This past spring, the team at Path realized it was time for a change. The San Francisco-based startup had debuted its flagship photo sharing app (accompanied with a serious amount of media buzz and some mixed reviews) in November 2010, and had spent the first several months post-launch working to perfect the original product.

“Six months ago we stopped. We just said, ‘Okay, what are people really using Path to do?’” Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin said in an interview this week. The company surveyed Path users and found that many were using the app to remember moments in their daily lives — it wasn’t just about sharing photos, it was about cataloging personal memories for themselves. “Ultimately we realized that we had to completely re-imagine Path.”

Path 2, the new version of Path that is launching Tuesday for both iPhone and Android, is what’s emerged from that redesign effort. But to think of this as the 2.0 version of Path would be a big mistake: Path 2 is a dramatically different product than the app the company launched one year ago.

A diary for a mobile and social world
Path 2 aims to be a “smart journal” that catalogs all the big and small moments of your daily life. Along with your photos and videos, the new app has features that let you keep track of your thoughts, the music you’re listening to, where you are, who you’re with, and even when you wake and when you sleep. You can choose to keep each update entirely to yourself, share it with your Path contacts (limited to 150 based on Dunbar’s number), or share it publicly via Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare (Tumblr support is on the way.)

Path 2 screenshot (click to enlarge)

Morin took me through an in-depth demo of Path 2, and for me it had the perfect combination that I look for in the increasingly crowded world of mobile apps: It was both beautiful and actually useful. Lots of people — myself included — maintain personal blogs or use social media sites partly for the same reason that they would maintain a diary: To personally remember what they’ve done. Every New Years’, I vow that I will be better about tracking the little things that make up my days by keeping a journal, but I typically start slacking off on it a couple months in. With Path 2, it could be a lot easier to keep my resolution: It’s on my mobile phone which makes it easy, and the social options make it more fun.

More complexity, more competition
With this redesign, Path is going more squarely into competition with services such as Evernote and even Facebook, the platform on which it was conceived as a much simpler photo-sharing app one year ago. When asked about this, Morin stressed that Path is different from Facebook on several counts: “We’re private by default and always will be, while Facebook is often public by defualt. We’re a tech company, Facebook is a media company. We’re a freemium business, and Facebook is advertising driven.” He was more accepting of an Evernote comparison, but pointed out that many people use Evernote primarily to keep track of their business lives. “What Evernote does for work, we do for life.”

Path 2 music post (click to enlarge)

This move also brings up questions for Path that weren’t there when it was a simple photo sharing app. When you position your service to be something as personal as a diary, users have the right to be a bit more demanding than they would with a more standard social app. For example: Path 2 still does not have a one-button export feature for all your content, although Morin says this is on the way. Right now, the only way to get all your data from the system is by sending an email request to customer service.

Also, the ability to view and analyze your Path data from other perspectives — say by zooming out to see an annual timeline, or a month view — is not yet available. These types of features could be made possible if Path releases an API, which Morin says is a definite possibility for the future.

But will it have staying power?
The question of money is an important one here. Many web startups don’t start thinking seriously about revenue in the first couple years of business, but if you’re going to use an app as your personal journal, you want to have confidence that it will stay around for a while. Evernote, for example, is a profitable business: The company charges $45 per year for its premium app and the company’s CEO Phil Libin has been forthright about his mission to make Evernote a going concern for the next 100 years.

Path, which has 20 employees, is not at a point where it can cover its own costs. Path 2 is a totally free app and Morin says he has no plans to start running ads. The business model is a “freemium” one, but for now the only premium products Path sells are small: Additional photo filter options and the like. Path has other premium offerings in the pipeline, Morin tells me, and the good news is the company won’t have to worry about keeping the lights on for a while: It has taken on some $11 million in funding since its inception.

All in all, Path 2 is a great looking app and it stands a chance to become a big hit in the months ahead. But if it wants people to really be serious about committing to the new app, Path could do well to outline its financial plans a bit more firmly for prospective users.

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionNewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social mediaFlash analysis: the tech startup investment environment, Q3 2011

As we know, sharing photos is one of the most popular things to do on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr. The act of sharing photos has also spawned services like Flickr, Instagram, and 500px who serve that purpose exclusively.

While you probably haven’t gotten around to storing all of your photos in one place with a service like Snapjoy, it can be a maddening experience to try to figure out which site you shared what photo on. Especially if you’re trying to show one to someone at a bar or family function.

SuperAlbum won’t store all of your photos for you, but the iOS app will let you view all of your shared photos from one interface within the app. It’s extremely well done, and fixes a problem I’ve been facing for years.

The app is $.99 cents, which is a steal if you’re facing the problem of “where did I post that photo?” like I am.

All the photos
Once you open up SuperAlbum, you connect the app with all of your accounts. Luckily, most services provide quick and painless authorization, so this shouldn’t take but a few minutes. After you’ve connected your accounts, you can start taking a look at all of the photos you’ve shared over the years.



The thing you’ll notice right away, is that SuperAlbum has a prettier and easier to navigate interface than most of the apps it supports. For example, one of my major gripes with Instagram is that I can’t swipe through a feed of photos, or through someone’s personal collection. SuperAlbum lets you do just that.



Additionally, SuperAlbum will let you save any picture you see onto your iDevice’s Camera Roll, which is really handy if you’re trying to text or email it to someone. The app will also let you tweet a picture instantly, or send it to another application for editing or sharing that SuperAlbum works with, seamlessly.



For the price, SuperAlbum is completely worth it, and as soon as I started using it, I didn’t feel like my pictures were as scattered around the Internet as I first thought. Some of the other services out there should take note of SuperAlbum’s features their own adoption, as I find that even Facebook’s app is sluggish when cycling through photos.

➤SuperAlbum

Jobs. Gates. Ellison. McNealy. A generation ago, they changed the way we live, work and communicate with each other.

Those are the kinds of names that sprang to mind when I first saw the lineup for GigaOM RoadMap, and I thought about the new generation of entrepreneurs that we’re seeing spring up right before our eyes. There’s a whole new set of revolutionary applications and technologies that are being launched today, and a whole new generation of whiz kids leading that charge.

This week I was lucky enough to see people like Jack Dorsey, Brian Cheskey and Drew Houston take the stage and talk about how the world is changing, and how technology is revolutionizing the way we interact with each other. They’re not alone, of course. We could throw out other names — Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, David Karp of Tumblr, Dennis Crowley of Foursquare and Kevin Systrom of Instagram. Each is, in his own way, contributing to a fundamental shift in communication and consumption enabled by the Internet.

Lessons from Outliers
What interests me about this new crop of entrepreneurs is the enabling force behind their rise. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that it was timing more than anything else that gave rise to the personal computing revolution and the entrepreneurs that rode that wave. As Gladwell points out, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs Bill Joy and Scott McNealy were all born within a few years of each other, and all hit adulthood around the same time that the first do-it-yourself computer kit hit the market.

What fundamentally changed personal computing was the introduction of the graphical user interface, which stripped away the need for a command line interface. When all you had to do was point and click, users no longer needed to understand how a computer worked to use one — and that opened up a whole new set of productivity tools and applications.

More than thirty years have passed since then, and we haven’t seen a comparable crop of world-changing thought leaders pop up, all at the same time. Sure, we have Larry and Sergey, but the rise of Google seems a truly extraordinary exception to the more general dot-com crash. There’s Jeff Bezos and Amazon, which also rose to prominence in the same environment. More importantly, however, what those companies focused on is automation, on solving problems and creating efficiencies through data and algorithms. In a way, they were focused on taking humans out of the equation.

People are the connection
This crop of entrepreneurs is fundamentally different. Their mission is not to create tools that increase productivity, but that seamlessly connect people with one another. They’re not building hardware or software or networking technologies; for the most part, that heavy lifting has already been taken care of for them.

The personal computing revolution took hold because the software that runs computers finally became user-friendly. The value that the visionaries of the 80s provided was in taking all of the hardware and software that was already available and simplifying the user interface.

Today’s entrepreneurs are faced with a similar challenge: the Internet already enabled communication through a number of tools like email, voice and video chat. Just as Jobs and Gates provided the abstraction layer on the PC which simplified the user interface, Zuckerberg, Dorsey and others are simplifying the way users interact and enable new applications on top of the network. In a world where everyone is persistently connected through PCs, mobile phones and other devices, the goal is to make sharing between people easy and seamless.

At the core, what they are building are user experiences and removing the barriers that exist in bringing people closer together. That’s why companies like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram — all of which help users connect, share and communicate — are so important. And that’s why, 30 years after the dawn of personal computing, there’s a whole new group of whiz kids that are once again changing the way we think, learn, live and work.

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionNewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social mediaA 2011 NewNet Forecast

Before Steve Jobs had even passed away, people had already started playing the “who is the next Steve Jobs” game — trying to come up with names of technology and design visionaries who might be able to don the mantle of the Apple co-founder and CEO. Jeff Bezos of Amazon? Napster co-founder and Spotify investor Sean Parker? Those names and others have been floated by industry watchers, but listening to Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference on Thursday made me think that he is at least as strong a contender for that mantle (if such a thing even exists) as any of them. Could Dorsey change the way we interact with technology and the world around us in as profound a way as Jobs?

Why do we even need an heir to Steve Jobs? The obvious answer is that we don’t. Jobs was unique, in both positive and negative ways, and the precise combination of those features made him who he was — and thus made Apple what it was. No one is going to be “the next Steve Jobs” because they will have a different combination of strengths and weaknesses, and they may not be as smart (or as lucky) in specific ways. But when it comes to the role that Jobs played in technology — the role of visionary designer, creator, instigator and disruptor — it’s a different story. We need those people more than ever, because visionaries inspire others, and they change the way we look at the world in fundamental ways.

Not just technology, but how it changes us as human beings
I haven’t spent a lot of time around Jack Dorsey, but based on his conversation with Om at RoadMap, he clearly spends a lot of time thinking about the big picture behind the technology that he is involved in. So it’s not just about Twitter and how it works — or what it looks like or even how to monetize it — but how it connects us to our own “humanness” as he put it, and enables us to experience things and see through the eyes of others. He described how he found this an incredibly powerful thing during the protests in Iran, and I think others have had a similar response to the events of the Arab Spring and the earthquakes in Japan and Haiti.

And when it comes to Square — the other company that Dorsey is helping shape and create — it’s not just making payments easier or more efficient that interests him, but how making that easier can help artisans and individuals more easily become fully functioning businesses, and how that could help change society.

Dorsey’s roles with two very different companies have also sparked some comparisons to Jobs, who helped revolutionize animated films with Pixar while also changing the personal electronics industry at Apple (the differences between Square and Twitter are arguably even more dramatic than Pixar and Apple, since Square is device-based and Twitter is an information network). And Dorsey was also forced out of the company he founded, much like Jobs was — after a dispute with former CEO Evan Williams, who funded the company in its early years — and then returned to become the product visionary.

The way Twitter has evolved as a service is also very different from the way things worked at Apple. The company excelled at product design during Jobs’ reign as CEO, but it was notoriously inept at anything service related: iTunes, to take just one example, is a total mess when it comes to usability and design despite years of evolution, and efforts like Ping have effectively been stillborn. One of the most powerful things about Twitter, however, is the way in which the service was transformed by its users, with additions like the @ mention and the retweet — features that were never even imagined by its creators. Steve Jobs, by contrast, wouldn’t even let people replace the battery in his products.

Steve Jobs’ replacement or not, vision is in short supply
From what I can tell, Dorsey also seems to be missing what could charitably be called the “difficult” elements of Jobs’ personality (other people have more blunt terms for it), which are detailed in Walter Isaacson’s biography: the shouting, the merciless humiliation, the ruthlessness even with friends, the crying in meetings, and so on. One of the questions that this description of Jobs raises is whether those things were a necessary part of his success, or simply character flaws. Would Apple products have been the same, or been as revolutionary, if he were a different kind of person?

