jotabl is an interesting blend of social media. Sign up to receive your free shoutbox which you can embed into your website. Messages can then be posted in two different ways:

1. A user can include the URL to the shoutbox in their tweet, jotabl will pick this up and place it in your shoutbox.
2. A user can leave a message by signing in via Twitter, with the option to have the message tweeted for them.

With jotabl you have a full admin system that allows you to remove messages and block Twitter users from posting messages.

The shoutbox has now become more personal thanks to jotabl.

He said he and his friend John Battelle of Federated Media had been playing around with an alternative which was Web 2.0 + World = Web Squared.

When I asked Mr O’Reilly if he loved or hated the name Web 2.0 that he popularised, he let out a big sigh and said “Awww does it have to be one or the other?”

Eventually he admitted “I love it and I hate it. It’s a term that has been very effective and very successful in getting across an idea. I spent a long time talking about that idea around the turn of the Millenium, talking about building the internet operating system. It didn’t catch on and all of a sudden we had this new term Web 2.0 and everyone got it so how could you not love that?”

In the end he said “I have mixed feelings about it. I am delighted with its effectiveness, it did what I wanted it to do. To catalyse the industry after the dotcom bust that things weren’t over and that something mattered about the companies that had survived. They knew something that the others didn’t. And I think that continues to be true.

“The companies that are succeeding today understand better than others what it means to be building software in the age of the internet.”

As to really getting behind Web Squared, Mr O’Reilly said “It was just one of these idle thoughts where you go dub dub dub and then you go one more w and that gets you to web squared, right?”

My unscientific research on the expo floor found more people hating than loving the Web 2.0 title.

Paul Thompson said “Keep it. It hasn’t been around for very long and you need a few years to build an identity. If you replace it with Web Squared, people will go what happened to Web 2.0?”

Mark Kirthcart thought “it’s sounding a little dated and overused.”

Sindee Thomson’s view was “Web 3.0 will be here soon.” For her, Web Squared was a total no no. “I hate it. It reminds me of mathematics and I was never good at my sums. I think it should be Web Cubed.”

Brooklynn Morris was a big fan. “I think Web 2.0 is a great title but I think people don’t like titles in general especially when it gets in the way of free concepts.”

Kevin Marshall said he thought people were “tired of Web 2.0 because of all the hype around it. Web Squared however, I don’t think is any better.”

Alistair Mitchell suggested that instead of Web Squared it should be “Web Shared because the web today is all about sharing – sharing the content of your life through things like Flickr, Facebook, where you live, where you are and how you work.”

Taomas Rio said “Web 2.0 is too techy. Sure the core of people who come here know what it means but the internet is always evolving so why do you need versions or numbers to categorise it?”

As for Web Squared, Taomas was aghast. “Oh no that’s web weird!”

Any better suggestions?

Original URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/04/renaming_web_20.html

The DiggBar, even though small in size, is big in value and comes complete with the ability to digg posts, view total diggs, check out a varied sampling of comments, and see total page views (not just Digg views). The left-hand side of the DiggBar also includes options to favorite content, view more content from the source you’re looking at, and take a glimpse at related or random Digg content in a the dropdown preview window.

The Twitter crowd loves this and services such as twiggit have already implemented this as a short URL for your tweets.

The DiggBar will expose a lot of new people to Digg and will also increase Digg’s overall traffic substantially – unlike other short URL services, Digg doesn’t simply redirect to the longer URL. It keeps you on Digg and shows the site being pointed to in an iframe wrapper. You can get to the underlying URL by clicking on the X button on the top right.

But Digg didn’t stop there. They’re also using DiggBar for all stories on Digg as well. So all those home page stories that send massive amounts of traffic around the web are now redirecting right back to Digg, too. That keeps all that traffic in the Digg ecosystem, to the detriment of the sites being linked to.

Watch this short video from Kevin Rose (founder of Digg) or test it out by typing digg.com/ in front of any page URL.

