A veritable treasure trove of documents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show some of the different ways that Apple is looking to integrate location, travel and commerce into future versions of iOS . Patently Apple has uncovered some of the latest developments, which include additions to the iTravel app that surfaced back in April, as well as social shopping and fashion applications. We’ve covered some of Apple’s other iOS-related patents in the past, including iTickets and iGroups , as well as some system-wide integrations with Facebook , but the newest patents revolve around two areas that really make sense for a mobile device. Travel …

Twitter’s hosting provider, NTT America, is upgrading a portion of our internal network starting July 31 at 11PM Pacific.  ( August 1 at 600 UTC) This maintenance will last approximately five hours.    During this time, there may be intermittent periods when some users are unable to use  Twitter.  During these intermittent periods you will see the maintenance page — as pictured above — which

With more than a hundred million users on Twitter, there are sure to be at least dozens of accounts out there that will reflect your interests. The trouble is finding all of them. Today we’re beginning to roll out a simple, but powerful new feature to help address that — “Suggestions for You”. The algorithms in this feature, built by our user relevance team, suggest people you don’t currently follow that you may find interesting. The suggestions are based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow. You’ll see these suggestions on Twitter.com and the Find People section. If you like a suggestion, click “follow”; if you don’t, click “hide,” and we’ll try not to suggest that user again. In…

Good news for any New Yorker who hates interacting with others during their daily commute (read: all New Yorkers): Wi-Fi and mobile service are coming to a subway near you. Yup, now even the Mole People won’t be able to escape the outside world. According to Bloomberg , after three years of stalled progress, Transit Wireless LLC — a conglomerate of wireless and construction companies that was awarded a contract to undergo this project with New York Transit — has finally found the money to move forward. Broadcast Australia …

The Twitter API is returning an elevated level of errors. Engineers are working to address the problem.

Facebook may postpone its initial public offering to 2012, Bloomberg has learned from three sources familiar with the matter. This comes as no surprise as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has always been very careful on the subject. “At some point along the path, I think it’ll make sense to have an IPO. But we’re not running the company to do that. We’re running the company to serve more people,” he said recently. Facebook’s IPO has been one of the burning topics in business circles in the last couple of years. With the company’s …

0 Points Well, you can add blatant, overt censorship to Facebook’s list of crimes against humanity, tacking it right up there with supporting holocaust deniers and denying nipple supporters. read more This is a content summary only, please visit twittown.com for the full article.

0 Points Facebook announced this week that they were beta-testing a new feature on the massively popular social network, called “Questions.” The concept is quite simple, and one that many of us are intimately familiar with. Facebook users can pose questions, which will show up not only… This is a content summary only, please visit twittown.com for the full article.

We’ve been reading reports tonight that the popular European music service Spotify has hit yet another delay in making an entry in the U.S. market. According to Billboard, Spotify’s negotiations with U.S. record labels have broken down and are “back to square one.” Apparently, the startup is still aiming for a 2010/early 2011 U.S. launch, but there’s no telling how long label negotiations could take or if they will be successful at all. When we last heard from Spotify CEO Daniel Ek at SXSW 2010, he projected a Q3 U.S. launch and the unveiling of several new mobile applications. And while the service’s social and…

It seems that Kanye West is doing a tour of the Silicon Valley’s nerd hubs. After freestyling over at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California, the other day — and subsequently joining Twitter yesterday — he jammed on over to Twitter Central and treated Biz Stone and Co. to a performance as well. As we pointed out yesterday , Kanye West has an almost embattled relationship with the micoblogging service. Last year, he busted …

0 Points Breaking his one-time vow to never use the immensely popular microblogging platform, Kanye West joined Twitter today, posting forty-seven tweets in just seventeen hours and amassing over 200,000 followers – quite possibly a record in terms of Twitter follower growth. read more This is a content summary only, please visit twittown.com for the full article.

0 Points When word came down this week that the much-loathed DMCA had been reviewed and subsequently relaxed, iPhone hackers around the US rejoiced. But what exactly to the new changes mean for iPhone owners and their iDevices? In short: a much greater amount of legal freedom to tweak the… This is a content summary only, please visit twittown.com for the full article.

Facebook’s newest feature , Questions, has the potential to bring social Q&A into the mainstream. But like most beta features and apps, Questions is somewhat fragmented, and suffers from usability issues and apparent bugs. It could also benefit from a more seamless and connected integration across the social platform. Perhaps most notably, the feature could be more effectively integrated with Facebook Pages, which are used by millions of users and brands worldwide. To better engage their…

More women than men across the world visit social networking sites and spend 30% more time per month using them. As such, in the “Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet” report, comScore concludes that women are the digital mainstream, a group of savvy Internet explorers who are more engaged than their male counterparts, and are the primary drivers of online and group buying. comScore analyzed the Internet behaviors of women everywhere and found that while women make up a little less than half of the global online population (46%), their online behaviors drastically distinguish them from male Internet users. The detailed report, available for download , delves into everything from women’s entertainment predilections (they really like puzzle games) to search behaviors, mobile …

SpokenTwitter allows you to record a message that is tweeted out as a link so people hear your voice.  You can reply, retweet and more with their menus and they provide local access numbers across numerous countries. Features: (via any phone) Post spoken tweets to Twitter Unlimited recording length NO 140 character restriction Voice tweet in local language Followers, hear real voice Tweet while mobile / offline Local access numbers Listen to Twitter text timeline Audio playback of voice tweets @Replies to tweets The only way I see this being monetized is commercials and advertisers inserted at some point in the process of usage and growth  They have to store all of these audio tweets for retrieval and playback.  As well as index and make instantly available.