- Lots of activity on the iPhone front. The reviews are now out for the iPhone 3GS and they are generally very positive. The phone goes on sale on Friday, but its new operating system update – 3.0 – became available on Wednesday and sparked an avalanche of downloads. Meanwhile, Apple’s ongoing irritation with its rival, the Palm Pre, continues. It has already made thinly veiled threats about the Palm device’s similar use of a multi-touch screen. Now, it is warning that newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with non-Apple digital media players – a reference to a popular function on the Pre.
- Facebook seems to be casting an envious eye on all the attention Twitter is getting for breaking real-time news, such as the Iranian election protests. It has launched in beta a search tool that can uncover all public information on Facebook on a subject. By sheer coincidence we’re sure, it shows an example of searching for Iran, with the results page producing comments and links to news and video on the election from friends and “fan” pages. But Facebook’s problem in trying to add real-time search capabilities like those of Twitter, Friendfeed or (coming soon) Google is that much of its information is held back by its privacy rules. Michael Arrington at Techcrunch says Facebook will tackle this next week by encouraging users to make their updates viewable to everyone.
- A report by Credit Suisse analyst Spencer Wang caused a stir in April when he suggested the YouTube video service was losing Google around $500m a year. He has now been contradicted by IT consultancy RampRate, which puts the loss at around $175m. Only Google could say which is the closer, but RampRate says Mr Wang overestimated YouTube’s hosting and bandwidth costs.
- Google‘s latest attempt to woo customers of Microsoft‘s Outlook has the unhappy side-effect of exposing them to a “serious bug/ flaw.” So says Microsoft, which is clearly not happy with the recent Google plug-in designed to sync Outlook data with Google Apps. One effect of the software is to disable the Windows desktop search program, making it harder to find Outlook information. Microsoft’s terse conclusion: “We have brought these issues to Google’s attention, and have offered to work with them to find a resolution for our mutual customers.”
© The Financial Times Ltd 2012 FT and 'Financial Times' are trademarks of The Financial Times Ltd.