Popular social media website, Pinterest, has announced that they have launched an app for both Android and iPad. If the scores of Pinterest users who liken it to “online crack” didn’t have enough access to it, they do now. Additionally, version 2.0 of the iPhone app is available for download in iTunes, offering a new format and some bug fixes.

[NOTE: Songza is no longer available, having been borged by – yep – Google]

Would you pay to belong to an ad-free social network? Dalton Caldwell, mastermind behind App.net, akin to an ad-free Facebook or ad-free Twitter, thinks you just might. While he doesn’t presume that App.net will score the huge user-base of Twitter or Facebook, he does think that he will amass enough of a following that the $50 per person annual fee, coupled with the an ad-free and developer-friendly platform, will build a sustainable network that instills trust among both users and developers.

It is being hailed the “Instagram of Video” and, much like Instagram, has taken off like wildfire in the mobile and social media communities. Socialcam, a free video-sharing app, is quickly becoming a worthy adversary for YouTube on account of the fact that it is strictly a mobile app, and is tailored to be such. Many complain that uploading videos to YouTube from their phones is kind of a pain and being able to do so is a mere side product of YouTube’s focus on a computer-based user experience.

Amazon made an exciting announcement today that users can now watch Amazon Prime Instant Video on the iPad. It appears that Amazon is slowly acknowledging that a large portion of its Prime member base has, and is loyal to, an iPad. With many Prime members frustrated that the free book lending benefit of a Prime membership only works on an actual Kindle device, Amazon seems to finally have learned to play nice with their Kindle’s adversary with today’s announcement that Amazon Instant Video is now able to be used on the iPad.

While we love Apple and Apple products, they surprised many iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users by pulling popular app, Clueful, from the app store. In a move that seems suspiciously shrouded in mystery, Apple pulled the app under the same set of rules that the app was approved, prompting Clueful development company, Bitfender, to immediately begin working on redeveloping the app so that it could be re-approved.

Google has found themselves in hot water over privacy issues yet again. As we previously reported, it was discovered that the Google Street View vehicles were collecting data illegally, while taking street pictures in the US, Australia and Europe. In fact, they were doing it for three years, between 2007 and 2010, by harvesting personal data through open wifi routers as the Street View car drove by. This data included entire emails, site visit history, passwords, and other private information that the average citizen probably does not want floating around.

A new iPhone and Android app, FlyRights (not FlyRight, which is confusingly another iPhone application which allows you to use social media to provide feedback to the airlines) allows users who feel that they have been the the victim of racial profiling by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to immediately – on the spot – file a complaint (via the FlyRights app – hence “Fly Rights”) with both the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

While it’s often fine to leave all of the apps running on your iPhone or iPad, sometimes, for various reasons, you want to completely shut down an app , i.e. kill it, stop it from running, or close it.  It’s actually really easy to completely close an iPhone app (or an iPad app), but this is another one of those things that, while easy, is not obvious.  So here is a step-by-step tutorial (only 3 steps!) to completely shut down and stop an app from running.

As part of our iPad series, we would like to introduce you to what we believe, hands-down, is the best iPad drawing game app out there. It also happens to be a fabulous iPhone and Android drawing game. The game is called “Draw Something”, and it is a cross between Pictionary and Boggle (mostly Pictionary, with a little Boggle thrown in). Warning: Draw Something is very addictive! But it’s also a game where you are interacting with others, and using your brain. And there is even a free version! Direct link included below.

One of the biggest (and indeed only) frustrations for people who use the iPad (be it iPad 2, iPad 3, or originally flavor iPad) for business, or even for personal email use if you don’t use a Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or other webmail address) is that the native mail app on the iPad will only use your webmail address as your “From” address, even if you have a different default email address set within your webmail app. For example, your Gmail address may be example@gmail.com, but you may have example@yourdomain.com set as your default “From:” address in Gmail, and Gmail will honor that, but the mail app on your iPad will insist on sending your email ‘from’ your example@gmail.com address instead of your default example@yourdomain.com address. There is no way to change that default “from” address on your iPad. But it turns out that there is a way to beat your iPad into submission, and to set your default “from” address to whatever you would prefer it to be. Here’s how.

Reports are coming out that there is a new trend amongst Saudi women looking to rebel, where they post pictures of various parts of their bodies to Facebook. While Americans may be used to the “Girls Gone Wild” brazenness of young women in in the US, the pictures posted by Saudi women are much more tame by American standards, but some Saudi people are extremely unhappy with what is displayed in the pictures.

Oh, how the Internet, and society in general, do love a scandal. Especially if it involves one of the big Internet or tech companies, like Google (witness this week’s scandal over Google’s “new” privacy policy) or Microsoft. This week everybody is mad at Microsoft for being, allegedly, racist, by updating their GPS software offerings to include a purported “avoid ghettos” feature. Some are even calling it “the avoid ghetto app”.

A new Facebook program, called “If I Die” (shouldn’t that be “When I Die” or “If I’m Dead”?) allows a last farewell message to be posted to the user’s wall after they pass away. No, they don’t actually post after they are dead from beyond the grave (that would be a Oujia Board app), but the “If I Die” app is said to be the next best thing.

“Take This Lollipop”, the creepy Facebook tour through your personal information, is an excellent example of something we have been trying to pound into your heads all along: putting personal information on the Internet (such as location based check ins) can be dangerous. More to the point: most people have no idea how much personal information they really have revealed online, and how easy it is to track them down, stalking them, and worse. “Take this Lollipop” is technically a Facebook app, which is how (and why) it asks for you to log in using Facebook Connect, something that we also advise against.