Via CNET Webware, today both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect launched. Both are services that let you sign on to third party sites using your credentials from the respective site. While this feels like a trip back to 1999 when Microsoft launched Passport as a single-sign-on service (what was Passport is today Windows Live ID, and it's not open to third parties anymore). Arguably Microsoft's biggest mistake back then was asking thousands of dollars in licensing fees for those wanting to implement it. In 2008, in Web 2.0, you can't charge for anything, so there's no cost associated with either.
Both Facebook and Google's Connect services go beyond what Microsoft was offering back then. Both allow the third party site to access the user's contacts, in the case of Facebook, a user's privacy settings as propagated as well. Facebook Connect lets those sites then publish items back to the user's news feed. Google Friend Connect ties into OpenSocial, allowing third party sites to make use of social widgets. The root functionality of these two services— single sign-on—is the same, but the implementation and other features offered differentiate them a fair bit.
These systems still run into the argument that many used against Microsoft Passport: a single point of failure, controlled by a corporation. OpenID, an open protocol, decentralized single sign-on system, has come to maturity lately, but uptake and use is slow. Many large services such as Google and Yahoo act as OpenID providers, but much fewer sites actually accept OpenID credentials. Google Friend Connect actually accepts OpenID among others, but to an average user who already has a Google and Facebook account, OpenID is just something they don't understand. For many developers, the closed system where most people already have an account is much more appealing.
Eight years after Microsoft tried to solve the single sign-on problem, it's intriguing that it's taken this long for others to try in their footsteps. That's eight years of making separate accounts for every site you use. We have the technology to solve this, but can we settle on agreement of how?
Portland-based Values of n announced on November 24 that they will be closing its doors on Monday, December 8. The good news? Their intellectual property has been bought by Twitter, so fans of Values of n's Stikkit and I Want Sandy will hopefully see some of their favourite features incorporated into Twitter in the future.
Rael Dornfest, CEO of Values of n, is moving into an engineering position on the User Experience group at Twitter; a consultant there for several months, he admits that he "fell in love with the team."
An RSS pioneer, the purchse looks to have been a strategic play for Dornfest himself. Dornfest seems to be genuinely looking forward to the move:
"I'm excited to continue building simple, engrossing products -- my favorite thing to do -- and to imbue my work with all I've learned over the last three years."
No numbers have come out yet regarding the deal, but one number we do have is $500 million, which is the offer Twitter recently turned down from Facebook.
Our mission is to help people collaborate and get organized. Simple enough. And yet, building software that quietly facilitates collaboration as... [more]
Twitter is a privately funded startup with offices in the SoMA neighborhood of San Francisco, CA. Started as a side project in March of 2006,... [more]
When the recent Facebook redesign relegated applications to a tab instead of the front user profile, some declared that they were giving up on the Platform. This week Facebook launched it's Application Verification Program. Qualifying applications get a special badge indicating that it has been reviewed by Facebook, increased limits for requests and emails, and increased news feed visibility. For this, an app must pass their Guiding Priciples for Social Applications, and submit $375 for an approval good for one year. The principles are somewhat vague but basically common sense: be meaningful and/or interesting, don't be spammy, buggy, or ugly.
Is this an attempt at monetization beyond advertising? TechCrunch's Arrington calls it a "protection racket" and includes a picture from The Godfather in his post. In my opinion, this is a reasonable move to help solve the problem of distrust in Facebook applications. However, I believe that the distrust could have been largely prevented had Facebook been more conservative with the platform launch.
In Fall 2007, developer enthusiasm for the Facebook Platform was at a fever pitch. At the first Facebook Developer Garage in Vancouver, we had to turn people away after filling the theatre and then some. Enthusiastic developers shared their new creations, and we all revelled in the huge potential of the platform. But by Winter, Facebook app fatigue was setting in hard. Shady developers had exploited any weakness possible to gain users; some tricked users into sending invites out to their entire friends list. Users had become annoyed by spammy apps to the point that they didn't trust them. The reputation of the platform was tarnished hard.
Over this same time period, Apple and Google have launched platforms that have maintained and built good reputation. Third party iPhone apps must pass Apple's approval, and are limited in what aspects of the phone they can access. If they attempt to overstep their bounds, the phone will kill the process. While developers complain about the restrictions and the approval process, iPhone users can rest assured that no app will harm their phone or compromise their security. Google App Engine launched in beta with very tight restrictions on CPU usage, data storage, ability to send outbound email, and number of people accepted into the beta. They've increased the limits over time as the platform has proved stable and secure.
Looking back at the progression of the Facebook Platform, they took a big chance in opening major site functionality to third party developers. Unfortunately it backfired when they didn't act as a strong enough gatekeeper to their service. The platform isn't dead, but developers now need to try extra hard to win over users. The Verification Program is a good step, but if Facebook is serious about the platform, they'll have to prove it stronger.
Bellevue-based Eyealike recently introduced VisualAd, an image and video-based contextual ad platform--Eyealike VisualAd recognizes facial features, skin colour, gender, and age, and discerns logos or product images. This gives them a means to offer highly-targeted ads by indexing, filtering and classifying images and videos rather than using keywords for the targeting purposes. Admittedly, this concept makes me feel slightly uneasy, but posting pictures to social networking sites is done so at the expense of the user's privacy anyway.
Using this type of “dual serving” technology offers these sites twice the impact on ad relevancy. Eyealike President Greg Heuss calls the technology "dual serving"--he insists that social networking sites are interested in what types of images you post, what you look at, and what they tell the SNS about you. I was curious about how VisualAd will infer information about a user based on photos that will undoubtedly feature other people. CEO John Hafen argues that Eyealike first "tells" the technology what given photos are. Then the software "gets smarter with time and with more and more images to view. After a while, it becomes self aware"--learning and then self-teaching, presumably, as it learns to cluster images based on content.
Eyealike may have an early advantage through the accuracy of their recognition algorithms, which are apparently at 90% according to Hafen. VisualAd uses data from all of a user's profile on their user-generated content site. It extracts a certain probability that a target object is in each individual photo, and then if that target object (or objects) are in multiple photos the probability increases that the user has that object (or is at least in close proximity). This will work the same whether the object is a baby, a Golden Retriever, a Subaru, or Mount Rushmore.
Hafen attests that "What will put us ahead of the pack is our accuracy, how we apply it, and the basic scalability of the system. We built it from scratch with super-scalability in mind." Scalability will be important, because Eyealike is looking to market directly to social networking sites. Sites like Facebook and MySpace will likely be eager to monetize user-generated photos.
Eyealike, an innovator of visual-based search, fills a gap in the text-dominated search world, both for image intensive Web sites and enterprise... [more]
SplashCast has made its mark by creating custom media player widgets for popular musicians, like Justin Timberlake and Britney, but their biggest hit could very well come from wonking it up on the political scene.
Response for Hillary Speaks For Me, a SplashCast project that allows individuals to view and add videos showing support for US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stands to eclipse all SplashCast efforts to date.
In two weeks, the SplashCast application has garnered hundreds of thousands of views, thousands of Facebook users, and hundreds of short videos submissions. But perhaps the most impressive stat is the press coverage the application is generating, both online and off:
HillarySpeaksForMe has been mentioned on several major blogs such as Politico.com and Daily Koz. I got a kick seeing Wolf Blitzer mention the effort on CNN. It was also fun to see a clip of young supporters chanting “Hillary speaks for me” at a rally in Texas.
For more information on the progress of the app, visit the SplashCast blog. To see the player in action, visit HillarySpeaksForMe.com.
