The service pulls in extensive data to reach its conclusions. According to the website, the information comes from the following:

• In-bound aircraft tracking
• Weather forecasts
• FAA monitoring
• 10 years of flight history

I am not sure where they managed to get 10 years of flight history, it seems like the government would be mum on such information due to trumped up terrorism fears, but they have it. And from the demo screenshot (I am sadly not travelling for another three weeks, so have yet to run it live), it takes all four inputs and spits them out in a simple to understand page. Look at this and claim to be confused, I dare you:

Happily, they even have an iPhone application to go with the website. No words on monetization yet, but I could see them licensing the product to every single Fortune 500 company in existence. Any company with travelling team members, that is, every company, is going to love this product. I’ll post more information after I get to use it live, but until then, I will drool contentedly over the above screenshot.

I want to take a stand against this. It came to a head yesterday, when on some strange whim, the FriendFeed Facebook application began pushing my tweets from FF and putting them into FB. My friends on Facebook for the vast majority still have no idea what the hell Twitter is, and would probably not want to see that content there. I was going to be defiling their news feed. Eventually, I found the kill switch and pulled it, but it was an annoying ten minutes.

I went back to FriendFeed and undid a variety of linking. Do I really need to push my Gtalk status from Gmail to Friendfeed? Not really. How about my Pandora information? Probably not. Just because you can share it, does not mean that you should. We have forgotten that. Some bits of content that come off of my online presence are not very good for sharing on different platforms. This is one of the major reasons why FriendFeed never made sense to me, I had to sift through endless drivel to find the one piece of information or commentary that was actually interesting. It’s like the thrift shop of the internet, but less entertaining.

I wonder what would happen if we kept Twitter on Twitter, Facebook on Facebook, and the like. Personally, I use each differently. Perhaps you do not, but the endless cross posting, re posting, re tweeting, re sharing, liking, and sharing is putting me in a drivel-coma. And it is not that the most important information is being pushed the most. Just log on, anywhere, to any service. Take a look at the major or trending topics. It’s enough to make you ashamed of the userbase of that service.

At the risk of sounding ranty, I will close this by just saying this: is the update that you are posting so damn interesting that it needs to be pushed across half a dozen platforms? Are we really that intriguing?

Of course my personal site matters little in such a comparison, but compared to Bing, Twitter’s growth looks tame. Just remember that there were months when Twitter nigh doubled in size. Bingjust one from zero to warp speed in a second flat. I still use Google, but if I was Sergey Brin I would be sitting up and looking around with eyes squinted and a gun at the ready. Redmond has a winner on their hands, and Google cannot let that happen if they want to keep their ascendant P/E ratio.

Besides, Bing, stop making profitless web startups look bad.

The New York Times has a new article out that is making the rounds in the technology wolrd, concerning the success of Hulu. It’s surprisingly lucid, in all honesty, but it leaves out some important points that we need raise. Hulu’s success and ascendant traffic cannot be attributed to a single cause, it is far too complex for that. Let’s break down the important points.

1. Unrivaled access to content: Sure, Hulu is owned by the conglomerates, but that does not guarantee access to their best content. Hulu, however, has a deep index of the quickly updating content from most of the most popular shows on television. How can the lax and lazy consumer say no?
2. Well designed: When I first heard of Hulu ages past from Michael Arrrington I assumed it was going to look like trash, and navigate poorly. To my great surprise, the site is clean, the content easy to find, and the video player simple and powerful. Who what have thought.
3. Attacking pirates: Piracy takes time. First you navigate the porn spam and virus laden torrent website. Then you must wait patiently while the files torrent, pray that they are what you thought they were, and then dodge more viruses. That was still the best solution (disregarding morality) before Hulu. Now, if I want to watch show X, I can be lazy and watch it on Hulu. PirateBay what?
4. High quality streaming: Hulu streaming has two quality levels: decent, and pretty good. I found that I can full screen the higher level on my larger monitor and have is be more than tolerable. All this streaming? Damn.
5. Limited advertising: This is the final place where Hulu does an excellent job. No more sitting at the television and watching 5 commercials every 4 minutes. Instead, a handful of short ads. Sometimes you can even watch just one ad upfront and then run the show straight through without interruption.

I am sure that this list is incomplete, but it is an outline of the reasons that Hulu is excelling. The question that this all leads to, is whether Hulu will eventually be able to take a large bite out of traditional television audiences and move them online?

Ah, Google, you and your nefarious layout trickery. There was much debate and hot air lost among the technorati this morning over an article on TweetCrunch over the supposed end of the free version of Google Apps. It turned out that, just kidding, Google had merely hidden the page with the ability to sign up for free. If you are so inclined, head over here and sign up. A Google spokesman claimed that it was all a big mistake, and that the free version had been removed accidentally.

Like hell.

