What you need to know - Friday 9/3/10

Facebook stalker button, Google to launch music, Vox to shut down, Facebook blocks Ping from API

It's another morning, and you know what that means, more news to keep you up to date on the last day of your working week! Enjoy checking out what has happened in the last 24 hours.

Vox is set to shutter its doors. The more family-focused blog service, started by Six Apart in 2006, announced on its offical blog that the service would be taken down forever on Sept 30th. They have added features that will allow end users to export to TypePad, rather then lose all of their content.

Clearly there's some tension between Facebook and Apple. If you haven't noticed, there is no way to find your Facebook friends on Apple's new social network, Ping. Apparently, Facebook blocked Apple's Ping social network access to its API. Normally, APIs are open to third-parties. But in this case, an agreement had to be reached, and Apple's Steve Jobs tells AllThingsD that the terms were "onerous." 

Twitter said its mobile usage has surged. It's up 62% since mid-April to a total of 16% of all hew Twitter users coming from mobile devices. This puts Twitter's user base at 145 million, thanks to its mobile users and mainly due to the applications like Twitter for iPhone, Twitter for BlackBerry and Twitter for Android.

Facebook adds a stalker button, also known as subscribe to user. The new feature, first revealed by All Facebook, the site is  testing a new subscription button which will allow an end user to receive alerts any time a friend takes actions on the social network. Right now the feature is being tested only with a small group of end users.

Google wave in a box. Google announced that Wave, a set of protocols that are designed to support a new generation of communication and collaboration tools, will be available as a stand alone application. According to the official blog post the features will include "an application bundle including a server and web client supporting real-time collaboration, gadget, robot and data API support and a persistent wave store and search implementation for the server."

New York proposes a law to protect those people looking for love online. The Internet  safety act, as the law is being called, would require online dating websites to warn their end users about all of the bad things that can happen when you meet someone online. Matronly warnings, like the every popular let people know where you are going and when you will be back, would be a part of the news standard nagging.

A student was fined $250 and forced to write an essay on the constitutional right to a fair trial to a juror who talked about a court verdict on Facebook. The juror, and pre-medical student, Hadley Jons who is 20 years old was assessed a fee and assigned an essay for the status update "gonna be fun to tell the defendant they're GUILTY,". The essay is due Oct 1st.

Google Music hopes to launch this year. The site, which Google hopes to have the service up by December 1st. The service, which many people are theorizing could take a significant chunk of the iTunes stores revenue. The only caveat, is that despite having hired music attorney Elizabeth Moody to assist them with negotiations, no deals have been made at this point.