National Public Radio, the US radio network too long lagging in the technology department, relaunched NPR Musiclate last night. The new site is a real joy to use. While the old NPR website ran all media through RealPlayer or Windows Media, the new site employs a slick Flash pop-up player that's easy to use. The site also integrates media from 12 leading local NPR affiliates. Say what you will about their politics - NPR does a great job on music.The new player works not just at NPR Music, but across all NPR properties. It lets you click a single link anywhere on the site to add an audio file you're reading about to your playlist. Playlists will run continuously and link back out to the articles they were derived from. In testing the site I was able to quickly assemble a playlist of both single songs and hour-long concert performances. Playback was very smooth in most circumstances though switching between multiple hour-long recordings sometimes took awhile to buffer.In addition to the ability to quickly put together your own playlists, the new NPR Music site highlights a wide variety of pre-built playlists: from Yo-Yo Ma's Top Five Faves to five of the best songs recently released in Africa, courtesy of the hosts of the show "All Songs Considered." In an increasingly unmanageable world, expert aggregation in any field is a top-notch value add.There's non-skippable interstitial ads, some recommended songs, shows and live concert recordings and hip celebrity music blogs (including one from my neighbor, Portland guitarist Carrie Brownstein, former member of Sleater-Kinney). NPR has truly joined the present age. Let's hope they can keep that development cycle up and not rely on the current site for the next ten years.See also our recent coverageof the excellant new NPR Mobile site.

  After months if not years of speculation, Google announced todaythat they are not in fact developing a single phone, but rather an ostensibly open-source mobile operating system called Android. Google stock prices jumpedfrom $710 per share to $730 per share this morning on the news.For all the "wow" everyone was hoping for from a GPhone, this is probably a much smarter move. Just as all non-dominant players in the social networking market have to give some thought to teaming up under the Google-led OpenSocial, so too will all mobile manufacturers likely think hard about leveraging the Google-led Android in the face of the iPhone's threat to remake their industry. Google won't be able to match Apple's eye-candy, but they may be able to offer far more utility in a mobile OS that's still far more pleasing to use than almost anything else on the market today.Android was developed in co-ordination with the 30 members of the Open Handset Alliance. Participating vendors include Motorola, Qualcomm, HTC and T-Mobile; but not AT&T and Verizon. Android will be available for any phone manufacturer to install and build on top of. It will allow for extensive use of Google applications, mashups based on those applications combined with third party apps and will in time live on portable devices other than phones, like car navigation systems.Google says that some of the partner companies are aiming for a late 2008 release of Android enabled phones. The developers' SDKwill be available in about a week. The OS is based on Linux and Java.The New York Times was briefed extensivelybefore today's announcement and the Official Google Blog's announcement is here.

  IAC/InterActiveCorp, the Internet conglomerate that runs some of the web's most well-known brands, announced that it will be broken up into 5 companies. Current head of the company, Barry Diller, will run IAC -- which will remain a potpourri of Internet properties including Ask, Evite, InsiderPage, Match.com, Excite, CollegeHumor, and others, and will manage IAC's investments in sites like BrightCove, and MerchantCircle. The other four newly formed properties will be HSN (shopping), Ticketmaster (event tickets), Interval International (vacation/travel), and LendingTree (loans)."We've been a complex enterprise almost from the very beginning 12 years ago, with hundreds of transactions over those years," said Diller in a statement about the split. "And while we've created a lot of value, I've always believed our complexity and many mouthfuls of sentences to explain who we are and what our strategy is have hampered clarity and understanding with all our constituencies, particularly investors." According to Diller, the spun off entities will retain strong inter-company relationships.IAC also announced a major advertising deal with Google, according to paidContent. The deal will put Google sponsored search ads on IAC properties and is worth at least $3.5 billion, said Diller in a press conference this morning.IACIwas up nearly 9% in early morning trading.

