Author: Mike Melanson

YouTube announced today that it will provide its users with a “video speed dashboard”, which shows them not only their average speed, but the speed of other users for comparison.

While the idea of a speed test is nothing new, of course, this puts it directly in front of a lot of people’s faces that would never see it otherwise.

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The data is broken down into users in the same city, state, country, and even offers a comparison with others using the same ISP. You can also see how you compare to the global average.

We have to assume that this is YouTube’s way of showing you that it’s your problem, or your ISP’s problem, that your videos are not running smoothly.

“So, what can you do with all of this new data about your video speed?” YouTube’s blog post asks and we have to admit, we’re not sure either. We imagine it will just end up in a lot of confused and angry calls to ISPs over how and why things aren’t running as fast as they should be.

To see how your speeds stack up against the rest, just visit YouTube’s dashboard and take a look.

While the dashboard gives you a comparison to other users and regions, it says nothing of what speeds you should expect to need in order to watch streaming video.

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A new version of Google Chrome for Mac is now available for download and this time it has a feature many Mac users have been anticipating – extensions.

Chrome for Mac was introduced in December and, to many people’s dismay, did not support extensions. This latest version not only brings extensions to the Mac, but browser syncing for keeping your bookmarks organized and with you, wherever you may go.

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Chrome’s extension gallery currently has over 2,200 extensions to choose from. Extensions do anything from taking snapshots of the website you’re on and creating a .jpg image to creating customized homepages made up from your favorite websites. They can even help you keep track of your favorite blogs, like ReadWriteWeb.

For most people, the update should happen automatically. If you’re wondering if it has already happened for you, simply look under “About”. If you have version 5.0.307 you’re ready to go.

The new extensions support makes installing extensions simple and quick. This feature should help Chrome to continue grabbing an ever larger piece of the browser market. It currently sits at about 6%, holding the No. 3 spot behind Internet Explorer and Firefox.

For some good background on Chrome and extensions, read Marshall Kirpatrick’s “5 Cool Things to Know About Google Chrome Extensions“.

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The BBC reports this morning that record label Warner Music has announced it will no longer license its music to free streaming sites like Last.fm, Spotify or Pandora.

The news comes on the heels of an announcement yesterday by Warner Music that digital revenue, at $184 million, accounts for 20% of total revenue.

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The BBC quotes Warner chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr as saying that “free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed.

In January, we wrote about a report by analyst firm Forrester that predicted that music industry revenues would continue their slide before evening out in 2013, with digital music sales taking up most of the slack.

“On a constant-currency basis, digital revenue grew 4% sequentially and was up 5% from the prior-year quarter,” reads yesterday’s report from Warner.

The BBC doesn’t say when or how this will affect the average person, but when our favorite artists start disappearing from streaming music sites, we’ll surely notice.

Update:

We got in touch with Tom Conrad, the CTO of Pandora, who had this to say regarding the effect this would have on the company. He writes:

This all started with Edgar Bronfman’s comment on the Warner conference call where he was addressing free on-demand services such as Spotify that are directly licensed. Pandora operates under a different licensing structure and won’t be impacted by Warner’s apparent decision with respect to free, on-demand services.

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It’s been just about a year now since Twitter started using OAuth as a solution for connecting with third-party applications, but to this day we still find situations where we are asked to enter our user name and password.

According to a blog post by a member of Twitter’s API/Platform team, we may not need to worry about this particular nuisance, and potential security hole, much longer.

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Raffi Krikorian, a self-professed “hacker, writer, and … tinkerer”, made some waves in the Twitter development arena late into last night with his blog post, which proposes a solution to a problem many developers have been keeping an eye on.

“We really want to get people to switch over and stop using Basic Authentication when talking to our API in a production manner,” he writes. “Why? Basic Authentication is, simply, horribly insecure.”

Here’s the problem, as Krikorian describes it:

You’re an OAuth enabled Twitter client, and you’ve already authorized your user. You user wants to use a media providing service like TwitPic. TwitPic, currently, asks for the username and password of your user so it can store the photo on behalf of the Twitter user. You don’t have that username and password, so how do you give the ability to TwitPic to verify the identity of your user?

Krikorian is proposing a solution he calls “OAuth identification delegation”, wherein the application your using, Tweetie in his example, passes along its OAuth authorization to TwitPic, which TwitPic can then use to verify its actions as authorized. Right now, using TwitPic requires you to enter your user name and password separately.

