It's Friday, and you know what that means: Time to get out of the office and go have some fun. But how do you find out where your friends are, and what's going on in your city? Why, with your iPhone of course!

Going.com lets you find cool things to do in your city, and they've got a newly updated iPhone app out. In addition to telling you about events to check out, people to see, and places to be seen right in your own city, you can share where you are with your friends by updating your status on Facebook and Twitter, right from the app. Once you're there, you can let your friends know what you think about the event with ratings, comments, and photos.

Browse popular events around town, share them with friends, get on the RSVP list, see who else is going and get all the info on where it's going down. Sign up at going.com (or log in using Facebook Connect), get the Going App, and get Going!

Of course, if you'd rather just spend a quiet evening over a dinner and a movie with a loved one, there's an app for that, too. Grab the Moviefone app to find out what's playing, view trailers, and get showtimes and directions to theaters nearby.

Either way, use your iPhone to check out what's going on near you, and have a great weekend!

Today is the Running Man's birthday.

If you're an iPhone user (and I don't know why you're reading this blog if you're not), then you'll easily recognize the familiar form of the Running Man popping out from your home screen on a field of red or purple. AOL's Running Man has been an icon - both literally and figuratively - in the online world since he was conceived, and now he's a core champion of our mission to inform, entertain, and connect the world.

He's been around the world; he's been on TV, he's even been a super hero, and it was 13 years ago today that he first arrived on the scene. So here's to you, Running Man. Happy birthday, and thanks for pointing the way to a better, more connected Internet.

The Running Man doesn't need gifts, but he could use your vote. He's been nominated (for a third year) for the Madison Avenue Advertising Walk of Fame. It's the highest honor an icon can get. The Advertising Week poll runs until Sept. 18, and he's up against some strong competition. Won't you help him out by clicking over to http://runningman.aol.com to follow his campaign and to vote? You could even win an Acer Aspire One or two tickets to an exclusive AOL Music Event!

When I was younger, Friday nights meant getting together with friends and going to see the latest movie that hit the theaters. Back then, GI Joe was a cartoon, not a feature film, and when we wanted to find out what was playing, we called 777-FILM. That's when I was first introduced to The Voice. You know the one; he'd answer the phone with "Hello and welcome to Moviefone. If you know the name of the movie you wish to see, press 1..." Over the years, Mr. Moviefone became enshrined in popular culture with appearances on Seinfeld and burned into the minds of a generation of moviegoers like me. I even got offered a job by Mr. Moviefone once (Seriously. He called me and I half expected him to say, "If you want to work in software, press 1").

Now, of course, when I want to see a film, I whip out my iPhone, and with the Moviefone app, I can find a theater near me with GPS, view trailers, read plot summaries and actor bios, even get behind the scenes or movie premiere photos. It's all very high tech and wonderful and a luxury I couldn't have imagined all those years ago. But I can't help be nostalgic from time to time of the era when finding out what was at the movies meant picking up a phone... and actually dialing. I wonder if years from now, today's kids will look back and think fondly of the time when they used to flick through film listings on their iPhone.

Anyway, if you haven't tried it yet, check out the Moviefone app before you check out what's showing. And as always, let us know what you like and don't like about it. We always appreciate your comments.

See you at the movies!

Epilogue: Another icon of the silver screen when I was growing up was, of course, John Hughes. With films like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Breakfast Club and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to his credit, he helped to define a generation, not to mention made dozens of budding actors and actresses into household names. The movies - or at least my version of the movies - wouldn't be quite the same without Mr. Hughes, and so it seems appropriate to say thanks for making us laugh, for making us cry, and for being part of my life in those wonderful, scary formative years. Rest In Peace, John Hughes.

When you use one of our iPhone apps - AIM, AOL Radio, Pixcetera, Daily Finance, or the many other apps that we produce - you're tasting the fruits of a lot of people's labor - software engineers, designers, quality assurance folks, product managers, and more. But there's a set of unsung heroes that I want to call out today - the hard working men and women who work behind the scenes keeping all these services running.

It takes a lot of effort - not to mention thousands of servers - to deliver the billions of instant messages we process each day, or to serve up thousands of hours of streaming radio, or to deliver millions of pictures and maps and stock quotes and movie times. Behind every one of those services is a system administrator - or more often than not - a team of system administrators - that make sure that the machines keep running, that your data stays safe, and that we can continue to provide you with the services that power all those great iPhone apps you love.

We usually take these folks for granted; most of the time the work they do is invisible. It's only when something goes wrong that we notice just how much we are in their debt each day. So today, on System Administrator Appreciation Day, all of us would like to offer a huge thank you to all of the hard working IT professionals - across the industry and especially here at AOL - for helping us to deliver the apps that you use and rely on every day. We couldn't do it without you!

If you're among the many who are lucky enough to have an iPhone and to be able to travel overseas on vacation this year (or maybe you're unlucky enough to have to travel overseas every week on business), you'll soon run into the pain and expense of trying to use your phone while you're away from home. And while AT&T's charges for international roaming are stunning (I get charged for people who leave me voicemail even when I don't answer the phone?), as our friends at TUAW point out, it's no better if you're visiting the States, either.

I was recently in the UK on vacation, and I wanted to share couple tips you might not know about using your iPhone - without using the phone - after the jump.

Recently, several blogs have posted articles suggesting that they've been able to get push notifications from AIM intended for other people. These articles go on to imply that there's been an "exploit" of AIM or of Apple's push notification system that allows this behavior to occur.

