Just the other day, Facebook and Google jointly launched the new official Facebook for Android application. Everyone had been waiting for this app since FBook was pulled out of the market earlier this year. Sadly, the app has left many unsatisfied.

FB for Android does have two features that you can’t find in any other third party Facebook application, though. There’s the “oh-so-cool” shake to refresh gimmick, and the Facebook phonebook. I’m sure we can all figure out what “shake to refresh” does, and why it’s so silly (and pointless?), but the phonebook option is what’s really cool. you can add a folder to your home screen, and Facebook then pulls down all of your friends’ phone numbers so you can easily call them. You just click on your friend’s name, and the phone’s dialer is opened with the phone number already set for you.

Now for the bad news: the app really isn’t that great. There are other applications (namely Babbler) that have many more features, like uploading video or …

Twitter announced on the company blog that they’re working on an API which would allow third-party app developers to include location data along with any tweet in the form of longitude and latitude coordinates. The blog itself says that this feature will be off by default, which is a good thing for the tin foil hat wearers among us (or for people who just don’t like it when people know EXACTLY where they are). Based on that, I assume that app makers like TweetDeck will give users an option to show or hide their locations, just because to force users to show where they are is a great way to spark an exodus from your product.

The most interesting speculation I’ve seen so far about the API is from paidContent, which suggests that Twitter might use the data for geotargeted advertising. A lot of people use Twitter the way that we at Techgeist frequently use the Aardvark service. If I were out and about and I tweet “Looking for a good, cheap place to eat,” nearby companies could send me @replies saying “Eat here! Show this tweet and get 20% off” …

Oh, Twitter spam. Most of us are used to a pretty standard spam routine on the microblogging service: someone follows you, and every link on their account turns out to be a link to GetAFreeMacbookAir.com. Well, the spam I got today is much more along the lines of old-school email spam.

When you click on one of those nifty links to the so-called pictures or videos, you get redirected from the TinyURL link to a middle site, and then to something called xxxdatingprofile.com, which tells you some girl is looking for a good time and is within 60 miles of you (no, it’s not actually figuring out your location). But some of the links are dead, thanks to TinyURL interventions. One of those links sent to me was redirected to this page on the TinyURL site, which says that the original link violated the site’s terms of service. Keep on fighting the good fight, TinyURL.

The biggest news story of yesterday was unequivocally the announcement that Facebook was buying FriendFeed. This is perhaps Facebook’s biggest move yet into Twitter territory, a business which Facebook really wants to be in. This became clear earlier this year, when Facebook added its very Twitter-like homepage. It’s also clear to anyone who has used FriendFeed that it’s way more similar to Twitter than anything on Facebook. So with its recent acquisition, the question everyone should be asking is this: does Facebook have an idea for how to make money in Twitter’s business?

It seems like Facebook must have what they believe is an actual business model for the microblogging business. According to a Wall Street Journal estimate, Facebook paid close to $50 million for FriendFeed. Even though Facebook is valued at nearly $10 billion these days, analysts believe that the company revenue back in 2008 was closer to $300 million, meaning that the FriendFeed purchase was a pretty significant chunk of the money Facebook brought in for the year.

From a business perspective, it makes a whole lot of sense to plan how your investment will make you a return …

Britain’s Royal Opera House is going to take crowdsourcing to a whole new level – the company will be staging scenes from an opera with a libretto written by Twitter users. Fittingly, the first scene, which has already been completed, will be about a man who has been kidnapped by birds. This use of Twitter is is part of the Royal Opera House’s attempt to involve the public in the creative side of opera, which is itself an attempt to counteract a problem that all opera companies have seen: namely that people aren’t all that interested in opera anymore.

Already, we see that the move is working: Techgeist, a technology blog, is covering opera because of this announcement. But whether or not Twitter can be used to create a coherent creative work is yet to be seen. Like the rest of the music world, I’m going to take what is no doubt the popular opinion and say that if this opera is any good, it won’t have anything to do with the people who submitted the tweets. Even if the opera sucks, it probably won’t be the fault of Twitter users.