For now, he says the idea is still in development, writing “once I think we’ve come upon the best solution, I’ll write this up more formally, as well as port it to OAuth WRAP/2.0 (where Twitter is headed).”

Krikorian included a diagram of his solution and is soliciting feedback on his blog.

OAuth Identity Verification Delegation Example Workflow v0.2

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Facebook and AOL announced last night a partnership that will integrate a user’s Facebook friends into their AOL Instant Messager. The announcement came on a day when Google announced its new attempt at capturing your social attention with Google Buzz and Yahoo! reminded us from the outskirts that they’ve been at this game for a year now.

According to Mercury News, about 70% of AOL users also use Facebook and the move is a sign of where AOL is heading, but we wonder if it isn’t more a sign of where Facebook is heading and has been all along.

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The partnership will use Facebook Connect to import a user’s Facebook friends into their AIM contacts, enabling chat directly between the two services. This will allow AIM’s 17 million users to continue using AIM while being able to keep in touch with their existing friends on AIM.

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The Great Migrations

If you think back to 2002, the big news was Friendster. For many of us, it was the first time we’d joined a social network and we went wild adding friends. Then, in 2003, Myspace came along and we slowly started adding these same friends on Myspace until one day the virtual cobwebs became too much and we left Friendster altogether. And then came Facebook and we did it again.

Let’s face it – if we can avoid it, we’d rather not do this again and that’s precisely what Facebook wants. Facebook has already become the dominant platform for social networking, but as it expands its business in other directions, we will begin to see it pull users away from other businesses too. This partnership is not only about preventing that, but further solidifying Facebook’s place as our one, true login.

The more integrated Facebook becomes, the less willing we’ll be to recreate that same web of social connections we’ve reinvented time and again.

While many of us may complain about Facebook’s on-site chat breaking down, being slow or crashing our browsers, the fact remains that Facebook is where we’ve based our online social life and chat is a basic extension of this. AIM used to be one of the industry standards in this realm, but now it looks more like the company is hedging its bets and trying not to fall prey to the same circumstances that caused us to abandon other platforms.

Your One True Login

As we wrote last month, users already prefer to use Facebook Connect by a margin of 2-to-1 and countless sites already let you make connections on their site by comparing their user base with your Facebook friends.

In this case, however, it isn’t the connections that are being imported – real-time interaction with an external user base is being imported. Whether or not a particular friend has an account with AOL is irrelevant. The partnership reinforces the idea that our Facebook profile is at the center of our online existence. Whether or not someone is signed into AOL is no longer what’s at stake here, it’s whether or not the user is logged into Facebook.

While other integrations attempt to replicate our social connections, to port them over to the site we’re on, this one makes no such demands. We can continue using AIM while taking advantage of the particular friend set we’ve likely spent the most time cultivating and grooming – our Facebook friends.

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Foursquare has come out strong in recent weeks with partnership deals that look to put it at the top of the location-based app game. Last week, it announced a partnership with Bravo, the style and fashion-centric television network, and today it has come out with a partnership with Zagat, the restaurant guide, and the New York Times.

As we wrote last week, Foursquare is competing in an increasingly crowded space. These partnerships may help it attract a whole new audience and remain competitive against other services like Yelp that are just joining in the location-based arena.

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According to the New York Times’ Bits Blog, the partnership will provide Foursquare users with new “Foodie” badges when they check in to Zagat rated restaurants. The service will also provide restaurant ratings and reviews from Zagat. Just as with last week’s deal with Bravo, the high profile connection is likely to draw attention to Foursquare in more than the bar-hopping techie crowd where it found its initial popularity.

In addition to its partnership with Zagat, Foursquare just announced this afternoon a partnership with the New York Times, which will start this Friday. Working together, Foursquare and the Times will put out special badges and features for the Winter Olympics. One such new feature will be “recommendations for visitors and local residents on restaurants, popular attractions, shopping and nightlife in Vancouver, Whistler and the town of Squamish … The tips will be pulled from the Times’ travel and entertainment coverage on the cities.”

We have to say, with partners like these, Foursquare seems like its not only here to stay, but it won’t be long before you hear even your less techie friends and family talking about this app.

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Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and his company Tiny Speck have come out today with a game they boldly assert could be “the greatest game there ever was”. The massively-multiplayer, Web-based Flash game was unveiled this morning and will be opening for private alpha testing soon.

While the game will not be fully open to the public until late in 2010, the current site not only gives us a preview of what Tiny Speck has been working on, but offers a way for you to keep track of what’s new and sign up to be one of the game’s testers.

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What’s Your Glitch

First, let’s get the name out of the way:

It’s called Glitch because in the far-distant and totally-perfect future, the world starts becoming less and less probable, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and there occurs what comes to be called the “glitch” — a grave danger of disemprobablization.

We had a chance to talk with Butterfield this morning about what to look forward to and the game he described was certainly something different. Though he says they haven’t determined the pricing structure and are now just halfway through development, the game will primarily be free, with additional features and in-game goods available for purchase.

Glitch, from the looks of the preview video, looks like a standard side-scroller game with a Flash look that will be appropriate for all ages. As the FAQ states, the only thing you’ll be killing in this game is your time. Butterfield said that, from the beginning, they were looking at creating an “something that’s non-violent, a little bit more absurd and surreal.”

In The Minds of Giants

The game, Butterfield told us, “takes place in the minds of these giants that are walking along and singing and humming the world into existence” – a reference to aboriginal myths of the world’s creation. This backbone gives the whole game a flexibility that seems to be key, both in the experience of the game as well as the game-play itself.

“If you’re in someone’s imagination, even the rules can change to a certain extent based on location,” Butterfield said, noting that games visual and aural design will change throughout.

Calling the game an “emerging collaborative situation,” Butterfield said that the players would really create the game’s dynamics as they went along.

“The social, economic and political structures that people evolve will change the direction of the game,” he told us. “You can have a supply and demand economy.”

But on it’s most base level, the game is still a puzzle-based side-scroller, with some interesting new potential.

Where Will It Go?

One of the things we’re immediately wondering about is the connections with social media made available by a Web-based platform. Already, the public beta testing sign-up offers a connection with Facebook Connect. The brief FAQ on the site hints at the social nature of the game, reading “We’ll make it easy for you to find [your friends]. And since it is all one big world, there are no worries about who is on what server.”

This could be a big leap from other MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft, where you have to chose a server, only to later find out that half your friends are on this server, while half your friends are on different servers and you can’t play together.

In addition to the potential for social interaction, such as tweeting your in-game location – one example offered by Butterfield – Glitch also provides an API that will allow for even more extra-game interaction and expandability.

The game’s development in Java and Javascript “means we’ll be able to push new content — new items, new places, new characters — on a daily basis,” states the FAQ. “It also means that we’ll have lots of APIs with which the game can be expanded and extended.”

For now, get there quick and sign up for private alpha testing, which starts soon. Public beta testing will begin this summer.

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These days, the words “social media campaign” are on the lips of everyone around, from media professionals to small business owners to college students in coffee shops. While the idea of a social media campaign is becoming widespread, the tools to manage one are often left for the former, while the latter look in awe at the price.

ViralHeat, a social media analytics firm, hopes to fill the space left empty by other, far more expensive services.

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The Basics

ViralHeat has been around for just over six months, providing a low-price but full-featured social media analysis for the budget minded. We had a chance to chat with CEO Raj Kadam and founder Vishal Sankhla today before the relaunch, which is unveiling support for Facebook monitoring, a new user interface and API support.

The fully Web-based app gives full analytics by monitoring an array of blogs, over 200 video sites, Twitter and now Facebook for mentions of your brand, which is set up as a profile. Each profile exists as a simple logic search, wherein you can keep track of your brand by searching for phrases, domains and hashtags, all in the syntax we’ve become accustomed to from using from sites like Google.

Champagne Tastes on a Beer Budget?

While ViralHeat compares itself on price to services like Radian6, there is a primary difference between the two services. ViralHeat offers a full set of analytics features, from standard mention monitoring to sentiment analysis using a natural language algorithm, but this is where it stays. It does not venture over to the content creation side, where we find the more expensive and extensive services like Radian6. Other services might offer workflow management, scheduled content delivery and other conversational tools, but this would be overkill for the users we imagine at this app’s usability sweetspot.

We see that as an additional merit: ViralHeat has both the price point and the feature set fit for the company that wants to get on top of its image and perception on the social Web but can’t afford to bring a social media expert on board – and on salary. The learning curve is suitable for the DIY set and the analytics it provides are self explanatory, not riddled with indecipherable, industry jargon.

For those of you that like the pricing but want to do a little more with the data, the service also allows you to export data into Excel format and access your data using the API.

The Price is Right

Speaking of pricing, this is a point that really brings it home for ViralHeat. With today’s relaunch of the site, ViralHeat offers a three tiered pricing system, starting with a basic package for $9.99, a professional package for $29.99 and a business package for $89.99. The Basic package offers standard mentions analysis for 5 profiles, while the other packages offer sentiment analysis and API access for 20 and 40 profiles, respectively.

If we haven’t drilled it in enough quite yet, here’s the bottom line: ViralHeat looks like a solid social media analysis tool that is priced and designed for the more casual user, while offering simple features like export and API interaction that keep it flexible enough for the more serious user.

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Now that Google Chrome has entered the world of fully-extensible browsers, with its recent addition of extensions and Greasemonkey scripts, you’ve likely found yourself perusing the libraries and tweaking until your heart’s content. With that, however, comes the inevitable – browser crashes.

While Google Chrome doesn’t have a safe mode in the same way the Firefox or Windows does, it does offer another option that provides the same functionality and can save you a whole bunch of trouble.

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The folks over at the Google Operating System blog pointed out this tip today and we thought it was a worthwhile how-to for our readers.

If you’ve found yourself in the terrible position of having a broken version of Chrome and you don’t want to uninstall and start over from scratch, you can instead launch Chrome using “incognito mode”, which disables extensions and allows you to disable the bad apple extensions.

Setting up a shortcut to launch Chrome in incognito mode is a simple four-step process:

1. We recommend first making a copy of your shortcut, that way you can access the browser normally too, once you’ve fixed whatever problem you’re experiencing.
2. Find your copied Chrome shortcut, right click on it and select “Properties”.
3. Select the “Target” field and append “–incognito” to the end of the command.
4. Click “Apply” and then “Okay” to save your changes.

Now, all you have to do is double click on the edited shortcut to enter into a “Safe Mode”-style Chrome. From here, all you’ll need to do is enter “chrome://extensions/” (minus the quotes) into the browser’s navigation bar to edit the extensions.

If you’re unsure which extension broke Chrome’s back, simply disable them all and switch back and forth between incognito Chrome and regular Chrome until you break it again.

And while we’re speaking of Chrome extensions, we recommend going and getting the ReadWriteWeb extension to keep up to date with everything we post here. After all, if your Chrome shuts down from extension overload, now you know how to fix it.

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SourceForge, the world’s largest open source software development website, has backed off a widely unpopular, end of January decision that had banned entire countries from accessing the site’s vast assortment of open-source software projects. In a blog post yesterday, SourceForge announced that it would discontinue its blanket ban of users, which was done using automatic IP blocking.

The new policy puts the responsibility for restricting access to certain projects in the hands of project administrators.

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According to SourceForge’s original statement, certain countries were banned to achieve a compliance with U.S. law. The IP ban had affected users from a number of countries, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.

Under the site’s new policy, the most restrictive settings will be set as default, leaving the impetus to change who can access a project, and from where, up to the project administrator.

“Our action provoked a strong, angry reaction from those it affected and from the community at large,” reads the blog post. “We recognize that, for some people, the recent site changes called into question whether your support of us is justified. The changes that we deployed today are intended to empower our projects and reward your continued trust.”

It will now be up to the administrator to determine that their project can be exported and how access might be restricted according to “the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security,” which SourceForge identified in its original decision.

While this opens the doors back up to users in a number of countries, we can only wonder what type of problems project administrators might run into now. Is this an admirable move or is it like a news organization not backing up its reporters? Instead of making a statement about U.S. laws and how they might apply to the open-source movement, SourceForge is instead saying it will go with the flow and leave any stance-taking up to its users.

Right now, all projects remain restricted by default, so we’ll have to wait and see if the open-source community rallies behind their stated outrage and opens up the projects en masse or if it cowers behind uncertainty over U.S. export laws.

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If our attempts at getting such simple information as bus schedules or account balances from automated voice recognition systems are any indication, then we imagine Google has a lot of work to do in its latest endeavor – real-time, spoken-language translation.

According to the Times UK, Google is working on developing software for a mobile phone that would translate what you were saying into the language of the speaker on the other end of the line and vice versa.

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As you may have noticed, Google already has a hand in the translation business, with its web page translation service. Google Translate currently translates between 52 languages, which includes a number of languages with completely different alphabets.

The Times UK spoke with Franz Och, head of Google’s translation services, who said that this new service should be up and running and “work reasonably well in a few years’ time.”

“Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch,” said Och. “But recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you.”

Och is referring to the fact that the software would have the opportunity to learn your accent, dialect and general manner of speaking over time, becoming more accurate. But we can only imagine the difficulty of the task ahead, especially with languages such as Mandarin or Cantonese, which are tonally based. In Mandarin, for example, the word “ma” can have four different meanings according to the tone used. If the speaker uses the first tone, a constant high pitch, then the word means “mother”. If they use the third tone, a dropping then rising pitch, however, the meaning changes to “horse”.

The fun doesn’t stop there, the Times UK article points out, as handling the vast number of accents and dialects is also an immense task. Much like the web-based translation that Google does, though, the system would become more accurate over time, essentially learning from its experience.

We hope that one of the first things it learns is not to call our new Chinese friend’s mother a horse.

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The FBI made it clear this week that it wants Internet service providers to keep track of your web surfing behaviors. According to the CNet article on the topic, the agency invoked the likes of busting child pornography in support of its call for monitoring, but the move will likely be met with calls of “big brother” and resistence from ISPs.

The bureau is pushing for ISPs to keep a two-year backlog of “origin and destination information,” emphasizing that it was looking to keep logs of routing, not content.

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No details are currently available on the exact information the FBI is calling for, as much of the report comes from CNet’s Declan McCullagh, who attended the meeting on Thursday where “law enforcement representatives spoke”. McCullagh quotes Greg Motta, chief of FBI’s digital evidence section, as saying that issues of privacy and technical feasibility have shaped the request.

“The question at least for the bureau has been about non-content transactional data to be preserved: transmission records, non-content records…addressing, routing, signaling of the communication,” Motta said. Director Mueller recognizes, he added “there’s going to be a balance of what industry can bear…He recommends origin and destination information for non-content data.”

While the emphasis is being placed on “routing” information and not “content”, a lot of content can be gleaned from these connections.

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As we’ve seen from some of the previews of the new layout, search is becoming more of a focal point for Facebook, and today’s announcement seems to back that up. Microsoft and Facebook announced this morning an expanded partnership, making Bing the default search engine for Facebook’s more than 400 million users worldwide.

The two companies also came to a “mutual decision” to allow Facebook to take over sole responsibility for advertisements on the social network, a move that we see as part of Facebook’s continual progression toward becoming an ad provider.

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Facebook’s Slide Into Advertising?

Facebook and Microsoft had entered into a deal last August to start serving up Microsoft ads, but Facebook has made several moves lately that look to protect its valuable stake in advertising. On Wednesday, the site rolled out a new set of terms for ad and offer providers, increasing accountability and further clarifying how user information gathered through apps could not be shared for advertising.

Facebook has also told us that the company’s recent moves to usher more user content into the light of day and outside of privacy settings are motivated in part by a desire to improve and grow advertising. Furthermore, the company is uniquely positioned, with its Facebook Connect preferred by users by a margin of 2-to-1, to offer tailored advertising to third-party sites using the mass of information it gathers daily on its users. And with Facebook moving into the full-featured webmail game, it may soon be able to compete with Google with an all-encompassing grasp on your information.

Back To That Search Engine Part…

As for the deal with Bing, the search engine had already been providing search capabilities for users in the U.S., but now will expand its services worldwide. The announcement also said that the search engine would provide results “beyond a set of links, including richer answers combined with tools that help customers make faster, smarter decisions.”

By increasing the capabilities of the on-site search, Facebook is hoping to become your one and only portal to the web. If Facebook can get its users to perform on-site searches, it can not only keep you on the site longer, but like Google, it can gather even more information about its users through their searches. This stuff is advertising gold.

While some argue that the difficulty here is that it’s hard to monetize Facebook’s data compared to Google’s – Facebook know’s you care about Haiti, while Google knows you’re in the market for a Lexus – this move goes directly at the heart of that problem. By making search a focal point of the site, Facebook is looking to gather the type of data it knows it can leverage in the advertising world.

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Every day, hundreds of tweets fly past our eyes with links to important articles, meaningless drivel and the occasional self-promotion. There’s little, if any, way to tell what’s important and what’s not. Feedtrace has stepped in to try to fill this void and let you know what people are linking to that you might care about.

For ways to harness the beast that is our Twitter stream, Feedtrace may have just stepped in as an addition to the daily toolbox.

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How It Works

Feedtrace works as a Twitter overlay, of sorts. You don’t look at your Twitter stream, but instead at the Feedtrace sidebar where you find your list of ranked links. As you navigate the links from this sidebar, Feedtrace steps out of the way and minimizes to the side of the window. It’s a browsing companion for navigating what people are linking to on Twitter.

Personalization In Aggregation

Not only does Feedtrace collect tweeted links by overall popularity, like Tweetmeme, but it customizes what links it shows you by comparing to ones that you yourself have tweeted. It uses a ranking system, ranking each link according to how recently it was posted, the “credibility” of the user according to their following/follower ratio, and the number of tweets and retweets.

In addition to aggregating the most popular links Twitter-wide, you can also choose to login to the service with your Twitter account and have it examine only those links added by people you follow. We think this might be a real, distinguishing feature. There are a thousand ways to find out what everyone else is talking about. This lets you find out what the people you are following are talking about.

You can also restrict Feedtrace to look just at a single website, to see what people are talking about the most. This can be a great tool, not only to quickly skim for what people really like right now on a website, but if you have a website yourself, it’s another way of measuring your own success.

What’s The Buzz?

The final feature we want to note is that the you can also take a look at who is saying what about the current link you’ve chosen to visit. By clicking the “buzz” tab on Feedtrace, you can see all of the tweets related to the current page. Feedtrace also lets you interact with those users, allowing you to retweet, favorite and reply from directly within the sidebar.

The program was just launched last week and is still officially in beta, but from what we’ve seen we’re excited to see more. According to its blog, a new version “will incorporate new personalization options and improved navigation” and should be released before the end of February.

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Online advertising can, at times, be downright villainous. We’ve all fallen victim to the misleading “X” that opened up more windows instead of closing the one, or lured by ads that seemed to know all our personal information. But today, Facebook released a new set of terms for ad and offer networks that looks to help prevent dishonest advertising.

David Swain, a spokesperson for Facebook, said that the new terms are meant to create more accountability and faster enforcement when things run afoul.

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The terms are in addition to the already existing, so-called “Facebook Policies,” to which the ad and offer networks are already held.

What’s New?

In today’s release of “Platform Terms for Advertising Providers”, we see a common theme – accountability and protection for the user. Within the seven new term items, companies are required to keep open lines of communication with Facebook, provide “a clear and conspicuous method for a user to make a complaint” and “provide to Facebook the names, email addresses, and business addresses of all operators and employees of the ad provider.”

Overall, the terms appear to make a number of connections and communication channels and hold ad providers responsible, which is something we certainly won’t complain about. They prevent back-dealing and information swapping, especially for companies that run both ad networks and Facebook applications, and require companies to operate transparently. The terms also look to prevent companies from duping Facebook by using IP filtering to show different content to Facebook employees than other users might see.

Keeping Relationships Above Board

It also looks like Facebook is trying to avoid a repeat of past issues with advertisers, especially an instance in December, when a health insurance lobbying group reportedly paid Facebook users in virtual, “in-game” currency to send a letter opposing health-care reform legislation to their Congressional representative.

The fourth term reads as follows:

If the ad provider owns or operates an application on Facebook Platform, the ad provider may not make customer support contingent upon using such an application or require a user to share information with the application, and will not use any data it receives through operation of the application to tailor content (such as serving advertisements through an ad network).

This term seems to address that sort of situation directly, something we strongly agree with. Using the more addictive qualities of Farmville and the like should not create influence over political outcomes. What we’re saying is, an addict’s desire for virtual corn should not be for sale, especially in ways that force people to act and potentially cause real change in the world.

It is illegal to buy votes and it should be for companies to trade virtual corn for letters to congressman. We hope these terms help ensure that simple idea.

While Zynga was not implicated in the December debacle, we asked how it saw this term affecting its business practices, if at all. Zynga is, after all, the exact type of company described in the clause. We did not receive a response by press time.

On a less sinister note, this also seems to prohibit ads using friends pictures and other data collected from applications. While Swain reminded us that Facebook had already “prohibited user data [from] showing up in third-party ads,” we hope that these new terms keep that a reality.

In the end, the number of ways that Facebook tries to hold companies accountable is substantial and we hope that we never seeing an ad for a date with our mother ever again.

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Apparently Microsoft is talking profit in the midst of 15 straight quarters of losses, according to a Paid Content article this morning. The company is looking to Bing to pull it out of its nearly four-year long slide, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft senior vice president of online business, said in an interview last night with Reuters.

According to the interview, Bing is looking at becoming a “credible No. 2” as soon as Microsoft closes a deal with Yahoo, making Bing the backbone for Yahoo search. We do see a few areas where Bing has been gaining ground and wonder if Microsoft may be able to come back out of the red.

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According to the Reuters, if Microsoft closes the deal with Yahoo, it will then effectively control nearly 30% of the search engine market, a magic number in the advertising business.

“The nice thing is we can say (to advertisers) you can be close to 30 percent share in one easy buy,” Mehdi told Reuters. “Clearly there’s a huge return in the search marketplace that can more than make up the investments we’ve put in to this point.”

In addition to the Yahoo partnership, Microsoft has been in talks recently with Apple about becoming the default search engine on the iPhone. We looked at this scenario last week and found that Bing looks to potentially gain up to 50% of iPhone traffic were it to take over Google’s default spot. At the same time, we also noted data from Hitwise, which showed that Bing had actually lost market share recently.

Image courtesy of Business Insider’s “Chart of the Day”.

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The latest word on Skype for 3G is “soon” according to a blog post on its website today. You may have missed out last week, amid all the iPad hubbub, but Apple removed its restriction on VoIP calls on 3G with the release of its latest iPhone SDK.

The return of Skype to the iPhone is something we’ve not-so-patiently awaited since it was banned only a short time after being released last March, and it looks like we won’t have to wait much longer. And this time around, we’re hoping video chat isn’t far behind.

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Since AT&T first banned Skype over 3g last April, with Apple following suit, iPhone users have only been able to make VoIP calls over WiFi.

According to a video interview with David Ponsford, project lead for Skype for iPhone, the move to 3G will provide “CD quality” when making Skype-to-Skype calls. Ponsford says that the new Skype app will also include a quality indicator, which will use a traffic light style notification to show network quality.

We also chatted with Peter Parkes, the social media communications lead at Skype, and asked him when we could reasonably expect video chat capabilities. He told us that he couldn’t be specific on any time-line or make any promises regarding video chat, but that “where devices can support video calls, we’ll look to develop video-capable apps.”

“But the focus will be on a great experience,” he said. “If all we can get is pixelated and low frame rate, we won’t release it. When it looks great – that’s when we’ll make it available.”

The interview with David Ponsford is included below.

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Just to put the numbers into perspective, with its recent earnings from entering the online movie rental business, YouTube couldn’t even afford one minimum-wage, full-time employee. But it’s not a bad start, nonetheless, and the best news may be for the filmmakers themselves.

When YouTube announced the move two weeks ago, we mused over whether or not people would be willing to pay for content, as is always the question. For a relatively quick, quiet test campaign, we would venture that YouTube certainly outpaced Newsday, with its 35 online subscribers.

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…A Whpoping $10,709.16

The initial test, which ran for a brief 10 days, raked in $10,709.16 according to the New York Times’ Bits Blog. It featured five independent films pulled from the ranks of Sundance Film Festival, which received 2,684 views at $3.99 a piece.

The 10-day test run was just the beginning, YouTube said on its blog, as the company will start to offer videos for rent “across different industries, including health and education … in the weeks ahead.”

According to the company’s original announcement, content partners “can decide the price of their videos and the rental duration; they can decide when and where their content is available; and they can keep 100% of their rights.” This led us, of course, to wonder how much of a cut YouTube takes from the deal?

While $10,000 is chump change for a company like Google-owned YouTube, that, or even one-fifth, is anything but for the independent filmmaker – especially for a distribution deal that retains all of your rights and decision-making abilities.

YouTube Gets Into the Distribution Business

We spoke with Chris Dale, a spokesman for YouTube, and he told us that he couldn’t confirm the exact details of the revenue split, but would say that the content provided kept anywhere from 51% of the revenue to more than that. To quote him directly, he said that “the majority of the revenue share goes to the content partner.”