So is Jack Dorsey the new Steve Jobs? Probably not (although even some early Apple employees think he could be). But he clearly has a vision about two fairly significant areas of the technology sphere — the way in which even a simple service like Twitter can change the way we interact with each other and distribute information in a digital and connected world, and the way a simple payment service like Square can potentially transform entrepreneurialism and small business. And he is thoughtful about the implications of those things in a way that many product or business-focused technology executives are not (he even has a fascination with Zen Buddhist design principles, as Steve Jobs did).

Dorsey has already altered the media landscape with Twitter, whether he knew that’s what he was doing or not, and he is also trying to alter the payment landscape with Square. Either of those would be a substantial undertaking for any technology CEO. Whether those changes turn out to be as massive and transformational as the ones Jobs unleashed remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure — we could definitely use more visionaries.

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionMillennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforceNewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang

Strobe, an App Delivery Network that facilitates getting HTML5 apps up and running on various platforms and app stores, has joined Facebook, CEO Charles Jolley announced today.

Jolley is also the creator of the SproutCore JavaScript framework for web apps that is used to quickly build web apps in the browser. It’s used by companies like NPR, Second Story and Sports Illustrated, as well as being popular among Facebook app developers.

Before Jolley created SproutCore, he was responsible for Mobile Me app development at Apple.

We’re happy to announce that, as of this week, the Strobe team is joining Facebook!

Strobe was founded on the belief that HTML5 can transform the way average people use their mobile phones through apps that are available everywhere, anytime, on any device. Now we’re joining the talented people at Facebook to help develop innovative mobile experiences for their users around the world.

For now, the Strobe service will continue to be available to existing users in its existing beta form. We will provide updates by email if and when this changes. SproutCore, meanwhile, will continue as an independent project.

Strobe has been a fantastic adventure. Thank you to everyone who has supported us. We look forward to working with you again in our future roles.

Sincerely,

- The Strobe Team

Strobe is described as “an App Delivery Network that solves the problem by enabling you to combine what the Web and native apps do best, using cutting-edge tools and technologies. It’s the quickest and easiest way to get your HTML5 applications up and running, on the web and in app stores.”

As SproutCore is remaining an independent product, at least for now, it seems like Facebook is after the technology or skills offered by the Strobe team. This appears to be an effort by Facebook to bolster its web and mobile experience and syncing services between them.

Facebook has come under fire lately for the relatively poor quality of its mobile apps, while at the same time introducing a major revamp in its desktop experience.

SproutCore has become popular among app developers implementing Facebook connect, so hopefully it will continue to support it as well.

Extreme Venture Partners, the Toronto and Palo Alto-based early-stage venture firm, today announced that it is launching a new-and-improved version of its accelerator program, Extreme University — also known as “ExtremeU”. Extreme Venture Partner’s accelerator program has been up and running since 2009 and is aimed at becoming a training ground and valuable ecosystem for Canadian startups targeting the social, mobile, and local spaces.

Extreme University graduates, like Locationary and Uken Games have gone on to raise millions in follow-on financing rounds. Jon Evans also recently wrote about Maide, a current ExtremeU participant that’s turning iPads everywhere into 3-D controllers.

Extreme University’s revamped model will consist of a 12-week program, in which five selected teams will share office space at the venture firm’s offices in Toronto, along with access to its network of founders, advisors, and developers. Extreme University will run two 12-week programs a year, each with five participating startups. What’s more, founders will also have the opportunity to participate in weekly personal sessions with experts and advisors, as well as work directly with key members of of some of the tech industry’s biggest companies.

Case in point: The accelerator is today announcing the first of its collaborating partners, which is none other than the social network of record, Facebook. Representatives from Facebook (which will include Elmer Sotto, FB’s head of growth in Canada, and his team) will work with startups to design and build socially-enhanced products in addition to offering product strategy and design mentorship, including educating founders on the best ways to leverage its Open Graph to create powerful distribution channels for their products.

Facebook reps will also enable startups to test new features on the platform and offer feedback on the tools startups create during the program before they’re launched to the public.

In addition to this awesome collaboration with Facebook, the startups chosen to participate in ExtremeU will receive $50,000 in funding. The venture firm will be taking an equity stake in the companies chosen to participate. While the exact level of equity taken has yet to be decided, it will likely be between 5 to 10 percent.

Among the mentors that will be sharing their wisdom with ExtremeU’s class of startups will be former Facebook VP (and the founder of Social+Capital Partnership) Chamath Palihapitiya as well as Albert Lai of Kontagent, Tomi Poutanen of Yahoo Answers, and more. You can check out the list of mentors here.

Extreme Venture Partners has forged (and is forging) some deep relationships with Facebook, Google, and other well-known tech companies that have significant presences in Canada. While Y Combinator, TechStars et al get a lot play in the media (and deservedly so), it’s nice to see our neighbors to the north building a valuable resource (and ecosystem) for early-stage companies — and encouraging them to stay in Canada and help to build Toronto into a vibrant tech community.

For more on Extreme Ventures, check ‘em out at home here. Startups can apply to ExtremeU here.






Crunchbase





EXTREME VENTURE PARTNERS
FACEBOOK






Financial-organization:
Extreme Venture Partners


Website:
extremevp.com



Extreme Venture Partners (EVP) focuses on providing early stage venture capital and management expertise to startup businesses to help propel them into the big leagues. We work with smart people who have great ideas and the energy and abilities to deliver on them.

EVP has deep roots in the technology and investment communities. We get involved as early as possible in a startup’s development. Beyond the financial resources we provide, we like to take a hands-on approach to supporting our...






Learn more





Company:
Facebook


Website:
facebook.com


Launch Date:
January 2, 2004


Funding:
$2.34B



Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.

The original idea for the term...






Learn more

Video editing startup WeVideo is launching a new product that will enable organizations to use its collaborative editing products in the cloud. The WeVideo Commercial product is aimed at bloggers, journalists, marketers and other video creators who wish to easily edit, manage and publish videos from a single online platform.

By putting editing in the cloud, WeVideo is taking advantage of cloud-based processing power to eliminate the need for expensive editing hardware and software. It’s also betting on collaborative editing, which allows multiple editors to make changes and to approve videos before they go live.

The platform offers a suite of tools that match most prosumer video editing software packages, and it comes with a set of royalty-free audio clips, transitions and graphics. Since all editing is done in a web browser, the platform is agnostic to the device it’s being edited on, whether it’s Mac or PC — and it can even be used to edit on smartphones and tablets when connected to the Internet. WeVideo is also agnostic as to the source file or publishing destination.

Once completed, videos can be published on a corporate website, as well as popular destination sites such as YouTube or Vimeo. WeVideo also incorporates social sharing tools to let users publish or embed videos on social networks like Facebook or Twitter.

WeVideo operates on a freemium model, and it already offers a free, consumer-based product, which it launched at the Demo conference in September. It’s also available to YouTube users as a way to edit videos directly on that site. With the launch of WeVideo Commercial, it’s giving enterprise users a much greater amount of storage (50 GB), as well as up to 1080p video resolution and 24-hour support for $79 a month.

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NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social mediaPlayers and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream AdvertisingManaging infinite choice: the new era of TV user interfaces

The Open Compute battery cabinet.

The Facebook-led Open Compute Project launched a foundation Thursday to help it push the standardization of data center server hardware for webscale deployments. But as the project evolves it’s still hard to see where Facebook ends and Open Compute begins.

Leave the chassis to Open Compute and build something new.
The goal of the new Open Compute Foundation is to bring more vendors and voices into the mix, make sure their contributed intellectual property is well cared for, and to foster the idea that open-source development — so important in software — can benefit the stodgy world of data center servers. At the  Open Compute Project (OCP) launch in April, Facebook laid out building blocks for standard server designs. The idea is that other companies could build and innovate atop those designs and not waste time sweating the nuts and bolts.

“The main thing we want to achieve is accelerating the pace of innovation for scale computing environments and by open sourcing some of the base elements we will enable the industry in general to stop spending redundant brain cycles on things like re-inventing the chassis over and over and over and focus more on innovation,” Frankovsky said in an interview in advance of the foundation announcement. The effort will turn the data center, systems level and server hardware into commodity components designed for scaled out architectures.

The group has big backers with foundation directors including Silicon Valley superstar Andy Bechtolsheim who co-founded  Sun Microsystems and is now chief development officer of Arista Networks. Also on the board are Don Duet, head of global technology infrastructure for  Goldman Sachs;  Mark Roienigk, the COO of Rackspace; and Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel’s data center group. Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s director of hardware and supply chain, is executive director.

What’s inside Open Compute today and planned for tomorrow.
Along with the creation of the foundation, Facebook announced the Open Rack 1.0 specification, which lays out the basic design for power distribution and cooling for the server rack. That spec will evolve over time, integrating such perks as rack-level power capping, and I/O on the backplane at some point, Frankovsky said.

Also on Thursday ASUS said it will open-source its motherboard designs and Mellanox plans to release specifications for 10 Gigabit Ethernet cards. So far the OCP effort has received intellectual property contributions from Red Hat– which will certify OCP servers. Other contributions came from AMD, Dell, and Cloudera. Arista Networks is also now an official member of OCP, although has no specific contributions to announce at this time.

The OCP  has also moved to make OCP hardware more broadly available, working with Synnex, a computer distributor and its manufacturing arm, Hyve, which will act as a hardware OEM. Silicon Mechanics, a maker of rack-mount servers, is also aboard. When the effort launched in April Dell and Hewlett-Packard  both showed off servers that incorporated some of the elements of Open Compute.

 Open Compute Foundation, born of Facebook, still pretty close
The Open Compute chassis.

The fact that a Facebook executive doubles as the foundation’s executive director is bound to raise some eyebrows if OCP wants to shake the perception that it is an effort directed by the social networking giant.  Other open-source projects, notably the Eclipse effort around Java development environments, really hit their stride only after the lead vendor relinquished control. (In Eclipse’s case, that was IBM.) More recently, Rackspace eased some concerns among the OpenStack software crowd by forming an OpenStack Foundation, and vowing to step back.

“We modeled this as closely as possible on the Apache Foundation. Each project starts at an incubation committee which names a lead and [is eventually] voted in or out as a project,” Frankovsky said. “I have one-fifth vote. If the others don’t think it’s cool, it’s not in.”

Frankovsky said the effort is well-funded for now through voluntary seed contributions but the funding model remains a work in process.

What’s next for OCP?
As for what’s next? Frankovsky said the first round of motherboards were based on Intel’s Westmere chip technology while version two will be based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge technology. “Intel and Hyve will do a fast-ramp program,” he said.  OCP has worked to get early access to Sandy Bridge technologies that would otherwise not be available until the second quarter.

Facebook itself is working on some storage specifications it would like to  talk about for its next round of contributions. “Storing data at this scale has some unique challenges. We’ll work on those contributions and with the rest of the community on this,” he said.

The OCP remains focused on the compute platform itself, although Frankovsky didn’t rule out possible future forays into other parts of the data center universe.

Asked if networking was on the agenda, he said:  ”Andy Bechtolsheim has a lot of interest in networking but for now we’ve excluded networking from Open Compute. There’s already ONF [the Open Networking Foundation] and we don’t want to compete, but if the community thinks we should look at the physical layer of Open Compute, that’s a possibility.”

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Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes FlightBig Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4In Q3, Big Data Meant Big Dollars

If you’re a proud parent and owner of an iOS device, you know how important drawing apps are to your little ones. They’re addicted to putting their fingers onto the touch screen and are simply amazed by the stuff they see afterwards.

Why not show them AwwApp, a simple HTML5 web app that’s incredibly easy to use. A Web Whiteboard was developed by Senko Rašić, a web developer from Zagreb, Croatia, who has agreed to do a little interview for The Next Web.

TNW: How did you come up with an idea for an online whiteboard app?

SENKO RAŠIĆ: ”I scratched my own itch. I had a small tablet PC with a lousy choice of touch-friendly apps. Being a web dev, I wrote a drawing web app for myself. People liked it, suggested embedding and sharing, which I added and it turned out to be a hit – sharing is a major feature of AWW now.”

