Is there a tablet in Google’s future with a three-dimensional, multitouch user interface? It’s increasingly likely, given that the search giant has just acquired BumpTop, a startup whose unique software creates a 3-D environment where users can toss files and folders around as though they were playing cards, stack them in related piles and “hang” them on the virtual walls. If Google is working on an iPad-style tablet, as many believe that it is, a BumpTop-style interface would be dramatic departure from the typical 2-D app/icon approach, and could provide a significant alternative to the look and feel of Apple’s iPad.

A post on the BumpTop website on Sunday confirmed the acquisition, and said the company’s existing software (which was available for both Windows and Mac computers) “will no longer be available for sale [and] no updates to the products are planned.” Despite this, however, sources say the purchase of the company isn’t just another case of Google “acqu-hiring” some talented developers (something it has been doing a lot of recently).

Instead, they say Google is looking at the company’s 3-D, multitouch interface — or elements of it — as a potential addition to a tablet device. Mark McQueen at Wellington Financial also seems to see the potential for this, saying in his blog post:

Given the arm wrestling going on between Apple and Google over who will have the sweetest user experience, Bumptop’s cool desktop and underlying technology are a natural piece of Google’s user interface puzzle as they prepare to take on the current kings of all consumer electronics. The ones down the street in Cupertino.

There’s no question that the iPad is a revolutionary device in many ways, with its form factor and multitouch interface, but the look of the desktop is surprisingly boring, with tiny app icons spread out in a typical desktop grid. If Google is looking for something more dramatic to set its own tablet-type device apart from the crowd, BumpTop’s 3-D desktop would certainly fit the bill. As shown in the video below, icons representing files and folders can be flipped, stacked, fanned out, resized and manipulated in various ways. And perhaps just as important, BumpTop also holds patents on its interface.

Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but the Wellington Financial blog speculates that the price was in the $35-$40 million range. According to a recent profile of the company in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto-based company has raised $1.65 million from GrowthWorks Capital and Extreme Venture Partners, as well as angel investor and former Macintosh designer Andy Hertzfeld. According to Startup North, Canadian entrepreneur and angel investor Austin Hill was also involved in funding the company.

Speculation about a Google acquisition began with a tweet from someone in the Canadian startup community, which was noticed by TechCrunch, but then deleted (although StartupNorth got a screenshot). A post then appeared at the Wellington Financial blog speculating that the company had been acquired by Google, and the BumpTop website was later updated with confirmation of the deal.

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Firefox has thrown down the gauntlet in the race to take charge of your online identity, saying it will soon add identity management features to its browser, and hopes at some point to build recommendation services into the browser as well. The move pits the Mozilla Foundation and its open-source model against the proprietary approach taken by Facebook, which recently launched a series of features that it hopes will convince users and websites to use Facebook profiles as their default login for online services, and to implement the social network’s “Like” plugins as a universal standard.

The new addition to Firefox is called Account Manager, and it effectively transfers authority over logging in to various websites and services to the browser. Using a single menu in the main toolbar of the browser, next to the address field, Firefox will be able to log a user — or multiple users — into and out of multiple services, and will even be able to generate random passwords for users who don’t want to come up with their own. The service will apparently also support any standard for authentication such as OpenID (or presumably OAuth as well, which Facebook now supports), and is designed to be an open standard.

Firefox has effectively promoted the Account Manager plugin (or add-on, as it calls them now) from its Labs experimentation project to the official browser development stream. The add-on is available as a beta here, and after some testing and development will be added to the shipping version of the browser. The Firefox team said it is looking to “ship this feature as soon as possible,” and that adding support for it to an existing website or service should only take “as little as 15 minutes of hacking.”

It’s clear that Firefox sees the browser as the primary agent that stands between a user and the services and websites she wants to visit. That effectively means Firefox is going to go head-to-head with Facebook, which also wants to be the primary means by which users log in to websites and services. According to the Firefox blog, the Account Manager add-on is just part of a larger “online identity concept series” that Mozilla Labs has been working on, which includes looking at all the ways the browser can help users interact with the web:

Your Web browser, as your most trusted relationship in your life online, has nearly perfect knowledge of everything you do on the Web. We envision a world where your browser will play an even more active and critical role in helping you control and shape your online experience. To realize this vision, we need to increase the browser’s understanding of your online identity and provide a platform for building new capabilities that securely take advantage of this rich, dynamic set of data that represents the digital “you.”

According to Mozilla Labs, some of the ideas it’s working on include managing account information, but also questions such as “How can your browser help when you discover something cool on the Web that you want to share with your friends?” and also “What can your browser do to enable you to securely share data with websites and third-parties in return for context-rich Web experiences?” Those are both goals that will also bring the Firefox developer into direct competition with Facebook for access to user’s data and personalization or recommendation features.

Identity online seems to have gone from being a two-way race, with Google and Facebook, to being a three-way contest. May the best service win.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): There’s No Stopping Facebook

Interested in finding out what information Facebook is sharing about you through the company’s new open-graph API? Developer Ka-Ping Yee has come up with a simple tool that shows you everything the social network sends to anyone whose app or service decides to plug in to the new feature — all it requires is a user ID or user name. You can find out what information you’re sharing via your public profile by looking at your settings within Facebook,too, of course. But Yee’s tool shows you exactly what data a developer would get when it asks Facebook for info via the API, such as your name, birth date, location, etc. and also any public information such as your “likes” (formerly pages you were a “fan” of), your photos and so on.

As of yesterday, the tool was also showing some information that most users had not made public. Yee — a Canadian-born programmer who works for Google’s charitable arm, Google.org, and developed the “people finder” tool used after the Haiti earthquake — found that the API was showing what events he had recently attended, and even those he was planning to attend, information he didn’t recall giving Facebook access to (another developer says the old API provided this as well).

Thanks in part to Yee flagging the issue in a blog post and contacting the social network, Facebook now appears to have fixed it so that the API no longer makes this available by default (the developer says that his experiments with the Facebook API were the result of “personal dabbling” and don’t have anything to do with his work for Google).

Even though this glitch has been fixed, however, Yee’s tool has managed to surprise even some of the savviest tech users with what it reveals. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch.com, for example, on Twitter called it “immensely useful [and] potentially scary. I’m a sophisticated privacy vet & found things I hadn’t known I was sharing!”

Facebook has come under fire from a number of sources over privacy related to its new features, particularly the fact that users have been “opted in” to services such as “instant personalization,” which allows several sites that Facebook has partnered with to show users personalized content by drawing on their Facebook profile. Four senators sent the social network a letter today complaining about this kind of behavior, one of whom has also written a letter of complaint to the Federal Trade Commission.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user dirac3000

There has been plenty of talk about what Facebook would announce at the f8 conference this week, but the full magnitude of what the company has in mind didn’t really hit home until after the keynote by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a related presentation by Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor (Liz has a great overview of the issues here).

Both carried a single, unmistakable message: Facebook wants to own your activity on the Internet. Zuckerberg did his best to portray this as a great thing for users, but the corollary is inescapable: Facebook will be everywhere you are, watching what you do, keeping track of that data, and talking about what you’re doing to your friends and companies you “like.” A quick survey of the web shows that some seem to see this as a great idea (“Hey, I can show lots of cool stuff to my friends!”) and some are less enthusiastic (“Facebook is going to be following me and tracking my every movement!”).

The reaction from some observers on Twitter was positive. The LA Times said that it would “make sharing easier,” while Deborah Schultz of the Altimeter Group said, “A world that is more open and connected — always a good thing (despite some snarky comments); thanks FB for pushing open!!!” Her fellow Altimeter analyst Jeremiah Owyang was less enthused, however, describing it as Facebook’s “crusade of colonization.” The New York Times’s response was somewhat more tempered, calling it “Facebook to Go.”

Silicon Alley Insider called it a plan to “infiltrate the web,” and Silicon Beat said Facebook wants to “conquer the world.” Kevin Marks of BT, a former engineer with Technorati, said that “Facebook wants to replace links between sites with a database stored on their servers that they control access to,” and Eric Marcoullier (co-founder of Gnip and MyBlogLog) quipped: “Coldplay’s ‘when I ruled the world’ playing at F8. Interesting, if appropriate, choice.” Dan Gillmor of the Knight Center for Media Entrepreneurship summed it up by saying that “Facebook wants to be the Internet,” while Chris Dixon, co-founder of Hunch, said “we might look back at the 00’s as the golden age of the web, when we were ruled by Google, a benign dictator.”

