Author: Marshall Kirkpatrick

The era of location-as-platform for software development is just beginning. No longer of interest only to uber-geeks, everyday people are now reporting their physical locations online, often through their phones. Geolocation services are hot and ever more prominent ones (like Facebook) are believed to be right around the corner.

This is a very exciting development for lovers of innovation. Today we asked some of our favorite web-heads why they are excited about geolocation and below you’ll find their answers. We hope you’ll share with us what you too, dear readers, think of this hot new trend online.

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We’ll start with three short responses from software developers, in order to put things in some technical context. Then we’ll move on to what it all means, with thoughts from writer and renaissance man Dean McCall, Warner Bros. music geek Ethan Kaplan, groundbreaking Georgia school teacher Vicki Davis and Baratunde Thurston, comic, pundit and web editor at The Onion.

For Software Developers

John Musser, ProgrammableWeb

Nearly everything in our lives has a geo component – so it’s a universally useful service. Geolocation + mobile devices + open APIs give developers the tools to create entirely new classes of apps, and at the same time can make existing apps smarter and richer.

Raven Zachary, Small Society

Relevancy. The advances in mobile technology and wireless networks have finally allowed us to make use of location services in a way that fits into our existing lifestyle. We’ve been talking about the possibilities of location services for decades, and we have the infrastructure now to make these exciting services a reality.

Kevin Marshall, Hive Mind

If I know 5 people that love coffee – I would love to see what’s the place they all frequent the most. This sort of data just isn’t available right now…but hopefully it’s on its way.

Alex Iskold, GetGlue

The previous generation of application pushed its context onto the user. Today, we are moving in the opposite direction where apps appear in context. This innovation started on the web, with the rise of contextual apps based on user’s context and now is rapidly moving into Geolocation.

For Poets

Dean McCall, Idea Finishing School

For me its about pre-deterministic behavior: the idea that a location has a story about itself appeals to me. It allows me to make more informed decisions, to connect to new people and tell a better story about the world I am in.

It’s still to be determined how our conversations about locations will evolve as well as our conversations with one another…more transparency is my hope.

For Music

Ethan Kaplan, Warner Brothers Records

Geolocation is super important to us because the best experiences with music are predicated on being proximal to it in its raw form [live performances].

Being sensitive and reactive to user location is the easiest way to bring the band closer — physically, metaphorically and figuratively — to the fan.

For Education

Vicki Davis, Cool Cat Teacher

Well, here is the thing with Geolocation – it is outdoors. So, it brings in the nature learner by taking them outside – also the bodily kinesthetic learner. There is a book called Last Child in the Woods whose thesis is that we’ve pulled kids out of nature and actually calls it “nature deficit disorder.” As a “farm girl” I’m a big believer in taking kids outside to learn if possible. So, using geolocation opens that up as well as the possibility of using things like Scvngr to do campus tours.

The only thing to remember is that we also have to begin making objects intelligent so that when they cannot get GPS coordinates (like inside) that they can gain information about objects (like on a field trip).

We need to make our world mashable. This whole concept of hardlinking extends to GPS and Geolocation. So, this is the next major growth of the Internet as the Internet becomes a hardlinked network which incorporates the objects and locations in our daily life. And we have to empower students with handhelds that have these capabilities and are incorporating an excellent curriculum. Most publishers aren’t thinking this way, but need to. This is the great thing about having open educational resources – we can all build on our piece of it.

For Comedy

Baratunde Thurston, Web Editor at The Onion

Geo-location will offer another tool for the forces of Good in the great battle between effective filters and information overload. While social media helps me find value based on trusted sources, geo-location will go a step further by narrowing my choices to what’s nearby. For all its ability to build connections, the Internet has in some ways disconnected me from my locale. I’m a “national” or even “global” citizen and I look forward to once again being where I am. The creative opportunities are also fun. I’ve left a bunch of easter egg “tips” in Foursquare and have a bunch more hijinks planned. Geo-targeted comedy is the future.

That’s what some of our friends have to say about this trend, how about you? This is going to be a big topic in the near-term future, so let’s start talking about what we’d like to see from geolocation services.

If you’re excited about this trend like we are, check out specialist blogs like LocationMeme and CheckinBlog, too.

Finally, watch this space: location is the topic for one of our next research reports and for our next public in-person event. These are exciting times to know where you are and to have software that can do something with that information!

Titile image: Earth Chicken by Flickr user HikingArtist.com

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It’s Facebook’s 6th birthday today and it’s been a very big year. On February 4th, 2004 then 20-year old Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.com from his Harvard dorm-room.

At this time last year Facebook reported having more than 140 million users. We were awed then that the social network was doubling its membership every 12 months. Since then the numbers have more than doubled and the site may have already passed 400 million users. The world is on Facebook, but just 6 weeks ago the company changed what that meant with a fundamental shift in its privacy policy. Check out these 7 articles below for a big picture of the good and the bad about the incredible phenomenon that is Facebook.

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1. How a Facebook “Sentiment Engine” Could Be Huge

Facebook as living census. Facebook is changing peoples’ lives by making it easy to share thoughts and keep in touch. Facebook could change the world by offering us a better picture of ourselves as a society than we’ve ever had before.

2. Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

The Big Z puts it all on the table.

3. The Facebook Privacy Debate: What You Need to Know

We’ve covered the Facebook privacy debate in and out. Here’s a summary of the key points.

4. How Facebook Beat MySpace: From College Dorm to Platform

It’s the question everybody wants to know. Here’s our take on it.

5. Report: Facebook Game Addicts “Paid” to Oppose Health Care Reform

Incredible, horrifying story. Fortunately Facebook is taking action to prevent this kind of thing in the future, but an important read none the less.

