If your carrier offered to take a hefty chunk off the cost of a mobile handset but you let them put advertisements on the home screen, would you take the deal? Nokia thinks you might.

Our source deep within Nokia’s headquarters has just leaked us a bunch of information about the company’s future operating system release, Maemo “Harmattan”. It’s jam-packed full of unexpected twists, including their new-found love for home screen ads.

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Facebook’s battle with Twitter just got more interesting. Two months after its homepage redesign, Facebook’s iPhone application has caught up to the web version, and now features real-time updates.

This is actually a much bigger deal than it sounds. Facebook is clearly looking to take on Twitter with its recent focus on realtime and the way it allows celebrities to broadcast their updates to fans. And one of the key elements to Twitter’s success has been its mobile-friendly nature, allowing users to both update and see their friend’s updates just after they happen.

Facebook users have been able to submit photos and their status updates from their iPhones since last year. But until now, its iPhone app was stuck with the News Feed of Facebook past, displaying a handful of stories that were typically hours (and sometimes days) old. You could always browse over to the ‘Status Updates’ section to see more recent items, but they were never placed front and center.

We’re not sure when the new version went live (the changes appear to have been server-side), but the iPhone’s news feed now displays its first three items in ‘real-time’, while reserving the remainder of the feed for the ‘highlights’ – older items that it think you’ll be interested in. All real time updates appear to be limited to status messages – I’m not seeing any of the updates from applications or photos that I see in the web-based version.

This is probably only a taste of things to come. Facebook has a new iPhone application in the works, which is likely going to be timed to release alongside (or soon after) the launch of iPhone 3.0, and I suspect real-time will play an even more important role.

There have also been a few other subtle changes, like adding tiny profile images next to status updates (which actually makes the feed look almost exactly like FriendFeed’s current iPhone layout, seen below).

Source: TechCrunch

Well it looks like we’re getting very close to the big day.

iPhone 0S 3.0 beta 5 was only released yesterday, yet Apple have just sent an email to developers stating that:

“Beginning today, all submissions to the App Store will be reviewed on the latest beta of iPhone OS 3.0. If your app submission is not compatible with iPhone OS 3.0, it will not be approved.”

No release date has been set, but considering Apple are already forcing developers to ensure their apps work on a beta release of the new OS – its a sure sign that a release date is just around the corner.

According to TUAW, Apple may also remove applications from the store if they don’t meet the OS 3.0 requirements. iPhone developers, get to work!

Andrew Keen says that blogs are dead.
Matt Mullenweg says that blogging is only getting bigger.
Of course, they are both wrong.

The ways to promote yourself online are increasing every year. Once upon a time all we had was homepages with hard to remember urls at free hosting services which plastered our pages with bright and animated ads. We used the Blink tag, lots of animated gifs and some text. The most used sentence, no doubt, was “Under Construction”.

After that we evolved and started blogging. No more blinking eyecandy but nicely designed Themes with lots of useful widgets in the sidebar. And Google ads so we could earn some money. We wrote 2 posts a day in the first week, 1 posts a day in the second week then 1 post in the next month and then we simply stopped.

Now we have Facebook, Linkedin and MySpace pofiles, a personal and business blog, Delicious and StumbleUpOn tagged links collections and a Twitter and Flickr account.

I remember when I blogged a lot  on my personal blog I used to start with a simple idea (one that would probably fit in 140 characters) and sit down to write a blog post about it. I wrote an introduction, 3 examples and a conclusion. Then I added an illustration, some tags and a few hyperlinks and published. That generally took an hour.

Now I just tweet the simple idea I started out with and I’m done.

So, are blogs dead? No, of course not. Blogs are maturing and starting to follow basic economic principles where wealth (visitors, readers, audience) is unequally distributed. In the year 2000 the richest 1% of adults alone own 40% of global assets. That is how wealth is distributed in our world. When blogging started to hype the general idea was that everybody could make money from his or her blog and have an audience. Wealth (our readers) would be equally distributed.

In reality it turns out that most blogs have no more than 10 followers a month. In terms of audience these are the worlds poor. The bottom 50% of the world owns barely 1% of global wealth. Blogs are no exception to this unfortunate fact. We were hoping that the Lorenz Curve (the 80/20 rule) wouldn’t apply to blogging.

We now know it does.

On Twitter or Facebook these numbers work differently. If you have a Twitter accunt with 100 followers you might be perfectly happy with that. There is no need to make money on Twitter or get a huge following. A few interested listeners can make the whole experience worthwhile.

All of this leads to a huge shift from blogging to Twitter. Or to Microblogging in general. Matt Mullenweg told the audience at The Next Web Conference that in his experience blogging was actually growing. What he probably meant is that the top bloggers are receiving more visitors because Twitter and Facebook make sharing links easier.

I have no doubt however that a lot of people who would  have started a blog 2 years ago are now building their profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook or simply sticking to Twitter.

Anyone who says that blogging is dead has little or no sense of history. New technologies never ‘kill’ their predecessors. Television didn’t kill Radio and the Internet didn’t kill the Television. They all get a share of our attention and find their own audiences.

Blogs are dead?

No, The rumors of bloggings death have been greatly exaggerated…

Celebs and tech are currently all the rage, and Heroes’ Matt Parkman is taking things to another level with a genuinely superb iPhone app called Yowza!

I hesitated before posting this because unfortunately it’s still not available outside the US, however being so impressed by the idea and implementation (what I’ve seen of it anyway) that I had to share it with you.

To to sum up what Yowza actually does…Yowza partners with stores to bring vouchers directly to you via your iPhone, so whatever shop you might be in, you check Yowza to see if there are any available discounts available before you make your purchase. Clever eh? Well I thought so.

If you’re in the US of course, download the app here.

Update: There is a soon to launch UK iPhone app called VouChaCha which has yet to be launched officially. Will get a review up about it once we’ve got our hands on it.

Hattip to CrunchGear.