Have you ever thought about just how much stuff is on display in an Apple store? Those Macbook, iPhones, and iPods are probably worth hundred of thousands of dollars. Apple products aren’t cheap, after all.

Maybe that’s why these crooks targeted an Apple store in Marlton, New Jersey for a seemingly well-plan heist. The result was that five men were able to nab 23 Macbook Pros, 14 iPhones, and 9 iPod Touches. The kicker? The thieves were able to steal all of this stuff in exactly 31 seconds.

Video obtained by WPVI-TV highlights the tremendous efficiency of the operation. They quickly broke the glass and grabbed a range of Apple gadgets in speedy fashion, all while threatening a security guard with a possible firearm. Their faces were also covered to elude identification by the security tape. These are not your ordinary crooks.

We’ve included the shocking video below. Let us know your thoughts about this crime in the comments:

Tags: apple, Apple Store, iphone, robbery

But how many of those visitors – many of whom are likely checking out Twitter after hearing about it on TV – are actually signing up for the service? eMarketer takes a stab at that question today, and estimates that there are currently about 6 million registered Twitter users, which equates to around 3.8 percent of people on the Internet.

The research firm further projects that those numbers will double by the end of this year to 12.1 million users, and gap up another 50 percent in 2010 to bring the service to a total audience of roughly 18 million registered users.
 

Now, while that’s impressive growth by almost anyone’s standards, it still makes the site sound fairly tiny compared to Facebook, who now has more than 200 million active users, or even MySpace who still has user counts in the high 8 if not 9 digits.

However, the passive Twitter audience – people who don’t actually tweet, hence accounting for the difference between traffic and users – will likely continue to grow, much in the way that blogs have over the past decade. People will visit the Twitter profiles of friends, family, or their favorite celebrities, and access that information in different ways, whether it’s through clients or portals that attempt to aggregate it.

With that in mind, it actually might be best to start thinking of Twitter as the new Blogger – the startup that put Evan Williams on the map in the first place – as opposed to the new Facebook.

At the time of writing, Kutcher is still live streaming (video below) his successful attempt to reach 1 million Twitter followers before CNN, which Kutcher reports has been clamouring for new followers on its live news ticker. On Friday morning he goes on Oprah, who will post her first @oprah Tweet on live TV, reaching millions of US households.

It’s hard to define, exactly, when Twitter entered the public conscience: perhaps the Hudson plane crash, where the first real photo of the event appeared on Twitter before reaching the mainstream outlets. Perhaps it was earlier, in September 2008, when we noted that CNN was actively promoting its Twitter feed on air. Perhaps it was March 2009, when Twitter co-founder Evan Williams was interviewed by Charlie Rose…or perhaps fellow co-founder Biz Stone’s hilarious Stephen Colbert interview was the moment Twitter tipped. Or maybe all those declarations of a breakthrough were premature: perhaps a starring role on Oprah, hours from now, is the true mark of mainstream success.

And yet this assumes that social media needs mainstream media to justify its existence: that without its blessing social media is not confirmed. But mainstream media is increasingly becoming an echo of social media, allowing YouTube’s masses to define what matters (Susan Boyle, the Domino’s Pizza scandal) and mirroring that public sentiment.

For now, Twitter needs mainstream media more than mainstream media needs Twitter. But Ashton has an audience of 1 million at his fingertips: how much longer will the talent need its mainstream middleman?

video by origami madness

A long long time ago (2005) in a galaxy far far way (Vancouver) when we joined Yahoo! and moved FlickrHQ to the Bay Area all but one or two members of the team lived within ten square blocks of each other in San Francisco’s Mission District.

John Allspaw, a long-time resident of the Mission used to regale us with stories of one of the neighbourhood’s notable quirks commonly referred to as the “donut hole”: The rest of the city could be covered in fog, or raining, but the moment you crossed over in the Mission the sky would open up and the entire neighbourhood would be bathed in sunshine.

