The HTC Status hits AT&T and Best Buy stores on Sunday and will be the first phone released with its own Facebook button.

But what exactly does a Facebook button do? Well, so far, it makes sharing a status message or photo to Facebook even more simple than it already is on Google's Android operating system.

The Facebook button on the HTC Status is "context aware," so if a user is taking photos and they see a shot they want to upload to the popular social networking service, a tap of the blue-blocked-F takes them automatically to the phones built-in Facebook uploading app. 

When a new chat message or wall post comes into the Facebook account synched with the Status, the Facebook button lights up, alerting the user to something new. With a press of the button, you're in, browsing whatever content or interaction awaits.

But while the Facebook button and HTC's modifications of Android to take advantage of the button make using Facebook a bit more seamless, the Status is really just another Android phone -- and that's not a bad thing.

The Facebook button and increased integration is a feature, and the most prominent one at that, but with a 2.6-inch touch screen and full keyboard below it, the Status feels and operates like a regular old Android phone.

And I think that's the idea here. The Status steps up Facebook features, but it's not a full out Facebook phone, with the social network taking over every function. It's an Android phone with a little bit more Facebook.

So the appeal here really depends on what a consumer is looking for from a phone since, really, the dozens of Facebook-button-free Android options already out there do a great job of integrating with Facebook and Twitter -- pulling into the phone contacts from those networks and adding notifications from both services into the phones functions itself.

The Status sells for $50 with a two-year 3G data plan from AT&T and comes with 512 megabytes of internal storage that is expandable to 2 gigabytes with an included microSD card. I used up all the phone's storage (both internal and on microSD) quickly. 

For those who've never owned a smartphone before, or are looking for a lower-priced phone for a Facebook-loving high school or college student, the Status might be a solid option.

But that little blue Facebook button isn't close to compelling enough to have smartphone users drop their Apple iPhones, Motorola Droids or HTC Evo's anytime soon.

Check out our hands-on first look at the HTC Status in the video below.

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Image: The HTC Status, and its Facebook button. Credit: Armand Emamdjomeh / Los Angeles Times

Goodbye Bloomingdale's, hello iPad. Earlier this month ModiFace Inc., a company that specializes in facial recognition technology, released Ultimate Virtual Makeover, the second iteration of its popular iPhone, iPad and Android app.

The app allows users to upload a photo of themselves and experiment with different eye shadow colors, foundations, blushes, mascaras and lipsticks. If you find a color you like, Ultimate Virtual Makeover will tell you the brand and name of the color and take you directly to the website of the makeup maker. Enter your credit card info and you just bought a new lipstick -- no trip to Sephora required.

I got to try out the app Thursday when a representative from the company came by the office. It is the most realistic-looking virtual makeover app I've seen on the market, but it didn't work as flawlessly as I hoped. As a working mom with no time to go to the mall, I'd kill to be able to try makeup on virtually and purchase online with at least an educated guess that a certain color would flatter my skin tone. But when I asked the app to allow me to test Chanel's Mademoiselle Lipstick (a current obsession I can't seem to shake), the color was not available. Next I asked the app to give me red lipsticks to sample. Only three options came up.

"For now most of our users are using the app as a game," said Nikkie Gotto, director of advanced projects for ModiFace, who flew down from the company's office in Toronto to show off the app's capabilities.

As a general time-wasting game, Ultimate Virtual Makeover makes a ton of sense. It's fun to play with -- what do I look like with neon blue eye shadow? Or purple blush? -- but until the catalogue of makeup is exhaustive, it's not necessarily a great tool for purchasing makeup. But the possibilities are endless. Imagine if a company like Sephora teamed up with ModiFace and got all of its products to be virtually testable. I'd never sleep again.

ModiFace was founded by facial recognition specialist Dr. Parham Aarabi. He used to work on defense contracts before moving into the makeup field. While my big Sephora plan has not yet come to fruition, his company has found creative ways to partner with other makeup companies using the technology. The makeup company Stila's website allows you to upload a picture of yourself and try on just its products. And the drugstore DuaneReade will have a kiosk that uses ModiFace's technology in the company's flagship store in New York. Imagine trying on a Maybelline eye shadow right at your local pharmacy -- none of those germy testers needed.

