there was a plethora of third-party Twitter apps, people were having trouble finding and selecting one because none were called ‘Twitter.’ This kept them from using Twitter at all.” The company adopted a new strategy for mobile; rather than leaving all the mobile app development to third parties, Twitter decided to consolidate efforts. In the short term, this caused some consternation for third-party devs; however, looking at Twitter’s stats, it’s clear the company did the right thing for its shareholders and bottom line

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Twitter Mobile Usage Skyrocketed With “Official” Apps [STATS]

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Hurricane Earl is expected to wreak some havoc on the East Coast this Labor Day weekend. According to the the National Hurricane Center , Earl is expected “pass near the North Carolina outer banks tonight [Thursday]… and approach southeastern New England Friday night.” President Obama has declared a state of emergency for North Carolina, and FEMA has deployed teams to North Carolina, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. Whether you live near the National Hurricane Center’s official “ Forecast Cone ” or you’re one of the 34.4 million people who planned a trip for this weekend, you’ll want to keep an eye on Earl. Here are some resources to kickstart your tracking: Government Resources The National Weather Service Get your weather warnings and advisories right from the source on top of a color-coded map . You can also use the site to check in on where Earl is likely to hit and whether or not hurricane force winds are probable in your area.

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HOW TO: Track Hurricane Earl Online

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Facebook is apparently testing a new subscription feature that would allow users to receive alerts any time a specific friend takes certain actions on the social network. AllFacebook reports that it has noticed the new feature popping up on friends’ profiles. Facebook told the blog, “This feature is being tested with a small percent of users. It lets people subscribe to friends and pages to receive notifications whenever the person they’ve subscribed to updates their status or posts new content (photos, videos, links or notes).” In other words, when you click to subscribe to a user, you’ll get a new Facebook notification in your notifications bar at the top of the site or on the mobile device of your choosing any time that other user posts content. We’re not sure yet if you can subscribe to someone who’s not a friend, which is much more stalker-like, or if notifications include likes and comments (right now, it sounds like they won’t)

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Facebook Testing a “Stalker Button”

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Facebook is bolstering the security of user accounts through the launch of a new feature that gives users the ability to see their overall account activity and remotely log out of active sessions. Have you ever logged into your Facebook at a public computer, but forgot to log out when you left? What if you left your Facebook account open at home with a snooping brother, sister or spouse? They would have access to sensitive personal information or could wreak havoc by posing as you. These are the problems that Facebook is attempting to address with the gradual rollout of remote logout

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Facebook Beefs Up Security with Remote Logout Feature

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E-mail has invaded every aspect of our lives. We don’t need a survey to tell us as much, but new research from Xobni and Harris Interactive confirms that we’re not alone in dealing with e-mail overload. 2,200 adults 18 and older in the U.S. and U.K were surveyed on their e-mail habits and attitudes. Most respondents — 72% in the U.S, 68% in the U.K

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The Truth About E-mail: We Check It All the Time [STATS]

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Update: Commenter Bruce Hoffman contacted TuneCore about this issue and received this response: “Thanks for writing! Not only will Ping have ‘People’ accounts, but it will also have ‘Artist’ accounts that allow musicians to upload and create their own pages featuring their pictures, videos, tour-dates, music recommendations and a lot more. We were fortunate enough to speak with Apple today to begin working on getting the first TuneCore Artists Ping accounts set up. We will be able to get more and more TuneCore Artists set up over the next weeks as Apple works to authenticate and set up Ping Artist accounts for the millions of artists within iTunes.” Plenty of criticism has already been directed towards the new social network that’s baked into iTunes 10 — Ping — with an emphasis on the user (not to mention rumblings about a fleeting Facebook integration ). But there’s one contingent of users no one has really mentioned yet: the bands , many of which are still unable to get in on the action as of this afternoon. Immediately after hearing about Ping yesterday, I sent out a flurry of e-mails to band friends, urging them to, “Get on this now!” Everyone was stoked, ready to replace their MySpace pages with revenue-making destinations on the brand new iTunes social network

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Hey, iTunes Ping: What About the Bands?

