ReadWriteWeb

Vidoop and MySpace Bring OpenID to Flock

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 09:00:46 -0800

While OpenID is one of the more interesting online identity concepts, usability issues have clearly hampered its mainstream adoption. Flock, MySpace, and OpenID provider Vidoop have now come together to develop a browser extension for Flock that makes using OpenID a lot easier for Flock users. Besides managing your OpenID credentials, the extension also detects when a site supports OpenID and lets you sign in with the click of a button.

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While the extension is still in alpha, it worked perfectly fine in our tests.

Usability

One of the main problems with OpenID, a technology that allows you to use the same set of credentials to sign into any service that supports this standard, is that it is often confusing to mainstream users. A number of large vendors that support OpenID, including Yahoo, MySpace, and Microsoft, have started to develop best practices for using OpenID, but to us, this extension for Flock might just represent one of the best solutions we have seen so far.

The extension is based on Vidoop's work on 'Identity in the Browser,' which has also resulted in an interesting OpenID solution for Firefox.

Flock, of course, does not have a very large user base, but other extension and browser developers will hopefully use this as an inspiration to create similar features for other browsers in the near future.

IDIB OpenID for Flock from phatbuddhaz on Vimeo.

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Why is Google Not Deploying Gears Aggressively?

Bernard Lunn — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 08:00:00 -0800

We recently had the opportunity to meet with two senior executives at Google. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus and I met with Dave Girouard, President of Google Enterprise. Then a few weeks later, I met with Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, via video conference. Both meetings provided some interesting background - but the one question that keeps returning and that was not so well answered is: why is Google not deploying Gears aggressively?

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What Is Gears?

As explained on Google's FAQ:

"Gears is an open-source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features:

A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server;
A database, to store and access data from within the browser;
A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background."

That is important. The biggest single hurdle to mass adoption of web-based office software is the inability to use it when online access is not possible (in airplanes and other fun places off the grid). Offline access is also reassuring for those times when the cloud platform is having trouble: at least you can work offline for a while. This is not a small feature. It is the big one.

We get the usual beta warnings from Google:

"Gears is currently a beta product; moreover, it is currently considered to be a developer-only release. When the developer community has had a chance to examine, critique, and improve Gears, a final version suitable for use with production applications will be made available."

But we learn to ignore these beta designations from Google. Gmail still says beta.

But in this case, Google really is being shy about fully bringing Gears to its own product line-up.

Zoho Is Using Gears. Why Not Google Apps?

Zoho started using Gears in Writer as early as August 2007, nearly 18 months ago. In October 2008, Zoho Mail went offline with Gears.

On March 31st, 2008, Google announced Gears for Docs. This was a step forward, albeit 8 months after its competition (Zoho) did it.

So, the big question is, "When will Gmail enable offline use via Gears?" I posed this question to Dave Grirouard, President of Google Enterprise. The response was along the lines of, making it work on the scale of Gmail is not a trivial engineering challenge. That sort of made sense. But Gears has been out for a long time; it is a critical feature, and Google has the best software engineering talent on the planet.

Ahem, What About Chrome?

Again, from Google's FAQ:

"Gears works on the following browsers:

Apple Mac OS X (10.4 or higher)
- Firefox 1.5 or higher
- Safari 3.1.1 or higher (requires OS X Tiger 10.4.11+ or Leopard 10.5.3+)
Linux (Requirements)
- Firefox 1.5 or higher
Microsoft Windows (XP or higher)
- Firefox 1.5 or higher
- Internet Explorer 6 or higher
Microsoft Windows Mobile (5 or higher)
- Internet Explorer 4.01 or higher
- The following devices are not supported
  - Samsung i320 and i320N
  - Orange SPV C600
  - Motorola Q

Additionally, the team is working on supporting Safari on Mac OS X in a future release."

Notice the elephant not in the room? Yes, Gears does not work on Chrome. Is that because Chrome does not support extensions?

