Author: Mike Melanson

We don’t know about you, but we’re sort of a fan of being a fan of things on Facebook. It can be useful a way to keep up with what’s going on at the White House, for example. Or you can let the world know that you enjoy “Not Being On Fire“, in case they were wondering. Or, you can express your support for political change. Or can you?

We noticed over the weekend that one Facebook fan page has said that Facebook is forcing it to shut down to meet the terms of service, but we can’t help but wonder what exactly is going on here.

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The fan page, which goes by the uber-long title of “Revocation of tax-exempt status from churches engaging in political action“, sent out this message over the weekend:

NOTICE: To comply with Facebook Terms of Service, I am forced to delete this fan page because it is not an official organization. I have created a group page for the same purpose as the fan page. Please, join us in our new location. I will be deleting this page in 1 week..

Most often, a Facebook fan page is shut down because it is violating the terms of service by spamming its users. A look at the Revocation page (and having been a fan for some time now) shows no evidence of over-zealous promotion or spamming.

The group has over 120,000 fans and a number of them are crying foul.

“You mean to tell me SHOE LACES is an official organization?” writes one commenter.

Other commenters, it seems, are looking for retaliation at what they see as targeted censorship. One writes writes that they have “Just reported a bunch of Traditional Marriage fan pages [to Facebook] citing the same policy.”

The common thought throughout the threads is that complaints have reached Facebook from those who disagree with the group’s political bent and Facebook has acquiesced to their demands.

According to section 12 of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, “Pages are special profiles that may only be used to promote a business or other commercial, political, or charitable organization or endeavor (including non-profit organizations, political campaigns, bands, and celebrities).” [Emphais added]

This page in Facebook’s Help Center says that, “Only the official representative of an organization, business, celebrity, or band may create a Facebook Page.” But at the same time, could you not become the “official representative” of an “endeavor” at the time of creating that page? The moment you tell other people we should march for a cause, you become the march organizer – the “official representative”.

We do know that in the past, Facebook has stood strong on the side of promoting free speech, so we can only wonder at what is going on behind the scenes here. And while the fan page has organized a separate group, the difference between a group and a fan page on Facebook is not insignificant, as groups have little in the way of engaging their users and reaching out to them. A fan page, on the other hand, can post notices and announcements that will reach the feeds of its users. Another issue is that, unless the current users switch over, the page will lose a large portion of its followers. The group currently has about 17,000 members, about one tenth of the fan page.

We reached out to the fan page’s creators but have yet to receive any response. Facebook told us that it was going to have to look into it and get back to us later.

We would like to think that this is a misunderstanding or the fan page did violate the TOS is some way other than its claimed reason, otherwise, this doesn’t look good. If a competition between a pickle and Nickelback’s fan base is a valid fan page, then one expressing political thought that “endeavors” to create political change should surely stand.

We hope to have more for you as the day goes on.

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Google knows you. It knows what type of car you drive from that time, last year, when you looked up the where you could find a cheap set of tires. It knows that you like Mexican food from all the times you’ve looked on Google Maps. And Google knows how to leverage this type of information with services like Google AdWords, AdSense, and DoubleClick Ad Exchange but now it’s moving into what it’s calling “the next generation of ad serving” – a simplified, streamlined ad server.

While Google currently has the upper hand in the battle, it’s starting to look more and more like Google and Facebook are about to duke it out in the advertising arena. And who will they be battling over? The little guy.

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Google’s latest move in the advertising sphere replaces DoubleClick DART and Google Ad Manager with DoubleClick for Publishers, an ad management system meant to simplify the more complex aspects of managing ad space.

According to an article on PaidContent, this latest move by Google “involves the promise of greater simplicity as it aims for smaller publishers”. DoubleClick for Publishers offers a simple, free version of DFP for small businesses and another (not free) for larger websites – likely customers of DoubleClick DART.

The new service offers a redesigned interface, more detailed reporting, algorithms to automatically improve ad performance and a public API to allow for third-party apps to use the DFP system.

DFP will allow its users to perform a number of functions, from running different ads at different times, according to when they best perform, to mixing and matching different priced ads to various page locations.

We think that the increased focus on small businesses is a growing trend in online advertising, as we just saw with Facebook announcing last week that it would begin accepting PayPal for advertising. It seems that many of these big companies are realizing that they may be missing out on innumerable revenue streams from small businesses by making the task of advertising daunting and complicated. A dollar is a dollar, after all, and increasing accessibility while reducing confusion should only increase the number of dollars coming in.

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Dan Kantor, the man behind de.licio.us’s Playtagger and Firefox extension, has brought us a new toy to play with that literally makes the web your musical oyster. ExtensionFM is a Chrome extension that automatically scrubs the websites you visit, finds embedded music, and adds it to a library of online music.