6. Facebook Could Become World’s Leading News Reader (Sorry Google)

Days after we put this post up explaining why it could happen, new traffic numbers proved that it already has happened.

7. Facebook and the Future of Free Thought

Yes, this really is serious stuff. More than 350 million people use Facebook, many every single day. It’s a major cultural force.

So Facebook is taking over the world. What do you think about that? Send Facebook some birthday wishes in comments below and let us know what all this means to you.

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If you’re a creative design professional, you’ll want to check out a just-launched service called Black Tonic; it’s a remarkably simple, easy, fast and enjoyable way to share presentations remotely without Flash or browser plug-ins and while maintaining full control over the pace of the presentation to clients.

Using only HTML5 and Javascript, the service syncs your browser window with the browsers of viewers whether they’re using IE6, Chrome, an iPhone or almost anything else. Transitions between images are super-fast and the service is a joy to use. It doesn’t include things like markup or native voice support (you’ll have to get on the phone) but for $15 per month, we think it looks like a great deal.

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We’ve found very few shortcomings in our testing of the app so far and ReadWriteWeb’s own designer Jared Smith enjoyed using it a lot. “It demonstrates an awesome use of standard technologies and real-time technologies,” he says. Existing powerpoint decks will need to be exported as images and uploaded one at a time, but the company says it’s working on changing that.

My favorite part of Black Tonic is the iPhone Safari view. Even when we switched from broadcast mode to review mode, where I was able to scroll through all the images in the presentation and click to zoom in a light-box – the whole experience worked very quickly on my iPhone. All I had to do was load a simple URL and we were rolling. (This is going to be a lot of fun to watch on an iPad.)

The company explained what it calls FLOW, its DOMcasting technology, in a blog post this summer. Presenting from Chrome works wonderfully. Presenting from Firefox is a little slower as Black Tonic is javascript-heavy, but it’s still not bad at all. Watching a presentation in Firefox is no problem at all.

As we wrote in the profile of the then-unlaunched Black Tonic in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future:

The Black Tonic team believes that lightweight real-time technology is an opportunity to reconsider remote presentations, to add some structure to them and add the necessary control over presentation that they haven’t had with the workaround of emailing PDFs.

A whole lot of options arise when a new computing paradigm emerges. Real-time doesn’t have to only mean delivering a chaotic stream of social information to an individual at the center of the system. Black Tonic is a good example of looking outside the standard application of a new technology and instead taking advantage of the opportunity to reconsider standard practices [like emailing PDFs to design clients] that have been influenced by technological limitations that no longer exist.

Black Tonic is available today and includes a two-week free trial.

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Want to track a hot story being covered by multiple news outlets? Today Google News added the ability to pin hot stories to a special “starred” page where you can go back and find the latest updates at any time. It’s a simple but elegant feature that makes the service a lot more interactive and useful.

Stories on the front page can be starred as well as story clusters that appear in search results. The resulting page of starred stories becomes a fully customized news tracker. There are plenty of other features that could be added, but this is a great start.

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Starred stories appear to move up and down the page of saved clusters according to how recently they’ve been updated. The richness of coverage that has surfaced around topics of interest is one of the primary differentiators between this and other services like it. This feature is similar to one that Google News added in November, called “Sections” – essentially saved keyword searches.

We’d love to see the inclusion of automatic summary technologies like Factery Labs or Dygest into the mix.

What This Means

This morning we discussed the possibility that Facebook’s push towards becoming a news feed reader was likely to find far more mainstream success than Google Reader’s dedicated RSS reading technology has. This new feature of Google News could become the news reader of choice for many people, though, because it encompasses so much coverage of key issues and doesn’t work in a simple reverse-chronological way like the syndication method of subscribing on Facebook.

There are a wide variety of ways that news could be served up to people in the future. Google News today personalized its algorithmic approach. Facebook appears to be promoting its syndication and subscription approach. I’ve been enjoying the new iPhone app from Newser lately, where you can find very succinct summaries of top news stories, written by human beings, published in short paragraphs with links. I’m also a fan of Regator a Web and iPhone app that’s all about the company curating top blog sources on a wide variety of niche topics. Google’s Living Stories project with the New York Times and the Washington Post is also quite remarkable as well. Google Fast Flip is getting a lot of use, too.

All of these are accessible, innovative and interesting ways to deliver the news to readers. Will some models work better than others? Are some better suited for different circumstances and tastes in a reader? Will there be enough financial support in the news delivery market to allow multiple models to flourish long term?

There are many questions that a news technology like this tries to answer. At a time when traditional news outlets are under serious threat of extinction, we can at least be happy that there is a rich ecosystem of new approaches being developed every day.

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication partner of the New York Times.

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From TV to Tivo and Hulu, from the mall to Amazon and eCommerce and from newspaper carriers and delivery trucks to online syndication and subscription – distribution of goods, services and information has changed a lot thanks to the internet. Subscription to syndicated publications hasn’t changed nearly as much yet as it could in the future, though.

Services like MyYahoo and iGoogle saw some traction and many readers here may have a Google Reader account, but dedicated RSS (really simple syndication) feed reading services have never lived up to their potential to become a mainstream phenomenon. These days many people say they just wait until links get shared on Twitter and they never use a feed reader at all. Late last week Facebook threw its hat in the ring and called on users to use its service as a news feed reader. There are a number of reasons why Facebook could be the strongest online subscription option yet.

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If you publish content on the web and are looking for maximum distribution, you probably know that Facebook is the promised land. The site is about 10 times as big as Digg or Twitter but so far has been less focused on sharing and clicking links. If Facebook can become the go-to place for hundreds of millions of users to find news (and that seems quite likely, doesn’t it) then the company is going to be in a very good position.

Last week, Facebook’s Malorie Lucich posted to the company blog encouraging users set up their Facebook accounts for news reading. Lucich suggested becoming a “fan” of news organizations that publish to Facebook, then adding those connections to a dedicated “list” that only displays updates from news sources. You can subscribe that way to ReadWriteWeb here for example, to the New York Times, to the Environmental Justice Foundation or to thousands upon thousands of other organizations that publish regularly, usually with RSS under the hood.

Facebook could make some interface changes that would make this news-reader model all the easier, but this use case is quite compelling already. Facebook will never replace a dedicated RSS reader (or 5) for serious professional use but the fact is that the vast majority of people online have not begun to take advantage of the powerful subscription options that the web now allows. Online syndication has huge disruptive potential, not the least of which is access to larger audiences for smaller voices than they’ve ever been able to access before.

Is Google Reader better than Facebook for reading feeds? Maybe. There are RSS readers that are better than Google Reader, too. But in terms of change-the-world feed-reading mass adoption – it’s most likely to be Facebook that gets millions of mainstream users on board.

Here’s why Facebook could become a world-changing subscription platform.

• Hundreds of millions of people already use Facebook to keep up with friends and family. It’s an interface they know and love. The newsfeed model has been popularized by Facebook and so encouraging news subscription through it will be infinitely easier than trying to get people to use something new.
• Special messages can be posted directly to readers. Facebook isn’t a rigid “publish and subscribe” only channel, it’s a broader opportunity for communication than dedicated RSS readers offer. That makes more sense to users and is compelling to publishers.
• Facebook provides a common area to see all discussion around news. Google Reader added a long list of social features to its service over the past few years but social just turned into clutter and weighed the service down. Social + news in Facebook makes sense.
• Reader interaction expands distribution into larger, social contexts. When you “like” or comment on a news item, that shows up on your profile page and in the live feeds of all your friends. Thus they are exposed to whatever publishers you’re a fan of. Likewise, as of December the pages you’re a fan of (i.e. subscribed to) have been irrevocably visible to the public at large on your profile page. While it is a major privacy problem that people are no longer allowed to have private subscriptions on Facebook, the fact that they are public increases the likelihood that new people will discover those news sources and become fans themselves.
• Partial feeds are good for readers. Back in the early days of dedicated RSS readers, a debate raged about whether publishers should distribute their full news stories in their feeds or whether it’s ok to publish just an excerpt and require readers to click through and view ads in order to read the whole story. Geeky early adopters clearly expected full-feeds, but imagine full feeds showing up in your Facebook interface! No way. Nice, scannable excerpts serve readers well there and the requirement that links be clicked and ads viewed serve publishers well, giving them more reason to promote Facebook subscription than many publishers ever felt they had to promote RSS subscription.
• The branded logo of become a fan on Facebook is more powerfully communicative than the community-standard orange broadcast logo of an RSS feed. Click on an RSS icon and most people will just get confused. Click on the logo of the monolithic Facebook and you’re subscribed. Sometimes drastically reducing choices makes them more likely to participate. That’s not pretty, but it’s realistic.
• Finally, “Become a Fan” is a relatively clear call to action. It’s emotionally resonate and very obviously free of charge. Most people probably don’t even know they are subscribing to updates when they become a fan of something on Facebook. Maybe that will change, though. Using the word “subscribe” explicitly harkens a different media era, though, when subscription was almost never free.

Facebook is a publishing, syndication and subscription platform where the interests of the reader, the publisher and the platform provider are all in sync. That’s powerful. Subscription through Facebook may be sterile, hermetically sealed and controlled by one too-powerful communication company but it works. Facebook clearly has an opportunity to become the subscription mechanism of choice for hundreds of millions of readers and for millions of publishing organizations. That’s a good place for any company to be.

You can subscribe to (and discuss the future of the Web with) ReadWriteWeb on Facebook here.

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Today is the 3rd annual international Data Privacy Day and a whole bunch of companies are listed on the organization’s website as participants. Google, Microsoft, even Walmart. Facebook is not listed as a participant and has stirred up a lot of controversy with changes to its privacy policy lately.

Why are these corporations singing out loud about protecting our personal privacy? According to the website, “Data Privacy Day is an international celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information.” More than dignity, this is about building trust with consumers so that these companies can do things with our personal data. Some of those are things we might like, a lot. Aggregate data analysis and personal recommendation could be the foundation of the next step of the internet. Unfortunately, Facebook’s recent privacy policy changes put that future at risk by burning the trust of hundreds of millions of mainstream users.

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Facebook’s privacy changes were bad for two reasons: because they violated the trust of hundreds of millions of users, putting many of them at risk where they had felt safe before, and because by burning that trust in the first major social network online, the next generation of online innovation built on top of social network user data is put at risk.

Had Facebook opened up access to user data through users’ consent – then access to that data would be a whole different story. As is, the privacy change was unclear and pushed-through without user choice concerning some key data, putting the whole concept of users sharing their data at risk.

See also: Facebook’s round-up of other peoples’ statements about privacy today on its blog.

How Facebook Changed

This past December, Facebook did an about-face on privacy. (Here’s our extensive coverage of the changes and why they were made.) For years the company had based its core relationship with users on protecting their privacy, making sure the information they posted could only be viewed by trusted friends. Privacy control “is the vector around which Facebook operates,” Zuckerberg told me in an interview two years ago. 350 million people around the world signed up for that system.

Facebook’s obsession with privacy slowed down the work of people who wanted to build cool new features or find important social patterns on top of all the connections we users make between people, places and things on the site. (Marshall shared a link to The San Francisco Giants with Alex, for example.)

Those geeky cries in the wilderness to set the data free, for users to be allowed to take their data with them (“data portability”) from one website to another? Not going to happen at Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg said, due to privacy concerns.

Aggregate data analysis? Facebook as a living census unlike any the world has ever seen? Back off, sociologists, you can’t access aggregate Facebook user data due to…privacy concerns, the company said. Facebook staff did team with a few outside academics they knew and studied that Facebook data themselves. They published some charts about racial demographics on Facebook, concluding that everything was peachy-keen and only getting better on the social network. But if you thought an army of independent analysts could glean some objective insights into the contemporary human condition out of Facebook, you were wrong.

Then in December, things changed. Facebook began prompting users to re-evaluate their privacy settings. Public was the new default and some fields on a user’s profile were suddenly and irrevocably made visible to the web at large. Your photo, your list of friends and your interests as expressed through fan page subscriptions could no longer be set to private.

Sorry, 350 million people who signed up for the old system. When Facebook said in the fine print that it reserved the right to change its policies, the company really meant it.

The changes were responded to with an international wave of confusion and indignation. News stories were written all around the world about Facebook’s privacy changes – they’re still being written today. Yesterday the Canadian government announced it was launching its second investigation in six months into Facebook’s privacy policies.

Did Facebook Break the Future of the Internet?

Is it naive to think that things you post on the internet are really “private?” Many people say it is, but that was core to the value proposition that Facebook grew up on.

Presumably the companies working together on International Data Privacy Day don’t believe that privacy online is a lost cause.

In fact, trusting that your private data will remain private could be a key requirement for everyday, mainstream users to be willing to input all the more of their personal data into systems that would build value on top of that data.

Facebook is the first system ever that allowed hundreds of millions of people around the world to input information about their most personal interests, no matter how minor.

Will that information serve as a platform for developers to build applications and for social observers to tell us things about ourselves that we never could have seen without a bird’s eye view? That would be far more likely if more people trusted the systems they input their data into.

Think of Mint’s analysis of your spending habits over time. Think of Amazon’s product recommendations. Think of Facebook’s friend recommender. Think of the mashup between US census data and mortgage loan data that exposed the racist practice of real-estate Redlining in the last century.

Personal recommendations and the other side of that same coin – large-scale understanding of social patterns – could be the trend that defines the next era of the internet just like easy publishing of content has defined this era.

Imagine this kind of future:

You say: “Dear iPad (or whatever), I’m considering inviting Jane to lunch at The Observatory on Thursday, what can you tell me about that? Give me the widest scope of information possible.”

Then your Web 3.0-enabled iPad (or whatever) says to you: “Jane has not eaten Sushi in the past 6 weeks but has 2 times in the year so far. [Location data] The average calorie count of a lunch meal at that location is 250 calories, which would put you below your daily goal. [Nutrition data online.] Please note that there is a landmark within 100 yards of The Observatory for which the Wikipedia page is tagged with 3 keywords that match your recent newspaper reading interest-list and 4 of Jane’s. Furthermore…

“People who like sushi and that landmark also tend to like the movie showing at a theatre down the street. Since you have race and class demographics turned on, though, I can also tell you that college-educated black people tend to give that director’s movies unusually bad reviews. Click here to learn more.”

That’s what the future of the internet could look like. That sounds great to me. Think that vision of the future sounds crazy? How long ago was it that it sounded crazy to think a day would come when you typed little notes into your computer about how you felt and all your friends and family saw them?

But how many people will trust this new class of systems enough to contribute meaningfully to them, now that they’ve been burned by Facebook?

On International Data Privacy Day, it’s good to consider the possible implications of Facebook’s actions not just on users in the short term, but on the larger ecosystem of online development and innovation over time.

Photo: Mark Zuckerberg, by Andrew Feinberg

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Augmented Reality, technology that places data or images on top of our view of the world around us, is hot. Under development in research labs for decades and in use in industry for years, Augmented Reality (AR) began to hit the mainstream consumer market in 2009. Hundreds of AR applications were launched last year, around products like Topps baseball cards and GE’s Smart Grid.

Consumer AR, whether it be on your mobile phone or delivered through your computer’s webcam, tends to be a mixture of utility and advertising. How far will those types of content go and what balance do we want between them? London Architecture Graduate Student Keiichi Matsuda has produced a gripping video placing these questions inside a scenario of pure eye candy. Check it out.

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Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Matsuda’s video, titled Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop, is both very cool and very frightening. Some of the information delivered through the AR interface appears to be useful. The intensity of the advertising, though, seems utterly frightening. That the user has control over the “advertising level” they are exposed-to is encouraging, but why would anyone crank it all the way up? Would this kind of immersive hyper-marketing change our standards the way that new technologies have made us more comfortable with multi-tasking?

There are a lot of big questions to tackle in regards to Augmented Reality. ReadWriteWeb is currently working on our next premium research report on the topic of AR marketing. Watch this space for that.

Let’s not waste any time before we start thinking, though, about what we want out of an Augmented future. Many of the same questions that the Web has faced will be present in AR. Do we need an AR DNS? Will advertising support the production of quality, useful content? Or will the AR future be like Keiichi Matsuda depicts in the video above? Perhaps a mix of heaven and hell, delivered through eyeglasses in between the world and our brains.

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Last fall Google began experimenting with a new feature called Social Search, and we called it a big chess move against Facebook. Today Google Social Search is opening up in beta for all Google users. The experimental feature will surface search results from the social streams (bookmarks, blog posts, photos, etc.) of a user’s contacts on services like Gmail, Google Reader or Twitter.

Social Search still doesn’t have a super-prominent place in the Google Search results pages, but make no mistake: This is a very big step. What’s your portal to the Internet: Google’s algorithmic search of the Web at large, or your social circle of people on Facebook? That’s the battle for the future that Google and Facebook are waging now, and Google Social Search is a big move. Facebook search is nowhere near as good.

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You may need to go to Google.com/experimental to turn on Social Search and you should try an image search once you have. It will be turned on by default for an increasing number of users over the next few days. The feature requires you to be logged in and discovers your friend connections through your Google Profile.

Last week we wrote about how social networking is fast approaching the importance of online of search in terms of Web traffic. One vision of the future, though, has posited that social and search won’t remain separate forever.

Do you want to have your questions answered only via your friends and their online content? No, probably not. But do you want to have your questions answered without the input of your friends and their trusted content? You probably don’t want that either. Google Social Search is a nice combination of search and social. Facebook’s search is terribly weak in comparison. That’s where the real competition is, not between Google and Bing or Yahoo.

One interesting caveat, of course, is that most people have friend networks on Facebook, not in Gmail or Google Reader. Your Facebook Friends aren’t included in Google Social Search, as far as we can tell. Update: Limited information from Facebook may be included in Google Social Search if your friends have associated their Facebook profiles with Google Profiles. But after chasing the Google Social Search team around on the phone for 15 minutes and just getting a PR-answer about this, we’re left to conclude that the rivalry is as heated as we originally reported. Murali Viswanathan, Social Search product manager sent this by email: “If someone links to their Facebook account from their Google profile, Social Search may surface that user’s public profile page. These are the same public profile pages already available on a search of Google.com and other search engines today.”

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

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The Westboro Baptist Church, home of the best known anti-gay protest organization in the US, led by Pastor Fred Phelps, has a new target for its public outcry. This Thursday afternoon the organization will be picketing outside the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter.

NBC Bay Area reporter Jackson West unearthed the schedule for the group’s trip to the Bay Area and writes that after a day of protesting outside Jewish organizations, the congregation will travel to Twitter’s brand new office.

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The organization says that they aren’t protesting against Twitter, rather encouraging the organization to do its duty in serving God. Megan Phelps-Roper, granddaughter of Pastor Phelps, tweets:

Don’t be silly! We’re not protesting Twitter as a platform; that’s like picketing television! =) We’re picketing the people who run @Twitter, who don’t use their position & voice to warn a generation of rebels of the consequences of their rebellion. Same goes for those at Foursquare & Gowalla (tho I personally find their products useless — at least relative to Twitter. =)

Westboros, we’ve tried to browbeat the people at Twitter HQ into using the service in a different way, and it just doesn’t work. Besides, Facebook is right down the road and 10 times as big.

Thankfully social media technologies like Twitter and Facebook are making it easier than ever for marginalized people, like young gay people, to have a public voice. As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg often says, accurately if perhaps cynically, more open communication on these kinds of platforms will bring about more understanding between people, more empathy and a more peaceful world. Maybe the Westboro Baptist Church ought to be protesting these platforms themselves after all, then.

We’ll limit our comments on this noxious organization to that. Good luck on Thursday, folks at Twitter. I’m sure if you’d like some support, a Tweet-up wouldn’t be hard to organize.

@Jesus did not respond by press time to a public reply on Twitter requesting comment on this story.

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Google launched a new web-based version of its telephony service Google Voice on the iPhone today at m.google.com/voice, built on HTML5 like Google’s other iPhone apps are. This after a long and heated battle with Apple over allowing Google Voice on the iPhone. Once it’s a website, though, there’s nothing Apple can do about it.

HTML5 makes for a relatively nice experience, with its local caching for speed and its responsive interface, but there are some things about the Google Voice web app that just don’t feel quite right. It’s hard to know which of its problems are just oversights to be fixed and which of them are rooted in the fact that it’s a web app. What do you think, is an HTML5 telephony app good enough? Or does your phone need to, you know, be on your phone?

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The new Google Voice mobile web app doesn’t offer a clear way to add contacts through the mobile interface, its call history function falls short and there are other things that are funky about it. It’s fast, but it’s still just not as fast and responsive as a native mobile app. Perhaps that will change with time. It does feel nice, though, and has a very attractive interface.

It was less than a year ago that Gmail was first available in HTML5 on the iPhone. Now there’s a heated debate about whether the future for mobile apps is in the browser like this or whether native apps will still reign supreme.

What do you think? Is the new Google Voice in HTML5 good enough for you to use and like? Let us know in our poll below. RSS readers can click through to respond and view responses.

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The mobile location “check-in” is fast becoming the hot new status message type online. It was only a matter of time until “where you are” became a platform to build added value on top of just like “who you know” has on social networking sites like Facebook.

Canadian newspaper chain Metro announced today that it has launched a deal with location-based social network Foursquare that will deliver location-specific editorial content from the paper’s website to users’ phones when they check-in near a spot Metro has written about before. The potential for services like this is huge. It’s too bad Metro appears to be taking the easy way out and focusing on delivering restaurant reviews, but it’s a start.

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The Incredible Potential of Location-Based News

In November we wrote a long piece about some of the kinds of things Twitter’s new Geolocation API makes possible. So far we’ve seen very little development on top of that API, but it’s widely expected that Twitter and Facebook will make location a major part of their offerings just like startups Foursquare and Gowalla have and like Yelp just began to do last week.

Just imagine.

User checks-in, via mobile phone: “I’m checking in at the coffee shop at SE 78th and Stark.”

User’s favorite services, which they signed-up for on their favorite location-based social network, respond…

Local newspaper: “There were 3 stories in the Metro section last week about places within 1 block of your current location, 1 story in Business and 2 stories in Sports. The first time we reported about that coffee shop was in 1985, click here to read that story.”

Local events calendar: “There are 2 musical events, 1 political event and 3 religious events happening within 3 blocks of your location tonight. Click here to see those listings.”

Wikipedia: “There are 3 locations within 3 blocks of you that have Wikipedia entries written about them. Would you like to read about the history of the neighborhood you’re in?”

That’s entirely beyond the initial use-case of location-based social networks: telling you who among your friends is or has been near your current location. There’s also location-based advertising to consider, of course. I like the natural foods industry, I’d happily accept messages from organic and natural foods vendors within a few blocks of places I check-in at.

Let’s See Some Serious News, Too

The prospect of the local newspaper getting on board with a location-based social network is very exciting. It appears that Metro’s initial foray is going to focus on restaurant reviews. In and of itself that’s not so exciting. It’s hard to imagine such a service competing effectively with Yelp or Google’s excellent new Near Me Now.

Put a newspaper’s best and most unique strength, its journalists, into a geo-located, mobile app context and then you’re really talking about something. Does the local paper want to tell mobile users that there was a murder last night, down the street from where they just checked-in? The list of unpleasant things that a newspaper is ostensibly responsible for reporting on is long – isn’t it reasonable to expect newspapers to report on those through new media as well? Or will struggling papers just focus on commercially pleasant topics, like restaurant reviews?

I hope the disruptive possibilities for this kind of platform are fully explored. There’s a whole lot of potential when you look at these services as platforms.

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Out of the labs and into the marketplace, Augmented Reality (AR) became a hot topic in 2009. Technology that places data and images on top of our view of the world around us is increasingly common in media and marketing, but the bulk of the promise appears to be in the future.

A group of AR industry leaders have announced the first-ever Augmented Reality industry event on June 2nd and 3rd in Santa Clara, California and ReadWriteWeb intends on being a big part of it. Event organizer Ori Inbar is a supporter of the ISMAR (International Symposium on Mixed & Augmented Reality) conferences but says those are more focused on research and this event will focus on industry and practice.

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Above: AcrossAir released a new version of its Augmented Reality mobile browser last week.

The keynote speaker at the event will be award-winning speculative fiction writer and leading AR thinker Bruce Sterling. ReadWriteWeb will also have team members present and will be publishing an in-depth research report on the use of Augmented Reality for marketing prior to the event.

Organizers have also put out a call for speakers – that could mean you.

New to augmented reality? Check out some of our previous coverage of this emerging trend.

• Prepare Yourselves: Augmented Reality Hype of the Rise
• Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Mobile and Augmented Reality
• Augmented Reality & The Web: Present and Future Scenarios
• Augmented Reality: 5 Barriers to a Web That’s Everywhere

We’re excited to attend this important event in June and we hope you’ll join us there.

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It’s a new year and it’s time for you to try some fabulous new web apps. We look at new apps all day around here and would like to share 3 of the very best we’ve found already this new year.

Music discovery, social Q&A and sharing your plans – that’s what these apps are all about. Read on, I’m pretty sure that at least one of these will get you jumping up and down, clapping your hands. It’s stuff like this that makes me love the internet.

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thesixtyone

thesixtyone isn’t brand-new but it just relaunched with a gorgeous new design and we learned this morning that the YCombinator-backed music exploration site has also taken funding from Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito and his investing buddy Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn.

It’s hard to describe thesixtyone. It’s a very feature-rich music discovery site and marketplace, with user voting, a game made up of listening quests and big, full-screen photos all over the site. It’s a joy to explore. There’s all kinds of little quirks, like you can limit the music you’re shown by genre. Did I mention there’s really big pictures?

Music, game play, big pictures, hot financial backing – this one’s an app to watch, and listen-to as the case may be. Jumping up and down, clapping my hands? Well yes, I am now that I’ve found TheSixtyOne.

Quora

Take a team of early Facebook engineering rock-stars, have them tackle the age-old field of Question & Answer and what do you get? Quora, a social Q&A site that is a whole lot of fun to use and a great place to learn things trivial or useful. The company’s goal is to create a timeless, best-consensus knowledge collection on a wide variety of topics and with more participation than you find on Wikipedia. So far the site is mostly a hang-out for Silicon Valley insiders (it’s in closed beta) but as more and more of the rest of us filter in – hopefully the excellent user-experience can scale.

It’s more general-interest (if less populated) than StackOverflow and its clones, it’s more social (if slower) than Aardvark and it’s more usable (if less immediately stimulating of the intellect) than Hunch.

I’m “following” (subscribed to) topics on Quora like startups, journalism, food and the New York Times. I’ve been going back to Quora multiple times a day every day for weeks, because it’s so much fun to see what new questions have been asked, what new answers offered, what answers have been voted up and what new topics you can follow.

Plancast

“What are you doing?” It was only a matter of time until someone decided that question was too slow. Plancast asks what you are planning on doing. Started by former TechCrunch writer Mark Hendrickson and launched in December, Plancast is on fire right now. Robert Scoble asked this week whether it was going to pull a Twitter/SXSW and with the flurry of sign-ups I’m seeing, that seems possible.

It’s fun to see the plans that friends have in the long and short term. My friend Mark Krynsky is going to DrupalCon in April. I’m going to the Post Office on Sandy Blvd. in an hour, then I’ll grab lunch in the area. Interested in joining either of us in those plans? Now you can, thanks to Plancast. It’s fun.

Those are the three apps I’ve been most excited about in 2010 so far. What new apps have you been trying out so far this year? Let us know in comments.

Heart photo at top by Flickr user bymanu.

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Home and Garden TV just announced that it has signed Heather Armstrong, author of hyper-popular early blog Dooce.com, to collaborate on unspecified “convergence media” projects.

The millions of readers who have followed Armstrong on her nine-year journey as an ex-Mormon mom who got fired for the contents of her blog and then made that blog an international phenomenon will no doubt be excited to see what she does with the TV network. Armstrong is a designer by training.

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One of the earliest bloggers online, Armstrong is now 34 years old and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. Generally referred to as a mommy-blogger, Armstrong writes about a wide variety of topics including her family. She’s a very hip lady and can run circles around the internet. Can she bring her mix of style, poignancy, humor and brutal honesty to HGTV successfully? We’ll see.

Armstrong’s announcement is here. Old media, meet one of the Queens of New Media. Now let’s see what y’all can do together.

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It’s often said these days that Google and Facebook are major rivals, but how could that be if one is in search and the other, social networking? Traffic analyst firm Hitwise provided one very clear clue tonight when it published new numbers for web user activity in Australia. For perhaps the first time ever, social networking sites have surpassed the traffic search engines receive, Hitwise says. There is reason to question the company’s categorization of web traffic, but the trend is worth examining none the less.

Social networking climbed fast this year, and Hitwise says it just peaked over search for a few days during the communication frenzy of Christmas. Take that, Larry and Sergey – Mark and Ev are right behind you.

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The biggest problem with Hitwise’s numbers is that the company appears to include YouTube in the “social networks and forums” category that is challenging search. That’s a questionable categorization of (Google’s) YouTube, a site that some people call the 2nd-largest search engine on the web. A person certainly can use YouTube as a social network – but we’d guess that far more people use it as a search engine. If YouTube is growing (and this analysis says it is) then search is growing. You wouldn’t think search would have much room to grow, but YouTube demonstrates nicely that there can emerge new kinds of search at any time. Some people argue that real-time search is the next type that will emerge as a growth industry for the search market. Others point to social search and that kind of amalgamation could throw our search vs. social networking equation entirely!

The arguable mischaracterization of YouTube seems to throw a big monkey-wrench in Hitwise’s usually fabulous market analysis, but as a general trend social network is undoubtedly growing. At 2% of web use, according again to Hitwise, YouTube is a major player – but lets think about the rise of actual social networking sites relative to search.

What would it mean if social networking over-took search in terms of sheer visits online? It would mark a sea-change on the internet. No longer would our dominant use of the web be seeking out web-pages built by HTML web-masters! Now we would all be publishing tiny little updates that perhaps only our friends and family care about. We’d be subscribing, more than we ever did by RSS, to syndicated updates from organizations of interest, large and small. It would be (perhaps will be) a very different era and, to be frank, it’s going to be harder to monetize. There will be privacy battles. There will be new platforms for innovation.

It’s a pretty big deal. Things will really change if current trends continue and social networking rises to the top. That’s not as clear as this traffic analyst firm argues that it is, but it could happen. And that’s a big reason why Google and Facebook are rivals.

Classic post: Is YouTube the Next Google?

Check out our research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future.

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The Guardian, ostensibly a UK newspaper, but also a major proponent for opening data held by governments to use by outside software developers, has launched some software of its own: a search engine that unearths datasets and pathways to data sets provided by governments around the world. World Government Data Search is now live.

Yesterday the UK government released its new data site, data.gov.uk, to rave reviews (including ours). The new Guardian search engine searches across the UK, US, New Zealand and Australian governments’ data sites. The company also offered up a gallery of the 10 best visualizations and mash-ups built on top of government data like this.

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The Guardian quotes developer Ben Fry on the future of searching government data: “This is only going one way: there is no trend towards less data.”

Following an era when the quantity of data available online increased in orders of magnitude, thanks largely to easy publishing tools for end-users like blogging and social networks, many people expect the next era of development online to focus on strategic moves to make the most valuable data available in standardized formats that facilitate innovation by 3rd parties independent of the original sources of the data.

If large, standardized data sets are a new language, then it’s time for a new period of literature to be written.

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YouTube just announced that it will begin supporting HTML5 video players this evening across many of the videos on the site. The feature isn’t live yet but is expected to be within the next hour or two. If this test goes live site-wide, it will be a good thing for the web.

An HTML5 video player will allow videos to be viewed without Adobe’s Flashplayer plug-in, videos will load faster and developers will be able to build all kinds of other intriguing features into a media delivery scheme based on the next version of HTML.
For now users will need to sign-up the HTML5 preview on Test Tube and they’ll need to be using either Chrome, Safari or the Chrome frame in IE.

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The biggest benefit of HTML5 support is that it frees users from the need to use proprietary plug-ins like Flash player or Microsoft’s Silverlight by using a simple bit of code to render video. (Note this caveat regarding the lack of codec consensus, however.) If you’ve used Google’s Chrome much, you’ve probably seen how often Flash player crashes in that browser. Firefox doesn’t deal with Flash well, either.

HTML5 is being edited by Ian Hickson of Google and David Hyatt of Apple. Expect to see Google and Apple support this new standard all the more in the future so that those companies and others can build a web that looks more like Gmail on an iPhone than it does like a Flash landing page from the last decade.

For more details, see these 3 great HTML5 demonstration videos we highlighted previously.

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A new website dedicated to making non-personal data held by the U.K. government available for software developers has launched today with the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Data.gov.uk is being slammed with traffic but six months after the U.S. government opened its Data.gov site the U.K. site already has more than three times as much data than the U.S. site offers today.

At launch, Data.gov.uk has nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with. The U.S. site, Data.gov, has less than 1,000 data sets today.

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The UK government has been a big supporter of innovation built on top of public data. It sponsored a contest called Show Us a Better Way, giving cash prizes to people who came up with the best ideas for mashups they would like to create if they had access to the right government data. Charles Arthur at the Guardian has good coverage of the U.K.’s open data work (the Guardian has been working hard to open public data as well).

The U.S. government, on the other hand, has been lackluster in its move to open data to facilitate outside innovation. If Twitter is the poster child for building a thriving ecosystem around a streaming set of data, then the Obama administration has earned about 140 characters worth of praise for its fledgling efforts so far. The U.S. government’s efforts to advance agencies’ use of cloud computing may work in conjunction with opening data to the public and thus may improve the state of things, but time will tell.

Congress didn’t even ask U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra any questions about President Obama’s Open Government initiative during his confirmation hearings. When the U.S. government’s Data.gov site launched, critics pointed out that it was filled with relatively non-controversial data sets; plenty of USGS data but no DOJ or military data, for example. The U.K.’s data site, in contrast, includes 22 military data sets at launch, including one called Suicide and Open Verdict Deaths in the U.K. Regular Armed Forces.

One request that users of both sites still have is for data to be made available in standardized formats. The U.K. site does include a prominent promotion of the Semantic Web, no doubt a tribute to Berners-Lee’s focus on the paradigm as the next step for the future of the web. More standardized, structured data is expected to be the direction that the program tries to get government agencies to move toward in the future.

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If you’re hoping to go to Twitter’s first-ever developers conference, Chirp, you might like to know when it’s scheduled for, right? Twitter hasn’t publicly announced the date, but we wanted to know so that we didn’t schedule our next public event on the same date. So I just asked on Quora, the new Q&A service just launched by Facebook’s first CTO, Adam D’Angelo.

Within a few hours I got an answer, from Ashton Kutcher, the most-followed person in the world on Twitter. Ashton says the event is going to happen on April 14. So our event will not be on April 14.

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It’s possible that the Twitter event is not actually going to be held on April 14, but I strongly suspect that is in fact the plan. As Twitter’s number one guy, as the founder of a high-profile social media marketing company hanging out on a reputation-based site, as someone whose answer got a thumbs up from Quora engineer Kevin Der (who has a strong interest in the site being filled with accurate info) – it seems highly likely that Kutcher knows and is telling the truth.

Quora is a very compelling site, disproportionately filled with Silicon Valley engineering and investing elites talking comfortably among themselves for now. That’s unlikely to last (especially if people start blogging about what gets talked about there!) but the site’s user experience and design are more than good enough to hold their own long after the cool kids aren’t alone there anymore.

Quora is subject of another article, still forthcoming. (Here’s screenshots if you don’t have an invite.)

For now, just make a note: Twitter’s first public event is probably going to be held on April 14. That’s what Ashton Kutcher says, anyway.

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Elia Freedman used to have it made. He was a mobile app developer in the days of the Palm Pilot and he scored bundling deals that got his sophisticated calculator software into the hands of more than 15 million people. Differentiating his product from competitors “wasn’t something we had to deal with for years,” he says, because of the favored position his app got in pre-loaded bundles.

Now those days are gone. Today Freedman’s PowerOne Professional Calculator ($5.99 in iTunes) was accepted into the very crowded iTunes App Store, where competition for visibility is fierce. Freedman’s strategy: PowerOne now focuses on being a tool-building app. Template creation for complex custom calculators in sales, medical, real estate and other markets is what the app is all about. He says he wants to solve the “there’s not an App for that” problem that many professionals experience when they try to use their iPhones at work.

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Calculators: Not Just For Nerds Anymore

Our phones are becoming increasingly capable of finding meaning from and adding value to more types of data than most of us could have imagined just a few years ago. Our physical location, the direction we’re facing, our proximity to other peoples’ phones and soon the temperature our phone finds itself in are all fields of data that have become platforms for developers to build usable tools on top of.

Now imagine training your phone to perform the complex calculations that you need while out in the field for your unique occupation, just by entering new spreadsheet-style functions into a program and saving them as a template.

Freedman says he’s talked with a crash-test engineer who finds the custom calculator he’s built with PowerOne far more useful than carrying a clip board. Commercial real-estate agents in the field with clients have standard operations they can perform, but often have to pull out and enter printed formulae that slow them down and introduce a risk of error. There are millions of equations used in the medical industry, and miscalculation by nurses, doctors and pharmacists cost a shocking number of people their lives. Put the particular equations they need into their hands along with the ability to easily run equations on the fly in the field, and it could be a changed experience for all kinds of people. A phone you can train to perform the specific calculations you need in the field is a smart phone. A calculator app that helps you build calculator apps is very meta.

Possible Next Steps

Freedman says he’s working on developing a more robust Web-based back end where users can share the templates. (Right now he’s making-do with a GetSatisfaction page for sharing.)

He’s hoping to enable a feature where organizations can push out formulae and updates to multiple users. These kinds of social features and network effects could increase the value of the service substantially, but remain a separate challenge to implement effectively. A marketplace for reselling custom-developed equation templates? Freedman says he’s been contacted by multiple people inquiring about just that.

Could PowerOne function like a social, mobile, customizable version of Wolfram|Alpha? That seems like one possibility as well.

The app comes today with more than 50 pre-built templates, some quite sophisticated. Calculation results can easily be emailed to yourself or a client.

A customizable, mobile, computation application is a great example of the kind of lightweight platform that will come in handy in an increasingly data-centric future. That’s the kind of development that makes this era of mobile applications so much more exciting than the old days of bundled incumbents, no matter how good that period was for Elia Freedman. You’ve got to hand it to him, though – his new iPhone app is thought provoking relative to the challenges of the day.

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