Is Google holding up Gears until Chrome can support Gears? We hope not. That seems contrary to its philosophy to date, which has been to couple them very loosely. So that is probably just coincidence.

"Gears for Mobile Is the Holy Grail"

We had a fascinating talk with Vic Gundotra (VP of Engineering) and Sumit Agarwal (Mobile Product Management). They laid out a mobile strategy that clearly shows that Google is thinking bigger and deeper than anyone else about the future of this huge market. They were also frank about the scale of the engineering challenge. Looking globally, there is no dominant mobile device. In fact, it is an extremely fragmented market. That is a problem when each user expects a native interface.

Vic Gundotra described how about a year ago Google bet that the mobile browser would be the unifying force. Specifically, the strategy was to standardize on Webkit-based browsers. That makes sense but still leaves out the all-important offline access question. So, I posed the "What about Gears?" question. I was told that Gears in a mobile browser was, of course, the "holy grail."

The Answer Given Is Probably Correct

Google is confirming that Gears is critically important to both its web apps and its mobile strategy, and that the delay is simply because deploying Gears on the scale that Google operates is a tough engineering challenge. That seems like the best explanation. But we would love to hear from our readers. Have you used Zoho Mail with Gears, and did it work well? Is it simply a scale issue that is delaying Google's more aggressive deployment of Gears?

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PeopleBrowsr: A Visual Dashboard for Your Online Identities

Sarah Perez — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 07:30:37 -0800

Imagine TweetDeck as an online application. Now imagine that you could use its paneled dashboard interface to keep tabs on your other online identities, too. With PeopleBrowsr, you can. This new application, currently in alpha, lets you update your networks, follow your friends, organize your favorites, and search for content across networks that include Twitter, flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Digg, Seesmic, identi.ca, Photobucket, upcoming, and FriendFeed.

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About PeopleBrowser

Keeping tabs on all the happenings across the social web can be a challenge. For some, FriendFeed is the destination of choice as it lets you see streams of information from all your friends as they share, comment, and participate in social media. Others find the application too noisy, as it requires a lot of manual tweaking and filtering to remove unwanted content.

A good alternative for those who want to keep up with the social web in a more organized fashion is PeopleBrowsr, a virtual dashboard for tracking your online identities. It's very much inspired by TweetDeck with panels that you scroll through horizontally. It also has a "Groups" feature, but its implementation was somewhat confusing. We'll give it a pass for now, though, as the application is still in alpha.

How To Use It

To get started with PeopleBrowsr, you simply add your online IDs and authorize the PeopleBrowsr service when necessary, as with flickr and YouTube. Once you're finished, you can then switch over to the PeopleBrowsr app itself.

There are actually two different views to choose from: the stream view (which resembles TweetDeck) and the Gallery view which lays out the avatars of your friends across the page. You must select your view of choice upon login. In the Gallery view, you can click on friends' avatars to see their latest updates and then interact with those updates accordingly, depending on what network you are browsing at the time.

To select the network you want to see, there's a navigation bar at the top left side of the page. You can scroll through the various online sites listed, selecting those you want displayed. In the Stream view, this is more practical as it loads up each new network in a separate panel, letting you then scroll horizontally from Twitter, to flickr, to YouTube, etc.

Your Streams

Each network provides different options for the types of views you can add to your paneled view. Clicking on the network from the navigation bar (see above) will add some default views to the window, but you can also choose to add other views from the navigation bar above the streams themselves. For Twitter, the views to choose from may include things like Replies and your Friends Timeline, for Flickr it includes options like Favorites and Friends' photos, and for YouTube, it includes your videos, your favorites, and so on.

PeopleBrowsr also has "PeopleTags" which let you tag friends in order to create cross-network groups. This feature wasn't entirely intuitive to use because the "My Groups" option appears at the top of the page even when no groups have been created. It seems to respond to a click but does nothing even though you're assuming that it will open up a pane for group creation as in TweetDeck. However, as you click on the individual posted items in your streams, you have the option of tagging them in order to create groups which then makes the "My Groups" link functional.

