Google has launched several new APIs for its Buzz social networking service this week. One of the most significant additions is a new, real-time "firehose" feed that will allow third-party developers to consume all public Buzz messages. The firehose, which is powered by PubSubHubBub, will open the door for building sophisticated Buzz analytics and data mining tools.

Several companies are already using the feed to pull data into their own products. One of the launch partners is real-time search company OneRiot, which now includes messages from Google Buzz in its search results. Google built a sample application called Buzz Mood to showcase the new feature. The source code has been made available to help third-party developers get started on their own firehose-enabled Buzz applications.

Several other APIs have also been introduced, including a method for obtaining the total number of times that a particular URL has been shared in Buzz messages. It's sort of like a Buzz equivalent of the APIs offered by Twitter link-counting services TweetMeme and Topsy.

Although Google Buzz is starting to gain some traction, a brief perusal of the public stream shows that most of the content is aggregated from other services that users have linked with their Buzz accounts.

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Students who use social networking sites don't seem to suffer academically, according to research out of Northwestern University. In a recent paper titled "Predictors and consequences of differentiated practices on social network sites," researchers found that heavy use of sites like Facebook and MySpace doesn't affect college students' grade point averages. In fact, it's the usual suspects such as gender, ethnic background, and parental education that appear to have more of a determining factor in GPA than any kind of Facebook addiction.

According to the researchers' data, female students tend to have higher grades than male ones, and white students have higher grades than non-Hispanic African-American students. Students whose parents have college degrees have higher GPAs than those whose parents only have a high school diploma or lower.

The researchers then added in data about overall Internet use and social networking use, and found that there were no significant differences. "The most prevalent findings... are the persisting differences between respondents with different demographic backgrounds," reads the paper.

Indeed, Internet and social network use didn't affect the difference in GPAs between male and female or white and African American students. However, social network use did eliminate the difference in GPAs between students whose parents had differing levels of higher education. In fact, when controlling for certain demographics, the researchers found a positive relationship between Internet use and GPA.

"The positive relationship between web-use skills and GPA may illustrate that students who have better online skills can draw on their Internet savvy to aid in their schoolwork," wrote the researchers. "[E]ngaging more intensely with [social networking sites], in particular, shows no relationship to our outcome variable of academic achievement."

The researchers do acknowledge that students are perfectly capable of distracting themselves from their schoolwork and wasting time online. However, the positive effects seem to outweigh the negative ones for some students, or at least cancel each other out for others. So, the next time your mom accuses you of spending more time online than on your freshman projects, tell her you're just connecting with your peers for better project collaboration.

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China's controversial porn filtering software, Green Dam Youth Escort, may be at the end of the road. The Beijing Times (via China Daily) reported that China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has pulled funding on the project, and that efforts to secure more have not been successful.

Green Dam has a sordid history given its short lifespan. Last May, the Chinese government quietly ordered PC manufacturers to bundle the software with all computers sold in the country. The goal was to prevent children from seeing porn via a database of blocked sites that could be updated remotely. The software was also capable of performing semantic and image-based evaluation of incoming content.

Soon after the news broke, security researchers at the University of Michigan discovered a number of serious security vulnerabilities in Green Dam, saying that malicious websites could take advantage of the software and run arbitrary code on the user's computer. A code exploit was even posted on Wikileaks, and researchers further revealed that a large portion of the code in Green Dam appeared to have been stolen directly from commercial filtering programs in the US, including CyberSitter. (CyberSitter eventually sued the Chinese government for the alleged code theft.)

None of this seemed to faze China—until now, anyway. According to China Daily, MIIT had promised funding for development and a year of tech support to two companies behind Green Dam, but the teams have not received funding since May 2009. That's before news broke in the US about the project's existence in the first place, making us wonder whether China was ever as serious about Green Dam as it appeared.

Because of the lack of funding, the Chinese papers are now reporting that the project has been halted. One of the two companies is refuting that report, however; general manager of Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy Chen Xiaomeng said that the company simply stopped using its former office in Beijing and was not closing. He also said that the company would continue to provide free support to users, even without funding.

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The European Commission is continuing its investigation into allegations that Google is actively demoting competitors' rankings on its own search engine, according to antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia. Almunia spoke at a press conference Wednesday, saying that he's looking into the situation "very carefully" while noting that the investigation is still in its early, fact-finding stage.

The Commission's investigation began in February of this year after several of Google's competitors filed complaints against the company. Price comparison site Foundem and legal search engine ejustice had both accused Google of limiting the success of the competition by keeping their search rankings low on an algorithmic level. (Additionally, the now-Microsoft-owned Ciao! from Bing filed a complaint over Google's AdSense terms, which got grouped together with Foundem's and ejustice's complaints for some reason.)

