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Location-based social network Brightkite announced its first native BlackBerry application on Thursday. It was created by a third-party developer using the company's application programming interface. Brightkite already offers native applications to iPhone and Android users.

Dubbed myKite, the BlackBerry app, which was created by developer Chris Hallgren, locates the user through the BlackBerry's built-in GPS. It then finds other Brightkite users nearby in real time. When other people are found, myKite allows users to browse profiles, check status updates, post photos, and write notes on different establishments around town.

Prior to the release of myKite, BlackBerry users had to access the company's mobile site from their phones. According to Hallgren, he used Brightkite's API to develop myKite because he "wanted a native app for the BlackBerry."

myKite is available now for free in the BlackBerry App World. BlackBerry owners can download the app by either accessing it from their devices or by following this link.

Multiplied Media's local-search BlackBerry app Poynt hit the 1 million-download mark this week.

Poynt, which is similar to Yelp's local app for the iPhone, provides users with a series of local-search tools to help them find establishments in and around their area. They simply need to search for a specific location, and Poynt will display contact information and plot its position on a map. The app even provides directions on how to get there.

Unlike many of the local-search services currently available on mobile devices, Poynt also boasts people-search features, allowing users to find folks in their area.

So far, Poynt's application is only available for BlackBerry owners, but the company was quick to point out in a statement that a version for the iPhone is on its way. A previous announcement from the company said that it would be made available toward the end of the year.

Although a million downloads is a milestone for any developer, a certain level of measured excitement should go along with this announcement. The BlackBerry App World isn't Apple's App Store. There are far fewer applications. And as a BlackBerry owner that uses Poynt, I can say that although the product works well, there aren't many other viable alternatives to make me want to switch.

Poynt's real battle might begin when the company takes on Yelp and the others on the iPhone.

The H1N1 Influenza, better known as the swine flu, is a real concern for just about everyone this year, making keeping up to date on the latest news paramount.

But considering we're all so busy, remembering to visit government Web sites can be difficult. Installing some basic apps onto your iPhone isn't. Check out some of these apps that will keep you abreast of all the latest news about the swine flu.

Swine Flu apps

CDC News Reader If you want the latest and most up-to-date information on the swine flu, CDC News Reader is probably a good place to start.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides all the latest information available on the swine flu. And since it also provides information on other outbreaks the organization is tracking, you're likely to find some of the best health data of any app in this roundup. For 99 cents, it might be worth it.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is your primary source.

(Credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

H1N1 Cases by State If you want daily updates on how the swine flu is spreading, H1N1 Cases by State will fill you in.

H1N1 Cases by State automatically downloads daily all the new instances of swine flu in each state in the U.S. When you click on a new outbreak, you'll be brought to a page detailing it. You can also see how many deaths have occurred because of the outbreak. For 99 cents, it's not a bad app to have with you when you need some updates.

H1N1 Cases by State will help you determine where the outbreaks are.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

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Updated at 4:30 p.m. PDT following Yahoo's removal of the blog post and subsequent clarification of the situation. See below for details.

Yahoo appears to be a little miffed that Apple's App Store reviewers are still sitting on an update to the Yahoo Messenger for iPhone application.

In a post titled "And so we wait...on Apple," Yahoo's Sarah Bacon calls out Apple for "the somewhat unpredictable process for getting apps approved and released" on the App Store. Yahoo said it submitted an update for the Yahoo Messenger app (iTunes link) two weeks ago, but has nothing to show for it.

Now, as App Store approval delays or rejections go, two weeks is nothing. Yahoo could just ask Sling Media how it felt about the month-long delay in the approval process for SlingPlayer Mobile, or rival Google about the rejection of Google Voice from the App Store. But Yahoo's decision to publicly call out Apple is interesting, given the possible thawing of relations between iPhone developers and Apple following Apple Senior Vice President of Marketing Phil Schiller's outreach to bloggers and developers.

"Anyone want to bet that Facebook's app, which was submitted after ours, gets approved first?" Bacon asked. No action, Yahoo, especially now.

UPDATED 4:30 p.m. PDT - Yahoo has since removed the post in question, but according to Lucas Mast of Yahoo Mobile public relations, plans to update it later today. Apparently Bacon, who works for the Yahoo Messenger group, did not have all the facts concerning Yahoo's submission of the Messenger update to Apple, which was handled by the mobile team.

Yahoo did in fact submit the update to Apple two weeks ago, but pulled that update a week ago "to make some additional corrections/updates," Mast said. "This process resets the approval process time, which we were aware of."

