Author: Marshall Kirkpatrick

Google Chrome is probably the best browser available, if speed and extensions are both important to you, and one major problem experienced by Mac users was just solved. The developer version of Chrome for Mac just released an update that allows users to manage bookmarks better than ever before. (If you’re reading this, you should use the developer version.)

Before today, bookmarks in Chrome for Mac were unbearable. Now they are a joy to click, drag around, delete and rename. The only remaining problem I see? Major issues with Adobe Flash. Is there anything else you wish was fixed in Chrome?

Sponsor

Discuss

Ten year old local business rating company RateItAll has released a white-label location based mobile social networking platform called DoubleDutch. Events organizers, companies that work with multiple locations and others can work with DoubleDutch to offer their patrons a branded check-in app targeted specifically to their use case. You might say that DoubleDutch is to Foursquare what Ning is to Facebook. I think it’s a smart effort to make location based social networking more mainstream.

We caught up with CEO Lawrence Coburn at SXSW and found out how the service works.

Sponsor

DoubleDutch customers get to remove all branding from the apps but their own, they can design custom badges and they can weight their favored geo-location data higher for their app users than data for other locations in a given area. A college could have dorms show up higher on a list of nearby places than bars in an area, for example. Customers also get a tab on the app interface that they can populate with whatever content they choose. Events schedules might be a good fit, I suspect.

RateItAll says it has 5 million business reviews in its database. Coburn hopes that local reviews plus mobile geo-location will equal more meaningful context for both sides of that equation.

If geolocation is truly useful for people other than just geeks, then offering event-specific geolocation apps sounds like a great strategy. Everyday people may have little interest in checking-in to every place they go during real life, but night time events or lunch at a trade show? That makes a lot of sense. If anything’s going to make location sharing and check-ins mainstream, custom apps specifically targeted for keeping in touch with your friends at topical events could be it.

In addition to his work on RateItAll and DoubleDutch, Coburn is also co-authoring The Next Web’s new sub-blog about location services. You can read a more in-depth interview with him about the service there.

Chatroulette has been talked about a lot over the past 30 days but for all the media mentions – ComScore reports that the site is still seeing less than 1 million unique US visitors per month. Site visitors are disproportionately young, male and also interested in gay and lesbian websites, the company says. Comscore believes that 960,000 people in the US visited the site in February, the month it blew up.

As social network analyst danah boyd puts it, Chatroulette is “a hugely controversial site, one that is prompting yet-another moral panic about youth engagement online.” Given all the controversy – wouldn’t you think that more than 1 million people in the US would have visited the site last month?

Sponsor

Boyd again on the up side of the site:

ChatRoulette reminds me a lot of the quirkiness of the Internet that I grew up with. Like when I was a teen trolling through chatrooms, ChatRoulette is filled with all sorts of weird people. And most users ignore most other users until they find someone they find interesting or compelling…I can’t tell you how formative it was for me to grow up talking to all sorts of random people online. So I feel pretty depressed every time I watch people flip out about the dangers of talking to strangers. Strangers helped me become who I was. Strangers taught me about a different world than what I knew in my small town. Strangers allowed me to see from a different perspective. Strangers introduced me to academia, gender theory, Ivy League colleges, the politics of war, etc. So I hate how we vilify all strangers as inherently bad. Did I meet some sketchballs on the Internet when I was a teen? DEFINITELY. They were weird; I moved on…I simultaneously am amused by ChatRoulette and depressed because I realize that so many folks would prefer to keep themselves and their teens/college-aged-kids sheltered rather than giving them a way of thinking about systems like this and teaching them to walk away when things get weird.

Given all that, the fact that less than a million people in the US visited the site last month seems like a real shame. Heck, if it’s naked men you’re concerned with – I just spent 30 minutes on the site and only saw 2 of them. Maybe that’s changing.

Google Trends says Chatroulette is most popular in Tunisia, followed by Norway, France, Chilli and Finland. Belgium, Turkey and Sweden send more traffic to the site than the US too. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing, then. People in the US media find the site interesting, they talk about it all the time, but for some reason not a lot of people in the US are checking it out. ReadWriteWeb was bigger than Chatroulette last month, in fact. We’re not waiting by the phone for Jon Stewart to call, though.

Would you broadcast information about your credit card transactions publicly on the Internet? That might sound frighteningly irresponsible, but serial entrepreneur Phil Kaplan says his new social network Blippy does that and represents the way of the future. I thought he was crazy – until I sat down and talked with him today at SXSW. In just a few minutes Kaplan melted my skepticism and got me excited about what Blippy is doing.

You may have read about Blippy on sites like TechCrunch, Venturebeat and CNN. Kaplan shared a few things with us today that haven’t been published anywhere else though, and the story of Blippy is generally interesting. Here are seven things you probably don’t know about Blippy, a very far-out social network.

Sponsor

1. Users can manually review each item before it’s published or set up certain substreams that do different things – like automatically publish my iTunes transactions but ask me before publishing my Amazon purchases. Kaplan has two credit cards, one with a Blippy sticker on it to remind him that purchases made with that card are posted immediately to the web.

2. It’s not about the money. Kaplan says he wants Blippy to be a way for offline activity to publish online conversation. The things you buy are often convenient signals for activities that are important to you. The conversations that go on around the items are quite interesting… at least on Kaplan’s profile. He can buy a movie on iTunes and find a conversation about it swarming around his automatic Blippy post before the opening previews are over. Other users often don’t see any comments on their activity at all. Jason Calacanis sees some good conversation.

3. Blippy now sees $2 million worth of user transactions streaming through the site per week, Kaplan says, and has seen close to $15 million in transactions total since it launched publicly January 15.

4. Kaplan doesn’t think sharing credit card data is that big a deal. He cites LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman’s argument that people will share anything if there’s enough of a benefit to sharing it. Friendster was the first site where people used their real names on the Internet, and people weren’t comfortable with that at first, either.

