ReadWriteWeb

When I read Jon Mitchell's post on Glassmap, my first thought was, "Who in God's name would want anyone, even friends, knowing where they were all the time?" I wondered if this were a generational thing and to some degree, it probably is. But there's something more.

My life is interesting enough, even in its dull patches, that I would be mortified if you know where I was at any given time in a day. And plus, no offense, but if you were interesting enough to deserve that knowledge, I would already have given it to you.

The rise of the app store has fundamentally changed the concept of software delivery. Gone are the days when zealous software companies sent users discs in the mail (oh, AOL, we remember you well) that ended up making better coasters than promotion. Many computers these days do not even ship with a CD-ROM drive and smartphones have never seen any type of physical downloads. The delivery mechanism of the application store is an often-overlooked revolution of the mobile era.

A Croatian startup named ShoutEm that provides a platform for iOS and Android app creation created a timeline infographic of the history of the mobile app store. Starting in 2008 with the advent of Apple's App Store, the game has fundamentally changed. Check it out below.

At a not-too-distant point in our future, this will be a serious question. Today Ford and Bug Labs announced that they are jointly supporting the first open source car software. Think of it as your car's API. You'll need to install a small $40 piece of hardware to interact with the car systems, and the effort, called OpenXC, is making this data available to both Android and Arduino platforms. What can you do for starters? Things like read real-time data about your car's position and speed, and a dozen other measurements about your car's performance. "OpenXC opens up a previously opaque environment to an entirely new class of developers, who will bring more ideas and solutions to the table than any one company or industry consortium could dream up," according to information posted on the site.

At a not-too-distant point in our future, this will be a serious question. Today Ford and Bug Labs announced that they are jointly supporting the first open source car software. Think of it as your car's API. You'll need to install a small $40 piece of hardware to interact with the car systems, and the effort, called OpenXC, is making this data available to both Android and Arduino platforms. What can you do for starters? Things like read real-time data about your car's position and speed, and a dozen other measurements about your car's performance. "OpenXC opens up a previously opaque environment to an entirely new class of developers, who will bring more ideas and solutions to the table than any one company or industry consortium could dream up," according to information posted on the site.

Technology changes not only the medium in which we process information, but how we interpret and act on that information. The creation of cellphones was a seminal moment in the history of human communication. Barriers that were once impossible to cross are only a push of a button away. Cellphones satisfy a basic human impulse, "the need to belong." By fulfilling that need to belong, though, some researchers show that people may be less inclined be charitable to others.

The term for an individual being charitable to others is "prosocial." When we help out our community, give to a charity, volunteer our time, we are being prosocial. A study by researchers at the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business posits that cellphone use may be linked to less prosocial tendencies. Can it be true? By fulfilling our need to belong, do cellphones cause us to care less about our fellow human?

Whether you think the protestors camping out in various city parks around the world is justified or not, it is interesting to see this analysis published in Technology Review today. They used a tool from SocialFlow that examined a pile of Twitter data. Did you know the first use of their hashtag was in a July 13 Adbusters blog post?