Yahoo expects Apple to approve the update shortly, but it has only been less than a week since the clock was restarted on the update. "We have been pleased with the approval process and Apple's responsiveness and look forward to continued submissions as we mobilize Yahoo," Mast said.

Whoops.

At long last, Microsoft is publicly getting its Windows Mobile application storefront under way. On Monday, Microsoft opened the door to submissions from developers in 29 countries. To sweeten the deal and to drum up excitement, Microsoft has also announced the Race to Market Challenge, a contest of superlatives that will end with Redmond doling out four touch-screen Microsoft Surface tables to four winning developers.

All applications, games, and widgets certified in the Windows Marketplace for Mobile before December 31 will be eligible to win one of four categories: most downloaded freeware, most moneymaking app (calculated by the number of downloads times price), the most useful product, and the most playful. Microsoft will determine the last two subjective awards by a panel decision.

The winners' spoils are paltry in terms of quantity and heft when compared to Google's first Android Developer Challenge, which gave 10 teams a $275,000 award, 10 teams a $100,000 check, and each of the top 50 finalists $25,000 as an incentive to program the "best" of the first-ever Android applications.

Indeed, we were hoping to see more lucrative prizes from a company whose mobile operating system long ago lost its gleam to the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and now even the Palm Pre. With such a modest purse, it's doubtful that the contest will lure important developers more than the promise of sustained profit and saturating the mobile market on all platforms would. It might attract the smaller fish, whose success could likely be eclipsed by fast-acting bigger players.

Still, for the hopeful winners, odds clearly favor the free and premium applications that are promoted in the app store the longest, and among them, apps already popular on earlier Windows Mobile builds and on other mobile and desktop platforms (Google Mobile App might be one example).

The backdrop to Microsoft's challenge is its submission process, which Microsoft estimates will take 10 business days from start to finish. Developers will be able to chart their apps' progress on a dashboard, and access a report if Microsoft denies the submission for breaching content policies (PDF), prohibitions (PDF), and submission guidelines (PDF).

Microsoft's Windows Marketplace for Mobile application storefront will premier on Windows Mobile phones running the upcoming version 6.5 of the mobile operating system. It will be the distribution nexus for free and premium Windows Mobile applications that is similar in concept--and likely in form--to Apple's iTunes App Store, Google's Android Market, and RIM's BlackBerry App World.

Windows Mobile 6.5 phones are expected to hit shelves in early autumn.

Interested developers can access everything from the developer toolkit to the marketplace registration here.

Microsoft is accepting submissions from developers in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong SAR, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Though the iPhone gets much of the attention when it comes to mobile apps, RIM recently launched its BlackBerry App World to compete with Apple. I've been using apps from that store (and a few other Twitter clients that can be downloaded online) that bring social networking to the social networker. Some are better than others, but they're all worth trying at least once. And they're all free!

13 social network apps

Facebook The BlackBerry's Facebook app is the best social-networking app in the App World. It lets you update your status from your phone, upload pictures to your profile, and send messages to friends. One of my favorite features is the option to use a Facebook friend's profile photo as their image for your BlackBerry contact list. It's really well put together.

ITookThisOnMyPhone ITookThisOnMyPhone lets you snap pictures on your BlackBerry and upload them to your ITookThisOnMyPhone profile. You can also upload all those pictures to your favorite social network, like Facebook or MySpace. It didn't do it as quickly as uploads in the Facebook app, but it still worked as advertised. ITookThisOnMyPhone is useful for those who want to send pictures to their social-network friends. But if you already have the Facebook app, stick with that.

Loopt As long as friends have Loopt installed on their BlackBerry or iPhone, you can find them through the app's location-based positioning, and you can send messages. You can also share photos and comment on their images. Messaging friends is easy and sharing photos works relatively well. But finding those friends is made difficult at times, since the location-based service isn't perfect. I like Loopt, but it needs improvement.

MySpace The MySpace app on the BlackBerry App World is outstanding. You can send and receive MySpace mail and update your status. Like the Facebook app, you can also upload pictures to your profile from your BlackBerry. That feature works well. That said, I found that sifting through friend profiles is more difficult than it should be. But it's still worth downloading if you're a MySpace user.

Qik Livestreaming The Qik LiveStreaming app lets you stream video from your BlackBerry. It boasts an extremely simple (and slick) interface that gets you streaming video in seconds. And the quality of that video is quite impressive. I streamed a few times over the past couple days. There was little lag. I enjoyed using the app.

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This week Apple made a very small, but important tweak to the user rating system on its iTunes app store. It now shows which version of an application the user was running when they wrote the review. This has been applied retroactively, so that reviews written before the change will show which version the users had installed at the time they wrote it.

