I counted exactly 99 people in the queue in front of me when I arrived outside the Apple store in Corte Madera, California at around 7.15pm on Friday. There were more queuing inside past security, while others were steadily emerging with their special iPhone bags, most of them carrying the maximum-allowed two.

I’m not a queue jumper but I did happen to meet John Paczkowski, who blogs at All Things Digital and was halfway along the line. He was only buying one and offered to get me mine. By 8pm, I too was walking away with an iPhone bag.

John had arrived at 6pm when they first went on sale, finding a much longer line. But the Apple operation was impressive, buyers were processed quickly with no need to activate the phone instore and emails being sent out rather than paper receipts issued.

It was so organised and there were enough iPhones in stock to make anyone who had been queuing long before 6pm look foolish. The profiteers may feel even more so if the iPhone fails to sell out and they are unable to double their money selling theirs on eBay.

The iPhone comes in a stylish black box, the kind you expect to open and find a Fabergé egg nestling inside. Everything about the packaging oozes class, matching the phone it encases. You feel you are holding a thing of beauty: sleek, black and silver, a heft to it that lends substance and a display that lights up to reveal an interface unmatched by any other handheld device, let alone cellphones.

Activating it was a cinch online once I had downloaded the latest version of iTunes. It also synced right off the bat with my iTunes library and allowed me to import contacts and diary items from Outlook and bookmarks from Internet Explorer.

The iPhone likes to be stroked. A lot. This is probably a feature intended to engender pet-like attachment from its owner. Apple could have made it purr, but that could have made it too Furbie like. You stroke the iPhone to unlock, scroll through lists and flick through photo slideshows and iTunes record sleeves.

My first impression is that this is a design statement and entertainment device rather than a useful business tool I would carry around for work. Too much functionality is hidden for the sake of clean design in both the interface and the number of buttons available. The Edge network is painfully slow for web browsing, I find the keyboard far too small and practically impossible to use at the moment and I cannot imagine my IT department delivering company emails to me on this device.

Watching videos, listening to music and viewing photos is a dream though. My kids loved it, but could not figure out why this was the only phone they’d ever encountered without any games on it.

I’ve only had the iPhone a few hours, so these are first thoughts and there’s a first look on video below.

Jerry Taylor, moments after he walked out the Apple store with the first iPhone bought in San Francisco.

Could a nascent backlash swamp Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of turning Facebook into the next big web plaftform?

Yesterday, Valleywag published a lengthy breakdown of some of the percevied faults of Facebook’s platform strategy, at least in its current form. They include tiddly applications, unreliable servers, and, perhaps most importantly, concerns about Facebook changing the rules on developers in the middle of the game.

This last concern stems from the company’s decision to restrict the number of invitations users can send out to their friends to advertise a newly-downloaded widget. Although the move was taken to prevent rogue developers from spamming users with application invites, some programmers are saying it has made it difficult for newer applications to get noticed.

Now that Facebook has changed the rules around invites, some developers are concerned it might intervene elsewhere. As one entrepreneur put it:

Say you have 10 million active users of a Facebook app that is making tons of money. If Facebook decides they want that money, they can make their app the default. On the web, you’re never that vulnerable. Facebook may or may not ever try to crush successful applications, but from an acquisition or investment perspective, that risk is definitely going to have to be figured in.

This is the dilemma that software developers faced for years when dealing with Microsoft.

Whether or not Facebook pulls such shenanigans on its developers is irrelevant. The risk that it could happen is what counts. In the end, this is probably not a dealbreaker. But as long as Facebook continues to work on its own apps, it’s a risk outside developers and their investors will have to keep in mind.

We took a stroll past the San Francisco Apple store this morning and this is what we found:

More photos after the jump…

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From far and wide, arch-geeks have converged on Apple stores across the US to wait out the final 24 hours of iPhone madness. Until very recently, one notable exception had been the San Francisco Apple store, but a brief check after lunch confirmed that a small number of iPhone loonies have begun to set up camp there as well.

In New York, the first iPhone camper was revealed to be none other than Greg Packer, a notorious attention hog known for waiting in line at product launches and celebrity events in hope of being quoted in the newspaper. In Palo Alto, the noted tech blogger Robert Scoble was the first in line, along with his son Patrick.