But the story only becomes more entertaining when we bring in the ever blowing-hard Mark Cuban. Mark wrote a piece recently called “When you succeed with free,  you are going to die by free.” Of course when the Google story broke he jumped on the wagon. Mark tossed up a new post that is now wildly incorrect with the news that, in fact, Google Apps is still free. Listen to him:

“ Has Google realized that at least in the corporate market (B2B), if you live by free, you die by free ? That the rising expectations of support and product enhancements by corporations never end and are expensive to live up to ?”

That would be brilliant if anything had changed. Not that I disagree with Mark on freemium, I am quite positive that it will be the future of the whole internet, but this time he seems a little hysterical. More as it comes.

Predictably, Amazon finds these charges to be bollocks, and does not want to have to tell its investors that all the Kindle profits for the coming decade just evaporated to finance the Japanese governments budget. TechCrunch points out that Amazon as a whole had operating income of $842 million last year, 10% of that supposedly coming from Japan. We are looking at something close to 140% of a full years profit from Japan, in one swoop.

If you have been reading the news, you have noted that Japan has been getting itself into tax trouble around the States as well. Everyone cross your fingers that Amazon bullies their way through this. Who else will be the savior of reading?

What to do when you want the littlest communication possible from part of your country? The TechGeist team’s love of the Iranian government is possibly only superseded by our dedication to the Chinese military junta single party. Well, brilliance thinks alike, and China stole a move from Teheran’s dance book and shut down Twitter and the general internet over in a “western province,” during heavy ethnic rioting.

Apparently China was afraid of picture uploads similar to those from the Tibet debacle. Small tip, China, if you are afraid of having people see what you are doing, you probably should not be doing it. At least in America when our government fails completely (Hurricane Katrina?) we all get to enjoy watching them at it. From the mouth of the source:

“One Twitter user posted what he said was an explanation of the Internet outage from the provincial branches of China Telecom and China Unicom. Service would remain down indefinitely to prevent growth of the riots, the message said.”

Now let’s play a small game, who do you think owns the telecom giants in China? China does! Shockingly enough, getting part of your own government to knuckle under and do what its source of paychecks says is probably little effort. This is a disturbing precedent, the shuttering of lines of communication to dodge the international eye. We must protest this. How can you proxy out when someone cut the cable?

“A little sunlight is the best disinfectant,” – Barack Obama

If you missed what is happening overall (Pre user?), take a look at this. iPhone’s have been randomly overheating, burning users, and refusing to be used until a more agreeable temperature is reached. Great for a new product launch.

PCWorld, the gentlemen that they are, have complied a list of tips and tricks, but from the community and from other sources to keep your iPhone at a fair temperature. You can read them here. I have not had this issue in the year that I have had my iPhone 3G, and given how it seems to be an accelerating problem, i want to hazard that recent design changes are causing problems. This must be very depressing to the old 3G owner who shelled out the $500 to get the 3GS only to have it turn their fingers into charcoal.

Apple, take this public, fix the firmware, or launch a recall. Being “coy” in this situation is akin to being an asshole.

Well, the Chinese government just put us all through the rumor mill. We just discover that Green Dam has been delayed, perhaps indefinitely, and then hours days later it comes roaring back ready for action. A higher up in the Chinese regime claimed that it was only “a matter of time,” until the software was in place. Now, why would the Chinese government want to do this? Let’s break down the options to make this clear:

1. Suppress freedom?
2. Block pornography?

If you picked number one, or both, you are correct. We all need to be very clear about this: Green Dam will be used to control the population of China. Do you find it strange that it comes back to life following the pro-democracy rallies in Iran? Not to think to hard and invent things, but it seems that they could be connected. If the Iranians so successfully used the internet to fight tyranny, then one of the largest most powerful remaining tyrannical governments would be watching that with fear in its eyes.

Of course, Green Dam remains a poorly coded, perhaps pirated, piece of software. It is hackable, but to the average citizen if might be too hard to work around. This is an attack on freedom. American PC manufacturers, do not comply with the Chinese government! Take a stand against a government attempting to silence and control parts of their population.

Impressed? Since we are in the middle of the Great Browser Wars, any launch of a major browser requires an old fashioned pissing contest. Safari did so many million in so many days. Chrome did a fraction of that, but was XX% faster than so an so. It goes on and on. Still, nothing comes close to the world record setting eight million downloads that FF 3 did on launch day.

Even so, Firefox 3.5 did a very respectable 5 million in 24 hours, which breaks down to:

1. 208,333.33 downloads per hour
2. 3472.22 downloads per minute
3. 57.87 downloads per second.
4. 5.787 downloads per 1/10th of a second.

Of course, the total Firefox numbers are also quite impressive. Firefox has seen a total of 950 millions downloads, of which 500 million came in the last year. When Firefox breaks through a billion downloads, expect a party in the open source world, and mock funeral in Redmond. Actually, a Billion-Firefox party sounds like fun, who’s down for drinks?