Author: Marshall Kirkpatrick

Google is developing a system that will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published. Search industry analyst Danny Sullivan told us today that this could be “the next chapter” for Google.

Last Fall we were told by Google’s Brett Slatkin, lead developer on the PubSubHubbub (PuSH) real time syndication protocol, that he hoped Google would some day use PuSH for indexing the web instead of the crawling of links that has been the way search engines have indexed the web for years.

Google senior product manager Dylan Casey said yesterday at Sullivan’s Search Marketing Expo in Santa Clara, California that the company plans to soon publish a standard way for site owners to participate in a program much like that.

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How The System Might Work

PuSH is a syndication system based on the ATOM format where a publisher tells the world about a Hub that it will notify every time new content is published. Subscribers then tell the Hub “when this Publisher posts new content, please deliver it to me right away.” So instead of the Subscriber checking back with the Publisher all the time to see if there’s new content, they just sit and wait to be told that there is by the Hub. The Publisher publishes something, then tells the Hub that it’s available, then the Hub goes and delivers it to all the Subscribers. This can take as little as a few seconds.

If Google can implement an Indexing by PuSH program, it would ask every website to implement the technology and declare which Hub they push to at the top of each document, just like they declare where the RSS feeds they publish can be found. Then Google would subscribe to those PuSH feeds to discover new content when it’s published.

PuSH wouldn’t likely replace crawling, in fact a crawl would be needed to discover PuSH feeds to subscribe to, but the real-time format would be used to augment Google’s existing index.

As Danny Sullivan told us today, Google would have to implement some sort of spam control and not just let content be pushed live to the index unvetted. That was what happened in the earliest days of search and it was a real mess, he told us.

The Advantages of a Real Time Google Index

PuSH is much more computationally efficient for Google but 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.

“I am being told by my engineering bosses to openly promote this open aproach even to our competitors,” Slatkin says. That’s a very good sign.

We expect this will be a very big deal and we’ll be covering it more extensively in the coming days, as well as whenever Google has something to announce more formally.

Don’t Forget: ReadWriteWeb recently released a big research report titled The Real-Time Web and Its Future, based on 50+ interviews with key innovators, like PubSubHubbub creator Brett Slatkin. Check it out!

Above: Slatkin’s deck for a presentation about Hubbub at Facebook HQ last Fall.
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Millions of people around the world don’t know what a browser is, they don’t know the difference between a search bar and an address bar and they sure don’t follow the finer points of Google’s many little changes it makes to their search results. They go to the Google and they type in Facebook login. Then they click on the links that show up, sometimes with very humorous results.

Google today introduced a new feature that will let mainstream users get search results to hold still and remain where they expect them to be. It’s called Stars and it’s essentially pinning a link permanently to the top of a search results page for a certain query.

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Above: Probably not how this feature will generally be used.

When one of our blog posts showed up high in a Google search last month for “Facebook login” we saw hundreds of thousands of confused people stream into our site and post typo-ridden comments like “I WANT MY FAFEBOOK!” Many of them couldn’t tell that they were visiting a blog post about Facebook, and with Facebook Connect login, and not Facebook.com itself. Even though we said as much in big bold letters after the first few thousand of them.

Thousands more people visited the site to gawk at those users and their comments. A common response was for web designers to say “we must not be serving mainstream users very well if they are confused in a situation like this.”

Enter features like Google Stars. It’s a great idea. No dumbing-down the internet for those lucky relative few of us who do know how to use it, just some additional options for those who are still beginning to learn. Expect to see more developments like this as regular web use becomes a more common experience for non technical people. This may be an example of a best-case solution.

Update: Several people in comments have said they don’t think Stars are going to work for mainstream users, either. What do you think?

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If you like Electronic Music, you might like Musique Concrète. If you like Cartography, you might like Map Projection. Into Head-mounted displays? Check out Organic light-emitting diodes! These are a few of the recommendations I’ve received this week from semantic, social recommendation service Get Glue and I’m pretty excited about it.

