(Credit: Crave UK)

A Digg application for the iPhone is in the works, two years after Apple announced its own version. Kevin Rose, co-founder of the popular social-bookmarking and Web aggregation site, was spotted playing with the app in London.

Rose was attending the Future of Web Apps conference, where he hung out with our own Nate Lanxon and Natali Del Conte. Arnt Eriksen and Thomas Moen of Norwegian videocast Sofaprat clocked Rose playing with a trial version of the app on his iPhone.

Rose was unforthcoming about the functionality of the app, chuckling, "You're not even supposed to know about that." A quick way of submitting links to Digg would be useful, but we wonder how you'd move from the Safari browser to the Digg app, as Apple locks out apps from running in the background. It seems likely the app will have a built-in mini-browser, allowing you to view submitted content, then vote stories up or down, known as digging or burying.

A Digg iPhone app was announced in Apple's app news in 2007. This mobile version of the site includes iPhone scrolling, mini-permalink pages with the top five comments, and digging ability. Rose claimed then that the mobile site was coded in 48 hours, so who knows what kind of features they could have come up with in two years?

(Source: Crave UK)

Kenley Bradstreet joins the show to fill in Justin's shoes, after he has an unfortunate accident with a missing bike seat. On today's show, Jeff rants about Digg's new ads while he gets new Hoboken Twitter followers. Wilson doesn't feel too hot about James Cameron's new movie "Avatar." Violet Blue starts her own URL shortner. And Kenley brings us a story about a murderous Brazilian talk show host. Yes, it is yet another episode of The 404.

(Credit: Twentieth Century Fox)

(Credit: Kenley Bradstreet)

Before we get too ahead of ourselves, let's explain today's show title. Apparently, there is a blog called "Skanks in NYC," and someone called a Vogue cover model, Liskula Cohen, a skank. Using words like "psychotic," "lying" and "whoring" to describe Ms. Cohen, a judge ruled that the model has a right to know who was defaming her. Beyond the First Amendment questions that this ruling raises, Kenley wonders if this undermines the whole point of the Internet?

James Cameron has been on hiatus for the last couple of years after his massive success with "Titanic." Turns out, he's been working on "Avatar" for the last 10 years, inventing all sorts of new technology to bring his vision to the big screen. While the project has been hyped in Hollywood, The 404 gang remains unimpressed with the blue people with tails. Kind of looks like a cross between a PS3 game and Halo, doesn't it?

Before we leave, we mention the new URL shortening service from Violet Blue, sex educator and columnist. At first, we were a bit confused as to why one would need another URL shortening service, but after a few hints from the chat room, we figured out that it's a warning that the link you're about to click on might be a bit NSFW. Bravo! Finally, Kenley alerts us to Wallace Souza, a Brazilian television host. On his top rated show, he features crime busts. Turns out, he was calling hits on people to get the ratings in the first place. We think the police were tipped off when a Steadicam operator, crane and lapel mic were found on scene.

Everyone have a great weekend! Wilson will be out for most of the week next week, so expect more awesome guests to keep his seat warm. In the mean time, please, please, please call in and leave a message at 1-866-404-CNET (2638) or write to us at the404 [at] cnet [dot] com.

Boxee, the open-source software platform that combines Internet media with personal content, announced a slew of updates Tuesday.

Most notably, the company announced that it has made Boxee publicly available to Windows users.

The public alpha version of Boxee for Windows will work with Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Users will also be able to run it on Windows Media Center, making it possible to bring Boxee to HDTVs through Microsoft's platform. A beta release of the software should be made available later this year.

MLB comes to Boxee
Boxee has also inked a deal with Major League Baseball that will bring MLB.tv Premium to the platform. According to the company, Boxee users will be able to watch "thousands of baseball games, live and on-demand in HD."

Users will be able to pause and rewind a live game. But in order for them to access those games, they will need to sign up for the MLB.tv Premium service, which costs $89.95 per year or $19.95 per month.

Even more content
Since Digg has a popular video section, it only makes sense that Boxee would sign a deal with the social-news site to bring its videos to the platform.

According to Boxee, users will now be able to watch Digg's most popular videos, as well as upcoming clips. Users will soon be able to Digg videos from within Boxee, but that feature is currently not available.

Boxee also signed on with Tumblr to give that site's users the option to stream music and slideshows to Boxee. The company said more Tumblr features are on the way, but it wouldn't divulge what those are.

As if that's not enough, Boxee also announced that Current TV shows are now available on the platform. Current is home to popular shows, including The Rotten Tomatoes Show, InfoMania, and SuperNews.

New navigation
Since Boxee has made so many content enhancements, the company apparently had to improve its user interface. Boxee now features two new categories: Applications and Local Media. The Applications menu will feature all the Internet content available for the platform. The Local Media menu lists content from the user's computer and local network.

Dennis Crowley, inventor of many things good, including Dodgeball (the social Web tool, not the terrible movie or the gym game Justin and Wilson can't play because of their thick glasses), joins The 404 today to talk about some interesting stories from the Web and his latest social Web tool, Four Square.

(Credit: Dennis Crowley)

Today, we go a bit back in Web 2.0 history with the first Twitter/Loopt social-networking tool, invented by Mr. Crowley, Dodgeball--from its inception, to its purchase by Google, to its eventual shutdown.

Not to be deterred, Dennis is back at it again with Four Square, another social-networking tool, where users can compete with one another and earn badges and points when they hang at certain places. It's available for both iPhone/iPod Touch, BlackBerry, and SMS. We encourage you to check it out and report back to us, whether it improves your social life or earns you a "Douchebag Badge."

Also on today's show, we get to some voice mails about Buzz Out Loud infringing a little too much on 404-territory. It's no surprise, given our general awesomeness. In actual stories, we've got Justin Yu's review of the new "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" movie that his "friend" let him watch through a telescope in another room.

