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Network World – A few weeks ago I wrote about the first round of fallout that resulted from the press reports that Apple had rejected a Google Voice application after Google tried to add it to the App Store.

The next round in this likely long process has just started. Apple, AT&T and Google have sent the FCC answers to its questions. If you just read the first two of these responses you would get images: an Apple that has strong ideas on what is Right and is buried in poorly written applications, and a timorous AT&T afraid of the fragility of its network and of its business. Reading the third one paints a picture of Google as a kid not wanting to share its report card with adults.

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The letters do make it clear that some of the conspiracy theories being bandied about on the Internet over the last few weeks that had AT&T telling a subservient Apple to block Google Voice were off the mark — at least in this case. Both the AT&T letter and the Apple letter say that AT&T was not involved in Apple’s review of the Google Voice application.The two letters also say that AT&T has provided Apple with some rules about what kind of applications cannot be approved. For example, AT&T wants to block some types of applications that use the AT&T cellular network, including voice over IP (VoIP) applications, and applications that use a lot of bandwidth, such as TV redirectors. Note that neither of these apply to Google Voice.

AT&T cries poverty about these applications — poverty of network resources for the high-bandwidth applications and poverty of business model for the VoIP applications. I guess AT&T does not think it can get by just selling you data connectivity; it also needs to rip you off for minutes of voice airtime and SMS messages in order to get by.

Apple said that it spends a lot of time being a nanny to the App Store — testing and rejecting buggy or naughty applications. Apparently, Apple thinks it will reflect poorly on the company if you download an application written by some amateur programmer and it crashes.

In its letter Apple said that it did not actually rejected Google Voice — it was just in a long, thoughtful, review process. Long enough that it feels like rejection to some people. It also said that it had a problem with Google Voice’s user interface, since it moved things around compared to the Apple user interface. Some commentators have said that is just a ruse that Apple is using to keep Google at bay.

SAN FRANCISCO — Dave Magnusen has never used Twitter, yet it bugs him.
“It’s a form of communication, but it’s not very social,” says Magnusen, 55, a database administrator in Durham, N.C. “You can’t ignore (Twitter), but it’s kind of sad how it’s replaced people talking.”

FROM APRIL: Should entrepreneurs Twitter? Uh, no, columnist says

Tony Fuda feels the same way. The Niles, Ohio, native is particularly irked by tweets that insist on sharing the most mundane details of life.

“Do we really need to know that you just put your pants on, just brushed your teeth, just ordered a hamburger, just finished dinner, just walked out of the bathroom?” he says.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Facebook | Twitter
Magnusen’s and Fuda’s gripes underscore a strong undercurrent of resentment — and incredulity — by non-Twitter users toward the social-media service used by tens of millions.

Backlash among anti-Twitterers — reflected in scores of recent online comments to USATODAY.com — often center on unfamiliarity with the technology, its often narcissistic bent and the “random” use by many of its advocates, says Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

“With the advent of every new medium — books, radio, TV, social networks — there is a built-in fear, social concern, that it will lead to lack of productivity and a general sense of dysfunction,” he says. “This is one of the tropes of the arrival of any new media. Many consider Twitter a fad.”

Twitter spokeswoman Jenna Sampson pointed to a recent blog post by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. In it, he acknowledged the company has work to do in reaching out to those who are new to Twitter. “Defining a ‘tweet’ … doesn’t resonate with everyone,” Stone wrote.

Earlier this month, Twitter bashers had another reason to send their tongues wagging: A new study concludes that 40% of tweets are “pointless babble.”

Pear Analytics categorized 811 out of 2,000 random tweets over two weeks as babble. It categorized 751 (38%) as conversational, 174 (9%) as moderately interesting and 117 (6%) as self-promotional. Spam accounted for only 4%, or 75, of the tweets.

Callie Greenberg is not sweet on tweets. “I can’t stand it,” says Greenberg, 25, a medical-sales rep in Denver who is a loyal Facebook user. “Twitter is basically the same as updating your status on Facebook — only 20 times a day. It’s overuse, almost stalkerish. Get a life.”