You can use the AwwApp with your friends. Just invite them into the whiteboard and you’ll instantly see what are they drawing. It’s actually quite amazing to see the different uses of HTML5 today; it even has potential to replace current CAPTCHA systems.

AwwApp doesn’t have too many options; you get three different brush sizes, seven colors and ability to invite someone, download your image or share it with friends.

Senko promises that the app will remain free for end users, but he has plans to monetize it in the future by charging a monthly fee to people wanting to embed the functionality into their own apps.

But before he could sell the app, Senko needed a way to test out the embed API interface. So he build a Facebook AwwApp:

The Facebook app was the first use of the embed API I’m offering to customers, so it was a good stress test. Beyond that, I had to work around the fact that Facebook doesn’t expose good real-time API for third parties (so eg. I can’t use FB requests for board sharing) – I’m hoping that’s going to improve in the future.

AwwApp

So go ahead, take out your iPad or any other touch screen device, open up AwwApp and give it to your toddler. While your kids draw with their fingers, you can jump in and draw with them using the AwwApp in your browser.

Photos, Photos, Photos. Now that photography is all digital, we’ve got hundreds of them, sometimes thousands of them. With the iPhone, we’re taking pictures of meals, our cats and dogs, our feet, a funny sign, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

Taking photos has never been easier. Furthermore, photo sharing has never been easier thanks to services like Facebook, Google, Flickr, Instagram, and the list goes on and on.

Everyone is a photographer now, which is fantastic because moments that have never been captured before, are.

But what are we going to do with all of these photos? It’s an area ripe for innovation where I’m personally seeing little or none.

Photo Hosting
Photo hosting is somewhat easy for startups to get into, since cloud storage has become so cheap on services like Amazon EC2. Facebook has developed amazing technology to host photos for over 800 million users, with next to zero downtime. Google, with its infinite server farms, can host photos for every person in the world. Apple has gotten into the game as well with iCloud, sending photos that you take from your iPhone or iPad and sending it to the sky forevermore. Shoot, even Twitter will host your photos now. These services let you host them there and maybe let you categorize them into albums, but that’s about it.

As far as I’m concerned, the best photo feature I’ve seen in years comes from photo host Snapjoy. They let you see a random photo, and give you simple shuffle button.

But so what? You’re storing our photos. That’s just not enough anymore. What’s next?

Photo Sharing
Photo sharing is something that most of us do with the really great photos that we’re proud of. Be it an artistic shot, or a photo of a street sign that says something ridiculous, we’re posting them on the internet for the world to see. The thing with photo sharing though, is that they’re sent into a stream of a zillion other posts.

When I post a photo on Twitter or even Google+, perhaps 50 of my 15,000+ followers are paying attention at any given second.

Twitter now shares the photos that you’ve posted recently in a place that gets the least amount of traffic, your profile. How much time do you spend on someones profile on Twitter? Not a lot. So that’s just not going to cut it. Google+ has photo albums using its Picasa platform, but it still feels disconnected from the overall experience.

Facebook lets you tag people in photos, which is very social, and even has facial recognition software behind it now. This still feels like a utility sharing overall, but maybe Timeline will bring older photos back to life.

Flickr was the absolute best place to share photos, because the community that used Flickr really used Flickr. We used to spend hours pouring through photos, commenting on them, and marking favorites. And then Yahoo! bought them, and the innovation, heart, and soul died.

Instagram has picked up the slack for Flickr by letting you share a photo, slap a filter on it, and post it to a…stream. Mind you, Instagram has done a wonderful job with its “Popular” feature, which lets you see the photos that have been liked the most on the platform. A real community is building there, and since it’s completely mobile, people are interacting there a lot. It still needs work though.

What’s next for photo sharing?

Photo Editing
Photoshop is great, but requires a lot of attention to detail that most normal folks just don’t have. Editing a single photo requires time and passion. A lot of the photos are tossing into a stream don’t feel like there’s enough passion behind them to spend a half hour making them pretty using Photoshop. It’s also expensive software.

I’m excited that Google purchased Picnik, because it’s a nice editing tool that should evolve under Google’s wing, but as we know with Google, products sometimes get purchased and die. I’d hate to see that happen to a product like Picnik.

You could count Instagram as a photo editor, because of its filters and effects, but it’s a bit of a stretch.

Photo editing just isn’t something that has been innovated on enough to make the average Joe and Jill want to do it. But why not? Hosting is bountiful, and sharing is simple!

Photo cards and postcards
Now we’re getting somewhere. We have a ton of photos, putting them on postcards or greeting cards is a perfect way to bring moments to life in a new and physical way.

Apple Card launched, Postagram is doing well, so that’s a space I’d like to see evolve as well. Surely cards and postcards aren’t the only ways to bring a photo to life in a unique way. Digital prints are just boring, so I won’t even spend time on them.

My point is, photos have been around for a long time. It used to be really expensive and time-consuming to get photos taken and developed. You don’t have to do those things anymore, so we’re taking and taking photos, storing them all over the world, and we’re doing nothing with them other than share them briefly, get a comment or ten, and forget about them. I’m seeing some interesting things starting to happen with Instagram’s API, which is a step in the right direction.

Startups, it’s time to start innovating in photography. Fast. It’s a golden opportunity to give us something to do with amazing moments taken and shared in real-time. It’s the day after we take the photos though that the real innovation can begin. Even further innovation can take place on photos we took years ago. Yes, years. Remember those?

If you’ve seen great apps and companies doing new and cool things with Photos, drop them in the comments!

It might sound crazy, but I think there’s an argument that Facebook could become a leading enterprise software vendor for the webscale world if the social-networking kingpin is so inclined. Over the past couple years, it has released details on a number of its internal efforts to automate and simplify the management of its massive infrastructure. As we continue to consume web applications, and cloud services and webscale data centers become more common, Facebook’s tools and expertise could be a cash cow.

During a fireside chat at Structure 2011, NetApp Founder Dave Hitz joked to me that perhaps Facebook would be the next big enterprise vendor nobody saw coming. As I was putting together the third-quarter wrapup report for GigaOM Pro, analyzing the summer’s news highlights and picking out key trends, it occurred to me that Hitz’s offhand comment might actually be right on the mark. In July, Facebook explained how it moved its 30-petabyte Hadoop cluster without taking it offline. In September, it talked about a system called FBAR that helps automate the resolution of system errors to the point that two administrators can manage half of Facebook’s massive infrastructure.

But that’s just in the last two months. In May, Facebook detailed how it moved operations into a new data center thanks in part to a homegrown configuration, provisioning and testing tool called Kobold. Over the past few years, it has blessed data types with a plethora of entirely new products and techniques, from the Cassandra NoSQL database to geographically distributed Hadoop clusters. And say what you will about its reliance on MySQL, but Facebook has undeniably done masterful work to make an old database work at a scale for which it was never designed. It also knows a thing or two about data center design.

Other companies likely would, and certainly should, be willing to pay large sums of money for Facebook’s webscale expertise. Twitter, Reddit and — just a few days into its life as a cloud provider — Apple have already established reputations for shoddy uptime. Other growing companies such as Zynga and LinkedIn, and even the next generation of webscale companies, are also going to run into the same problems that Facebook has. Why recreate the wheel trying to solve problems Facebook has already solved?

It’s already happening elsewhere. Google has converted its deep expertise in running a webscale search engine into its wide array of enterprise services that includes Google Apps and App Engine. Yahoo spun off Hortonworks to capitalize on its extensive Hadoop knowledge. These companies had developed internal skill sets in next-generation technologies, and when markets emerged for those skills, they productized them.

Systems management software and support is a huge market, but few, if any, legacy vendors have products and knowledge that easily translate into webscale environments. Facebook could stand to make a lot of money by consulting with customers on how to build their data centers and architect their applications, and then selling them the software tools to keep those apps up and running. I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if it did.

Image courtesy of Facebook.

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It’s no big surprise that Facebook wants to make it as easy as possible for users to share with their friends what they’re reading, listening to and watching. That was the key message at the social network’s f8 developers conference. But when it comes to video, a little-known law from the ’80s could hold back those ambitions, at least for users who want to seamlessly share what they’re watching on Netflix or Hulu.

The Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which was enacted in 1987 in the wake of the Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination hearings (after Bork’s video rental records were released to a newspaper by his local video store), prohibits companies from sharing viewer records publicly. The act was also at the center of a class-action lawsuit aimed at Blockbuster after the rental store began sharing its records with Facebook back during the Facebook Beacon debacle of 2007.

As a result, some video companies — most notably Netflix — have shied away from integrating with Facebook’s Open Graph, at least in the U.S. While Netflix will allow users to share viewing history with Facebook friends in Canada and in Latin America, it doesn’t plan to roll out the same functionality in the U.S. until Congress removes some uncertainty around the VPPA.

The House Judiciary Committee is considering a bill that would amend the VPPA, but concerns from certain Congressmen could require users to explicitly opt-in each time they want to share what they’re watching. The bill, HR 2471, would clarify what is now ambiguous language about when and how users share their viewing information. In particular, it seeks to amend the type of disclosure necessary for companies like Facebook, Hulu and others to make such information available to others:

“to any person with the informed, written consent (including through an electronic means using the Internet) of the consumer given at one or both of the following times:

(i) The time the disclosure is sought.
(ii) In advance for a set period of time or until consent is withdrawn by such consumer.”

In other words, the amendment as it stands would now let users opt-in once to sharing information with friends and social networks. That is, until they withdraw such consent, or decide they don’t want to share anymore.

That would be a boon for Hulu, Netflix and other video distributors which seek to connect with Facebook’s Open Graph. But some Congressman have expressed concern about the lack of privacy oversight that comes from enacting such an amendment. In particular, Congressman Bobby Scott of Virginia and Congressman Mel Watts from North Carolina had voiced some concerns about the bill during the mark up hearing.

According to Tech of the Hub:

“Congressman Watts is concerned the current bill trades convenience at the expense of privacy. He offered an amendment to require a consumer’s permission explicitly each time video viewing data is shared as opposed to the current bill’s up-front one-time consent… Watts stated the bill ‘does not adequately address the realities of privacy in this age of instant and wide-spread information distribution and consumption.’”

Those concerns are due to the “dynamic nature of friend lists on social networks as well as the lack of safeguards for children.” Under Netflix’s current proposed implementation of Facebook Connect, for instance, only the Netflix account holder would be able to share his or her viewing history on the social network. But many Netflix accounts are shared within a household, which means that the history of multiple users could be broadcast under a single Facebook account — and as a result, a child’s viewing history can be shared without any controls placed on it.

It’s not clear which, if any, version of the bill will be put forward or if it will be passed. But it’s important to note the concerns about the effect that the sort of frictionless sharing would have on social networks, particularly as Netflix, Hulu and others haven’t implemented a satisfactory way to enable multiple Facebook-authenticated users to share the same account.

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Developers who activate and set up their Facebook Timeline, they are now being told that if they don’t choose to publish it now, it will go live on October 19th, 2011.

Even if you’re not a Facebook developer there has been a “hack” of sorts in place to become a developer and gain early access to your Facebook timeline, if you didn’t want to sign up and wait.

At this time, it is not known if Facebook’s Timeline will be available to everyone on October 19th, but as you can see by the screenshot above, Timelines will be published publicly on that date. However, when most of us were getting our Timeline, we weren’t shown a date at all, so this is a recent update from Facebook.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for more information about the Timeline launch, but have yet to hear back. We will keep you updated.

Thanks to @JPKing88 who spotted this and tipped The Next Web.

Well if it isn’t my old friend the new Facebook app developer page … Yes that mysteriously up-to-date Facebook mobile developer page from a couple of weeks ago is officially live with an explanation of how the synchronized Facebook mobile platform will work across its iPhone, iPad, web and eventually Android apps (sometimes these things are so anticlimactic).

And, unlike the simplistic three-step tutorial (below) I was given when I downloaded the new Facebook iPhone app, this developer fact sheet has a bit more information about the motivation behind the changes.

