10 days ago, Facebook developer Joe Hewitt rocked the iPhone development world when he announced that he would stop making iPhone apps because he was fed up with the way Apple is running the App Store. This is significant since Hewitt was pretty much solely responsible for one of the most popular (and best) iPhone apps out there: Facebook’s. And now, just a little over a week later, we may be seeing the downside of Hewitt’s decision.

The Facebook iPhone app is broken, and has been for a while now. Every single user profile page contains zero updates or posts. Instead, each loads a stream that reads “USER has no recent posts.” Judging from Twitter searches, tips coming in, and a Facebook thread, this has been the case since at least yesterday, and possibly before that.

“Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.” – Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail, co-founder of FriendFeed, currently doing vague infrastructure things at Facebook.

Today, at our RealTime CrunchUp event in San Francisco, Buchheit and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman sat down for a chat with our own Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld. The topic was: Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus.

So can we kill email?

Rotten Tomatoes is a great site because it takes all the movie reviews from around the web and condenses them into an easy-to-understand aggregate score. But let’s be honest: Most movie reviewers suck. Why not instead rely on people in your social circle to recommend movies to you? That’s the idea behind FlixUp.

This new iPhone app unveiled at our Realtime CrunchUp event in San Francisco today essentially scans Twitter for what people are saying about a movie and shows you a rating based on that. It can return a general score from across Twitter, or the tweets about the movie from people you follow on Twitter.

You know the retweet button you see on content spread throughout the web? You can thank TweetMeme for that. Long before Twitter’s new Retweet functionality existed, this button was the way to share on Twitter. And it still is for content not on twitter.com. But now it’s time for TweetMeme to think about making money. And they’ve come up with a way that people are either going to love or hate.

At our Realtime CrunchUp in San Francisco today, TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead has unveiled AdTweets. As you might expect, this involves ads that appear on your site — but with the addition of a retweet button. Yes, you can also retweet these ads just as you would any piece of content.

The first randomly selected audience winner today at the RealTime CrunchUp is SuperFeedr. They are an API service that works with both XMPP and PubSubHubbub (which launched at the first CrunchUp) to create realtime content feeds.

As they noted on stage, it’s hard to demo something that is API only, but one implementation that we’ve written about before is Excla.im, which we wrote about recently. This allows for the realtime tracking of keywords on Twitter via IM. But this idea works for all content.

I’m a big fan of keeping things simple, but that doesn’t mean things have to be bland. Google search results are pretty bland. Sure, sometimes you get returned things like YouTube thumbnails or pictures, but many results are still just a monotonous stream of blue links. Google tried to break this stream up a bit with its Search Options, an expandable feature, that gives you a left-side toolbar. But even that is just a bland series of links. Google is finally thinking about changing that.

Today, Google has begun testing a new look for Search Options. This offers more visual approach to this sidebar, including colors and graphics (oh my). As you can see in the screenshot, “Everything” (regular Google results), “News,” and “Blogs” are a few of the newly visual tabs. There is also a “More” area that shows other things like “Maps.”

Today, during the Filtering the Stream roundtable at our RealTime CrunchUp, Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur asked why Facebook isn’t giving third parties access to their Friend Lists. Obviously, that’s a good question now that Twitter has starting giving third parties access to its Lists feature via an API. Normally, you’d expect a canned response along the lines of “we may do that in the future” or “we’re thinking about it,” but Facebook’s VP of Platform Bret Taylor was much more candid.

Taylor said that Le Meur’s request seemed “reasonable” and continued “we should do that.” “We’re not working on that. But we should be,” he continued. So there you go, done deal. Great. It would seem that soon, third parties should have access to the list filters that Facebook uses.

At our RealTime CrunchUp event today in San Francisco, the first roundtable is entitled “Filtering the Stream: Getting Rid of the Noise.”

The panel is populated by a lot of big players in the space: Facebook, VP of Product Chris Cox, Google, Google Fellow, Amit Singhal, Seesmic, CEO Loic Le Meur, Futurity Ventures, investor/entrepreneur Edo Segal, CrowdEye, CEO Ken Moss, Microsoft, GM of FUSE Labs, Lili Cheng, Facebook, VP of Platform, Bret Taylor, MySpace, Chief Product Officer, Jason Hirschhorn, Thing Labs/Brizzly, CEO Jason Shellen, OneRiot, CEO Kimbal Musk, and Angel Investor Ron Conway. Our own Erick Schonfeld and Steve Gillmor are moderating.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

Opening our RealTime CrunchUp event today in San Francisco is Twitter COO Dick Costolo. Our own Michael Arrington and Steve Gillmor are sitting down with Costolo for a 30 minute conversation.