Perhaps the same factors that made Twitter an overnight phenomenon have also stoked animosity, says Jeremy Pepper, a Twitter user since December 2006 who helps companies set up Twitter accounts so they can communicate with the public.

“There are two natural reactions to something overhyped as the next big thing: Some are drawn to it. Others dislike it,” says Pepper. “Many consider it too cool for school.”

Many bemoan the loss of face-to-face communication among a generation of people glued to their smartphones, netbooks or websites.

Indeed, 87% of 1,000 adults questioned in June said they prefer to deal with other people in person instead of via computers or smartphones, according to a survey from Brightkite, a mobile social-networking service, and GfK Technology, a market research agency.

“People are losing human contact,” says Fuda, 39, a mail carrier. “They would rather text/Twitter/tweet — whatever it is called — than actually speak face-to-face with a person.”

For some, social media is the latest step away from the art of simple conversation and human interaction. “Ten or 15 years ago, people on vacation would, rather than enjoy the moments and the time with the family, have a video camera stuck to their eye the entire time,” says Magnusen, who uses e-mail and instant-messaging services. “I mean, taping a thrill ride so you can go home and watch your vacation? I don’t know …”

Others simply have little tweet tolerance for what they consider phony or preening messages.

“It’s a look-at-me technology that seems to be more about vanity and competition than about information,” says Jason King, 32, of Maysville, Ga. He does not use Twitter or Facebook.

He says celebrities’ and athletes’ use of Twitter has led many of their fans to the misguided impression that they’re on a first-name basis with an Ashton Kutcher because they follow him on Twitter.

Kutcher has more than 3.2 million followers

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Grocery-store operator Winn-Dixie Stores Inc. on Monday reported a fiscal fourth-quarter profit as it remodeled some stores and sales edged higher.

Profit for the quarter ended June 24 totaled $9.4 million, or 17 cents per share, compared with a year-ago loss of $5.5 million, or 10 cents per share. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters, on average, predicted a profit of 16 cents per share.

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Yahoo! BuzzRevenue edged up about 1 percent to $1.72 billion from $1.69 billion last year.

Fiscal-year profit quadrupled to $39.8 million, or 73 cents per share, from $12.8 million, or 24 cents per share, last year. Revenue rose about 1 percent to $7.37 billion from $7.28 billion.

Sales in stores open at least one year rose 1.6 percent. The company remodeled 75 stores in fiscal 2009, and said it is on track to remodel about half of its stores by the end of fiscal 2010 and most of its stores by the end of fiscal 2013.

SHANGHAI, Aug 25 (Reuters) – Aluminum Corp of China Ltd (Chalco) (2600.HK)(601600.SS), the world’s No. 3 alumina maker, expects alumina output this year to fall 11 percent from 2008 to 8 million tonnes, a senior executive said on Tuesday.

Chalco, also China’s largest primary aluminium producer, expected to produce 3.4 million tonnes of aluminium, up 5 percent from a year earlier, Luo Jianchuan, the company’s president, told a press conference.

“Since the second quarter, recovering prices have encouraged Chinese companies to partially restart idled capacity,” said Luo, adding that Chalco had restarted 670,000 tonnes of alumina production capacity, and was now running at 67 percent of its total capacity.

The company had also restarted 310,000 tonnes of aluminium production capacity, and was running at 83 percent of total capacity, Luo said.

“Many production lines are getting ready to restart, or have already restarted a little,” said Liu Xiangming, vice president of the company.

“But we need to take a long-term view, and consider the market fluctuations, consider the impact on prices brought about by increasing recovered production capacity.”

Chalco expects China to import 5.5 million tonnes of alumina this year.

Chalco posted a bigger-than-expected loss for the second quarter, its third consecutive quarterly loss due to weak demand and low prices of aluminium, in the aftermath of the financial crisis which unfolded last year. [ID:nPEK188870]

“We must work hard not to lose money in the second half and from the full year perspective we will try to cut the losses that we saw in the first half,” said Xiong Weiping, chairman and chief executive officer of Chalco.

“China’s aluminium industry has entered a phase with excessive production capacity and fierce competition. But in the long term, the aluminium industry is still a sunrise industry.

He added that demand for the metal would increase as urbanisation and industrialisation grow with economic development.