PeopleBrowsr Shows Promise

For an alpha app, this is a great first start. There are still some tweaks, like the Groups feature for example, that need to be made. Also, although it was possible to add a FriendFeed ID, FriendFeed did not appear in the top navigation for some reason. Without its inclusion, this would be an incomplete application. The app was also slow at times, once even crashing Firefox entirely. However, it's hard to tell for sure whether that's the app at fault or the pre-beta OS the testing was done on. That said, PeopleBrowsr definitely looks like a promising tool to organize your social streams in ways that make sense to you.

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Education 2.0: Never Memorize Again?

Sarah Perez — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:02:56 -0800

Memorization is a waste of time when Google is only a a few clicks away. That's what Don Tapscott, author of the bestselling books Wikinomics and Growing Up Digital, believes. Tapscott, considered by many to be a leading commentator on our Internet age, believes the age of learning through the memorization of facts and figures is coming to an end. Instead, students should be taught to think creatively and better understand the knowledge that's available online.

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Rote Learning is a Waste of Time

According to Tapscott, the existence of Google, Wikipedia, and other online libraries means that rote memorization is no longer a necessary part of education. "Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is," Tapscott told the Times. "Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don't need to know all the dates. It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorize that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google," he said.

He doesn't feel that method of learning is anti-education since the information we must all digest is coming in at lightning speed. "Children are going to have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple times," he continues. "So for them memorizing facts and figures is a waste of time."

For the older generations who grew up having to memorize historical dates and mathematical formulas, the idea that memorization shouldn't be a part of the educational experience is somewhat shocking. Of course you need to know the exact year something happened...don't you? Or is it better to just have a general idea so you can focus on better understanding the context and meaning?

Our Wired Brains

Today's students are growing up in a world where multi-tasking has them completely immersed in digital experiences. They text and surf the net while listening to music and updating their Facebook page. This "continuous partial attention" and its impacts on our brains is a much-discussed topic these days in educational circles. Are we driving distracted or have our brains adapted to the incoming stimuli?

A new book on the subject, "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," states that our exposure to the net is impacting the way our brains form neural pathways. Wiring up our brains like this makes us adept at filtering information, making snap decisions, and fielding the incoming digital debris, but sustained concentration, reading body language, and making offline friends are skills that are fading away.

If our brains are, in fact, becoming rewired, wouldn't it make sense that the way we teach students to learn should adapt, too? Actually, there aren't too many people who think so. Most educators, like Richard Cairns, Headmaster of Brighton College, one of the U.K's top-performing independent schools, believe that core level of knowledge was essential. "It's important that children learn facts. If you have no store of knowledge in your head to draw from, you cannot easily engage in discussions or make informed decisions," he says.

Do you agree?

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I Want Sandy Back, Says Open Source Project

Rick Turoczy — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:14:51 -0800

Last week, ReadWriteWeb and RWW Jobwire both reported on Twitter acquiring Rael Dornfest's company, Values of n. The acquisition brought Rael to Twitter, along with products Sandy and Stikkit. The unfortunate part of the news for Sandy users was that - like Six Apart's acquisition of Pownce - Twitter has decided to shutter the Values of n services, leaving a number of faithful users without a virtual digital assistance.

But all hope may not be lost. Lifehacker reports that a group of developers are scrambling to develop an open-source version of Sandy.

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For those who never got the chance to meet Sandy, she served as an anthropomorphic digital assistant who helped users remember to-dos and appointments. And she was intelligent enough to interact via email, IM, and Twitter. (Clearly, she took on so many human qualities that many of us continue to refer to her as "her" instead of "it.")

The open-source project proposes to recreate Sandy from the ground up, ensuring that users still have access to the functionality that the original Sandy possessed. They're beginning to consider plans for monetization, as well.