Twitter is one of the hottest players in the realtime field right now. And it has a $1 billion valuation, which has been the source of much controversy. Twitter also recently signed search deals with both Microsoft and Google.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

Brizzly was first unveiled in private beta at our first CrunchUp event in July, so it’s only appropriate that today, the day of our next CrunchUp, it’s being opened to the public. Now, to be clear, the product is still technically in beta, but that’s only so the team at Thing Labs can keep experimenting with new ways to make Brizzly even better.

For those who have not had the opportunity to try Brizzly yet, it’s a web app that serves as a way to interact with both Twitter and now Facebook. It has advantages over Twitter’s regular website because it shows pictures and videos inline, and they actually did lists (which they called Groups) before Twitter. Now that Twitter has rolled out that functionality, Brizzly has integrated it. Perhaps more importantly, Brizzly also offers as one-click way to do the old-school way of retweeting. You know, the “RT” way.

Earlier this month, Twitter rolled out a Spanish language version of its service. This was the first language to gain native support beyond English and Japanese. Today, it’s announcing French support as well.

As the service announced in October, it needed help from the community in order to roll out to the so-called “FIGS” languages. That is French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Just over a month later, 2 of those are already complete.

Back in August, Twitter announced that it was getting ready to roll out an ambitious new project: Geolocation. The idea was to be able to attach a location to every tweet. Today, the API for the feature has been officially turned on, but location is not a part of the main site — yet.

This means that applications that have been built using the APIs — such as Birdfeed, which we previewed recently — will be the first to be able to use location features. As Twitter notes, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and a few others are also supporting location right now.

If you’re addicted to Techmeme, like we are, you’re probably addicted to reading it on your mobile phone too. The problem is that the experience hasn’t been great. There was a mobile version of the site, called Mini-Techmeme, but no one seemed to know about it. More importantly, it didn’t give the full Techmeme experience because it didn’t include discussion items. Today, Techmeme has launched a new version of its site optimized for smart phones.

If you visit the regular Techmeme site now on devices like an iPhone, a Palm Pre, or the new Verizon Droid, you’ll see a site optimized for touchscreen phones. The site include three main tabs, “Top, ” More,” and “New.” These represent the three key areas of Techmeme’s main site. This tabbed navigation allows you to easily jump through the sections. Each section contains the main headlines and a right pointing arrow which you click on to see the discussion items.

After being restricted to just a handful of cities for the first several months of its existence, Foursquare is now in a period of rapid expansion around the globe. Fresh of its launch of 15 European cities a couple week ago, today the site has rolled out support for 50, yes 50, new cities.

Though they haven’t formally announced the massive expansion yet, which pretty much doubles their total (they had 53 cities previously), Foursquare’s Harry Heymann tweeted about the addition today. And if you look in the site’s city drop down list, you’ll see a huge list of new cities.

We’re here today in Mountain View, CA at the Googleplex for an event during which Google is promising to give a lot of details about Chrome OS. This includes a full product rundown and details about the formal launch, which is expected to occur early next year.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Google’s Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS are speaking at the event. And there will be a Q&A session afterwards.

Ahead of its press event to talk about the new Chrome OS Google has just posted the source code for Chrome OS on the Chromium site. As you can see in the file structure, Google is doing the same thing it does with Chrome, which is based off of Chromium, the open-source component. So yes, it does appear there is something called Chromium OS, which is the open-source version of what will become Chrome OS.

First of all, yes, everyone on Twitter now should have access to the new Retweet functionality. Currently, only Twitter.com and a handful of clients support the new mechanism. But did you know that you can also trigger the new Retweets via SMS?

As the Twitter mobile account noted earlier tonight, if you simply send “RT USERNAME” to 40404 (at least in the U.S.) it will automatically retweet the last tweet of whatever username you entered has sent. And yes, it will be a new-style Retweet.

