It’s not everyday that you get to reveal a new company to the world for the first time. This is one of those cases. PlaceBook is run by former execs from Netflix, among other places, and is about to jump into the location-based service space occupied by Foursquare, SimpleGeo, Gowalla, Brightkite, Whrrl, Loopt, and a few others. You can learn more about the executive team on LinkedIn.

What is their philosophy? That privacy matters when it comes to location data.

Anyway, listen into CEO/founder Michael Rubin as he tells me what he’s seeing happen in location and gives me a first sneak peak at what they are doing.

Then sign up for their beta.

What are they doing? They will give you a variety of location-based services, arranged into metaphorical bookshelf. Applications like personal fitness, trip planning, scrapbooking, among other things. All apps will have a heavy location component. Will this be even cooler than Foursquare? It sure looks potentially that this company will get location at a level few others do. But I’ll let him introduce the company to you in his own words.

Yeah, people are arguing about whether it really is a “retina display.” IE, can your eye see individual pixels on the new iPhone’s screen?

I say hell with that. The screen is the best one I’ve seen — by far.

How good is it? Well, click on the photo above and you’ll be taken to the full resolution photo straight off of my Canon 5D MK II’s sensor of the 960×640 screen on the iPhone (you will have to scroll around a bit to get to the right part of the screen).

Now THAT is sharp!

Oh, and if you still can’t get enough, here’s a video (make sure you click “watch in HD” and open it in full screen mode to get the full effect:

UPDATE: Just for comparison sake, here’s the iPhone 3GS’ screen with the New York Times on it so you can see the difference. It’s not even close! On the 3GS you can’t read any of the text without zooming in, while on the iPhone 4 you can clearly read the text.

Twitter has been down for more than 30 minutes now. Basically since I finished writing that last post about why we should consider Google Buzz again.

Seems that the World Cup traffic has been hammering Twitter.

I sure wish Twitter would get a handle on its scaling problems. Did no one see that an event like this would get everyone to Tweet?

UPDATE: Twitter has posted that they are having sitewide issues. Still is down, now has been down for more than an hour.

UPDATE2: as of 3:20 a.m. Pacific Time I’m able to get to Twitter again.