Portland social mapping startup Platialhas acquired old-school favorite Frapper, another social mapping service, it was announced today. If the announcement had been made yesterday it would have warranted inclusion in Om Malik's post Startups Should Team Up to Grow.Is this a case of marginal companies merging for the sake of survival in the face of a crowded market and comparable features offered by Google? Platial says that's not a bad way to understand their announcement, but I don't think that tells the whole story here.About the PlayersHere's how I see it. Frapper has a healthy community of users. Its feature set was considered innovative several years ago and while that's less the case today - it's a solid little company with a loyal userbase. Its team knows how to build a community and the company is a good buy. Frappr was owned by a company called Rising Concepts, which was previously acquired by widget megalith Slide. Platial assures me there's not an interesting story behind all of those maneuvers and I'll accept that.Platial is a social networking type of service layered on top of Google Maps. Its existing product let people map what goes on in places around the world (the company calls itself "the peoples' atlas") and now with Frappr that dataset will expand to include demographic and interest-based information tied to geographic locations as well. The company is doing interesting work with data extraction, social network widgets, mobile mapping and other cutting edge technologies. Platial is backed by a range of all-star investors including KeyNote Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield &Byers, Omidyar Network, Ram Shriram, Georges Harik, Jack Dangermon, and Ron Conway.What About the Big G?This plucky little VC-backed mapping startup may look like roadkill to-be in the path of Google Maps, but Platial CEO Dianne Eisner assures me that in the world of people paying attention to maps it's understood that's not the case. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are all focused on search in maps, she says, and all have growing partnerships already formed with Platial. Platial is, more now than ever before, focused on social networking and maps. Yesterday's announcement of profile pages for Google Maps users notwithstanding, Eisner says Google is not looking to engage in full scale social networking in its Maps and Earth products. Google Maps and Earth Director John Hanke even contributed a quote to the press release for today's announcement, citing Platial as a key innovator serving the growing community of map enthusiasts.Map savvy Texas-based consultant Dean McCall says he doesn't buy it. He believes that there is more than enough integration already of other Google services with the company's My Maps product to pose a credible threat to Platial's future viability. That's not an uncommon argument, but the newly expanded and always innovative Platial and its investors are unlikely to go down without a fight.

  One of my favorite parts of the Web 2.0 conferences run by O'Reilly/CMP is the 15 minute quickfire presentation done every year by Mary Meeker. There is always a wealth of fascinating data about Web trends and products, which Meeker hits you with at a mllion miles an hour. Luckily in this case her presentation was up on the Morgan Stanley website when she came on stage, so I got to listen instead of frantically typing soundbotes. This year there were 48 slides (a record for Meeker at Web 2.0!) and you can download them here.Along with the usual trends such as mobile uptake and China growth (which are present in all Meeker presentations at Web 2.0), here are some of the lesser known trends that I learned about:We're now in two cycles in the "Cloud" age - broadband and wireless. This is seen in new products like Apple iPhone, 3 Skype Phone, Amazon Kindle, the upcoming Google ‘GPhone’. Also Meeker noted that there will be a "critical mass inflection point" for 3G in 2009. Meeker predicts a "new generation of Internet leaders to capitalize on growing access to fast Internet access on mobiles".Some interesting data points this year about the growth in Enterprise web 2.0. Slide 12 notes that the "next wave of corporate productivity gains should be paced by Web 2.0 driven collaboration tools that use the network as the platform to enable users to connect ‘any device to any content over any combination of networks’ (John Chambers, CEO, Cisco Systems, 5/22/07)". Related to this, enterprises may be coming out of a "relative purchasing funk" (slide 13).Meeker noted a few times that the US economy is a worry and that US in general is slipping behind China - and other countries such as India and South Korea are exhibiting very strong growth in technology. Specifically Meeker said that the US is "less relevant to global economy" nowadays - although judging by the rest of her slides on tech companies, the US still dominates the technology business. Still, Internet user growth is fastest in non-US markets according to Meeker.The following slide regarding Internet trends is worth highlighting in its entirity:Also check out this slide highlighting international Web trends:Personalization and recommendation systems are trends we discuss a lot here on Read/WriteWeb. Meeker called this out nicely in a slide about Amazon.com, a company that puts a lot of this theory into successful practise:Other great data points include: strong growth in online music (sales up 107% over the past year); Skype/VoIP growing near 100% per annum too; there is a "battle for platforms" in social networking, advertising, payments, commerce and mobile devices (Meeker described this one as a "rugby scrum").Finally Meeker referenced a group of Internet companies, including YouTube, digg, Joost. The most interesting one of course this year is Facebook, which Meeker said had experienced extraordinary growth over the past year:Meeker noted that Zuckerberg was 11 when Netscape did its IPO and wasn't born when microsoft went public, but Meeker said that Zuckerberg "thinks differently and we think that's a good thing".Overall, some fantastic data points as usual. Let us know in the comments what you think of these trends and what in particular interests you. For me, it is the different kinds of web tech products we are seeing coming from (and for) the International market. Plus the new kinds of Web apps for mobile devices. These are things we will explore more on R/WW.