Okay, we’ve uncovered Engadget’s big secret: Surprise, redesign! (No, sadly, it’s not a golden heffer or starchild or iPhone-killer.)

The new look is quite magazine-like. Look for it to go live shortly.

This message currently graces every page on Engadget. Not sure what they’re up to, but it’s promised to be “awesome awesome stuff,” editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky tweets.

In fact, beyond the in your face teaser promising that, “What’s next is coming now. Stay close.”, Topolsky has been tweeting teasers all night. So Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera decided to respond (below):

Regular readers will know that my browser of choice has long been Camino. It’s that other browser built under the brand of Firefox-makers Mozilla, that runs on the Mac platform and is entirely open-source and volunteer-built. I love it because it’s much lighter and faster than Firefox is, while being extremely compatible with just about all sites on the web. And today, version 2.0 has just launched.

Version 2 has been beta testing for several months now, and a release candidate was unveiled a couple weeks ago. For a while, there was some concern that its release would get pushed indefinitely since the lead on it, Mike Pinkerton, also happens to be the guy helping Google build Chrome for Mac. But, “Mike is still involved in overseeing changes that land, planning features, and overall guidance for the project. While his day job may be Chromium, he continues to lead the Camino Project in his spare time,” Samuel Sidler, Camino’s team coordinator tells us.

About a year ago, tech news aggregator Techmeme hired Megan McCarthy as its first dedicated human editor. Founder Gabe Rivera clearly liked the idea; he’s now added three more, doubling the size of the staff.

Rich DeMuro (formerly of CNET), Lidija Davis (formerly of ReadWriteWeb) and Mahendra Palsule (a former IT project manager) all join McCarthy to make up the editorial staff for Techmeme. Rivera notes that this team means they basically have human eyes watching for the best tech news 24 hours a day now. This allows Rivera and his fellow programmer, Omer Horvitz to keep the backend and the algorithm rolling.

Google is powerful. We all know this, and live with it. But that brings up some interesting concerns when they break into new businesses — will they use that power to give them an unfair advantage? With great power comes great responsibility, and all that. Today brings a totally innocuous example, but it’s still interesting.

A new feature in Gmail Labs allows you to change your contacts’ circular chat status icons in Android logo status icons. But the key is that these icons only change for users who are currently online on their Android phones.

Imagine a world where you sit at your computer and you never go outside. Where you never see another human being. This is the world that sites like Google and Facebook want you to live in.

Though they’d never admit to such a thing, the reasoning should be obvious: The longer you’re at your computer, the more time you’re spending on their sites. The more time your spending on their sites, the more ads you’re being served. The more ads being served, the more money they are earning. No matter why these sites originally started, or what features they add, that is, quite literally, the bottom line. They’d have us strapped to a chair with our eyes taped open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, if they could. The only difference is that we’d have a contraption on our arms to allow us to click on the ads being shown every so often.

Thankfully, we don’t quite live in that world yet. And there are a couple factors pushing us the opposite way from that. Mobile devices are the biggest one. But even that is still just a screen. You may not be chained to a desk using it, but as plenty of people with an iPhone will tell you, you may end staring at this screen even more than you do a desktop or laptop monitor throughout a day. But there’s another up and coming factor working against our screen slavery: Location.

I don’t recall ever paying for a TypePad blog, but apparently I did. I learned this today when I logged in for the first time in years to see that the site I had set up in 2005 was deactivated because my credit card had expired. Lucky for me, I don’t have to pay anymore because TypePad has finally launched a free version of the service.

TypePad Micro will be very familiar to anyone who has ever used Tumblr or Posterous in the past. I hate the term “micro-blogging,” but that’s essentially what this is in the eyes of some people. That is to say, it’s a platform that makes it easy to quickly post items you find that you enjoy from around the web. You can certainly use it to write more traditional blog posts if you want, but the clear emphasis is on sharing links, photos, music, and other quick-share items from around the web.

Google is planning to hold a special Chrome OS event at its headquarters in Mountain View, CA this Thursday morning, we’ve just been notified. The plan is to give some technical background information as well as show off some demos, we’re told. More notably, they will be giving a “complete overview” of the new OS, which they say will launch next year.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Google Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS will be speaking at the event. And there will be a Q&A session afterwards.