Adapted From: TechCrunch & Mashable

And if they decide to open it up even just a little, this could be a major breakthrough in tearing down the virtual wall between the desktop and the web, a trend we’ve been noticing for years.

The service would essentially be capable of providing you with a secure unique ID for all the files and folders on your desktop, enabling users to share, comment on, tag and search files like photos and videos via a dedicated web page powered by .NET. Think of this as social URLs that link to files which could easily be pushed to third-party services like Twitter or Digg but also Microsoft’s own Windows Live Messenger without the need for you to copy, move or upload anything. Furthermore, social interaction around the files would be visible from inside the Windows desktop OS, blurring the line between the desktop and the web even more.

You can have a URL drill into a subportion of a document or a PowerPoint deck, or data can come from a Web service or a database. Social Desktop is a local service that maps the user’s local data into a .NET service bus service, enabling local data to be accessible through firewalls. Social Desktop also provides a Web-service view over the same data, with inherent RSS event streams for any container. New data sources can be mapped into the URL hierarchy, enabling a distributed view to be built. There are simple sharing paradigms that enable URLs to be shared temporarily or permanently.

Social Desktop runs on Silverlight and leverages both the Windows OS and Windows Azure, the software giant’s very own cloud services platform which Microsoft announced in October 2008. TechFlash reviewed the service as well last week, and asked the project leads how Social Desktop differs from Live Mesh. The response came from Lili Cheng, who manages Microsoft Research’s Creative Systems Group: “In the Mesh model, you can almost imagine your PC being pushed to the cloud,” she explained. “In this, you can almost imagine the Web being embedded inside your desktop.”

I don’t know about you, but to me this all sounds very promising and I’m curious if using Social Desktop would change my file sharing habits. Even with the plethora of free, simple and fast online backup and sharing services around, there’s still a trust barrier not easily overcome by startups who need to market their services extensively on an inherently low budget to reach any kind of scale. Besides, Social Desktop even relieves you from the not-so-cumbersome task of moving a file to the cloud in order to store or share it, so that makes for one hell of a substantial benefit compared to other services where you’d be required to register and do a series of actions before that happens.

Unfortunately, a Microsoft spokesperson told NetworkWorld that Social Desktop at this point is merely a research prototype which will not be a feature in Windows 7, nor will it be available for public use.

But I still want to get my hands on Windows 7 Beta (it makes use of the new operating system’s file-preview functions) right now even if just to test this application once (and if) they release it.

Original URL: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/23/microsoft-research-a-look-at-the-intriguing-social-desktop-prototype/

That might be true now. And with an executive lineup sourced from Bay Area elite (including a handful of former Google leaders), high-profile conferences and parties, not to mention developer “hackathons” all over the world, it has all the makings of a landmark Silicon Valley craze. But don’t let that fool you: Facebook owes its early growth, and hence the foundations for its wildfire expansion of late, to its roots in a more buttoned-up tradition of the East Coast elite. The site’s conservative, calculated debut and blueblood allure were what sowed the seeds for Valley success.

Facebook’s origins at Harvard University, created over many dorm room all-nighters on the part of founder Mark Zuckerberg and his friends, are tech press canon by now. They have surfaced in dozens of magazine and newspaper articles, the occasional courtroom spat, and now apparently a book penned by Bringing Down The House author Ben Mezrich. What’s not talked about as often is that when Facebook, then called TheFacebook, made its quiet debut early in February 2004, it was just another entrant in a pack.

That was the same academic year that some colleges and universities launched online “facebooks” of their own as supplements to the paper directories that were then a staple in dorm rooms across the country. Plus, entrepreneurially minded students at a number of colleges, including several at Harvard in addition to Zuckerberg, were trying to best their alma maters by doing the same thing.

“When Facebook launched, the first week at Harvard was incredible because the adoption was through the roof,” said Sam Lessin, founder of start-up Drop.io, who was a classmate of Zuckerberg at the time, “and this was in the context of a lot of stuff other people had been doing online, including quote-unquote social-networking sites. The beauty of the product was that it was super simple and super easy to use.”

