We’re hearing that iTunes will be implementing Facebook Connect support in the near future, allowing users to share some of their recent purchases with their friends on Facebook. We’re still gathering more details, but it sounds like this could happen quite soon.

It certainly adds up. Over the last few weeks, iTunes has been building out its Facebook Page at Facebook.com/iTunes, which now includes polls, featured items, and is being promoted in iTunes itself.  And Lala, which was acquired by Apple in December, has extensive experience working with Facebook Connect (they also power Facebook’s song gifting feature).

To be clear, you can already share songs on iTunes using both Facebook and Twitter (the feature was introduced last September). It sounds like this integration would make this easier, and there’s obviously the possibly for Apple to leverage Facebook’s social graph in much more interesting ways in the future.

Apple has previously worked to add Facebook support to other apps — iPhoto includes an integrated Facebook photo uploader.

Yahoo has built a number of applications for the iPhone (and even a custom one for the iPad already), but with all the buzz about location-aware services they haven’t yet felt the urge to optimize its own Upcoming service for the mobile platform.

Enter developer Nik Fletcher, who has spent about a year developing one dubbed Happening to “scratch his own itch”. Version 1.2 is available in the App Store right now (iTunes link).

It’s essentially the Upcoming app Yahoo should have built – and at the very least they should have made it easier for the man to develop it for them.

With the tagline ‘Nearby Events in your Pocket’, it’s easy to guess what the app is all about: it accesses the wide range of events listed on Upcoming, and lets you look up events nearby based on your location or simply by searching the database.

Once you authorize the app to access your personal Upcoming settings (which took an awfully long time in my experience), you can also use your iPhone or iPod touch to browse your saved events, RSVP to them in-app, see what your friends are planning to attend and more.

The app costs $1.99 in the U.S. App Store – we should note Yahoo offers a mobile-optimized website for Upcoming too.

Fletcher also told me an incredible story about his dealings with Yahoo to get the app cleared and live. Rather than recount the story, here’s his version of the facts:

So, in August last year (!) I decided to release the app publicly and dropped Yahoo an email (via their Developer site) requesting commerical API access for Upcoming. I heard nothing, however a friend put me in touch with someone at YDN. After chatting with YDN, they couldn’t find anyone at Upcoming to approve my use of the API – however aluded that they wouldn’t have a problem with me using the API – and confirmed the number of API requests per day I’d be able to use.

Towards the end of last year, noticing an increase in activity from Yahoo on Upcoming, I contacted them again and didn’t hear anything. I chased it again, and was able to make contact with their Community Manager. She mentioned their API request limit (half of that previously mentioned), however said that going forward if that was an issue we could discuss the rate limit. At any rate, they haven’t objected to my building the app and releasing it commercially. The only concern now is the API key hitting its (rather low) rate limit of 5,000 requests per day

Makes me wonder how Yahoo is going to act if the app becomes a major hit. If at all.

(Full disclosure: I’m a partner in a company called Oxynade, which has developed a similar solution for looking up nearby events from your iPhone (iTunes link), albeit mostly for events going on in Europe – the majority of events listed on Yahoo’s Upcoming are in the United States or the UK. You might want to give both a whirl.)

With all the talk about Google and Amazon versus Apple, both Internet companies have been quick to release custom applications for the latter’s freshly launched iPad device.

Amazon.com had already introduced its Kindle app for iPad, and over the weekend added a second one to the stable: an IMDb (Internet Movie Database) app (iTunes link).

The Amazon.com subsidiary, which offers a ton of information on movies, TV and celebrities, has actually not released an entirely new app but simply altered its iPhone app to optimize the experience for the bigger screen. According to the company, the IMDb Movies & TV App for iPad lets customers access more than 1.5 million movie and TV titles with information on 3.2 million celebrities, actors, actresses, directors and crew members.

Users can also use the app to watch movie trailers in HD, find localized movie showtimes in the United States, browse photo galleries and shop for DVD and Blu-ray releases. The app is free of charge – it hasn’t garnered any reviews on iTunes so far.

IMDb’s website welcomes over 57 million unique visitors per month, although it looks and feels incredibly old school to me. No doubt, iPad owners with even the slightest interest in movies, TV or celebrities are going to want this app.

Be sure to check out our complete list of the best iPad apps at launch.

We had some fun yesterday for April Fools day, fake-covering the launch of the New York Times iPad app by replacing some words of an article in the paper published back in 1996 upon the launch of its first Website.

Now, the company has introduced its iPad app for real. It’s free and both advertiser-sponsored and advertising-supported, but there’s also a “full, paid app” in the works.

Screenshots of the app had already surfaced yesterday, first on MacStories.

The iPad application is dubbed The New York Times Editors’ Choice app (iTunes link) and offers a selection of news, opinion and feature articles chosen by Times editors that can be downloaded automatically to the tablet device. It delivers two pages of content with the top eight to ten articles in latest news, business, technology, opinion and feature sections with accompanying videos and photo slideshows.

The app is free of charge, but the launch was sponsored exclusively by Chase Sapphire and Medialets took care of the advertising part of the equation: a full-page vertical and horizontal interstitial ad.

Features of the application include (straight from the press release):

Simple navigation – read articles and view videos and slideshows with ease using the iPad’s sophisticated navigation capabilities and cutting-edge multi-touch screen.

Offline reading – download and sync articles and images to iPad device for viewing offline or in airplane mode.

Share options – e-mail articles to friends from the app.