Like many open-source pursuits, this project stems from user frustration over the lack of control they have in the situation. It will be interesting to see where the community decides to take the project now that they have more control over Sandy's features.

For now, the developers are seeking guidance on initial features and functionality:

"If you are a fan of Sandy, let us know here or at mysandy on twitter what features are most important to you, highest priority for us to focus on implementing first. Note that we won't be able to recreate all of Sandy's full feature-set for a first release. So it's helpful to know from you what your priorities are. Please keep in mind we'll need to provide features based on what's available to us open source and free, for now, so that will be a constraint on what features are in the first release."

It's also interesting to note, that there are already mentions of working with identi.ca, the open-source microblogging tool that sprung onto the scene during a similarly difficult time with Twitter.

Whatever the case, they're off to a running start. The team says they currently have a proof of concept prototype up and running.

We'll continue to keep tabs on the open-source Sandy, even without the original Sandy around to remind us to do so.

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Join the YouTube Global Symphony, Play Carnegie Hall

Rick Turoczy — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:39:52 -0800

Always wanted to play in a symphony? Here's your chance - without even leaving your living room. YouTube has just announced the "world's first collaborative online orchestra" - the YouTube Symphony Orchestra - a one-of-a-kind experiment that provides individual musicians with an opportunity to collaborate with other musicians all over the world.

But that's not all. If you play well enough, show some creativity, and exude passion, you may find yourself seated in the famed Carnegie Hall, performing live with other YouTube musicians.

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The contest is open to all musicians over age 14, regardless of instrument or skill. But it's not going to be easy. It's going to take some practice.

To begin, download the sheet music and start learning your part. The music? You get to pick your favorite classical piece to showcase your talent. And you'll also have the opportunity to perform a new piece - "The Internet Symphony" - by Chinese composer Tan Dun, the Grammy and Oscar winning composer of the score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

But you won't be practicing alone. YouTube will help you learn the music, rehearse, and upload your performance for the virtual symphony video. Along the way you'll gain insight from Tan Dun and the London Symphony Orchestra, and get tips from pianist Lang Lang. Rest assured, all of your hard work and practice will pay off, culminating in a unique YouTube concert composed of users from around the globe.

If you perform well enough, there may be more in store for you. Musicians who exhibit that certain je ne se quois will get the opportunity to perform at the renowned Carnegie Hall, under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony.

Submissions are open until January 28, 2009. The live performance in Carnegie Hall will be held in April 2009.

Now, would be a good time to start practicing.

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Google's New Open Stack Expanding - Sans Facebook, Microsoft

Richard MacManus — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:52:02 -0800

A couple of weeks ago we celebrated the first birthday of Google's OpenSocial project, an open API framework for social networks and websites. Google's OpenSocial Blog recently presented some statistics, including that OpenSocial now reaches nearly 675 M registered users and there are 7,500 applications.

What's interesting about these numbers is that the single largest number of registered users isn't coming from MySpace, hi5 or even Orkut. The largest user base appears to be from 51.com, which as we've reported before is one of China's largest social networks with 130M registered users.

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China is obviously a key market for OpenSocial, with another recent Chinese addition being the social network Xiaonei (30M registered people).

Here are the other stats that Google mentioned:

315M+ app installs
85M+ daily canvas page views
7,500+ applications
20+ live containers

2,100 of the 7,500 apps are attributed to hi5.

As we noted in our previous post, for the first year OpenSocial has seen tremendous uptake in the online community. The list of organizations developing apps includes AOL, Bebo, hi5, Google, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, Yahoo!. Of course still missing from OpenSocial are Facebook and Microsoft.

Perhaps with MySpace covering the key U.S. base and the Chinese social networks coming on board OpenSocial, Facebook will find itself on the outer. Google looks to be well on its way to defining the "new open stack" and populating it with large social networks - so we have to wonder how long Facebook can hold out, even despite its recent moves to expand Facebook Connect. Check out the full OpenSocial slides here.

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SixApart Hires Pownce Founders, Closes Service

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:49:17 -0800

The team behind microblogging service Pownce announced on the company blog today that it is joining blog software company SixApart and closing Pownce in two weeks. Pownce left private beta with a big launch just 11 months ago but the service never grew beyond a core group of fans.

The Pownce team says it plans to "come back with something much better in 2009." We're excited to see what Pownce co-founders Leah Culver and Mike Malone do at SixApart; it should be a very good environment for them to innovate in.

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This is the second move where well known innovators have taken their technology and brains to a bigger company and shuttered their startup that we've reported on in a week. Last week open source star Rael Dornfest sold his personal assistant startup Sandy to Twitter.

Though these startups were inspiring, we also think it quite noteworthy that even at a down time economically there are still jobs for super smart people. We covered the Pownce/SixApart deal in greater depth at our hire-tracking site Jobwire. See that coverage for more details about the technology that Pownce will bring to SixApart.

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Yahoo's Top 10 Mobile Searches for 2008: Local Info and Social Networking

Frederic Lardinois — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:44:55 -0800

Yahoo just announced the top 10 search terms on its mobile search engine. The top mobile searches are either for social networks (MySpace, Facebook), or searches for local information (Craigslist, movies, weather). A lot of of mobile searchers were also looking for auctions on eBay. The top 10 is rounded out by searches for more time sensitive topics like the Olympics, AIG, and The Dark Knight. The only celebrity to appear in Yahoo's top 10 mobile searches is Kim Kardashian.

Interestingly, not a single one of the top mobile search terms appears on Yahoo's top 10 list of searches on its regular search engine.

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Here are both top 10 lists in order:

	Mobile Searches	Regular Searches
1	MySpace	Britney Spears
2	Facebook	WWE
3	Craigslist	Barack Obama
4	Movies	Miley Cyrus
5	Weather	RuneScape
6	Olympics	Jessica Alba
7	The Dark Knight	Naruto
8	Kim Kardashian	Lindsay Lohan
9	eBay	Angeline Jolie
10	AIG	American Idol

There are no real surprises here, but these results definitely stress the difference between what mobile users are looking for when they do searches compared to regular Internet users.

Getting to relevant information quickly is definitely the most important aspect of mobile search for mobile Internet users, who don't seem to be very interested in browsing the web for the sake of it. Hence, mobile users are obviously more interested in local and timely information like movie showtimes and weather than female celebrities. Social networks, which give users a quick dose of updates from friends, also fit in well with this style of Internet use.

Mobile users also seem to rely on search as a substitute for bookmarks more than regular Internet users.

Strangely, none of the top mobile search terms were related to the recent U.S. elections.

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Obama Puts Change.gov Under Creative Commons

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:17:31 -0800

Last week Barack Obama's Presidential transition website Change.gov added OpenID login for commenters and now the entire site has been put under a Creative Commons license. These concepts are no longer just the dreams of "crack-pot fringe case" advocates - they're the official policy of the US President Elect.

The particular Creative Commons license chosen by Change.gov, the "By" license (one of many options), means that instead of the default US Copyright of "all rights reserved," visitors are now allowed to reuse any of the content from the site as long as they give attribution back to the original source. Standard Copyright is for protecting scarce content but Creative Commons is a legal framework set up to make sharing and reuse as easy as possible.

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We frequently post Creative Commons licensed photos in posts on this blog, for example. The CC "By" section on photo sharing site Flickr is filled with images that can be used commercialy and in derivative works, just as long as attribution is given to the original photo publisher. Travel social network Dopplr recently began using images from this same section of Flickr to create beautiful city profile pages on their site. Creative Commons recently created a new case study collection to demonstrate in detail how the various CC licenses have served publishers around the world.

Introducing Creative Commons to More People

The license on Change.gov also states that anyone who posts anything to Change.gov (like comments) must accept that their content will be under Creative Commons as well. This could be the first introduction to the CC concept for millions of people. It would have been good to see the CC license listed on the bottom of every page instead of just on a relatively obscure "copyright policy" page. In all likelihood though, the Obama team chose CC because it makes the most sense to use, not to prove a point.

This act of support for progressive intellectual property policy is big news, but it also makes us wonder - what's next? That's exciting to think about.

Check out CreativeCommons.org to learn more about this new publishing paradigm.

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Blockbuster is Planning Video Services on Top of Live Mesh

Frederic Lardinois — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:06:51 -0800

According to the Dallas Morning News, Blockbuster, the beleaguered video rental chain, is planning to use Microsoft's Live Mesh platform to deliver streaming video to desktops and mobile devices. The article is weak on specifics, but Blockbuster seems to be planning to use Live Mesh specifically to allow users to start watching a movie on one TV and then to continue the movie on another TV or mobile device later on. Bockbuster's CIO Keith Morrow also mentioned a parental notification system that would alert parents if a child tried to watch a movie during homework time.

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It is not quite clear why Blockbuster chose Live Mesh to provide this functionality instead of developing its own software (indeed, the author of the article doesn't seem to be quite sure what Live Mesh is in the first place). Based on the available information, it would seem that Blockbuster is mostly interested in the synchronization features that make up the core of the current Live Mesh experience. It is also not clear if Blockbuster plans to utilize other aspects of Microsoft's Azure platform.

Judging from the tentative language used by Keith Morrow, it is hard to pinpoint when (or even if) Blockbuster will release any consumer products based on Live Mesh. However, Live Mesh is clearly on the radar of a lot of corporate IT departments and hopefully we will see some 'real' products very soon.

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Songbeat: Interesting New Music Service - But is it Legal?

Frederic Lardinois — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 08:45:46 -0800

Songbeat is an interesting new desktop music application that lets you stream and download songs from SeeqPod, Project Playlist, Spool.fm, and iASK. Songbeat also gives you the option to 'record' music from your last.fm stations. To do this, the application records the live stream, which, according to Songbeat is perfectly legal in Germany, where the company is headquartered.

The free version of Songbeat allows you to download up to 25 songs for free, but in order to download an unlimited number of songs, users will have to pay $29.99.

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As of now, Songbeat is only available for Vista and XP. Songbeat is planning to release Mac and iPhone versions next year.

Features

Of course, there are already numerous application (online and offline) that allow users to search and play songs from various free music services. Some of the features that make Songbeat stand out are the ability to quickly import your downloaded songs to iTunes, Winamp, or the Windows Media Player, as well as its large directory of mixtapes. Songbeat also automatically downloads lyrics and album art with every song.

Money

Besides selling the full version of Songbeat, the company hopes to make money through the 'Songbeat Discover' service, which allows users to legally buy songs from Amazon's music store and concert tickets from Ticketmaster.

Legal?

There are some obvious legal questions about the service. Songbeat's founders Philip Eggersgluess and Marco Rydmann argue that Songbeat only creates a model for monetizing music that is already freely available online. However, it remains to be seen if the RIAA will agree with this line of reasoning.

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The End of Online Anonymity

Sarah Perez — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 07:46:20 -0800

It seems we're approaching a new age here on the Internet. Instead being anonymous, faceless IP addresses, social computing and changing technologies have allowed the lines between the "real" world and the "virtual" world to blur. Web 2.0 helped create a world where your identity is revealed in bits and pieces as you share snippets of your life online - a photo here, a Stumble there, a tweet, a Digg, etc. However, the rise of social media is only one of the changes that is busy shaping the new web.

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On tomorrow's web, we're no longer going to be anonymous. In fact, one can argue that we're no longer anonymous today, but that's not entirely true. We're still hearing of people hijacking people's names and brands on social networking sites like Twitter, for example, and any MySpace search for a famous celebrity will return hundreds of results purporting to be the "official" page for that person. But those days of "faking it" may be fading fast.

