Bing Goes The iPhone. Still Great For Porn.

Since the dawn of Bing, it’s been exceptionally good at one thing: Finding porn. Its new iPhone app, which launched tonight in the App Store, is no different.
By default, the app has a Safe Search setting of “Moderate.” Searching for “porn” this way yields several promising results. However, with just two clicks, any kids can turn off safe search and off they go! The porn results are nothing, if not impressive.
I love this for two reasons: 1) The app is rated 4+, yet it’s super simple to gain access to hardcore porn in a few clicks. This continues to highlight Apple’s hypocrisy when it comes to the App Store. Apps that allow you to lift up Asian schoolgirl’s outfits are just fine. Apps that make satirical references to public figures are banned. And now, apps that gives you hardcore porn at your fingertips are rated 4+. Sure, this content in on the web, and not in the app itself, but to a viewer, what’s the difference? 2) Bing continues to be a great resource for porn.
To be fair, Google’s iPhone app also allows you to search for porn. But, 1) It’s not as easy to search for just images with the Google app (image search is a plus for the Bing app) 2) the results are much less hardcore, and 3) It’s much less obvious as to how to turn off the safe search settings.
All that said, the Bing app is actually quite nice. The voice search feature (just like Google’s on the iPhone) works quite well. The app also features the standard Bing daily images complete with hover-over factoids. It also has a nice overlay on the main screen to easily search for Movies, Maps, Businesses, News, Direction, and yes Images. Find the app in the App Store here. It’s a free download.
Both images below taken on a search for “porn” with safe search turned off. As you can see, Bing returns many more great results. Badda Bing.

Buzzd Is An iPhone App Built For Party Crashing

A couple months ago, we wrote about SocialGreat, a cool service that uses Foursquare’s location APIs to determine the hot places that people are hanging out at. It’s a good idea, but it’s limited to Foursquare data [update below], which is still a relatively small service. Buzzd, on the other hand, pulls its data from Twitter and other Buzzd users, for a bigger picture of places that are hot.

With Buzzd, which is launching its free iPhone app today, you simply load the program and it will bring up a list of venues close to you that are currently popular based on people talking about them on Twitter and Buzzd. It also uses some location data pulled from Twitter. Right now, that data is pulled from users’s Twitter profiles, so it is imprecise, but with the Geolocation API (which may be sort of live already) that will soon change.

If you click on a place, you can learn more about it, including how far away it is, its phone number, and a description of it. You can also see “buzzes” about it, meaning the things people are saying about a place on Twitter and in the Buzzd community. And you can “Buzz It,” meaning you can tell the community you are at a place and give a short description of what it is or why it’s good. And you can send that info to Twitter.

To do all of that, you have to create an account on Buzzd and sign-in, but one nice thing about the service is that you can see all of this data without ever creating an account. If you really don’t care about buzzing data yourself, you can simply use it passively.

There is certainly an upside to using data that is purely location-based, as it is with SocialGreat, but until location-based services truly take off, services with a lower barrier to entry, like Twitter, are going to have much more data to offer up. And you can clearly see that with Buzzd.

Buzzd has actually been around for a little while, but it has mainly existed on the mobile web and as an app on the BlackBerry. There’s a good reason for this: It was one of the original BlackBerry Partners Fund receipients. But the lure of the iPhone proved too strong, and after one meek attempt at an app, this new version of Buzzd looks like the real deal. It’s not a complex app, but it’s good for what it does.

Last month, the service had 500,000 active user over the web and its BlackBerry app, we’re told. Those numbers should undoubtedly jump with this new iPhone app. As it gains users, you can imagine them doing slightly more interesting things such as allowing users to say if a venue is good or bad, rather than just if they are there or not.

The business model will revolve around advertising, but the company is doing some interesting things in terms of striking deals with some locations to get their places featured.

You can find Buzzd here in the App Store. Again, it is a free download.

Update: We originally had said that SocialGreat only pulls in Foursquare data, but it now pulls in more, including data from Brightkite and GraffitiGeo. Still no Twitter data yet (the big source), but you can imagine that when Geolocation is ready, they may just do that.

WeddingWire’s iPhone App Lets You Plan Your Wedding On The Go

Planning a wedding can be an incredibly stressful process (I know from experience-I just got married a few weeks ago). WeddingWire, an online wedding planning platform and vendor directory, is launching an new version of its app to let brides (and grooms) plan their weddings with the help of their iPhone.

The previous version of WeddingWire’s app just let you see lists of vendors in your area. The new app is a lightweight version of WeddingWire’s site that will sync with your account on the planning platform’s site. Once you log-in to the app with your WeddingWire account, you can keep track of to-do items in your planning list, access your customized budget tool, and find local wedding vendors and reviews.

The review feature is key, sort of serving like a Yelp for weddings vendors. You can see reviews of a vendor then create a to-do item in your planning checklist to follow up with that vendor at a later date. Surprisingly, there aren’t as many wedding planning apps in the app store as I though there would be. Other wedding planning apps include Bride Guide, and iWedding but both are paid apps. WeddingWire’s app is free. The Knot, which is one of the more popular wedding planning sites on the web, has an iPhone app that simply lets you get advice for their experts but doesn’t recreate the planning experience from the site on your device.

What Are These Bars On My iPhone? Wait, You Mean AT&T Is Working?!

Over the weekend I noticed something odd going on with my iPhone: It was working! That is to say I actually had signal in the SoMa district of San Francisco, which is something that I had basically given up on long ago. But it was working, and it was actually solid 3G service. Still, I chalked it up to a fluke. I had been screwed over by AT&T too many times to get my hopes up. Maybe everyone in SoMa was just out of town, I thought.