The serious business on the last day of life as we know it began with a town hall meeting at Apple headquarters, where Steve Jobs said that each Apple employee would receive a free 8GB iPhone by the end of July as a reward for their hard work, then proceeded to give a strategy update. A tipster told ARS Technica that Jobs compared Apple’s business model to a chair with two legs - the iPod and the Mac.

The third leg of the chair, Steve hopes, will be the iPhone business, which he hopes to grow into something as strong as the iPod. He added that he hopes for the fourth leg to become the Apple TV, but focus is on the iPhone for now.

The Apple boss also hinted that new iPods and Macs might be coming in the near future.

With all this hype, it’s hard to believe that Apple will have enough iPhones on hand on Friday to keep up with demand. Not to worry, though. Beginning at 9pm on Thursday, customers will be able to go to the Apple web site to make sure the phone is still in stock on their local Apple store.

Here is a roundup of our recent iPhone coverage, just in case there’s anyone left out there who hasn’t had enough. See you on the flip side.

• Lex: Apple’s iPhone
• Motorola concerned at launch of iPhone
• Commeth the iPhone, commeth the cult
• iPhone costs hit Apple shares
• Vodafone tipped for iPhone deal in Europe
• Apple takes risks in bid to shake up the mobile market
• Apple’s core iPhone rivals

Second Life is not the life for everyone. There are plenty of internet universes to inhabit and companies are beginning to market their products in other virtual worlds.

There.com, with nearly 1m members, average age 22, announced a partnership with Capitol Music Group today to bring its artists into specially created nightclubs in the virtual world.

Rap artist MIMS, Yellowcard, Korn, the Beastie Boys and Lily Allen will make appearances, answering fans’ questions and talking about tours and albums. Interactive kiosks, placed throughout There.com, will sell both real and virtual world merchandise.

This could bring in substantial revenues. A Virtual Goods Summit at Stanford University last week was told that people are spending more than $1.5bn a year on virtual items, with sites such as Habbo Hotel and China’s Tencent leading the way in revenues.

There.com’s business model is different from Second Life, which has been the subject of some negative articles recently about the corporate sector tiring of experimenting inside a fairly lawless environment and starting to pull out.

While Second Life has allowed itself to be a 3D canvas for third-party design firms to create islands and buildings for their corporate customers, There.com plays a more pro-active role with virtual-world designers to offer its clients a complete package.

“The [virtual world] pie is growing continually, it’s going to be interesting, we’ve so much further to go,” Michael Wilson, chief executive of There’s owner - Makena Techologies - told me.

“We are all for companies starting small and working their way up.”

This means going from in-world advertising and promotion to building a zone, a dedicated region and then a custom world.

MTV, the teen lifestyle channel, has already used There to create a virtual Laguna Beach, The Hills and Pimp My Ride, based on its TV programmes.

Other worlds are also getting in on the act. Millions of Us, a developer dedicated to Second Life until now, has announced it will partner with Gaia Online, a virtual world with more than 2m users per month, in order to offer integrated campaigns spanning worlds.

With so many of them out there, selling across different virtual geographies represents a new challenge for marketers.

The new microblogging services, Jaiku and Twitter, are aiming to avoid the bad relationships between their older brothers - the instant messaging services that never talked to one another.

AOL’s instant messenger, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger used their own proprietary protocols for instant messaging, so a user on one could not chat with a member of another, meaning users often having all three clients open on their desktops.

Jabber, an open-source client, Meebo, a browser-based one, and a belated link-up between Yahoo and Microsoft have helped to improve the situation, but the microbloggers hope to nail a lack of interoperability in its infancy.

"We’re getting into interoperating pretty quickly," says Jyri Engestrom, the Finnish co-founder of Jaiku.
"Our challenge is to federate our services so it doesn’t matter if you are on one or the other. We are using the same underlying protocol, which is Java, so it’s technically possible."

Linking the two would profit both, he says, growing the market and moving lifestreaming into the mainstream.

Not surprisingly, a fan has already made a mashup called Twitku that lets users post to Twitter, Jaiku or both at the same time.

This should help those wondering whether to switch from one to another. Jaiku’s servers crashed in April when the biggest Twitterer, Leo Laporte, moved over and the mega-blogger Robert Scoble now appears on both.

Jyri says Jaiku is seen as having a better interface and a richer feature set than Twitter. Its mobile capabilities are particularly impressive. A presence feature identifies the nearest cell, to which users are adding street locations. So Jyri’s visit to our San Francisco office showed him as being at Grant and Post Street in his Jaiku profile, accurate to within a few feet.