Being "Fake" Is Now A Crime

A precedent-setting case, the Lori Drew MySpace trial, has just come to an end. If you're unfamiliar, this was a case where an overprotective mom established a fake online identity to bully her daughter's rival. The judge's ruling has now criminalized the act of creating a fake persona online. In the case of Drew, most would agree she deserves the punishment she received. However, the aftershocks of the ruling could very well impact the online identity creation process for years to come if it's not overturned.

"If this verdict stands, it means that every site on the internet gets to define the criminal law," stated senior legal policy analyst Andrew Grossman for the Heritage Foundation. "That's a radical change. What used to be small-stakes contracts become high-stakes criminal prohibitions."

Authenticating The "Real" You

To address the needs of sites wanting weed out fake personas, users will have to be authenticated in new ways. Here, companies like Facebook, Google, and others are already in position to offer a solution for making sure people are who they say they are. Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and Yahoo's Open Strategy, have all been busy trying to grab land on the new frontier of identity management. All of them want to be your de facto online identity provider.

No matter who wins, though, it's anonymity that loses. For the sites that move to these types of authentication methods, no longer will their users be able to create disposable usernames and passwords so they can troll around harassing others and leaving juvenile comments. Instead, all participants are themselves online - and subject to the same standards for behavior that you would expect to see if you encountered them in a real-life public situation.

The Psychological Impacts Of One Identity

Even the utopian plans of OpenID, which MySpace pledged to support, is being embraced by other big names like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and even President-Elect Obama. With this federated identity, one set of credentials can follow you around the net, providing access to hundreds of sites. Although everyday computer users may not understand the technicalities of OpenID, the psychological impact will become apparent.

To the technically unsophisticated, the concept that you are one set of credentials, one username, one person across numerous sites will start people thinking that their activities can be traced, that they are not as anonymous as before...regardless as to whether or not that is true.

The User Data Overlords

Finally, there is Google, the company we joke around as being "our new overlords." The reality is that we have, in fact, turned over vast amounts of our personal identity to this company in exchange for free webmail with pretty themes, snappy web browsing experiences, free analytics tools, more. As Allen Stern noted this weekend, "Google Knows Where I Am and Everything I Do." (If you want to jump even deeper down that rabbit hole, take a closer look at Google's User Data Empire).

The terrifying vision of our future that Orwell imagined in his masterpiece, 1984, has been surpassed by miles. Big Brother staring at us through TV screens is nothing - instead, we've managed to create a world where we blindly, willingly, hand over our data and personal identities to a publicly traded company because they promised us they were trustworthy. And like the Eloi people in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, everything we need is provided to us - up until the time we become the dinner for the evils that lurk just below the surface.

Struggling To Adapt

In many ways, our society will struggle to adapt to the changes imposed by the lack of anonymity. Those embarrassing Facebook photos you got tagged in this weekend could lose you your job and prevent you from getting a new one. But how can we draw the line between what's public and private when so many of us have already decided that it's socially acceptable to shove cameras and video recorders in people's faces (without asking!) and publish the captured images to the net immediately?

The only way to prevent reputations from being damaged in the process is to always "be on your best behavior" in public. Frankly, that's no fun. No more wild boys nights out? No more getting silly and stupid with your friends? No - not unless you're willing to live with the consequences of having it plastered online in the morning.

When we reach the point where online anonymity has ended, instead of getting to be who we really are, the fact that we've become so aware of the fact that we're always being recorded, photographed, tracked, and traced, will have actually created a slightly altered personality instead. Like reality TV show contestants, the act of being observed will change our behavior. Our personal brand image will become our public identity and therefore our identity.