Yahoo! may have thrown in the towel on the business of searching for information online. But the company is doubling down on a technology where it already has the lead over search king Google: in free e-mail service offered over the Web.

During an event at its Sunnyvale (Calif.) headquarters on Aug. 24, Yahoo (YHOO) unveiled a new design for its Yahoo Mail service. The updated version of the e-mail service lets users merge their in-boxes with other Internet services so they can send invitations using Evite or organize photos with Xoopit without having to leave Yahoo’s familiar e-mail environs.

Social networking features such as Twitter-like status updates have also gained new prominence on the upgraded site, now available to U.S. users and scheduled for a worldwide rollout in coming weeks. The idea is to keep users coming back for more Yahoo services due to the frequency with which they check their e-mail.

For more than a decade, Web-based mail services have served as the glue that keeps millions of users returning to Yahoo. The latest round of improvements is a sign that the company plans to defend its lead among Web mail services in the U.S. by making the site more relevant to consumers, who have many options for keeping in touch. While e-mail rivals Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) appear focused on funneling e-mailers to their more profitable search engines, Yahoo executives say that e-mail can be a profitable standalone business.

Microsoft Deal Frees Yahoo to Focus
The enhancements to Yahoo Mail are also a chance for the company to prove its technical prowess at a time when critics see the company primarily as a media business.

Yahoo essentially quit the Web search business via a July deal with Microsoft to outsource its search capability in return for ongoing payments from Microsoft for the right to serve ads on Yahoo pages. According to Yahoo, the deal has freed up more resources to train on products such as e-mail. The search deal “allows us to invest in the rest of the audience properties at a faster pace,” says Bryan Lamkin, senior vice-president of Yahoo Applications. E-mail “will be one of the key recipients of that focus.”

Yahoo’s e-mail service doesn’t appear to be a big moneymaker in its own right. Display ads served on e-mail sites typically perform worse than those paired with, say, news articles, according to analysts. In most cases, the ads don’t cover the high cost of developing and running a free e-mail service. Yahoo also has a small premium service that does away with ads in exchange for a $20 annual fee, which “hardly anybody uses,” says Sara Radicati, president and CEO of the The Radicati Group.

What e-mail does accomplish for Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft is to help circulate traffic to higher-profit pages, such as Web search and news. “People check their e-mail multiple times a day and that keeps driving them back to the portals and using other properties on those sites,” says Cowen & Co. analyst Jim Friedland. Adds David Hallerman, senior analyst with marketing researcher eMarketer: “It’s a loss leader.”

In July, 87.2 Million Yahoo Mail Visitors
“As a standalone entity, [e-mail] is not a great business,” says Brian Hall, general manager of Windows Live at Microsoft. “It has a high marginal cost per user. And while you can do interesting things from an advertising perspective, it’s just never going to be a bi

Mac early adopters can set a date: Apple announced this morning that it will ship its next version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, this Friday, Aug. 28 — earlier than it had predicted in June — and it’s already taking pre-orders for it on its Web site.

Snow Leopard — you can also call it Mac OS X 10.6, but Apple, like Microsoft, has been moving away from using version numbers to identify its operating-system updates — will be an unusual release in some ways. Apple is emphasizing performance over new features, calling this version “refined, not reinvented” and advertising such incremental improvements as faster startup and shutdown times, a smaller disk footprint and a more crash-resistant Web browser.

Apple is also pricing Snow Leopard low enough to make it almost an automatic upgrade from the current, already-good OS X 10.5 Leopard: just $29, $100 less than what Leopard sold for at its debut. (If you bought a Mac from June 8 on, right after Snow Leopard had its first in-depth demonstration at an Apple conference, you can probably get it for just $9.95.)

But people running older versions of OS X aren’t eligible for those deals, and many older Macs can’t run Snow Leopard at any price.

If you use 10.4 Tiger, you’ll have to buy the “Mac Box Set,” a $169 bundle of Snow Leopard and the latest versions of Apple’s iLife media-creativity and iWork personal-productivity suites. I like iLife and iWork, but I’m not sure that every Tiger user will appreciate having to pay for those two bundles as part of a Leopard upgrade.