  At the Web 2.0 Summit in SanFrancisco today, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said that the company is working toward shifting all of their apps online, but that it would probably take about 10 years for a complete shift. While the web as the computing platform of the future is currently a popular idea, and while prognostication 10 years out is rarely a good idea, I'm skeptical that Adobe could pull off a full shift of its software catalog to Internet apps.Adobe has launched stripped down online versions of some of its apps, already. Premiere Express, which powers the video mashups at sites like Photobucket and YouTube, is one of the nicer online video editors, but still falls well short of Adobe's software offering. Two week's ago at the Adobe Max event, Adobe showed off the latest version of their Photoshop Express web app -- again, it appeared to be one of the nicer online offerings, but still well short of their traditional software package.The high-level processing necessary to do a lot of the things that Adobe's popular offline apps do -- managing multiple layers, calculating the math behind vector graphics, applying complex filters -- these are all things that are complex, and I would guess are beyond the capabilities of Flex or Flash. Further, the US will need a massive leap in broadband speeds to support complex web apps at speeds comparable to desktop apps.Adobe did recently show off their new image processing programming language, Hydra, which will be integrated into the next version of Flash. Though early in development, the Hydra demos are impressive and its addition to Flash may eventually make Photoshop-like filter effects more plausible in web apps, but achieving the sort of speed and complexity of Photoshop online -- even in 10 years -- still seems implausible to me.Certainly, we will see more web applications from Adobe, and more complex applications that will closely mimic their offline brethren. It is very plausible that Adobe can have (less powerful) online versions of its most popular software aimed at the consumer market within 10 years, but I think it will be a long time before professional users are comfortable using completely online applications for critical graphic, video, animation, and programming work. Matching the speed and complexity of Adobe's offline applications online is more than 10 years away, in my opinion.What do you think? Is it feasible for Adobe to have its entire catalog of software online in 10 years?

  Reports are flying all over the blogosphere todayabout "China blocking" more US based websites, including search engines, and in some cases redirecting traffic in China to Chinese search engines instead of Google and Yahoo.The truth of the matter is probably not nearly so simple. As I understand itit's almost never as simple as "China is blocking X.Y.Z websites". It depends on which ISP you're using, there are technical obstacles to good service and there's a maze of face-to-face meetingsthat go on in order to plan and enact any such censorship, redirects, etc. It's highly unlikely that there is any nationwide policy suddenly put into place that effects internet users all across that huge nation. There are certainly a few big policies that are self-enforced by online service providers, but many of the comments being left on today's China coverage denying nation-wide censorship are probably the honest truth.Today's news coverage itself deserves some serious scrutiny.David Feng at BlogNationtests a number of sites from inside China and says access is relatively unchanged. The service GreatFireWallofChina.orgpurports to act as a proxy for testing but tells me that Baidu is inaccessible in China, so much for that. There are in fact probably few nation-wide policies enforced online in China and even if there were it would be hard to verify them.Some of the language of "economic attack" may be thinly veiled jingoism and calls to "boycott the Olympics" are pretty tasteless in light of the true Chinese crimes against humanity that long term human rights activists have been citing for withdrawal from the event. Darfur? Loud voices calling for economic sanctions in response to the alleged activities of the Western world's economic challengers sound like fair-weather friends of free speech to me.Online freedom in China is important, but online accuracy is important everywhere.

  This evening News Corp chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, and MySpace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe, were the featured speakers at the Web 2.0 Summit. It is the two year anniversary of the News Corp acquisition of MySpace, so there was some discussion on the growth of MySpace and how it is evolving. The pair also discussed, in a roundabout way, aspects of the upcoming MySpace Platform. Here are some of the highlights of the discussion, with thanks to MySpace for a lot of the background information. Also see TechCrunch's coverage, as they have been following this news since the rumors first surfaced a few weeks ago.Developer Platform Details RevealedTonight MySpace confirmed they will launch a developer platform in the "near term". DeWolfe and Murdoch cited the "original openness and personalization of the MySpace community" as being integral to MySpace's success to date. They also noted that MySpace helped develop the widget eco-system. During the discussion, DeWolfe seemed a little cagey about the concept of openness, but (under pressure from the mighty Marc Canter's questioning) admitted that it is "largely a good thing for users." In the end DeWolfe caved to Canter's persistent questions and said that yes they'll open up! But of course it remains to be seen whether they will, truly.It was revealed tonight that MySpace will formalize relationships with the developer community and "roll out a new platform in the coming months".• The steps to MySpace's developer platform strategy will include:1) In the coming weeks MySpace is launching a catalogue of all widgets and tools available on MySpace;2) In "several months" they will make industry standard APIs available through a new platform where developers can try new things in a sandbox environment;3) MySpace users will have the opportunity to participate in an opt-in beta test program, to determine usability;4) Users will vote and ultimately determine which of the third party widgets get tightly integrated into MySpace;5) MySpace will formally introduce the best widgets into the community, with what they term "highly developed integration".•Skype partnershipThe discussion touched on the MySpace partnership with Skype, which we covered earlier today. Murdoch and DeWolfe noted that Skype is a great example of how they will work with partners to extend the MySpace community into other applications on the Internet. Through this partnership, DeWolfe said, the Skype community can now access their MySpace network and content through the Skype client (and visa versa). DeWolfe at first seemed to imply that this was a form of "openness", but that was quickly shot down by Marc Canter and Battelle.MySpace Music / Sony BMG•This week MySpace announced a licensing agreement, their first with a music label, with Sony BMG Entertainment. This furthers the "MySpace Music platform", which incidentally was very noticeable in a MySpace party I attended tonight in San Francisco. The party featured some excellent art work and interactive displays of MySpace pages for prominent bands and musicians -- it reinforced that music was what made MySpace popular, and makes it much 'cooler' than Facebook to the young demographic.The deal is for MySpace and Sony BMG to share in sponsorship and advertising revenues. Sony BMG will license "music videos, select audio material, and other content", so that it's available on its artistsÂ’ MySpace profile pages. There will also be other promotion by MySpace of Sony BMG artists.MySpace opens San Francisco Office•The party I attended tonight was a celebration of the new SF office, which will house developers, engineers, sales people.• Murdoch said tonight, in answer to a direct question from John Battelle about what he thinks of Silicon Valley, that the valley is full of innovation and disruptive ideas. So the SF office will enable MySpace to "be closer to that action". It will also of course give MySpace access to the abundent engineering talent available in the valley -- watch out Google, Yahoo! and startups! Above pic by Don LoebMySpace Growth•MySpace is currently active in more than 20 international markets, and they have another 10 on the way - including Russia, India and Poland. Their international HQ will now be London. Also according to the company, MySpace is the number 1 social network in Europe and itÂ’s the most trafficked site in the United States. They are reportedly adding 300,000 new users each day. •When News Corp acquired MySpace, the company had 10 million unique users - MySpace currently has 110 active global monthly users.Geeks & Media People Mixing!Excellent growth and as I mentioned above, MySpace continues to be a favored destination for musicians and music fans. Facebook comes from a college crowd, but MySpace is younger, hipper and - if it delivers on the platform promises - may start to appeal more to developers too. Indeed, at tonight's party it was a strange experience seeing geeks with glasses (I was one of them) mixing with trendy and beautiful people. A.k.a. technology mixing with media. Perhaps that's a sign of things to come with the MySpace platform!