5. Data portability: Kaplan is working on a Blippy App Programming Interface and “it’s going to have everything.” Data caching policy is something “we have to think about still.” Imagine a website that recommends recipes based on the food it knows you have in your refridgerator. That’s one example of the kind of service that could be built on top of Blippy.

6. Aggregate data analysis isn’t something Kaplan is personally interested in, he says. It’s hard to believe but he says he’ll leave that kind of thing up to third parties using the Blippy API if they want to. The company will focus all its energy on making Blippy a good experiene for users. Really, that’s what he said.

7. Location data is something Blippy sees but doesn’t expose right now. Kaplan says it’s coming, though. He thinks the current location-based social networks need to deliver more value to users, and says that’s something Blippy can do.

People these days produce all kinds of data streams, Kaplan says – from Facebook to Twitter to Smart Grid utility use and electronic medical data. Some of those streams you wouldn’t want to be public about at all, but some of them you can benefit from partially exposing. He thinks that at least some of your credit card transactions are better shared than kept private. Time will tell whether or not other people agree with him.

Discuss

Facebook plans to announce the availability of a firehose of user data at its F8 developers conference in April, we believe based on research. Such an offering could be similar to the firehose that Twitter has shared with large partners and select small developers building the famous Twitter ecosystem of 3rd party applications around the web. A Facebook representative did not offer a denial, saying only that the company would not comment on speculation.

The huge social network was once private by default, then made controversial changes in December that pushed hundreds of millions of users toward publishing their information in public and now appears aimed to complete the about-face at its F8 developer conference by offering up public user data in a huge river that outside parties can consume, analyze and build on top of.

Sponsor

The first F8 conference saw the unveiling of the Facebook Platform, a way for app developers to build games and utilities inside of Facebook. This announcement would represent Facebook as a platform and enable far more to be built outside and on top of the social network. Privacy concerns? For sure. Genuinely world-changing potential? There’s a lot of that too.

It’s not clear exactly what would be included in this firehose, it could be a stream of low-value Fan Page promotional content, for example. The most likely thing content to be included though is user activity data published under public privacy settings. There’s far, far more of that today than there was just a few months ago.

If you’ve participated in a supermarket loyalty program, you’re familiar with the concept of opting-in to sharing data about your activities with outside parties in exchange for benefits. In that common practice, though, consumers gain shopping discounts but get nothing from the analysis of the data they emit.

In the case of the Twitter Firehose, the much sought-after full feed of public user data from across the site, users gain access to all kinds of interesting applications and insights based on analysis of their use of Twitter.

A Facebook firehose would be much bigger. We’re hearing that there will be no launch partners in the announcement, but the imagination runs wild thinking about all the mashup possibilities. We learned last week that user location data is coming to Facebook at F8, now picture all this rich data roaring like a river into the data digesting machines of a wide range of developers all over the world.

A firehose of public Facebook user activity data could function like a living, breathing global census. Cross reference that data with any other data set and we may find an ocean of insights into the human condition, around the world, for slices of people, second by second or over time.

This is something we’ve been calling on Facebook to do for some time. I’ve sat with founder Mark Zuckerberg and discussed the importance and potential of releasing aggregate user data at length.

That, though, was before last December when the privacy policy changed.

Privacy Concerns

Just because something is posted publicly on the web, Microsoft researcher danah boyd said in her opening keynote at SXSW yesterday, doesn’t mean people want it to be broadcast more generally. Making something public is not permission to publicize it.

Is the inclusion of public activity into a firehose programatically available to outside developers a case of broadcast that violates user control and thus privacy?

I don’t think it’s clear either way. In a discussion about aggregate Twitter data analysis late last year, a representative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told me that Twitter users had no reasonable expectation that their data wouldn’t be redistributed and analyzed in bulk because Twitter was a public forum.

Facebook used to be different. It was private by default, our actions were shared only with friends and family that we gave permission to see our status messages and photos.

Then in December the company made a dramatic shift, prompting users to re-evaluate their privacy settings and making “share with everyone all over the internet” the new default for most options. Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was only changing to reflect the way the world was changing, but we argued that was a disingenous rationalization of Facebook’s culture-changing actions driven in part by its own profit motive. We also argued that by pushing users toward being more public the company was reducing user control over data and spreading distrust about making data available online at all. That put at risk the idea of sharing your data in a way that could be analyzed.

Is there a reasonable expectation that online social networking activity set to “public” will not be redistributed in bulk to outside parties? How can a company like Facebook respect user privacy as much as possible while still achieving the incredible things that can be achieved by making aggregate user data available for analysis?

Let’s begin to discuss it.

See also: The personal blog of Cameron Marlow, Facebook’s in-house sociologist and big data guy.
Related analysis: Twitter 2.0: API Rate Change Could Lead to a World of New Apps & Features
Chewing on the Issues: Twitter Data Dump: InfoChimps Puts 1B Connections Up for Sale

Discuss

Buzz, Google’s controversial attempt to unseat Facebook as the most mainstream of social activity stream readers, just made some much-needed changes that Facebook could learn from as well.

Buzz users now have more granular control over what social interactions with content trigger an email sent to their email inboxes and explicit explanations for why each piece of content was sent by email to them. These changes are a good start but ought to extended into the body of Buzz as well.

Sponsor

Just like most Facebook users can’t explain the difference between the new algorithmically filtered News Feed and the raw bulk flow of the Live Feed, Buzz too could benefit from explaining the mystery behind the magic. As social networking analyst danah boyd said at the opening talk of SXSW today, privacy online is grounded in user control.

Buzz violated the basic understanding of email as private when it surprised users by layering the new social network on top of their private Gmail. By granting users more control over information, today’s changes are a small move in a better direction.

Why Not Give Users The Tools to Drive Their Own Experience?

Might social activity stream participation become more mainstream if users had clear and more complete control over what they see, what they expose and to whom? Many people believe that users are incapable of dealing with too many settings and need these decisions made for them. Perhaps it’s just a user experience challenge, though. Nobody said creating the ultimate interface for mainstream users to drive their online activity was going to be easy.

Google’s move with Buzz today looks like a nice first start. Hopefully it will be extended beyond the Buzz and Gmail relationship.

See also: How Google Buzz is Disruptive: Open Data Standards

Real-tme feed publishing startup Superfeedr has quietly turned on automatic location data in the feeds it republishes from around the web, we confirmed with the company today. Founder Julien Genestoux explained the feature using Twitter as his example, but the same content extraction and analysis is being done on all kinds of feeds run through the service.

“If you turn geolocation on in Twitter, then your feed will include geolocation in your Tweets and we’ll just push that through,” he said. “If you don’t do that but you Tweet about Austin, we will deliver the latitude and longitude for Austin in the XML.” In other words, developers building apps on top of Superfeedr’s real-time feeds will now know programmatically what geographic locations are discussed in the content coming through the feeds. Future feature? Subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL.

Sponsor

Genestoux says he is using a number of 3rd party services to extract this data, including the Yahoo Placemaker API. Along with this location data, the service also offers automatic language identification and is working on entity extraction and sentiment analysis.

The prospect of subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL is an exciting one, though Genestoux says he’s just beginning to develop it. Could that facilitate a location data stream that crosses and goes beyond the siloed location based social networks so widely discussed these days? We suspect that it could.

Superfeedr could be described as “FeedBurner 2.0” – for a more real-time and meta-data savvy web. The company was funded this Fall by real-time incubator Betaworks and media mogul Mark Cuban. Betaworks announced today that it has raised $20 million more to build out its portfolio of companies like Superfeedr, Bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Tumblr and more.

Discuss

MySpace has taken a bold step and allowed a large quantity of bulk user data to be put up for sale on startup data marketplace InfoChimps. Data offered includes user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes. Friend lists are not included. Remember, Facebook and Twitter may be the name of the game these days in tech circles, but MySpace still sees 1 billion user status updates posted every month. Those updates will now be available for bulk analysis.

This user data is intended for crunching by everyone from academic researchers to music industry information scientists. Will people buy the data and make interesting use of it? Will MySpace users be ok with that? Is this something Facebook and Twitter ought to do? The MySpace announcement raises a number of interesting questions.

Sponsor

The 22 sets of data being made available are cheap. Prices range from $10 for raw dumps from the MySpace API to $300 for everything broken out by latitude and longitude. Subsequently derived data sets can be put on sale by InfoChimps users as well, with a revenue split.

Analysis coming from the data could include things like music trends per zipcode, popular URLs being shared, etc.

MySpace is generally thought of as a social network on the decline, but if it is able to position itself as the place to do music still then its hundreds of millions of users could remain engaged. Will data scientists want this data, though? Time will tell, but MySpace has long done cooler things with data than competitors Facebook and Twitter and people haven’t gotten terribly excited about it yet.

Related: See today’s coverage of the cancelation of the Netflix Challenge due to privacy concerns.

Bulk user data has tremendous analytical potential and both Facebook and Twitter have thrown the breaks on 3rd parties offering up their user data more than once. We covered InfoChimps’ offering of bulk Twitter data in depth this Fall, but the marketplace quietly removed that data after Twitter asked them to “wait” for a second time.

In February we profiled Pete Warden (The Man Who Looked Into Facebook’s Soul), a developer who planned on putting a huge pile of Facebook user data online for academic analysis. As we wrote in that article:

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public.

Days later Facebook contacted Warden days later and asked him to hold off on release of that data as well. Last week Warden posted open source code for harvesting the same type of bulk user data from Google Profiles, so the game’s not up yet, not by a long shot.

Why is this kind of big data interesting? This rational may be less applicable in the case of MySpace given its focus on music, or it may be more applicable given the allegedly poorer user demographics on the site compared to Facebook, but here’s how I explained my interest in big social network data analysis in general, as part of a discussion about an excellent special report on big data in the Economist this month.

I think in big data there lies a lot of hidden patterns that represent both opportunities for action and for reflection. At RWW we’re working on trying to find ways to mine data to find news first (we’ve got some interesting methods employed already) and personally, I think the world is an awfully unfair mess and I’m hoping that data analysis will help illuminate some of the hows and the whys. Like the way that real-estate redlining was exposed back in the day by cross referencing census data around racial demographics and housing loan data. That illuminated systematic discrimination against black families in applying for home loans in certain parts of town. So too I think we’ll find a lot of undeniable proof of injustices and clues for how we might deal with them in big data today.

What will we see come out of MySpace’s bulk data? What could we see come from Facebook and Twitter data if only they would let people get their hands on it? Time will tell.

Discuss

Location based social networks – are you over it already? It feels like location is all we ever hear about anymore, especially this week leading up to SXSW.

We’re excited about location too; see our enthusiastic write-ups What Twitter’s Geolocation API Makes Possible and The Era of Location as Platform Has Arrived. But it’s getting a little ridiculous. We offer below a few thoughts to consider about all this location madness.

Sponsor

1. That Phrase: “Location, Location, Location”

   You’re going to hear journalists use it far too much. Want to know where it came from? Language sleuth William Safire investigated for the NYT last year and concluded that the phrase was probably first used in a 1926 real estate classified ad in the Chicago Tribune: “Attention salesmen, sales managers: location, location, location, close to Rogers Park.” Don’t you feel more savvy now?

2. Too Many Startups?

   We’re under embargo on almost all of them, but we can tell you there are at least 25 companies making location-related announcements at SXSW this week. Probably more. The Dunbar number of startups in a particular market, if you will, is something like 5. More than that and most people stop taking new entrants seriously. It’s one thing to offer different technologies along the value chain of location, but sharing your location and aggregating messages by things like hashtag are two very crowded niches right now. One of my favorites is SitBy.Us, an app that lets you see where your Twitter friends are sitting in a conference session. That’s pretty cool.

   You’ve got to wonder if and when Location will Jump the Shark and what consumer exhaustion for it might mean for the long-term prospects of the market. Everyone wants to be “the Twitter of SXSW 2010” but the fact is that SXSW represented a statistically insignificant increase in Twitter usage, historically speaking.

3. Location Startups “Not Playing Nice”

   There are loads of ways to post your location but it’s very hard to get a feel for who exactly is where. SimpleGeo launched a site called Vicarious.ly today that aggregates check-ins across scads of services, all around Austin. It doesn’t work very well, though. SimpleGeo’s Matt Galligan told us today that the site is really just a proof of concept and that our perception that these startups aren’t playing very nice together is very true. “And it’s a real shame,” he told us. It’s hard for a 3rd party service to clearly identify whether these competing services are really talking about the same location, for example. No one tells their users what users on competing services are up to in the same location. Gowalla’s Josh Williams says he doesn’t know what the problem is and that Gowalla is very open about user data by open standards.

   Update: Galligan pinged us after publication to clarify: “I mostly meant the problem with venue data was because of how awful the *business listings* market is. There’s certainly issues with non-connecting venue data but it’s a *very* hard problem to solve, so I don’t blame them right now. It can, however, be solved in the future.”

4. We Need Cross-Service Venue Tracking

   If you’re thinking of going to a place, or you’re there and wonder who else is, what you need is a place where you can see who has checked in there across all services. For the place to be at the center of your experience, not the service. Michael Arrington says the new AOL Lifestream lets you track particular locations, but that service only supports Foursquare among location services. What we need is something like that across any and every check-in service. That’s the kind of thing that data standards can enable.

   Google’s Chris Messina told us that the Activity Streams standard has a namespace for “place” and would probably add support for GeoRSS soon, but that so far Google Buzz is the only location service that seems to be supporting it.

5. Gowalla Doesn’t Get Enough Love

   Gowalla’s API is read-only, meaning that 3rd party apps can’t publish check-ins to the service like they can to Foursquare. Gowalla says they are working on it, but they are the underdog already and this isn’t helping. AOL’s cool new Lifestream product, for example, only supports Foursquare, not Gowalla. That’s a real shame. You know what’s nice about Gowalla, though? You can see who has checked into a place and when, even if they aren’t friends of yours. That’s not something that’s easy to do with Foursquare at all. It’s also much prettier than Foursquare and uses peoples’ full names, instead of grade-school-style first names and last initials. Gowalla’s API just isn’t seeing the adoption that Foursquares is, though. Have you seen Avoidr.org for example? That’s pretty funny stuff and it’s built on top of Foursquare.



The above is for illustration purposes only. I like both these guys just fine.
6. Imagine the Future, It’s Going to Be Different

   If location based services ever become popular with the mainstream, every urban area might end up looking like the Foursquare map of downtown Austin this weekend. That means services are going to have to come up with creative and interesting new ways to make that data usable day-to-day and not overwhelming.

   Likewise, when you think about the future, imagine Facebook being a player in this market, because they are going to be soon. It’s possible that Facebook and Twitter could be where all these other services meet-up. Brightkite has different features than BlockChalk but we can see what our friends are doing across any of these apps on Facebook, perhaps. And Facebook is where your mom checks-in, if she’s not an early adopter.

   Finally, will location tracking be persistent? Loopt right now uses mobile carrier tie-ins to track your location constantly and expose it to a circle of trusted friends. Is that something that all services will enable in the future? Gowalla CEO Josh Williams told us “no way” does he think that will be the dominant model, but Adam Duvander, author of the forthcoming book Mapscripting 101, says he agrees with Loopt: that the value in persistent location tracking will be so compelling that everyone will end up going for it in the end, once proper privacy settings are figured out.

   What do you think, do you think persistent location tracking is the future of location based services?

   These are some of the things I’m thinking about location this week.

   Discuss

   
   

   

   

Plancast, the plan-sharing startup with big-name angel investors and “future as platform” aspirations, has just had its iPhone app accepted into the iTunes store. The app was built by contracted star developer Leah Culver. It’s simple, functional, attractive and useful. It’s going to be very good for SXSW and probably beyond, if the service continues to stick with users as it has so far.

Here’s the iTunes link and below you can see some screenshots.

Sponsor

I’m posting my plans at Plancast.com/marshallk. You can see who’s coming to our SXSW party Sunday night with NPR, PBS and more here on Plancast.

See also: Hot Potato also has a new iPhone app just released today (iTunes link) which may come in handy for discussing the events that you attend via Plancast and otherwise.

Discuss

Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we’ve learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website earlier today.

Evri launched just short of two years ago and raised $8 million from Vulcan, the fund of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More interesting than the business side of this story, though, is the technology. Evri brings the semantic and the real-time web together in some very interesting ways.

Sponsor

We profiled Evri as one of 10 intriguing companies in the real-time web space in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future. Also included was the now Google-acquired Aardvark. (See our coverage: How I Loved and Lost an Aardvark)

Here’s how we described the real time part of what Evri does in that report:

Evri is a semantic Web recommendation service for online publishers. The company tracks the real-time Web to know when it needs to create or update a topic page for one of its emerging news topics.

Evri watches news sources to see when a news topic is trending, including articles on Wikipedia that publicly available data shows have leaped in page views. Then it visits structured databases like Wikipedia and FreeBase to check for updates to entries about related entities. It then creates or updates a topic page with news links, photos and Twitter search results. The language used in those Twitter posts is analyzed and the names of news entities in the posts are linked to other Evri topic pages, like pivots.

Evri has done lots of other things as well, including a blog widget, an iPhone app, automated content portals for publishers and a sentiment analysis product. The company didn’t see a particularly large amount of hype but was closely watched. Robert Scoble, for example, named Evri one of his top startups to watch for 2010, even a year and a half after it launched.

We haven’t been able to identify the company that has acquired Evri yet but the most obvious candidate would be its neighbor and kin Microsoft, where the service would compliment the Powerset team nicely and change the Bing user experience in news search dramatically. Now that we know that Google is working on building a real-time index of the web (our coverage) the prospect of a competitor upping the ante with near real-time semantic parsing, riding on top of real-time indexing, sounds like a hot move.

A number of people have raised the possibility of an Amazon acquisition as well. Evri was also tested out by Yahoo! starting last Fall as a way to facilitate navigation throughout its Sports content pages.

Take that, semantic web doubters.

We’ll update this post when the acquiring party is identified. Geeky types interested in an in-depth explanation of Evri’s work would be well served by checking out a 6 part video series on YouTube wherein Deep Dhillon, CTO of Evri, discusses the company’s technology with students at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

Discuss

It never ceases to amaze me how many high-tech industry elites get ensnared in every Twitter phishing attack. (See our November story 7 High-Tech Twitter Users Who Fell for Phishing Scams) This evening Twitter announced that a new program will intercept links sent out by Direct Message and through email, checking to make sure they are safe. Phishing prevention is no small matter.

Twitter’s is a good move but a lot more is needed all over the web. If we want a transactional developer ecosystem of distributed identity and portable user data, there are both user education and technical changes that need to be made.

Sponsor

I don’t mean to be pedantic about this, but here’s my take on the subject.

It’s only because there is a big developer ecosystem creating interesting new services on top of our Twitter identities that any of us would ever consider logging in to Twitter while on another website. That ecosystem is great, and it’s the kind of thing that an interconnected web that leverages portable user data would be filled with. But if user data is a form of currency and even people who are professional technology analysts (paid hundreds of dollars an hour for their technology advice – and many of these people are falling for Twitter phishing scams) – if even these people can’t tell the difference between a good transaction and a bad one, then what does that say for the future of distributed developer ecosystems and data portability?

Apparently, though, fooling people these days into handing over their Twitter login through an unsafe transaction is like taking candy from a baby. It’s really easy.

That’s a failing of user education and of the design of distributed authentication transactions, isn’t it? (Though it’s tempting to blame the users who fall for it, it really is!)

Remember when debit and credit cards were first introduced and many people didn’t trust them? Aren’t you glad we figured out how to make that work? Similarly, we need a combination of user education (don’t give out your credit card number to random people who call you on the phone) and practical measures – credit card transaction receipts have two copies, your copy is the one with the full number printed on it – take it with you. Little things like that and more made plastic a viable platform for commerce. Distributed online identity needs similar measures taken.

You know what also doesn’t help? People who try to be helpful by urging users to not even click on phishing links. It’s not like these are mysterious poisonous substances that will kill you if you touch them. Go ahead and click on them! Just don’t give the resulting spoof pages your username and password. That’s the problem!

It’s early days in all of this and more moves like Twitter’s tonight will be needed. For the good of user security but also for the good of all the innovation this web has the potential to deliver.

Discuss

Seth Goldstein comes up with a lot of ideas. Some of them work and some of them don’t. He was one of the original backers of Del.icio.us (bought by Yahoo), Etherpad (bought by Google) and Bit.ly (huge via Twitter). He was also President of the short-lived Attention Trust and built a browser plug-in that allowed people to track, manage and sell on the Chicago Board of Trade futures in their browsing history and other online attention data. That didn’t work out so well, though it was a very interesting idea. Two years ago he raised $10m, built an advertising network called SocialMedia.com and then sold it off a big chunk of it in November.

Goldstein’s latest idea may be one of his most interesting yet. He’s co-founded a company called Stickybits. It’s a service that uses vinyl barcode stickers and a mobile scanning app to layer social media content on top of physical objects.

Sponsor

You scan a Stickybits barcode that you place or find on some thing or some place (perhaps on someone) and you can see all the multimedia that’s been associated with that barcode before and add your own.

Erick Schonfeld covered Stickybits this morning on TechCrunch and called it a way to unlock “the secret lives of objects.” Commenters on that post brought up far more questions than Stickybits has answered so far.

Someone is going to nail this, though. I’ve long fantasized about being able to use my mobile phone while around town to find out the news, demographic and property ownership history of various locations. Stickybits isn’t doing anything that ambitious yet; it’s mostly just tweets, photos and audio messages. It’s hard to know if a temporary sticker from one particular company will be the way forward into a world of places and objects with social histories made easy to unlock.

Stickybits is selling packs of 20 attractive vinyl stickers for $10, a steep price if you ask me, but perhaps calculated to maximize the significance of each one and minimize the annoyance of property owners about to get annotated. How that price point and the need to download a free mobile app will impact the spread of the program remains to be seen. Whether the messages attached to the stickers end up looking more like Foursquare, Gowalla, Wikipedia or ChatRoulette is another one of the many questions that come to mind.

In a location-aware world, the primary role of the barcode stickers may simply be in letting people know that there is data associated with a particular location, something that other services that let you “tag your world” have struggled with. There will likely be other user experience subtleties, sublime and profane, that users start to notice after a few Stickybits scanning experiences.

Expect to find these things stuck around various places in Austin this weekend. Perhaps on cats, dogs, planes, trains, automobiles and street light poles all around the country soon. Will it work? We’d love to hear your thoughts in comments below.

Discuss

NTT docomo, the telephone provider patronized by approximately half the population of Japan, today linked its mobile identity layer with a general web identity for users through OpenID, according to the OpenID Foundation. NTT docomo users will now be able to quickly and easily log-in to any OpenID supporting website online with the same account credentials they already use in the country’s flourishing mobile ecommerce and content ecosystem.

Just when you thought the Identity game was over and Facebook or Twitter had won, now you can welcome 55 million more docomo customers onto the OpenID side of the contest.

Sponsor

Why OpenID is Important

OpenID is an open source and open standards system of Identity that allows users to log-in to any OpenID supporting website with the account they’ve already created through a trusted identity provider. The system makes it easy for users to start using new sites with just a few clicks, easy for them to take their profile and friend data with them from site to site and easy for websites to offer personalized service immediately, based on the data an OpenID user brings in with them from their cross-service identity provider. Though ease of login has been the primary use to date, identity and payload as web-wide development platform is the long-term promise of OpenID.

It’s an intriguing paradigm that has had mixed success to date, limited primarily by design and User Experience challenges. The entry of Japan’s largest telco into the OpenID ecosystem could help propel OpenID forward, but many other large companies have gotten as far as offering outbound OpenID and then ceased active engagement with the protocol.

We’ve got our fingers crossed, though, for the success of a portable identity system that isn’t owned by one single provider like Facebook. Facebook’s Connect system of identity does offer a good perspective, though, on what’s possible in every way but independent ownership.

Discuss

Mark Fletcher builds software, that’s just what he does. He may have sold the system that became Yahoo Groups for $400 million, and then made millions selling Bloglines to Ask.com as well, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to stop making software. And it’s not just any software he makes, either. Those two projects changed millions of peoples’ lives.

Tomorrow morning Fletcher will unveil his newest creation, a lightweight group communication tool called SnapGroups. We first wrote about it two weeks ago but hadn’t been able to take a look until tonight. We’re happy to report that you’re probably going to like it a lot: it’s easy, it’s clear, it’s got good social design and it’s real time. Check out the screenshots below.

Sponsor

Update: Just after we posted this, Fletcher says he’s lifted the password from the site and it’s live!

SnapGroups makes it really easy to create a group discussion around a particular topic, invite people, set variable privacy controls and then participate in that conversation as part of a whole “newsfeed” style stream of updates from all your various groups in one place. Fresh comments, likes and dislikes get pushed to your browser live using a home-made bit of AJAX and the whole thing couldn’t be much simpler. It’s a lot of fun to use, in fact.

Fletcher says this is only the beginning, that all kinds of features are still to come, but he’s focused on the basics for now. He started working on the site in October and says his favorite part of the project was “learning about the new technologies that have sprung up in the past couple years.” “The various databases that have come out recently are great,” he told us. “I’m using Mongo, but there are many interesting projects now.” The core of the site is written in C++.

Fletcher says SnapGroups will go live tomorrow morning. You should try it out when it does. Invites to groups will no doubt be flying around Twitter and Facebook. It may very well become something you want to use regularly. Hopefully there will be a way to export your conversations easily. Fletcher is a pretty straightforward guy and will probably implement just about anything that enough people ask for and that isn’t too hard to do.

Mark Fletcher has a habit of building relatively simple things, like the first major email list system and the first popular RSS reader, that end up being a defining player in the rise of a new era online. Simple, real-time group communication? Not at all hard to imagine that being a big new thing as well.

Discuss

Mark Hedrickson is 24 years old. He grew up in Menlo Park, California, down the street from Stanford, raised by a high-tech marketer Dad and a Mom in banking. Then he went to college and studied Nietzsche. He has now set out to build The Future – specifically your future, your intentions, your plans as a platform for analysis and software development.

The story became particularly interesting today: Hendrickson’s new company Plancast is submitting its much-anticipated iPhone app to Apple days before SXSW and announced on Hendrickson’s alma matter tech blog TechCrunch that it has raised just short of $1m from a list of industry stars. We offer below some perspective on what Plancast aims to do: nothing less than “to be the platform for all ‘intent’ data,” Mark Hendrickson says.

Sponsor

Plancast is a website where people post their plans. Plans to attend a conference, plans to go to a party, perhaps plans to get a haircut. “We have the same ‘who wants to share that?’ issue as Twitter,” Hendrickson told us today, “the standard ‘I dont use Twitter because i don’t care you’re eating a sandwich.’ What we’ve learned though is that semi-mundane stuff is actually interesting. So, perhaps we wont have a lot of the ‘getting a haircut’ stuff because that’s indeed quite mundane, but we will get ‘getting drinks tonight downtown’ or ‘heading to Palo Alto for the day’ type stuff. Which actually leads to very cool serendipity.”

Now that Twitter is such an unqualified success in all but monetization, it’s cool to say you’ve got the same problems Twitter had.

Mash up all those plans from friends and you get an interesting stream of forthcoming events.

The site is simple, if smart, today. The little company has big plans for the future, though. “We want to host and distribute all content that pertains to what individuals, organizations and businesses have planned for the future,” Hendrickson says. “If you break the idea of an ‘event’ down into its basic units (what’s going to happen, when, and where), there’s a ton of relevant social content through the long tail. We’re designed to host a superset of all this event data.”

Leveraging the Future

If the web first enabled people to publish diaries of their past actions, then moved on to status updates and check-ins about current thoughts and locations, then Plancast aims to be focused on the Future. “I think [the future has] been a neglected area in geo-location discussions,” Hendrickson says.

“Check-ins have dominated the conversation over the past year, and check-ins are great for what they are – but they have a certain limited value. If someone checks in somewhere across town, what are the chances you’re going to get up and hustle over there to join? You also have limited data — often you dont know why they’re there. From an advertiser’s point of view, you have to grab their attention immediately. Whereas if you have intent, you have more time to give them an offer and have them consider that offer and act on it. The scope of planning data is larger than check-in data in other ways too. Check-ins are really specific to particular venues — bars, retaurants, parks etc. so the scope of content/ads you can serve up is quite local.”

This conversation about the future needed to move on to something other than advertising.

“It’s absolutely a platform,” Hendrickson told us.

“It’s not just a consumer destination. We’re building our API early [expect to see it launch very soon] because we want to be the plumbing for future intent data. We want to power third party website calendar systems, third party apps, mash ups, etc. We want to do analysis on big data sets that compile intent data from all over. Once we start pulling from lots of sources — Facebook, Meetup, Linkedin, Twitter, Dopplr, Tripit, etc etc — we can then match intents and figure out really cool stuff. 50% more people are planning to see Avatar this weekend vs Hurt Locker. And we can pump this data back out to other companies that have special needs for it.

“Let’s say one day you can search ‘movies’ on Plancast and it knows A) your location, B) your past behavior, C) your friends’ activity, and D) aggregate activity. The top result could be a movie showing that 2 of your friends have already planned to see and which is very popular in aggregate in your city.”

Hendrickson says he’s hard at work building out privacy settings that will help more people feel more comfortable sharing more plans. That’s easier said than done, of course. This young, philosophically-trained startup co-founder from Palo Alto would be well-served by reaching out and bringing close to the company some advisors who specialize in understanding the privacy concerns of everyday people online, if he’s going to build a platform for the future of our communication around intent. Location based social networks in general face a big challenge in making people comfortable using them and demonstrating their utility before they can become mainstream phenomena.

For now Plancast is hiring engineers with its new money, which was just announced today. Investors include SoftTech VC, True Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, and Zelkova Ventures. Angels Aydin Senkut, Saul Klein, David Cohen, Joshua Schachter, Dave McClure, Dan Martell, Ron Bouganim and Paige Craig put in money as well, bringing the total to $800,000.

Things have come along quickly since Hendrickson was writing blog posts at TechCrunch, he left the staff there one year ago this Wednesday, and bought the domain Plancast.com for $500 last summer. (“I thought about buying Plancaster,” he says, “but some guy named Paul Lancaster had it.”)

Can this young man and his team build “the platform for all ‘intent’ data?” Marketing analyst Jeremiah Owyang has been bullish on Plancast for months. He described it as a leading example of the forthcoming “intention web” in December.

Expect the real-time web to quickly evolve into the intention web. People will work together to share their information about what they plan to do, and improve how they work or organize. Expect Social CRM systems (Salesforce, SAP), Brand Monitoring vendors (Radian6, Visible Technologies), and Search Engines (Bing and Google) to quickly try to make predictive models on what could happen, and what are the chances. Businesses that have a physical location like retail, events, or packaged goods can use this data to anticipate consumer demand. They may offer contextualized marketing, or increase or decrease inventory or store hours to accommodate. Don’t be surprised in the future and you walk into a store with your preferred items, meal, or drink already nicely packaged for you.

Plancast may or may not play a big role in transforming visions like that into reality, but it’s definitely a startup worth watching either way. Look for the company’s iPhone app later this week (built by high-profile developer Leah Culver) and check out the many listings of SXSW events on the site already, including our very own ReadWriteWeb event on Saturday night. We’d like to know if you plan on joining us.

Discuss

Every one of our blog posts around here is like a delicate, magical snowflake that we nurture lovingly (if quickly) before we push it out the door into the harsh lonely world of the web. Many of them are well received (otherwise we couldn’t do this for a living) but sometimes we write something we’re really proud of and it just melts into the river of news without being read by as many people as we wished.

Thus we present to you, our staff’s hand-picked posts this week that we think you may have missed but would likely enjoy quite a bit:

Sponsor

Frederic Lardinois has been covering the e-book market closely for months. This week he wrote up…
E-Books: After the Hype and Before the iPad

The e-book hype reached its apex just before the holiday season. Now seems like a good time to take a closer look at the e-book market, especially given that this business is heading for another disruption once Apple’s iPad launches.

Richard MacManus has been focusing on an emerging trend called The Internet of Things. Check out this interview he put up at the end of last month:
Everyware: Interview with Adam Greenfield, Part 1

Last week I had the privilege of meeting Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. It’s one of my favorite books about the Internet of Things and is still ahead of the curve, even though it was written in 2005 and published in 2006. Greenfield was in my city Wellington for the week, so I sat down with him at a local cafe to get his views on the current state of Internet of Things and where it’s headed.

Sarah Perez lives in Florida and she’s regularly got super smart content posted before the rest of us have even rolled out of bed in the morning. Her latest sleeper fave?
Beyond Twitter Search: Semantic Analysis of the Real-Time Web

Many of you probably never heard of the Ellerdale project until this week, when Twitter announced it was one of the company’s new partners in receiving the “firehose” of Twitter data, a full feed stream of tweets that was, prior to Monday, only available to the major players like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft.

What Ellerdale is now doing with Twitter’s 50 million tweets per day is definitely interesting – the service uses an intelligent data-parsing engine to analyze the context of tweets and the links they contain and combines that with other data sources like RSS feeds and Wikipedia to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker that provides more than just a list of tweets – it provides an understanding of the world’s conversations.

What would a new newsman say is news if a new newsman could say news was news? We asked Mike Melanson, our newest addition to the news writing team. He said his favorite under-read post this week was…
Ads with Eyes: Keeping Digital Signage in Check

While geolocation based services have been in the forefront of our minds lately, with websites like PleaseRobMe making us second guess announcing our whereabouts, another industry has been quietly ramping up its data collection practices.

The Center for Democracy & Technology issued a report yesterday addressing the growing “digital signage” industry, suggesting a number of privacy practices it might adopt.

Alex Williams helps make Enterprise tech news interesting and he posted some very important coverage of enterprise innovation this week in….

Will StatusNet Be Another Open-Source Star in the Enterprise?

What a week for StatusNet, the open-source, microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, one of the first services to emerge as a focal player in the movement around the real-time Web.