If your Mac doesn’t have an Intel processor inside, you can’t install Snow Leopard on that machine. Four years after it announced it would switch to Intel’s processors from PowerPC chips and some three and a half years since it shipped its first Intel-based Mac, Apple considers that transition over.

I plan to have a review of Snow Leopard online and in print as soon as I can. Meanwhile, I’d like to hear from current and potential Mac users: Do you plan to switch to Snow Leopard? If so, how soon? If not, what’s pushing you away? (Windows and Linux users are, of course, free to chime in, too.) The comments are yours …

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA fueled space shuttle Discovery for an early morning flight to the international space station on Tuesday as a TV comedian whose treadmill is on board gave a “go” for launch and urged, “Let’s light this candle!”

Thunderstorms remained over the launch site late Monday, however, and forecasters lowered the odds of acceptable conditions to a grim 40 percent.

Discovery and seven astronauts were set to blast off at 1:36 a.m. with a full load of supplies, experiments and equipment. They headed out to the launch pad Monday night, waving and smiling, and climbed into the shuttle one by one. The weather worsened as the night wore on, and a lightning strike was reported six miles from the pad.

Discovery’s most prominent payload is NASA’s new $5 million treadmill, which is named after Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert. He could not attend the launch, but said in a recorded message that he couldn’t be prouder that his treadmill soon will be installed at the space station “to help finally slim down all those chubby astronauts.”

“Let’s face it, being weightless is mostly just a desperate bid to get away from that bathroom scale every morning,” Colbert said. “But you guys and gals are ambassadors to the universe. Don’t make us look bad. Put down the astronaut ice cream, tubby. Tubby, tubby, two-by-four, couldn’t fit through the air lock door.”

Colbert campaigned earlier this year to have a space station room named after him. He won the online vote, but NASA went with Tranquility, the name of the dry lunar sea in which Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed 40 years ago this summer. As a consolation prize, Colbert got the treadmill. It’s full name is Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill; it will fly up in more than 100 pieces and won’t be put together until sometime next month.

Colbert poked fun at NASA’s choice of Tranquility for the chamber, which will be launched early next year. “Yeah, that will scare the aliens,” he said. He ended his televised message by shouting, “I am ‘go’ to launch me. Let’s light this candle!”

In all, the space shuttle will deliver about 17,000 pounds of gear to the space station. The experiments include six mice that will remain at the orbiting outpost until the following shuttle visit in November. Part of a bone loss study, the mice will be the first mammal creatures — other than humans — to spend a prolonged period at the space station.

Three spacewalks will be performed during the 13-day shuttle flight, to install a new ammonia tank, part of the space station’s cooling system, and replace other equipment and retrieve outdoor experiments. And the station will get a new resident, Nicole Stott. She will replace an astronaut who moved in during the last shuttle flight last month. That spaceman will return to Earth aboard Discovery, as will Buzz Lightyear. The action figure toy has been in orbit for more than a year.

Soap opera fans, listen up: The Liskula Cohen “Skanks in NYC” debacle is turning into quite the saucy story. In one corner, we have the former Vogue cover girl who claims she’s been defamed by a blogger’s harsh words. In the other, we have the blogger — anonymous until a recent court order unmasked her — who now claims she’s the one who’s been wronged.

But wait…there’s more. Our model and blogger, it seems, are no strangers: The two women were reportedly acquaintances on Manhattan’s fashion scene and, according to some newly published accounts, may have even had an ongoing quarrel involving the blogger’s ex-boyfriend.

Confused? Aroused? Hungry for a hamburger? Whatever the case may be, keep reading. The story only gets stranger.

The Supermodel-Blogger Backstory

Before you start screaming out “cat fight,” let’s review what brought us to this point. The twisted tale began back in August of last year, when a then-anonymous blogger built a site at Google’s Blogger service entitled “Skanks in NYC.” The blog took on fashion model Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old former supermodel who had previously made headlines with an unfortunate bottle-smashing run-in involving a Manhattan doorman.

Postings at the blog called Cohen a “skank” and “old hag” and employed such colorful adjectives as “psychotic,” “lying,” and “whoring.” Cohen called the blog defamatory and asked Google for its writer’s name. When Google wouldn’t comply, she turned to the New York Supreme Court, which ruled last week that Google had to reveal the blogger’s identity.