Interestingly, The Times said there’s also a paid app forthcoming, but wouldn’t detail the price or what people would be paying for exactly.

Presumably, the paid iPad app will let people access the full array of digital content the NYT has to offer rather than only articles hand-picked by its editors. A lot will depend on the price, but I assume the paid app won’t come with advertising.

Would you pay for a NYT app if you had an iPad? How much would you say is too much?

YouTube EDU, the video portal’s collection of university and college content contributed by schools around the world, launched a year ago today. To commemorate the occasion, the YouTube team has shared some stats about the initiative.

Since launching, YouTube has grown to include content from 300 colleges and universities, spanning 10 countries and seven languages. The collection has grown to 65,000 videos, including 350 full courses. And with the addition of auto-captioning, the site can automatically translate any lectures spoken in English to other languages.

Another major player in distributing educational content online is iTunes U, which boasts 600 university partners and “250,000 free lectures, videos, films, and other resources”. The programs do have some differences though — for one, schools on iTunes U can restrict the ability of their content to students (around half of them have share their content publicly), whereas YouTube videos are generally available to everyone.

To kick-start a process to reach scale they’ve used volunteers and app users to visit and review hundreds of workspaces where the coffee is good and the screaming kids are less prevelant – rating WiFi, noise levels, power provision, “community feel”, with the idea that we all hang out in a mobile kind of way these days.

They have an Augmented Reality iphone app [iTunes Store link] which pulls in data from the site.

SXSW Interactive is now over. While a clear winner in the “Location War” has yet to be determined, the truth is that many of the location-based services won, as all of them got a huge amount of exposure over the past week. And look for that trend to continue in a big way, as Apple is now highlighting several of them in the App Store.

As you can see in the images in this post, Apple is highlighting five of the key location players both in the App Store on iTunes, as well as on the App Store on the iPhone itself. On the iTunes version, the apps have their own area right below the “New & Noteworthy” area. On the iPhone, the five apps takes up the top five slots of the “What’s Hot” area. Simply put: This promotion is huge.

So what are the five apps? The names should be familiar to you because we’ve covered each very recently. Foursquare (our coverage), Gowalla (our coverage), Loopt (our coverage), Whrrl 3 (our coverage), and MyTown (our coverage). I’d like to think Apple picked these guys to feature after reading TechCrunch, but who knows what goes on behind the doors of the secretive company.

As any app developer will tell you, having your app featured can make or break it. Even the two most-hyped players, Foursquare and Gowalla (the two key players in the most recent Location War), stand to benefit from Apple’s ability to reach all kinds of different audiences with the App Store. Foursquare announced earlier that it had gained 100,000 new users in just the past 10 days — that type of growth may actually continue as long as Apple keeps featuring the app.

The other three, have all benefited in the past from previous Apple promotions. Notably, this helped MyTown surpass both Foursquare and Gowalla in size in under a month after its launch.

Game on, says Apple.

Zimbalam, the digital music distributor from Believe Digital, launches in the US today.

The service lets artists submit and distribute their music through 25 of the most popular music platforms, including Apple’s iTunes and Spotify, in addition to “several hundred additional stores worldwide”. This makes Zimbalam the largest music distribution network as measured by number of stores and geographic reach, says the Paris-based company.

To distribute their music via Zimbalam’s network, artists are charged a simple annual fee ($29.99 in year one then $19.98 per year after for an EP or album) and then once the fee is recouped, get to keep 100% of royalties – after, of course, whatever commission is taken by each store. Additionally, following year one, artists won’t be charged by Zimbalam if they don’t make enough sales to cover the annual fee.

Over the last six months, doubleTwist, the iTunes alternative that lets you manage your music, videos, and photos, has really been stepping up its game. In October the company integrated an Amazon-powered MP3 store, allowing users to download and sync their music directly with any of hundreds of compatible devices, much as they would with the iTunes/iPod combo. And today it’s adding a new feature that makes it an even more viable iTunes competitor: support for podcasts.

Co-founder Monique Farantzos says that doubleTwist has built and integrated a podcast search engine with 20 times as many podcasts as iTunes offers. Rankings are based on popularity (as opposed to a simple listing that would grow unmanageable with that much content). The new feature is launching on Windows now, with Mac support for podcasts coming next month.  Later this year, doubleTwist will offer an API allowing other applications to tap into the podcast search engine.  The company is also planning to launch a client for Android (which would presumably allow users to stream content) over the summer.

Farantzos says that doubleTwist is also going to start offering more cloud-based services. In May, users will be able to store the podcasts they’re subscribed to server-side, so they’ll be able to use the same subscriptions on their desktop and mobile clients without having to dock them together.

While it supports many devices, doubleTwist is becoming increasingly popular as an ‘iTunes for Android’. In January, it forged a partnership with T-Mobile, which promotes doubleTwist and has pre-installed it on some devices. Now, 53% of doubleTwist users are using it to sync with Android phones. The application also supports syncing with many other devices, including WebOS, BlackBerry, Sony PSP, and digital cameras.

doubleTwist is still missing some of the functionality that iTunes has, like the ability to download TV shows and movies. But the podcast functionality will add some video content, and 1 in 5 users are using it to manage video content they already have.  And some people may even appreciate the added simplicity if they’re just interested in music. In any case, it probably isn’t worth holding your breath for doubleTwist to add movies and TV downloads any time soon — content owners are still set on wrapping that content in DRM.

Also see Songbird, another iTunes alternative (you can see our past coverage here).