As time has gone on, we’ve found fewer and fewer reasons to actually download music and ExtensionFM gives us one less.

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Kantor has done some big things in online music over the years. He created Playtagger, a music player that made mp3 bookmarks in de.licio.us playable right there on the page, and founded Streampad, a social web-scale music application that was acquired by AOL in 2008. If you use the Firefox plug-in for Delicious, Kantor built that too. Until 2009, he was the product director of AOL Music and now he brings us ExtensionFM.

Kantor pre-released the music plugin just over two weeks ago with little to-do, but we can’t get enough of it. ExtensionFM runs quietly in the background as you browse, collecting any and all tracks and archiving them. If you decide you’d like to listen as you go, you can simply click on the icon and play individual songs, queue songs, or play or queue them all. If you decide that you like a song enough to own it, you can simply right click on it and chose “Buy”, which sends you to the song on Amazon. But even if that were to not work, the program keeps the link to the site where it originally found the song.

Then, when you switch over to the full screen extension, all of the tracks you’ve discovered while browsing are neatly organized by artist, album, track name and even the site where it was originally discovered, with a link, so you can go back and find out more about tracks you like.

When you first start up ExtensionFM, it has six featured sites, including Spinner, Live Music Archive, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Daytrotter and Tuneage, making it easy to get going.

What’s even more, ExtensionFM will let you “scrobble” to Last.fm, which means it will follow along and keep track of your music listening habits and send them to your Last.fm account.

We got in touch with Kantor this afternoon and he told us that he does have plans to make ExtensionFM available as a Firefox add-on at some point in the future, but for now it is only available for Chrome. He also said that right now, music can only be played when the user is online, but that offline playing is another feature they’re looking into.

Because we have a supply of just 50 beta invite codes, we’ve put information on how to get your invite on our Facebook page. Head there now to be one of the lucky few, and if you’re so inclined, we’d love it if you added us to your Facebook friends, as well!

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Do you remember that terrible yearbook picture of you, with the feathered hair, two-inch thick Coke bottle glasses and braces? (Don’t even mention the giant forehead zit.) That one? It might be coming back to haunt you.

TechFlash reported this week that Classmates.com has an “ambitious plan” to digitize high-school yearbooks and offer them on the site.

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According to TechFlash, Classmates.com CEO Mark Goldston laid out plans to digitize yearbooks, among other initiatives, as a way to differentiate itself from other social networking sites. The initiative comes after the company reported a nearly 20% profit loss in the fourth-quarter from the previous year. Goldston said the company plans to offer free thumbnail views of the yearbooks, but will charge for full-size views as well as DVD and hard copies.

In addition to yearbook scanning, the company plans on developing apps for both Facebook and the iPhone, as well as getting in on the business of class reunions.

Goldston told TechFlash that the company is looking at a “major reunions initiative that will allow us to be more involved in the planning and selling of tickets, travel-related revenues, and the creation of reunion-specific products and services that we can sell to our users.”

We found ourselves wondering where exactly Classmates.com is going to get all of these yearbooks. Will schools have a collection and willingly hand them over to the site for use? Or will the have to pay some sort of royalty? Even more importantly, will they be scanning in clean, unadulterated copies of yearbooks or are we going to be able to see all the silly, dirty and downright mean things we all wrote when we were in high school?

We know that when many of us graduated high school, we weren’t yet aware of the fact that everything we said and did could end up permanently enshrined on the Internet.

Perhaps our saving grace here is the fact that Classmates gets only a fraction of the traffic of Facebook or Myspace and is largely kept behind a pay wall.

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Quick – you have 140 characters to say something witty, include a link and disclose the fact that the company you’re tweeting about happened to give you a free sample of the product so you could give it a whirl. What do you do?

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association says you should use #samp, one of three new hashtags it has adopted specifically for this purpose, which tells everyone you received a sample of what you’re tweeting about.

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The WOMMA released a set of guidelines this month in response to last months Federal Trade Commission adoption of a guide on endorsements and testimonials in advertising.

According to WOMMA’s Social Media Marketing Disclosure Guide (.pdf), the FTC requires a disclosure of all “material connections”. It defines these connections as any connection that could “affect the credibility consumers give to that blogger’s statements.”

The three hashtags that WOMMA is proposing are #spon for sponsored tweets, #paid for paid tweets and #samp for when the blogger received a sample.

Depending on how you approach this, you can either use it as an AdBlock opportunity and make sure none of these sorts of tweets get through to you, you can go out and seek them, or you just be aware of what you’re clicking on and why it was suggested.

