Posted to Twitter by Dana Stevens--@thehighsign

It's the kind of mistake that's irresistible to social media wits: an iPhone app for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign misspells the word America. The app lets users take photos and it currently superimposes the legend "A Better Amercia (sic)" over them. While the Romney campaign is seeking to have the app corrected and replaced in the iTunes store as soon as possible, jokes about the screw-up spread like wildfire across Twitter Tuesday night. It is tempting to run down a catalogue of wisecracks but one tweet represents the general tone pretty well:

Won't you join @andybowers' lead and have your dog share @MittRomney's wish for "A Better Amercia"? Here's mine:twitpic.com/9qte94

— Dana Stevens (@thehighsign) May 30, 2012

No one comes away completely clean, though--the Washington Post's blog entry regarding the screw up was titled "Romney app misspells 'Amercia,'"--unintentionally (we guess?) implying Mr. Romney's app had misspelled the misspelling. Or something.

Embarrassing as the foul-up may be for the otherwise tightly organized Romney campaign, at least it's unlikely anyone will lose a foot over it.

Mr. Simkhai

THERE HAVE BEEN MANY HAPPY BOYS who have found their perfect matches on Grindr, the social network for single gay men, but founder Joel Simkhai has a favorite.

“There was a serviceman in the Air Force, stationed in Baghdad and Kuwait,” Mr. Simkhai said on the phone from Los Angeles, where he lives. “He used Grindr to connect with other gay men in the military—and locals!”

The smartphone application, which debuted in March 2009, employs G.P.S. technology to conjure up the profiles of gay men who are in close proximity to the user. Since its introduction, more than two million men in 192 countries have logged on. Through the social network’s chat channel, users can arrange anything from a friendly coffee date to a random quickie.

And it’s discreet. The soldier stationed in Baghdad didn’t ask, didn’t tell and didn’t care.

“He was just so thankful,” Mr. Simkhai recalled. “It literally brought tears to my eyes, and I thanked him for his service to our country.”

BORN IN TEL AVIV, Mr. Simkhai grew up in Long Island and attended Tufts. After receiving a double major in international relations and economics, he headed to New York, where, despite being young, attractive and out of the closet, Mr. Simkhai found the hook-up scene less than satisfying.

“I’ve always kind of wondered who’s gay around me,” he said. “I’ve always had the situation where I make eye contact and nothing emerges.”

Mr. Simkhai reached out to Dodgeball creator Dennis Crowley and asked if he could develop an add-on for his startup—which was later bought by Google and inspired his next project, Foursquare—for gay men to pinpoint the exact location of other gay men.

When he declined, he decided to create the thing on his own. The second generation iPhone came equipped with G.P.S., so Mr. Simkhai asked a software developer in Denmark to lay the groundwork for a startup that could utilize that technology.

Grindr has been wildly successful, at least among its target audience. Now, two years after its launch, the app is poised to grow its user base to include women and heterosexuals. Code-named Project Amicus, the new arm of the site will debut later this year.

Being straight, I had only recently become familiar with the Grindr app. I was first struck but the name, the racy insinuations of that word, the way the d and the r rub up against one another. Nice branding!

Mr. Simkhai, however, plays coy on the subject of Grindr’s sexual implications. “That’s not what it’s really about,” he said. “We looked at a coffee grinder, a social stew, mixing people up; that was the inspiration for the name.”

We told him the name reminded us of hardcore foreplay.

“Even if you were to grind two people together, that’s not sex,” he said. “It is intimate, and that’s cool. We’re not scared of intimacy.”

In that case, I asked Joel if he thought it would be O.K. if I got a Grindr account of my own.

“I guess you can try it out,” he said. “It’ll be a good test.”

FIVE MINUTES AFTER creating an account on Grindr and uploading a good-looking picture of myself holding a bottle of Chambord—when in Rome, right?—I received a message from a man wearing a button down shirt and flashing a toothy, wholesome smile. He was 32 years old, six feet tall and 400 feet away.

“Very cute,” he chatted me.

“Oh cool,” I chatted him back. “Hey, wanna meet near 321 44th for a smoke?”