Aarabi said the Ultimate Virtual Makeover app will continue to improve over time. In the meantime, he said, his company is working on a program that will show online shoppers what dresses will look like using customer photos.

Ladies, get your credit cards out. It's a whole new virtual shopping world.

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Photo credit: Courtesy of ModiFace Inc.

In the middle of tweeting yet another 140-character-or-less update about your dog, your job and the weather, do you ever wonder who else -- and how many -- other people in the world are doing the same?

Then take a look at the Flickr photo set "See something or say something" created by programmer Eric Fischer, who took data about where people were when they geotagged tweets to Twitter or photos to Flickr, and put them as bright beacons of light on maps.

The result: some genuinely beautiful maps that represent millions of folks around the globe madly tweeting, uploading and contributing information to the insatiable black hole that is the Internet.

What's not too surprising is what the maps reveal: Cities tend to generate tweets (or at least geotag tweets) more then non-cities; North America and Europe are the two continents with the heaviest Twitter and Flickr usage; and Angelenos like to tweet and use Flickr -- a lot.

"I used a program that I wrote specifically for that purpose," Eric Fischer explained on (what else?) his Twitter account, in response to another Twitter user's query about how he created his maps.

In addition to worldwide maps, Fischer also built city-specific maps that cover a number of the probable cosmopolitan Twitter hubs of the world -- Los Angeles; New York; London; Tokyo; San Francisco; Singapore; Jakarta, Indonesia; Sao Paolo, Brazil; Mexico City and more.

Twitter announced Friday that 350 billion tweets are now delivered each day.

After the Big Mac and the Internet, there's probably no American invention as contagious as oversharing.

So take a look. See what you think. And then tweet about it.

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Upper image: Global map of geotagged tweets and Flickr photos. Lower image: Los Angeles map of geotagged tweets and Flickr photos. Credit: Eric Fischer via Flickr.

Carmageddon -- the much anticipated (feared?) shutdown of the 405 Freeway from the 101 to the 10 this weekend -- may force many Angelenos to stay in their homes, maybe even ride a bike to get around and, hopefully, stay away from traffic that is expected to be widely congested.

If you'll be one of those staying in and surfing the Web, the California Department of Transportation is live-streaming video of traffic and construction for those who want to keep an eye on just what's going on around the 405.

As noted by the website Gigaom, Caltrans offers up streams of video from multiple cameras (the feed switches every few seconds) on the 134 and 405 freeways, the 10, 105 and 605 and 101 and 110.

Also, be sure to check out the L.A. Times' extensive coverage of all things Carmageddon.

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Photo: Traffic on the 405 in West Los Angeles. Credit: Reed Saxon / Associated Press        

Lost in the clamor over Apple Inc.'s preliminary patent victory over rival phone-maker HTC Corp. is that the two patents in question are so old they predate smartphones.

A judge at the U.S. International Trade Commission has ruled that HTC infringed two of Apple's patents, HTC acknowledged today, causing speculation that other Android phone makers may also be in for trouble if they're also using Apple-owned technology.  (The ITC still has to make a final ruling on the HTC case, and the company says it will appeal.).

But what kind of technology is at issue here? When we think of smartphones, we think of touch screens, software apps, wireless radios, Bluetooth and other recent inventions.  But the patents at issue here go back way further than that. 

The first one, 6,343,263, was filed in August 1994 -- 17 years ago -- and covers "Real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data."  Meaning, roughly, it handles data ("voice, facsimile, video and the like") being sent to it from other devices over a network.  There is no mention in the patent of wireless networks, cellular phones or really anything you'd directly associate with a smartphone except the sending and receiving of data. 

You can imagine that many -- or all -- smartphones would need to be able to receive and process real-time data from outside sources, so whether Apple's infringement claim on it will stop at HTC, or Android, or anywhere, seems to be an open question.

The second patent, 5,946,647, was filed in February 1996, and treats an even more generic subject: System and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data. What's that, you ask? Well, if you open an email on your HTC touch-screen phone, you are in fact using your finger to interact with a piece of data. By touching it, you are commanding the phone to perform an action (like "open") on the email. This patent has to do with the system that, for instance, tells the phone to open the email.

This stuff is pretty fundamental to the way most smartphones -- actually, most computers -- work these days. That's why there's so much speculation about how a ruling in Apple's favor could be problematic for many other manufacturers. 