  Matt Mullenweg announced todaythat Automattic, the maker of ultra-popular blog platform Wordpress, has acquired universal avatar service Gravatarfor an undisclosed sum. Gravatar, which stands for "globally recognized avatar," provides centralized hosting and web serving for 80x80 avatars, which can then be called from any participating blog, forum, or web application that taps into the Gravatar API. The theory is that users can have one web avatar that they manage in a single location, but which represents them automatically anywhere they post online.Automattic has already moved the Gravatar operation to the Wordpress infrastructure, which they say has resulted in gravatar serving that is 3 times faster -- which is good, because one of the reasons I was initially cold the service when it launched was that it often seemed to hang forum and blog pages that used it.Mullenweg also hinted at other improvements to the service, including moving gravatar delivery to a CDN, making all premium features (such as the ability to have multiple avatars) free, upping the maximum size of gravatars to 128px, integrating the service with Wordpress.com (duh), and supporting Microformats on the site's profile pages. He also talked about rewriting the Gravatar application itself (which is written in Rails) to better fit with the Wordpress infrastructure. I suppose that means a PHP-based Gravatar service in the near future.Mullenweg compared Gravatar to another Automattic product, spam protection plugin Akismet. "I also saw a lot of parallels to Akismet, a product that does one thing, does it well, and has an open API so any platform can use it," he wrote. But where Askimet does something fairly complicated and benefits from the input of its users (flagging spam that slips through causes its filters to improve), Gravatar does something pretty simple and doesn't really benefit from the crowd.At the forum I co-own, we've been slowly working on developing our own proprietary forum software. We considered using Gravatar for avatar management, but I've been arguing against it for a few reasons. First, uploading and storing small images is an easy task and not very resource intensive (avatars are generally under 8k each), and relying on an outside service has always seemed silly to me. Second, I think web sites tend to run faster the fewer outside services they have to query on each page load -- avatar hosting is such a painless thing to handle on our end it seemed to make more sense to do just that. Finally, asking people to sign up to a third party service to upload an avatar would be an unnecessary annoyance for users. Besides, I like to try on different avatars at different communities (sometimes I'm "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski, other times I am "Raoul Duke" from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas).I can see how the idea of a globally accessibly avatar would be appealing to many people though, and the acquisition does make sense for Automattic. They can further build out their blog services platform (Wordpress, Akismet, and now Gravatar), and integrate it into Wordpress.com, which could help them build the hosted blog platform into a social network akin to Live Journal or Xanga if they ever decided to go that route. Either way, congratulations to Gravatar founder, Tom Werner. Tom is a big Ruby guy, so with the potential of a Gravatar rewrite in PHP (as Mullenweg appeared to allude), it seems unlikely to me that he'd stick around Automattic. So what's next, Tom?

  I'm here at the Web 2.0 Summit 2007in San Francisco, the third year I've been to the conference. Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle started out with an overview of web 2.0 now; and one thing they noted is that social networking has moved from an 'edge' technology to a center technology. John Battelle then invited founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, onto the stage to discuss this topic. Mark came across as an awkward young man (and to be totally fair, he is very young), so the first 5 minutes didn't offer much insight. Eventually though Zuckerberg warmed up, especially when Battelle asked him to define 'social graph'. Zuckerberg said "it's the set of conenctions that a person has in the world" and that Facebook is simply trying to map this. He said it's about exposing peoples connections, but respecting peoples privacy. Battelle asked about the Facebook platform. Zuckerberg said that "it's incredibly humbling to see all these people build on top of a platform that's still early stage". He said it might take "tens of years" before the platform is mature, so launching the platform this year was a "quick start" (i.e. they just wanted to get it out there and iterate). Battelle asked how can developers be sure that their apps won't be taken offline in the future? Zuckerberg said that the site is evolving very fast, so they need to make sure there's enough flexibility in the system. That didn't answer the question, so Battelle persisted with the topic - noting that Microsoft essentially built a platform too, but they went on to "colonize" it. So will Facebook do the same? Zuckerberg said maybe with ads (!) He said that Facebook "reserves the right to build apps on the platform". Like a dog with a bone, Battelle asked what kind of advertising system Facebook will build - will they compete with Microsoft and Google, outside the FB ecosystem. Zuckerberg didn't bite and had no answer.Battelle asked: what about media? Zuckerberg said "we're not really a media company", so it's unlikely they'll build media apps. He said they'll stick to social networking functionality.Later, Marc Canter got in the first question - he asked will Facebook release APIs that allow users to export their social graph and other personal data. Marc says Facebook isn't "all the way open" - will that change? Zuckerberg says "we want to get there" and that's their goal. He cited how FB started off just being for US college studemts, then opened up to world, then to the platform for apps inside FB. He says "we realize this is a flaw in the system", but he didn't give a timeframe (despite Marc's questions around exactly that).Charlene Li asked: many of the FB apps today are "frivalous", so is Mark happy about that? Zuckerberg reiterated that it's still very early, but that many verticals have been filled in already. He says it's amazing to him that they have 6000 apps already. The other part of Li's question was what kind of apps does he want built? Zuckerberg said that he hopes more apps that go outside personal and social media will be built - e.g. health.Battelle's last question is "at some time or another you've got to bring in a grown-up", so will FB do that? Zuckerberg says they're focusing on "building a really good team" (great side-step!).

  For the past two days, AltSearchEngineseditor Charles Knight has been attending the Search Marketing Expo: Social Mediaconference in New York City. He's been live blogging every session from the conference and there is some really great stuff in his notes, all of which have been posted to the ASE blog. Definitely don't miss any of his excellent and all inclusive coverage:Session 1: Social Media Marketing FundamentalsSession 2: Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media SitesSession 3: Extra! Extra! The Social News SitesSession 4: A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking &TaggingSession 5: Keynote Q &A with Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us &Garrett Camp of StumbleUponSession 6: Effectively Leveraging Social NetworkingSession 7: Evangelist - The Marketer’s Role in SMMSession 8: Micro CommunitiesSession 9: Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and Answer SharingSession 10: Final Session - Wikipedia Clinic

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Screenshots_Out_for_Microsoft_Office_Live_Workspace';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Microsoft has been sharing with bloggers today some screenshots of the forthcoming Microsoft Office Live Workspace. The company made its most recent major announcementabout the online collaboration suite that integrates with Office at the end of last month. Interested users can now pre-registerfor the free service's launch later this year.Obviously a major challenge to Google Docs and other online office and collaboration tools, Live Workspace looks great to me in these screenshots. I haven't investigated to see if it will be cross-platform compatible but if not I'll fire up Windows just to test it out when released. Richard MacManus wrote at length hereabout Workspace earlier this month, calling it a "weak me-too offering." I'm not so sure. In case you haven't noticed, Google Docs look, export and print dog-ugly. There's certainly room for competition, as even Adobe signaled with their acquisition of a Buzzwordthis month.Screenshots below, click these preview images to view them in beautiful full size.

  Ars Technicareported late last night that the Free Flow of Information Act, which would grant protection of sources and documents at a federal level to journalists, including professional bloggers, easily passed the US House of Representatives by a vote of 398-21. The bill, which was cosponsored by Reps. Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Mike Pence (R-IN), still may never become a law should it reach President Bush's desk.According to Ars, the Bush administration views the FFIA "as carte blanche to leak government information without penalty," and released a statement yesterday in opposition citing the "overriding imperative to protect national security," as a reason for their objection to the measure.As Ars Technica notes, though the FFIA would would extend coverage to professional bloggers as journalists, the definition of "journalist" would likely be debated at length in court. Ars writer Nate Anderson recalls Apple's lawsuit against AppleInsider and PowerPage a few years ago over a product breach, in which case Apple claimed that bloggers were not journalists. What makes a journalist and what makes a professional blogger are finer points of the bill that would be up to the courts to interpret.It should certainly be noted, though, that most major mainstream news organizations now employ full time bloggers and have detailed blogging strategies implemented on their web sites. Further, top news organizations like USA Today, Reuters and Fox are licensing blog content through BlogBurstfor their publications. So it follows that at least some bloggers are firmly operating in the realm of traditional journalists and should enjoy the same shield protection.The Senate will be considering a similar bill.What do you think? Should bloggers be treated as journalists? Should any journalists have shield protection to allow them to keep their sources and notes private? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

