Easily my favorite app on the Android platform is Imeem. It’s simple, fast and powerful, allowing you to listen to a huge range of music for free. And now it’s coming to the iPhone, we’ve learned.

The Imeem app has already been submitted for App Store approval and could be released any day, we’re hearing from a reliable source. In terms of what it will offer, you can probably expect it to be about the same as the Android version. That means access to Imeem’s library of music and perhaps more importantly, access to your own collection of songs from the cloud, if you use Imeem’s MyMusic service to put your music on their servers.

Since Gmail’s birth in 2004, Google has steadily built a powerful cloud-based email platform that’s chock full of innovative features including offline access, chat, search, mobile access and more. Google saw the opportunity to integrate Gmail and apps, like docs and calendar features, into the enterprise space and rolled out premier editions of Apps catering to the business community. Today, Google announced that it has struck a partnership with Valeo, an automotive components manufacturer, to deploy Google Apps on the company’s entire global workforce, which totals about 30,000 internet-using employees.

After coming under increasing scrutiny from various state attorneys general for the open prostitution listings in its “erotic services” category, Craigslist is now folding in the face of criminal charges.The company said in a blog post that it will replace the erotic services category with a new “Adult services” category where each ad will be individually reviewed before posting.

Existing ads in the erotic services category will remain for seven days, but already new ads are not being accepted in that category. People trying to place an ad in the adult category are reminded: “Ads suggesting or implying an exchange of sexual favors for money are strictly prohibited” and “Ads including pornographic images, or images suggestive of an offer of sexual favors are strictly prohibited.”

Surprise, surprise. Last night Twitter abruptly decided to disable an option in the way @replies worked. The feature, while not widely used, was very popular among so-called ‘power users’ because it helped expose them to new users and conversations. Users have been up in arms since the change, venting their complaints in the highly trending channel #fixreplies. It’s been a disaster.

At the time of the change co-founder Biz Stone wrote an oddly condescending blog post, stating that the feature was an “undesirable and confusing option” which was exactly why they took it away. This didn’t make much sense given the fact that the option was nestled in the settings menu and wasn’t the default. Most people didn’t even know it was there.

This morning in a new blog post titled Whoa Feedback, Stone has revealed the true reason behind the change: it’s an engineering problem. Stone writes “The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt—it wouldn’t have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever.”

I don’t know about you, but the novelty of watching random YouTube videos on my iDevice wore off pretty quickly. And with iHulu (a.k.a. an official Hulu iPhone app) nowhere to be found, there aren’t too many other quality alternatives for viewing free content on your iPhone or iPod touch…until now.

CNET points out that NBC’s mobile site – m.nbc.com – provides access to full episodes of many of the network’s most popular shows, including Heroes and The Office.

The catch – the episodes are broken up into 7+ minute segments, each with a commercial intro. However, on the bright side, once the show begins to buffer you can manually fast forward past the commercial to the good stuff.

Over the weekend I wrote a post on the disgusting habit of hand shaking: Hand Shaking Is So Medieval. Let’s End It. 500 comments later, about 40% of readers seemed to agree with me. The rest think I have OCD or some other psychological condition that needs treatment. Or just have no social skills.

If I could take a poll, though, it’s clear that the people who have hands thrust at them more than they thrust hands at others are more likely to be opposed to hand shaking. CEOs and journalists, for example, tended to agree. Business development and sales types hate the idea.

But whatever people’s individual feelings on hand shaking, one thing is clear. Some people are using this as a cue to stop the barbaric practice once and for all. And yesterday one brave company and its board of directors were willing to publicly admit that they held an actual board of directors meeting where no one shook hands. That was unthinkable a week ago.

From Chester Ng, who twittered this morning: “@arrington’s “handshake revolution” has begun! We kicked off our BOD meeting w/ awkward yet sanitary fist-bumps w/ @davidcowan @jamescham“

When Facebook redesigned its homepage in early March in a wholehearted embrace of the real-time activity stream as its primary user interface, everybody complained. “Why on earth does the world need 2 Twitters?,” asked one of my friends on Facebook. Twitter-envy aside, some early data suggests that embracing the stream was the right decision after all.

Since the redesign went into effect, Facebook’s growth has accelerated. After flat 0.3 growth in February, Facebook added nearly 4 million unique U.S. visitors in March (up 6.6 percent over February), and another 5 million in April (up 10.3 percent over March) to end at 67.5 million domestic uniques, according to comScore. That puts it within kissing distance of MySpace’s 71 million unique U.S. visitors in April, by the way (see chart below), and keeps a healthy 50-million visitor gap with Twitter, which added 8 million U.S. visitors in April alone.