From the looks of it the new mobile Facebook experience is centered around keeping app developers content and complacent on the Facebook platform. In an update released today, both the web apps and iOS apps now feature prominent icons for Friends, Messages and Notifications. In a nod towards developer symbiosis, Facebook is highlighting that Notifications will allow users to follow links to iOS or web apps if they are invited by their friends — In the same vein, users will be able to access apps by clicking on links in their News Feed.

The documentation also suggests that Timeline, another sign that Facebook wants to be the aggregator of all apps, will be coming to mobile soon.

Perhaps the biggest step towards making their developers feel all warm and cozy (and comfortable) in Facebook’s cross-platform mobile integration is Bookmarks, which allow you to navigate to an app from inside Facebook mobile. Bookmarks is a boon for developers seeking to increase virality; I’ve already downloaded one iOS app simply because it was bookmarked on Facebook (“Words With Friends”) and I’m figuring Facebook will drive enough app downloads that it will be able to charge affiliate fees. Facebook told Inside Facebook that their policy was not “to discuss such details.”

Perhaps the only thing about the new features that wasn’t entirely a developer plus was the stipulation that developers cannot use Facebook Credits on their iOS native or web apps, but even that too is mitigated by the fact that both Facebook and Apple take the same 30% cut — so devs are fleeced either way.

While you think they’d eventually link up the two, my Facebook Web app is currently only giving me the option to visit apps that have corresponding HTML5 apps and my Facebook iOS app is only showing me apps that have corresponding iOS apps. I’ve asked Facebook if they’ll ever include both HTML5 and iOS apps across all platforms and they have yet to get back to me.

Perhaps it’s because they’re still bulking up on apps? Their HTML5 “Apps Showcase” is currently slim pickins. 






Crunchbase





FACEBOOK






Company:
Facebook


Website:
facebook.com


Launch Date:
January 2, 2004


Funding:
$2.34B



Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.

The original idea for the term...






Learn more

Thanks to smartphones and wireless networking and SMS and Twitter, we are all swimming in an ocean of real-time information — an ocean that can often seem overwhelming. Are new technologies going to help, or are they going to increase the problem? A presentation at the recent Society for News Design conference included a video called “The Storm Collection,” whose creators imagined a near future in which real-time updates about a news event would be shown in virtual heads-up displays on picture frames, car windshields and even eyeglasses. But would this kind of technology make our information-overload problem better or worse?

In the video (embedded below), the two creators — Matt Thompson, editorial product manager at National Public Radio, and writer/blogger Robin Sloan, who is also part of the media partnerships team at Twitter — talk about some of the technologies we already have for getting live updates about something like a tornado hitting a small town: SMS for text messaging people, mobile media websites with official information, Instagram for sharing photos of damage, and Twitter and Facebook for talking about the event and posting status updates, pictures, videos and so on.

Want to watch a video from an unmanned drone?
What might things look like a few years from now? Among other things, Sloan and Thompson imagine photo frames that include news-related and location-based updates about the person who appears in the picture (“Sarah checked in at Tornado Safety Zone”), televisions and video terminals that show a real-time video feed from unmanned drones flying over the damaged areas, and heads-up displays embedded in car windshields and eyeglasses that give live updates about damage near the user of the device (“Downed power lines in area, please use caution”).

I have no doubt that the things that Sloan and Thompson are describing are close to becoming reality, if they aren’t already. And the benefits of having a photo frame that could update you about the location of the loved one in the picture in case of emergency — by using GPS or a location-based service such as Foursquare, presumably — seem pretty obvious. And if anyone likes a constant stream of real-time news and information about the world, it’s me; I am connected to Twitter almost all the time (as my family will tell you), and I use Instagram and Facebook and plenty of other social services to keep track of what friends and family are doing.

But I wonder whether a world like the one portrayed in “The Storm Collection” would be a positive thing for many people, and particularly those who already feel overwhelmed by the waves of information that they are already subjected to — whether it’s 24-hour TV news programs, or Twitter and Facebook, or all the other real-time sources we are all bombarded by throughout the average day.

The biggest issue is one that media analyst and journalism professor Clay Shirky has described, when he said the problem with the digital age isn’t so much information overload as it is “filter failure.” As Robin Sloan is no doubt aware, Twitter is a great example of this phenomenon in action: it allows you to follow the comments of hundreds of even thousands of people, as I do, but it doesn’t really provide all that many great ways of filtering that content so that it is manageable. Trending topics is one way, and lists are another, but neither of these provides a great solution.

How do we deal with “filter failure?”
Twitter isn’t alone in this; Facebook has implemented “smart lists” and now allows people to “subscribe” to others in the same way Twitter does, but in some ways this actually exaggerates the problem instead of solving it. Google+ has Circles, which allow users to create mini-groups that they can either follow or post their comments to, but many people don’t use them (just as many people don’t use Facebook or Twitter lists, which have been around for a while now). As a result, it’s still easy to become overwhelmed by the “activity stream,” whether it’s Twitter or Facebook or Google.

To come back to “The Storm Collection” example, it looks as though Sloan and Thompson see most of the real-time news updates and unmanned-drone videos and so on coming from media outlets (in this case the Fresno Bee, owned by McClatchy). But the filtering problem exists for media companies as well; in fact, in some ways, it’s worse, because they are taking in so many other sources of content in addition to Twitter and SMS and photos. This is complicated by another phenomenon Sloan and Thompson dealt with in a 2004 video project called EPIC 2014: the explosion of “user-generated content” or citizen journalism that blogging and other tools allow.

As a post from a BBC “user-generated content” editor described earlier this year, filtering and making sense of this never-ending stream of information isn’t an easy task: The UGC desk at the British broadcaster has a large staff that try to verify and “curate” news reports from Twitter and Flickr and YouTube about events such as the revolutions in Egypt. Andy Carvin of NPR has turned his personal Twitter stream into a one-man newswire of curated and verified “citizen journalism,” but even his output is so massive in some cases that it needs a second set of curators using tools like Storify to filter what he has already filtered.

In the presentation to the Society of News Design, Sloan said: “If the world is suddenly this new terrain full of all these new screens and all these new ways to get stories out there, [journalists] should be in the business of identifying rich new territory, sending out scouts, and seizing it.” In the end, the problem may not be identifying or seizing these new territories, but coming up with ways to prevent them from becoming just another piece of flotsam in a never-ending sea of real-time content.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Ed Kohler

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Curating and sharing links on the web is a hot space. Delicious has relaunched, and services we’ve written about like Snip.it are trying to get you to share all of your links on its service.

Utopic goes a step further in helping you discover and share links, videos, music, and pictures that are relevant to you with its brand new gorgeous design and visual bookmarking launch.

Utopic had this to say about its new visual bookmarking feature:

With one click you can now save, tag, share and later quickly recover anything on the internet that you find interesting. The same goes for your favourites and links already shared on social networks. Utopic allows you to automatically import and publish those links in a beautiful visual profile. Topic-based content discovery through other people sharing your interests is still there as well, albeit with a new design and navigation.

Discovery
When you sign-up for Utopic, you can connect your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google reader accounts. The service will then import all of your shared links and media and save them as bookmarks within the site for automatic tagging. This gives Utopic an idea of what type of content you’d be interested in. The results are pretty spot-on.

Once you’ve connected your accounts, Utopic takes about a half hour to go through your links. Once that process takes place, the home page starts giving you content based on your tastes. The service also displays topic tags and suggested friends to follow on the right hand side as well.

The design is visually stunning, and doesn’t make you feel like there are too many options, something other bookmark sharing sites suffer from. The focus is clearly on the content, which changes as you refresh the page.

Sharing is caring
Sharing content can be done in two ways. Once you discover something on the Utopic site, you can share it to any of your connected accounts with a click of a button. Of course, the fact that you shared something will factor back into Utopic finding more relevant stories for you, so it pays to share what you like using the service.

The second way to share using Utopic is its new visual bookmarking feature, which is actually really nice. When you visit a site or piece of content that you like and want to share or save for yourself, you can simply use their bookmarklet, click “<3 it", and you're given a very lovely window that shows you how the content will be saved. The service even dynamically creates tags based on the content you're sharing. That feature sets it apart from the rest. You're able to add notes to the content, as well as tags later on if you like.

The only limitation of the service is that Utopic doesn’t tell you exactly how or why it’s showing you content. I would personally like to know the context of why a certain video or picture is shown. Right now, you’re only told who originally shared it. That’s something, but not enough to make me really trust what Utopic is showing me. The results were very very relevant for me, so I’m not complaining, but as I use the service more I’d like to see a bit more insight into why things are described as “hot topics” for me.

If you’ve ever wanted to share a section of a website, particularly content or text on the page and not an image, taking a screenshot and uploading it is probably too lengthy of a process and doesn’t provide enough context.

Similarly, if you copy and paste text to send to someone via instant message, email, or tweet, the people on the receiving end lose the context of the text.

Enter Marker.to for Chrome, the easy to use highlighter for the web.

Highlight and Share
There’s no sign-up process for Marker.to, which makes things even easier. Simply install Marker.to’s Chrome Extension and when you’re ready to highlight text on a website, just click the marker button on Chrome and highlight as you would do normally.

After you’ve highlighted the text you’d like to share, a pop-up shows on the top left giving you your Marker.to sharing options. A short URL is created instantly, and you have the choice of sending it to Twitter, Facebook, or going directly to the URL. When someone clicks on your shared link, on any browser, they are taken to the section of the page that you’ve highlighted.

 

The Marker.to website tracks all of your shared highlights without even having to sign up. Another nice touch is that publishers can add a Marker.to widget to let your web page or blog visitors start highlighting right right away. If this is of interest to you, Highlighter is another great alternative.

The only problem with Marker.to is that it’s only a Chrome extension. Seeing something cross browser would most certainly get more people to do it. Curating links is nothing new, but highlighting an interesting chunk on a page to share with someone is a deeper experience, and Marker.to does it well.

A number of issues are likely to play a crucial role in the ongoing antitrust investigation into Google, including the question of whether the company is using its dominant position in a way that damages the market (which as we’ve described before is a lot harder to answer than it might seem). In addition to that, one likely argument will be the one that Chris O’Brien at the San Jose Mercury News tried to float this past weekend: that Google’s position is now unassailable thanks to network effects and a number of other factors, and therefore. the company is unkillable. But is this really true?

In his column, O’Brien argues that Google’s grip on its users is “as firm as it is invisible,” and tries to make the case that while there aren’t any obvious signs that Google has an unshakeable monopoly on search, the company effectively does anyway. To take the least convincing part of O’Brien’s argument first, he says millions of people have become habituated to using Google, and this makes it extremely unlikely they will ever switch — even if a better search engine does come along. O’Brien quotes search-industry analyst and Search Engine Land blogger Danny Sullivan as saying:

People can quit smoking any time, too, but they find it very hard to do it. If you’ve got that habit, it’s very hard to break it. People don’t just go over and start trying new things.

This would be a much more powerful argument if using Google was actually addictive in the same way nicotine is, but so far that isn’t part of the government’s case (that I know of). Still, Google has clearly become the default search engine for millions of people, to the point where its name has achieved the status of a verb and people talk about “Googling” something instead of searching for it. And O’Brien argues this can be a barrier to entry into the market because “inertia is a powerful force” (although upstart competitor Blekko doesn’t think it needs the government’s help).

Google’s search position has been declining

But does this mean Google’s position is unassailable, and no one will ever use another search engine? Hardly. Google’s search-market share is only at around 65 percent (depending on which traffic measurement firm you choose to believe), which proves at least some people are already using a different search engine. And not only that, but since Google’s market share has actually been falling recently — from the 80-plus percent level it commanded just a few years ago — we know this group of users has actually been growing fairly steadily of late.

It’s not just our desire to use Google that makes it such a dominant force, according to O’Brien. He argues that the search giant also has a couple of other unfair advantages — such as its massive, globe-spanning collection of servers. This physical infrastructure, he says, makes it virtually impossible that any competitor, particularly a small startup, would be able to match Google on search results and become good enough to draw away users.