We’re not sure we’d necessarily recommend filtering out these tweets, though. A quick search for #spon on Twitter revealed some great links. Remember, these are not necessarily just terrible ads, like you might be force fed on some website, they’re just tweets where the tweeter is disclosing the full background. As more and more people are getting paid to tweet, we hope these tags will make that more clear.

With companies like McDonalds, Michelin, Dell and Porter Novelli using WOMMA guidelines, we’re willing to bet you’re about to start seeing these tags more and more.

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When Facebook began rolling out its redesign at the beginning of the month, there was one change that stood out – the prominent display of “Credits Balance” on the menu used to log out and edit your friends and privacy settings. We thought this might signify a change coming in Facebook and today’s announcement of a “strategic relationship” with PayPal seems to confirm that Facebook is looking to move in new directions.

Facebook has made a number of changes recently, including the redesign and the revision of its advertising terms. And all of it seems to point to Facebook looking to monetize its biggest asset – its 400 million strong user base.

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As the press release states, “the option to pay with PayPal makes it even easier for advertisers, particularly small international companies, to run campaigns on Facebook”. Facebook recently dropped Microsoft as an advertiser because it doesn’t want to go in the direction of a small number of advertisers spending big dollars – it wants millions of small advertisers to take advantage of its advertising capabilities.

“We want to give the people who use Facebook, as well as advertisers and developers, a fast and trusted way to pay across our service,” said Dan Levy, director of payment operations, Facebook. “As our business has grown, offering local methods of payment has become increasingly important for advertisers who want to buy Facebook Ads.”

Facebook knows that it has the data to offer small businesses advertising that is targeted at the proper demographics and these businesses commonly use PayPal. The company will also be using PayPal to allow users to buy Facebook Credits, which can be used to purchase virtual goods and gifts.

We think that it’s only a matter of time before Facebook credits become the standalone currency for a greater number of goods, both virtual and real.

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The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is said to be “leading the charge” in trying to get content on tablet devices, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, including, of course, Apple’s iPad, which is set to hit the market sometime next month. The ABC currently uses Flash, a software infamously not supported by the iPad, to stream video on its website.

Just last Tuesday, Adobe and Wired Magazine announced a partnership, debuting a rather slick print-to-digital adaptation of the magazine. According to the report by the Herald, a senior executive at Adobe received an email from the ABC seeking a similar deal.

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Update: We mistakenly reported this as ABC, the American Broadcasting Company, not the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The Herald quotes Abigail Thomas, head of strategic development at the ABC, as saying, the iPad will be more appropriate for entertainment than the iPhone.

”It’s going to be an entertainment device. Whereas the iPhone is where you might get quick bites of news … with this [the iPad] you can imagine people sitting back on the sofa and enjoying something longer,” she said.

While the iPad has received plenty in the way of criticism, including many seeing the lack of Flash as a huge detractor, it looks like some big names are working to get past this and get their content on the iPad. According the the Herald, a number of other companies, including the New York Times, Vanity Fair, GQ and Sports Illustrated, have also been working to bring their content to tablet devices, a number of which have been released at this week’s Mobile World Congress.

Thanks to iPadInsider.com for the tip and lead image.

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When Google unveiled Buzz, their new social network add-on to Gmail, last week, many members of the technology community were excited, but that excitement quickly gave way to concerns over privacy as more and more people saw the number of ways their private information was being exposed.

While some people wrote scathing blog posts, saying quite simply – and in big, bold lettering – “F*ck You, Google“, a Florida woman has gone one logical step further and filed a class action lawsuit against the hapless email-turned-social-network provider. Maybe, if Google had simply asked its users before signing them up for the service, they could have avoided all of this.

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The most common complaint among many is that when Google automatically signed Gmail users up for the service, it auto-followed the people they talked with the most, publicly, exposing connections users would otherwise reasonably expect to remain private. Other complaints range from how easy it is to hack Google’s numeric profile URL, revealing a user’s Gmail address, to revealing a user’s geo-location.

According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the complaint filed yesterday in a San Jose federal court alleges that “Google Inc. broke the law when its controversial Google Buzz service shared personal data without the consent of users.” The suit accuses Google of breaking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, an online privacy protection group, filed a similar complaint [pdf] earlier this week, asserting the simple idea that “users should have meaningful control over their information.”

We got in touch with Google, but the company says it has still yet to be served and cannot comment until it’s been able to review the complaint.

It seems that some others think this lawsuit is merely a “pure money grab“, but we think that Google’s actions can have real-world consequences for the more than 30 million Gmail users it signed up for the service without properly testing it beforehand. And even if they had properly tested it beforehand, those people signed up for an email service, not a social network.

The Gmail Privacy Policy, under the section somewhat ironically entitled “Your Choices”, now reads to say that users have the ability to “choose to use additional Gmail features, such as chat, which connects to the Google Talk network, or Google Buzz.” We emailed Google asking where in the user agreements one might consent to something like being automatically signed up for Google Buzz, but did not receive a response by press time.

As Harriet Jacobs, the author of the colorfully-titled post cursing Google, points out, anyone from abusive ex-husbands to Internet stalkers were suddenly given information that Google’s users had intentionally kept hidden. While this may have been a mistake, a company that has access to as much information about us as Google has needs to have appropriate preventative measures in place for this sort of thing.

Could you imagine the uproar if something like our search habits were suddenly released to the public in a big “Oops!” moment for Google? Would an apologetic blog post suffice then? Somehow, we don’t think so and we’re not sure it should now either.

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AOL is continuing with its push to create content on a massive local scale, according to a story by the Silicon Valley Insider. The story says that AOL is looking to “expand Patch, its network of local news blogs, from 30 sites to ‘hundreds’, by the end of 2010.”

AOL recently announced a similar 0-to-60 sort of initiative with its attempt to cover every single band at this year’s South By Southwest festival with its content distribution project Seed.

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The article quotes an internal communication, saying that AOL is looking “to be leaders in one of the most promising ‘white spaces’ on the Internet” as well as “in sourcing, creating, producing and delivering high quality content”.

Patch is a “hyperlocal” website that offers news, photos and videos, discussions and information about local businesses. It is run by “professional editors, writers, photographers and videographers who live in or near the communities [they] serve”. As such, Patch seems like a perfect candidate for the type of service offered by another arm of AOL, crowdsourced content provider Seed.

While the article declares the intention to go from 30 sites to hundreds “quite the ambitious goal,” we wonder if having a system like Seed already in place wouldn’t make an otherwise potentially daunting task a bit easier. Actually, the SXSW coverage seems like a good testing ground for doing the same sort of coverage in hundreds of locations throughout the country.

As Paid Content wrote last month, Saul Hansell left the New York Times’ Bits Blog in December to join Seed, with the purpose of “leveraging Seed across all of AOL’s platforms”.

Looking at the site, it would seem that the only issue in growing from 30 to hundreds would be general scalability, as each location is identical, but with different content. With an army of content providers at your fingertips, it would seem that the expansion is the obvious next step more than anything else.

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It’s been just over two months since Google, the New York Times and the Washington Post joined together to experiment with a new way to provide news with Google’s Living Stories. Today, Google has declared the experiment a success and has said that it will offer the project’s functionality to the general public.

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According to Google, 75% of people who sent feedback regarding the Living Stories project have said that they preferred the format to traditional online news. But maybe that’s the thing – “traditional” online news is just the knee jerk reaction of a previously print-based industry trying to jump on the bandwagon. Trying to keep up with the health care debate by typing those words into Google or even Google News or any number of other search engines is often more a waste of time than anything else.

Google’s Living Stories allows media to provide news in a way that lets readers fully explore a story from a central location. They don’t have to scroll down through a page of search results or unrelated articles. Instead, a single page break a story down into four main components: a general summary at the top, a list of filters along the left side, a time-line of important events along the right side and a stream of updates and articles in the center. Living Stories is like a personalized RSS feed reader, but customized to pay attention to just that one story. The story is customized to the user, keeping track of what they have already seen so that it can alert them when new content is available.

When we first saw the news delivery system two months ago, we said that we could “imagine other publications employing this kind of system of organization” and now we’re glad to see that this will become a reality. Something to note, however, is that this is not an algorithm-based service provided by Google – the content of a Living Story is completely determined by an editorial team. In a way, it’s just another content management system, but one that is tailored to telling a single story and, from what we’ve seen, telling it well and from a number of angles.

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication partner of the NYTimes.

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Everybody is getting in the game. Google just announced Buzz, its social feed add-on to Gmail, last week and today Microsoft is bringing the feed to Outlook. Microsoft first announced its social media add-on, the Outlook Social Connector, last November but today begins the public beta period for LinkedIn for Outlook. The company has also announced partnerships with Facebook and Myspace.

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Coming in the wake of Buzz, Microsoft is being very careful to tout it’s concern for your privacy concerns, as well as take a very step-by-step approach to rolling out the new features.

The LinkedIn plug-in works with Outlook 2010, 2007 and 2003. As opposed to Buzz, users have full control over whether or not to use the service. They not only have to opt-in, they need to download and install the beta version of Outlook, the social connector extension and the LinkedIn plug-in. By the time you’re finished, we couldn’t imagine you could have ended up there by accident.

