Apple has been the darling of the tech crowd for years, but will they remain so if they keep acting like dicks?

Apple’s App Store has become a huge money-making opportunity for developers, but now Apple is starting to behave in a way that can piss off the developer community. Banning apps without notice, while leaving alone similar apps from huge companies like Sports Illustrated and Playboy, will definitely get some attention.

Apple has started banning many applications for its iPhone that feature sexually suggestive material, including photos of women in bikinis and lingerie, a move that came as an abrupt surprise to developers who had been profiting from such programs.

The company’s decision to remove the applications from its App Store over the last few days indicates that it is not interested in giving up its tight control over the software available there, even as competitors like Google take a more hands-off approach.

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Many software developers have long complained about Apple’s strict screening process and, at times, seemingly arbitrary decisions about what was acceptable in the App Store. The company’s latest move, which was first reported by TechCrunch, did little to change their minds.

Fred Clarke, co-president of a small software company called On the Go Girls, which made Sexy Scratch Off, said that as of Monday all 50 of his company’s applications were no longer available. They included an application in which a woman wearing a swimsuit appeared to wipe finger marks from the iPhone’s screen with a rag and spray bottle.

“I’m shocked,” said Mr. Clarke, who said the company had not had a problem with its applications since the first one went on sale last June. “We’re showing stuff that’s racier than the Disney Channel, but not by much.”

Mr. Clarke said his company had been earning thousands of dollars a day from the App Store.

“It’s very hard to go from making a good living to zero,” he said. “This goes farther than sexy content. For developers, how do you know you aren’t going to invest thousands into a business only to find out one day you’ve been cut off?”

So what’s the standard here? Babes in bikinis are OK, but only if they come from a big company like SI?

MG Siegler blasts Apple for its hypocrisy in a scathing post on TechCrunch, but as he points out this will probably blow over as long as Apple continues to dominate this market. That said, we’re seeing a significant backlash against their arbitrary policies. Let’s hope more people call them out on it.

Pepsi ought to leave the dating scene to the pick-up artists. Their attempt to create a humorous app has resulted in an epic fail.

When it comes to dating, the difference between success and failure often comes down to delivery. And as Pepsi Co. learned this week, even a good bit of self-deprecation can’t fix a poorly executed pick up line.

Pepsi’s AMP energy drink released a new app — “Amp Up Before You Score” — which got into trouble with more than a few people for the way it approached the fairer sex.

Pepsi quickly took to social media to apologize, but by broadcasting the apology across platforms and brands (and including a self-deprecating hashtag), Pepsi helped turn the tkt into a tempest.

“Before You Score” categorizes women into 24 types — including “Cougar,” “bookworm,” “treehugger” and “rebound girl” — and then gives users conversational resources, namely wikipedia articles and other superficial info to help with pickup lines. In an additional layer of sensitivity, the app connects to social media so that users can share their conquests: “Get lucky? Add her to your Brag List. You can include a name, date and whatever details you remember.”

In one sense I give them credit for trying. Brands need to find new ways to reach their audience, but this effort is just hilarious.

Google Wave sounds VERY cool.

Google is about to hit a milestone for a product that the search giant hopes will transform how people communicate and collaborate online, and perhaps hook more users on Google’s menu of web based services.

Google Wave, which combines elements of email, instant messaging and social networking to allow groups of people to collaborate on a task in real time, will be previewed starting to more than 100,000 developers and users who have signed up to try Wave and give Google feedback on how well it works.

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Wave users running Ribbit’s applications could, for example, hold a telephone conference that would connect through any kind of voice communication – a mobile phone, a land line or voice-over-internet – and then store a recording of the resulting conversation as an audio file or transcribe the conversation into a text document embedded in the Wave.

Another application Google demonstrated on its blog included a group of friends in scattered locations using the online version of the Lonely Planet guides to plan a trip to Australia through Wave, searching out attractions in Melbourne with Google maps, reading Lonely’s Planet’s description of those places, messaging their thoughts with the rest of the group, and collectively writing up a day-by-day itinerary, within one wave.

The idea here is real-time collaboration on the web. For many of us who have “virtual companies” with workers working remotely in different locations, Google Wave could revolutionize how we work.

There are some issues with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (big surprise) but it’s supposed to work well with other major browsers.

A demonstration is available here.

Google has sent out a bunch of invites for people to use the beta version of the product, and naturally people are all over this on Twitter, as some are trying to sell their invitations – #googlewave.

This is an encouraging story.

On Tuesday, Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, unveiled Apps.Gov, a Web site where federal agencies will able to buy so-called cloud computing applications and services that have been approved by the government to replace more costly and cumbersome computing services at their own locations.

The push to promote cloud computing is part of the Obama administration’s effort to modernize the government’s information technology systems and to help reduce the $75 billion annual budget for federal I.T. in the process.

The apps storefront, which is run by the General Services Administration, includes an array of business applications, productivity software, services like storage and Web hosting and social applications. In a speech at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, Mr. Kundra said that the cloud offerings could be cheaper and more energy-efficient and allow the federal government to benefit from the same technological advances that most consumers enjoy.

Wow. Is it possible that we finally have an administration that embraces technology and the Internet? Can you imagine how much money our government wastes on inefficient systems and hardware?

Assuming they can manage the security issues, this could be a huge benefit for the government, making it more efficient, more effective, and cheaper as well.

This one sounds interesting.

The “limited beta” has become a right of passage for budding Web companies. In the case of Seattle-based Gist.com, an e-mail in-box management service, it’s a business strategy.

Gist launched on Tuesday, concluding an almost two-year period of controlled growth. During that time, thousands of potential users signed up for an invitation and dutifully filled out a survey for potential users. In exchange for the mere chance to be invited to test the service, chief executive T.A. McCann got from users behavioral data, feature ideas and marketing leads–all for free.

The relationship management service scours some 60,000 news sources, 20 million blogs and 600,000 Twitter handles and matches up the information they find to a contact list generated from a user’s e-mail correspondence. The result is that Gist is an advanced Web communication tool that helps you keep tabs on the people and companies that matter most. Some of the company’s success, however, comes from one the Web’s most primitive of communication tools: online forms.

We’ll see how this does, but there’s a clear need for this service, as we all struggle to manage all sorts of online accounts. Anything that can centralize one’s networking strategy is worth trying.

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting featuring covering the top 5 web trends of 2009. Their latest entry covers the Internet of Things.

The Internet of Things is a network of Internet-enabled objects, together with web services that interact with these objects. Underlying the Internet of Things are technologies such as RFID (radio frequency identification), sensors, and smartphones.

The Internet fridge is probably the most oft-quoted example of what the Internet of Things will enable. Imagine a refrigerator that monitors the food inside it and notifies you when you’re low on milk. It also perhaps monitors all of the best food websites, gathering recipes for your dinners and adding the ingredients automatically to your shopping list. This fridge knows what kinds of foods you like to eat, based on the ratings you have given to your dinners. Indeed the fridge helps you take care of your health, because it knows which foods are good for you.

The potential impact on a new, all-digital lifestyle is quite staggering. The fridge example is a good one, but it opens up so many possibilities.

Imagine how we can monitor aging people in the future. Many seniors currently have little choice but to live in a nursing home. Assisted living is becoming much more common, but with tools like this family members, and health care providers, could more easily monitor loved ones. Home security and personal security is another huge opportunity.

On the other hand, this will raise serious privacy issues as well. In the future, will everything, and everyone, be monitored all the time?

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