Right before the launch of the Palm Pre, the press was buzzing about a feature that had remained quiet until that time: That the Palm Pre can sync with iTunes. This is a key feature at least in theory as the Pre is seen as the biggest competitor to Apple’s iPhone to date. It stands to reason that Palm may have wanted to keep the feature under wraps until the launch neared, so Apple couldn’t neutralize it. Which it seems is exactly what they’re getting ready to do.

In a rather odd update on the support area of its site today, Apple has an entry titled: iTunes: About unsupported third-party digital media players. While it never explicitly mentions the Pre, or any other device, it doesn’t take an Apple Store Genius to figure out what it means. Here’s the full text of the article:

Last night, we noted that iPhone 3G S pre-orders started leaving their point of origin in China yesterday, and many had a scheduled delivery date of tomorrow — a full two days before they’re scheduled to hit stores. Today brings more proof of that, as the phones have hit American shores already.

Okay, they’re in Alaska, so not exactly at the local FedEx for many of us. But still, the stated date of delivery on these orders remains tomorrow. So everyone who pre-ordered their’s from a store can commence their bitching. At least until we all find out that AT&T won’t activate these early iPhone 3G Ss until Friday.

Alright, because you’ve demanded it, here’s the post about Twitter being down. Yes, Twitter is down. Yes, it will be down for the next hour or so. Yes, it was scheduled. Actually, this one is interesting because it was rescheduled, apparently at the behest of the U.S. government which wanted to make sure the communication regarding the protests in Iran over the election could go on without interruption.

And here’s our favorite tip that Twitter is down so far:

Bad news for Facebook from Germany today. Facebook has had issues with Berlin-based social network StudiVZ (”student directory” in German) for years before deciding last summer to finally sue their German clone in the US. In November, Facebook filed another suit [PDF], this time in Germany. The allegation in both cases: Intellectual property theft, with Facebook saying StudiVZ infringes on their site’s design, features and services. In addition, StudiVZ is accused of having stolen PHP source code from Facebook.

Anyone who spends more than 2 minutes on StudiVZ must come to the conclusion that the site is a total knock-off of the American original. It’s even rumored that several lines of very early StudiVZ code contained the word “Fakebook” and as a German, I can say StudiVZ is more or less a translated duplicate. But today the County Court in Cologne (where the suit was filed in November) decided against Facebook. And the judges were pretty harsh in their verdict.

Yesterday, we wrote about Microsoft’s pledge to feed the hungry if you download their web browser. That campaign is misleading, and it really shows when you compare it to another campaign of a similar nature.

Today, while at Facebook’s new headquarters in Palo Alto, we noticed that it too is involved in a campaign to end hunger. But rather than pledging to feed hungry people only if you download something from Facebook, the company is doing it on the down-low, asking its employees to help out, in its own cafeteria.

By now, you’ve probably heard all about the controversy surrounding the Iranian election and subsequent protests. If not, check here for a solid roundup. And you’ve probably also heard how this has spilled over into the tech world because Twitter has been one of the key points of contact between those inside Iran dissenting, and the outside world. If Twitter escaped being blocked by the Iranian government, you’d think FriendFeed would have too, right? Nope.

FriendFeed has been “almost completely blocked” in Iran, co-founder Bret Taylor tells us. You might not think this matters too much since FriendFeed is much smaller than Twitter in terms of users, but the service was hugely popular in Iran, Taylor says. In fact, Iran is one of the service’s most active countries, and it is the most active region as defined by comments per user per day, according to Taylor.

Google’s book settlement with the Author’s Guild has drawn an unusual number of critics and an antitrust investigation by the Department of Justice. Amazon CEO Jefrey Bezos doesn’t like it either.

Asked about the settlement onstage today at Wired’s Disruptive By Design Conference, Bezos replied:

That settlement in our opinion needs to be revisited. It doesn’t seem right that you should kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights. The class action settlement law . . . , you can’t believe that is the way it actually works.

It’s over. Facebook is now as large as MySpace in the U.S., according to May data released today by comScore. Facebook actually passed MySpace by a smidgeon, with 70.278 million unique visitors compared to MySpace’s 70.255 million. While Facebook passed MySpace on a worldwide basis last year, as recently as last March, Facebook was still trailing MySpace by 9 million unique visitors.

In May, Facebook gained another 2.8 million unique visitors in the U.S. MySpace, which has been stagnating lately and as a result now has a new CEO, lost about 700,000 unique visitors during the month. A few months ago, it looked like it might take Facebook until the end of the summer to catch up to MySpace, but it has already done so.