"This is basically Macintosh-related technology," said Florian Mueller, an intellectual property watcher who has been closely following the smartphone patent wars. (Apple has been developing the Macintosh line since the early 1980s.) In smartphones, he said, "we see a convergence of computer hardware and software and the mobile communications industry."

"And that's why the patent problem is such a mess," Mueller added. "The vast majority of the patents in a smartphone are computer hardware and software patents -- mobile communication is just a minority."

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Photo:  Sprint's HTC EVO 4G, among the smartphones that could be affected by Apple's patent complaint. Credit: Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times

Twitter was launched publicly five years ago, on July 13, 2006, and has gone from an unknown text-messaging and Web service then called Twttr to one of the biggest forces in social media.

On Friday, Twitter's engineering department said in a message sent out over the micro-blogging service that 350 billion tweets were delivered each day.

"When someone tweets, that tweet is sent to the timelines of his/her followers," a Twitter spokeswoman said. "Each of those is one delivery."

An average of 200 million tweets are sent out by users each day, she said.

"For context on the speed of Twitter's growth, in January of 2009, users sent two million Tweets a day, and one year ago they posted 65 million a day," Twitter said in a June blog post on hitting 200 million tweets.

In another Friday message, this time from Twitter's main account, the company said that "there were 224 tweets sent on July 15, 2006. Today, users send that many Tweets in less than a tenth of a second."

The fifth birthday for the social networking service, now used by about 13% of U.S. adults online according to Pew Research Center estimates, has been celebrated by Twitter since about March, which is the month that the programming to build the service got started back in '06.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone celebrated with an appearance on the TV show "Conan," later joining co-founder Jack Dorsey on "Piers Morgan Tonight." Dorsey, who now leads product development at Twitter, sent out a series of tweets highlighting the young firm's history in March. And even Snoop Dogg and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton popped up in a video with other public figures wishing the 400-person company well.

"Yesterday, we saw more than 600,000 signups," Twitter said in another Friday tweet. "It took us more than *16 months* to reach the first 600,000 Twitter accounts."

Another tweet from the company linked to a personal blog post from Stone published on July 15, 2006, when Twitter was opened to the public.

In that launch-day blog post, Stone (then an working at the podcasting company Odeo, which built Twttr as a side project) emphasized the text messaging (SMS) aspect of the product:

Twttr is a new mobile service that helps groups of friends bounce random thoughts around with SMS. When we showed it to Jason Goldman (product manager of Blogger) he called it "present tense blogging." That's a great way to describe it. It's fun to use because it strips social blogging down to it's essence and makes it immediate.

Jack Dorsey is one of Odeo's brightest stars so when he told us about this idea that has been haunting him for six years we had to listen. It's not even remotely related to audio but it's an awesome idea so we told him to go for it. Jack put this thing together very quickly but it took a few months to get a short code.

As noted by the tech blog Mashable, Stone also appeared in short YouTube video trying to explain -- jokingly -- what exactly Twitter was to those on the Web. Check out the video below.

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Image: A screenshot of Twitter.com's homepage. Credit: Twitter

Microsoft published prototype designs of a new social search engine called Tulalip to the URL Socl.com Thursday, but then quickly took down the website, putting an apology in its place.

"Thanks for stopping by," the replacement message at Socl.com said on Friday. "Socl.com is an internal design project from a team in Microsoft Research which was mistakenly published to the web. We didn't mean to, honest."

The brief posting of Tulalip on Thursday was found by a blogger identified only as J.B., who wrote about it on the website domain news site Fusible.com.

"The four letter domain socl.com would complement bing.com," the Fusible post said. "Although the site isn't operational, visitors can get an idea of where Microsoft is going with the service called 'Tulalip', which also happens to be the name of a group of Native American tribes located not far from Redmond, Washington, where Microsoft is headquartered."

J.B. snapped a screenshot of what could be found at Socl.com before Microsoft took it down -- a green rectangle with the word "Welcome" above a short description that read "With Tulalip you can Find what you need and Share what you know easier than ever."

Sign-in options for the site appeared to be offered for both Facebook and Twitter users -- no Google+ option there -- but when links were clicked, they didn't work, the blog post said.

Officials at Microsoft were unavailable to comment beyond what is already posted at Socl.com, that what was published wasn't meant for the world to see.