In keeping with its roots at one of the world’s most selective universities, Facebook’s initial allure was not that everyone had a profile, but that not everyone could have a profile.

When Zuckerberg and his team first launched the site, it was restricted to their fellow students at Harvard University. Then it began to roll out to the rest of the Ivy League and other prestigious universities: Stanford, Yale, and Columbia were the first three, in March 2004. A valid e-mail address from a participating school was required to sign up.

From a technical standpoint, this was smart because it allowed Facebook to manage its growth, avoiding overloaded servers and skyrocketing bandwidth bills. On the PR side, however, exclusivity fueled Facebook’s early buzz. MySpace, at the top of the social-networking heap at the time, was the massive nightclub where you might spot celebrities from afar. Facebook was the quiet cocktail lounge a few blocks away that required a password, but where you could be sure to see all your closest friends.

“There was a cachet to it. Everyone wanted in, and wanted to see what it was and how it worked,” Lessin said. When the site launched at a new school, he added, “you’d have this incredible initial bump of people who had heard about it and seen clippings or articles about it, and were excited to jump on board.”

With the exception of a short-lived file-sharing side project called Wirehog, Facebook’s team kept the site a purely networking-focused tool at the start. Although you’ve been able to “poke” your friends from day 1, the original Facebook had none of its current media- and information-sharing features; initially, you couldn’t even add friends from other participating schools, just your own.

But Facebook grew, both in accessibility and in flashiness. Members could start registering with e-mail addresses from corporations rather than just universities. It launched a photo album application that now hosts more than 10 billion pictures.

The “news feed” feature launched in September 2006, shortly before Facebook announced that it would let anyone join the site, setting off a brief wave of privacy-conscious member panic before becoming one of the site’s defining functions.

Then there was the developer platform, which hit the scene in May 2007 with the first of Facebook’s now-ubiquitous “hackathons.” Even after relocating from Boston to Palo Alto, Calif., and in spite of a billion-dollar buyout offer from Yahoo, Facebook hadn’t enjoyed much real “tech cred.” The platform changed that.

Creating a Facebook application soared to the top of Web companies’ priority lists, and even though Facebook’s traffic had started to take off when open registration launched the previous fall, this was when it really escalated.

With Facebook now five years old and reaching more than 150 million members worldwide, it comes into question whether it has abandoned those austere New England roots and that strategy of calculated growth in favor of Silicon Valley’s get-big-now attitude.

The Facebook Connect product lets third-party sites use Facebook’s log-in credentials for the first time, something that’s put it back at the forefront of the developer community. It’s also caught on in many countries outside the United States, with a big majority of its new registrants now overseas. That brings both technological implications–server power outside the States can be especially expensive–as well as political ones.

And no regular reader of tech blogs can avoid the constant coverage of Facebook’s ongoing search for a solid revenue model, the ultimate Valley narrative of struggle and all-too-frequent failure. But in a post on the company blog late on Tuesday, founder Zuckerberg hailed Facebook’s iterative nature and go-forth attitude, something that has become increasingly prominent since its westward journey into the Valley’s upper echelon.

“Building and moving quickly for five years hasn’t been easy, and we aren’t finished,” Zuckerberg wrote. “The challenge motivates us to keep innovating and pushing technical boundaries to produce better ways to share information.”

What Zuckerberg and his hundreds of employees ought to keep in mind is that even though Facebook’s willingness to change and evolve has been key to its success, so has its awareness that change should be steady and pragmatic. When Facebook moved too fast, as with the launches of the News Feed and the Beacon advertising program, members freaked out.

“They’ve built this incredible, incredible product that’s just incredibly successful and valuable and useful, but really, its roots were just super simple and super local,” Lessin reflected on Facebook’s early days. “Because they were able to do that, and grow in a very controlled way, by the time they really wanted to turn things on, they were able to.”