When John and George Oates and I used to car pool between the city and the offices in Sunnyvale, we would drive up and down highway 280 and sure enough as you approached the city, at the end of the day, you would drive into an enormous blanket of fog the moment we passed the airport in Millbrae. And as soon as we’d pulled off the San Jose exit there would be an open stretch of clear sky all the way to Civic Center where it would stop again just as suddenly.

Some mornings, when I look out my kitchen window at the clouds hanging over Diamond Heights I like to pretend I can see the curvature of the inside of the donut hole itself. I was reminded of all this the other morning when I was generating some visualizations based on the shapefiles that are derived from the almost 100 million geotagged photos on Flickr.

The larger, blue, contour is the “shape” of the city of Paris (or WOE ID 615702) according to Flickr. The smaller white contours are the child neighbourhoods of that WOE ID with public, geotagged photos. So, what’s going on then?

The first outline maps roughly to the extremities of the RER, the communter train that services Paris and the surrounding suburbs. This is a fairly accurate representation of the “greater metropolitain” area of Paris. Metropolitain areas, increasingly common in both popular folklore and government administrivia as more and more people shift from rural to urban living , are noticeably lacking from the Flickr hierarchy of place types and a subject probably best left for another blog post.

The rest, taken as a whole, follow closer to the shape of the old city gates that most people think of when asked to imagine Paris. Which one is right? Well, both obviously!

Cities long ago stopped being defined by the walls that surround(ed) them. There is probably no better place in the world to see this than Barcelona which first burst out of its Old City with the construction of the Eixample at the end of the 19th century and then again, after the wars, pushed further out towards the hills and rivers that surround it.

There are lots of reasons to criticize urban sprawl as a phenomenon but sprawl, too, is still made of people who over time inherit, share and shape the history and geography they live in. Whether it’s Paris, Los Angeles, William Gibson’s dystopic “Boston-Atlanta Metropolitain Axis” (BAMA) or the San Francisco “Bay Area” they all encompass wildly different communities who, in spite of the grievances harboured towards one another, often feel as much of a connection to the larger whole as they do to whatever neighbourhood, suburb or village they spend their days and nights in.

That’s one reason I think it’s so interesting to look at the shape of cities and see how they spill out beyond the boundaries of traditional maps and travel guides. In the example above the shape for Paris completely engulfs the commune of Orly, 20 kilometers to the South of central Paris, which makes a certain amount of sense.

It also contains Orly airport which isn’t that notable except that we treat airports as though they were cities in their own right because the realities of contemporary travel mean that airports have evolved from being simple gateways to captial-P places with their own culture, norms and gravity. So, now you have cities contained within cities which most people would tell you are just neighbourhoods.

We’re recently finished rendering the second batch of shapefiles and looking ahead I am wondering whether we should also be rendering shapes based on the relationship of one place to another. Rendering the shape of the child places for a city or a country (you can do this using the handy, if awkwardly named, flickr.places.getChildrenWithPhotosPublic API method) would allow you to see a city’s “center” but also provide a way to filter out parts of a shape with low Earthiness (aka water).

The issue is not to prevent, or correct, shapes that provide a “false” view because I don’t think they do. As Schuyler observed, while we were getting all this stuff to work in the first place, and testing the neighbourhoods that meet San Francisco Bay they are really the shapes of people looking at the city. They are each different, but the same.

But maybe we should also map the neighbourhoods that aren’t considered the immediate children of a city but which overlap its boundaries. What if you could call an API method to return the list or the shape of a place’s “cousins”? What could that tell us about a place?

What does all of this have to do with donuts? Nothing really, but it’s a nice way to think about the problem and since we have a long and storied tradition of silly names for projects I imagine this one will stick too.

There are no fixed dates yet for when, or whether, any of this will make its way in to the API but quite a lot of it could be done with API methods already available today. One change we have made is to add a new flickr.places.getShapeHistory API method which include pointers to all the shapefiles that have been rendered for a place. I have dim and distant memories of possible reasons why not to do this, in the past, but the exercise in making donut shapes makes me think I was wrong. The more data and “nubby bits” that people have to work with the more interesting it will be for everyone.

Enjoy!

Such a promising idea. Disappointing result. Not even ginger