The Social

Along with its nifty new iPhone application, Facebook on Monday night unveiled a new home page. No, not the moderately infamous "redesign" of its member pages--this is a new look for the page that you see when you navigate to Facebook.com without being logged in. It's what you'll see if you're not yet a member.

There's a pretty new blue gradient background, sure, and it makes the whole page look a little bit less stuffy. But more importantly, there's a map of the world with little Facebook "head" icons … Read more

Despite the outages, shortages, and related hand-wringing associated with last Friday's iPhone 3G launch and Thursday's release of the iPhone 2.0 firmware, Apple says there were nevertheless 10 million downloads from its new App Store in its first weekend of existence.

And those long lines? A total of one million iPhone 3G units were sold. The millionth phone was sold on Sunday.

"The App Store is a grand slam, with a staggering 10 million applications downloaded in just three days," Apple overlord Steve Jobs said in a release Monday. "Developers have created some extraordinary … Read more

This post was updated at 10:34 a.m. PDT with further details of the server issues.

NEW YORK--The process of obtaining an iPhone 3G appears to be going in slow motion because of AT&T activation server crashes that have been confirmed in New York, San Francisco, and Palo Alto, Calif.

Unlike its predecessor last year, the iPhone 3G must be activated in-store, an antihacking measure that Apple had said could take 10 to 15 minutes.

That's long enough to make the line move a lot more slowly than the speedy process that made last year's … Read more

NEW YORK--In an informal poll of random people waiting in line for the iPhone 3G outside the Fifth Avenue flagship store, it looks like roughly 75 percent of these uber-early-adopters plan to purchase the higher-end 16GB iPhone.

Most of the other 25 percent plan to get the lower-end 8GB model, though a few people told me they still hadn't made up their minds (they still have an hour, after all) and one said he planned to buy one of each. But since these are the most hardcore of hardcore iPhone fans, it's likely that this 3-to-1 breakdown won'… Read more

NEW YORK--There are video crews gearing up at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store for the iPhone 3G launch in just under two hours, but the line is only about a quarter the length of last year's.

And, to boot, many of the eager Apple customers near the back of the line got here within the past half hour. Clearly, a five-day wait isn't necessary this time around. (It wasn't last year, either, as customers soon learned.) The line continues to get longer as more people show up, but it's gotten obvious that the wait for the … Read more

NEW YORK--Now this is more like it.

For days, the line at Apple's midtown flagship store for the hotly anticipated iPhone 3G had consisted solely of the crew from Waiting for Apples, who have the dual goal of breaking the Guinness world record for "longest wait for a product release" (or something like that) and simultaneously spreading the word about sustainable agriculture.

Now, three more people have joined them, and these fellows look a whole lot more like what we'd expect people waiting in line for the iPhone to be: Skinny, wearing jeans and black t-shirts, … Read more

What does the iPhone 3G have to do with the future of social platforms like Facebook and OpenSocial? A lot, actually.

It's because of the iPhone App Store, the add-on to the iTunes Store that opened its doors on Thursday in anticipation of the new device and its iPhone 2.0 software.

With more than 550 third-party applications available at launch, Apple's new mini marketplace means that for the first time since the social-application craze started more than a year ago, the hottest new trend has nothing to do with Web-based networks.

"(The iPhone is) a device … Read more

Looks like some big-media deal-making went into this one.

Photobucket, the photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, has announced the launch of an iPhone application (download), just like everybody else.

Users can browse their Photobucket albums, as well as upload images from the iPhone to the service with a single click. The application costs $4.99.

But Photobucket had a more interesting announcement on Thursday, namely a multiyear partnership with Ask.com, the search engine owned by new-media conglomerate InterActiveCorp.

Through the deal, Photobucket will use exclusively Ask.com search for its … Read more

NEW YORK--It's a lovely day here at the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue and East 58th Street, at least so far. Temperatures are slated to hit 90 degrees within hours, and the short line for the iPhone 3G hasn't gotten any longer. It comes out on Friday at 8 a.m., in just slightly less than three days.

I was explaining to a friend over breakfast this morning that I think there's a critical-mass issue at hand; you need about 15 people in line to really get the ball rolling. Then would-be queuers will stop wavering and … Read more