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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Now that Yahoo’s (YHOO) search deal is done, the company can finally focus on making itself a better Yahoo. The first step: Build a better homepage.

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When social network app-maker Slide took $50 million in funding to set its value at $500 million in January 2008, the only way to almost justify the outrageous figure was to say Slide wasn’t really a widget-maker, but a huge ad network in the making. Since then, the ad market has cratered even while inventory continues to expand.

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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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Jason Calacanis just put Twitter in business. How? He offered $250,000 to be one of 20 users in Twitter’s “Suggested Follows” for two years.

Twitter is growing so fast that being on the “suggested” list for new users can generate more than 10,000 followers a day. Jason thinks the slots will soon be worth a Super-Bowl-like $1 million a year, as companies compete to be able to send real-time messages directly to millions of followers.

Or not.

Dave Winer complains that the Suggested Follows list is unfair. Twitter investor Fred Wilson seems to agree:

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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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Walking into Gavin Purcell’s office at 30 Rockefeller Center the first thing you notice is his computer monitor. It’s a 52-inch flat screen mounted to the wall across from his desk. The desktop background is a picture of a Sega Light Phaser.

Ladies and gentleman, the co-producer of NBC’s “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon”–debuting Monday–is a geek.

Or at least the former producer of G4’s Attack of the Show, is geek-y. He’s not stuck in a basement somewhere uploading pictures to 4chan, but he knows what 4chan is.

The point is that Gavin and his team are bringing a new sensibility to the business of making a late-night talk show. It’s one that they developed by living in an Internet-connected world. “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” will be a talk show for the Twitter era.

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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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With newspapers croaking right and left, American citizens are justifiably wondering what or who is going to fill the local-paper vacuum. To that end, a handful of companies have tried to float new local news models.

So far, most have failed (WaPo’s Loudoun County experiment, for example). Google boss Tim Armstrong, however, seems to be on the right track with his new company, Patch.

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The Web has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to evolve and leave embedded franchises struggling or in the dirt. Prodigy, AOL were early candidates. Today Yahoo (YHOO) and eBay (EBAY) are struggling, and I think Google (GOOG) is tipping down the same path. This cycle of creative destruction–more recently framed as the innovators dilemma–is both fascinating and hugely dislocating for businesses. To see this immense franchises melt before your very eyes–is hard to say the least.

I saw it up close at AOL. I remember back in 2000, just after the new organizational structure for AOL / Time Warner (TWX) was announced there was a three-day HBS training program for 80 or so of us at AOL. I loathe these HR programs–but this one was amazing. I remember Kotter as great (fascinating set of videos on leadership, wish I had them recorded), Colin Powell was amazing and then on the second morning Clay Christensen spoke to the group.

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When he joined the company last summer, Google CFO Patrick Pichette said he intended to “feed the winners” and “starve the losers.” Lately, insiders have begun crediting him for bringing new discipline to Google (GOOG).

One told us that Patrick has been “taking on a lot of the low-hanging fruit” and that “it’s going to make a difference in revenues over the next year.”

But while its true that since Patrick joined, Google (GOOG) has put its first ads against products like Google Images and Google Finance, the company still has a long way to go before there will be no–pick your metaphor–”losers” or “low-hanging fruit” left.

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In what tech pundits at Gartner Research (IT) call the curve of hype and gloom, Linden Lab’s virtual world, Second Life, has officially entered the gloom stage.

In October, Reuters pulled its full-time Second Life reporter Eric Krangel, who had written daily news stories about the virtual world’s economy for a year and a half, out of the virtual world. Krangel, who now blogs at Silicon Alley Insider, wrote that Linden Lab needs to recognize that “Second Life’s reputation is now a liability,” and that hanging out in the virtual world was “like watching paint dry.” In November, Google (GOOG) seemed to echo the bearish mood toward virtual worlds when it shut down its own online microcosm, Lively.

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