As we all know, advertising has been a tough nut for YouTube to crack. While a lot of videos feature overlaid ads at the bottom, some have been testing in-stream video ads that run before, during and after videos. Today, YouTube is starting to test a new way for users to interact with those ads.

On a “small percentage of videos,” you will now have the option of watching one “Promoted Video” (a video someone is paying for YouTube to promote, so yes, an ad) at the beginning of the clip, or choose to see a few different in-stream ads throughout the clip. And if you choose the one long clip beforehand, you will get to choose which clip you watch. Unfortunately, “none” is not an option.

In search, nobody wants to go up against Google. Even Microsoft is trying to position Bing as a “decision engine” even though it is really just a search engine. But Hunch, a startup which launched publicly today, is an actual decision engine. The only thing it attempts to do is help you make a decision through a question-and-answer interface.

Hunch is part of a recent flowering of Q&A sites (such as Aardvark and Mahalo Answers) which address a part of search that is orthogonal to what Google does. In part, these startups are responding to the success of Yahoo Answers, but they also push beyond what Yahoo Answers does. Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, who worked on Yahoo Answers before she left Yahoo and is now running product design at Hunch, says: “Yahoo Answers is not the answer.”

You may find this hard to believe, but back in the 90s, I was what you might consider a bit of a Microsoft fanboy.

I bought practically every piece of software they made (yes, including Bob). I was at the midnight launch of Windows 95 in my hometown. I bought Windows Me and XP the day they came out. But then a combination of things happened. First, Apple’s products started to get better and the iPod served as a gateway drug of sorts to their computers. Second, the rise of Google and the web as a whole made what desktop software I was using less important. Third, Microsoft’s products went through a period of lack of innovation, or worse, regressed.

I bring this up because some people familiar with my work, seem to want to believe that I dislike all Microsoft products by default. That’s simply not true. Even to this day, I will praise the work Microsoft has done with the Xbox 360. And I find a smattering of other things within the company that I find interesting, like Azure. And now something else from Microsoft is coming on my radar: Bing.

So, maybe you heard about Microsoft’s newest promotion to get people to use one of its products. If you download Internet Explorer 8 through this site, Microsoft promises to donate 8 meals per download to a group called Feeding America, which wants to end hunger in this country. Sounds great, right? Read the fine print.

Only complete downloads of Windows® Internet Explorer® 8 through browserforthebetter.com from June 8, 2009 through August 8, 2009 qualify for the charitable donation to Feeding America®. Microsoft® is donating $1.15 per download to Feeding America® up to a maximum of $1,000,000. Meals are used for illustrative purposes only. Meal conversion is effective until June 30th, 2010.

In case you missed it, let me highlight the hilarious part: $1.15 per download. For 8 meals. Let’s do the math.

Some people use Twitter to organize street protests in Tehran. Some people use it to share their daily thoughts and observation. But it is increasingly becoming clear that one of the most common ways people use Twitter is as a social information filter and link distributor.

Over the past few months, TechCrunch has experienced the power of this micro-media firsthand as the percentage of traffic we get from Twitter has grown to the point that it is now our second largest source of outside traffic after Google. In the past 30 days, Twitter accounted for 9.7 percent of all traffic to Techcrunch.com, up from 1.8 percent six months ago. This is out of millions of visits.

Looking at our Google Analytics numbers, here is the breakdown of visits to TechCrunch by source over the past 30 days:

You may not realize it yet, but the App Store is broken.

I spent this week at Apple’s WWDC conference in San Francisco talking to quite a few iPhone app developers. One thing that struck me was just how many of them shared the exact same concern with the App Store: App discovery.

By now, you’ve likely heard some of the success stories from the App Store (Apple does what it can to promote these at just about every event it holds pertaining to the iPhone now). But for each of those, there are also a ton of developers who work hard on apps only to watch them fall by the wayside. Apple’s greatest strength with the store — the fact that there are now 50,000 + apps — is also turning into its weakness with many developers. And if it doesn’t adapt the store to its huge growth, those developers might start looking at other platforms.

The problem is that while early on, it was pretty easy for small-time developers to make an app and get it noticed in the store, now with 50,000 apps, we’re getting to the point where you need to do something else to promote your apps. That’s good news for big time development studios like EA, which can throw marketing money at the problem. But for some smaller developers — some of which are just one person — that’s simply not an option. But there is one potential solution, and it’s one Apple already has built-in to iTunes: Genius recommendations.

Twitter users, the Twitpocalypse is upon us.