Last week, the company launched StatusNet Enterprise Network, a microblogging service with a support program for the corporate market. Initial customers include Motorola Corporation and Canonical Ltd.

Kaliya Hamlin is a frequent guest contributor, events partner and friend of the family here at ReadWriteWeb. She wrote a great post this week titled…
Bending the Identity Spectrum: Verifiable Anonymity at RSA

Today at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, Microsoft’s Corporate VP of Trustworthy Computing, Scott Charney, spoke – opening his talk with this question: “Do you want anonymity or accountability? YES!”

But how can you have both? I created a spectrum of identity to help understand the different forms that exist on the internet. On one end is Anonymous Identity. Basically you use an account or identifier every time go to a Web site – no persistence, no way to connect the search you did last week with the one you did this week.

Finally, my personal pick from my own archive. I’ve been having a great time writing up narrative tales of leading technology innovators. This is one you may not be familiar with but I think it’s really a moving and important story.
What Does it Mean to Make 5 Million Maps? Platial’s Legacy

It’s not every day that a business shuts down but declares itself a success in helping kick off an unstoppable movement to change the world.

Community mapping service Platial announced this week that it is turning off its servers and asking users to move their content onto the servers of other providers. Just short of 5 years old, Platial raised some venture capital, bought other small companies and made a name for itself, but in the end wasn’t able to build a business. Co-founder Di-Ann Eisnor defiantly says that Platial changed the world anyway. Cartography used to be an elite practice of drawing borders around resources and power. Platial helped transform it into an accessible practice for millions of people to share how they have experienced the world around them.

Those are our picks for this week! Come back daily for the best tech blog coverage we can provide.

Snowflake photo CC by Flickr user YellowCloud

Discuss

Google is developing a system to ingest real-time content updates from any page on the web automatically, using the open PubSubHubbub Atom protocol, we reported on Wednesday.

Google already indexes a whole lot of content very quickly, will a real-time indexing system make a big difference? There are differences of opinion on the matter and we’d like to know what you think. Search analyst Danny Sullivan told us on Wednesday that he thought it could be “the next chapter” for Google. John Battelle said this morning: “In short, it’s a new way for Google to get (more) real time signals. But honestly, not a huge deal. I don’t think. Correct me if I’m wrong…” What do you think, readers?

Sponsor

We explained the specifics of how the Hubbub system might work in our earlier coverage so let’s talk now about possible impacts (or lack thereof).

As we wrote on Wednesday:

PuSH is much more computationally efficient for Google but [Google’s Brett] Slatkin says that even more important is the impact of such a move for small publishers. Right now many small sites get visited by Google maybe once a week. With a PuSH system in place, they would be able to get their content to Google automatically right away.

A richer, faster, more efficient internet would be good for everyone, but the benefits in search wouldn’t be limited to Google, either. The PubSubHubbub is an open protocol and the feeds would be as visible to Yahoo and Bing as they would be to Google.

Readers Who Think This is Big

Sharon Kavanagh says:

This all sounds fantastic for the small guy as I have just created my first ever website which is for a reunion. The site will only be live for a short period as the date is May15th 2010 for the event and yet, it will probably take Google till then before my site is indexed and hence the peple I am trying to reach will never find it.

Scott Holodak says:

Previously you had to wait for spiders to crawl around the web to find changes on your site. Pages are crawled over again and again just to see if anything has changed. It’s a pretty inefficient process. Now the spiders are going to be fat and lazy because you are going to deliver your changes directly to them.

No Big Deal

Reader comments arguing this is not a big deal.

“Scott” says:

A properly designed website already “pushes” to (more accurately: gets “pulled” by) search engines and the frequency of indexing by search engines is determined by the popularity of the website.

This information doesn’t seem too new to me.

Bruce Wayne says:

Pushing unstructured content in real time can only mean the non relevant results will make it into the search results faster. To me this is another google hocus pocus distraction away from the the fact that search as it is today has hit a wall….millions of pages on unstructured data created exclusively to game the system….and now these pages of non relevant content can be pushed into the search stream in real time….

What Do You Think?

I think there is something fundamentally different about a web that Google’s index subscribes to in real time vs. a web that Google has to plow through with a spider looking for new content. I’m still wrapping my head around it, but there’s something about the PuSH method that feels like it would make the Google index a living, breathing phenomenon.

What do you think?

Discuss

Cambridge UK startup Rapportive has released a Firefox and Chrome extension that will replace the ads in your Gmail with photos, biographic data and social media links, including a live display of recent Tweets, for whoever you’re corresponding with by email. It’s fantastic and takes about 2 minutes to set up.

The three person team behind Rapportive queries data provider Rapleaf for the social media profile data and does some local caching for performance optimization. Let’s stop talking about it though – just go download it! Check out the screenshot and details below.

Sponsor

Trusting the Service

You don’t need to give Rapportive your Gmail credentials, the service asks you to login via secure Google Federated Login, or OpenID. The startup doesn’t have access to your password, but it does access the contents of your email – that’s how it builds a service for you to use. Any browser extension has access to everything you do on the web, but I expect some people will feel a little nervous about installing a webmail related extension from a small company. I don’t think that concern is warranted enough to justify missing out on this awesome service.

The company says that if your details are inaccurate you can visit Rapleaf and correct them.

Inbox as Platform

Rapportive is developing a platform for the development of custom applets that other companies can integrate within their local data stores so you can look up an email sender on your own system as part of the Rapportive display. Co-founder Rahul Vohra says such integration takes minutes to set up and in the long term the company hopes to create a marketplace for those applets. Team collaboration so notes left on contacts can be shared is also in the works, as is integration with popular paid CRM and customer service systems.

Rapportive was first reported on by The Next Web this morning.

I’ve been hoping to find something like this for a long time.

Discuss