While that may make it sound potentially less appealing, he did point out that this is an opportunity for distribution, on the filmmakers terms – something most filmmakers are unlikely to run across during an entire career.

“In 2009, out of 9,000 films sent to Sundance, only 53 got distribution deals,” Dale said. “That tops out at only a .6% success rate. Given that, it’s important for filmmakers to have other options at their fingertips.”

We tend to agree. He said that the filmmaker can decide on the pricing, ranging anywhere from 99 cents to around $20, but again wouldn’t confirm anything further on the split. The deal gives filmmakers a reputable locale to offer their product and a potential for income as well as exposure. We think this could provide an interesting outlet for smaller filmmakers who can’t afford the expenses of DVD distribution deals. It also puts YouTube in a good spot, both providing these filmmakers with an outlet, as they’ve always done, while providing them a source of income.

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First released just over a year ago, Chrome has come to occupy 6% of the browser market worldwide, becoming the third most popular browser behind Internet Explorer and Firefox. As it continues to add features, it is poised to gain even more ground. Last December, the addition of browser extensions filled one of the browser’s biggest shortcomings, and today the little browser that could has taken another step in the right direction by adding support for Greasemonkey scripts.

Greasemonkey, previously only a Firefox add-on, lets you customize the way a website is displayed using small bits of Javascript, and we’re excited to see it added to one of the faster, tidier browsers available.

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Actually, it looks like Greasemonkey support has been available since the last version of Google Chrome was released, but maybe Google forgot to mention it. In his blog post today, Greasemonkey creator Aaron Boodman said that 15% to 25% of scripts may not work on Chrome because of differences between it and Firefox. But, with more than 40,000 scripts available, this should still leave well over 30,000 working scripts for you to browse.

Greasemonkey scripts perform a variety of nifty little functions, from autofilling Twitter usernames to hiding links on Digg that you’ve already dugg.

While users were able to manually install Greasemonkey scripts before Chrome 4, this latest version provides native support and one-click installation. We gave it a quick test run and everything was just as advertised. Pick a Greasemonkey script, read up on it, and if you decide you like it and trust it, click install. Voila!

We’d been expecting this development since December, when we noticed that Boodman had been hired onto the Chrome Extensions team. It looks like the day has finally come. If you’ll excuse us, we have a couple thousand new browser tweaks we need to go check out.

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Internet Explorer 8 has regained the top spot in the never-ending browser battle today, or so says the Guardian, citing statistics from Net Applications. According to the statistics, IE 8 has taken a 5% lead over Firefox 3.5, but this is not only unsurprising, but likely temporary.

We also have some numbers from StatCounter that show the race to be much closer than Net Applications would have you believe.

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According to the Guardian article, “the decade-old IE6 had a transitory spot at the top of the chart because of IE7 users switching to IE8,” but now IE8 has finally taken the lead from IE 6 because of the decline of Windows XP. We have to assume that there are a number of other reasons at play. According to Net Applications, IE 8 leads all browser versions with 22% of the market, IE 6 comes in second with 20% and Firefox 3.5 comes in with 17%.

StatCounter, on the other hand, shows IE 8 and Firefox 3.5 in a virtual tie, with 21% each, and IE 7 coming next with 19%.

In December, we reported that Firefox 3.5 had overtaken all versions of Internet Explorer for the top spot, but that was only looking at statistics from StatCounter. We’re inclined to believe the StatCounter numbers over the Net Applications numbers for a few reasons. Take a look at the StatCounter graph of the same period.

A lot has happened in the browser wars since we declared Firefox 3.5 the number one browser version. When word hit that Internet Explorer was at fault for the Google hacks in China, both France and Germany recommended that their citizens switch browsers. This caused a large number of people to flee Internet Explorer and adopt other browsers, such as Firefox, in its place. At the same time, Firefox finished multiple rounds of release candidates before finally releasing Firefox 3.6. This release caused a lot of people to stop using Firefox 3.5 and switch to the newer version, causing the numbers for 3.5 to drop slightly.

While we can see these drops in the graph provided by StatCounter, the Net Applications graph shows a steady climb for IE 8. We find ourselves unable to declare a current leader in the never-ending war of browsers superiority, and, in all honesty, think it would be futile do so at this moment in time. With new versions and public relations battles over security, everything is shifting and we think it will be a while before any browser clearly pulls ahead.

That said, it won’t stop us from taking a look the next time the numbers change.

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