Twitpocalypse is the name given to a bug that’s about to be exposed. Apparently, it’s similar to the Y2K bug in its nature, and stems from the fact that every tweet sent out has a unique numeric identifier. This identifier is about to hit 2,147,483,647. This number is the signed integer limit and apparently when some third-party Twitter clients start hitting it, the identifiers will start turning negative, and those apps are likely to crash as a result.

This crash was supposed to happen sometime tomorrow, according to the countdown, but it looks like Twitter has just moved up the Twitpocalypse time to 21:00 GMT, which is 2 PM Pacific/5PM Eastern time today. Yes, in a couple hours.

If you’re reading this, chances are you haven’t been using an over-the-air antenna to get analog television service for quite some time. I’m not even sure I’ve seen the “rabbit ears” since the 80s. But just in case you are one of the rumored 6 million Americans who aren’t ready for the switch from analog to digital, Yahoo and YouTube are doing their part to remind you. Both sites feature analog-to-digital logos to mark the transition that happens today.

While YouTube’s is purely cosmetic, Yahoo was nice enough to link its to a site that gives users more details about the switch. But again, I’m not sure that at this point if you’ve missed the notice after notice that the transition was happening, that’s you’re surfing Yahoo either — or own a computer, or even watch TV. The U.S. government started a $1.2 billion campaign in 2007 to let people know about the switch. But somehow all that time and money still wasn’t enough as Congress had to delay the transition in February (when it was supposed to occur) and give the program more money.

It seems that even in this downturn, there is still room for tech IPOs, at least in Japan. Cookpad [JP], the nation’s biggest site for sharing recipes, today announced it will be listed in the “Mothers” section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange on July 17.

Cookpad was launched as early as 1997 by the Tokyo-based company of the same name. The Japanese-only site now offers nearly 560,000 different recipes (submitted by users) and saw a whopping 351 million page views last month, generated by 6.8 million unique visitors. By way of comparison, one of America’s leading recipe sites, Allrecipes.com, claims it has almost double that number, but Google Trends shows there isn’t too much of difference.

The web threw a hissy fit a couple weeks ago after some screenshots of the iPhone 3.0 beta software indicated that you would have to re-purchase apps that you had removed from your iPhone or iPod touch. But it looks like everyone can calm down now. In the latest iPhone 3.0 GM build, which went live shortly after the WWDC keynote on Monday, the ability to re-download an app you’ve already purchased, looks to be have been restored.

The blog AppAdvice did some digging and found that the new iTunes 8.2 software apparently includes some logic which allows it to tell exactly which iTunes account is authorized for app purchases made. This is to prevent users from sharing apps by signing out of one iTunes account and into another one on the iPhone itself.

There’s a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley: A lot of people are using their iPhones to stream live video over the web. The reason this is kept secret is because technically, no one is supposed to have such an app on their iPhone. You see, Apple has not allowed any of these live-streaming apps into the App Store. One reason is because these apps use hacks to get the iPhone’s camera to record video. But another is undoubtedly because AT&T does not want live streaming video clogging up its network. But if Apple and AT&T think videos like this and this were shot on something like a Nokia N95, they’re dreaming.

Even the video-crippled iPhone 3G has proven to be a great tool for shooting streaming live video, and now with the launch of the iPhone 3G S — which actually supports video, the implications are huge. Companies like Qik and Ustream should be shouting from the rooftops, “Finally!,” right? So why is everyone so quiet when it comes to using the iPhone 3G S for streaming live video? Well, because it’s still far from a sure thing.

Oh, the burdens of popularity. We already know that most people on Twitter are sheep with few followers and who don’t Tweet much. But what about the rams? If you want to lead a flock on Twitter, you need to be heard. People with 100 followers send out an average of 2.4 Tweets per day, while those with 1,800 followers Tweet an average of 10.2 a day, according to a new study by Sysomos, a social media analytics company based in Toronto. The inflection point seems to be between 800 followers (2.8 Tweets a day) and 1,000 followers (6.4 Tweets a day).

The more followers you have, the more you Tweet. Perhaps once people attract a large enough audience they feel obligated to keep them entertained. More likely, the more you Tweet the more followers you get, provided you actually have something interesting to say. As it turns out, not everybody uses Twitter as a broadcast mechanism. Many people simply tune in passively and skim their feeds. Sysomos looked at 11.5 million Twitter accounts and concluded that the top 10 percent of Twitter users produce 86 percent of the Tweets (which closely matches a Harvard Business School study that estimates the top 10 percent of Twitter users do 90 percent of the Tweeting). It is even more concentrated than that. The Sysomos data indicates that the top 5 percent of people on Twitter account for 75 percent of all Tweets.