If you could get the users and the momentum, it’s possible that some venture capitalists might pony up the money to build out infrastructure. But it would still take years to actually match Google’s current footprint.

There’s no question that Google has a massive server network. It won’t say exactly how many servers it has, but some estimate the number at close to a million, which is about 2 percent of all the servers in the world. So is that a barrier to entry that no one can breach? Possibly. But it’s worth remembering that when Google first came along, no one believed it had any hope of becoming as huge as it is now. Most analysts said the search market was wrapped up by AltaVista and the other big players like Yahoo, since the latter was a giant Internet player with deep pockets.

If there’s one good argument against this position, in fact, it’s Yahoo itself: The company that once dominated the web and was a major player in search is now adrift, without a CEO and thinking about splitting itself up for parts, having sold off its search business to Microsoft after admitting it could no longer compete. And Google certainly didn’t have millions of servers when it started.

All it takes to compete is a better algorithm

What did Google have? A bunch of math nerds and a really great algorithm combined with a completely different way of thinking about search. The company didn’t even have a business model (it would later copy one from a company that Yahoo wound up buying called Overture). Now look at the search market today: Although they’ve been drowned out by the “Google is a monopoly” camp, there have been repeated criticisms that the company’s search results are no longer as good as they used to be, thanks in part to content farms and other spam that makes it hard to find good results.

Google has taken steps to kill off some of these weeds clogging up its results, by improving its algorithm, but there are still criticisms that a raw Google search is not as useful as it once was. And what is becoming more useful are “social searches” that involve networks like Facebook and Twitter, which is one reason why Google has put so many of its resources behind Google+ and plans to make that network a core part of all its assets. In a nutshell, it needs to figure out how to become a player in social search before it loses even more ground to competitors like Facebook.

In the end, O’Brien — and many other critics of Google, including law professor Tim Wu, author of the book The Master Switch – also argue that the search giant is unassailable because it benefits from network effects that no one else can match. In other words, the more people use its search, the better its results get, and the more people come to see it as the default for searching, and so on. It’s a killer combination.

But are network effects a recipe for omnipotence? Not really. Obviously, they can be very powerful, and are likely helping Google maintain its market share, but if network effects were all that mattered, we would all still be using AOL and Friendster. Both had network effects that seemed unbeatable in their day, as did AltaVista and Myspace. They all toppled when a better solution came along, and — while it may seem incredibly unlikely — that fate could just as easily befall Google.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Stefan and World Economic Forum

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Facebook’s recent launch of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “frictionless sharing” — in which apps from services like Spotify and publishers like The Washington Post  can post a user’s activity to their wall, without asking for permission for every item — has caused a lot of controversy over whether the feature is a worthwhile addition or a massive invasion of privacy. Consumer advocacy groups such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center are arguing the latter, and have even asked the government to step in, while some users have deleted their Facebook accounts in protest. But there’s an argument to be made that Facebook isn’t forcing anyone to share; it’s simply adapting to the increasingly social way that we are living our lives online.

EPIC and the American Civil Liberties Union seem to be making the case that even if users get the choice to share a continuous stream of their activity through one of Facebook’s new “social apps,” they will either forget that they have done this or not understand the consequences of their choice, and therefore will wind up sharing more than they should — sharing that the advocacy groups argue benefits only Facebook, since it gets more personal data. Said EPIC director Mark Rotenberg:

The main point is that Facebook is encouraging users to ‘share’ information in ways that they do not truly control because it is Facebook that ultimately determines who will have access to the information users provided

To some, “frictionless sharing” has more than a few echoes of Facebook’s ill-fated “Beacon” project from 2007, which posted a user’s activity at third-party websites and services to their Facebook wall, but was eventually shut down after criticism over the privacy implications. According to former New York Times  developer Michael Donohoe, the newspaper initially worked with Facebook on a social app similar to the one launched by the Washington Post and The Guardian, but decided the “frictionless sharing” concept seemed like an invasion of users’ privacy, even though users would get full control over whether they chose to share their activity through the app.

The inevitable privacy backlash

Gizmodo writer Mat Honan and others are protesting by either deleting their Facebook accounts or saying they will never use any service that requires Facebook Connect, and longtime web-programming guru Dave Winer says he is also scared by what Facebook is proposing. Spotify, meanwhile, has had to roll out a private-listening option after an outcry over its new frictionless-sharing features, and the fact that users can’t join the service unless they have a Facebook account. I’ve even noticed an uptick in people trying out would-be Facebook competitor Diaspora as well, although it has had little traction since it launched last year.

While it’s tempting to see frictionless sharing as just another cynical attempt by Facebook to get more personalized data that it can use to target advertising (based on the principle that if you aren’t paying for the service, then you are the product that is being sold), there are some clear benefits for users from this kind of sharing. Has Facebook moved too quickly, or overstepped what some feel are the boundaries of privacy? Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean it is going in the wrong direction.

As with many other features of the network, seeing what Facebook calls “lightweight” activity in the Ticker, such as friends listening to songs or reading articles or watching movies, is a way of staying in touch — however briefly — with those friends and connections. It may be noisy, and much of it may be uninteresting, but it also exposes you to serendipitous experiences. I’ve already found music and video clips I’m interested in just by watching that activity. It also fits right in with the concept that underlies Facebook and most social networking, which is what user-interface designer Leisa Reichelt has called “ambient intimacy”: the idea that there’s something to be gained by having transient and lightweight connections to people in your life.

The news feed was controversial too

That concept was also behind another Facebook feature that caused a huge outcry of criticism and led to people quitting the network in droves — namely, the news feed. It seems so obvious and commonplace now that it’s hard to remember when the news feed didn’t exist, but there was a lot of backlash to the feature when it first launched in 2006. Many users seemed uncomfortable with the idea that their activity on the site — whose status they “liked,” whose photos they commented on, etc. — would be broadcast to other Facebook users all the time.

In a lot of ways, that was Facebook’s first experiment in “frictionless sharing,” and it proved to be hugely popular and successful. The news feed is the core of what makes Facebook so virally popular with many users — and what makes them spend longer on the network than virtually every other social website combined, according to a recent survey from Nielsen about our online social behavior.

That kind of success, along with Facebook’s rollout of other features that also push the sharing envelope, has undoubtedly convinced Zuckerberg that his “law of social sharing” — that the amount of data people share doubles every year — is a good predictor of what people will do, regardless of what they say they will do, or how much they criticize features like frictionless sharing from social apps. And soon, the idea that apps are sharing a continuous stream of our activity will seem just as commonplace and uncontroversial as the original news feed.

So is frictionless sharing good or bad? The answer, as with most things that involve Facebook, is a little of both. Some people will probably never accept that the network is pushing them to share more, and will always be suspicious of what might happen to that data, and there will no doubt be incidents when the data is used improperly or leads to something embarrassing. But social sharing online isn’t going away any time soon; it’s not just the core of Facebook, but the organizing principle of the modern web — Facebook is just a symptom of that change, not the cause.

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The moments we have in life are important, and sometimes when we’re using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, we forget to fully enjoy the moment. Or worse, we totally forget the context of the moment. We’re left with a bunch of photos, videos, and tweets with nothing more than a date and time on them. No notes, no guidance on what was really going on at that very moment.

Nostalgiqa for iOS wants to take your memories as they happen and store each item as a “fragment”, with a parent memory. For example, the “Snoop Dogg Concert” would be a memory and “The Cute Girl” would be a fragment. With Nostalgiqa, you could take a picture of said cute girl and tie it to the parent memory.

After you’ve started your memory, and start to save your fragment, you can record text, a picture, and your emotion at the time of the memory. The text feature is interesting, it’s like keeping a private diary that you can make public if you like, or keep for yourself. All of these extra steps will pay off in the future, as with any service, the more data and information you put in, the more you get back by way of visualization and collection.

This is a really neat concept and the app is drop dead gorgeous. It’s nice to see some visual designs in apps, as some developers are using the basic design kits days, and everything is starting to look like Instagram. Sure, the Nostalgiqa way of adding items takes some extra thought, but the outcome is well worth it in the long run.

Nostalgiqa is 99 cents in the iOS app store, and I think it’s well worth it, especially if you prefer to privately record memories and moments for recollection. Facebook’s timeline is a way to bring up the context of when something happened, but again, the full picture of the experience still isn’t there.

There’s public sharing here as well, letting you take a glimpse into other people’s memories and fragments. This exploration feature is equally gorgeous as the rest of the app. After going through some of the text and photo posts that are shared in public, it feels very reminiscent of LiveJournal’s early days.

It will take a lot for the public sharing aspect of Nostalgiqa to take off, but if enough photo moment collectors enjoy the concept of adding a little more “color” to their memories by way of text, then it could happen.

What do Bill Belichick defensive schemes, Tom Clancy novels, Google+ and Facebook have in common? The answer is that all are so byzantine that they leave many people scratching their heads to figure them out.

For NFL playbooks and spy novels, such intricacies are the norm. Social networking should not be that way. The trouble is the latter is rapidly descending into a black hole of complexity that you now really do need one of those Missing Manuals to figure out the basics.

With all of the news coming out of Google and Facebook this week, our relationship with social networking sites has entered the dreaded ”it’s complicated” stage. That’s a shame, since it’s simplicity that attracted us in the first place.

Google’s minimalist interface and ability to execute a search exceptionally well is what catapulted it to the forefront. It made us quickly see just how bloated other services like Yahoo had become as they aimed to become portals. Now Google is a complex portal.

Facebook, much the same, rose to prominence because it was just so simple compared to others. Back in 2007, author/pundit Jeff Jarvis praised its “elegant organization” as the nucleus of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s genius.  Now, however, the interface has grown a lot more complicated. It too is a portal.

Somewhere along the way both Google and Facebook lost sight of keeping things simple
Today Google+ and Facebook are locked in a features arms race the likes of which we haven’t seen since Microsoft Word defeated Wordperfect back in the early 1990s. Both are rapidly adding buttons and gizmos to keep a fickle public in their grasp.

On the one hand, some might see this as a smart move. History has shown us that no single community or social platform has had staying power more than a few years. Users get bored, new platforms emerge and there’s churn. Features encourage tighter connections, more sharing and increase the emotional switching “costs.” It can keep users in their fold – even the disgruntled.

But there’s a balance, and both are starting to go too far
The flip side is that, in social networking, you can go too fast. People already are time starved. Adding new features that cause consumers to have to invest precious mental processing cycles to figure them out may have the opposite effect to what’s intended.

I don’t fault the platforms for innovating. They have to. However, they should consider going a little slower and phase in new advances over time, rather than all at once. Be evolutionary, not revolutionary. Make some features “mandatory,” but allow users to discover the hidden delights.

This is even more pivotal in social networking because of privacy. Already a lot of people fear that Google and Facebook know too much about them. As feature creep becomes the norm, both platforms are encouraging more sharing, not less. The problem is this requires that they add tighter privacy and sharing settings. While welcome, this only creates even more complexity and a vicious cycle ensues. Worse, they’re bucking the trend.

As technology pervades every aspect of our lives, less is the new more
In computing, Apple has remained true to this approach its entire history. Microsoft meanwhile, with its bold new Metro interfaces, is also aiming to make things simpler for users (Microsoft is an Edelman client). In social networking, Tumblr and Instagram are making inroads because  they always keep things simple and elegant. They do a one or two  things really well and they don’t rush. The same is true for mobile platforms like 37 Signals and Instapaper, both of which have eschewed bloat.

Yet they all innovate.
Google and Facebook can learn a few things from these other companies. They should, of course, innovate. However, they must do so carefully. Because if they go too fast, it moves them away from what made them attractive in the first place. And that’s elegance. As they add new features, consumers now must invest more mental energy, not less. This is especially the case when it comes to privacy. It violates what usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s cardinal rule – “Don’t make me think.”