This is important on two levels, with the first being how transparent user reviews are. No longer do you have to wonder what version a user had installed when they said there was a problem, or broken feature. If you find several reviews chiding a bug that has since been fixed, it may lead you to dismiss them and make a purchase, which could end up bringing in more sales for both Apple and the developer.

It also doubles as a permanent record of application updates, that is assuming the user reviews make mentions of new or updated features. When an application is updated the developer can put out a list of what's been fixed, added, or removed, however Apple does not offer users a way to go back and review a change log. Sites like AppShopper.com have started to build an archive for this very purpose, and with this update this is the closest thing users have received.

In addition to showing you which version users had installed from the mobile version of the App Store, Apple has also built this into the latest version of iTunes. Here, as usual, iTunes users get an extra layer of depth compared to their mobile brethren in being able to sort the reviews by version number. Unfortunately, Apple does not let you skip to a specific version, it simply puts them in order, which forces you to skip through several hundred pages to get to the version you're looking for.

This is a promising sign of further changes coming to App Store reviews, but on the mobile side it's still a long ways off from offering some of the great sorting features iTunes users are able to get on the desktop.

As an iPhone user, one of the things I've found to be increasingly irksome is the customer review system built into Apple's App Store for the iPhones and iPod Touch.

It's as basic as you get, which follows the design ethos found in the many of Apple's hardware products, such as the no-button Mighty Mouse, disappearing MacBook buttons, and I/O ports on its notebook computers and LCD displays.

While simplicity is one of the qualities that makes Apple's products more approachable for the basic user, it's something that doesn't translate well to a crowd-powered review system.

In its current state, the review system lets you very easily rate a software application from one to five stars, along with the option to write in any thoughts or feelings you have about it. This sounds great, in theory, but a good majority of the reviews found on App Store applications seem to prove otherwise.

More often than not, you'll see one-star reviews in which people are raving about the quality of an application. There are also people who give an application five stars, then go on to spend two paragraphs discussing how often it crashes and larger off-topic issues like international pricing and the handset's lack of a copy-and-paste feature. You also get a lot of comments written in ALL CAPS, with lines of Emoji icons, colored stars, and superfluous exclamation marks.

In every sense, it's like the Wild West: untamed and full of interesting characters.

To Apple's credit, on Friday, the company (as promised) removed reviews from customers who had not purchased the application they were reviewing. This may cut down on spam and ill-conceived or written reviews, but it's not a big step in improving how the review system works.

Problematic by design
The problem stems from the fact that Apple has treated software reviews with the same level of simplicity it's approached movie and music reviews. These two mediums are not interactive, nor do they have hangups like development schedules and performance issues.

While you can rate an album or music track based on your enjoyment of it, it's not speaking to a truth about frame rate jitters, buggy code, or a developer who has not put out a necessary update in six months--all things you may find in iPhone applications and that can be good to know before plunking down money on a purchase.

One reason there's a lack of these types of clarifications in user reviews is that Apple has fragmented its reviews system based on platform. Mobile users don't get the same quality of review browsing as those using iTunes do. For instance, when viewing user reviews in iTunes, you get the option to flag a bad review and say whether it was helpful. You can also sort by best and worst reviews, along with the most helpful and recent.

On the iPhone, users have none of these options. In fact, there's currently only one way to view reviews--in chronological order. For a device that's slowly gaining independence from having to sync up with a computer (as seen in recent improvements to podcast downloading on the device), this is troubling.

A better system
There are a three things Apple could do, explicitly to software application reviews, that would beef up the system and make reviews really matter to the potential customers who read them. All three can be found on Amazon.com, which has done a really fantastic job of creating a single ratings system that works on multiple genres of products:

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The iPhone developer behind Podcaster has found a way to get into Apple's App Store without invoking the wrath of iPhone Inspector No. 5.

The developer, who has a private Blogger profile but appears to go by Alex according to Uneasy Silence, has a new application called RSS Player that duplicates the basic function of Podcaster--letting you download podcasts to your iPhone or iPod Touch--but without some of the features that Apple appears to have disliked. For example, you can't search for podcasts through the app, you have to subscribe to the RSS feed for those podcasts.

Back in September, Apple rejected an iPhone application called Podcaster that allowed you to search for podcasts and download them to your device, which was a feature Apple later added to the iPhone. That was one of the first rejected apps to highlight iPhone developer frustration over a lack of communication concerning which technologies and features were forbidden from the App Store, and why.

The iPhone application review process still seems a bit nebulous, but the iPhone application business itself is booming. Apple announced two weeks ago that 15,000 applications are available on the App Store, and that those applications have been downloaded 500 million times, just six months after the store opened for business.