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Speed Up RSS? FriendFeed's Going to TryToday

RSS is the backbone for most things Web 2.0 but these days, it's not always fast enough. Politeness limits ping times to every 15 minutes at best in most cases, string a couple of applications together and information will sometimes not arrive where you're waiting for it for up to an hour.

A number of people are trying to speed up the feeds but today sees the first public mention of a new effort lead by the guys at popular lifestreaming service FriendFeed. FriendFeed is working on an open source add-on to RSS and Atom that will make it easier to discover when a feed has been updated. This could be a big deal.

What it Is

The FriendFeed crew is working on something called a Simple Update Protocol. It was first reported on by venture publication The Deal and subsequently by Venture Beat, leading us to believe the PR push is an effort to for the company to raise some more money.

In response to our questions, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit told us the following:

• RWW: How will it work?

  Buchheit: SUP is just a very simple extension to RSS and Atom that make

A Bad Day for Apple: Banned iPhone Ads, Embarrassing Security Hole, and a Censored ComicToday

For most companies, having to deal with one piece of bad publicity in a day is already bad enough. Apple, however, has to deal with three pieces of bad publicity today. In England, the Advertising Standards Authority, moved to ban one of Apple's ads for the iPhone because of misleading statements in it. Also, an embarrassing security hole in the iPhone firmware lets anybody bypass your security code, and Apple's move to ban a violent comic book from the App Store has also set off a minor firestorm of protests.

iPhone Ad Banned

Apparently, two British TV viewers were unhappy about the fact that one Apple TV ad for the iPhone stated that the phone would give you access to the whole Internet. However, because the phone does not support Flash or Java, these folks argued that this is a misleading statement and the Advertising Standards Authority  agreed.

Back to School: 10 Great Web Apps for College StudentsToday

For a lot of college students, the new semester is just around the corner. Last year, we created a long list of great Web 2.0 tools that we thought would be helpful for college students.

But given how fast things develop on the web, we thought we would revisit this topic again this year and look at some of the most useful Web 2.0 tools that have the potential to help students do better in school, collaborate with their fellow students, and save them time.

Taking Notes

1) Evernote

Evernote is a great note taking application, but that only scratches the surface of what it can do. If you are in a lecture, for example, you can also take a picture of the blackboard with your phone, upload it to the Evernote server, and thanks to Evernote's clever OCR algorithms, even pictures of handwritten notes become instantly searchable.

You can also use it to bookmark web pages and write down your own lecture notes. Best of all, you can use a web app, a Windows or Mac desktop app, or a Windows Mobile and iPhone app, all of which seamlessly synch with each other, so that your notes are always up to date.

2) Google Notebook

Everything You Thought You Knew About the Business of YouTube Was WrongToday

Have you turned up your nose at YouTube for being born from low quality, financially unsustainable, pirated content? If you've made that argument in conversation before (and we now many people do) - new claims from YouTube itself now indicate that you'd be wrong.

The official Google Blog made a post this morning following up on a New York Times story last week where the company claimed that 90% of the owners of copyrighted content are now advertising against pirated video they own when they find it using YouTube's new content ID technology. The news upends many long held beliefs about the site.

Argument: Content ID is Next to Impossible

Many have argued that YouTube wasn't capable of finding all the pirated content uploaded to its site - that it's been an arms race pitting human monitors and shoddy ID technology against a sea of users uploading content. Video maverick Mark Cuban has argued that YouTube's claim it can't identify content was refuted by the fact that it manages to keep porn off the site and thus that the company co

Has Yahoo! Buzz Lived Up to the Buzz?Today

Since our initial review of Yahoo! Buzz earlier this year, not much has changed about the service. At the same time, however, the perception, acceptance, and impact of the service has changed drastically. The service has shown that it can send enormous amounts of traffic (very talkative traffic), and has displaced Digg as the most active 'social news' community. In the process, they added widgets and rss, and most recently (and most importantly) have opened up participation to everyone.

Since they opened the submission process to everyone, the buzz surrounding the site has really been at a high. Desperate publishers and marketers who were previously locked out of the supposed 'traffic mecca' have joined the service in droves and have already started the practice of vote-begging in the hopes that enough votes will get them promoted to Yahoo's main page. Here's what you need to know about