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

Is there a method to the madness that Apple uses when choosing cities for retail locations? After reading an Experian Simmons report that ranks designated market areas by the number of Apple customers in each, I suspect as much.

Using data collected with its Experian’s Micromarketer Generation3 analytics tool, Experian Simmons created an index that calculates a consumer propensity to own or use Apple products. A geographic market with an index score of 100 indicates the middle ground; higher scores reflect an area where consumers are more likely to use Apple wares while those with lower indices are less likely to do so. As the numbers make clear, markets with the highest scores generally have a greater number of Apple retail locations.

Source: Experian Simmons

Some notable markets from the report:

San Francisco – Oakland – San Jose, Calif. — With the highest index of 149, consumers in this area are nearly 50 percent more likely to buy and use Apple products than the average U.S. consumer and as such, is home to 12 retail locations. Given that this is where Apple’s headquarters is located, this makes perfect sense.
Boston — 31.3 percent of the Boston adult population uses Apple, earning it a spot just behind Apple’s home turf with an index of 145. Number of Apple retail locations: 11
New York City — Nearly one in three adults uses an Apple product — nearly 4.9 million people — truly justifying the Big Apple name. An index of 141 might be worth many Apple Stores, but the four in New York are spread out to attract the most traffic in densely populated areas.
Bluefield – Beckley – Oak Hill, W. Va. — With the lowest index score of 41, residents here won’t find an Apple Store within the state. Instead, they’d have to travel over 200 miles to either North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia or Pennsylvania for the Apple retail experience.

One could easily take a chicken-and-egg approach to the data and argue that perhaps there are more Apple customers in certain areas because there are more retail locations to begin with. I don’t think that’s the case, though. Customers from any market can simply purchase Apple products online — but folks in West Virginia don’t seem to be doing so.

I have little doubt that adding a retail location helps Apple’s sales, but I’m inclined to believe that the company puts more of its stores in markets where it already has a captive audience. And Apple stores are also service centers for Apple products — adding stores where you don’t have products to service may not be the best strategy for growth. Instead of repeating the mistake made by many retailers by building a store and hoping for audience, Apple builds the audience which helps support the store.

India’s Bharti Airtel will become the fifth-largest telecom provider in the world by purchasing 15 African markets from Zain in deal valued at $10.7 billion, according to Wireless Intelligence. Combining the 15 new markets with the three that Bharti held prior, the purchase will give it just under 170 million subscribers out of a potential customer population of 450 million in all 18 areas. Unless a regulatory issue holds up the deal, the newly acquired markets will include: Burkina Faso, Chad, Congo Brazzaville, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

As I review the largest mobile providers in the world, I’m reminded that I need to spend more time looking beyond my backyard in the U.S. It would take the combined subscriber counts of the two largest carriers here — Verizon’s 91 million and AT&T’s 85 million — to rival Bharti’s new size. Perhaps Nokia’s focus on emerging markets isn’t such a bad strategy after all. This worldwide approach is rubbing off on others as Dell just announced a deal with Telfonica Group in Latin America, the world’s No. 3 three mobile provider, to provide services and smartphones such as its Android-powered Aero handset. Now if we could only get the carriers to work out better international roaming agreements so that no one ever gets another $10,000 monthly bill, we’d be in business.

Here’s a look at where Airtel will fit in among the top mobile providers in the world:

Worldwide Mobile Telecom Rankings

Rank
Provider
Total Connections
Markets

1
China Mobile
525,331,266
2

2
Vodafone Group
309,580,257
23

3
Telefonica Group
202,333,430
20

4
America Movil Group
186,544,900
17

5
Airtel Group
169,468,523
18

6
China Unicom
147,587,000
1

7
Deutsche Telekom Group
127,919,986
12

8
Telenor Group
101,367,838
10

Table Source: Wireless Intelligence

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

SpringSource, a division of VMware, has purchased the open-source cloud messaging company behind the RabbitMQ software. The value of the deal was undisclosed, but the purchase of Rabbit Technologies Ltd. is yet another effort by VMware to become the operating system for enterprise clouds (GigaOM Pro, sub req’d) and add value to its commoditized hypervisor. It’s also the latest example of a company selling proprietary software buying up an open-source software company aimed at the cloud.

Cloud providers use RabbitMQ to create a messaging server allowing them to quickly manage the flow of messages between applications. It can also be used to notify users of a web service when content on the site has changed, such as when someone posts a Facebook photo and the service sends an email out notifying all a user’s friends.

The RabbitMQ code was created by Cohesive FT and LShift based on the relatively young AMQP standards effort backed by major banks, Cisco and a handful of smaller companies. As hardware is virtualized, translating some of the network equipment like load balancers into software allow services running on the virtualized hardware to scale better. Hopefully we’ll learn more about SpringSource, RabbitMQ and VMware’s plans for becoming the cloud OS when VMware CEO Paul Maritz speaks at our Structure conference in June.