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RIP Meme: The Double Rainbow Guy Sells Out to Microsoft

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Skype — apparently pleased with its five-way beta group video-calling functionality — has just released a new version of Skype 5.0 for Windows that doubles group support. It now allows for up to 10 video callers. Skype 5.0 beta two is already available for download; it includes 10-way video calls, automatic call recovery and a cleaner user interface. The update is also said to improve call quality and includes a number of bug fixes to make the overall experience much smoother

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Skype Introduces 10-Way Video Calling

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This post originally appeared on Dyn.com , a world leader in managed DNS, powering the best brands on the web including Gowalla, Mashable, Twitter, Wikia and more. Follow @DynInc on Twitter. Taking a business from idea to reality involves a good deal of attrition, ingenuity, and compromise.

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8 Funding Contests to Kick Start Your Big Idea

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It’s hard to believe that two years have passed since the Chrome browser first hit the web. In that time, Chrome has come to control more than 7.5% of the worldwide browser market, according to Net Marketshare . Sure, Internet Explorer and Firefox hold 60.4% and 22.9% respectively, but if one considers that after 10 years, Opera holds less than 2.4%, then it’s fairly impressive.

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Google Chrome Version 6 Arrives on Browser’s Second Birthday

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Banksimple has just raised $2.9 million in a Series A round to fund their ambitious alternative online banking startup for full-service, fee-free banking. The round includes investments from First Round Capital, IA Ventures and Village Ventures, a collection of industry veterans with extensive startup portfolios. Banksimple’s mission is to reinvent the way consumers bank, both online and off. In 2011, the startup will offer bankers an online-only banking solution designed to eliminate traditional service fees, provide stellar customer service, offer predictive money management and integrate social media into the system.

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Ambitious Online Banking Alternative Scores $2.9 Million in Series A

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It may not be the most socially acceptable way to check in, but Vlingo has created a way for Android app users to check in on Foursquare with their voices. It’s a speech-to-checkin feature that will save time, even if it does raise a few eyebrows. With the new app , Android users can speak a simple “check in to [insert place name]” command after tapping the home screen button. The command will prompt Vlingo to automatically pull up the location in question, and other nearby venues, on Foursquare, providing users with a fast alternative to touch-based Foursquare checkins.

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Check in on Foursquare Using Your Voice [APPS]

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Mashable is excited to announce MashBash BlogWorld, the opening party for this year’s BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas on October 15-16. To kick off the Expo, we’ll be hosting the first night’s official party at Haze at Aria Hotel. We would love for you to join us, so we’re giving away passes to BlogWorld. To enter, answer the following question — “What is the future of blogging?” — in the comments below

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Announcing MashBash BlogWorld: Win a Free Pass [CONTEST]

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Alexander Hotz is a freelance multimedia journalist and public radio junkie based in New York City. Currently he teaches digital media at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Follow Alex on Twitter at @hotzington . With another long hot American summer coming to a close, many students are scrambling to get back into “learning mode” before school starts. One of the simplest ways to ease that transition is with podcasts

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15 Essential Back to School Podcasts

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Google and AOL have signed a deal that extends the search and advertising partnership between the two companies for another five years. The agreement also includes mobile search and adds a content sharing partnership with YouTube. In a statement , AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said, “After nearly a decade-long partnership in search, we’re looking forward to expanding our global relationship to mobile search and YouTube.

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Google to Power AOL Search for the Next 5 Years

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A picture is worth a thousand words. But if you include an entire database, make it interactive, and add filtering options, the word-to-picture exchange rate is even better. Infographics at their best are more than just pictures — they can provide new understandings, succinct summaries, or just plain old fun. In that respect, reading newspaper archives isn’t the only way to get a deeper understanding of current events. Infographics can help us get a better grasp on what’s going on

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10 of the Web’s Most Insightful News Infographics

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