When folks do share a story from The Daily via a service like Twitter, it gets posted to the web as a static image, which is a pretty poor experience. Users can't expand photos within the article or clink on any links to related stories or ongoing coverage.

Maybe that's why social activity has been falling, down to roughly a quarter of what it was back in early February when The Daily launched. According to a piece at the Nieman Journalism Lab, daily readers were sending out over 200 tweets per day the second week of February, compared to around 50 the last day of March.

Both of those data points are pretty alarming, considering that News Corp. has said hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the app. Sure, their audience probably is the trigger happy types from sites like Mashable or HuffPo, who rack up hundreds and even thousands of tweets on single story. But for a fully fledged news staff producing a sizeable paper each day, 50 tweets is an alarmingly low level of activity.

The notion that the walled garden that Apple was creating would encourage users to purchase content they were accustomed to getting on the open web for free seemed to play out at first, with eye-popping sales for certain glossy magazines.

But those numbers didn't last, and yesterday Apple whipped up a hornet-s nest, instituting a mandatory in-app subscription for all paid services and taking a 30 percent cut of each new subscription.

Some companies, like the music streaming service Rhapsody, immediately cried foul, saying their margins wouldn't accomodate such a hefty toll to Apple. Across the web the decision was by turns described as greedy, overreaching or brilliant, and The Wall Street Journal's Nathan Koppel reported that law professors may even see an antitrust case forming against Apple.

For now, publishers have little choice. They can sacrifice profits on Apple-sourced customers in order to maintain marketshare, or they call Apple's bluff and hope Android and HTML5 come through in a hurry. As NY entrepreneur Yaron Galai joked on Twitter, publishers can, "a) pull my app from the App Store, or b) invest *all* available cash in Apple stock."

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper