Author: Jolie O’Dell

Last week, we were chasing our tails in giddiness over HipHop, a newly open-sourced PHP runtime developed in house at Facebook.

Today, amid the rabid excitement over Google Buzz, Facebook quietly pumped some more code into the world. XHP is a new way to write PHP that “augments the syntax of the language to both make your front-end code easier to understand and help you avoid cross-site scripting attacks,” according to Facebook engineer Marcel Laverdet. “XHP has enabled us to build better websites faster; our Lite site was written entirely with XHP.”

Here’s what a few developers, including PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf, had to say about it.

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Lerdorf describes XHP as “a new PHP extension today that supports inlining XML… It adds an extra parsing step which maps inlined XML element to PHP classes.

“The main interest, at least to me, is that because PHP now understands XML it is outputting, filtering can be done in a context-sensitive manner.”

He also comments on XHP’s significant performance issues and speculates how XHP would work specifically at Facebook.

“Running XHP on plain PHP is definitely out of the question. But, knowing that Facebook uses APC [alternative PHP cache] heavily and looking through the code (see the MINIT function in ext.cpp) we can see that it should play nicely with APC… So, when you combine XHP with HipHop PHP you can start to imagine that the performance penalty would be a lot less than 75% and it becomes a viable approach.”

Meanwhile, over at Hacker News, Wikispaces creator James Byers writes, “For me, XHP is far more interesting than HipHop. And I say that as someone who administers a pile of single-application CPU-bound PHP servers. This completely and forever changes the templates-vs-just-PHP debate, and I’m glad – it’s the kind of evolution PHP needs to continue to be taken seriously.”

Tipjoy co-founder and current Facebook engineer Ivan Kirigin also chimes in with strong praise, saying, “XHP rocks so [expletive deleted] hard, it isn’t even funny. It is just so much better than alternatives.

“IMHO, It is the only PHP tool I use at Facebook that is better than alternatives in other languages. I’m looking at you, Django templates! The notation perfectly represents the objects, with no cruft associated with object oriented programming. That is really rare.”

Here’s XHP on GitHub, and here’s the documentation wiki. Take a look, and let us know what you think in the comments!

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We all know that young folks use the social Web for personal purposes, from keeping tabs on family members to sharing party pics with friends. And yes, as we reported more than a year ago, they even use the social Web – gasp! – while at their places of employment. But they’re also using more tech for work-related tasks, including interacting with customers and vendors and forming or strengthening new and existing partnerships.

According to a 5,595-person, 13-country survey from tech consultancy Accenture, since this generation has grown up with daily doses of technology in one form or another, “They don’t see bright lines between work
and personal, virtual and physical, sanctioned and prohibited. It’s not, ‘Would you approve this, boss?’ but, ‘Whatever gets the job done.’”

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Millenials may not be completely aware of their company’s IT policies, including those on social media use. For example, only 40 percent of U.S. citizens ages 14-27 know what their company’s IT policy is. That percentage dips to 38 percent in the U.K., 36 percent in Australia and a laid-back 25 percent in France. And even if millenials are aware of these policies, many choose to ignore them and bypass restrictions.

IT managers often see these behaviors as weaknesses – loopholes that allow for security breaches and loss of productivity due to distractions and heavy multitasking. But they might also be allowing millenials to work smarter, not harder.

For example, more young people are using real-time communication methods such as IM, thus reducing the amount of time checking email and waiting for an asynchronous response. In fact, 10 percent of respondents said supervisors used SMS and chat to communicate with them, and 20 percent more said they wished their bosses would use these media more.

Web apps are also gaining favor in the young workplace. Around 75 percent of respondents said they used online collaboration tools and applications for work purposes; many of these millenials also thought that workplaces should be improving their use of emerging technologies. “Globally,” states the report, “about one-half of millennials have accessed online collaborative tools, online applications and open-source technologies from free public websites when those technologies are not available at work or when the versions offered at work don’t meet millennials’ expectations.”

Young people’s expectations are also high when it comes to selecting their next employer. Not only did 37 percent of respondents say they want to see state-of-the-art technology being used in their prospective workplace; just as recruiters and hiring managers often snoop around search and social sites to investigate a potential hire’s character, the millenial job-hunter will check up on prospective companies, peers and bosses, as well.

To hear some respondents explaining their attitudes and behaviors in their own words, check out this video from Accenture:

Although these attitudes and work styles can clash with older managers’ expectations, they can also provide great benefits to a workplace and team. “Millennials are more intimate with technology than any previous generation,” the report states. “Even high school interns can now add value. Companies that figure out how to tap younger workers’ tech savvy and listen to their ideas in a productive way will likely enjoy an increasingly strong innovation-based competitive advantage.

“Listen and learn. Millenials are a resource to be tapped, not a problem to be solved.:

What do you think of these results? Do they line up with your experiences using tech in the workplace and the attitudes and behaviors of your colleagues? Let us know in the comments.

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While end users are eager to try out Google Buzz for themselves, many of the Web’s largest social properties have expressed a certain amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt about the search giant’s move into the social space.

A Facebook rep said that the company is interested to see how Google’s latest product will make the Web more social and more open, but the Facebook team has their concerns about whether Buzz’s friendship model is really all that functional. After a little bit of messing around with the new product today, we can understand their point of view.

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“We’re supportive of technologies that help make the web more social and the world more open,” a Facebook rep wrote to us today, “and we’re interested to see how Google Buzz progresses over time.”

However, the Facebooker had words of warning about Buzz’s hazy friendship model.

To offer a brief explanation, Google has taken users’ Gmail inboxes and Google Talk IM contacts and programmatically tried to determine with whom users communicate most frequently. Users can share Buzz posts with the world (and Google search), or they can share privately through their existing Gmail groups or custom-made groups in Buzz. For more detail, take a look at this demo video:

Google Buzz seems to involve an asymmetric follower/friend model, but we’re not completely sure how friendships and shared posts will work. As our Facebooker wrote, “The continued growth of the social web will be determined by people and personal relationships. The people that you email and chat with the most may not be your closest friends or the people that you want to share and connect with.“

We can definitely understand this point of view. Some folks rarely use Gmail to communicate with their closest friends and family members because they see them in person or use other networks to get in touch. On the flip side of that coin, as more of us are using Gmail for work communication, it might be irrelevant or overly personal to follow and share with professional contacts.

All in all, one of our biggest concerns about Buzz adoption (being able to play nicely with existing social apps) carries over into this part of the conversation, as well: In addition to creating “best guesses” for who to friend and follow using Gmail & Google Talk, why doesn’t Google simply use Twitter OAuth and Facebook Connect to import existing friendships?

What do you think? Will Google Buzz’s friendship model work? Or does Facebook have a point about having carefully user-approved friendships online?

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This is the first in a five-part series of video interviews on how startups can benefit from participating in conferences and competitions at any stage of their growth.

YourVersion CEO Dan Olsen has been bootstrapping his startup for two and a half years but has recently been hitting the startup circuit hard. Since his launch at TechCrunch 50, he and his team have been hard at work competing and promoting their work.

So far his team has been mostly concentrating on being very visible in the San Francisco area, but they’re starting to branch out. At Twiistup in Los Angeles, he took some time to tell us about the costs and the returns of participating in shows and conferences, from user and traffic spikes to press mentions to VC interest.

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This morning, Google is announcing some exciting new features for two of its most popular applications.

Team Red, as we affectionately call ourselves, is present at the Googleplex in Mountain View, and we’ll be live blogging the event, giving you, dear reader, a fascinating play-by-play. Stay tuned for updates!

The event will begin at 10 a.m. Pacific (UTC -8). Just refresh this post to see new content as events unfold.

Additional on-the-fly research and images from RWW journalist Frederic Lardinois.

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11:11: The event is over! Time to chase people down and ask some more pointed questions. Stay tuned to RWW for ongoing analysis.

11:08: Developers, here’s the Google Code page for Buzz’s APIs.

11:06: Will Buzz results appear high in Google search results? They’re not doing anything special to promote those results, but users can search within Buzz. And all posts are indexed in real time.

11:04: Buzz is live.

11:02: Buzz will pull in tweets, and will publish to Twitter as a Twitter client in a later version. The team has put a lot of spam controls in place.

10:58: Will Google’s social products succeed? Brin says he’s seen a lot more productivity from using Google Buzz internally. Horowitz says the approach – creating something useful, not just entertaining – is different from “anything else I’ve tried.”

10:56: Buzz user feeds will be available via PubSubHubBub/XML. Google will be releasing APIs. Google intends to make it as open as possible. They also want to integrate Buzz with other Google products such as the homepage.

10:52: Sergei Brin takes the stage. Fangirl here is very excited. Q&A starts. Buzz could integrate with Wave – a lot of functionality is inspired by Wave.

10:51: Buzz will launch at 11 a.m., when it will begin to roll out to Gmail users. Journos here will get it first. For the rest of Gmail users, they’ll get Buzz within a few days.

10:50: Google is launching Buzz as an enterprise product soon, as well. “It will change the way businesses work around the world.” Wasn’t Wave supposed to do that?

10:45: Mobile Buzz will have a “nearby” setting to see posts and pics from folks around you. Makes the product a bit of a Foursquare/Yelp competitor?

10:42: Buzz allows for mobile posting by voice. The user speaks, and Google transcribes the audio into a geotagged text post.

10:40: You can use Buzz from Google’s mobile homepage, mobile apps, and from a new Google Maps app for the major platforms. These apps will translate latitude and longitude into “real locations.” Buzz will take its best guess and ask for confirmation. It’s tied in with Place Pages.

10:39: You can use Buzz from Google’s mobile homepage, mobile apps, and from a new Google Maps app for the major platforms.

10:37: Location is a powerful signal for relevancy. In the digital world we have not yet elevated location as a powerful signal. Computers speak latitude and longitude, but humans have a hard time interpreting this information.

10:35: Mobile: “You are going to love the new product experiences we will launch today.” Consume and use Buzz on your mobile. One of Google’s great insights was pagerank, which gave websites relevancy. Now, we need to find relevancy in social expressions on Twitter and other social networks. “It’s easy to start drowning in this.” How do we find relevancy in the real world? What signals do we use?

10:32: Google Buzz will have @replies with auto-complete. Users who are @ replied will receive inbox notifications.

10:29: When a user posts to Google Buzz, he can share publicly to followers and his Google profile, or privately to his existing Gmail groups or custom groups. Notifications of shares and comments will appear in a user’s inbox with a special Buzz icon next to those items. Comments will appear in real time.

10:25: The Buzz tab will be located right below your inbox tab. Gmail will “know” who your friends are. The social stream features Yahoo! Meme-like content previews and will play nicely with Flickr and YouTube. Pictures will open in a lightbox-type UI. Shared links will feature headlines and thumbnails.

10:22: Buzz will surface your social graph by having you auto-follow the people you email and IM with the most. It will have a rich and fast-sharing experience for multimedia sharing. Sharing will be public and Google-indexed, or private – just depending on how users choose to share. It’ll be integrated with your inbox in a way that goes beyond normal email. Finally, it will filter out the garbage and leave “just the good stuff.”

10:20: Google is launching Google Buzz, a Google approach to sharing. Todd Jackson is the product manager, and he reveals that it’s built into Gmail.

10:15: Google VP Product Marketing Bradley Horowitz kicks off the event: “I’ve got something exciting… We’re going to talk about sharing.” He’s talking about finding the right audience for your content, real-time sharing and tools for attention management.

10:13: Wondering how much trouble I’d get in for casually paging through the slide preso on the podium laptop before the event starts… Probably not worth the scoop.

10:00: The event’s a wee bit late kicking off, but Dodge is chatting about his work with Google Apps. He says the product range is already quite broad; they’re working now to create a deeper set of features.

9:48: The music is pumping and the luminaries are trickling in and getting caffeinated. I’m sitting next to Jeremiah Owyang and Don Dodge.

Discuss

As soon as this week, Google might be rolling out a “Twitter-killer” feature for Gmail users, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Gmail users can currently broadcast status messages via the Google Talk feature. The main difference between the current offering and the new feature is that status messages aren’t available in a timeline format. With the new “Twitter clone,” they will be.

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UPDATE: While we’re still waiting for an official response from Google’s PR team, we’ve been invited to an event at the Googleplex tomorrow “to see some innovations in two of our most popular products.” The event will begin at 10 a.m. PT (UTC -8) – stay tuned tomorrow for RWW’s live coverage of the event!

This is the current option for updating statuses in Gmail:

Google’s new tools, however, will better integrate with Google’s multimedia sites, YouTube and Picasa. (Currently, Google Talk users can share YouTube videos via chat, which prompts a miniaturized version of the video to pop up above the chat in progress.) Users will also be able to see “a stream of status updates from people they choose to connect with.”

We’re contacting Google for more information and will update this post as we learn more.

In the meantime, however, we’re wondering how this feature will integrate with other status-sharing sites. Will Gmail and Google Talk’s new feature act as Google’s first steps into developing a social media client (like Tweetdeck) in its own right?

The new feature could start appearing on users’ screen as soon as this week. If you had this tool, would you use it?

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According to reports from China Daily, what is believed to be the largest illegal hacker training and recruitment entity in China has been shut down by police.

Three people were arrested and the equivalent of a quarter of a million dollars in assets frozen. The accused, who ran a now-shuttered site called Black Hawk Safety Net, are suspected of offering online attacking programs, disseminating viruses and recruiting almost 200,000 members. Police have confiscated nine servers and five computers and completely closed all associated websites.

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Over the past 5 years, the site owners had collected more than the equivalent of $1 million in membership fees. Reportedly, paying members were able to download trojans and were coached on writing programs designed to steal accounts for profit.

According to China Daily’s police sources, Black Hawk Safety Net was the subject of research and scrutiny from a team of around 50 police officers ever since 2007, when suspected hackers in another attack were found to be members of the site.

There is no word yet as to whether this site or its members of owners were affiliated with the recent attacks on Google accounts and other international entities. To read more related news, check out our ever-growing archives on China’s Internet exploits.

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According to 4chan’s Twitter account and status update blog, they have been “explicitly blocked” by the Verizon wireless network.

If you’re unfamiliar with 4chan and why an ISP/wireless company would block it, read more about it on Wikipedia. The high-traffic image board of mostly anonymous users was created by Christopher Poole in 2003 and has been the subject of a fair amount of negative media and legal attention over the past six years. But why would Verizon choose to block the site now? Does this put Verizon on par with foreign ISPs that block torrent sites and social networks? Or is there more to the story?

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Poole wrote this afternoon, “Over the past 72 hours, we’ve been receiving reports from Verizon Wireless customers having difficulty accessing the image boards. After investigating, we found that Verizon is dropping traffic… only on port 80 (HTTP). No other subdomain/IP/port is affected, which leads us to believe this block is intentional.”

However, a couple hours ago, Poole posted, “After an hour and a half on the phone, we’ve received confirmation from Verizon’s Network Repair Bureau (NRB) that we are ‘explicitly blocked.’”

In the past, we’ve held a generally negative view of ISP censorship and traffic-shaping, regardless of site content. It’ll be interesting to see how this battle shapes up, as Poole is calling for 4chan users to file complaints with Verizon’s Network Repair Bureau.

We are contacting Poole and Verizon to figure out specifically why the site is being blocked and will update this post as more information becomes available.

While we’ve personally confirmed that the image boards are not accessible from the Verizon wireless network, we’re not certain that Verizon as an ISP is blocking the site or whether they plan to in the near future. Again, a move of this magnitude would have to have some pretty compelling justifications, and we can’t wait to find out Verizon’s reasons.

This incident calls to mind AT&T’s temporary blocking of the site in July 2009. Eventually, AT&T said the block was due to a DDoS originating from 4chan IP addresses, to which Poole responded, “We’re glad to see this short-lived debacle has prompted renewed interest and debate over net neutrality and Internet censorship – two very important issues that don’t get nearly enough attention – so perhaps this was all just a blessing in disguise.”

UPDATE: A Verizon NRB rep said their center has been deluged with phone calls but was unable to relate the specific reason the site has been blocked. We are continuing to call other Verizon numbers at this time, but we’ve been alerted that Verizon has not yet set up any process for dealing with media calls on this issue as no other media outlets have yet contacted them.

UPDATE: Multiple Verizon FIOS/DSL customers have let us know that the boards are still accessible from other devices not on the Verizon wireless network. However, we’re confused as to why Verizon wireless would block a website and still allow access on other parts of its network.

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Are you suspicious of those sexy avatars and “marketingbizpro” accounts following you on Twitter, but don’t have the time or inclination to block and report them one by one as they pop up?

We’ve just found a new, completely free app that will zap those bots and bad users in just one click. It’s fully customizable, so you can tell the blocker what you personally consider to be a spam account. And you can choose to simply unfollow those users, block them or report the accounts to Twitter, as well – again, all with just one click. StopTweet is definitely one of the more useful apps we’ve seen lately, and it also helps us all do our part to clean up the Twitter universe.

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We just tried it on an account and caught around 50 spam followers; pretty exciting, no?

Here’s how it works: You tell StopTweet what behavior you think is spammy by defining a few important parameters. The first parameter is follower/friend ratios, which StopTweet considers on a scale of one to 100 percent. I personally think it’s sketchy when none of the people you follow have returned the favor. I like my friends to be engaged and engaging.

Next, you tell StopTweet how many tweets you’d like your followers to have on a scale of zero to 30. This won’t work on the spambots that ping 500 people with the same “LOOK AT THIS CRAZY BRITNEY VIDEO!!1!”, but it’ll certainly get rid of inactive accounts and users who aren’t really adding much value to your network.

It works for followers and friends, and you can take one of three actions (unfollow, block or report) on the account StopTweet finds. StopTweet also comes with three convenient presets for light, medium and aggressive scans.

The app also has a tab to see your own list of spammer accounts, but we weren’t able to click through due to a possible bug in the very new app.

“We didn’t like any of the applications that were already out there. They were all too complicated for the average Twitter user,” wrote creators Joi Company, who also created Twitstatus, a keyword-based Twitter widget generator. “The application is extremely easy to use, and allows you to only block who you want to block without hassle. On top of all this, it’s free. Most of the apps we found charge a monthly or yearly fee. We do not.”

We think StopTweet is a genuinely useful app, and we recommend that you give it a shot and let us know how it works for you.

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Our young friends at the Teens In Tech Conference this year have all the blessings and foibles of their tender years.

They haven’t learned that the sky is not, in fact, the limit – and for god’s sake, don’t tell them. And, as we likely felt at their age, they feel that adults are the slowest, dumbest, IE-using, fax-sending nerds imaginable. Check out this video of these great kids and the adults who admire and are inspired by them – including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who stopped by the conference to mingle with the youth and sign a few MacBooks.

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Be sure to check out our Facebook album of pics from the Teens In Tech Conference, held yesterday at the Google offices in San Francisco. You’ll get to see Robert Scoble in action and Steve “The Woz” Wozinak in a giant space helmet. And if you haven’t done so yet, please connect with us on Facebook while you’re there!

While making this video, we were privileged to chat with Teens In Tech founder Daniel Brusilovsky, Tobias of Nimbuzz, John Ramey of isocket, Adam Helweh, the talented youngsters of SimFlecks and Alex Nichols.

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Today has been the Day of Location-Based Reporting at ReadWriteWeb, and what better way to help you end your tedious work week than by showing you this entirely speculative infographic that’s recently been making the rounds in our back channels.

Now, since the Commander in Chief has admitted to not even being a Twitter user, we can also safely assume he’s not big into Foursquare, either. But what if he were? What if he had the freedom to complain about bad restaurant service, gossip about his colleagues and get a hard-earned “Bender” badge just like the rest of us? Would the maps of his checkins look something like these, perhaps?

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Featuring humorous – if fictional – anecdotes and tips from the POTUS, this graphic also blends real info about hotspots the First Family has hit up in four major U.S. cities.

Perhaps one day, we’ll be able to talk Obama (or one of his predecessors) into sharing the minutiae of his nightlife with the public. How do you think the Secret Service would feel about that?

Click the image below to see the full version, and let us know what you think in the comments.

The piece was inspired by the Foursquare-integrating BlackBook Guides (iTunes link), a set of cultural guides to major cities, featuring restaurants, nightlife, travel, fashion and entertainment.

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Welcome to the weekend, friends – and what a week it’s been. Facebook announced a huge open-source code dump; Social Media Week kicked off in six cities around the world; and the tech world was constantly humming with news and opinions about the iPad.

Frankly, we’re exhausted.

One topic that’s been top-of-mind at RWW, though, week in and week out, has been location-aware apps and technologies. We’re so excited about these kinds of technology that our next premium report is going to center around a lot of geo-based tech! More on that later. For now, fill up your iPod with these three podcasts on location-aware tech, and have a relaxing, informative weekend.

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To kick things off, here’s a blast from the past: A long-lost episode of RWW Live, a yearlong podcast series we ran in 2008/2009, this March 2009 talk focuses on location aware/sensitive mobile applications. Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley joined Tom Coates of Yahoo!, Mark Josephson of Outside.in and our own Sean Ammirati and Marshall Kirkpatrick to talk about “how the Web is evolving to include more location aware applications and what barriers are still in the way – both social & technical barriers.”

Download here or listen here. Running time: 52:50

All Points Blog is quickly becoming one of our favorite resources for location-based tech information. In this podcast, we are asked, “If consumers think of geodata as a commodity, what does that say for its future? What are the key data relationships? And what, if anything, will differentiate one offering from another?” The All Points editors ponder these questions with the full knowledge that most consumers know and care little about who makes, manages and updates basemaps.

Download here or listen here. Running time: 15:22

Finally, VerySpatial presents a 2009 retrospective and a look forward into the location-based tech that may come in 2010. Editors Jesse, Sue and Frank present an admirable year-in-review show that covers the most noteworthy computing, web and mobile trends that continue to shape the tech we currently use.

Download here or listen here. Running time: 28:00

Many thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick for finding these gems, and a huge hat-tip to Huffduffer creator Jeremy Keith for making such a nifty tool for all us podcast lovers.

To subscribe to the Podcast Parade, check out our Huffduffer page and feed, or just use this link to subscribe through iTunes. Thanks for listening, and we hope you enjoy!

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Ah, the sea. The big blue. From sharks to shipwrecks, from the perfectly formed pipes of Hawaii’s waves to the dark and chilly depths of the deepest sea trenches, it’s one of Earth’s most fascinating habitats – one that people love watching and exploring.

Tonight, Google is bringing Internet-bound ocean lovers a new portal to the amazing biological and topographical diversity that lies beneath the waves. If you’re into underwater environments and you’re down with Google Earth,

we highly recommend checking out Ocean Showcase, Google’s latest product release.

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“Anyone can be a desktop Cousteau,” writes Googler Jenifer Austin Foulkes. The Google Earth browser plugin allows users to browse through a selection of highlighted tours. Users of Google Earth 5 can go on to explore more, downloading tours and viewing photos and videos by checking the Ocean folder in the left-hand layers panel.

National Geographic ocean explorer Sylvia Earle narrates the highlights tour. The smattering of categories in the plugin-enabled tours include research discoveries, shipwrecks, dive spots, surf spots, underwater terrain and the Great Lakes. The tours are dotted with YouTube videos and more information from carefully curated websites.

Google’s put together some entertaining and high-quality content that integrates different technologies, including Google Earth and YouTube. We also think that Ocean Showcase is going to be a huge hit in the classrooms, as it gives brief and educational content snippets in a visual, interactive context that kids can appreciate and learn from.

Let us know what you think of this product in the comments, and check out ReadWriteWeb’s archive of Google Earth-related products and news.

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Last fall, we told you about an exciting and innovative competition to find – and fun – civic-focused web abd mobile apps in New York City.

Tonight, after an all-star panel of judges had reviewed more than 80 apps over a month-long period, a handful of winning applications were announced.

These apps include WayFinder, a resource for navigating around the city; Taxihack, a live-feed commentary on New York City taxis; Big Apple Ed, a guide to New York City schools; and seven others.

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Judges for the competition included such media and technology luminaries as NY Tech Meetup co-founder Dawn Barber, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, Mahalo co-founder Jason Calacanis, EDVentures Founder Esther Dyson, FirstMark Capital CEO Lawrence Lenihan, AlleyCorp co-founder Kevin Ryan, DFJ Gotham Ventures managing partner Danny Schultz, and Union Square Ventures managing general partner Fred Wilson.

The BigApps prizes also included a Popular Choice Award, which was decided by an online public vote from people around the world.

The grand prize winner for the competition, Wayfinder, is actually an Andoird app that allows users to find the nearest and best directions to New York City subway and New Jersey PATH stations. It was also selected as the Grand Prize winner for the Data Visualization Award. That team received a total of $7,500 for both prizes.

Other winning applications include:

• Actuatr, a platform that simplifies opening up data to developers;
• NYC Way, an iPhone application that bundles a variety of NYC resources for tourists and locals (also the Investor’s Choice for monetization potential and Popular Choice winner, a $5,000 prize altogether);
• PushpinWeb, a platform for public data;
• Trees Near You, an iPhone app that shows data about trees around New York City;
• UpNext 3D NYC, an interactive 3D map for exploring and discovering the city;
• Overview New York City Parks and Recreation Online, a web app for finding New York City parks; and
• Bookzee, a location-based library book search.

“We opened up the 170 datasets of City information to unleash the creativity and ingenuity of New Yorkers, and we were not disappointed,” said Mayor Bloomberg, who announced the awards at a dinner tonight. “The apps submitted offer a range of unique capabilities, many of which use the data in ways we hadn’t considered. We want New York City to stay ahead of the innovation and technology curve, and we’ll continue to capitalize on our greatest asset – New Yorkers – to make sure we do. Thank you to all of those who submitted apps, and congratulations to the winners.”

The New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications worked with around 30 agencies to provide more than 170 datasets for the competition. The data included geographic locations of all sidewalk cafés, laundry facilities, playgrounds, dog runs, city landmarks, as well as census data, extensive property valuation and assessments, the results of restaurant inspections, lists of permitted citywide events and even side parking and traffic updates.

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Earlier this week, we pinged PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf about the implications of HipHop, the new PHP runtime that Facebook just open-sourced.

Using ReadWriteWeb as an example, he goes into great detail about how speeding up PHP isn’t simply a matter of finding a single magic bullet. Lerdorf contends that true optimization comes down to attacking the mundane inefficiencies that sneak into sites of all sizes – even suggesting free tools for PHP devs to use – before a solution such as HipHop is considered.

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Additional reporting by RWW journalist Mike Melanson.

But first, for an overview of what HipHop is (Facebook’s rewrite of the PHP runtime) and what it does (translates PHP to C++ and compiles it with g++), check out our growing archive of HipHop posts or watch this video from Facebook:

Lerdorf begins his assessment of the project on a positive note. “I think it is a cool project and it will certainly be a good option for some sites,” he wrote to us in an email.

“The effectiveness is going to depend a lot on the type of code it is used on. Like similar projects such as Psyco, Cython, Pypy and ShedSkin in the Python world, results vary greatly.”

However, he continued to say that raw execution speed was “not a significant factor” for many applications. “Even if you double the execution speed of something that is 10% of your overall request cost, that is only a 5% overall improvement. If on every request you are hitting memcache/postgresql/mysql 10 times and spending a lot of time in system calls, don’t expect miracles from HipHop.”

Calling the code translator “a nifty trick,” Lerdorf worries that some developers will see HipHop as “some kind of magic bullet” for site performance. Noting the amount of hype he’s seen lately about the new runtime, Lerdorf wrote, “I’d love to see those same people get excited about basic profiling and identifying the most costly areas of an application. Speeding up one of the faster parts of your system isn’t going to give you anywhere near as much of a benefit as speeding up, or eliminating, one of the slower parts of your overall system.

“People generally don’t bother doing even the most basic site optimizations. PHP execution speed is usually quite far down the list if you sit down and profile the end-to-end series of HTTP requests that lead to the final page in a broswer…” At that point, Lerdorf was kind enough to give us a run-down of site issues with ReadWriteWeb.com that we dutifully passed on to our new and often beleaguered webmaster.

“These are relatively minor and very common things, but they all contribute to your users’ perceived performance of your site. And that’s just the frontend. If I sat down with a profiler and looked at your backend I predict I would find similar inefficiencies.”

In a word, Lerdorf is telling us all to not get too excited about the “nifty trick” that is HipHop until the runtime is the biggest thing that’s stopping a site from being as fast as possible. Given Facebook’s engineering focus, we can imagine that the site’s been pretty well optimized and HipHop gives enough efficiency to give users a faster front end while also using fewer server resources.

Lerdorf ended by suggesting Yahoo’s YSlow and Google’s Page Speed for analyzing front-end issues, and he recommended Valgrind’s Callgrind for low-level back-end profiling and XDebug for userspace PHP profiling.

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We’ve just discovered an awesome new feature that Facebook is using to experiment with friend request confirmation pages.

When you confirm a new friend, you’ll be presented with four people that friend is connected to – four suggestions for people who might be mutual acquaintances based on your social graph. It’s more useful and more accurate than the current friend/fan suggestion feature, and we actually like it a lot. Check out the screenshots, or try it for yourself the next time someone friend requests you.

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Here’s a screenshot of what happened for me when I approved a recent string of requests:

I realized that I did, in fact, want to be connected to quite a few of these people because our social graphs do have quite a bit of overlap and we’ve met in person or online. Some of these recommendations, such as Tara Hunt and Sarah Austin, popped up several times as they were mutual friends of more than one new friend I’d just confirmed. Smart tech!

“We are still testing it,” wroteFacebook rep Kathleen Loughlin in an email, “but we’ve found that Facebook is a more valuable experience for people when they are able to find and connect with their friends. While we already have a variety of tools to help people connect, we’ve started experimenting with ways to make these tools even more accessible and easy to use.”

We particularly enjoy this feature because it gives a more tangible reason to reach out to a new friend than the easily ignored “mystery people” column on the right side of the screen. Sure, they might have friends in common with me, but which friends? What social groups are they part of that relate to what I’m doing? Making and finding friends this way can require a bit of digging around, for example, realizing that you’ve actually met the person before because you go to the same conferences. So it’s not ideal for at-a-glace suggestions sometimes.

What do you think of the new feature? Is it helpful or not for how you use Facebook and how you define or filter your Facebook friends? Let us know what you think about it in the comments.

Also, if you’ve got a moment, check out RWW’s Facebook page! We’d love to have you as a fan.

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So, Facebook went and secretly rewrote PHP’s runtime to be a lean, mean, C++ translated, g++ compiled piece of resource-friendly hotness.

If that sentence confused you, then you’re not the target audience for this post. We want to know what our developer friends think of HipHop, the latest open-source code project to emerge from the deep, dark dungeons of Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters (ok, the HQ’s actually quite pretty, but we like a good turn of phrase). Read these expert opinions (and by “expert,” we mean Rasmus Lerdorf), and let us know in the comments what you think of the new PHP runtime.

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Here’s the skinny on what HipHop is and what it does: Last night, we broke news that Facebook was getting ready to release a JIT compiler for PHP. Turns out we were slightly wrong.

Facebook engineer David Recordon told us this morning, “HipHop isn’t actually a just-in-time compiler. Rather it transforms your PHP source code into C++ and uses a well established compiler (g++) to produce the resulting binary.”

The Facebook engineer who was responsible for concepting and developing HipHop, Haiping Zhao, wrote this morning, “With HipHop we’ve reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page.”

So, with HipHop, Facebook (and by extension other PHP-based sites and apps) becomes faster and more scalable, since rewriting the runtime probably cost a lot less than trying to scale horizontally with more servers.

Late last night, we pinged PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf on Twitter, asking for his opinions on the new PHP runtime. This morning, he wrote, “I think HipHop is cool and will certainly help the poor people stuck in framework soup.” However, he also noted, “HipHop on simpler template-style PHP pages probably isn’t going to help you too much. It’s not going to make your SQL queries any faster.”

Our friend and a PHP dev himself, Warren Benedetto, wrote to us with a wealth of interesting implications, saying, “[Facebook] get to have their cake and eat it, too. Keep the site in PHP, keep their large staff of PHP developers, rapidly iterate existing features while developing new ones, AND get all the performance benefits of a compiled language on the back end.”

He also notes that the improved speed and performance might cause more enterprises to consider using PHP for sites, features and applications rather than Java or .NET.

But one of our biggest concerns with HipHop was the delay in open-sourcing the project. Former Digg lead architect and current SimpleGeo co-founder Joe Stump wrote this morning on Twitter, “Thanks, Facebook, for open sourcing HipHop. We, the FOSS [free and open-source] community, look forward to maintaining this fork separately from you going forward.” Take that!

So, that’s what a few of our friends and acquaintances think of Facebook’s HipHop and the rewritten PHP runtime. What’s your take on it? Let us know in the comments!

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Last week, we asked if you thought the iPad was a flop, and many of you told us exactly why.

In that comments thread, you joined us in collective head-scratching and fist-shaking over the price point and the lack of certain key features. It’s clear that many of us won’t be flocking to the nearest Apple store to pick up one of these gadgets. But there may be alternatives. In the event that a competitor releases a tablet device, what features would you want it to have? Give us your wish list in the comments; hopefully, manufactures are listening.

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Here’s our own wish list of features that would make us really excited to buy a tablet from an Apple competitor.

A Better Price

The iPad starts at $500, but with just 16 gigabytes of storage, it’s not the music/video/photo-carrying device most of us will need or want. That price point is essentially a phantom. And when we start to add up all the costs for the iPad we’d actually want to have, it makes more sense to scrape together another couple hundred dollars and spring for a top-of-the-line PC laptop – something a bit more functional, not just a big, expensive geek toy.

A Camera

For a device that promises to make picture- and video-sharing simple and fun, the lack of a camera is a great disappointment. Without a camera, it’s true that there’s no ability to snap pics and vids for Facebook or DailyBooth or talk to others via Skype video or TinyChat, but users are also missing out on one of RWW’s favorite tech trends: augmented reality! We wrote a whole post lamenting the fact that this long-awaited device can’t play nicely with some of our favorite AR toys.