As Liz has pointed out, the key to what Facebook wants to do is to control the hooks and tools that allow it to understand and participate in the social web, the “people-centered” web. By watching and indexing your “likes” and the likes of millions of others — Zuckerberg said that within 24 hours of his keynote, there would a billion “Like” buttons and plugins around the web — the company can create an incredibly powerful map of the relationships between people and their friends, and between people and the things they like, whether they are movies or bands or dishwashing detergent.

That’s a tremendous power to have, and the youthful CEO of Facebook makes it seem friendly and appealing. Why wouldn’t you want to share with your friends? But to use a popular phrase from Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. Let’s hope Zuckerberg chooses to use his powers for good instead of evil.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Andrew Feinberg

Twiiter, at its first-ever developers conference — known as Chirp — which is being held in San Francisco had its co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams provided some hard numbers behind the growth and size of the social network. Here are some of the most important ones we’ve collected so far:

105,779,710 registered users

3 billion API calls a day

175 employees

600 million searches per day

300,000 new users per day

180 million unique visitors per month

37 percent of active users use Twitter on their phones

75 percent of traffic comes from outside Twitter.com

100,000 registered applications

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): As Twitter Develops, Developers Quiver in Fear

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user lrargerich

I don’t have an iPad, but watching this amazing video (embedded below) demonstrating the Alice in Wonderland app made me want to run out and get one — and if I had a young child, it would make me want to get one even faster. I know that many people believe reading should be a quiet and relaxing activity, and that there’s nothing quite like communing with the pages of a well-read classic, but this video makes reading “Alice in Wonderland” look like…well, it looks like a lot of fun. And I have a feeling if Charles Lutwidge Dodson (i.e., Lewis Carroll) could see his story represented like this, he would probably think it was kind of fun as well.




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The app comes from Atomic Antelope, which makes iPhone apps, including one called Bauble that lets you turn your iPhone into the world’s most expensive Christmas card. The Alice app brings an interactive element to the pages of this children’s classic, with features that are based on the original illustrations and allow readers to stretch Alice’s body when she comes to the table with the “Drink Me” bottle, to throw tarts at the Queen of Hearts and watch them bounce off her, and to rock the baby that turns into a pig. The app costs $8.99, although there’s also a free “lite” version. Chris Stevens, one half of Atomic Antelope, wrote about creating the app here.

So is this the future of e-books — every book its own app? It’s certainly a great example of the kind of full-color and interactivity and motion (using the accelerometer) that isn’t possible on other e-readers. These kinds of apps could certainly help the tablet app market hit the $8 billion-mark that GigaOM Pro analyst Mike Wolf forecast it would in a recent report on the sector (sub req’d). It’s also a sign of the creativity that traditional publishers seem to lack, as they try to maintain their traditional stranglehold on book prices in the online world, as Paul Sweeting detailed in this recent GigaOM Pro analysis. Now I’m trying to imagine what a Dr. Seuss book would look like as an iPad app.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark says that he believes social networking and the rise of distributed trust and reputation networks are helping to shift the balance of power in society, away from those with nominal power and money and towards people who emerge from the grassroots. Although personal social networks are relatively small in real life, unless someone is a celebrity or a politician, Newmark says that social networking allows online networks to be much larger and much more powerful by comparison.

While distributed trust systems are just emerging through services such as Facebook and LinkedIn and new ventures such as Unvarnished , the Craigslist founder says the potential implications of such networks are significant.

By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power. That is, peer networks will confer legitimacy on people emerging from the grassroots. This shift is already happening, gradually creating a new power and influence equilibrium with new checks and balances. It will seem dramatic when its tipping point occurs, even though we’re living through it now.

Newmark also says in his post — which he is discussing in a live-streamed talk this morning at the Reynolds Journalism Institute — that he sees the need for reputation networks that can manage the distributed identities and trust information of people online, just as banks manage money.

The repositories of trust information are the banks in which we store this big asset. Like any banks, having a lot of this kind of currency confers a lot of power in them. Having some competition provides some checks and balances. We need to be able to move around the currency of trust, whatever that turns out to be, like we move money from one bank to another. That suggests the need for interchange standards, and ethical standards that require the release of that information when requested.

Newmark’s blog post expands on ideas he raised when I had coffee with him recently at his favorite cafe in San Francisco, where I shot a short video embedded below. At the time, he said that managing trust and reputation online was “the next big problem for the web,” and called some form of distributed trust system “the killingest of killer apps.”

