We’d like to poll the ReadWriteWeb community on this topic. Let us know how you currently get online video (and other media content) onto your TV. Also, which of the emerging products do you think has the best chance to be the consumer offering of choice?

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The key points of the new Apple TV are: a much lower price (now $99, compared to $229 for the first generation product), streamlined form (80% smaller), streaming functionality, no more local storage, Netflix and YouTube access, and 99c TV show rentals.

Other ways to access Web content on your TV include: modern Internet-connected TVs; online gaming devices like Sony PlayStation 3 and X-Box 360; P2P software; Set-top boxes like TiVo (specifically, its Premiere offering released in March); streaming software for computers, such as playon; wireless USB display adapter sets; special cables to hook a computer up to a TV.

Of course, there’s still the matter of accessing good content. All of the online TV players have been busy doing deals with TV and movie distributors, a process which is far from being worked through. Meanwhile, many consumers have used P2P services like BitTorrent to get such content for free.

The video below from the Google TV announcement shows the (potential) benefits of streaming Web content to your TV:

I myself use a combination of Sony Playstation 3 and the P2P client Vuze in order to stream the occasional TV show and movie to my TV. Although it converts online video to a PS3 compatible format, it’s still not a completely satisfactory solution. Sometimes the sound doesn’t work, or the video is choppy, and so on. So I’m looking forward to purchasing one of the upcoming devices from Apple, Boxee, Roku or Google.

Do you stream content from the Internet into your TV? If so, tell everyone how you do it in the comments below.

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“Since the beginning, it has been our vision that the Google Wave protocols could support a new generation of communication and collaboration tools,” engineer Alex North wrote on the Google Wave developer blog.

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Google had big plans for Wave – it was supposed to replace email and the killer app among Google Apps, but the company basically gave up on the project earlier this month (see Google Wave Is Dead). It still seems possible for the technology to do big things. But it sounds like Google plans to move on after the application is released. The future of the open source project will be defined by developers’ contributions, North wrote.

Wave In A Box will not have the “full functionality” of the Gmail-integrated Web app, but it will feature threaded conversations and support importing data from wave.google.com.

The release of Wave as an application could be a big deal for developers, especially at businesses that want to take advantage of Wave for real-time collaboration and discussion (see our post, 5 Services That Leverage Google Wave).

Wave was always intended for people to run on their own machines, but this release will make the process much easier. Developers and enterprise users that have been eyeing Wave will be more likely to take the technology into their own hands and build things like feature-rich Web forums, productivity tools and apps to facilitate collaborative projects.

Google did not specify a timeline for the release of the new code, but it has said that wave.google.com will be available at least through the end of the year.

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But the solution has proved easy. By simply releasing mobile apps named “Twitter,” the company has seen a boost in new users.

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Twitter announced today that the number of total mobile users has jumped 62% since mid-April, thanks to the release of Twitter for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. These apps existed before – Twitter for iPhone is just a rebranded version of the third-party client Tweetie – but they weren’t recruiting new users.

“We did iPhone user tests and confirmed that even though there was a plethora of third-party Twitter apps, people were having trouble finding and selecting one because none were called ‘Twitter.’ This kept them from using Twitter at all,” CEO Evan Williams wrote in a blog post titled “The Evolving Ecosystem” today.

Now 16% of new users sign up via mobile, versus 5% before the name changes. Almost half of all active users “make mobile a regular part of their Twitter experience,” according to Twitter.

Despite the mobile push and recent speculation that Twitter’s clients have killed its Web site, 78% of users still access Twitter at least once a month via the Web.

Twitter.com and Twitter’s mobile Web site are the top ways users access Twitter, followed by SMS and the official iPhone and BlackBerry clients. TwitPic, the photo-uploading service, and Google Friend Connect, the widget that lets websites feature content from social networks, are also in the top ten ways users access Twitter. Surprisingly, Twitter for Android was not.

The rest of the 300,000 registered Twitter applications have much fewer users, Twitter said. But Williams is encouraged by the growth and variety of apps in Twitter’s ecosystem. “These new services help people get the most out of Twitter, contributing to user growth and new business opportunities,” he wrote.

Twitter said it now has more than 145 million registered users, although the number of active users is lower.

How do you access Twitter?

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We’ve written before about the things to ask yourself as to whether or not a job at a startup is right for you. But if you think your post-graduate plans involve life with a startup, then there are a number of things you can do, while still in school, to prep.

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Preparing Now for the Post-Graduate Job Hunt

The first, of course, may be to look for an internship. While the traditional notion of internship conjures images of corporate drudgery (in my head, at least), YouTern is one organization that works to place college students with entrepreneurial-driven companies. (See our ReadWriteWeb write-up here.) Not only are internships important skill-, network-, and resume-building experiences, it’s a great way to get a taste for the startup life – something quite different than other post-college jobs.