Whew…still with me? Good. Here’s what’s happening now.

Meet the Blogger

Over the weekend, the “Skanks in NYC” blogger stepped out of the shadows and spoke to the New York Daily News. The woman — identified as Rosemary Port, a 29-year-old student at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (and, by some accounts, unemployed night club hostess) — tells the Daily News Cohen “defamed herself” by making such a big deal out of the small-scale blog.

“Before her suit, there were probably two hits on my Web site: one from me looking at it, and one from her looking at it,” Port tells the Daily News. “That was before it became a spectacle. I feel my right to privacy has been violated.”

Hang on, though: We’re not even at the juiciest part yet. Port now says she’s going to file a lawsuit of her own — against Google. Her attorney tells the Daily News she’ll accuse Google of “breach[ing] its fiduciary duty to protect her expectation of anonymity” (or, in regular English, not protecting Port’s right to speak freely and anonymously). Port’s demand: $15 million in damages.

The blogger-model beef, the Daily News reports, actually began some time ago, when Cohen (the model) “badmouthed” Port (the blogger) to Port’s former boyfriend.

I told you: “Days of Our Lives” simply can’t compete with this plot.

Conclusions and Predictions

Liskula Cohen’s crew, not surprisingly, is shooting down the blogger’s claims that she brought this whole thing upon herself. An attorney is quoted as saying if Cohen and her advisors had “thought for a minute that the Google case would have brought more attention to the anonymous blogger’s site, [they] never would have started it.”

(I don’t possess any kind of crystal ball, personally, but I could have looked at this situation six months ago and told you it was going to generate an awful lot of attention. But maybe I just have unrealized clairvoyant powers.)

Here’s the kicker of it all: Cohen now says she won’t pursue any legal action against the insult-slingin’ blogger, despite the whole mask-melting (and publicity-generating) process.

So, all combined, what do we have on our hands? As far as I’m concerned, the odd events and back-and-forth bickering lead to only one logical conclusion: Our two gal pals are actually working in tandem to set the stage for an upcoming VH1 reality show. It’ll have a title along the lines of “Celebrity Blog Battle.” A wresting ring, lots of baby oil, and Bret Michaels will presumably all be involved.

Just remember, you heard it here first.

Subscription music service Rhapsody, a division of Real Networks, has announced plans to port its service to Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch. In a blog post Sunday, the company said it will submit the application (demonstrated on the video below) this week to Apple for review.

Historically, Apple has steered clear of subscription music, making it impossible for services such as Napster or Rhapsody to work with the iPod, fearing competition with its own iTunes music service. But the success of iPhone music applications such as Pandora, Last.fm, and Slacker, may have opened the door for subscription services as well. (Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET News.)

Rhapsody’s mobile app will require that users hold a Rhapsody-to-Go account, which currently runs $14.95 per month. (Non-subscribers will apparently be offered a limited time free-trial period.) The Rhapsody app allows subscribers to explore and stream Rhapsody’s entire online music catalog over EDGE, 3G, or Wi-Fi, as well as create and store playlist queues of their favorite content. The app does not, however, allow users to download and store Rhapsody songs directly on the device, or cache content temporarily to hear offline.

If Rhapsody’s application is approved by Apple, it won’t likely be alone. Competing services such as Spotify have shown off similar applications, and Napster will surely want to get in on the action as well. The real question is whether people will find subscription music capabilities valuable. With free, ad-supported services such as Pandora already dominating the spotlight, it remains to be seen whether Rhapsody can convince new customers to spend close to $15 a month for unlimited on-demand music streaming.

In the blog post, Rhapsody also revealed plans to develop an Android application. It’s not known whether that version would offer greater flexibility (local storage, over-the-air downloads) than the version for the iPhone.

CHICAGO, Aug. 24 — Drinking water containing a common herbicide could pose a greater public health risk than previously thought because regular municipal monitoring doesn’t detect frequent spikes in the chemical’s levels, according to a report released Monday by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The report documented spikes in atrazine in the water supplies of Midwestern and Southern towns in agricultural areas, where the herbicide is applied to the vast majority of corn, sorghum and sugar cane fields.

