TomTom’s new app for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone is getting attention for its high price tag of $99.99 but is garnering a positive first impression in the gadget blogosphere.

The app offers many of the features offered in its standalone GPS devices, including navigation help, trip-planning tools and multi-language support. “True, it’s not the first app offering turn-by-turn driving instructions for the iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS–but it is from TomTom, an industry heavyweight that is finally delivering on years of rumor and speculation,” Thomas Ricker of Engadget writes.

On Silicon Alley Insider, Dan Frommer calls it “the $100 iPhone app you might actually buy,” adding, “Assuming you use it for more than 10 months, the one-time fee will end up being a better purchase than other similar apps, which run as $10 per month subscriptions.”

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Thanks to Twitter’s rising popularity–and its finite, 140-character message length limit–free URL shortening services have been all the rage recently. But they should not become a critical part of your company’s infrastructure.

Why not? Because there’s no guaranteeing they’re going to work.

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While many professional journalists fondly remember the work they did in college–covering townie news for the university paper or radio station–some are trying to erase their past work from the Internet because it shows up prominently on search engines like Google (GOOG).

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice feature about the subject in its May 15 issue, called “Alumni Try to Rewrite History on College-Newspaper Web Sites.”

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Apple (AAPL) continues to serve as nanny and tastemaker for its iPhone app store. It’s rejected yet another app from the app store: A religious photo parody app called “Me So Holy.” Apple insists the app is “objectionable.”

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Facebook has been putting a lot of effort into its videos lately.

The latest: A beautiful, hi-def video illustrating how the company’s engineers elegantly handle almost 2,000 photo uploads per second and manage more than 40 billion photos. All with what one Facebook engineer, Bob, says is the highest active-user-per-developer ratio ever–about one million users per developer.

But also: Look at how much fun they’re having!

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Is Apple (AAPL) in the process of reinventing the way mainstream headphones are designed for the second time this decade?

Ten years ago, I was the only guy on the train wearing earbuds. Thanks to Apple’s iPod, now everyone is. Is the remote control clicky-thing the next thing every set of earphones has to have?

Apple has been shipping earbuds with built-in microphones and in-line remote controls since the iPhone went on sale in June, 2007. But they’ve increasingly become useful with other Apple products. The new iPod touch and iPod nano, released last fall, respond to the remote control to play and pause tracks, and can access the microphone. New Mac laptops do, too.

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Apple (AAPL) is famous for keeping its gadget pricing steady. But the iPhone app store is a much different market: App developers have cut prices significantly in the last few months. And the market for $10 premium apps seems to have evaporated.

The top 100 paid apps in the iPhone app store have dropped 19 percent in average price over the last two months, according to AppShopper sales charts we analyzed. Today, the average top-100 app sells for $2.55. A month ago, it was $2.78. Two months ago, it was $3.15. (The 50 most popular apps have dropped in price even faster: The average top-50 app now sells for $2.39, down 34 percent from $3.63 two months ago.)

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Turns out we’re not the only ones who’ve been inspired by John McCain’s brilliant idea to suspend his campaign to focus on the economic crisis. The cranks at Twitter are doing the same thing, using “#suspending”–a “hash tag” Twitterers use to track a meme.

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Apple’s (AAPL) new iPhone 3G is supposedly twice as fast as the old one, and its new App Store opens up all kinds of neat new mobile Internet services like baseball video and free streaming radio. Yet AT&T says iPhone 3G users are using less bandwidth than they anticipated.

The carrier expected a 5x growth in data consumption over the old iPhone, but it’s been closer to a 3x jump, AT&T (T) CTO John Donovan said this morning at a Goldman Sachs investor conference, Moconews notes.

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We haven’t spotted many ads so far in Apple’s (AAPL) two-week-old iPhone app platform. But that could change soon: Mobile ad network AdMob is opening … up to iPhone app developers, and is giving away $1 million of free advertising to get developers to use it.

The key difference between AdMob and other iPhone app-focused ad networks we’ve seen so far: It already has a host of big-name advertisers and publishers signed up.

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Have you ever wished you could fall asleep and wake up as Samantha, a 19-year-old who loves the outdoors? Or Erik, a 29-year-old booze hound with cooking skills? Now you can! On Facebook, at least.

An eBay seller named pseudopr415 is auctioning off 10 fake Facebook profiles, each with a minimum 200 real “friends,” who live in major cities across the U.S. The idea: Marketers might want to buy these profiles to sneakily advertise their wares under the guise of a real person. Who are these fake folks?

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Turns out the iPhone shortage isn’t limited to New York Apple stores: Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster called 20 Apple stores nationwide today–and all of them were sold out of iPhones. In a note, Munster says the lead time for iPhones on Apple.com is still “5-7 days.” What does this mean?

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Hulu’s Web video service might never make it as a business. But it’s going to help save me hundreds of bucks a year. Why? I finally packed up my set-top box and canceled cable. Digital cable is a nice service, especially on a high-definition TV. But it’s hard to justify spending lots of money on something I don’t really need anymore. The math is simple: My $80 cable bill adds up to $960 a year.

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