  The world's largest social networking site today announcedthat it would be launching a new advertising program it calls "HyperTargeting," which uses profile data to target ads to users. MySpacerolled out the first phase of its HyperTargeting program to a select group of advertisers, including Microsoft, Ford, Toyota, Proctor &Gamble, and Universal Pictures, in July by dividing its users into 10 target groups (music, movies, personal finance, gaming, consumer electronics, sports, travel, auto, fashion, and fitness). The company claims that performance increases for early testers of the platform were as high as 300% over demographically tageted ads.The company has now expanded those 10 categories to over 100 more tightly defined groups. Right now the changes have only occured on the US-based site, but should roll out on the international versions of MySpace next year. The company hopes to eventually expand to over 1000 target categories."About a year ago we went out and recruited people away from Google, Microsoft and Ebay. We have 150 folks working on monetization technology and engineers focused on segmenting the audience, ad delivery and analytics," said Adam Bain, chief technology officer for Fox Interactive Media (which runs MySpace) to the Financial Times. Bain also said that the company plans to focus more on better targeting ads to the interests of its users and making them more "contextually relevant."MySpace also said it would be releasing a self-serve tool that will allow smaller advertisers to place ads on the site.

  Last weekwas all about OpenSocial, Google's project that will tie together Google, MySpace and many other social networks in a common developer environment. The goal: one common set of code to create widgets from. This strikes at the very heart of Facebook's platform, which is not open and forces developers to use proprietary languages to create their widgets.So, the big question this week will be: will Facebook bow to Google and join its OpenSocial club? The reality is that, for now, developers will create widgets for both Facebook and OpenSocial. Both have very large user bases. But long-term, Facebook risks its user base slowly leaking away and (re)turning to MySpace - or perhaps even niche social networks inthe OpenSocial alliance - as more and more cool widgets get released on those other platforms.Today I've read a couple of compelling posts arguing against OpenSocial (see Jack Schofield's postin the Guardian) and for Facebook (see Mark Cuban's post). And as our own Marshall Kirkpatrick and Josh Catone wrote, OpenSocial isn't that openand so perhaps Facebook doesn't have that much to be scared of.What do you think: will Facebook join OpenSocial? Or will they snub Google and do their own thing? We're keen to know your opinion! Have your say in the poll below, and in the comments.Take Our Poll

  Our network blog AltSearchEngines reportsthat Google has around 90% search engine market share in France (well, 89.98% to be exact!). The next biggest is Yahoo ! (3.17%), followed by MSN (2.33%). Over the past year, between August 2006 and August 2007, Google has gone up by 3.76%. Whereas its 4 main competitors have all lost ground in the same time span, as indicated by this graph:SourceIf you think about how Microsoft peaked at nearly 90% market share with IE6 in the early 2000s - and it still has over 75% even now - one wonders if Google Search willever gain that kind of dominance worldwide? Already Google has shown it has a lot of sway over social networks, having enticed all the main players but Facebook to sign up to its set of API standards called OpenSocial. So Google is setting standards now in search and social networking, the two most popular activities on the Web.Recent comScore researchput Google at just over 60% market share for search engines worldwide, and Yahoo second with around 14%. Third? Not Microsoft, but Chinese search engine Baidu with about 5%. Microsoft has around 3.5% share worldwide in search engines, according to comScore.Source: comScoreGoogle's worldwide share looks even better at Net Applications, where Google sites account for 71% + of worldwide search market share. Yahoo has roughly 10% in those stats. However Baidu only gets 0.10% in Net Applications, so I suspect comScore's figures are closer to the truth.Source: Net ApplicationsGoing back to the France results, Google has 90% market share there - can they do it in other major countries, like the US and China? You'd have to say no on China, based on Baidu's lead there. But in the US and other major countries, Google is becoming more and more powerful. However, no need to raise alarm bells yet in the US. The latest Hitwise statsfor the US show Google with 63.55% market share, up 2.62% from the year before. Yahoo is holding steady at 22%, according to Hitwise.Still, it's worth keeping an eye on the global stats. If Google can hit 90% in a large market like France, well it could happen elsewhere too.