Such bloat over time may have precisely the opposite intended result. It could drive users away rather than keep them closer. And it creates a distinct avenue for disruptive, elegant competitors to come along just as Google and Facebook did in their salad days to gain share.

Steve Rubel is EVP/Global Strategy for Edelman – the world’s largest public relations firm. He tweets @steverubel.

Image courtesy of Flickr user jasminejennyjen.

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Salesforce.com GM of Platforms (and former Heroku CEO) Byron Sebastian

Last week, Facebook and Heroku announced a partnership through which Facebook developers could easily launch applications on Heroku’s cloud Platform-as a Service via the Facebook development portal. That appears to have been a smart partnership for Heroku, which reports it saw more than 33,800 Facebook applications launched on its service since the social network giant unveiled new features at yesterday’s f8 conference.

On the official Heroku blog, Adam Seligman notes “that’s more than 20 [applications] a minute. Facebook has again innovated and captured the excitement of the developer community.”

However, in the comments to both Heroku’s post and on Hacker News, there’s some debate over whether these are “fake apps” launched to get access to the new Timeline feature. It’s difficult to tell, especially because developers don’t need to launch on Heroku to access those features, some commenters claim.

Assuming at least a good portion are actual applications, though, such a large number is also a ringing endorsement for PaaS, in general, which increasingly appears to ideal for developers wanting to build and launch lightweight applications. For individual developers, PaaS is a way to host an application without getting caught up in systems management or other low-level concerns. Enterprise developers get the same benefits, even if they only utilize right now for non-mission-critical Facebook or mobile applications.

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We learned a lot about two people’s lives during Facebook’s f8 keynote on Thursday: Mark Zuckerberg and Nicholas Felton. Zuck showed off photos of his dog and his childhood to demonstrate the company’s new Timeline feature, which made sense. But why was Facebook VP of Product Management Chris Cox talking so much about Felton’s life, elaborating some 10 minutes about how Felton really loved to collect data that would bore most other people? And who the heck is Nicholas Felton?

In short, he’s the god of data visualization. Felton’s work has been featured in Wired, the New York Times  and the Wall Street Journal. He’s received props for turning unwieldy things like all the things that have been written about on Wikipedia or abstract concepts like the economy of ideas into compelling infographics. But he’s probably best known for the mundane aspects of his everyday life. Like the music he listens to and the kind of booze he drinks.

The kind of music Nicholas Felton listened to in 2008 to, as visualized by Nicholas Felton.

The reason for that is that Felton has been turning this kind of data into annual reports about his own life and the life of people close to him ever since 2005. These annual reports contain beautiful data visualizations, which is why Cox called them works of art on stage on Thursday.

However, the reports also provide interesting clues on how to utilize and get value out of data that others would simply discard, which is exactly what Facebook’s new Timeline feature is about. When working on this, Facebook had to decide how to make sense of a person’s life, how to summarize some behavior and feature other events. No wonder they turned to Felton for advice. The data visualization expert was hired by Facebook in April — and on Thursday, it looked like this key hire more than paid off.

Image courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) Flickr user poptech.

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As social-media sites become more prevalent and individuals share more and more details of their personal lives online, I think we need to rethink the bounds of our right to privacy. Not to regulate technology or industries — I actually think government should tread cautiously on that front — or to limit how authorities can access our information, but to protect us from each other.

Existing remedies have arguably worked well over the last century or so, but they don’t stand up very well in today’s web-centric world. By tomorrow — as I explain in a recent Long View on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d) — they’ll be obsolete.

What we call a right to privacy
Although the Constitution doesn’t expressly grant a right to privacy, court decisions and statutes have effectively created one over the years. Now there are somewhat clear limitations on how much the government can interfere with our personal lives, or where the 4th Amendment begins and ends. There are also criminal statutes that protect us against privacy violations by private citizens, such as cybercrime or actual physical intrusions of our personal space.

Often times, though, invasions of privacy merely hurt our feelings. In this case, we’re left with a collection of common law or what are called “tort” claims: intrusion upon solitude, publicity given to private life, appropriation of name or likeness, and publicity placing a person in a false light. They’re defined generally in Section 652 of the Restatement (Second) of Torts (excerpted here), although every state that recognizes them probably has slightly different interpretations.

Publicity given to private life is probably the most interesting because, unlike libel or slander, truth isn’t a defense. And if you’re upset about someone publishing your private details online, that claim is probably your best bet for redress. But in the Web 3.0 era and beyond, it’s probably not enough.

The web changes everything
Our invasion of privacy tort claims were spurred in large part by an influential 1890 Harvard Law Review article by Samuel Warren and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. They were concerned that the invention of the camera, as well as more-invasive journalistic techniques, would result in undue damage to our “right to be let alone.” Newspapers represented an ideal channel for spreading idle gossip about just about anybody and publishing photos that put names and potentially embarrassing details to otherwise anonymous faces in the crowd.

The publicity-given-to-private-life claim has withstood the last century’s technological innovations, such as the television and instant cameras, but it’s antiquated in the face of the web and social media. For one, it carves out an exception for newsworthiness that’s potentially problematic in an age of citizen journalism. It also requires that the information “would be highly offensive to a reasonable person.” Finally, its requirement of publicity instead of mere publication is very limiting and written for a traditional media world. Here’s how the Restatement describes the difference:

“Publication[]” … is a word of art, which includes any communication by the defendant to a third person. “Publicity,” on the other hand, means that the matter is made public, by communicating it to the public at large, or to so many persons that the matter must be regarded as substantially certain to become one of public knowledge.

However, in a world where there’s the potential for even a seemingly innocuous photo to go viral, these distinctions make for some very difficult line-drawing, for example:

If a celebrity’s friend tweets a photo of that celebrity smoking pot in his own house, is that information protected because it’s newsworthy?
If I’m an individual who simply wants to keep to myself — no Facebook, no Twitter, not even an email address — is writing about me on a personal blog or Facebook page, or uploading (and/or tagging) photos of me, “highly offensive to a reasonable person?”
Even if a disclosure is highly offensive, does publication via social media constitute publicity? What if the publisher only has 3 friends? Or 100? Or 2,000?
Does something going viral change a publication among friends into publicity?
What if a Flickr photo from an intimate dinner with friends, not highly offensive, but potentially embarrassing just because someone is ugly, goes viral and the subject becomes a laughing-stock? What’s the recourse?

But it doesn’t stop there. As I discuss in more detail in my GigaOM Pro piece, the confluence of facial-recognition technology, cloud computing and big-data processing could soon make it possible to determine a person’s name and any publicly accessible information about them via a mobile app. Nefarious types with some data-science skills could predict your Social Security number knowing just your name, age and hometown. And it all starts with a single photo on Facebook.

For someone who has intentionally kept a low profile online to avoid sharing personal information, the advent of such technologies completely undermines that personal decision. Far from being just a face in the crowd or a guy at the end of the bar, anyone with a mobile phone and $4.99 app could know more personal information than that person would ever share willingly. All because his friends are sharing the details of their own lives online.

I don’t know how exactly judges and legal scholars might create a new tort claim to balance individuals’ interests in privacy against other individuals’ freedom of speech and technological progression, but it seems like the time is right — more than 120 years after Warren & Brandeis — to rethink our right to be let alone. In an era of viral video and social graphs, information travels faster and further than ever before, making it more important than ever to determine whose right it is to tell their own story.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user striatic.

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This week’s announcement of Skype’s acquisition of GroupMe, and the recent introduction of Facebook’s Beluga-based Messenger, are part of something much bigger than group text messaging: The landscape of personal online communication is changing. The very communication paradigms we’re accustomed to — email, text messaging, chat and wall posts — are starting to be blurred and redesigned. In the next generation of social media interaction, users will communicate online in ways that better mirror their organic interactions in real life. Welcome to the age of fluid personal communication.

In a thoughtful recent post Om said:

“…instead of getting bogged down by the old-fashioned notion of communication – phone calls, emails, instant messages and text messages – [Google] needs to think about interactions…..To me, interactions are synchronous, are highly personal, are location-aware and allow the sharing of experiences, whether it’s photographs, video streams or simply smiley faces. Interactions are supposed to mimic the feeling of actually being there. Interactions are about enmeshing the virtual with the physical.”

I agree, but the concept of fluid communication goes deeper. Until now, personal electronic communication could be crudely divided into two types – active and passive. Email, chat and text messaging are the prototypical active forms. Facebook wall posts, tweets, and Google+ posts, are the prototypical passive ones. Until recently, these two types lived separate lives, but that’s changing, and with it are some of our basic assumptions about online communication. Here are some thoughts about the new challenges and how to deal with them.

Three issues combine to make the story interesting: groups, informational side effects, and the social contract inherent to social networks. They are all important, but the interaction among them is particularly interesting – and confusing.

Groups. If you think of the continuum between emailing a small group of people and posting to a newsgroup or mailing list, Facebook wall posts resemble the latter. But the recent introduction of Google+ Circles, and the renewed interest this has brought to the long-standing (if somewhat dormant) Facebook Lists, blurs the boundaries.  Is sharing a photo with my eight-member “Immediate Family” List on Facebook (or the corresponding Circle on Google+) much different than sending the group an email with that photo attached?  Experience suggests it’s not.

Informational side effects. Email has long recognized informational side effects — the distinction between To and Bcc is the best example of it.  When I address a message to Sally and Bill we’ve achieved common knowledge of the content:  we are all aware of the message.  When I send a message to Sally but Bcc Bill, something more complex happens: Sally and I achieve common knowledge of the content, and Bill and I achieve common knowledge of both the message content and the fact that Sally and I have common knowledge of it. There are other, more subtle informational side effects of To.  For starters, if Sally and Bill don’t know each other, then by emailing them both together I’ve made their existence common knowledge, and disclosed that I have a relationship with both. And obviously they now can communicate directly. I once had a banker who sent email to several of his clients using To, a gross privacy violation. The banker could have used Bcc in that instance, but in other cases that’s throwing away the baby with the bath water. For example, a company may need to send a message to its investors. It’s important that everyone know who all the investors are, but at the same time it may be inappropriate to reveal their email addresses.

Social contract. Careful control of who sees what is perhaps something of a corner case in email, and one can imagine various ways to deal with it; for example, in the company investor’s case, one could Bcc everyone, and includes just their names in the body of the message. But what is possibly a corner case in email becomes central in social media.

A social network is not merely a communication medium. It is first and foremost a place in which social contracts are established and maintained; and when you overlay a communication framework over such a social graph new things happen. The most noticeable complication arises when the social network requires permission to establish a social connection. For example, when I post on my wall, since Facebook adopts a version of email’s “reply-all,” my friends see each other’s posts. Is it appropriate for two of my friends who are not mutually connected to comment on each other’s comment?

So what does this all mean?
The lesson from this is that in the era of social networks we need to revisit communication conventions that previously served us well. In particular, we can’t take for granted the distinction between active and passive communication. Every developer of a new communication service should ask him/herself the following questions:

When a group is created, are the group members aware of it in any way? If yes, what exact information do they get and who decides it?
Is the communication style active, passive, or does it span the spectrum?
What are possible responses to a group message? Reply? Reply-all?  Reply-only-to-other-people-who-have-also-replied? Reply-only-to-people-the-sender-is-connected-to?
When a user communicates with a group, what information does each recipient have about the other recipients?
Who can initiate communication with whom? In particular, when a group receives a message, can any group member now communicate freely with any other member?
If I create a group and communicate with it, and the system permits the recipients to freely initiate new communications with the group, does it remain “my” group or have I now put it in the public domain?

Overlaying multicast communication on top of a social graph is tricky; you need to think about the informational side effects and to respect social contracts. This can get complicated, but the issues are real. To borrow from Einstein: Communication in social networks should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Yoav Shoham is a professor of computer science at Stanford University and co-founder of Katango. These issues have been the subject of much discussion at Katango, but this should not be viewed as describing Katango’s strategy or product offering; the goal is to have a conversation among all of us attempting to improve users’ digital social experience.