Atrazine, an endocrine disrupter, can interfere with the body’s hormonal activity and the development of reproductive organs. The Environmental Protection Agency looks at annual average levels of the chemical in drinking-water systems, but the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says this misses spikes likely to occur after rain and springtime application of the herbicide.

“Our biggest concern is early-life-stage development,” said NRDC senior scientist Jennifer Sass. “If there’s a disruption during that time, it becomes hard-wired into the system. These endocrine disrupters act in the body at extremely low levels. These spikes matter.”

She said the chemical could also be linked to menstrual problems and endocrine-related cancers in adults.

Scientists with atrazine manufacturer Syngenta called the NRDC study alarmist and said the spikes fall within one- and 10-day limits that the EPA considers safe.

“Atrazine is one of the best studied, most thoroughly regulated molecules on the planet,” said Syngenta toxicologist Tim Pastoor. “Those momentary spikes are not going to be injurious to human health.”

Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, municipal water supplies are typically tested for chemicals, including atrazine, four times a year. The EPA considers an annual average atrazine level below 3 parts per billion as safe for human consumption. But biweekly data collected by the EPA from 139 municipal water systems found that atrazine was present 90 percent of the time and that 54 water systems had one-time spikes above 3 parts per billion in 2003 and 2004, according to an analysis by the NRDC.

NRDC scientists and lawyers argue that the EPA’s limits are too lenient, given studies showing the effects of low levels of atrazine on rats and other animals and the fact that it is nearly impossible to epidemiologically trace the chemical’s effects on humans.

Steve Owens, assistant administrator for the EPA’s office of prevention, pesticides and toxic substances, said the agency will review its atrazine policies as part of a larger reassessment of how chemicals and pesticides are regulated.

“The Obama EPA will take a hard look at atrazine and other substances,” he said. “This thorough review will rely on transparency and sound science, including independent scientific peer review. We will continue to closely track new scientific developments and will determine whether a change in our regulatory position is appropriate.”

Atrazine can be removed by carbon filters at water treatment plants or in households. Many water treatment plants use such filters, but others do not. The Washington Aqueduct, which treats water from the Potomac River for about 1 million Washington area customers, does not treat for atrazine because it is rarely found at levels over 0.5 parts per billion in the water.

The NRDC is asking the EPA to step up its atrazine monitoring and make the results public. The group is also encouraging farmers to greatly reduce or end use of the herbicide. Atrazine is effectively banned in the European Union, though Pastoor said a similar chemical, terbuthylazine, is widely used in Europe. He noted that atrazine, introduced in 1958, is especially attractive to farmers because it lasts for about 40 days in the soil and can be applied before, during or after planting. It is considered conducive to no-till practices that reduce a field’s carbon footprint.

Atrazine is also used on lawns and golf courses in the South, and Sass said children playing on treated grass could be dangerously exposed to it. It can also concentrate in rain and fog.

Since 2003, the EPA has monitored atrazine levels in surface and ground water in 40 watersheds in the central and southern United States. The NRDC says the results raise grave concerns for wildlife and ecosystems in these areas and in the Gulf of Mexico, where much of the agricultural runoff from the Midwest ends up. Atrazine has been found to cause limb deformities and hermaphroditism in frogs at concentrations as low as 0.1 parts per billion. It is also known to kill algae and micro-organisms that make up the base of aquatic food chains, and in conjunction with other pesticides and herbicides, it suppresses animals’ immune systems.

In 2003 the NRDC filed a lawsuit charging that the EPA violated the Endangered Species Act during the atrazine re-registration process by failing to adequately consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service about how the herbicide could affect about 20 endangered species of frogs, fish, turtles and other reptiles and amphibians.

A 2008 letter from the Fish and Wildlife Service says atrazine could harm endangered Alabama sturgeon and Chesapeake Bay dwarf wedgemussel, since it is known to damage such organisms and affect food supplies, even at lower levels than what the EPA considers safe.

Negotiations between the Fish and Wildlife Service and the EPA could result in different limits or requirements for atrazine.