Mo’Minis, an Israeli-based startup that provides developers a platform to create mobile games and entertainment applications, has secured $1.5 million in Series A funding from BRM Capital. The company says that the funding will be used to improve the current development platform, strengthen its community of developers and close strategic partnerships with distributors operating mobile carriers worldwide.

Launched in 2008, Mo’Minis raised $400,000 in seed money from private investors. Mo’Minis’ platform allows advanced as well as non-skilled developers to create rich media casual games from scratch, without the need of programming, and have them seamlessly supported on a wide range of mobile handsets. Furthermore, developers can collaborate, share game assets with Mo’Minis developers’ community members and can monetize their games through Mo’Minis various distribution channels.

One of the few necessary evils that accompanies the uber-cool recently launched Google Voice service (which was officially released in March) is the necessity to convert all of your numbers (cell, landline, office) to one number. It can be an annoying and daunting task to change your cell phone number, especially if you are reliant on your cell for business and personal communications. Mobile startup Skydeck’s new mashup with Google Voice may help you avoid the hassle of changing at least your cell phone number while still letting you use Google Voice.

While Google Voice is all your numbers online, Skydeck’s service, which came out of beta earlier this year, is just your cell phone online. Via an app on your cell phone, all your calls, text messages, voicemails and contacts are backed up on Skydeck.com and you can search, read, and reply to your messages (by voice or by text) from Skydeck as if it were your cell phone. If you don’t answer a call, Skydeck takes a voicemail, converts the speech to text, and sends you an email. If you are at your desk, you can call or text people from Skydeck. The call appears to come from your cell phone, so your friends will know who it is. Similar to Google Voice, you read a transcribed version of each voicemail (via SpinVox). It works best on Blackberry and Android phones (although most of the features work on nearly any phone), and costs $9.95 a month.

San Francisco startup RocketOn, the company behind a virtual world platform that bares the same name, has more tricks up its sleeve and is today showing off the second product it created.

The web application it’s introducing today is dubbed Blerp, and its ambition is to turn the Web into a giant interactive message board by making it possible for visitors to add text comments and multimedia to existing web pages and share them with their friends.

Under the motto ‘layer the web!’, Blerp aims to enable people to enrich web pages with an additional layer of content with the ability to let others join in on the fun at any time. RocketOn is calling the concept Hyperlayers, and if the idea makes you think of social annotation services like Reframe It, Diigo or Fleck, that’s because it’s taking an extremely similar route with Blerp.

The European Commission today announced that it has fined Intel a record €1.06 billion ($1.45 billion) for abusing its dominance in the market for computer chips to exclude its biggest (and frankly, the only serious) rival AMD by paying computer manufacturers Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and NEC as well as retailers to postpone, cancel or downright avoid using or selling the latter’s products.

That’s one hell of a fine, considering the previous record for similar abuses in the EU was ‘only’ €497 million (Microsoft, back in 2004).

The European Commission has ordered Intel to stop the exclusion practices immediately, and said it would closely and actively monitor Intel’s compliance with its decision. E.U. regulators first began investigating Intel in 2001, after AMD filed a complaint in Brussels the year before.

Over the last few months celebrities have become something of a currency on the social web as services vie to attract big-name stars (and gather the resulting media coverage and new users in the process). Twitter has garnered the most attention for its roster, which includes celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Oprah. Facebook too has been making strides in this area, especially since releasing its redesigned ‘Pages’ that allow celebrities and brands to broadcast their updates to fans.

Another contender in the celebrity hunt is social network platform Ning, which is already home to a number of social networks dedicated to celebrities, politicians, and musicians. Today, the company has announced that it has forged a partnership with The Collective, a management company whose clients include Enrique Iglesias, to create custom networks for a number of The Collective’s biggest clients.

Ashton Kutcher got his start on the small screen. His roles in That 70s Show and development of the MTV show Punk’d (which is being kind of reborn with Ustream) allowed him to become a movie star. But these days he seems more interested in using the web to further his career. His recent race with CNN to be the first user with a million Twitter followers was just one facet of what he’s doing online. He also has his own web-based show Blah Girls. But now he’s sending that the opposite way: Back to television.

Katalyst Media, the production company Kutcher runs with Jason Goldman, has signed a deal with CBS Television Distribution (CTD) to distribute Blah Girls on television. Specifically, the show will run as one-minute interstitials between segments on the entertainment magazine show, The Insider. While the show has run on the web since its launch during TechCrunch50 last June, a television distribution deal has always been a part of the broader goal for the content. And CBS has a larger development deal with Katalyst Media, so this is simply an extension of that.

iLike, the popular music discovery site with a huge presence on social networks, is launching a set of new syndication services for musicians. Beginning tonight, iLike now offers extensive integration with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, allowing artists to distribute content to each of their online presences from a single control panel. In addition to these, the company is also launching a new self-serve platform for building customized iPhone applications for artists, allowing them to establish themselves on the App Store with a minimum amount of effort and resources.

