There aren’t a lot of Nokia users left in the United States, which is kind of a shame–partly their fault and partly the fault of philistines.

Nokia makes unparalleled hardware. I have an E71 and it’s sleek, has all the functionality of BlackBerry, and ever feature one could want on a QWERTY phone. It’s professional grade, and I love it.

But taking a look at iPhone’s app store, I realize my E71 is not nearly as cool as the iPhone. Sure, the battery lasts for two days, even if I’m running multiple programs and hooked up to 3.5G, I get email pushed instantly to my inbox without additional rates, and the GPS has saved my bacon numerous times. But I want to be able to shake it and find a restaurant!
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Undoubtedly, one of the biggest knocks on Disqus, the San Francisco-based web commenting system, was the fact that all of the comments on one’s blog were stored remotely on Disqus’ own server. This presented a variety of problems, not the least of which was an SEO black hole that drove all of the good Google juice the comments generated away from your blog and back to Disqus.

Disqus 2.0 solves this problem by allowing users to backup comment posts on their own database. This also allows users who want to quit Disqus and move on to carry over their comments. While the comments on your blog will still be stored on Disqus’ server, they will be yours and the SEO problems have apparently been solved.
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The new iPhone is receiving near-universal praise from tech circles, and there’s plenty of reasons why. It’s powerful, cheaper, and cooler than anything out there. The original iPhone reports customer satisfaction that is off the charts, and the next gen iPhone is even faster. Add to this a built-in iPhone store combined with the iPhone’s upcoming availability in far more markets than it’s in now, and it seems as though Google Android developers would be jumping ship, if only for their own good.

Not so fast. As Vasanth Sridharan reports in Silicon Alley Insider, there are a few very important reasons why Android developers are hesitant to make the leap.
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Google Earth, previously confined to your PC based client, will now be available on the web and for developers to mash up as they wish. In fact, any of the over 150,000 sites that have already integrated Google Maps into their sites will be able to include Google Earth with just a single line of code. This will put it in direct competition with Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, which is already a browser-based application.

Google announced this today at their annual conference for software developers in San Francisco.
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A study by Park Associates reveals that 20% of heads of households in the United States have still never sent an email in their life. 18% have no Internet access. This puts the number of households without Internet access at about 20 million. The total number of people without net access would then be much higher.

Not surprisingly, the elderly and the uneducated dominate the other side of the digital railroad tracks. What is somewhat surprising is that only 7% of those who weren’t connected to the Internet claimed they planned on getting online in the next 12 months. Therefore, it’s unlikely the numbers are going to change very much anytime soon. However, the number of households not connected was 28% two years ago, so some progress is being made.
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Last Thursday at a web conference in Beijing, Google introduced the latest step in visual search technology, VisualRank.

Currently, image search delivers results based on the text associated with each picture rather than anything about the image itself. Theoretically, if somebody labeled a ham sandwich as the Taj Mahal, your image search of “Taj Mahal” would show you a sandwich. Google wants to eliminate this method by an analysis of many of the more popular images on the web.
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A 12 person staff composed of some former Google employees is working on a new social search service through their startup Mechanical Zoo.

They’ve managed to keep the development under wraps, but are expecting to release a beta sometime in the next month or two.

Details are slow to emerge from the proceedings, but we do at least have an idea of who’s working on it. Ex-Google employees Nathan Stoll, Max Ventilla, and Fritz Schneider. The team also includs old-school computer scientist Damon Horowitz.
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Google, after showing off its well received App Engine, introduced an online chat app developed by employees on the new platform. The idea was to show off the possibilities of the App Engine to future developers.

Well, their efforts ran into a bit of snag after it became obvious their new app, HuddleChat, was eerily similar to an app developed by 37signals, Campfire.
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There’s a good article in Adotas by Lars Albright, Vice President of Business Development at Quattro Wireless, about how to most effectively advertise on the iPhone.

Not only is the iPhone being purchased in great numbers, but it is almost universally beloved by its owners. AT&T mobility president and CEO Ralph de la Vega reports that 95% of iPhone users regularly use the handset’s browser, and nine out of 10 users say that the iPhone is a better device than their previous phone. The positivity that users associate with the iPhone opens it up for effective targeted advertising.
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Facebook is going ahead with their own IM service that will be built directly onto the social network’s pages, and will use the Jabber open-source platform that Gtalk uses. This will allow users of other popular chat services to fuse Facebook chat with their favorite other instant messaging clients.

This comes at the expense of third party developers (like Social.IM), some of whom were being funded. No more; it’s over, and all the time and money that went into developing these services is for naught.
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