If you’re sure the startup world is right for you, then Jason Shen and Derek Flanzraich, both recent college graduates working at startups (Shen works for isocket and Flanzraich for Clicker) have written a great set of tips on how to land a startup job out of college.

Here are a few of their tips:

• Know Your Industry Inside and Out: Do your research. Domain experience matters.
• Focus – Only Target a Few Startups: You want to find the startup that matches your skills, your knowledge (see above), but also your workstyle and your vision.
• Get Good at Specific Stuff: As Shen and Flanzraich write, startups “need people who can make an immediate impact on their ‘bottom line’, whether that’s users, revenue, traffic, or something else.” You need to bring a strong skill-set, but also a diverse skill-set.
• Prove Your Worth: As with any job hunt nowadays, you want to make sure your online presence demonstrates a portfolio of projects and blog posts.
• Get a Referral – Or Become a Friendly Face: Startups rarely have “openings,” and even when they do, a reference makes a big difference. Don’t know anyone who can recommend you? Shen and Flanzraich suggest volunteering. “Startups love free labor.”
• Send in a Killer, Personalized and Memorable App: “Do something something different,” they suggest. “Do something memorable. Something that proves your enthusiasm and dedication to the company.”
• Be Yourself

Sure, it’s Fall and college students are just beginning to return to campus. But it’s never too early to start preparing for graduation – and the job search – in the spring.

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The company is also hoping to drive new sign-ups for its Pro account, which is being offered at a discounted rate of $79 per month (normally $99), at least until midnight Pacific Time on Friday, September 3, 2010.

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The SEOMoz Web app, which manages crawl diagnostics, on-page optimization, and keyword tracking, is now available to all Pro users. Other features like XML sitemaps and integration with Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics are on the horizon, according to SEOMoz Community Manager Jen Sable Lopez.

Although the site’s UI was already pretty snazzy, SEOMoz.org is also sporting an brand new design from head to footer.

SEOMoz is used by big names like Ebay, Best Buy, The New York Times, Facebook and Yahoo!, among others. In addition to their paid Pro account, they offer an extensive library of free SEO resources, including The Beginner’s Guide to SEO and one of the most highly-acclaimed SEO blogs on the planet.

Interested in taking SEOMoz Pro for a spin? You can still sign-up at the discounted rate until midnight Pacific Time on Friday September 3.

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They explored going through the expense of transforming the building where the servers were housed or moving to a new building all together.

Virtualization helped sort things out. They discovered servers that were soaking up power but were doing next to nothing. The results came far faster than expected. The cost savings were almost immediate.

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The statement reinforces the image of a world where the majority of the population is catalogued in Facebook’s growing database. The long-term vision for Facebook Places is starting to take shape: Facebook wants to dominate the location-based Web.

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Facebook demonstrated that it wants your profile to be your identity on the Internet with Facebook Connect (see Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login). Basically, it now wants you to add location to that identity.

Covering the basics

Places is restricted to basic location-confirmed check-ins – who is where, when – shunning mayorships and badges and leaving any sort of advertising up to third-party developers. This minimalist functionality leaves out some of the fun out of checking in, but it makes sense if Facebook’s plan is simply to place its 500 million users on a dynamic map.

And Facebook hopes that soon, any app developer who comes up with a new location-based service will turn first to Facebook’s massive trove of data.

Early projections

The full manifestation of Facebook Places is still five to ten years out. The feature is available to all users in the U.S., but not everyone is using it.

For one thing, Places requires users to check in from a GPS-enabled device, but less than a third of Americans have smartphones, according to Nielson. That’s changing rapidly – Nielson estimates that half of Americans will own a smartphone by the end of 2011.

Trusting Facebook with location data

And all this is contingent on people sharing their location information with Facebook, of course. That’s no guarantee given the company’s history of privacy slip-ups (see The Facebook Privacy Debate: What You Need to Know). But whether people use the service will depend on how much utility they get from it, as it did when Facebook introduced the News Feed feature. Users initially rejected the change, it now drives much of the activity on the site because it’s useful and fun.

Users, developers and advertisers should all be excited for the possibilites for location-based services, from social shopping and rewards programs to real-time travel guides. The question is whether Facebook can persuade its users to trust it with their location data. Users might prefer to give their location data directly to individual applications, or another company might rise up to collect this data.

What do you think? Are you ready to trust Facebook to handle your real-time location for the apps of the future?

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In the last year, the venture-backed Mountain View-based company has quickly grown to support over 64,000 developers and thousands of mobile apps across several platforms. The company’s flagship offering, Titanium, allows developers familiar with Web languages to quickly piece together mobile applications with native platform functionality.

