ReadWriteWeb

Something cool is coming to your neighborhood. AOL appears to be preparing us for some kind of neighborhood-based social network built around MapQuest (remember them?). It has registered a bunch of domains this year that all point to a page that says something called "mqVibe" is coming soon.

Earlier this month, we reported on a slew of domain name purchases and trademark applications that indicated some kind of AOL social network was in the works. At the time, we figured it could have just been speculative. But no, it looks like AOL is serious. MapQuest will be the hub of AOL's effort to get on the social networking map.

Facebook has the most downloaded native application of all time. It also has perhaps the most visited mobile website of all time with nearly 350 million users and growing from feature phones to the smartest smartphones. It is available everywhere. The company started working on mobile solutions in 2006 and since then have grown with the times, using the tools available to them as they went along, from m.sites and WebKit touch interfaces to now the precipice of HTML5. Facebook's creed, or really just a way to make their developers' lives easier, is to write once and run everywhere. This has been next to impossible.

Facebook mobile is predicated on browser technology. As Facebook's engineering manager Dave Zetterman says in the transcript below, the browser is what Facebook is good at, how it got to the point it is at now and how it is going to iterate for the future of mobile. We will touch on the future tomorrow, but be sure to read Fetterman's presentation at Facebook's f8 developer conference below because it will inform what we are going to explore tomorrow morning. Really, how did Facebook design for all those platforms and devices?

Google News just announced a redesign of its U.K. and India sites in order to unify the experience across editions. The improvements are designed to be more browsable and present trending and popular stories more clearly, as well as to offer more customization and sharing options.

The U.S. edition was redesigned in May, introducing a one-column format, highlighted top stories and more multimedia links. These same improvements will now roll out for the U.K. and India editions.

The answer is to moderate our use of and dependence on social media, especially Facebook.

Frictionless sharing, the act of passively notifying social media of all manner of activity, scares the hell out of me. Not just because of the obvious privacy implications. Frictionless sharing turns up the volume on useless information and simultaneously threatens user privacy and control of online identity. Not only is Facebook becoming too central to our online discourse – it's becoming too crapified to even be useful. We have a social media problem, and the time to turn back is now. And the answer isn't regulating Facebook.

We've heard the phrase "Windows Everywhere" for some decades now, and many of us already came to the conclusion that if you someday carried Windows with you wherever you go, that's what it meant. Windows Embedded is a phrase we haven't found ourselves saying as often, though it's been around for five years and its predecessor, Windows CE, since 1997.

In an era when it's more popular to outsource computing power to a data center someplace in "the cloud," you'd think a consumer-oriented campaign around distributed computing to smaller clients would seem a little antiquated, like a trip through Disney's Tomorrowland circa 1970.

U.S. consumers are still watching TV during the hours traditionally defined as "prime time," but we're also face-to-face with our second -and sometimes third - screens during those hours, according to a tidbit of data released by Flurry.

By layering their data about iOS and Apple data usage on top of a chart from Ad Age showing TV and Web usage, Flurry was able to demonstrate something most us already had a sneaking suspicion of: That mobile app usage peaks in the evening hours, right around the time that TV-watching has historically peaked.

The big question among Web developers has been whether browser and platform makers are simply leveraging HTML5 as an open-ended means to a closed end: specifically, as a standard language for producing native apps for multiple platforms, as opposed to a single, cross-platform app that plays for all. That question may very soon be rendered moot if and when the leading producers of JavaScript libraries render native-looking content using cross-platform code.

That day may be drawing very close. Last week, Michael Mullany, the CEO of Sencha - whose Ext JS library renders spectacular content on multiple browsers regardless of platform - gave an early nod of approval to Internet Explorer 10, the HTML5 rendering engine for Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 8.

It might be a decade late, but it appears as though the music industry may have found the antidote to the digital piracy it claims has ravaged its revenues for so long.

New research into Swedish music consumption indicates that the public launch of Spotify in that country has led to a 25% reduction in the illegal downloading of songs and albums. In the second quarter of 2011, music piracy had dropped 9% from the same period last year.

Thoora, your robot buddy for exploring and sharing topics on the Web, is coming to Android tablets, and maybe even to your new Kindle Fire. Thoora's new app, optimized for Android 3.0, is available in the Android Market now for free. The team plans to submit to the Amazon Appstore after testing on a Kindle Fire, and an iPad version and smartphone apps are coming before the end of the year.

The Thoora app has nearly all of the features of the Web version. Users can create and explore topics that Thoora builds for them using machine learning and deep Web search. Articles discovered on the Thoora app can be easily shared on all the major social services. Whether it's just for fun or for serious research, Thoora digs deep to find you relevant content, and it feels great in the tablet form factor.

Google Analytics, the super dominant free web analytics platform, has to date offered analytics that were roughly 24 hours behind. The wait to stop waiting has come to an end and today the company announced that Google Analytics is now rolling out real-time reporting to its users. Update: Just when you thought that was a big deal, Google Analytics also rolled out a premium offering today. Details below.

This is something that many people are going to be very happy about. Real-time analytics startups like Chartbeat and Woopra (whom we use here) may not be among that group of happy people, but publishers and marketers are likely going to love it. You can sign up to request priority access here.

Uber-hyped question and answer site Quora has finally released its long-awaited iPhone app today and it's ok. I wish it was better but I'll probably use it more than the website. As expected, location is a big part of it, though I wish location was more granular and involved automated categorization.

That's not really the biggest let-down though. There are a number of other issues with it. TechCrunch's MG Siegler says he's been testing the app for days, yet he didn't offer any critique of it in his write-up. So I thought I'd focus on three things I've noticed this morning that I wish were better.

Everybody freaked out this morning over The Onion's decision to "live"-tweet a story about members of Congress holding children hostage in the Capitol building. Without a doubt, the first tweet of the barrage was troubling. "BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside the Capitol building," the tweet rang out. It has since been retweeted 141 times.

But just because this message flew by on Twitter, does that mean we should go into panic mode? The Onion is a satirical source. It produces works of fiction, and it tries to be funny. That's all it does. It can publish whatever it wants. One tweet is not an isolated incident. It's part of a stream of messages, and the rest of the messages here tell an obviously satirical story.

There is an announcement coming next week from Cupertino. While, there is a slight possibility that it will be about the death of the iPod Nano, it is far more likely that Apple is going to announce much-anticipated iPhone 5. Anything else would be shocking.

We do not play the iPhone rumor game much at ReadWriteWeb. It is impossible to keep up with and we do not really like to speculate on things like Gorilla Glass or the speed of ARM processors. What we do like is to cover how iOS 5 will change the Apple platform and what new software Apple is cooking up to change our lives. What do you want in the iPhone 5? Check out the infographic below and let us know in the comments.

Looking to spin up a virtual machine and get that project done in a hurry but not sure what your choices are in terms of cloud vendors?

Here is a listing (not a rating) of some of the top vendors and what they offer.