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If you’re on a website that uses accounts, the sign in button can be anywhere. Sure, there are some common best practices, but I can think of dozens of sites that put them all over the place. Mozilla is looking to fix that, by bringing the sign in to the browser level.

A new experimental extension that Mozilla has released for Firefox does exactly this. When it’s installed, you’ll see a new “Sign In” button just to the left of the URL box. Clicking this, pops open a window that prompts you for a username and password for the site you’re on. It then shows you when you’re signed into a site, and gives you one-click ability to sign out. Easy. Simple. Nice.

Of course, the site you’re on has to support this functionality. But Mozilla has made it easy to do so, as they outline in their post on the subject. And the best part is that this can be used with any type of log in — it can be a broad one like OpenID, or specific ones like a blog or even Facebook, Twitter, etc — again, if those sites were to implement something like this.

One important note:

It’s worth noting that this feature doesn’t communicate with any server-side components, and doesn’t capture, store or transfer any personal information. The button is semantically the same as clicking “sign in” on a page: it just tells the page you want to sign in (or sign out) right now.

Essentially, Mozilla is just creating a common place for the sign in button to reside within the browser chrome itself. Though they also note that it will support cookies if the site turns that functionality on as well.

While this is open for any site/service to use, it is also an extension of another Mozilla project: BrowserID. As they announced here last month, their idea for this new web identification system is similar to something like OpenID, which has never quite caught on (Mozilla also says it’s more secure and seamless). Mozilla is trying to re-think identification on the web from a high level.

Beyond BrowserID (which is an open technology anyway), Mozilla doesn’t have any real skin in this game. But some of their competitors could. For example, Google is in the process of implementing a signed in experience for their Chrome browser. This already works with Sync, but Google is working on profiles for Chrome as well. Being signed in on the browser level also allows you to be signed in to Google sites, which is key for something like Chrome OS.

Meanwhile, Facebook has been working with RockMelt on a Facebook signed-in experience for that browser (which, coincidentally is also based on Chromium).

And on a broader level, both Google and Facebook have been thinking about this always-signed-in experience quite a bit. This is especially important in mobile, where it can be more annoying to type in usernames and passwords over and over again. This, along with the focus on being a central identity for the web has led to projects like Facebook’s Single Sign On.

So while Mozilla may have mostly noble intentions here, I still suspect we’re going to see more along these lines from their competitors that aren’t quite as noble. That’s not to say they’re meant to be evil, just done for more selfish reasons. Google already has their browser. I’d bet that Facebook will have one sooner or later. This could help Mozilla, as they could end up as the truly open alternative.







Crunchbase

MOZILLA








Company:
MOZILLA


Website:
http://mozilla.com


Launch Date:
1/2/1998


Funding:
$2.3M



Born from Netscape’s 1998 open sourcing of the code base behind its Netscape Communicator internet suite, Mozilla Firefox currently holds approximately 22.48% of the world market for internet browsers...







Learn more

Google is upping the competition with Facebook by turning on games for its Google+ social network, the company announced today. The first titles include Angry Birds from Rovio, Bejeweled Blitz from PopCap and most notably Zynga Poker from longtime Facebook game developer Zynga, which is preparing to go public.

Like Google+, Google is emphasizing that users have control over when they see the games and who they share them with. Users can just click on the games button at the top of their stream.

On the games page, users will be able to see the latest game updates from their circles, browse invites and check out games that friends have played recently. They will also be able to see their accomplishments, which they can share with their circles.

The move ratchets up the competition with Facebook and gives Facebook game developers a new opportunity. Some have felt that Facebook has played favorites with Zynga, which is by far the largest developer on Facebook. Now this will give them more leverage in dealing with Facebook and another place to make some money. Google+ won’t have top Zynga titles like Cityville and Farmville because they’re exclusive to Facebook but it does show that Zynga is further branching out apart from Facebook.

Gaming on Google+ was expected and in fact, Google let slip that the move was in the works. But it’s another sign that Google+ continues to gain momentum. It’s gotten off to a strong start with 10 million members and is showing that it is poised to be a viable competitor in the social space. Turning on games turns Google+ into a larger platform that can become an ecosystem of its own. And if Google can offer developers better terms than what they see on Facebook, it could be a popular place for social gaming developers.

Google is really trying to differentiate itself from Facebook by emphasizing control. The thinking is that users who don’t play games don’t want their stream to be cluttered with game-related updates. And gamers won’t have to subject their non-game loving friends to their game updates.

I don’t know how big a deal that is, since Facebook has clamped down on some of the game notifications you see. But it’s one way that Google is trying to stand out. I think more importantly, it will be about good games and good social connections and the interaction that pops up around that. If Google+ can attract some killer titles, it has a shot at competing in this space. But it will need to keep gathering users to make it worth the while of game devs.

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The recently rolled out Google+ is Google’s latest effort to get a handle on something that so far has eluded the company: namely, gaining access to the data users generate when they post status updates, share photos and comment on friends’ activities. More and more, these social “signals” are becoming a crucial part of how people behave online, and if Google wants to remain on top, it needs to re-evaluate its business strategy and find a way to integrate these features into its search business.

As I describe in a new research report for GigaOM Pro (subscription required), that means other companies that depend on Google for their livelihood — as almost everyone does to some extent — must also change the way that they think about search, in order to take advantage of its increasingly social nature.

Google’s failed attempts at social features are fairly well documented: Orkut was the first — and, until Google+ came along, arguably the most successful — attempt to bolt a social element onto the company’s business. Then came Google Wave, Google Buzz and a number of social tweaks and add-ons for services such as Google News, none of which achieved much success for a variety of reasons (Wave was too complicated and Buzz turned people off because of the way it handled privacy.)

As we’ve explained at GigaOM a number of times, the driving force behind these efforts is not a desire on Google’s part to mimic Facebook or provide a nice place for people to chat about photos of their pets. The main impetus is to extract information from the social activity that occurs on such networks, and to use that information to make better decisions about search results and other targeted services.

Doug Edwards, who was employee number 59 at Google, and involved in the development of Gmail and other major initiatives, described the company’s motivation for its social efforts in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal:

[I]t’s not because they enjoy warm and fuzzy social interaction and they think oh, this would be a really wonderful way to bring our friends together and build a social circle. They look at it and say, “the information created in social networks is extremely important and valuable. If we don’t have access to that information, Google will be less valuable as an information source.”

The key point is that social “signals” — Likes, retweets, etc. — are becoming a much more powerful force in determining user behavior online. In a world where many people devote large amounts of their attention to Facebook, Twitter and other services, the movements —- including shopping-related activity —- of Internet users are being influenced more and more by the recommendations and social signals of their friends.

Google has to figure out how to capitalize on those kinds of signals, in order to maintain its dominant position between Internet users and the information they want. And as the search giant and the rest of the web move toward social signals rather than raw page links, this shift to social search is going to have some profound effects on the search-engine optimization (SEO) industry and the way that companies use these tools to connect to their customers.

The bottom line is that companies of all kinds will have to be more aware of —- and actively involved in -— social networks, so that they can become part of the social signals that Google is indexing. For more on the impact that social behavior is having on search, and some advice on how to take advantage of it, please read the full report.

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The tech industry’s movers and shakers have been saying for months now that the HTML5 is very important. New data released Friday indicates that HTML5 is not just going to be big, it’s going to be huge — and it’s coming fast.

More than 2.1 billion mobile devices will have HTML5 browsers by 2016, up from just 109 million in 2010, according to a new report by ABI Research. Much of this growth will be thanks to Apple’s massive support for the HTML5 platform, according to the study. And Apple is also likely to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the technology’s wide scale adoption. Because Apple has so much control over its software and devices, it will be most poised to take full advantage of HTML features as they emerge in the coming years.

As is often the case in business, where there’s a winner, there’s usually a loser. HTML5 could largely replace Abobe’s proprietary Flash technology. And HTML5′s swift ascent could render Flash irrelevant in short order. “I think the disappearance of Flash is closer than people think,” ABI senior analyst Mark Beccue said in a press release accompanying the data.

HTML5′s projected growth is all the more impressive considering that the actual standard is not officially expected to be completed until 2020, according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body. But that won’t stop companies and independent engineers from developing and deploying HTML5 features, ABI said.

Indeed, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor has said his company is putting a “huge amount of our investment” in HTML5, and Google recently debuted its first homepage doodle composed entirely with the HTML5 mark-up language. It may seem like buzz about HTML5 is everywhere already, but if the latest research is correct, we’re only at the beginning.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user EJ Callow.

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A few weeks ago when I fell in love with Turntable.fm, I wrote about the emergence of a web that was alive. Driven by constant connectivity, this “Alive Web” is a web that is experienced when and if we want. It was about immersion and interactions. It was about having social connections based on an all familiar offline behavior of engagement with other humans.

On this new Alive Web, what we miss doesn’t matter. What matters is the connection and the interactions. We get online to socialize instead of posting status updates, just as we would when we would go to our favorite club or a neighborhood bar.

Last week when I first saw Google+, it became obvious that Google Hangouts was the next big killer app of the Alive Web. Jenna Wortham gets it right when she deems Hangouts as a killer feature of Google+. Having said so myself, I am not going to disagree.

Why? Because Hangouts is about having a conversation, albeit over video. It isn’t a chat (in the traditional Internet sense) and it isn’t a conference call. Hangout with folks you want to connect, even for a few seconds, enjoy an immersive interaction and then move on. It is just for hanging out — just like some of the early killer apps of the Internet such as BBS, IRC and AOL Chat Rooms. And for that precise reason, Hangouts is very different from the video chatting offered by Skype and Facebook.

Having spent nearly a day with the Facebook/Skype video chat, I have to say, that it is shockingly predictable and conventional, two words I rarely use in the context of Mark Zuckerberg’s baby. I have a theory why Facebook wasn’t daring enough with its video offering and chose the safe route — it is worried that it would distract from Facebook’s core behavior of sharing. I mean if you are all hanging out with your friends, why share photos, links or video clips or random status updates?

As I said earlier — if Google wants to beat Facebook, it would have to do social differently. It would have to circumvent Facebook’s two main behaviors — sharing and use of activity streams. In so doing, it would have to figure out a way to encourage interaction, immersion and engagement, both on web and on the mobile. Hangouts is a good start. And for the Alive Web, it’s a big boost.

Recommended reading: How Google+ Hangouts works.

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We are the connected generation. Thanks to our ever-present mobile devices we are always ‘on’ and connected. This allows us to capture a record of all the great things we do, and share our experiences, our recommendations and our memorable moments with friends, colleagues and the world at large, through the medium of popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp. We broadcast these moments out to the rest of the world. We let others share in our passions and see the details of our daily lives. We have become the lifeblood of information for our friends and followers, and they have taken on the role of gatekeepers as we filter and pump information from network to network.

As the opportunities to share information have become more ubiquitous, there has been an increasingly hyped-up debate and concern around the topic of privacy. But is privacy really the issue? As Jeff Jarvis rightly points out, the reason for using social services is for sharing, not hiding. Twitter and Instagram are prime examples of this, where the user is forced to choose between sharing everything or limiting their sharing to a personally selected group who apply for the privilege. Nonetheless, the fact is that although many of us want to share, we want to be able to fine-tune our audience. This challenges services like Facebook where you determine sharing settings in advance of your broadcast.

Has the notion of a ‘friend’ become too diluted by the many different definitions of ‘contact’ across social media networks? Path is trying to redefine this by limiting the number of friends you can add to 50, encouraging you to only share with your “real friends.” But then the question is whether this really solves the issue? Do we only want to share with our close social circle, or do we (as I would argue) have things we want to share with other groups of contacts we would not classify as “friends”?

The problem is that there is currently no universal standard for privacy settings. Each social network has implemented their own interpretation as it applies to types of content shared on their platform. As social networks open up their APIs, allowing users to give third parties access to their content, their social media content can become spread across multiple services. Every network defines their privacy and sharing settings differently, so there is significant ambiguity around how these settings translate when transferring content among services. If you try to inherit privacy settings from multiple services the level of complexity that results is enormously challenging both from a development and a user perspective.