It’s like they always say: never forget where you came from.

Original URL: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10156661-36.html

When will the firehose be ready?

By late January, early February 2009. For at least Q1 2009, the “firehose” (the near-realtime stream of all public status updates on Twitter) will only be available to a small group of trusted partners. The firehose is a stream HTTP solution; a client connects to it and the stream begins, ceasing only when the client disconnects. Once we’re confident in the stability of the service, we’ll add partners on a case-by-case basis. We may allow a wider selection of clients to consume subsets of the public stream (that is, updates from a collection of user IDs or matching specific search terms). We do not intend to allow anonymous, unregulated public access to this stream for any number of legal, financial, and technical reasons.

Now, the translation:

Real soon now, especially now that FriendFeed has a quarter of our page views with a stunningly familar hockeystick of growth, we will release the firehose to trusted partners. Trusted means those vendors who will agree not to allow access to… see below. The firehose is the full stream of our data that has been blocked from its contributors since May, 2008. Once we’re sure it is stable, we’ll continue to make it available while adding what must be semi-trusted cases. It’s also possible we’ll deliver a subset of the firehose (analogous to somewhat pregnant) defined as Track on identities and keywords. The keyword here is “may”. Finally, we won’t allow anonymous unregulated access, period. That is, even though we have numerous partners and untrusted startups currently recording Twitter notices and storing them for unregulated anonymous access since Twitter began.

FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor appeared on NewsGang Live Friday, and told me relationships with Twitter continue to be good. The two companies are working through some problems with the rate limiting curbs introduced by Twitter several weeks ago, but Taylor anticipates a resolution shortly. Several third party Track projects, most notably including Dustin Sallings’ TwitterSpy, have been disabled due to the 20,000 API call limit imposed. Sallings is blunt in this FriendFeed thread:

They’re going to offer a friendfeed-style HTTP firehose to a limited group. My suspicion is that that group will be limited more by how threatening a business is than even by how much twitter’s traffic may be reduced by such a partnership. I might be wrong, but the only ideas they seem to have for making money from their business involve removing value their customers want.

Meanwhile, Taylor says FriendFeed is moving forward with enhanced realtime tools to help model Twitter and other data. Rooms will gain new controls for aggregating multiple streams, a major search-related announcement is coming later this week, broader filtering and track functionality awaits a several-month rewrite of some parts of the core architecture, and most importantly, FriendFeed will continue to employ an open, inward and outward-facing data strategy. This is in sharp contrast to both Twitter and Facebook, who allow ingress but limit outbound flow.

There are several efforts underway to work around or via the back channel with Twitter to reengage track services. Services such as Twhirl that have released betas with “track” support may fall into both categories, but eventually Twitter will find a happy medium where monetization will begin to flow. In the meantime, FriendFeed continues to offer a more conversational and flexible model, making it a significant competitor for user contributions. Even now, it’s trivial to maintain a Twitter presence via FriendFeed that would require a fundamental change in developer relations to undermine.

Now that Twitter has achieved a certain stability and clarity in its rate-limiting strategy, the next phase will focus on identifying and rationalizing its trusted partners. The fundamental value proposition of track – the filtering of micromessages based on a combination of identity and conversational context – can now be achieved in FriendFeed with greater fidelity and, soon, realtime alert mechanisms that allow more personalized and affinity-powered flow regulation. The result: time-efficient information at the center of the user experience.

Over time, Twitter’s huge audience size and mainstream media acceptance will become less significant, forcing Twitter to name its price for its unique value even as it is watered down by more flexible tools and micro-community adoption of its competitors. Regardless of the anger in the community, which clearly has been discounted as a small minority in Twitter’s game plan, the clarity of Twitter’s rate limiting and brute force approach in managing its developer community now stand in sharp contrast to FriendFeed’s approach.

Original URL: http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/02/01/twitter-comes-clean/

MySpace and online video ad technology company Auditude planned to announce a partnership Monday with Viacom Inc.-owned MTV Networks that will let ads be placed in clips of the network’s shows that users upload to MySpace. These include Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” and MTV’s reality show “The Hills.”

MySpace generally tries to keep such clips off its social network along with other copyright-protected content that users post. The News Corp.-owned site removes clips at the request of the videos’ copyright owners. Google Inc.’s YouTube has a similar policy, although Viacom is suing YouTube for allegedly profiting from clips of Viacom shows posted online.

Now MySpace will take a different approach with videos produced by partners it makes in its new ad deal.

Under this first partnership, MySpace users will be allowed to upload videos of MTV Networks shows. Technology from Auditude will detect and identify the clip, and overlay an ad on it. Revenue generated from the ads will be shared by MySpace, Auditude and the content copyright holders.

Auditude’s chief executive, Adam Cahan, said the system will tag videos with a so-called “attribution overlay” — a semitransparent bar across the bottom of a video that give viewers information like the episode’s original air date and a link to buy the episode.

One of these will appear for about 10 to 15 seconds near the start of a video, and be followed by an ad.

The overlays and ads are expected to start showing up on MySpace in the coming weeks, and MySpace and Auditude predicted that new ad formats and ad partners will soon follow.

But will users be bothered by having ads tacked to videos they post to their MySpace pages?

Jeff Berman, MySpace’s president of marketing and sales, thinks people will prefer that to having copyright-protected content filtered out entirely.

Original URL: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20081103/ap_on_hi_te/tec_myspace_video_ads

The New Hosted Apps Service
At this time, there are only three applications available in the new hosted format:

• LimeSurvey
• MediaWiki
• phpBB

However, any existing application can now be enabled as a hosted app, too. This can be done from the new “Hosted Apps” Project Admin page, a link to which can be found under the “Admin” project navigation menu.

According to Ross Turk, director of community at SourceForge, “developers can be much more productive when they don’t have to worry about maintaining their infrastructure, and this new offering allows them to use the tools they know and like without the burden of maintaining them.”

Benefits Of Hosted Apps
This service was actually launched quietly a few weeks ago, as SourceForge insiders may already know. The announcement was then made via a forum posting which clued in members to the new service. But since the news only hit the mainstream channels today, we imagine this means that they’re now ready for primetime.

That earlier announcement touted several benefits to using Hosted Apps, including the following:

• Eliminates the overhead of deploying supported applications; simply opt-in and begin using the application right away. No need to deal with config files and install procedures.
• Served from a dedicated database and web server pool, separate from the project web servers — so you don’t need to cope with the security limitations of project web’s shared hosting environment, or project web’s outbound mail and connectivity restrictions.
• They maintain the application code for Hosted Apps and will deploy updates as they become available from the vendor. This should reduce the risk from vulnerabilities found in the Hosted Apps and eliminate a major administrative burden (installing updates) to projects.
• They perform regular backups of the Hosted Apps data, but also provide you the ability to easily make application backups on-demand.
• They perform application testing, tuning and monitoring to ensure Hosted Apps operate properly. If service faults occur, they respond and fix the issues. If defects are found in the application (either through our own testing or through end-user report), they will repair the defects or raise the defect to the vendor for repair.
• All Hosted Apps make use of our centralized authentication infrastructure (users login with their SourceForge.net usernames and passwords) but retain the permissions (authorization) of the application (so, for example, existing users of MediaWiki will find permissions handling exactly as they expect).
• Since this offering is centrally managed, any improvements they make either to the infrastructure or to the Hosted Apps themselves will immediately become available to all projects. The Hosted Apps offering reduces their overhead for adding major new functionality to their offering, since all applications share common integration points and common infrastructure.
• Since Hosted Apps are available under an Open Source license, this centralized service has the potential to rapidly increase the user base of Open Source applications and drive high quality feedback for the further improvement of those applications.

Original URL: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sourceforge_announces_hosted_apps.php

The site can be seen at http://twiggit.org/