Newmark suggested that big players such as Google, Facebook and Amazon were the kinds of entities that would have the scale to handle such a distributed trust or reputation-management network, and said that despite some occasional missteps by both Google and Facebook when it came to privacy (Google Buzz and Facebook Beacon, respectively), he believed that both were acting in good faith and had a policy of “not being evil.”

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

With the launch of the Apple iPad just days away, magazine and newspaper companies are putting the finishing touches on their apps for the tablet, hoping to lure both new and existing readers to this new format of multimedia device, and possibly even get them to (gasp!) pay for digital content. As the Wall Street Journal has described, magazine publishers are falling all over themselves to create iPad apps, in part because advertisers are eager to get on the device, and also because a comScore survey showed that a surprisingly large number of potential iPad buyers were actually interested in paying for content on it. So what would you most like to read on the iPad? Take our poll, which is embedded below, or leave your thoughts in the comments:


View This Pollsurveys


Magazine giant Conde Nast has apps for Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, Glamour and The New Yorker in the works, and others to come soon. But probably the most eagerly awaited magazine in that group is Wired, which showed off its iPad prototype at the TED conference.

VIV magazine also came up with a prototype of an interactive feature spread, as described in the New York Times Bits blog:

And one designer came up with a mockup of what a magazine cover could look like on a multimedia device like the iPad, as described at TUAW:

Whether the iPad will in fact be a game-changer for the media industry remains to be seen, but even Dan “Fake Steve Jobs” Lyons has changed his mind as to whether he wants one or not — although former Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block says the iPad probably won’t change your life. Meanwhile, GigaOM Pro research analyst Michael Wolf estimated in a recent report (subscription required) that the launch of the Apple device could kickstart an $8 billion tablet app market (that report is just one of several iPad-related GigaOM Pro reports you can find here).

There’s no point in worrying about your reputation anymore, TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington has decided; everything will eventually find its way into the public sphere anyway. Union Square Ventures investor Fred Wilson, however, thinks there is a way to manage your reputation, namely having your community of friends and those who know you through social networks defend you. Pete Kazanjy says his new service Unvarnished, a social network for reputation management that launched yesterday, takes something from both of those ideas.

Unlike LinkedIn, which gives a user ultimate control over what appears on their profile, Unvarnished takes the same approach as Yelp does to restaurants: Anyone can create a profile for any person and then review them, at which point the person being reviewed can “claim” their profile. They can’t delete or vote on negative reviews they’ve received, but they can respond to them — and they can encourage their friends, coworkers and social network followers to vote on them or provide their own.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Unvarnished is that the reviews are anonymous (Kazanjy prefers to say that the reviewer’s identity has been “obscured”) so that you never know, for example, who exactly provided that two-star rating. Although it seems like the kind of thing that no one in their right mind would want, Kazanjy says such anonymity is a crucial part of what makes Unvarnished different from LinkedIn. Human nature, he says, means that the reviews on a LinkedIn profile are almost always positive, and are often so banal and vague that they convey virtually no real information whatsoever.




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In some cases, those reviews may even be flat-out wrong. But no one will actually say what they really think because they don’t want to offend the person they’re reviewing — and besides, no one would ever authorize anything less than an enthusiastic review on their LinkedIn profile. Which, Kazanjy says, is like letting the owners of restaurants control what reviews appear on their Yelp pages — it ensures that nothing bad ever appears, and thus that no one ever gets a completely objective summary of all the information about that restaurant.

Even though you don’t know the identity of the person who left that bad review on Unvarnished, Kazanjy says the system is designed to track their behavior throughout the site, and that over time it creates a kind of persistent identity that’s almost as good as knowing who the person is (and users can reveal themselves in a comment or review at any time if they want to). Reviewers gain trust within the system by providing more reviews, and the service has an algorithm that looks at how long they’ve been a member, how many of their reviews are one-star vs. four or five, and so on. Users are awarded badges — new, novice and trusted — based on their activity, that others can view.

The bottom line is that the principle behind Unvarnished is a very real one: Your reputation is already being outsourced, whether you like it or not. All you can do is respond to criticism wherever it appears, and to get your friends and coworkers to do the same. Unvarnished offers a way to do that all in one place. It’s a valiant effort — but will it take off? The biggest issue for the service is that not everyone is going to want to confront those negative reviews, and/or hustle their friends to review them positively to counterbalance them. Of course, people already do that to some extent with LinkedIn, so what Unvarnished has to do is show that there is more value in the way it approaches online reputation.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user seeveeaar