While most readers probably associate iLike with music playlists and streaming, the service is also home to 300,000 artists who use its services to help manage and distrbute their content. Before today’s annoucement, the service offered more limited syndication options, allowing them send data through the iLike Facebook application, its iGoogle widget, and an iTunes plugin. But the new options go much further.

Lots of heat is being put on Facebook over Holocaust denial, ranging from blogs to CNN to pissed off moms who still can’t post pictures of their breasts on their Facebook pages. Facebook is standing firm in their defense of the deniers.

Meanwhile, MySpace is just hoping no one looks their way. In an email to MySpace forum moderators today, MySpace asked moderators to “keep an eye out for anti-semitism and derogatory comments.” Based on the text of the email, some of which has been redacted, it looks like moderators are expected to remove this content promptly and even perhaps ban offending users.

MySpace’s motivation to deal with the problem may be fairly sad (just to avoid bad press), but at least they’re doing the right thing by getting this hate speech off the site. MySpace’s terms of use are similar to Facebook’s – specifically hate speech is banned.

Here’s the email:

Twitter is officially getting dumbed down.

For the second time in less than two months, Twitter has changed its @reply system, this time by removing an option that has existed for many months in an effort to appease confused newcomers.

The basic premise behind the @reply system is that it allows you to create a semi-public conversation with another Twitter user. To prevent you from having to listen in to conversations you might not care about, the default setting has long been to only show these @replies if you were following both people in the conversation. And that’s the choice most people stuck with.

But there was an option to receive all @reply messages from any users you were following. This led to an increase in noise, but it also exposed you to new Twitter users and conversations that you might have otherwise missed out on. I’ve had it turned on for over a year. But apparently that option has confused too many people, so Twitter is killing it.

Earlier today Google announced that it was going to begin limited support of RDFa, a framework that allows web developers to incorporate structured metadata into their sites. To most people, this probably doesn’t sound particularly exciting, but it’s an important step that may indicate that the search giant is going to embrace structured data on the web – something that it has long shied away from.

I’m not going to get into the specifics of the RDFa standard (if you’d like a more thorough explaination you can find one here and here). But the benefits of using such semantic tagging can be seen in a few basic examples. If I was to write a post that mentioned “The President” without naming him, Google probably wouldn’t realize that I was talking about President Obama – it might think I was referring to another US president, or perhaps the leader of a company. But using RDFa I could tag the words “The President” with “Barack Obama”. That tag would be visible to machines spidering the page for indexing (resulting in smarter search results), but wouldn’t be shown to users reading the post.

Today saw the launch of two new real-time search engines, from OneRiot and Tweetmeme. While the two are slightly different in ways that I went into earlier, all that really matters are the results you get. So I put those two to the test along with Twitter Search, Google Search, FriendFeed and the recently launched Scoopler. To see which would give the best results based on a current event.

One bit of news I was interested in was the space shuttle, because it received some damage today while venturing into space. I decided to do a pretty generic search for “Space Shuttle,” since that is likely what most people would enter of all the possible combinations of words. Here are the results:

Celebrities love Twitter, right? Just look around, Ashton Kutcher, Jimmy Fallon, P Diddy — they won’t shut up on it or about it. But not every celebrity loves it. Take hip hop artist Kanye West, for example. Apparently mad about people pretending to be him on Twitter, he went on a Peter Finch-style rant today on his blog about the service.

He specifically calls out the “heads of Twitter” a few times. Let’s see if @ev @biz and @jack are listening. (Update: yup) – Hopefully, he doesn’t have the caps keylock on for nothing. Here’s what he had to say:

In 1999 eBay was under heavy fire for allowing the sale of Nazi memorabilia. Their policy approach at the time mirrors almost exactly what Facebook is doing now with Holocaust denial groups, namely banning behavior in certain countries to comply with local laws, but allowing it everywhere else.

From a 1999 New York Times article: “eBay…said that the company already prohibited the sale of such items in Germany because they are outlawed there. But he said it generally polices the sales of banned items only after receiving complaints from users”

From a PCMag article in May 2009 on Facebook: “We have recently begun to block content by IP in countries where that content is illegal, including Nazi-related and Holocaust denial content in certain European countries,” the Facebook spokesman said. “The groups in question have been blocked in the appropriate countries.”

By 2001, though, eBay had changed its policies to ban all sales of Nazi memorabilia across its sites. The ban includes sales of Holocaust denial items. The current policy is here.

Part of the balancing act eBay uses when making a decision on a listing is is to ban items which “lack substantial social, artistic, or political value.” It goes on to state “this includes items that may be deemed inappropriate or insensitive to victims of natural disasters or human tragedies.”