  We're honored to be nominated for Best Technology Blogin the 2007 Weblog Awards. Voting closes November 8, 2007 and you may vote once every 24 hours, determined by IP address.R/WW is up against some very strong competition: Engadget, Gizmodo, Lifehacker and The Apple Blog are all a long way ahead of us at this time. So if you are a fan of our humble Web Technology blog, then feel free to vote for Read/WriteWeb. We definitely need it at this point ;-).

  Google's OpenSocialhas caused quite a stir over the past week. With support from MySpace, Hi5, Ning, LinkedIn, SalesForce, Friendster and a number of other large social networks, many have wondered if OpenSocial might deal a large blow to Facebook, or if it might be something Facebook will be forced to join to keep up (something that they appear to be open to). But Facebook doesn't need to worry.The killer app for any social network is its users, not its developer API. No one joins a social network so they can rate movies, or turn their friends into zombies, or declare allegiance to their favorite sports club. The reason most people join social networks is because their friends are already there, all that other stuff just enhances their experience once they're in. Users are what make social networks go.Things like open APIs and data portability and cross network compatibility excite pundits and developers, but most users care for only two things: a good experience (apps can certainly help here) and to be where their friends are. OpenSocial is a huge win for developers, who can now create applications or widgets for just two platforms (OpenSocial and Facebook) and have them deployed to most of the largest social networks. That means a lot less work to reach a maximum amount of people. But it's silly to think that app developers are going to shun Facebook's 50 million users if they don't join OpenSocial. It's equally silly to think that any significant portion of those 50 million users are suddenly going to defect from Facebook because popular social apps will likely be available on other networks.Facebook was growing like a weed long before they announced their platform strategy, and they'll continue growing like a weed in spite of Google's OpenSocial APIs. Facebook still has the two killer features of any successful social network: users and a good experience. Nothing Google announced this week has changed that, and neither will anything Google announced allow any other social network to automatically trump Facebook in either of those areas.The winners of OpenSocial are Google (who now has hooks into a large number of social networking sites that reach hundreds of millions of people -- whom Google surely hopes will one day be viewing Google ads), users (who now have access to social apps on networks that previously didn't have developer APIs), app developers. If there are any losers -- and I'm not sure there are -- Facebook is definitely not one.All that said, joining OpenSocial wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea for Facebook. It might make developers happy. It might make users who maintain more than one social networking profile happy. It could potentially expose their users to new applications, and it would ensure that no killer app that everyone needs is developed for OpenSocial but not for Facebook.Of everything that was written this weekend on OpenSocial, I'd urge you to check out Don Dodge's excellent post, which I think was one of the most clear headed analyses of the news. But what do you think? Is OpenSocial a threat to Facebook? Should Facebook join with Google or does it not matter? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

  Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feedor by email.Note: If you would like to sponsor the Weekly Wrapup- which gives you a banner ad in our feeds as well as on site - please contact the editorfor pricing details.Web NewsThis week was dominated by Google OpenSocial, a project that will tie together Google, MySpace and numerous other social networking platforms in a common environment that application publishers can publish widgets to with one set of code. The project wasn't officially launchedtill Friday morning US, but throughout the week there was a lot of discussion about the impending release. When news first surfaced of OpenSocialat the beginning of the week, it was said to be 3 fairly generic API calls; and initial partners were 'second tier' social networks such as Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle. So at that point OpenSocial was viewed as a threat to the big social networks, MySpace and Facebook in particular.However Google's real coup was announced on Thursday US, when it was revealed that the world's top social network MySpace had joined OpenSocial as a partner. Chris DeWolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace, said that "this is about helping the start-up spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network." This announcement put the pressure squarely on Facebook, whose platform has been criticized in the past for not being open enough.Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick took a more critical look at OpenSocial in a post entitled OpenSocial: Three Big Concerns. Marshall asked:Is Google exercising leadership or control?Will one network be able to pull in bio, friend and interest data from another?Why couldn't this all be based on microformats and other existing open standards? These are important questions - check out the post and comments thread(see also digg) for a fascinating discussion.Facebook's Response?At this stage it's not known if Facebook will join OpenSocial. However, the young company isn't standing still. Next week Facebook will launch its "Social Ads" advertising service. This will take Facebook ads outside the social network and enable third party sites to run them. Essentially this is Facebook's answer to Google's Adsense, so it will be watched carefully in the industry!Also next week we'll hear more details on Facebook's "Project Beacon", an internal project that will allow Facebook to gather buying information about its users on third party ecommerce sites, in exchange for free advertising in the news feed from those third parties.Web ProductsHulu Peeks at the Public with a WhimperHulu, the online video project from Newscorp and NBC/Universal - with participation by Sony, MGM and others - began its highly controlled opening to the public this week. The Hollywood-content-only, wildly over funded project opened up a private beta to a few thousand users. However it is US-only and seems to just be filled with old episodes of TV. As Marshall Kirkpatrick grumbled, you won't likely be able to interact with the Hulu site for months and much of the content is available on other sites, in their video players, now.Marshall's conclusion: there's nothing courageous or innovative about Hulu - the whole project is quite the opposite in fact. Huge media is exposing its crown jewels to the web because it has to - much as they wish it wasn't, this internet thing is real. The initial offering that Hulu is bringing to market is shamefully uninspiring and woefully inadequate for a new world of media.Plentyoffish: 1-Man Company May Be Worth $1BillionThis week we caught up with Markus Frind, owner of leading online dating site Plentyoffish, a site he runs almost single-handedly and earns a great deal of money from. In our post, Markus said that POF will earn $10 Million + next year (which puts it at around $30k per day). He also compared his business favorably to Facebook, noting that per page view, Plentyoffish has 5-10 times the click through rate of Facebook. So by his calculations, POF's 1.2 Billion page views per month is the same as 5-10 Billion Facebook page views per month. Facebook "only" generates 40 billion page views a month and yet it has a $15 Billion valuation. You do the math and see if you agree, but either way Markus Frind is a huge success story on the Web.You can find many other startup profiles in our Startups category.AnalysisWhy Amazon's HaaS (Hardware as a Service) Strategy is a WinnerWe all know the term 'Software as a Service (SaaS). The term SaaS was coined in a conference in 2005 and then popularized by Salesforce with its "No Software" motto. Today Google is one of the strongest backers of this approach, with such products as Gmail, Google Reader and Google Docs. And ever since Bill Gates' famous Internet services memo in November 2005, Microsoft has been promoting the concept too.But today there is a new, similar term: HaaS, for 'Hardware as a Service'. Hardware has always been available as a service through dedicated hosting providers, but it was neverso well abstracted until Amazon introduced S3 and EC2. Emre Sokullu explains why in this post, by comparing Amazon's HaaS strategy to Google Adsense.Amazon Dynamo: The Next Generation Of Virtual Distributed StorageContinuing the Amazon theme this week, Alex Iskold explored Amazon's highly available storage system called Dynamo. Since early last year,the e-commerce giant has been making forays into becoming a Web OS company. Alex concluded that Amazon is on track to roll out more virtual web services, which will collectively amount to a web operating system. The building blocks that are already in place and the ones to come are going to be remixed to create new web applications that were simply not possible before.The State of Office 2.0 and its FutureEmre Sokullu's post is a great overview of Web Office and where it's headed. He wrote that over the past 10 years, Corel, Sun, IBM and others have tried to compete with Microsoft in the office software business, but thus far none of them have been able to take a significant chunk of Microsoft's large market share, which generates revenues exceeding $15 billion each year. These companies have tried everything; including Sun open sourcing their StarOffice suite and releasing it as the free OpenOffice. Yet, even this very compelling move has not been able to make a serious dent in the market.However, with web 2.0 and the rise of Rich Internet Applications there are renewed hopes for entrepreneurs to be able to compete with Microsoft's Office juggernaut. Now these smaller players can leverage the sharing and collaboration capabilities of the Internet, remove installation and maintenance frictions, and provide globally accessible office software.You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.R/WW Network Blogslast100This week our Digital Lifestyle blog last100had a feature post analyzing Google's mobile phone plans. Daniel Langendorf wrote that we’ve been waiting a long time to hear from Google about its mobile plans and the so-called Gphone or Google-powered phones - but that wait may be over soon.Alt Search EnginesAltSearchEnginesreleased