Google countered that it's not doing anything to demote Foundem or ejustice—it's just trying to give people useful search results. Both Foundem and ejustice aggregate third-party content and have a plethora of outbound links. At best, they do not offer the kind of original content that Google claims is important in its search rankings. At worst, they look like spammy link farms. Either way, Foundem said December of 2009 that Google had lifted its "search penalty" and that its traffic from Google increased by 10,000 percent "overnight."

So, what has changed between February and now? Not much, it seems, though Google took the opportunity to point out that it's working with the EU's antitrust chief to answer all his questions about how Google's search ranking works. "With success comes scrutiny. We have a good case," Google's senior competition counsel Julia Holtz told Bloomberg during a break in the press conference. Almunia reiterated that the EC is taking the investigation seriously, but given the pace at which it has been moving thus far, it doesn't seem likely that Google will be facing sanctions just yet.

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Like the MobileMe Mail client before it, Apple is opening up a beta for a revised version of its Web-based MobileMe Calendar. The new design is again iPad-inspired (perhaps something to look for in the desktop clients come Mac OS X 10.7), adding several useful features in the process.

The current Calendar looks very similar to iCal on Mac OS X. The new Calendar Web app gains new views for month, week, and day, as well as a handy list view. These seem to map very closely to the Calendar UI on the iPad. Along with the UI changes, Apple is adding private calendar sharing with other MobileMe users, public sharing via CalDAV and a read-only Web view, and event invitations with RSVPs. Like the new Mail, Calendar will also gain performance improvements as well.

To sign up for the beta, log in to MobileMe and switch to the calendar. You'll see a link to request to participate, though don't expect instant new calendar goodness. Instead, you'll get the following message: "You're signed up! We'll send you an invitation in the coming weeks."

The beta won't be for everyone, though. For some reason, Apple says the beta will only work with Mac OS X 10.6.4 on the desktop—perhaps due to specific iCal syncing features. It won't sync with Entourage, and for Windows users it doesn't yet sync with Outlook (though support is promised soon). Push updates to the iPad are also not yet supported, though in general it works with the CalDAV support in iOS 3.2.

Apple has a full list of known issues still being worked out for the beta, as well as host of other details in a knowledge base article. Unless you have a compelling reason to sign up for the beta, though (or are willing to help out by filing bug reports), you may prefer to simply wait for Apple to roll out the official update.

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Surprise, surprise! Google's purchase of travel services company ITA is almost certain to come under scrutiny by the government, as soon as the Federal Trade Commission and the US Department of Justice can decide which body gets to do the dirty work. According to an insider speaking to the New York Times, there are currently discussions going on between the two organizations over which one will investigate, though either one would "dig in pretty aggressively."

To say we saw this coming would be an understatement. ITA doesn't just have its own (awesome) website for travel planning, the company's services power Google competitor Bing's travel section, as well as numerous other online travel sites such as Kayak, Orbitz, and CheapTickets. In fact, ITA also powers numerous travel agencies and some airline booking systems.

As we pointed out last week, ITA is clearly very important to much of the air travel industry, and competitors are disturbed by the prospect of Google having full control of such a vital industry tool. Enter the FTC or DoJ, either of which is expected to perform a "significant review" of the purchase, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Still, Google said during the acquisition announcement last week that it planned to honor all of ITA's existing agreements, as well as add new partners. Even if Google just wants to give itself home court advantage while continuing to license ITA's services to others, regulators will have some tough calls to make.

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In a move to bring screen-orientation awareness to mobile Web applications, Google has added accelerometer APIs to the WebKit HTML renderer. The APIs are based on the DeviceOrientation Event Specification, a W3C Web standard draft that describes DOM events for monitoring orientation changes and accelerometer activity.

The WebKit implementation of the DeviceOrientation standard was developed by Google engineer Steve Block, one of the coauthors of the specification. The code landed in WebKit in May, but was only enabled for the Android platform. Google is now preparing to bring the feature to Chromium.

The feature will allow Web application developers to track the device's orientation with JavaScript and programmatically perform certain actions when the orientation changes. Similar features are already implemented in Mozilla's Firefox Web browser. Mozilla's work on the feature preceded the W3C specification, so Firefox has its own, slightly different API. You can see Firefox's accelerometer support in action today in the version of Firefox Mobile that is available for the N900.

Accelerometer API support in Chromium could be useful in the future if Google's upcoming Chrome OS ever comes to tablet devices. The feature is, however, still under active development.

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Netflix continues to inch its way up the movie distribution hierarchy and will soon be able to stream some new releases during the so-called "pay TV window." The company struck a deal with Relativity Media, a distribution house responsible for some major Hollywood films, that will give Netflix users access to streamed movies years faster in some cases.

As many Netflix users are painfully aware, the Watch Instantly pool is typically made up of a random selection of old 'n' busted films (and usually not even the good ones), with the occasional surprise movie that was released sometime after the year 2000. The reason for this is because most distribution houses give priority to their DVD release window, at which time, no one can play the movie until the studios feel they have milked every last drop of DVD revenue.