Gaming developer Storm8 has been sued for allegedly collecting phone numbers of iPhone users who downloaded the company’s popular games from the iTunes app store.

Suit coming from Lynwood, WA.

A collection of iPhone home screens.

a New Zealand study that claims a medium-size dog leaves a larger ecological footprint than an SUV.

Given the rumored more-dogs-than-children ratio in Seattle, the irony is palpable…

I’m fascinated by application groupthink. Everyone who reads DaringFireball apparently also uses OmniFocus, Instapaper, Birdhouse, Tweetie, SimpleNote, MyTexts…

You get the idea. So now I keep my eyes open for productivity / cool interface apps that will help me join the borg. This could be one of them.

Again, at first, this seems very democratic and very nice. After all, it’s great to throw a party for the whole world and let them drink your wine and have conversations with your kids. But, be honest here, would you rather have a private dinner with Steve Jobs, or would you rather have a dinner with Steve Jobs and 5,000 people who you don’t really know?

Must-read post from Scoble on “the chatroom problem,” and why some services devolve into useless drivel and others maintain their relevance. The upshot: self-defined community limits make for good community.

Another scam: Video Professor. Users are offered in game currency if they sign up to receive a free learning CD from Video Professor. The user is told they pay nothing except a $10 shipping charge. But the fine print, on a different page from checkout, tells them they are really getting a whole set of CDs and will be billed $189.95 unless they return them. Most users never return them because they don’t know about the extra charge.

Like in any industry, there’s easy money in gaming and there’s hard money. And the better way to make a sustainable gaming community is to focus on making a really good game and treating your users with respect (the hard way).

Given that Fred Wilson is an investor in Zynga, I’m a little surprised he hasn’t said anything in their defense.

That said, I haven’t played any of the games TC mentions in this post, so I don’t know how prominent the “scams” are; if only a few people “buy” in game points to begin with…there’s a lot of nuance to this.

The main opposition in the contract appears to revolve around the “atmospheric” provision, which allows employers to use actors in 20 voice roles, for up to 300 words, at the “daily base rate” of $782 for four hours of work. That means Nolan North might not just be the lead in your next video game, but play every character in the adventure — we wonder how his falsetto is for female voices.

I quit Google Reader over a year ago, but for an entirely different reason than any of the ones Scoble offers — I like to see web sites. The designs and colors are fun to see, and I feel like going through GR is, you know, work.

Manohla Dargis of the NYTimes on Jackson’s concert movie:

At once a greatest-hits compendium and a suggestive glance at what might have been, the movie — which had its premiere Tuesday and opened Wednesday on a staggering 18,000 screens worldwide — has been so nakedly designed to serve so many different agendas that it seemed unlikely anything would be left for Mr. Jackson’s fans beyond the sheer spectacle of such colossal posthumous exploitation.

Ouch.

Scalzi explains why the Obama administration is not making a mistake by calling out Fox News:

Meanwhile the noise is all covered by multiple other news outlets, which in aggregate reach a much larger audience, which show Fox News anchors and personalities in the middle of ideological conniptions, confirming to the general population the proposition that, indeed, Fox News is more interested in politics than news, and reinforcing the impression that Fox News and the GOP are reading off the same page.

Time for me to get back into the forum thing. I forgot how vibrant this gaming community is.

I can’t decide if this is nuts or awesome:

Mr. Toth has built a precise replica of a first-class cabin from a Pan Am World Airways 747 in the garage of his two-bedroom condo in Redondo Beach, Calif. The setup includes almost everything fliers in the late 1970s and 1980s would have found onboard: pairs of red-and-blue reclining seats, original overhead luggage bins and a curved, red-carpeted staircase.

If you recall “Spore”’s promotional campaign, it was similar — tons of gameplay video, the Creature Creator available months before release, and a huge amount of hype surrounding the game. For Triple-A titles, when it comes to releasing content, the rule is simple: Less isn’t more, more is more — often to a parodic extent.

Contrast this with the approach movie promotion often takes. From “Jaws” to “Cloverfield,” movie promotions often try to avoid showing the monster — often until the theatergoers are in the seats and the lights start to dim. Spoilers are tightly controlled, because the theory goes that if people know who Kaiser Soze is or what happens to Dumbledore, nobody’s going to pay to see the film.

Of course, game makers try very hard to maintain secrecy around game plot spoilers. What gets circulated endlessly is gameplay footage, and plenty of gameplay mechanics – which really works as pre-game-release training as well.

Trailers serve the same purpose with movies, there’s just a lot less non-spoiler material to work with.

As usual, a fantastic piece from Kevin Kelly on the role of technology in personal fulfillment. Amish are among the happiest people in the US, and yet:

The Amish are a little sensitive about this, but their self reliant lifestyle as it is currently practiced is heavily dependent on the greater technium that surrounds their enclaves. They do not mine the metal they build their mowers from. They do not drill or process the kerosene they use. They don’t manufacture the solar panels on their roofs.

Now, the reasons the PC platform are getting seemingly “better” features in the game are a result of DICE ignoring the PC user base for the past 3-4 years and this is a homage to the PC platform, and also because it’s a lot of things that PC users simply deserve.

There are die-hards for PCs and die-hards for Consoles, but in the end, it’s really about making each version of the game fit the platform that it’s built for.