But a few more days past as people started telling me they were noticing the same thing. It would go in and out at certain times, but for the most part, AT&T’s network actually seemed to be working in the area. Were we all going crazy? No, says AT&T, who I contacted to today to see what was going on that my service was actually working. “Improvements are underway,” is what I was told by a representative of the company after he asked around.

“Most of this is 850 MHz spectrum being added.” That is inline with recent reports about upgrades for AT&T GSM network. But those upgrades were scheduled to start in Atlanta first, as I said, I’m in San Francisco. I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up (most of all mine), but it looks like AT&T may actually be taking the steps necessary to get its network working in the areas where service is particularly bad.

I’m told that this upgrade process (at least in San Francisco) will be continuing over the coming weeks. When that’s complete, AT&T is offering to give us a walk through of the big changes they’re making to improve the network that we rip at just about every chance we get (which I think is fair, given what we pay for the service). I’m cautiously optimistic on this. Has anyone else been noticing better service on their iPhones or any other AT&T device? Let us know in the comments.

Facebook 3.0 May Be The Most Useful App On The iPhone Yet

When Facebook launched the 2.0 version of its iPhone app in September of last year, it was a huge upgrade from its original app that launched with the App Store last July. And now it’s on the verge of launching the 3.0 version of the app, and having tested it today, we can safely say that it once again takes Facebook on the device to the next level. In fact, it may be the most useful app on the iPhone now, period.

This new version simply improves upon the old one in just about every way imaginable. Not only does it have a wide range of new options and features, many of which we went over previously, but it’s actually faster. And the design is rather brilliant. Built by Facebook engineer Joe Hewitt, the app manages to maintain the good practices found in many iPhone apps, while at the same time creating its own unique look and feel.

Features

Nowhere is this new look more evident than on the new Facebook home screen. It’s sort of like the iPhone main screen, but with a different, distinctive design. The large buttons are easy to hit, and best of all, you can add people’s profiles and pages as icons as well, to provide shortcuts to your favorites.

The main screen that you were probably used to from the old app now resides in the upper left corner of the main screen, as the “News Feed.” It largely looks the same but the ability to “like” items has been added to the ability to comment on them. You can also now easily take and post videos if you have an iPhone 3GS. Hitting the “News Feed” button in the upper right hand corner, allows you to sort this feed by the various filters you’ve set up.

The “Profile” area is the next button on the main screen. The overall look and feel have been updated, and now also include the “like” and “comment” elements on the Wall. You can also now see your profile pictures.

The “Friends” area has been updated to include both Friends and Pages. But a killer feature may be the ability to hit the phone icon and have the option to call or text your contacts. People who consider Facebook to be their contact list, will love this.

The “Inbox” is the next main area, and it now features not only new messages, but updates from your groups, and sent messages. But the best thing about this feature is how fast messages load. It’s leaps and bounds better than trying to load messages on the regular Facebook, and I think from now on I’ll simply use the app to respond to any emails I get through it.

The “Chat” and “Requests” areas remain largely the same, though both have been cleaned up.

The big new feature of this app has to be “Events”. The lack of a way to even see events in the previous version of the app was a major complaint against it — it had people using the web interface to log-in specifically to find events. Now, not only can you see them in the app, you can see details like the address of the event and host of it. And you can RSVP, and you can see who else is attending. With so many Facebook users now using its events feature for social gatherings, it simply made no sense not to have this in there. The Events area also features a “Birthdays” tab to specifically see which of your friends’ birthday is coming up.

The “Photos” area now allows you to create new photo albums, and it is significantly easier and more obvious as to how to tag someone in a picture. And at last, Facebook photos allow you to take advantage of the iPhone’s multi-touch to pinch zoom in and out of pictures.

The last main page element is “Notes,” which is new. You can see, edit and create new notes from here, just in case your Status Updates don’t give you enough room for all you want to say.

Below the main elements is the “Notifications” area that seems to update in near real-time when someone comments or “likes” one of your items or an item you’ve commented on.

What’s Missing

As good as this new Facebook iPhone app is, there are still some missing features. The two biggest ones are Push Notifications and a robust search. Hewitt had mentioned previously that Push Notifications would not be in 3.0, but hinted that they could come in 3.1. He stated on Twitter that with 3.0 done, the work is already starting on 3.1.

When we asked him about any new features for that build, Hewitt said he wasn’t ready to comment on specifics yet. But it’s probably a good bet that Push Notifications will be one of them. And earlier today, he also noted that there will be a landscape mode in 3.1. And he’s also noted that videos recorded on the iPhone 3GS don’t yet play in the app because Facebook doesn’t encode them in an iPhone-compatible way. That should change soon too.

The bigger omission, as I see it, is the lack of a robust search tool. Facebook recently rolled out the upgraded search functionality on its site, but on the iPhone searching is limited to profiles and pages. Basically, it’s useless, as you can get much of this information from the Friends area. If Facebook is serious about search, it needs to make basically everything that gets updated on the site (allowed for by individual’s privacy settings, of course) searchable on its mobile app in real-time. That would be a killer feature.

Overall

Overall, the Facebook 3.0 iPhone app is a huge step forward as a social tool. In fact, in terms of the data it lets you access, it’s hard to argue that any app is more robust. It’s now basically a way to keep track of and remark about what your friends are up to, an always up-to-date contact list, a picture and video sharer, an inbox, an IM client, and a event coordinator, all tied to over 250 million social users.

With the additions of Push Notifications and a better search tool, it will be nearly perfect. And all of these new features wrapped into an app that is even zippier, makes this a great (and free) upgrade.

Update: Hewitt has just let us know about another really nice feature. If you tap the Facebook logo, you’ll automatically go back to the main home screen. Tap it again and you’ll return to where you just were. Subtle, but nice feature.