We learn through the new Digg Bar that young, white males binge drink. You can thank the U.S. federal budget deficit for that wonderful, no-duh study.

Per usual, send us a voice mail, especially about your social life experiments with Four Square, at 1-866-404-CNET (2638). Or via e-mail, if you're international, at the404 [at] cnet [dot] com. More guests coming up, including an appearance by Dan the Mantern and Alison Rosen.

A new kind of Natali Del Conte joins The 404. She references "Octo-pussy" and makes us play Marry/Boff/Kill. We can already tell that HR is going to be on us any second. She brings some big news to the show by announcing CBS will be streaming live online via Ustream.tv "The Early Show" on Saturday morning. It's their first attempt at an interactive, live show. We anticipate a rowdy chat room with Natali on.

On today's show, we chat about the worst kind of fanboys--forgetting the fact that almost all of us are Mac fanboys. (Come on! They just work!) The creators of the costumes from "The Lord of the Rings Trilogy" and "Chronicles of Narnia" bring happiness to a woman who lost her legs when she was younger. They turn her into a mermaid! We also discuss Microsoft's move to ban a user who admitted openly she was a lesbian from Xbox Live. Jeff hates on Digg's new StumbleUpon-like toolbar. And Natali discovers "Spanks for Men." It gives Justin the much-needed muscles. Finally, find out who won our "Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection" for the Xbox 360.

Episode 288

Gaming is one of the greatest uses of Flash technology. There are tons of places to get your Flash gaming on, and one of my new favorites is Nonoba. I found my way there earlier this morning from a link on Download Squad for a particularly fun game called Comboll that's a cross between Breakout and a scrolling level of Super Mario Bros.

The site offers the same communal experience of playing games with others as Kongregate does, with built-in user chat, reviews and commenting, along with achievements and a built-in social network. There's also a revenue-sharing program for publishers looking to make some cash off their work. One of the service's coolest features, however, are the labs.

Like Digg's swarm visualization, Nonoba has its own visualizer called LiveStats to show you what people on the site are up to in real-time. It shows if they're on a game or community page, or when new games have been uploaded. The more users there are in any location the bigger the spheres get. It also shows you user movements of both registered and unregistered users as they zip around the site. This is far more engaging than a simple Top 10 list, and after watching it for a while you can see trends as masses of people hop on to play certain games and small titles become more and more popular.

One small hiccup is that the visualizer chugs to a near standstill when the site is overrun with users. On several occasions it would make my browser hang--so be careful about leaving it on to long.

Track user activity on the gaming site Nonoba with its Flash visualizer.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I'd Digg you if you were cuter, buddy.

(Credit: NerdyShirts.com)

...and it's probably yourself, or maybe your mom if she uses Digg. Think of it as social news gone emo. The "Digg button" has become one of the most universally recognized symbols of Web 2.0, and now NerdyShirts is selling this cotton gem at a sale price of $14.98.

The Coin-Operated blog notes that the only way to get more Diggs with this T-shirt is to get punched in the sternum. It figures, doesn't it? As in, "Go home, nerd, and go back to 'burying' fake iPhone rumors."

News aggregation community Digg has announced a number of new features designed to take the site's social networking beyond simply "digging" and "burying" headlines and blog entries.

Starting Wednesday night, members of the site can further customize their account profiles so that they more closely resemble something on a social-networking site--more personal information, bigger photos, and a more extensive record of site activity. They will also be able to use their friends lists as content filters so that their "social news" comes from a select group rather than the Digg community as a whole.

That's not all. In a video posted on the Digg blog, founder Kevin Rose boasted that the site has launched more than 50 new features. Among them are "shout," so that users can send quick messages to people on their friends lists, and a "sharing" function much like Facebook's--or the link-sharing feature in Rose's other start-up, Pownce.

In addition, more new Digg features are on the calendar: in late October, the long-awaited "Digg Images" section, where people will be able to submit and vote on images rather than news stories, will launch. Later this year, the site will release a recommendations engine that sounds much like StumbleUpon, as well as a way for people to craft customized e-mail alerts.

By allowing individual Diggers to shape their identities--and their methods of news consumption--on the site, the company may be doing some image therapy, whether intended or unintended. Digg, touted upon its launch as a small media revolution, has become wildly popular (the company's statistics say 19.3 million unique visitors in August) but nevertheless has gained a reputation as being a geek hub--its audience is often compared to that of veteran "nerd news" sites like Slashdot and Fark.

Stories about the likes of Linux and HD DVD often dominate the front page, and if there's any kind of iPhone news, forget about finding much else in the top 10. But that could change with extensive customization features that will allow relative Luddites to block out the swarms of Apple and Google junkies, as well as more detailed profiles that highlight individual Digger identities rather than allowing the community to blend into an amorphous mass of vociferous tech newshounds.

And that might be exactly what Digg needs.

The company is certainly highlighting its desire to retool its reputation. "Digg has made great progress expanding beyond its roots in tech news: page views of content related to technology currently represent only 12 percent of all page views on Digg," the company said in a statement Wednesday. "This trend, which started about a year ago when nontech content submissions first outnumbered tech content submissions, continues to grow as the Digg user base becomes more diverse."

You don't need an iPhone to try out iPhone apps. Since the application platform is just a browser, you can see right now how some of the apps that people are building will look on your phone.

We've covered Digg and OneTrip already, but to see even more iPhone apps all together on one page, check out iPhoneApplicationList. For best results you should use Safari, although I've also had good luck previewing iPhone apps in Firefox.

Since the apps are just Web pages, no doubt there will be many, many iPhone app directories springing up soon.

Via: Del.icio.us.