Not All Bad, Just Different

The truth is, giving up our online anonymity may not be all bad - we'll have a convenient, portable friend graph, for example. We can burn our notebook filled with our usernames and passwords. Our search data will be easily accessible from one place. But for the convenience of a simple login, searchable personal data and web history, and social networks filled with friends, we'll have exchanged a bit of who we are in the process. We'll pay for our services on the new internet with our identity and personal information. When the companies we sold ourselves to use it for their own benefits, our outrage will come too late. We'll only have ourselves to blame.

Image credit: iPhone with transparent screen, edans

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Black Friday, Cyber Monday...Mobile Tuesday?

Sarah Perez — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:10:32 -0800

Do we really need another shopping holiday? Some marketing firms and major retailers think we do. To follow up on the success of Black Friday, the start of holiday shopping season for American consumers, and Cyber Monday, the day when we surf online for the deals we missed at the mall, a mobile marketing firm called Mobigosee is planning to launch "Mobile Tuesday" on December 2nd of this year.

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The concept for Mobile Tuesday was born out of research that showed that the Tuesday after Thanksgiving was a slow shopping day, as are many Tuesdays throughout the year. To encourage the shopping madness to continue, Mobile Tuesday will send out coupons from various retailers to participants' cell phones. Mobigosee is paid only when those mobile coupons are redeemed.

According to AdAge, the advertising campaign, including radio and outdoor media, will launch tomorrow in 10 U.S. cities. Earlier this year that campaign was going to include a major car manufacturer and several well-known luxury brands, but due to the weakening economy, many of the early participants were forced to pull out as budgets were slashed. Tomorrow's launch will now just include McDonald's, Finish Line, and RedTag.

Mobile Tuesday's promotion will also have an online presence at a yet-to-be revealed URL. However, some 18,000 crafty shoppers have discovered the link thanks to sites posting Black Friday deals. Mobigosee already considers the campaign a success as they have surpassed their original goal of 5,000 and the campaign has not even officially begun.

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ReadWriteWeb Gets a COO: Bernard Lunn

Richard MacManus — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:00:00 -0800

I'm very pleased to announce that Bernard Lunn has joined ReadWriteWeb full-time as our Chief Operating Officer. Starting today, Bernard will assume responsibility for most of the non-editorial functions of our business - sales, business development and other operational matters. This allows me to re-focus on leading our editorial, including doing more writing! I will still be running the business, but Bernard will take a lot of pressure off me by running our sales and business development operations. He will also be leading our 'channel' strategy.

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Bernard Lunn is based in New York and he has an extensive background in media, having started in online publishing before the Internet (with Prestel in 1980!). He has lived in and started companies in Asia and Europe as well as America; he is Chairman of IQ Resource and Co-founder of iYogi.

Bernard worked for Aregon from 1979 - 1994, a pioneer in what is now called Publish & Subscribe technology. Bernard led sales and marketing for Aregon in London in the run up to the Big Bang deregulation in 1985, took the company into Europe after the crash of 1987 and then built the US operations from 1990 to 1992 in a recession, with minimal capital, against entrenched competitors. After Aregon merged with Kapiti (back office banking systems), Bernard took over and rejuvenated Kapiti's US operations before moving to Asia in 1994 and then the U.S. after that. You can read more about Bernard's background on LinkedIn.

Many of you probably know Bernard already as a writer at ReadWriteWeb (since July '07) and editor of our new Enterprise channel. He often focuses on business issues in his writing, so we're all excited to see that innovative theory being put into practise here at ReadWriteWeb!

Bernard is the third full-time member of ReadWriteWeb, after myself (the founder) and Marshall Kirkpatrick, VP Content Development who joined us full-time in August. The rest of our staff are contractors. I am proud of the whole team we have managed to put together without external funding - or indeed a presence in Silicon Valley until our recent writing hire of Lidija Davis.

Please join me in welcoming Bernard into his new role. We all have big plans for ReadWriteWeb and we're grateful for the continued support of our readers and sponsors.

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