the November edition of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines Listthis week. ASE Editor Charles Knight says that 2008 will prove that the Future of Search (FoS) is the Vertical Search Engines (VSE) plus (+) a Virtual User Interface (VUI). FoS = VSE + VUI. Check out the list to find out which alts are leading the charge. Also Charles was featured in a Newsweek article, which asked: Is Google Vulnerable to Alternative Search Engines?.Read/WriteTalkSean Ammirati of Read/WriteTalkchatted with David Karp, the CEO and founder of Tumblr. Tumblr is a platform that makes it easy to express yourself on the web. In some ways, it is very similar to Twitter and other services like it. This week Tumblr announced a number of new features, which Karp talked about in the podcast.PollPoll: Are We Still Changing the Web?There was some blogger discussion during the week about whether there is innovation happening on the Web currently. So in a poll we asked: are there enough startups and initiatives changing the Web? Here are the results:Yes, there is more Web innovation today than ever 33% (35 votes)Yes, but not as much as previous years 27% (28 votes)It's about the same 10% (11 votes)No, there is not enough Web innovation today 18% (19 votes)The bubble's going to burst! 8% (8 votes)Other (please comment below) 4% (4 votes)70% of respondants think there is still innovation happening; only 26% were pessimistic about this. So that's good to hear! We here at Read/WriteWeb think there is still a lot of innovation on the Web - and we do our best to cover and analyze it all for you each week :-)That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

  TechCrunch has uncoveredpart of what Facebookwill be announcing next week at ad:techin New York. "Project Beacon" is an internal project that will allow Facebook to gather buying information about its users on third party ecommerce sites, in exchange for free advertising in the news feed from those third parties.The way it works, according to a leaked document obtained by TechCrunch, is that participating partner sites would give buyers the option of sending purchase information to their Facebook news feed (i.e., "Username bought a product at Partner Site"). Third party sites don't receive any monetary compensation for participation in Beacon, but in return they get free advertising in the Facebook news feed. On their end, Facebook gets highly valuable user data, which they can use to better target ads, and they get increased brand awareness (on those retailer web sites).Image from TechCrunch.As with most things involving the news feed, Facebook users will have finely tuned controls over which participating ecommerce sites can send purchase information to their news feed, and can choose to send all data, send no data, or ask after every purchase on a site by site bases (or, users will reportedly be able to make those settings global).Beacon, at least as it exists in the leaked document that TechCrunch reported on, is a good idea. If Facebook can get just a handful of major retailers that have a lot of reach on the Internet to participate, they'll be able to get a large amount of very valuable data on their users. Imagine buying a playpen on Amazon and then getting ads for baby toys on Facebook -- that's very powerful stuff. Further, I think if the privacy controls are done well, people won't look at this as an invasion of privacy because shopping is already such a social activity for so many people (just take a trip to your local mall to see what I mean). As long as you can easily leave embarrassing purchases off the news feed (or purchases that are made as presents for friends who might read said news feed), this should fly with users.What do you think about Facebook's planned tie-in with third party ecommerce sites? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/University_Defies_RIAA_Demand_to_Release_Student_Downloaders_Names';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';The University of Oregon (my alma mater, coincidentally) is believed to be the first US educational institution to refuse an RIAA demand to hand over the names of students alleged to have illegally downloaded music. Detailed reporting and lengthy discussion can be found at SlashDot- one alumni tech blogger's perspective below.The Oregon Attorney General, working with the University, has filed a motion in court to quash the legal move by the Recording Industry Association of America, which the University says is trying to force the educational institution to perform a legal investigation for the benefit of a private corporation. The agrieved parties ought to perform their own investigation, the University argues.A number of the names requested are of students living in University of Oregon dorms, making it impossible to determine which of the students living there downloaded the music, representatives of the school said. The U of O is infamous for its inhumanely cramped dorm rooms, though, making it improbable that one resident could have committed such an act without the other being intimately aware.According to the elderly gentleman in line at the coffee shop this morning who first told me about the news (we were discussing In Rainbows, which was playing on the stereo there) - the music industry needs to get with the times and stop taking their giant profits from the old business model for granted.

  Florida-based DailyMeis a personalized news aggregation service that creates a daily online newspaper that can be delivered at set times via email or browsed from the web. The site aggregates news in a wide variety of topic areas from over 3,000 mainstream and blog sources, including the Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Engadget, Time Magazine, and BusinessWeek.DailyMe lets users choose and prioritize the news topics they are interested in tracking from a large list of prepackaged topical sources. Users can further drill down the topic modules by entering keywords - for example, only receiving Internet news related to "Facebook." Users can also subscribe to specific sources, which can be refined by topic or keyword.Setting up a newspaper is easy and the interface is slick, though I had a few issues. First, every time you add, move, or remove a source from your DailyMe selections lineup, the site has to refresh -- which is slow and annoying. I also had trouble with some of the Javascript scrollers, which got stuck a few times and wouldn't let me scroll to the source I wanted. Javascript effects are only good if they work!Another issue I had was with the implementation of keywords. DailyMe creates a separate page in your newspaper for each keyword, but that's not overly clear when setting the page up. As such, when I entered a bunch of keywords on a single line, I ended up with a bunch of blank pages.Slight caveats aside, however, DailyMe was generally a breeze to set up. The quality of the news that DailyMe displays is pretty good, though the site doesn't deliver a lot of it (however, the page is updated fairly regularly with new content). I am assuming that there is a mix of algorithmic and human editing at play here to decide which news stories are published at the top of the page, however that's just a guess. The real alluring aspect of DailyMe is that they have secured licensing agreements with their content sources, meaning that articles are delivered in full -- no teasers or headline links. This gives them a slight leg up, in terms of news contennt, on competing sites like MyYahoo!I think that DailyMe will appeal to a more mainstream crowd than news aggregators like Digg, Techmeme, Reddit, Drudge Report, or Fark. Because DailyMe gathers actual content, rather than just links, it feels more like a personalized newspaper than an aggregation service. Set up is easy enough to appeal to novice Internet users, and the site offers a wide variety of distribution methods, including scheduled email delivery and online publication. The site even offers an automatic printing service via a downloadable client (Windows-only for now) -- imagine how convenient it would be for some folks to wake up every morning to a personalized news report sitting in their printer tray.What DailyMe lacks, is a little polish. It could also use some more customization options - i.e., it would be great to be able to block keywords, as well as track them, and to be able to subscribe to custom RSS feeds (a feature the company has said is coming).

  Back in June of 1999, while the dot com IPOs were coming fast and furious, I participated in a fantasy stock market game on Yahoo! Being 16 and having no real knowledge of the stock market, I sunk all my virtual money into Broadcom and the Mail.com IPO. Much to my surprise and delight, by the end of the month I was ranked in the top 100. Now that I know a little bit more about the market (not much more, mind you), and now that tech companies -- the only kind I know anything about -- are doing well again, I've often thought it would be fun to try my hand at a virtual stock market game, but unfortunately, Yahoo! long ago discontinued theirs.Happily, in our email tips box this week came word of two new startups, The UpDownand Big Smarty, have launched fantasy stock trading games that let users compete for real cash prizes. Both take very different approaches and have vastly different aims.The UpDownAt The UpDown, users are given $1 million in play money to invest in the real stock market however they wish. Each trade costs $100 to make (virtual money) and anyone who outperforms the S&P 500 Index gets paid (real money). Each month the site dishes out cash to any member who has outperformed the S&P in the given month, and over the past 12 months (or since they joined). The UpDown also pays members weekly for submitting the best stock analyses. Analyses are rated by members, but it's unclear if community ratings are a determining factor in who gets paid.Interface-wise, The UpDown is very slick and basically modeled after a real-world trading application.The money comes from real investments the site makes based on the aggregate market data from the site. In that regard, the site is very similar to Marketocracy, which launched in 2000 and uses the data from over 65,000 model portfolios (filled with play money) to manage their very real, Masters 100 fund. The fund has consistently outperformed the S&P 500 and has gained a 3-star ratingfrom Morningstar. So the idea is plausible. By adding the competition component, which could motivate users to be more serious about investing their play money, The UpDown could have better results than Marketocracy.The UpDown is backed by Swiss serial entrepreneur Joachim Schoss, who sold his most recent company in 2004 for $221 million. The site was founded by three Harvard students and is headquartered in Cambridge, MA.BigSmartyBigSmarty Wallstreet is fantasy stock market that gives out up to $50,000 per month in a variety of tournaments. For example, the $200k Racegives a $1,000 cash prize to the first player to double their portfolio from $100,000 to $200,000 in play month, while the WallStret BINGOgame involves picking 25 stocks that will gain between 1% and 5% each month, each week, a lucky winner gets a $200 cash prize."Our goal is to become the ESPN of Wall Street, where we can discover the superstars of stock trading," said Douglas Burdick, CEO of of the Chattanooga, TN-based company. "We've combined the fame and fortune aspects of Fantasy Football, American Idol, MySpace and The World Poker Tour and wrapped them all into a world-wide competition."Phew! That's a mouthful. But for stock market novices or those with only a cursory interest in investing, BigSmarty's alternative approach might work. Those who are more comfortable with tradition investing tools, however, might find BigSmarty's games gimmicky. I'm not sure where the company's business model lies (I guess advertising? The data gleaned from most of these games is a lot less likely to be as helpful as the trading data The UpDown and Marketocracy collect), but they seem to have some cash to throw around for now. BigSmarty recently announced a $50,000 "World Series of Wall Street" tournament that will run next January and February -- top prize is $15,000.The site is operated by the Wallstreet Investor Network, which sells a stock trading training course.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/OpenSocial_Three_Big_Concerns';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';The Google-lead initiative called OpenSocialis all the buzz this week with anyone interested in online innovation, but beyond all the enthusiasm there are a number of questions that ought to be asked more visibly than they have been so far.OpenSocial is a hugely ambitious project that would tie together Google, MySpace and numerous other social networking platforms in a common environment that application publishers could publish widgets to with one set of code. There are some issues that need to be discussed about OpenSocial, however. It's not all a bed of roses, believe it or not.Here's my list of concerns, what's on yours?Is Google Exercising Leadership or Control?When rumors about OpenSocial started to take shape it appeared that it would be all based on Google - that communication between social networks would have to go through Google. According to participating companies now free to discuss the platform, that's not the case. An application could jump from MySpace to Ning without ever having to communicate with Google. Still remaining is the question of Google's control over the standards creation process. It's not possible that one of the largest companies in the US and the largest in this consortium would act entirely out of concern for the world at large. You know they bullied everyone else involved into accepting their terms of openness, at least a little and probably a lot.Google has control over a frightening amount of information about our world, from maps and email to genetics and the world's libraries. Tell me it's a brave new, open social world and Google is leading the charge and I can't help but be skeptical. They make great apps but I won't accept the brain implant no matter how open Google assures me it will be.Are These Write-Only APIs?While most APIs tend to be read-only, the OpenSocial APIs might be capable only of allowing widgets to be published from one network to another. Will one network be able to pull in bio, friend and interest data from another? That's not being discussed at all. The phrase Open Social implies portability of personal and social data. That would be exciting but there are entirely different protocols underway to deal with those ideas. As some people have told me tonight, it may have been more accurate to call this "OpenWidget" - though the press wouldn't have been as good. We've been waiting for data and identity portability - is this all we get?If This Is Good, Will Official Sanction Kill It?Web 2.0 application adoption tends to develop entirely outside of the official IT plan. Big media's "viral content" is almost always awful. When The Man tries to "get hip" it's usually a real disaster.Why couldn't this all be based on microformats and other existing open standards? Why the mysterious, brand-driven, limited APIs? Perhaps the culture of control and mega-corporate blessing is the only thing that the big players participating could comprehend. In that case it's probable that OpenSocial will likely be more closed and more anti-social than many of us would like.There's a whole lot of excitement around OpenSocial, and with good reason. I'm excited to see what it makes possible - but I'm also very cautious to see how reality compares to big words and an impressive participant list.