This long weekend, most of us will be down by the lake enjoying noodle salad. However, some will spend the upcoming long weekend bidding adieu to the summer by brewing up a symphony that features the dulcet sound of pew-pew-pew. If you belong to the latter group, this post is for you: On-demand cloud gaming service OnLive is discounting all of their cloud-based gaming offerings by half over the Labor Day Weekend.

It appears the mystery as to why Facebook Connect was available, and then not available, has a little something to do with blocked API access. According to sources at All Things D, Facebook denied Apple's Ping access to the application programming interface that would allow users to search for their friends, which left them with only a few friends willing to respond to their emailed Ping requests. Normally, this kind of API access is open and doesn't require any kind of permission, but when it's being accessed numerous times at a very rapid rate (like, say, 160 million at a time), it's natural for Facebook to put a screeching halt to the requests and focus on protecting their users data.

It seems that the Japanese research firm BCN has uncovered a factoid so illogical that could very well rip a hole in the fabric of the universe: In August, for the first time close to a decade, Sony's venerable Walkman outsold the iPod in Japan by 3.8%, with the devices holding a 47.8% and 44% market share respectively. BCN announced that Sony's climb to the top of the MP3 player dog pile is the first time since 2001 that the Japanese company has been able to outstrip the the success of the Apple's multimedia darling.

Is it a sign that Apple's planetary reign of awesome is coming to an end? Sony and any number of the world's electronics manufacturers would wish it to be so, but most likely, it's not the case.

Kara Swisher of All Things D managed to ask Steve Jobs why Facebook Connect was omitted from Ping as he was making his rounds through the media demo room after the Apple Music Event. The answer was that Apple had held talks with Facebook about "a variety of unspecified partnerships related to Ping, but the discussions went nowhere," according to Swisher's blog.

The FCC has released several PDFs full of images detailing the specifications and the innards of the 4th generation iPod touch. Check out the photos after the cut and revel at the new iOS device in its docile state. Then, let us know in the comments if you're planning on buying one.

Wednesday was an exciting day to be an Apple fan, but not so much for iPad users (save for that brief iOS 4.2 preview). All of that changed when the clock struck midnight and Twitter released an update to their official app, bringing universal compatibility.