The actual …

Yes, that’s a real book cover, and it’s a real problem. In fact, this is one of many books on the subject of using Twitter for marketing. Just looking at the search results on Amazon for Twitter hurts my eyes.

If you have enough presence on Twitter, you’ll start to notice that a lot of the people who follow you are professional marketing people who have a big user following. If you follow them, you’ll receive a stream of updates on all the ways they believe that you can acquire new followers and make everyone love you and blah blah blah. As strange as it sounds given their invisibility in the real world, marketing types are probably the most overrepresented demographic on Twitter.

I don’t blame them. To them (and really to anyone else who stops and thinks about it), Twitter is a way of directly talking to people in an attempt to exert some sort of influence. In addition to using Twitter to communicate with friends, users post stuff that they think their followers will find interesting. Marketing people recognized this behavior immediately, so they decided to jump onto Twitter and use …

I said I’d update on yesterday’s DDoS attacks against Twitter when I had more news, and boy do I ever have more news. First off, the attack wasn’t just directed against Twitter, but also at Facebook, Livejournal, and Google’s Blogger service, all of which are apparently home to works by a Georgian blogger and political dissident who goes by “Cyxymu.” The head of security for Facebook, Max Kelly, confirmed that the attacks were in fact directed against this one user (at least they were on Facebook). Mr. Kelly wouldn’t say who directed the attacks, but he did hint that it was someone who had something to gain by silencing Cyxymu. That leaves me thinking that the attack came from Russia, given Russia’s recent hostility towards Georgia (you know, with the invasion and all that?).

Now for why I’m bothering to write this story: this is only going to make Twitter seem like a more important thing in the world. Twitter recently has been seen as a means by which people could report on political issues. Twitter’s use to report happenings in Tehran during Iran’s turbulent election was in a lot of ways …

Lala is on the up and there seems to be no signs of them slowing down. The music streaming service that charges ten cents a song for “web music” is getting some permanent love from Billboard.com.

Billboard.com, which gets over one million hits a month, now features a built-in Lala music player familiar to that of the Lala widget embeddable on sites such as Facebook. By signing up for Lala through Billboard you will receive 25 free “web songs”. If you already have an account you can purchase the web song or download the full mp3. All songs on Billboard.com allow you to play and buy/download Lala tunes.

This type of integration of Lala on a music site is very clever and it would be fascinating to see Lala make deals with other popular music sites. Integration like this would be a great revenue driver and not to mention a great way for the mainstream audience to adopt to Lala. What would be more fascinating on Lala’s part would be an API for developers to work with and implement Lala in their own applications.

The Twitter client wars are always fun to watch and you can almost guarantee that at least once every week, some application out there in the wild will be developed and/or upgraded to be better than the competitor. This holds true for the in-browser Twitter client wars as well and HootSuite, one of the more popular in-browser Twitter clients is not taking the competition lying down, rather, they are going above and beyond.

HootSuite has been upgraded to HootSuite “2.0″ and has a number of improvements that make it a viable and serious alternative to the current love child of Twitter web clients, Seesmic Web. While I won’t go through all the updates (there are numerours) I can attest to the fact that after using HootSuite 2.0, I have moved away from Seesmic Web.

Seesmic Web, your move.

Many moons ago, I started to turn away from Facebook and gravitate more towards Twitter. One of the main reasons for that move was because of all of the silly requests I would get in Facebook-land. “So-and-so threw a sheep at you,” “someone else smiled at you,” and so on and so forth. I had always found Twitter to be a safe haven from such silly devices.

Until today…

I woke up this morning to find this waiting for me in my DM inbox:

I just gave A Great Friend to @dmonzel! You should send me a gift [link]

Sounds familiar, no? The link took me to fun140.com.

The only way this could have been any more Facebook-like is if it had actually happened on Facebook.

I know that there is a market for these kinds of things, but it would seriously be nice if they were opt-in. Hell, there is no option to not get DM’s from fun140. Yes, I see that you …