Even then, the social connector is a read-only service at the moment, meaning you cannot yet update your services from within Outlook. We’re sure that the ability to update from within Outlook will come, but as we said, Microsoft seems to be rolling out these features very carefully, so as not to have the same privacy concerns with its primarily enterprise user base.

As for privacy, Microsoft had the following to say:

Finally, its important to mention that with multiple professional and social networks available for the Outlook Social Connector, the design of the OSC is such that your privacy and permissions settings on each of the networks you use are represented and respected within this experience. For example, if your profile photo and job title are publicly listed on a given network, then OSC users will see your photo and job title when receiving an e-mail from you (if they use that same network). Similarly, if you choose to restrict profile access on a given network, the OSC will respect that privacy. The goal of the OSC is not to create another social network or set of privacy settings for you to manage, but rather to bring the networks you already value and use to the Outlook experience.

While this means that users don’t have to worry about tweaking yet another layer of privacy settings, they need to be aware of the settings they already have in place, as the OSC will import and use information from the included social networks.

For now, only the LinkedIn plug-in is available, and the only information on when Facebook and Myspace will be available is “later this year”. Microsoft did, however, offer a preview of what the new feature would look like.

While privacy concerns are huge for Microsoft’s customers, we have to wonder, like many others, about another concern – whether or not businesses really want social networks appearing in the company inbox.

As Will Kennedy, a corporate vice president for the Office group, was quoted as saying in the AP article on today’s announcement, “We don’t want this to sort of be the next great time waster in the workplace.”

Perhaps this roll-out is like slowly heating the water so the frog doesn’t jump out – if you get everyone acquainted with LinkedIn first, they won’t run away when Facebook and Myspace come around.

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As Internet users, we are becoming increasingly dependent on our social networks for a number of daily activities. We communicate with friends and family, share photos, invite and get invited to events and generally interact with the world around us. The social network is becoming the heart and soul of our Internet experience and Gigya will announce a range of new features this Thursday to help websites take full advantage of the roll of social media in today’s online environment.

We spoke with David Yovanno, CEO of Gigya, this morning about the different ways people are using the Internet, how this has changed from the old model and how Gigya can help.

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The Feed – Our Passively Interactive Web

“It used to be, users search the Internet on their own,” Yovanno told us. “Today, they look at what their friends are doing. Only something like 5% of the time you spend online is you actually searching for something.”

The big change he’s seen recently, he told us, is the concept of the feed as the center of our online interaction. We spend more time letting information passively approach us, by way of our friends, than actively searching for it. At the same time, by the very nature of the “feed”, we share information for our friends to see, who see it as part of their feed.

“Consumers have transitioned or added on top of email the idea of a feed,” he told us.

Yovanno said that Gigya has been working with Microsoft recently on its social strategy and he expects to see Microsoft’s take on a feed interface in the near future.

Gigya recently changed its direction to focus primarily on social media and interaction, so it’s betting on the fact that the feed will become ever more important in driving traffic.

Social Media Is The New Search

In a recent article, Marshall Kirpatrick showed us how, for the first time, social networking sites had surpassed search engines in driving traffic. Yovanno explained that many website are noting this trend and switching strategies.

“Social media is representing a larger and larger mix of traffic compared to search,” Yovanno said. “Sites are starting to wake up to the fact that they need to make some of those same level of investments in social as they did for search.”

Whereas search engine optimization was the primary focus of sites in search of traffic, many are now realizing that social interaction is quickly becoming a driving force.

What Gigya provides to this end is a way to not only let users login to a website using a number of different social media identities, from Twitter to LinkedIn to Facebook Connect, but also to create content that will be seen on those sites’ feeds without ever leaving the website they’re on.

A simple example of this can be seen on this article. If you log in using Facebook Connect to leave a comment, after you enter the comment and click “Send” a little window will pop up allowing you to share your comment in your Facebook feed.

Gigya 4 – The New Features

Thursday’s roll-out of Gigya 4 includes three primary new feature sets – increased connectivity, enhanced user interaction and analytics.

Gigya allows users to sign into a website using a number of different social identities, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo! and OpenID in more than 20 different languages. One they’re logged in, Gigya also provides a number of on-site widgets to allow for interaction and sharing, from inviting friends from other social media sites to chatting to sharing content in an off-site stream. Then, after everything is said and done, Gigya’s new social optimization platform provides you with analytics on how users are interacting with your content, other users, and their social networks.

“Our business, at the core, is a technology of connectivity,” Yovanno explained. “We create an abstract layer on top of Facebook Connect, LinkedIn’s open platform, Twitter … and we give a website a single API to write to.”

The provision of a so-called “super API” is clutch to the emerging social network atmosphere we find ourselves in today.

Yovanno pointed out that there are a number of networks available and, even though Facebook is the leading social network, it entirely depends on the audience for what network will be the most popular when users are given a choice. The more choices a website offers, the more likely a user will chose to log in using their social identity and therefor be able to share information about the site on their feed.

The “super API”, then, is key to providing as many login options as possible without having to constantly keep up with changing requirements from an ever-growing number of social networks.

Perhaps we were a bit premature in saying that Facebook was going to become your “one true login“, as services like Gigya will make sure that you’ll be able to continue using any number of social network identities to sign in and share. In the end, we find it more likely that the number of logins will continue to grow and Gigya’s gamble will ultimately pay off.

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Skype has announced today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it has joined with Verizon Wireless and will be availble on a number of the company’s phones.

The partnership brings Skype to both Blackberry and Android platforms on Verizon Wireless phones, which will be shipped beginning in March with Skype pre-installed. Skype over 3G will allow international call at rates unavailable over traditional wireless carriers.

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Skype will be available on a number of Verizon phones, “BlackBerry Storm 9530, Storm2 9550, Curve 8330, Curve 8530, 8830 World Edition and Tour 9630 smartphones, as well as DROID by Motorola, DROID ERIS by HTC and Motorola DEVOUR.”

Skype was recently allowed back on the iPhone for use over AT&T’s 3G network with the release of the new iPhone SDK, but has yet to be seen in the app store. The word on the street there is that it has been submitted but Apple has yet to approve it. Today’s partnership announcement puts Skype onto an even greater number of smartphones – Verizon Wireless has over 90 million wireless customers.

“More and more, what’s happening is that your mobile phones are really just personal computers in your pocket,” said Skype CEO Josh Silverman in a video on the company’s blog.”And people want to use those computers … to communicate.”

With this release, people will be able to communicate very cheaply. We took a quick look and compared Skype’s international calling rates to those on Verizon Wireless and we’re talking a big difference here in some cases.

For example, calling France on Skype costs $0.024 per minute, whereas Verizon charges $0.17. The Verizon rate is nearly eight times the rate offered by Skype and even that is when we assume the caller is paying the $3.99 monthly fee for an international calling plan. Without the plan, the caller pays a whopping, in comparison, $1.66 per minute.

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If you never saw Minority Report, then we can just tell you – when Tom Cruise uses a “computer” he looks more like a conductor of an orchestra, or maybe a DJ, than your average typist. As he browses through files, he swoops his arm dramatically in the air. He forcefully pushes useless information out of the way and manipulates video with swoops and twists of invisible dials.

If you’re anything like us, all you thought was “I can’t wait to play with that.” Well, your time is coming soon.

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The New York Times’ Bits Blog reports that John Underkoffler, a science consultant for Minority Report, has worked for the last decade with his company, Oblong Industries, to take the gesture-activated interface from the screen to, well, the screen. Underkoffler unveiled the interface, called the g-speak Spatial Operating Environment, at Friday’s annual TED conference.

The interface has been tested for a number of applications, from virtual pottery-making at RISD, where you watch a user create a digital wire-frame pot as if using a spinning wheel, to the more intangible Tangible Media Group at MIT, where the g-stalt interface allows the user to “manipulate complex data sets with the hands”.

“Starting today,” reads the Oblong website, “g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles.”

According to the article in the Times, this type of interface has already been in use in Fortune 50 companies, government agencies and universities, and it quotes Underkoffler as saying that “in five years’ time, when you buy a computer, you’ll get this”.

Several computer, PC and console makers are already getting ready to release gesture-based interfaces and consumers should start seeing them sometime within the next year, according to the Times.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

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SlingBox released the most recent version of its iPhone app today. The app allows SlingBox users to view streaming video from their home television wherever they are, whether or not there is a wireless network available. Sling had already announced its return to the 3G network at the beginning of the month, but the apps update just appeared this morning.

The Slingbox app runs $29.99, but for those customers that have already downloaded the app, the update is included. The announcement comes as part of what may be an exciting week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona

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While we’re excited about SlingBox coming to the 3G, we’re also wondering if Skype might be releasing their 3G version this week. Peter Parkes, the social media communications lead at Skype, interviewed Russ Shaw and posted a blog on Skype saying the company would be making “a couple of exiting announcements” this week at the conference.

According to the video, which we’ve included below, Skype will make announcements concerning “how [it] makes apps available for download, either through Skype.com or app stores”, work with handset manufacturers and partnerships with mobile operators. The one company on everybody’s mind – Apple – was decidedly absent from the video and the blog.

Both Skype and Sling were pulled from the 3G network last spring, before being allowed back on the network just recently. When AT&T announced that it would allow Sling to broadcast over the 3G networks at the beginning of this month, it said that it had worked with the company to make sure the app wouldn’t eat up too much bandwidth. Sling quickly responded, saying that its app worked to streamline video all along.

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While none of us here at ReadWriteWeb have yet to see it in our Google News, a tip this morning from blogger Joe Hobot tells us that trending topics may be coming to the search engine’s news aggregator.

We got in touch with Google this morning and a spokesman confirmed that the feature is indeed part of a series of experiments the company has been running since early this month.

Image thanks to Joe Hobot.

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According to Chris Gaither, a spokesperson for Google, Search Engine Rountable first reported the potential feature’s appearence last Friday. Gaither said that trending topics are one of many experiments Google is conducting in their redesign of the news homepage.

At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on our websites all over the world. Right now, we are running a small test of a new Google News homepage design. More information about how Google runs experiments can be found [here].

Google last redesigned its news page last May, adding more visual content to the layout. This time around, we expect to see more in the way of real-time content, including features such as the trending topics seen here.

If you keep a close watch, it is possible you will see other new features that Google is testing, but as the company’s blog post points out, often these features will show up and go completely unnoticed. In Hobot’s case, the trending topics showed up for a brief period before disappearing again.

We asked about the specifics of the new feature, but Gaither said that statement included above is all the company is saying about it at this time.

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The Apple App Store, the company’s one-stop-shop for over 100,000 different mobile applications, is getting a new rival – the Wholesale Applications Community. Twenty four individual mobile companies are joining together to form the group, which will represent over three billion customers world-wide.

While the applications will not be for the iPhone, and therefor not direct competition to the App Store, a centralized location for mobile applications may lure potential customers away from Apple and its iPhone.

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According to the press release, the group is meant to be “an alliance to build an open platform that delivers applications to all mobile phone users.” AT&T, China Mobile, China Unicom, Sprint and Verizon Wireless are among the companies joining the initiative. Three device manufacturers – LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson – are also on board.

The alliance “aims to unite a fragmented marketplace and create an open industry platform that benefits everybody”. The group will be conversing with W3C, the web standards consortium, to develop a standard for mobile application development. The group intends to make cross-platform development for a number a different mobile devices possible, with those applications available in one location, much in the same way that all Apple users rely on the app store.

The main question we have is, will this store also create the closed atmosphere that many complain about with the app store? Will there be a verification process for apps, giving the alliance the same sort of control Apple has, or will it be more of an open environment?

According to the release, the group aims to create “an ecosystem for the development and distribution of mobile and internet applications irrespective of device or technology,” so on that end, things look good.

We would have to agree with Google, however, in noting that the number of different device technologies and platforms could make the dream of a unified mobile front against the dominant iPhone could just be a pipe dream.

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If the latest numbers from online ad network Chitika are anything to go by, then we may well be on our way to the world of Idiocracy. According to the study, which compared click through rates to college education, the less educated your audience, the more likely they are to click through on an advertisement.

While this may be good news for some, it certainly seems to spell doom for supporting intelligent content through advertising.

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The two states with the lowest click rate were Massachusetts and Washington, while the state with the highest click-through rate was West Virginia. These correlate very strongly, according to Chitika’s blog post, with the education rates in those states.

The study works with stats on a large scale, comparing click through rates with education rates for entire states. The blog quotes Daniel Ruby, research director for Chitika, as saying that this should be taken as an opportunity.

“Obviously, if you’re targeting a more educated demographic, you need to do a better job of making your ad worthwhile,” says Ruby. “This, like everything, is an opportunity to push the industry towards the idea of content first, sales pitch second, even among advertisements.”

We fear that far too often, things like this work in the other direction and content follows the money, not vice versa.

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is supported by advetisers who have realized this and are targetting our unusualy educated audience & influential audience. 73% of respondents to our recent readers’ poll have an advanced or undergraduate degree, over 46% have significant or final authority over IT purchasing decisions, and our advertisers target their ads accordingly. We believe that our readers are also unusually attractive and smell extra sweet, but we have only anecdotal evidence of that.

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If you’ve ever sat around mulling over different parts of an interactive map after an election or studied the New York Time’s “How Different Groups Spend Their Day” graph, then you know the value of a good chart. They can suck users in and really engage them. They can take a complex concept and make it simple.

Google’s latest release, the Google Chart Tools, will make it easier for sites to show their users data in a meaningful, visual and interactive manner.

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These tools are broken down into two parts: image charts and interactive charts. The image charts work off a simple URL structure, defining all of the necessary characteristics through URL parameters. The interactive charts, while still relatively simple compared to custom creation, use a slightly more complicated Javascript library.

Interactive charts will allow for showing extra data on mouseovers and simple animation. There are 30 different chart styles available, from interactive maps to pie charts, line charts to Venn diagrams.

According to the Google Code Blog, “Interactive charts trigger events, providing tool-tips and animations. In addition to a rich gallery of charts, this tool can also read live data from a variety of data sources such as Oracle PL/SQL or Google spreadsheets.”

We’re hoping these take off and we see more interesting visual data sets to play with around the web in the very near future.

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It’s not every day you get to watch the birth of an Internet meme, but yesterday, I was there at the moment of conception. I didn’t give birth to it but I certainly played a completely inadvertent and circumstantial part.

Facebook and AOL had announced their partnership and I decided the news merited more than the two paragraph treatment I saw everywhere else. So I embarked on a diatribe about how Facebook was trying to be our “One True Login” – and unknowingly set in motion what has become the most epic comment thread ReadWriteWeb has ever seen. But how did this happen and why?

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Within a half an hour of posting, the number of visitors had skyrocketed. It looked like a real winner. An hour later, it had reached the number of visitors an average post might see in an entire day. I figured I’d hit a home run.

But then the comments started rolling in.

“When can we log in?” asked one commenter.

“I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!!” complained the next.

At first we wondered if it could be a giant, orchestrated prank. We weren’t sure who we might have offended, but obviously it was a premeditated assault. When we looked at our traffic, however, we didn’t see any of the usual suspects, just two little words on a very big website: “Facebook login” and Google. The post had become the number two search result.

By the end of the day, the post had several hundred comments and our back-channel chat room was still debating whether or not it could all be real.

It was like we had unearthed a long-lost city, the Atlantis of the Internet. But instead of treasures and gold we’d found a steady deluge of confused and frustrated users who had tried everything they knew to do and just wanted to log in to Facebook, damnit. But how had this happened? It certainly wasn’t that thousands and thousands of people had just started searching for “facebook login” yesterday. This stream of people has been there all along and something is broken.

Google had completely failed its users. It put us, with a post about how an AOL partnership foreshadowed Facebook becoming the de facto user database, above the most logical search result possible – Facebook’s login page.

While for us this was completely random, other search results show that this is actually a space that is otherwise intentionally occupied by sites trying to siphon off this traffic and profit from it. I don’t think the first search result for “Facebook login” was actually English, and the one that followed wasn’t either, but those two key words are used over and over.

By the next morning, the scale had tipped. News of the epic thread had started making its way around the social web, being retweeted across the Twitterverse, posted by early adopters on Buzz and submitted to sites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, HackerNews and Fark.

“No, really,” everyone seemed to be saying, “You GOTTA see this one.”

Suddenly, the two worlds collided. The tech savvy ran head-on into the tech illiterate and mockery and disbelief started to overtake confusion as the general tone in the comment thread. As the post made its way around the web, other comment threads, like those on Reddit and MetaFilter, began mimicking the now infamous comments. I suddenly realized that we might be standing at that flash point, that moment where it begins – the immaculate conception of an Internet meme. I’ve always wanted to be there at that moment. I’ve always wondered about the first person that saw a lobster and said, “You know what? I’m going to eat that.”

“I LIKE THE NEW ALL-BLUE FACEBOOK BUT CAN I JUST LOG IN NOW PLEEEEEZE?????!!!11” reads one comment on MetaFilter.

Another comment on Reddit reads, “IS THIS THE ARTICLE!!? ALL I SEE IS COMMENTS!!!!! HOW COME WHEN I TRY TO LOG IN I PEE ON MYSELF AND PASS OUT?!?? I LIKED REDDIT BEFORE THE PEE!!!”

One person has even written a sonnet, detailing the plight of the lost Facebook users.

While we mock those users, the simple fact is they haven’t necessarily failed, something failed them. With all of our talk about the semantic Web and search engine optimization and tailoring search results to the individual user, there are thousands upon thousands of users performing the same simple search and following the same wrong road. If this were a standard traffic sign misdirecting this many people, it would have been pulled down long ago. There would have been outraged citizens at town meetings and special reports on the five o’ clock news.

So, when five years down the road someone, somewhere, in a completely unrelated comment thread says “i need the old facebook this new one is very bad bbbbbbbbbbuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!” I will be happy to say that I was there – I was around for the birth of that Internet meme. But I also hope that, by then, we’ve addressed the problem at the core. This is the Internet and these are its users.

If this many of them can’t login to Facebook by typing that into Google and clicking on the first thing they see, maybe it’s not them that are wrong – but Google.

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