As a former Nokia senior product manager, he ’s pleased that Nokia is now offering a client version of Jaiku on 300 handsets, joining clients for the "Jaikuberry", Mac OS X and several others created by ordinary users.

Channels, introduced last week, are the latest innovation. Identified by a # mark, they allow discussions on particular topics among users.

Petteri Koponen, Jaiku’s other co-founder, defines lifestreaming as giving users  "social peripheral vision - you know what your friends are doing but you don’t have to react."

Jaiku expects to make money by offering mobile operators localised versions of the service and hopes to figure out how to inject simple relevant text ads into outgoing messages.

It does not see its service replacing instant messaging: "We think it’s going to co-exist and you’ll be able to click to connect to IM or Skype or a regular phone call with someone," says Jyri.

If you were still in any doubt as to why Yahoo! and MSN are in the tank, this chart should make all crystal clear (it’s from Sandeep Aggarwal at Oppenheimer, who has just started coverage of the internet advertising sector, based on comScore data.)

The reach of the big portals, in terms of unique visitors, has not diminished, but the shift in pageviews to the social networks has been striking.

However, anybody tempted to gloat too quickly about the fate of antiquated "Web 1.0" companies like Yahoo should weigh up the wider implications of this. This change in online behaviour is potentially disruptive to the entire internet advertising business, as noone has yet worked out how best to monetise these socially-connected eyeballs. Change on this scale can be painful.

Justin.tv, live for 100 days now, expects to make good on its promise to be the YouTube of live video on July 16 when it opens up its service to anyone who wants to broadcast their lives over the internet.

Justin Kan, the webcam-toting star of the eponymous website, has already recruited several others willing to film themselves 24/7, notably Justine, but the next version of the site is for everyone.

"I thought there’s only so much content I can do, I can only be in one place at one time. So the plan is to roll out the platform so everyone can do it," he told us.

"It took YouTube to show it was easy to upload and create a page for your video and I think we are a similar kind of thing."

The new interface will allow users to flip through channels, with the hottest feeds made more prominent by monitoring of network activity and seeing how many "tips" they are receiving from viewers.

Justin expects there to be more rivals to his service soon, along with existing players such as Ustream, Veodia and BlogTV.

"I see it as huge competition, it’s a battle to promote and popularise live video."

Empowering everyone with a webcam should make for an easier life for Justin.

"I actually like having the camera on, I have got so used to it. But it would take the pressure off to always be doing something interesting. I’m excited for the day when justin.tv will one day be replaced by people who are more interesting and charismatic than I am and eventually I will kind of fade away."

There’s more on the justin.tv phenomenon here.

T-Mobile has become the first US wireless carrier to offer a wi-fi option for users to replace their landlines, but, like other operators around the world, it is not handing its calls completely over to the internet.

T-Mobile launches Hotspot @ Home today with two new “Hotspot” cellphones from Samsung and Nokia and calling plans that allow unlimited nationwide calls over wi-fi at home or any open wi-fi hotspot for as low as $9.99 a month initially.

This would be in addition to a regular calling plan, but T-Mobile points out the savings could still be substantial if consumers are spending the industry average of $48 a month on their landline at home and can now replace it.

Of course, they could anyway with their regular cellphones, without the need for the new service, but T-Mobile says poor reception at home is the biggest barrier to landline replacement.

The new phones solve this by using the home internet connection to improve the GSM mobile experience. Calls made in the home are not like Voice-over-Internet Protocol Skype calls, but are instead GSM calls wrapped in IP.

This allows mobile carriers to maintain their billing systems on calls and ensure a reliable hand-off to the cellular system if someone walks out of their house or hotspot and carries on a conversation.

The UMA (unlicensed mobile access) technology has been used successfully by operators including Orange, BT and Telecom Italia in Europe. T-Mobile is the natural operator to launch it first in the US – it has set up a nationwide network of 8,500 wi-fi hotspots and it has no landline business here it could risk cannibalising.

The company is also offering a wireless router, free after a mail-in rebate, that will give better voice quality and prioritise voice traffic over data traffic, as well as improving the battery life of the phones.

One disappointment – you can’t surf for free to your heart’s content on the new wi-fi phones. Talk is cheap, but anything else requires a separate data plan.

UPDATE. Michael Gartenberg, Jupiter Research analyst, has a full review of the service here.