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Wall Street got to question the usually reclusive Larry Page on Thursday.

Now Oracle Corp. wants its shot at questioning Google Inc.'s new chief executive in high-stakes patent litigation that has pitted the two tech giants against each other. 

Oracle sued Google last year in federal court, claiming its Android mobile device software infringes on Oracle's Java patents which it picked up in 2010 when it bought Sun Microsystems. Oracle is seeking billions of dollars in damages.

In a court filing Thursday, Oracle asked to take Page's deposition because he was the one who decided to buy the company that made the Android software and because he participated in negotiations between Sun Microsystems and Google and in later discussions with Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison.

Oracle also noted that Google has said it wants to depose Ellison.

Google is fighting the request to have Oracle depose the Google co-founder who took over as chief executive in April, saying it amounts to harassment. 

An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment. A Google spokesman declined to comment.

"I believe Oracle has a pretty good chance because the judge presiding over the case has shown -- in a notice filed on Tuesday -- an exceptionally strong interest in exactly the issues on which Mr. Page could testify," wrote intellectual property analyst Florian Müller in a blog post. "According to Oracle, he was involved in Java licensing talks, and Google doesn't appear to dispute the fact of his involvement."

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If its new interface is any guide, online music service MOG is evolving again.

The service, launched in 2006 as a blogging platform for music lovers, gradually expanded to become a portal to scores of music-related blogs. It later added a subscription music service -- first from Rhapsody, then its own design -- enabling people to play the songs and artists that MOGgers were blogging about.

The new interface, like MOG's app for the Chrome browser, radically simplifies the service. Gone are the videos and the blog posts, the featured playlists and the feeds from other MOG users you've chosen to follow -- gone, at least from the Beta version of the new interface. What's left is a very clean, responsive guide to the millions of songs in MOG's online jukebox.

Users can search for tracks or artists through a dialog box at the top of the page, or they can browse through lists of new releases, company picks and hot titles and artists. Prominently placed near the top are two new features that take advantage of Facebook Connect: "Just For You" and "Inspired By Your Friends." The former recommends tracks based on the artists you've "liked" on Facebook; the latter recommends albums based on the artists your Facebook friends have "liked."

The simpler, speedier MOG is a better fit for cars -- the company showed off a MOG-enabled Mini at SXSW in March -- but it's not a very rich experience on the desktop. When asked whether MOG planned to jettison all those other features, spokeswoman Marni Greenberg said in an e-mail: "MOG still believes that editorial reviews and blogs are great ways to discover new music along with playlists, etc. As we evolve the beta player, we will strive to offer services and features that delight users by ensuring quality, personalization, and discovery. Our feature-set will continue to adjust to the needs and wants of our subscribers."

Translation:

In Google's ongoing quest to become more social, the search giant has released a new feature called Google News badges that tracks what users read and allows them to share their badges with Google contacts to see what interests they have in common.

The badges bring a bit of social gaming into news reading -- a tactic used by a number of other news sites over the last few years, as well as startups such as Badgeville.

"The more you read, the higher level badge you'll receive, starting with Bronze, then moving up the ladder to Silver, Gold, Platinum and finally, Ultimate," said Natasha Mohanty, an engineer working on Google News, in a company blog post. "We have more than 500 badges available, so no matter what kind of news you’re into, there’s a badge out there for you."

The badges are awarded to Google users when they're logged into their Google accounts (used for every Google service online) and reading items on Google News with their browser's Web history enabled (which is how Google tracks what a user is reading and how badged-up they should be), Mohanty said.

"Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends," she said. "Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation or just plain brag about how well-read you are."

While the badges show off what topics a person is interested in, they don't offer information on what specific articles a user reads -- that's always left private, Mohanty said.

In a very Google+ Sparks-like addition, users will also be able to tailor news feeds directly in Google News relating to their reading interests and the badges can help users figure out just what it is they read a lot about, she said.

"You can also add custom sections by hovering on a badge and clicking 'add section' to read more about your favorite topics," Mohanty said.

The badges are in their first iteration as of now, and more social features could be coming soon, she said. If a user reads a few articles on the same topic every day, it should take about a week to earn their first badge, Google said.

"Once we see how badges are used and shared, we look forward to taking this feature to the next level," Mohanty said.

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Image: A screenshot from a video about Google News badges. Credit: Google via YouTube