“I wanna fuck,” he responded a few seconds later.

“I don’t think I’m ready for that,” I said. “It’s 4:00 in the afternoon?”

“Damn,” he replied. “BJ?”

I’ll give him credit for persistence. “OK, have to be honest,” I said. “I’m a writer for a newspaper, and I’m writing a profile of grindr, so I wanted to try it out.”

“I’d love to play with u : )” he said.

A FEW DAYS AFTER I talked to Mr. Simkhai, I heard back from the military guy he mentioned. He’s a sergeant, first class, works in air traffic control and used Grindr to keep in touch with his boyfriend—they met on a military base in Mississippi—while on duty in Baghdad.

“There were about four or five other men on Grindr at my base,” he said over the phone. “We actually put together a volleyball team, all of the Grindr people. We didn’t name ourselves ‘The Grindrs’ or anything, but we were a team.”

As he moved from one corner of the country to another, the sergeant would fire up his Grindr app to touch base with the homosexual community there.

“You can go anywhere in this world, and you can launch Grindr, and you can find other gay men feet from you,” Mr. Simkhai said. “It tells our user, ‘You’re never alone.’”

That sounded good to me. When Project Amicus launches, a new mass of people will find friends, partners and one-night stands just feet away. Straights may never be as direct about sex as their gay counterparts tend to be, but the new app will at least facilitate the courtship process. All you have to do is whip out your iPhone, that instrument in your pants pocket, and say hello.

Celebrity apps tend to be costly and self-indulgent. But you get to keep a famous friend in your pocket, and some of the apps are pretty fun.

Nicki Minaj is the latest to join the legion of celebs this week at the hot new club, the App Store. Her app, "My Pink Friday," features the Nictionary, with phrases like "dolly lama," along with album samples, news from Twitter and Facebook and glamorous, pink-tinged photos of Ms. Minaj.

Check out the top ten celebrity iPhone apps available now >>

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

But perhaps we can shed these worries, once and for all. Gizmodo reports that iGrill is releasing a meat thermometer that, when hooked up to your iPhone via Bluetooth, can keep tabs on the internal temperature of you holiday ham, even if you're up to 200 feet away.

Handling your meat, hands-free! Christmas really is the most wonderful time of the year.

Check out The Top Tech Breakthroughs We're Still Waiting For. >>

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

We read the whole thing on a browser, as most people probably did. Anderson and Wolff each take up one half of the screen with their respective takes. Anderson's approach blames consumers for the web's perceived over-ness, citing our need for specialized apps as opposed to browsers. "You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service. You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone." Wolff hinges his piece on the idea that Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs resemble old-style media moguls in the way they control their content, separating themselves from the Google approach and, in turn, from the web in general. "While Google may have controlled traffic and sales, Apple controls the content itself," Wolff writes. "Indeed, it retains absolute approval rights over all third-party applications. Apple controls the look and feel and experience. And, what’s more, it controls both the content-delivery system (iTunes) and the devices (iPods, iPhones, and iPads) through which that content is consumed."

Elsewhere in the "Web is Dead" package, O'Reilly emails Anderson about the "great dance" between an open web and the closed web. "Openness is where innovation happens; closedness is where value is captured," he writes, explaining the value of each version of the Internet. Battelle, however, is not buying Wired's death knell. In fact, he's "particularly unhappy" that everyone is proclaiming the browser-based web to be a thing of the past. "I for one think the 'open, searchable, common platform' is not dead, and no one should be planning a party on its presumed grave," he writes. "It’s simply the most elegant approach to creating the most good in the world, and heralding its end strikes me as not only premature, but also shortsighted. Is that grumpy enough for ya?"

The pundits mostly agree that the way we've browsed in the past is on its way out and there's no doubt that the entire issue will look great on Wired's Scott Dadich-designed iPad app. Anderson even sneaks a plug for his magazine's new platform into the story—"check out Wired's cool new iPad app!" he says parenthetically. Yes, we get it — apps over browsers, the web is dead, etcetera. But another reminder of your prized app? Perhaps a bit much, Chris. It's not free, you know.