Not even two weeks in, Spotify's integration with Facebook already appears to be paying off in terms of application usage. The streaming service's Facebook app has seen a 55% rise in usage since Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced the new integration at the f8 conference on September 22.

This growth comes despite a recent outcry among some users, who object to Spotify's new policy of requiring people to sign up using their Facebook accounts.

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Since rolling out their deep integration with the social networking giant, Spotify has seen monthly active users of its Facebook application rise from 3.4 million to 5.3 million, according to new metrics from AppData. It's worth noting that these numbers don't refer to overall Spotify sign-ups, but rather users who are using the service's official Facebook application. The company has yet to divulge how many new sign-ups they've seen since peeling back the "closed beta" label and launching its Facebook integration last month.

This type of growth is exactly why Spotify and similar services have signed on with Facebook. The site's 800 million-strong user base is unmatched in the social networking space. Meanwhile, services like Spotify, MOG and Rdio have built impressive music libraries, something Facebook is not interested in trying to replicate. Instead, these partnerships allow both parties to do what they do best while piggybacking off each other's strengths.

These new content partnerships have not been without controversy. In addition to complaints over Spotify requiring a Facebook account to sign up, some have expressed concerns about the privacy implications of the frictionless sharing that Facebook is now encouraging.

Even so, it would appear that despite these concerns, Spotify is indeed benefiting from being baked so thoroughly into the Facebook experience, at least for the time being.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/readwriteweb/%7E3/Wb79NA0DHck/spotify_usage_grows_facebook_integration.php

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We've discussed a few times just how ridiculous it is that the US government still pretends that the State Department cables available via Wikileaks are somehow classified and secret. It's a head-in-sand approach, in which government employees have to pretend that information, which the rest of the world knows about, isn't actually known. This makes no sense. In the business world, if you sign a non-disclosure agreement, and content becomes public through other means, you're free to talk about it. The way the government does it is crazy... and opens up the possibility of abuse, such as in the following case.

State Department employee Peter van Buren has written a book that apparently criticizes the US's efforts in Iraq entitled: We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. Not surprisingly, the State Department isn't happy about the book. While it did review the manuscript before it was published, it can't stop the publication.

So, instead, it appears to being coming up with other ways to be vindictive. Such as investigating him for "disclosing classified information." And, no, it's not because of info in the book, which was pre-vetted by the government. It's because he wrote a blog post, where he dares to link to a Wikileaks cable, which is public to the whole world.

But, in the vindictive little minds of folks in the State Department, since such info is still technically "classified," they can go after van Buren for "disclosing classified info." And, making it even better, the investigators who interrogated him over this told him that if he wrote about the interrogation, he could also be charged with "interfering with a government investigation." It makes you wonder if the people involved in this recognize how petty and childish they appear in their actions. No one who can think straight thinks that van Buren linking to a very public document reveals classified information -- and on top of that, speaking publicly about State Department bullying is not, in any way, interfering with a government investigation.

Tragically, this is not an isolated incident. Despite the President's insistence that he wants to see more whistleblowing, every time we see whistleblowing in the federal government it seems like it's followed up by vindictive attacks by the federal government.

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Source: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110930/10580316151/state-department-vindictiveness-using-single-blog-link-to-wikileaks-to-investigate-employee-who-published-critical-book.shtml

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PC gamers will recognize Battlefield 3's Battlelog as the browser-based service you have to load before you can play the game. As this trailer explains, there's more to Battlelog than a server browser and front end. Battlelog expands on the franchise's history of stats tracking, melding it with new social networking features that look like they've been ripped right out of Facebook.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techreport/all/~3/kV7f_ZdfPkM/21751

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Halves early settlement discounts to 0.5% in miserly boom-time move

Channel bully boy Apple is halving the early settlement discount for resellers across Europe in a phased rollout.?

Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/09/30/apple_halves_early_settlement/

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How did 60 Minutes film their segment tonight on free solo climber Alex Honnold? For such a dangerous and unique assignment, only the best would do. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/%7Er/gizmodo/excerpts/%7E3/aasKMZSXjHo/60-minutes-shows-how-to-film-a-free-solo-mountain-climber-thousands-of-feet-in-the-air

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The CEO of the Chinese Internet company says he's very interested in buying his American counterpart.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20114292-93/could-yahoo-be-acquired-by-alibaba/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

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Building a spaceship to visit another star is hard enough, but keeping the humans onboard alive for the ride may be even harder, space experts said in a symposium dedicated to interstellar travel.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44744104/ns/technology_and_science-space/

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Introducing Kindle Fire, a Tablet from Amazon, for entertainment, web, games, reading and more. Built on the idea that enjoying your content should be simple and easy, one touch on the screen gives you instant access to Amazon?s massive content library, including over 18 million movies, TV shows, songs apps, magazines and books. Amazon Kindle [...]

Source: http://teknoise.com/2011/10/02/buy-now-kindle-fire-tablet-for-199-on-amazon-online-store/

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Tech companies are missing the boat if they let the Dunder Mifflin-Sabre tablet, unveiled Thursday night on NBC's "The Office," slip by them without taking a cue.

Source: http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/30/8063059-apple-listen-up-the-pyramid-tablet-rules

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Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:
Court accepts Verizon's and T-Mobile's briefs in support of Samsung against Apple  —  On Friday (September 30, 2011), Judge Lucy Koh of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California entered an order ruling on multiple motions of a procedural nature:

Source: http://www.techmeme.com/111001/p19#a111001p19

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