Introduction to AMQP Messaging with RabbitMQ
View more presentations from Dmitriy Samovskiy.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Joshua Davis

Microsoft today launched its Kin line of handsets — web-enabled touchscreen phones built around social networking features, messaging, video sharing and the company’s Zune music offering — with two initial models. The new line is aimed squarely at the pre-smartphone demographic — a group that few competitors are targeting.

The Kin One and Kin Two contain three software and service features not found on any other Microsoft handsets: Kin Loop, Kin Spot and Kin Studio. Similar to Motorola’s Motoblur, Loop provides a central place to follow contacts on Facebook, My Space, Twitter and Windows Live with constant refreshes. A nice touch is how it allows users to prioritize friends, so that updates from people you’re most interested in take priority over passing acquaintances on the web. Sharing web pages, pictures or locations involves a simple drag and drop of data to the Spot. The Studio, meanwhile, provides web-based timeline-styled backup of all data created on the phones, such as still pictures, videos and messages. It can be used to view any of this data, even if it’s not locally stored, which helps offset the limited local storage capacity on both handsets.

Although the new Kin services are front and center, Microsoft’s use of the Zune ecosystem is clever in several ways. First, it could bring in revenue via teens’ accessing of unlimited music tracks for $15 a month Zune Pass subscription. And it provides a shot across the bow of Apple, which doesn’t yet offer a music subscription service — an opportunity that, as I noted in a GigaOM Pro report (subscription required)  about streaming tunes from the cloud, the company was missing out on.

The Kin is clearly a direct descendant from the Sidekick line that Microsoft gained when it purchased Danger two years ago — the Kin offers similar features and targets the same crowd. And that narrow focus on a largely untapped audience is undoubtedly what convinced to finally start selling its own branded line of phones — something it previously said it wouldn’t do.

So the social teenager who’s ready to move up from a feature phone but doesn’t want or need an expensive smartphone and corresponding app store will be well-served by the Kin line. After that, Microsoft will be more than happy to introduce them to full-fledged Windows Phone 7 devices.

The two Kin phones debut exclusively in Verizon Wireless retail stores next month; they’ll also be available on the Vodafone network at a future date, which the company declined to name.

LoadingNextPreviousPicture 1 of 6 kin-phones-with-zune

Daily deal sites are like catnip for web entrepreneurs hunting for good ideas. In most cases, they look and work the same. But one new Groupon competitor, San Francisco-based HomeRun, has innovated useful social features that entice people to purchase coupons such as participation rewards, user profiles and sharing, and group bargaining. Though Groupon and other sites do encourage users to share deals on Facebook and Twitter, there’s still a lot of innovation to be done around things like personalization and socialization.

HomeRun, which appears to have started publishing offers last month, is currently available only in San Francisco. It’s led by CEO Jared Kopf, a co-founder of Slide and AdRoll. Kopf, who founded HomeRun in November and has hired a team including folks from WeatherBill and the Y Combinator program, said he was too busy to talk in detail about the startup just yet. However, the site is open for registrations, so here’s what I’m seeing so far.

HomeRun encourages users to connect their Facebook accounts and shows which of their friends are also on the site. It has built out profiles that show which members have purchased which deals. Giving the site real-world identity makes users more engaged through things like peer pressure, trusted recommendations and a stickier browsing experience.

Some of site’s deals don’t have static prices; there’s a feature called “avalanche” that brings down the price a dollar or so at a time when more people sign up. When the deal closes, everyone pays the last and lowest price.

HomeRun has a point system and offers cash-back credits. You accrue points for visiting the site, inviting new members, sharing and buying deals, and commenting and voting.

Like Groupon and some of the larger sites, HomeRun doesn’t limit itself to a single daily deal. It does a good job of capitalizing on different types of users by rewarding them with special types of deals. For instance, one side feature for users with a lot of participation points is a special deal called “The Private Reserve.” Another, “Beginner’s Luck,” is for users who’ve joined within the last 30 days.

Tweaking the social algorithm to encourage impulse buying and engagement is a great start, but it’s not all you need to challenge a company like Groupon with an established base, $100 million in revenue and profitability. Not to mention folks like LivingSocial, which has raised $35 million to take on Groupon. And these sites have grown to their current stature without HomeRun’s social features.

HomeRun is incredibly young and has changed so many variables — it’s too early to say if it’s got the formula right. But so far, I like its approach, and even if all the competition copies HomeRun tomorrow I’d trust these guys to keep being creative.

Related content from GigaOM Pro:

How Social Networks Will Help Yelp, Not Kill It

About six months ago, I wrote about Augmented Search, a new way of enhancing search results. It was developed by Xmarks, a San Francisco-based company that started life as Foxmarks, a Firefox plugin that backed up browser bookmarks on its servers and allowed consumers to sync browsers on different machines. (You can read how Augmented Search works here.)