Companies of all sizes, from startups like GetGlue to large corporations like eBay and NBC, have built consumer and enterprise level applications using the service. As Schwarzhoff points out, every company needs to plan ahead for mobile development.

“It’s important to have a really well thought-out development plan across all platforms that can sustain in the long term,” Schwarzhoff told ReadWriteWeb. “You can have a lot of things pop up in the form of new APIs, new capabilities and new platforms. You need to stay ahead of the curve.”

One of the best ways company looking to expand into mobility can roadmap their products is to understand what Appcelerator calls the “application maturity model,” which consists of three distinct phases.

• The Information Phase – The first step for many companies, says Schwarzhoff, is to dip their toes into the mobile sector with basic read-only apps that provide one-way information to the user. It’s in this phase that many first timers build familiarity with the platform, its capabilities and possible business models.
• The Participatory Phase – In this second phase, apps begin to allow for two-way communication, pushing and pulling information between the device and the cloud. Companies begin to realize the potential of the platform and its native functions, like location, photos and social networking.
• The Business Operations Phase – In the third phase, a company finally begins to use their apps as a new way to drive revenue and loyalty from their customers. It’s not just a side project, says Schwarzhoff, now it’s a critical part of the the overall strategy.

Schwarzhoff adds that companies don’t just pass through these phases with their apps, but with platforms as well. As companies enter the mobile scene on one device, like the iPad, they then get increasing curious about other form-factors.

Whatever your startup does, or intends to do, mobility should play an important role in the overall business strategy. Planning your mobile roadmap early and understanding the phases of app maturity will go a long way to help this facet of your business grow quickly and smoothly.

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The feature was first reported on by the watch-dog blog AllFacebook. This feature is going to be a big deal. It will facilitate greater interaction between a user and people of interest by placing updates about those peoples’ activities in the highest-priority place in the Facebook interface, the inbox with the strongest signal-to-noise ratio by far.

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AllFacebook correctly points out that there may be some amount of backlash among users who are not happy to have observation of their activities made all the faster and easier. That was peoples’ objection to the creation of the original Newsfeed, though, and that is now the central part of the Facebook experience. It’s fascinating that making already accessible information so much more easy to access can make such a big impact on the user experience, but anyone who has experienced the power of web page updates being centralized in an RSS reader knows that this type of technology really is powerful.

This is the type of change that a better implementation of Facebook Groups could accomplish as well. Imagine if it was it easier to put friends in groups, to access updates from that group in isolation with fewer clicks and to publish certain updates in a way that was only visible to particular groups with less friction than there is today. Facebook has de-emphasized groups for a long time, though, and this experiment makes it clear that one single high-priority pipeline for selected updates is more important to the company than the contextual integrity of communication within groups.

Subscription to notifications will help users track the activities of their closest friends and family, and possibly of people they have a work-related interest in, far more effectively than ever before.

The feature may also make users feel more comfortable adding a greater number of friends than they would otherwise, because they know that they won’t miss the activities of the most important people in their online lives. That will be good for both users and for Facebook.

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Yesterday, Greenpeace posted on its blog a letter from its director to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in which the environmental organization took the social networking company to task for the energy consumption and the energy source for the new Prineville data center. The facility will be powered by “dirty coal-fired electricity from PacificCorp, which runs an electricity mix that is disproportionately powered by coal, the largest source of global warming pollution,” and as Facebook has announced that the data center will be double the size initially planned, Greenpeace objects to this doubling of the demand for “dirty coal energy.”

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According to Greenpeace, at current growth rates data centers and telecommunication networks will consume about 1,963 billion kilowatts hours of electricity in 2020 – more than triple their current consumption and more than the current electricity consumption of France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined. Greenpeace says that over 500,000 people have joined the organization’s initiative calling for Facebook to “unfriend coal.”

Responding in the comments to the Greenpeace blog post, a Barry Schnitt, Director of Policy Communications for Facebook, touted the energy efficiency of the new data center, pointing out that while the industry average for Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ranges from 1.6 to 2 that the Prineville data center will have a PUE of 1.15. And Facebook. Schnitt suggested that there “just isn’t a perfect solution yet” to the energy problems associated with data centers, noting the percentage of coal energy tapped by Greenpeace’s own data center in Virginia.

Greenpeace responded on its blog today, agreeing that arguing that companies like Facebook are far from powerless to make a difference in the way in which energy consumption and sources operate. WIth being such massive consumers of energy, Greenpeace contends, Facebook can demand cleaner energy from its supplier. And Greenpeace pointed to the efforts by other Internet companies, namely Google and Yahoo in developing more energy efficient data centers.

While the tit-for-tat responses between Facebook and Greenpeace continue, it’s perhaps no coincidence then that Google updated its research blog yesterday with a post about the work the company is doing to develop “energy proportional data centers.”

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