No one has solved this problem yet, and it is a highly relevant and important issue that needs to be addressed. We need a platform where you can manage and arrange all your connections into one simple structure, allowing you to easily define the privacy layers for how, and with whom, you share your content online. And this platform needs to integrate all the social networks.

Facebook Connect was a good first attempt at this, but sadly they quickly closed down their API that allowed you to invite your Facebook Friends to join third-party services. Now you can only view and add friends who are already signed up to that service. The continuation of Facebook Connect in its original form would have made Facebook the major organ of social media sharing, pumping content between networks and controlling the flow to new arteries of social circulation. For users, this would have allowed them greater control and continuity of how their content was shared beyond the confines of Facebook’s network.

Until we create a unified theory of sharing across social networks, there will continue to be great concern around the conflicting definitions of individual privacy. Regulators, in their efforts to protect internet users, are already discussing how to create barriers to protect the individual and simultaneously stifle social sharing. What we need is not greater personal protection through legal limitations, but consistency and standards that are recognized across social networks.

This past week the Google+ platform was revealed, ushering in a promising new chapter in the movement towards a universal standard of privacy. Google+’s ‘circles’ interface allows users to easily organize their network of contacts into spheres of association. Their organizational model for privacy takes what Facebook has developed one step further by allowing the user to easily visualize their different spheres of contacts, and determine which group they want to share updates with as the final step in broadcasting content. Wouldn’t it be great if I could link that structure to all of my other social networks? Let’s hope that Google+ hurdles past the point where Facebook Connect retreated from and becomes the new heart of social network sharing.

Eric Lagier is the cofounder and CEO of Memolane, a service that creates social media timelines for individuals and companies. Lagier formerly was the director of hardware and mobile business development at Skype.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Josh Hallett

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This morning, Facebook launched a new feature called "login approvals," which offers users the ability to further secure access to their Facebook account through the introduction of a second step to the login process. Once opted-in to this security feature, users enter in their email address and password as usual, but will then receive a second code sent to them on their mobile phone. This short, numeric code must also be entered before being able to access Facebook from that computer.

While an extra step may not be to everyone's liking, for those looking for additional ways to secure access to their account, this feature will be welcomed.

Sponsor

Two-Factor Authentication Increases Security
This type of security feature is known as "two-factor authentication," a term which refers to the two separate steps taken to ensure a user is who they say they are. A username (in this case, the email address registered with Facebook) and a password can easily become compromised, as anyone who's had their Facebook account hacked can tell you. What's less likely, however, is for anyone else to gain physical access to your mobile phone.

By requiring that this second code is sent to a device you have in your possession, you can easily keep unwanted third-parties from getting into your Facebook account.

How to Use the Login Approvals Feature

To turn on login approvals, you'll first need to confirm what computer you'll be using, by entering in a security code sent via text message to your phone. Once you enter the code, you'll be asked to save the device to your account, so you don't see the message again when using that same computer.

After this initial setup is complete, if you ever login from an unrecognized device, you'll be asked to enter in another security code sent to your phone.  You will also be notified of this change upon the following login to Facebook, and asked to verify the attempted account access.

If it wasn't you who had attempted to sign in from the other device, you'll be able to change your Facebook password to re-secure the account immediately. However, you can be assured that the person who attempted to hack into your account would not have been able to access it, as they did not have the code sent to your mobile phone at the time.

And if you ever lose your phone, you can return to any previously authorized device to log back into Facebook.

To enable this feature, go to the "Account Security" section of the Account settings page on Facebook, and look for the new "Login Approvals" option. You can access your Account settings by clicking on the "Account" link at the top-right of the Facebook homepage.

Discuss

British developer Tom Hume recently went to hear a talk by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar — who famously posited that most humans can only handle around 150 social relationships — discuss his views on our ultramodern ways of staying in touch.

The session, titled “How Many Friends Does One Person Need?”, took a look through our lives and established that Dunbar’s number appears in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of places: in the military, in families and in business, for example. But aside from encouraging some fairly standard questions (does anyone really get value out of having 5,000 friends on Facebook?), it also prompted Hume to really examine what social services online are getting wrong.

As a result, he has outlined what he calls four “lies of social software:”  the set of assumptions almost every social service online makes, despite the fact that there is ample evidence that they’re wrong.

And they’re pretty bang on:

Your friends are equally important
Your friends are arranged into discrete groups
You can manage hundreds of friends
Friendship is reciprocal and equal

Almost every service offers you a way to make a connection with as many people as you want, and tools to help you categorize that connection into one of a few buckets. Many of us have started to adopt this way of managing our online friends, to try to eke some efficiency out of the system, but let’s be honest: Very few of us manage our lives in this way. We have siblings who are friends, and siblings who are not; we have co-workers we’d share intimate secrets with, and those we just can’t stand. We have friends who are closer to us than we want, and acquaintances who are further away than we’d like. In short, people are messy — and very few pieces of social software are able to reflect the complexity of real relationships.

When they do, they rarely get the credit they deserve. For example, I think one of Twitter’s great benefits was that it made the relationship between two users asymmetrical. I can follow anybody I like, but there is no real reason — besides a sort of social etiquette or the need for backchannel communication — for them to follow me back. That gives more power to celebrities and broadcasters, which can bring more new users in, and it also reduces the influence of spammers and makes the system more scaleable for different sorts of users. Your network can be pruned to be large, small, broadcast, narrowcast — precisely can choose who to follow without finding yourself overwhelmed.

Hume wonders whether, ultimately, we aren’t the ones holding things back:

Managing lists of friends is unpleasantly icky. I bet Google  or Facebook could take away much of the pain of creating these lists by analysing my flow of communications. I bet they could notice and prompt me to confirm changes (“you’re emailing Freda a lot at the moment — working late or is she a friend outside work nowadays?”). Perhaps the challenge is less technical and more how to present this to a privacy-concerned public;

Context-aware sociability is definitely possible. For all that people deride Google’s social efforts, for example, the company has shown with Gmail’s priority inbox feature that it can use our patterns of communication to determine what is actually important to us.

But I don’t think fear over our privacy is why we don’t let these companies in. In fact, we’ve been complicit in helping them erase privacy in many senses. Instead, I wonder whether it’s just that the laws of social networking are simply based on what others have done before.

In many ways Facebook is not a great deal more advanced than it was when SixDegrees and LiveJournal helped set the standard: and it still, by and large, subscribes to these same mistakes about how human relationships work.

Is it something that will ever be fixed?

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The explosion of real-time information through social networks and information services like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube has produced a never-ending firehose of content. It has also created an opportunity for tools such as Storify, the curation service that launched as an open beta Monday. Although the aggregation and filtering of the news is something that has traditionally been done by journalists and major media brands, tools like Storify allow anyone to perform the same kind of function, regardless of whether she’s been trained as a journalist — or even think of what she’s doing as journalism.

Storify is a relatively simple-looking tool that allows a user to pull in content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and other social-media services and create a kind of story stream. As I described in a post after the company’s launch as an invitation-only beta last fall, former Associated Press foreign correspondent Burt Herman started the service after thinking about how journalists could use social media during a Knight fellowship (a video interview with Herman is embedded below). I’ve used Storify and it definitely makes social-media curation fast and relatively simple.

There are other, similar services that also pull in Twitter feeds and allow users to create a kind of ongoing story about an event: Storyful is one of them, and Keepstream is another. Storify recently closed a $2-million Series A funding round with legendary Sand Hill Road firm Khosla Ventures, and Herman says Storify collections have been viewed more than 13 million times.

What Storify and similar tools do goes by a number of different name. Some call it “aggregation,” which is a somewhat mechanical-sounding term, and best describes the more automated approach taken by companies like Google with Google News. It’s also a term traditional media sources often use disparagingly when talking about new media, as New York Times  Executive Editor Bill Keller has when discussing The Huffington Post . Others prefer to call it “curation,” which implies a human being filtering and selecting the best of something and then pulling it together into some kind of coherent whole.

This is the term that many use to describe what Andy Carvin of National Public Radio has been doing with Twitter in the wake of the revolution in Egypt and popular uprisings in Libya. While he doesn’t actually report the news — since he’s thousands of miles away in an office in Washington, D.C. — Carvin selects, verifies and re-distributes the news from hundreds of different Twitter streams he monitors of people who are actually on the ground or have knowledge of what is occurring there. It’s a little like what a news anchor does on television, but with many different sources.

There are other examples as well. This week sees the publication of a book called Quakebook, which is a collection of memories and reactions related to the earthquakes in Japan and the aftermath of that disaster. All the responses were collected through Twitter, and became first an e-book and now a printed version.

We Need Curation More Than Ever
The rise of real-time information sources such as Twitter has produced such an unstoppable wave of content that we need curation and filtering more than we ever have before. And while that used to be something that only traditional media sources did, now it’s something anyone can do, regardless of whether they went to journalism school or work at a name-brand media outlet like the New York Times.

This is part of the reason why Bill Keller and others have reacted so strongly to what The Huffington Post and other digital media outlets do; it represents competition for them as the gatekeepers of information and the trusted oracles of what is important. And that poses a threat not just to their role in the media ecosystem, but to their financial status as well. Is Storify going to do this all by itself? No. But it is part of a much broader trend that is likely to become an even bigger part of the future of media.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Ed Kohler

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Forget everything you did today. Clear your schedule and spend the next half hour watching this video. It’s a presentation by Jesse Schell, founder of Schell Games and former creative director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio. A veteran game designer, he is also on the faculty of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University.

In a talk at the DICE 2010 conference held last week in Las Vegas, he gave a presentation called Design Outside the Box. It is the most mind-blowing thing I’ve seen in a long, long time. And while this presentation was about the future of games, Schell could very well be talking about the future of technology.

Schell, in a very articulate manner, weaves together various technologies — from the social web to reality television to the iPhone to geolocation data — and lays out the future as he sees it. And I buy it. He talks in particular about how no one saw Facebook games coming, and why they threw many people into a panic.

He quips that “there are more Farmville than there are Twitter accounts” and that in Facebook you “pay real money to get virtual money.” From the Playfish acquisition to billions of dollars in revenue generated by WiiFit and Guitar Hero, he talks about how the new games are essentially “psychological tricks.” For instance, Club Penguin offered everything free, including free virtual currency, but in order to spend the virtual money you needed to go to a store where you paid real money.

Schell points out that the future of games is in finding psychological angles and making experiences based in reality. If the past of games was about fantasy, today’s games are about reality (not realism), much like our collective obsession with reality TV.

Schell talks about why technological convergence is a total myth. Technologies are like species on the Galapagos islands, and like them they diverge. Of course, there are exceptions — such as the iPad, which is essentially a new kind of Swiss Army knife. It works as a Swiss Army knife because it fits in your pocket. In comparison, the iPad is stupid because it’s essentially a giant Swiss Army knife that doesn’t fit in your pocket.

I can go on and sum up the entire talk, but you should just watch it. I would never be able to do justice to its brilliance. (Hat tip. #)

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8×8 Inc., a Voice over Internet Protocol service provider, has released a new point-and-click VoIP calling application dubbed 8×8 Connect. It allows Facebook users to add a “Call Me” button to their home page, thereby enabling other users to call them without revealing their actual phone number.

“The application asks the person making the call to enter the phone number they wish to place the call from, calls that number and then automatically rings the Facebook user at a number they previously set as their preferred contact number,” the company explained in a press release.

Wanting to see if it worked as advertised, I installed the app, filled out the information and installed the Call Me button on my Facebook page. That done, I called myself. The call connected seamlessly. I would recommend it, mostly because you can control who can see your Facebook page.

I think this app could be especially helpful for small business owners and consultants, who could use it as a way to generate interest in the products/services they’re selling.

In the meantime, I hope 8X8 takes this app to the next level by making it more personal. I hate the random photo (see graphic) that’s now being displayed on my page, especially when it could easily customize it by picking one of my Facebook profile photos instead. Another bonus would be if one could place the Call Me button on fanpages as well.