A Stylus

Our awesome cartoonist, Rob Cottingham, just wrote this morning that as one who draws and doodles, he’d appreciate a way to interact with the iPad’s multitouch screen. Bridging that gap between the screen and the stylus might even be the graphics tablet-killer. For a company that’s traditionally held sway over the design and arts communities, Apple should’ve thought more about this part of its core audience.

A Slide-Out Keyboard

This is one of the reasons I’m so glad I held out for my Droid when the Apple fanboys and fangirls were mocking my iPhone-free lifestyle for years. Having a physical keyboard simply can’t be beat, particularly for content creators and enterprise users.

More Options for OSes and Carriers

No multitasking? AT&T? Those conditions are deal-breakers for me and quite a few others, I’m sure. I’d love to see a device that could run Jolicloud, Chrome OS or a lightweight Linux distro. And as a happy Verizon customer, I’d like to stick with my current carrier and perhaps even work the data charges into my current plan. Overall, we just want more openness and more options.

So, what do YOU want in a tablet? USB or other ports? A built-in WAN card for instant Internet connectivity? More storage? A faster processor? Flash? In the comments, give us your list of must-haves and what you expect to pay for them. Who knows – perhaps a manufacturer will be able to produce something for non-iPad fans sooner than we think.

Check out ReadWriteWeb’s full iPad Archives.

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A while ago, I wrote a rather condemning post on how most “social media for social good” efforts were heavy on social media activities but came up short on actual social good.

Still, there are organizations such as Kiva, The Extraordinaires or SocialVibe and many others that do turn user microactions and technology to affect change and do good in very tangible ways. Those are just three of the tech nonprofit or philanthropic organizations I can think of at the moment, but we at RWW would love to know more. Tell us in the comment what your favorite tech nonprofit is and why.

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As most of you already will know, Kiva is an organization that allows users such as you and I to make microloans to folks in developing countries. For example, I could loan $100 to a woman in the Philippines to help her buy supplies and livestock to start pig farming, increasing her own quality of life and improving the local economy around her. Trickle Up is another similar microlending organization.

SocialVibe is a company that helps brands and users create positive social change. In a typical SocialVibe setup, a brand “sponsors” users, who take small actions and engagements to raise money for the charity of their choice. In some ways, it’s kind of like a broader-in-scope version of The Hunger Site, which gets advertisers to shell out cash to feed hungry people when users click around the site.

And The Extraordinaires is a program we just recently discovered while finding out how to help our readers use their personal time and online actions to help folks in Haiti. This site allows organizations to create missions. Users can complete micro-tasks from their mobile devices or computers toward those missions. Currently, the site has around 50 participating organizations and about 6,000 members who have completed in excess of 35,000 micro-tasks. Missions range from mapping safe places for children to play to helping first-aid responders reduce fatalities.

But there are many ways tech can be used to help others, not just the social media-focused, crowdsources companies we’ve mentioned here. For example, Inveneo helps to give access to information and communications technologies, including phones, computers and Internet access, to people in remote parts of developing countries. And there are many organizations focusing on getting tech hardware into the hands of those who need it, including students and injured veterans.

We’d love to know more about similar projects and organizations, whether large or small, new or longstanding. In this open thread of comments, please tell us your favorite nonprofit or philanthropic tech organization and let us know what they do. And please spread the good word and invite others to share, as well!

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Today, Google, along with a group of DNS and content providers, including Neustar/UltraDNS, published a proposal to extend the DNS (domain name server) protocol. DNS is the system that translates URLs for humans (e.g., ReadWriteWeb.com) into numeric IP addresses used by all computers for online communication.

To be perfectly explicit, Google is proposing “to allow Authoritative Nameservers to return varying replies based upon the network address of the client that initiated the query rather than of the client’s Recursive Resolver.” If that made no sense to you, read on for a plain-English discussion of the issue at hand and what it means for users.

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Last month, when Google launched a public DNS service, they described DNS protocols simply, saying, “Most of us aren’t familiar with DNS because it’s often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names – e.g., www.google.com – into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers – e.g., 74.125.45.100 – that computers use to communicate with one another.”

What Google’s proposing is that enough information be sent during these machine/network communications to optimize browsing speed by creating connections with topologically close servers, but not so much information as to violate users’ privacy. In other words, by gathering enough data about a user’s location in a network, the system can then optimize that connection to have as few degrees of separation as possible between the user and the host.

Wilmer van der Gaast and Carlo Contavalli wrote on behalf of the Google Public DNS team, “Our proposed DNS protocol extension lets recursive DNS resolvers include part of your IP address in the request sent to authoritative nameservers. Only the first three octets, or top 24 bits, are sent providing enough information to the authoritative nameserver to determine your network location, without affecting your privacy.”

The proposal was posted today and might be accepted as an official Internet standard within the next few months. “We plan to continue working with all interested parties on implementing this solution and are looking forward to a healthy discussion on the dnsext mailing list,” the team concluded.

This relates pretty closely to the stated goals of Google’s Speed project, which aims to make users’ browsing experience faster overall. Internet protocols have been part of the Speed plan from its inception more than six months ago.

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