If you like books, music, movies or wine, then Glue could be the social network for you. I just like to browse Wikipedia entries and it’s making a big impact on my day.

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This long-running browser extension, prominently featured in both Firefox and Chrome official extension galleries, recently created a companion website that made use of the service skyrocket. Today Glue announced a new version of its extension that inserts links to see recommendations for related content on pages all around the web, from Google search pages to Facebook. Anywhere you find a link to a known website, that link will be augmented with a Glue link. There is one privacy setting you should change from the default, but do that and you’ll be ready to roll.

Get Glue recognizes when you’re looking at a website about a musician, a book, a bottle of wine, a movie or many other types of stuff. Then it makes it easy to look up additional info about that item across other websites like Last.fm, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. It does all of this unobtrusively, with social streams, recommendations and a game.

The newest version of the service recognizes links on search results and social networks, allowing you to invoke a handsome pop-up overlay on those pages as well. Check out the little grey “G” below. Hover over it and you’ll get a pop-up filled with options for learning more quickly and easily, without leaving the page.

Privacy Concerns

Glue tracks the pages you’re visiting, which is ok, but by default it exposes topics you look at on your public profile. You can turn that off and only expose the topics you interact with on Glue, like giving them a thumbs up or thumbs down. Yesterday I found an entry for a disgusting medical condition on my public Glue profile, because someone else (I swear) used my computer to look the condition up on Wikipedia. I wasn’t very happy about that. I now have the setting to expose visits turned off, but the company could explain even that better.

Glue is smart enough that it ought to be able to tell when I’m looking at web content that involves health, sex, money or other touchy topics and ask me if I want to expose those visits. This is just another example of the running debate around passive tracking, over sharing, privacy settings and default social software design.

It’s not hard to change this setting and once you do you then you’ll probably be pretty happy. It’s a shame it’s an all-or-nothing thing, though. I’d be happy to expose my browsing history to friends if the types of topics above could be excluded.

Get Glue is pretty awesome and the company adds new features all the time. My profile on the site is here. Come friend me up and we can be nerds together. Especially if you like looking up trippy stuff on the internet.

Disclosure: Glue CEO Alex Iskold is a long-time friend of ReadWriteWeb and one of the nicest, smartest people in the industry. (Read his heart warming personal story here.) His product was also something I disliked using for years until recent updates, so I feel pretty objective about my perception of it. Alex has particularly good taste in books and can be found here on Glue.

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Auto manufacturer Toyota launched a new Twitter-based portal called Toyota Conversations tonight and the site is getting a whole lot of press. Most people are focused on how the site seems to contain more positive Tweets than the world at large, but there are a lot of negative links on the site as well.

We got a look at the back-end infrastructure of the Tweetmeme portal system and have screenshots displayed below. These aren’t for the Toyota project in particular, but they are the same tools being put to use in a different campaign. We know you feed and data geeks fantasize about building the ultimate feed moderation system. Check out the one that Toyota put down no small sum to get to use. It’s a nice combination of heavy duty and easy to use, just like you’d expect for a big corporate customer like this. The best news? This system will be opened up to the public soon.

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No Cover Up Here

Below, an item page for a popular link shared about Toyota. Below is what appears to be the company’s direct response. Thus the name of the site, Conversations.

Easy to Use Logic Chains

Tweetmeme portal customers set up complex combinations of rules for which tweets to display using what company founder Nick Halstead calls “a mini-programming language – with a drag + drop interface for setting them up. Rules can be based on tweet, text from the story, title, meta data from the story, geo location data, twitter users who are tweeting…almost any data that is associated with twitter and the linked story that we spider as well. Each channel can have a number of chains – each chain can work separately – but be valued differently – i.e. have a confidence factor associated with it.”

The Big Dashboard in the Sky

This is what Tweetmeme HQ looks at, standing on top of all the channels. The ten person team calls its big set of rules “the pickle matrix”. Every time someone Tweets a tweet with a new link in it, or a Retweet, that data is thrown against the pickle matrix. That’s the field “access count.” Then an optimized process of rules are matched. “The data isn’t the problem,” Halstead says, “it’s the number of rules we put against it. This is 1,000 times more powerful than Twitter’s Track or search because we can apply tens of thousands of rules to every Tweet we see.”

Halstead’s company got a big boost from this deal, but Tweetmeme has been cash-flow positive for at least the last 3 months. “I think the more interesting fact,” he says, “is that I started this company for the sole purpose of doing this and companies are now only just starting to recognize the value in this kind of proposition. I think that shows how far social media has grown up. And that you have to stick at what you know is right – even if people ignore it to start with.”

No word yet on when this system will be opened up to the public, but used in conjunction with other media types like Toyota has it sure seems like there’s a lot of potential here.

Disclosure: FM Publishing, a partner in the Toyota project, is also RWW’s advertising network.

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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.

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In the late 90’s Di-Ann Eisnor was the founder and CEO of Eisnor Inc., an “alternative” marketing agency that helped companies launch and grew to 60 employees with $15 million in annual revenue. In 2000 she sold that company to Omnicon.

Then she traveled the world and did independent marketing work for large companies and small cultural institutions.

In 2004, Eisnor co-founded Platial in Portland, Oregon with Jake Olsen and Jason Wilson. The company’s pre-launch website described the project as “a rapidly developing application and community pivoting on the anchors of user annotation, layerability, collaborative mapping, social networking and real world publishing.” The three founders said they were taking advice from people like Clay Shirky, Anselm Hook and Arturo Duran. In addition to an email list you could sign up to learn when the product was available, the Platial website was filled with a tag cloud linking to Delicious pages of community bookmarks on topics like folksonomy, groupmaps and where2.0.

Platial put itself right in the middle of those heady times. We were all going to describe, categorize and display our world on our terms. Blogger had just been bought by Google the year before and WordPress had just launched. Delicious and Flickr had just gone live and would be acquired by Yahoo a year after Platial’s founding.

These were revolutionary tools, like tiny virtual Gutenberg dynamos, the number of publishers and amount of content and data published exploded. People were telling their stories through blog posts, they were posting their photos and using Platial and Frappr, which Platial later acquired, they were making maps.

They made maps about the history of Palo Alto, California. About the reconstruction of New Orleans. About the companies that make London, England the arms trade capital of the world. In the end Platial held 5 million user-created maps.

For perspective, the field of cartography began roughly 1500 years ago. Only 1,000 European maps of the world are known to still exist from the years 500 through 1600. Platial’s properties saw users make that many maps every eight hours, on average.

Now people are making maps all over the web, including on Google’s MyMaps service. Eisnor says Platial was particularly innovative among map making services. But it wasn’t able to build a sustainable business.

Eisnor says the business model was always local advertising but local advertising didn’t arrive in time. The company’s 500,000 map widgets embedded in blogs around the web never brought in more than a pittance in revenues. Delivering those widgets cost thousands of dollars per month. The company had a half a million iPhone app users to serve after being featured by Apple. The small staff worked without pay for the last 18 months. Several acquisition conversations fell through.

This weekend co-founder Jason Wilson put up a post on the company blog titled Geographic Euthanasia: The End of Platial As We Know It.

Eisnor says she has very mixed feelings about the elephant in the middle of the room, Google. “Without them we would be going out of business and there would be no where to send the data.”

“They started MyMaps two years after us. They executed really well. We didn’t pull it off… In terms of telling stories, I don’t know that there’s a business in [user created maps]. Google’s [map making effort] doesn’t have to be sustainable, it has an infinite amount of money. But Google is allowing people to tell their stories and is not in danger of having to shut down peoples’ maps. Plus they are very active in places like Africa where it’s even more important and hard to get people to contribute.

“Never mind that we used their maps. We took the movement further than they could have.”

Eisnor works at Waze now, a company that’s building real time street maps through shared driving data. It’s not the same, it’s an attempt to disrupt an established market instead of an effort to create a new user behavior, Eisnor says. Neither are the numerous location based check-in networks the same as what Platial was doing, they aren’t really about telling a story.

The market’s enthusiasm for user generated mapping may be contracting after a few years of initial excitement, but make no mistake: there is a big new way for people to publish the way we see the world now. That’s important and it will never disappear.

Platial says it was all about “AutoBioGeography, Place Memory, Location Awareness.” Those are important concepts that were changed by this ambitious little startup, whether it survived as a business or not.

You can stay abreast of future projects the Platial team develops on the side on its Twitter account and keep up with the work and thoughts of Di-Ann Eisnor, Jason Wilson and Jake Olsen.

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Location based social network Brightkite plans to launch a universal check-in API that will let users update their information on competing services like Gowalla, Foursquare and others later this month at South by Southwest, we believe.

In a poll we ran last night about competing location networks, Mark Krynsky, founder of Lifestreamblog and CheckInBlog, left the following comment: “I’d like to see a a multi-checkin service make its appearance at SXSW that would allow me to check into all 3 mentioned in the poll (more if possible) at once.

Think Ping.fm for checkin services.” Brightkite co-founder Martin May replied: “working on exactly that.”

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Brightkite executives declined to share any further details before they unveil whatever it is that they are working on, but there are additional reasons to believe that we’ll see a cross-system check-in tool from the company later this month. Brightkite API email list members were warned last month that major changes to the company’s development platform were coming at a time that roughly corresponds with SXSW. TechCrunch coverage of the company’s surprisingly high user numbers and local advertising deals from a week ago also includes brief mention of something coming around SXSW time.

A universal check-in system is the next logical step for location based social networks. It’s just no fun to use one service but give up the ability to see where your friends on other networks are. Siloed social networks end up competing not on the quality of their services, but on the number of your friends they have locked-in to their network in particular. Setting users free through a universal, interoperable check-in would be a bold move. It will be interesting to see how Brightkite tries to do it and how its competitors respond. (We’ve got inquiries in asking a few of them.)

Hopefully a universal check-in system will be good for all players in the field. That was the vision of Yahoo’s FireEagle, which you don’t hear a lot about these days.

Brightkite says it has 2 million active monthly users and it was the clear winner in last night’s ReadWriteWeb poll asking which location service people would use at SXSW. But it gets far less media hype these days than Foursquare and Gowalla and admittedly approximate web traffic services don’t show Brightkite in the lead at all.

Either way, offering up a way to read from and write across multiple location based social networks would be absolutely fabulous. Our fingers are crossed that this is what we’ll see from Brightkite in a few weeks and that it will be good.

Update: Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley says this is news to him and a reader in comments points out that Gowalla’s API is read-only, making a universal check-in impossible. Gowalla has said it is working on a write capable version of its API, though. Time will tell what’s going on! If not Brightkite, then somebody needs to build a universal check-in system ASAP. Google Buzz may be a good place to look for this as well, see How Google Buzz is Disruptive: Open Data Standards. Our fingers remain crossed.

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Walled gardens are already under attack because of the ease of sending content like messages and photos from one website to another. Sites that don’t let content flow in and out freely, when that’s what users want, are fighting against the powerful tide of the internet.

Now a new proposal aims to take things to the next level and send a payload of item-type specific action options along with every piece of content that gets shot across the internet. A loose body of innovators from some of the biggest social networking companies online have begun discussing an addition to the Activity Streams standard format called an Action Stream.

That could blow the world of social networking wide open, allowing users to try out other competing social networks without losing their ability to interact with friends on Facebook, for example.

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Earlier this month social software designer Adrian Chan offered up a proposal for what he called Action Streams.

Action streams would not only share status/activity update meta-data but also permit updates to function as actions. For example, an invitation update posted in twitter could be accepted in Buzz. The vision for action streams thus involves a distributed and decentralized ecosystem of coupled action posts, rendered by third party stream clients and within participating social networks.

This idea was added tonight to the Activity Streams wiki where it will be discussed by the community building the Activity Streams format. The standard types of actions that can be taken in regard to content items of the same categories on Amazon and Facebook were listed as prior art. The discussion has just begun, and data interoperability isn’t something that everyone at big social networks agrees is in their best short-term interests. These idea are exciting and are supported by a substantial number of people, though.

The Activity Streams discussion is participated in by engineers from companies like Google, Facebook, Nokia, Yahoo and others. Chris Messina, who joined Google in January, is one of the key voices, and semantic web builder Monica Keller, who left MySpace for Facebook last month, appears to be taking an even more active role in the effort than she had before.

If Activity Streams with Actions can be implemented effectively, that would mean not only that you could participate in any social network you choose and still read messages from outside that network – you could also interact with them from those other networks as well. RSVP to Facebook event invites, tag yourself in photos, etc. without visiting Facebook, but from within whichever social network won your heart through its superior features or design.

You could interact with your friends on Google Buzz from inside Facebook, or from a social network that doesn’t even exist yet. More and better social networks would spring into existence because the ability to see and interact with friends would no longer be a scarce resource hoarded by the biggest social networks.

If you think social networking is a world-changing phenomenon today, imagine what it might be like if interoperable social networks sprung up like wildflowers. It’s one thing to make content available in a standard format – but making some basic actions transmittable and standardized would make the prospect of communication across networks all the more real and powerful. That could mean an environment ripe for innovation and a better experience every day for users.

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Facebook is about to become a quieter, less annoying place for users. The company just announced that it has deprecated “application notifications” and will require apps to use other, less intrusive methods of sending news to users. It’s a big step in the ongoing anti-MySpace-ification of Facebook. Though to be fair, MySpace recently instituted something similar. Now your “notifications” section on Facebook will just be for things like comments left on your posts.

It’s a good move that puts the interests of users ahead of short-term benefits for app developers and monetization.

That’s in everyone’s best interests in the long term.

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Facebook has done a delicate dance with application developers for years: the more your users click through notifications about your application, the more notifications you’re allowed to send. Many developers would like to notify all users of anything, at any and all opportunities, because those notifications drive traffic. Facebook has sided with users in this equation, though, and today just threw the whole dance out of the spotlight and into a designated and less central part of the user experience.

Developers were recently given permission to ask app users for their email addresses, which they can use to email app notifications directly. (Granted, that could get annoying too, but at least it’s opt-in.) The creation of a special Applications and Games Dashboard offers another place for app notifications to be delivered.

Some developers may complain that they are being further pushed out of users’ line of sight with this decision. Facebook is most likely to respond like this: build a good app that people will use and share by choice and you’ll be just fine.

It’s unclear whether this will affect the Facebook Newsfeed, but the algorithmic method behind selection of which notifications to publish to the newsfeed and in what order is so central to the Facebook experience that the company was issued a controversial patent for it yesterday. As the newsfeed paradigm takes over the whole web, though, figuring out how to balance human with automated signals, and communication with marketing in the stream, is no trivial matter. These are the decisions upon which the future of the social web is being built.

At first blush, this looks like a good UX design decision that will improve the way everyone using Facebook feels about the site. Look for the change to go into effect on Monday.

Become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook and we’ll deliver you the best tech news and analysis online right into your newsfeed so you can discuss it with friends.

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Mark Fletcher, the man who built one of the first easy email group services online and sold it to Yahoo! for $400 million, then built former market-leading RSS reader Bloglines and sold it to Ask.com, plans to launch a new service next week called SnapGroups (currently password protected).

Fletcher planned on unveiling the company tonight at Dave McClure’s Palo Alto event Lean Startups but had technical problems hours before going on stage that delayed the launch of the site. None the less, he offered some details about what we can expect next week.

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Fletcher promised that SnapGroups will include rainbows and unicorns specifically, but thematically will be focused on real-time group communication. Given the company’s name, we presume SnapGroups will facilitate quick and easy group creation. “Groups are incredibly powerful,” Fletcher said tonight, “the best thing about the internet is group communication. But over the last 10 to 12 years groups have stagnated. Yahoo hasn’t done anything with Yahoo Groups.”

Fletcher said he used outsourced development and design services extensively in creating SnapGroups. He built the site for a mere $6k, a tiny fraction of what it took to build his previous products. There will be Twitter integration at launch and Facebook integration later. “We will tap into power-user groups at first,” Fletcher explained, “and have larger moderator groups to help shape the service going forward.”

Fletcher is a humble, soft-spoken innovator with a remarkable track record. OneList, the company that became Yahoo! Groups, was a defining technology for an era where hundreds of millions of people came online and found distributed communities for the first time. Bloglines was an equally powerful if far less popular technology. The market-leading RSS reader until the rise of Google Reader, Bloglines was the tool of choice for millions of people harnessing the power of user-driven syndication for the first time. RSS is a world-changing technology and Fletcher built the first popular interface for it.

Here at ReadWriteWeb we agree that groups are where it’s at, see our write-up titled Groups: The Secret Weapon of the Social Web. We’re very excited to see how Fletcher productizes the ability to communicate with groups of people. Watch this space next week.

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Swedish marketing technologist Dennis Hettema has created a hot-item tracking website for the most-shared items on Google Buzz, called Buzrr. The site is very simple right now, it doesn’t include categories, there’s no description of how it works (“we are jumping through a bunch of hoops,” Hettema says) and the “new buzz” column is already full of spam. People love this kind of thing, though, so check it out.

Tweetmeme had similar beginnings and is now quite an impressive little company. Google Buzz has a lot of potential, and Buzzr is worth watching too.

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Ultimately, popularity contests are only so interesting – but they do draw a crowd. If Buzzr can execute on really counting Buzz shares of stories, then maybe it could gain some critical mass and do some more interesting things with the data.

Buzzr has taken a page out of Tweetmeme’s book by prominently featuring a website button to share a story on Buzz, something that put the interests of publishers, users and Tweetmeme all in sync for that company.

On the other hand, there is a whole lot of backlash already concerning Buzz’s intrusiveness. That’s why we decided not to push content there automatically but to engage in conversations there instead. If that’s how the medium shapes up then services like Buzzr may not be as widely embraced as the number-pumping Tweetmeme has been.

Time will tell; since Google Buzz’s most disruptive quality is its open data standards, there should be a whole lot of services built on top of it soon.

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Facebook has been granted a patent on the Newsfeed, “displaying a news feed in a social network environment.” Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook found the patent first and says it could be “one of the most significant social web patents” in a decade.

If all algorithmic ranking and delivery of social activity updates to social network users falls under this patent Facebook applied for in August 2006 (one month before it launched its controversial Newsfeed) then there’s going to be a whole lot of trouble for sites all over the web. We’ve got calls and emails in with Facebook PR, we’re going to start thinking and reading up about what this could mean but for now, please join us over on Google Buzz to discuss this story as it unfolds in real time. Our coverage continues below.

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Working Summary: This patent appears to cover primarily implicit user activity updates (such as “person X changed their employer listed or their relationship status or became friends with person Y”) and the dynamic ranking of those items when delivered in the context of a social network. In contemporary Facebook terms, it would probably cover the News Feed but not the status messages in the Live Feed. It would probably not impact what Twitter is doing today. It could impact any number of other social networks – like LinkedIn, Ning and other systems not created yet. But it’s possible that Facebook will only use this patent defensively. Time will tell what the company’s intentions are.

18 months ago we wrote the following, as site after site adopted a Newsfeed model for delivering updates to users:

Today we’re ready to declare The Newsfeed the dominant internet metaphor of the day; the cascading waterfall of updates from your friends, with comments swirling even around those – that model is everywhere now!

MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo!, Twitter (?), the sharing part of Google Reader and even Google Buzz – do all of these sites have technology at the center of their social experiences that falls under this new patent of Facebook’s? Twitter probably doesn’t fall under this patent because the filing

Text of the Patent

Here’s the abstract for the patent, filed August 11th, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg listed as the first inventor:

A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further may further include displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers and dynamically limiting the number of news items displayed.

An initial response from Google’s Chris Messina, a leader of the Activity Streams standards organization that includes Facebook.

I hope that this is defensive and Facebook doesn’t intent to enforce this patent. this is why the Open Web Foundation was instantiated, so we could work on these kinds of features without any one organization invoking patent rights. this is just one more example of how the patent system isn’t architected to support the right kind of innovation.

[For all the other websites using activity streams-like formats] if this patent gets enforced, you could do it in reverse chronological order where there is no algorithmic ranking or you could license this technology from Facebook. i don’t know what this means for Facebook’s Platform and Connect.

It sounds crazy, but did Facebook invent the algorithm-driven newsfeed? Messina wasn’t quite willing to grant that in our conversation, but it’s a tough call. “Facebook certainly built the whole phenomena around the newsfeed,” he said.

Don’t miss: Dave Winer’s take on this news.

Nick O’Neill has published the following update to his story, but I’m not buying his conclusion:

It appears that this patent surrounds implicit actions. This means status updates, which is what Twitter is based on, are not part of this patent. Instead, this is about stories about the actions of a user’s friends. While still significant, the implications for competing social networks may be less substantial.

Implicit actions are a very big deal. LinkedIn contacts making new connections or changing their jobs would be the most immediate example that comes to mind. If offering a stream of updates of the non-status messages of friends is something Facebook alone could deliver, that would be a major loss for the rest of the social web.

There’s an active conversation going on our Google Buzz page for this topic, too.

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“The writing is on the wall that there will be baseline privacy legislation introduced,” said John Morris, general counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology at a Congressional hearing on location data and privacy yesterday. “It will require location be treated as sensitive data, like medical data. You’ll need to do more than just post a disclosure statement.”

We’re entering an era of location as platform, but should that location data be as fundamentally private by default as medical information is?

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Many users are concerned about their location being exposed in ways they don’t control, and that have adverse impacts on their safety and freedom. That’s one side of the debate. These concerns could cause the development of location-based services to backfire, argues the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Erica Newland in a blog post today:

Location privacy is a timely issue here at the dawn of the location-enabled Web: ensuring that location information is subject to neither commercial nor government misuse – but is instead transmitted and accessed in a privacy-protective way – is essential to the long-term success of location-based applications and services. Beyond the risks to individualsʼ privacy, the present lack of privacy protection also creates market risks for the very companies seeking to capitalize on location services.

That’s well put, but does location data need to be default private like medical information in order to prevent misuse, and to support an economy of innovation? Some people believe that it is the culture of sharing by default that makes location-based services what they are.

As writer Kit O’Connell said in our Google Buzz chat on this topic: “people will never treat location like medical data, because they are so willing to give it up to the world in so many cases. It becomes an issue of surveillance vs. sousveillance.” Sousveillance is outward-facing surveillance. Location-based social networks offer not just a way for us to be seen, but a way for us to see what the rest of the world around us is doing. Checking in to a location is interesting not just so other people know you’re there, but so you can see who else you know has been there as well and what they said about it.

Of course exposure of your location is going to be opt-in on all of these services, but the locations you choose to check in at ought to be public on some level so that interesting services can be built on top of them. See Gowalla’s new API, for example, or our post What Twitter’s New Geolocation API Makes Possible.

Of course it would also be good to let users limit exposure of their location in certain situations to certain circles of friends. I might be happy to check in at certain establishments if that was only made visible to a select group of my friends (not my family) and to other people checking in at that location, for example.

But treating location data like medical data sounds like a recipe for shrouding it in complete privacy by default. Not allowing information about our activities in public… to be public… would be a real blow to the location-service ecosystem.

Samuri on a Cell Phone photo credit: rumpleteaser.

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