Earlier today, there was a lot of hubbub over Facebook supposedly enabling HTML5 video playback on their website. This would, of course, allow Facebook videos to be played natively within the browser on the iPad and iPhone. More significantly, it would be another big blow to Adobe’s Flash format. The only problem? These Facebook videos aren’t using HTML5 at all.

Yes, videos on Facebook do play when clicked on from the iPad or iPhone, but only ReadWriteWeb noted that this was through an h264 player (which both the iPhone and iPad have always supported), and not actually any sort of HTML5 implimentation. We’ve since confirmed this with Facebook which says, “You are correct, this is not html 5. All new videos are encoded in h264 format, so we’re playing videos natively in the iPad since it supports h264-encoded videos.”

Okay, but more importantly, are there plans for Facebook to support HTML5 just as Apple, Google, and many others have started to? “We’ll consider it for the future,” a Facebook representative tells us.

I also took the opportunity to ask about the status of a native Facebook iPad app. Facebook’s iPhone app is easily one of the best applications in the App Store, but since it’s not universal (meaning there are versions for both the iPhone and iPad), it, like all other iPhone apps, looks a bit junky when running scaled to twice its size on the iPad. “We don’t have anything to announce re: your iPad question,” is all I was told.

Facebook was one of the first applications ready to go alongside the initial launch of the App Store in 2008, but it has been missing in action in the iPad App Store. And it’s a problem because a lot of people are searching for it, only to find cheap imitations. You might recall that the creator of the Facebook iPhone app, Joe Hewitt, stopped development on it over his distaste for some of the App Store policies. Facebook brought in a team to replace him, but so far, nada.

Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/facebook-html5-ipad-app/#ixzz0mMxPO2r5

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It looks like Apple has already started sending out the beta version and SDK for the next iteration of the iPhone OS, 3.1, to developers.

The iPhone 3.0 software was released just about two weeks ago, ahead of the iPhone 3GS launch. By most accounts it’s pretty stable, though some users have been having battery issues. That’s why it’s a bit odd that Apple would iterate up to version 3.1 already, instead of something like 3.0.1, which it tends to do for minor updates and bug fixes. Could we be seeing a larger update to the OS already?

I’m told that there’s nothing much of interest in the release notes to indicate anything major that is new or changed.

Here’s the text of the email being sent from Apple:

    iPhone SDK 3.1 beta and iPhone OS 3.1 beta are now posted to the iPhone Dev Center. These versions are for development and testing only and should be installed on devices dedicated to iPhone OS 3.1 beta software development. Please read the iPhone OS Pre-Install Advisory and the iPhone SDK 3.1 beta release notes before downloading and installing.

Update: I’m hearing a few reports that one change is that MMS is turned on by default. Perhaps AT&T is getting closer to turning it on as well in the U.S.

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Over the years I’ve gradually become somewhat impressed at Skinkers‘ sheer doggedness. Matteo Berlucchi has been CEO since its inception in 2001 and has kept on plugging away at their vision for delivering rich media to the desktop, even as the world has gradually moved to the web for the delivery of streaming video. Coming up with Livestation – broadcasting live TV to the desktop – in the mid-noughties, they got $3.5m from Spark Ventures (formerly NewMediaSpark). They they got a Series B round of $16m from Acacia Capital Partners and Spark again last year.

So what have they spent it all on? Well, they’ve been busy working on streaming live TV to the desktop mainly for corporate clients. Livestation offers peer-to-peer enabled streams from broadcasters like BBC and CNN. And it released some open software to download for the average user earlier this year. They are not the only ones in this game of course. Live Web streaming is now common place from TV broadcasters, and there is Zurich-based startup Zattoo plugging away with some desktop software. In the UK INUK Networks has the Freewire software, but it’s been limited to students sitting in smelly dorm rooms. Then there is the on-demand players like Joost and Babelgum and others.

Frankly, either the world was wrong about Web video or Skinkers was on to something. So far they’ve been proved wrong – Joost famously u-turned from desktop software after getting disappointing traction with their desktop app.

On Thursday Livestation will preview a development application for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Perhaps it will be the making of the platform? Who knows. But the irony to all this is that in 2006 Microsoft and Skinkers signed a technology for equity deal in 2006, a first for Microsoft in Europe at the time. So Microsoft will have a stake in bringing live TV to the iPhone. Nice.

Berlucchi will be online on Thursday 04 December at 5pm GMT in a LiveSTation chat room taking questions about their iPhone app. The app, when is hits the iPhone App Store, will only work over Wi-Fi at the moment. But who can wait? Instead, they’ve got a YouTube video, embeded below.

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Sequoia-backed visual search engine SearchMe finally got approval on their iPhone application – it appears to have been sitting at Apple waiting for approval for over two months.

Well, it was worth the wait. Like Google’s voice recognition app, it’s a much better search experience than the default Google search built into the iPhone browser. The app gives you a visual preview of all search results, which is a noticeably better way of searching on a small screen with a small virtual keyboard.

It isn’t in the app store yet directory yet, but you can download it here.

As an aside, will an iPhone developer please send me a screen shot of the “review pending” page that you have to look at day after day as you wait weeks, or possibly months, for Apple to get around to approving your app?

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