Based on that concept, Xmarks is launching a new product called SearchBoost. “As I hinted earlier, this is our business model,” said James Joaquin, the chief executive officer of Xmarks. “The paid service overlays ratings and reviews onto their pay-per-click (PPC) ads across the 450 million searches performed by Xmarks users each month.” The company currently has 4.5 million active add-on users and has a billion bookmarks in its database. Joaquin says that the company ran “an extensive 30-day test across 200K users and found that, on average, SearchBoost increases PPC click-through rates by 15 percent.”

Well now all they have to do is find customers and convince them to pay for this service.

Amazon Web Services has launched its Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), which allows developers to create a push notification system for applications. The service allows companies to deliver messages to customers of their applications or even to other applications in a couple of different formats, among them HTTP and email. Amazon SNS could be used for system administrators in an IT department (notifying clients if they’re hitting a certain limit on storage capacity or that latency on their service is too high), or it could be used to build out notifications for mobile applications, such as letting consumers when friends check into a location, or when they have new email.

Developers using the service pay per instance, as with all Amazon cloud products. The price includes a per-request, notification delivery and data transfer fee, but developers can get started with Amazon SNS for free. Each month, Amazon SNS customers get the first 100,000 Amazon SNS Requests, the first 100,000 notifications over HTTP and the first 1,000 notifications over email free. After that, prices range from 6 cents to $2 per 100,000 messages sent for delivery and 8-15 cents per gigabyte of data transferred.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req’d):Report: Delivering Content in the Cloud

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ed Siacoso (aka SC fiasco)

I’m one of those people who has a tough time trying to schedule meetings. What’s worse is that times change, mostly because of the ever-shifting deadlines that come with blogging. That’s one of the main reasons my calendar constantly descends into chaos. I turned to professional help, but if you are both like me and are a Google Calendar user, scheduling help could now be as simple as turning on a feature inside Google Calendar.

The new gadget, available in Google Calendar Labs, is called Smart Rescheduler. And it is dead simple. Once turned on, you can select an event and click “Find a new time” and the machine does the rest, offering up multiple options for folks to chose from.

Cyrus Mistery, Product Manager for Google Calendar told GigaOM that there are over 2 million businesses using Google Apps and many of them are large companies with many executives. “It becomes very hard to schedule meetings,” he said. While it is easy to find the next open spot or as Mistery called it, “a trivial computer science problem”, the harder problems emerge when say a meeting needs to happen before end of the week, without open slots and one person is in a remote location.

“That’s a search type problem and so we looked at our search algorithms and said yes, we can adapt these,”Mistery said. He pointed out that this can be used by consumers who are trying to schedule say dinner parties.

Cyrus Mistery, Product Manager for Google Calendar told GigaOM that there are over 2 million businesses using Google Apps and many of them are large companies with many executives. “It becomes very hard to schedule meetings,” he said. While it is easy to find the next open spot or as Mistery called it, “a trivial computer science problem”, the harder problems emerge when say a meeting needs to happen before end of the week, without open slots and one person is in a remote location.
David Marmaros, creator of the gadget, writes on the Gmail Blog:

[W]e decided to apply some of Google’s search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times. [...] You’ll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby. This process is 100% automated [...]

I just tried it out, rescheduled a meeting, and yes: it works as advertised. For once, I am not going to complain about a Google product. :-)

Additional reporting by Liz Gannes.

Pat Gelsinger, who moved to EMC late last year after 30 years at Intel, is stirring things up at the storage giant with a plan to virtualize and federate storage so data and compute can truly be linked together (hat tip The Register). The implication of this vision is that organizations will have the ability to keep constantly changing information up to date around the world in real time despite the challenges of moving huge amounts of data over networks that measure data in in gigabytes rather than petabytes.

In a presentation on Thursday, Gelsinger pointed out that compute and storage are rapidly getting better about dealing with more information, while networks  are trying to catch up. “Compute is doubling every two years. Storage doubles every 15 months, and networking is much much much slower, like every four years, so how do you deal with latency bandwidth and consistency?” Gelsinger said.

Gelsinger’s answer is caching. Imagine a two-way content delivery network built on EMC appliances that tracks and replicates changes made to data at one node and then pushes them out to all the other nodes as quickly as possible. Gelsinger calls this freeing the information from physical storage, but it sounds more like making sure your information is in a bunch of different physical storage containers. He mentions EMC’s acquisition of intellectual property from Yotta Yotta as offering the breakthrough required to build this technology.

But at the end of the day, this is all a big if, not an actual product yet.  If EMC can link storage and virtualized machines together, the data center that “follows the sun” — basically moving compute loads around the world where it’s cheapest to run them – or automatic failover for cloud services become possible. However, it will be controlled by a proprietary hardware vendor, which certainly clouds its prospects a bit.