All of us take our members' privacy very seriously, so although we've not heard from any users affected by this problem, we began investigating the issue at once, and we believe that unless you've purposefully hacked your phone, your IMs and push notifications remain safe.

Read on after the jump if you want the gory details.

We've heard from a number of you regarding issues you've had using your AOL or AIM screenname to log into iTunes or the App Store on iPhone OS 3.0. We've reported the issue and are working closely with Apple to resolve the issue. Until it is, though, if you want to purchase new music or update an app, you can still log into iTunes on your Mac or PC with your screenname and sync your purchases back to your iPhone. One other thing: you probably don't want to switch to a new Apple ID to resolve this problem. Doing so will mean that your existing music and app purchases will be bound to a different account than your new ones, and you won't solve the problem for apps that you may want to update in the future. We're trying to push this along just as fast as we can, and we're sorry for the inconvenience.

After long anticipation, I'm very pleased to announce that AIM and AIM (Free Edition), both with push notifications, are now available in the App Store. We've been waiting since the iPhone came out to be able to bring you an instant messaging app that works the way you expect, with notifications when you're doing something else like web surfing or listening to AOL Radio, and thanks to Apple's Push Notification framework, we finally can. While we were in there, we took the opportunity to tweak a few things as well. We fixed a couple of compatibility issues with iPhone OS 3.0, improved the speed and stability by making a number of internal changes in the app, and tweaked the fonts a little bit so that we could get more of your conversation on screen, as many had asked. For customers of the paid edition of AIM, we've also added one of your most requested features - support for landscape mode in just about every screen. We'll be continuing to improve our landscape support, and making the feature available in the Free Edition in a future release, but rest assured we're listening to all of your feedback, so please keep it coming. I know a number of you have been frustrated by the wait, especially those of you who've had issues since upgrading to OS 3.0. To all of you, we're sorry. As you know, like all other developers, our apps go through an approval process which, with all of the great apps coming for OS 3.0, took a little longer than anyone would have wanted. But now it's here, and we're thrilled to be able to bring it to you. Future postings will go over some more tips on how to use push, including the difference between Push Notifications and SMS notifications (and when you might want to use one vs. the other), what the "24 hour" sign in means, and how to control the alerts and vibrations you get with push technology. We'll also dive a little deeper into some of AIM's other features, like SMS text integration and location sharing. But for now, enjoy the update. If you're not seeing it in iTunes on your desktop, try quitting and restarting the app. (Note that deleting AIM on the iPhone and reinstalling, as some have suggested, may delete your past conversation state).

As a longtime and hardcore Apple fan and developer (starting for me way back with the Apple II), I think one of the one of the greatest honors is to be recognized by Apple for your work. A short while ago, Apple contacted us wanting to feature some of the work we'd done for the iPhone in an upcoming video. Apple brought in a big production crew, but like many things with Apple, we didn't know it was all for. Today, we found out, and I can't be prouder of our team and its development manager, Christina Wick, who stars in the video. Check it out at http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/iphone, and click on the video link on the right! Congrats, Christina, and congrats to the team!

Here's a big shout out to Apple for paying attention to all the feedback from both customers and developers in announcing all of the good stuff that's coming in iPhone OS 3.0. We're especially excited about push notification, of course (and I bet so are you), but there's a lot of other great stuff that was previewed this week as well. Better media handling, hardware interfaces, more flexible commerce options, and all sorts of other developer goodness is packed in the new SDK. And for users, cut and paste, universal search capabilities, improved parental controls and tethering(!) for users. What more could you want? (Ok, so we could name a couple things, but hey, it's still a very meaty upgrade). For our part, our engineers are already hard at work picking apart the new APIs so our apps will be able to take advantage of the new OS release this summer. I think you're going to like what we've got in store.

Welcome to our new iPhone blog. I was thrilled when the team asked me if I could kick this off by making the first post, until I realized it was probably so that I would leave them alone for a little bit. This blog is where we'll be telling you a little bit about the work I and the rest of the team here do for the iPhone (and of course, the iPod Touch) and get a chance to hear from you with your questions, rants, and hopefully some raves. I'll start it off by introducing the rest of the blogging team here:

• Lee Givens, iPhone and Mac product lead extraordinaire. He's been to more Apple Store openings than anyone I know (I suspect he's been to a majority of them in the US)
• Christina Wick, Engineering Director for Mac products. She's responsible for the team that produces AIM, AOL Radio, ICQ, touchTXT, and SHOUTcast Radio for iPhone. (Yes, all that from one team - and they do Mac software, too)
• Darren Austin, Director of Mobile Products. Darren helps herd the cats here and makes sure that we're able to bring you all the great stuff we've got going at AOL to your iPhone and iPod Touch.

And from time to time, I suspect we'll also hear from:

• Todd Brannam, Chief Architect. You may have seen Todd speak at WWDC 2008, or you might have seen his hand when we launched AIM for iPhone at the Apple SDK launch event last year. When he's not sharing the stage with Apple luminaries, he's cooking up the hot fresh bits that end up on your phone.
• Ron Anderson, Principal Engineer. For the many of you who love AOL Radio for iPhone, you have Ron to thank. Along with one other engineer, Ron built the first prototype for AOL Radio over a weekend, and it was too good not to make into a product.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be talking some about the new products and upgrades we'll be releasing soon, show you what goes on behind the scenes, and we'll continue with the Mac Blog's famous Feedback Friday feature, where we'll answer your questions. And yes, we'll even go into excruciating detail about why AIM for iPhone doesn't support landscape mode (yet). Stay tuned!