  After the YouTube/CNN US Presidential candidates debates received huge attention and the Yahoo! Candidate Mashup saw near record numbers of visitors to its site, you might wonder - what more could be done with online video around the upcoming election?10 Questionsis an honestly innovative project that combines user voting with the open-ended time format that online video can offer far better than TV. It's backed by a list of 40 media heavyweights, from the New York Times and MSNBC to Talking Points Memo to Michelle Malkin and TechRepublican. The project was put together by the folks at TechPresident and David Colarusso of Community Counts. Community Counts was a site put up in response to the YouTube/CNN debate, focused on viewer voting. If the media sponsors push this subsequent project through their channels - 10 Questions is probably going to be very big.Details and video after the fold.Here's how it works: users upload questions on either YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo, or Blip.tv and tag the videos "10Questions." The 10 Questions crew will grab those videos and put them up on the site for viewers to vote on. After four weeks of voting, ending November 14th, the 10 questions with the most votes will be sent to all the candidates.The candidates will then have 4 weeks to record their answers. There will be no time limit on their answers, which really is significant. The leading candidates will, unfortunately, probably record the shortest replies possible. Long shot candidates will offer interesting, detailed replies. Maybe, just maybe, this format could break that pattern.Their answers will be posted to 10 Questions, and presumably many sponsor sites, where viewers will be able to vote on whether they think the questions were answered to their satisfaction. This part will undoubtedly become a popularity contest and Ron Paul will likely be the winner (he's got nothing to lose by answering in greatest detail!) but it's still got some potential to be really interesting.While other online video question events like this did offer some interesting questions to the candidates - this one is going to be fundamentally different. The unique format combined with the incredible backing make 10 Questions an effort worth watching.

  This week has been an exciting one in mobile and voice news, here's three important stories you don't want to miss.iPhone to Open to Outside AppsSteve Jobs posted to the Apple Hot News pagetoday that a software development kit for the iPhone and iPod touch will be released in February. I'll be curious to see what kind of reactions emerge around this news in a few hours, after everyone sobers up from the announcement. I bought a futon couch on iPhone weekend (a purchase the whole family could enjoy, brick and price drop free) but our crew over at Last100has an in-depth analysis of the SDK news.GoogleDocs Goes MobileA new mobile version of Google Docshas been released and it's a whole lot better than nothing. That's about all it's better than, though - it's view only. Maybe I'd change my tune if I was viewing Google Docs Mobile on an iPhone, as Chris Messinais in the image here.On my BlackJack (great phone by the way) and IE mobile you can't edit any docs, you can't invite new collaborators or viewers, you can't do much at all in fact. Doc view is great and I'm thankful for that but spreadsheet view in HTML is barely usable and Presentations can't be viewed at all. It's a good start and I can imagine using it, but I sure hope it's only the beginning. MySpace Ads Skype CallingStarting next month, MySpace users will have Skype voice calling integrated into their IM clients. Both Skype In and Out will be available. That's a big score for Skype but why not team with Gizmoor another open standards based VOIP client so that developers can leverage that too in the forthcoming "MySpace platform." That's a rhetorical question. I'd love to see the business details on this deal.Some days the mobile and voice worlds are really interesting to pay attention to. I'd say today is one of those days. It's hard to think of a set of technologies likely to be more important in the future.

  Jerry Yang, founder and CEO of Yahoo!, the world's third most trafficked collection of web sites, yesterday laid out his plan to investors (and in a blog post) to revitalize the company. Yang wants Yahoo! to become the "starting point" for consumers on the Internet -- or in other words, return to the portal strategy that made it the most popular starting place for web surfers in the 90s.Yahoo! talked about creating the "sites that help you better manage your life and connect you to what matters most to you." According to the New York TimesYahoo! is rapidly losing ground to Google as the sort of web starting point that they want to become."What [Yang's] fighting against is how much Google has usurped the role of the portal... Google is increasingly winning loyalty for its other services too. It claims iGoogle -- its customized home page -- is its fastest-growing product. And many sites now say they are getting more traffic from iGoogle than the pioneering My Yahoo service. Gmail, while smaller than Yahoo Mail, is growing faster." -- New York TimesMany think the key for Yahoo! is social networking. I think social networking is something that will exist on the horizon for Yahoo!, but they first need to get their platform strategy in order. As we wrote in July, the platform is the killer appof today's web and Yahoo! needs to get on board. Words yesterday from Yang indicated that they will be doing just that, opening up more APIs and creating a platform that allows third-party developers to plug into their "starting point" properties."We have phenomenal technology platforms and data infrastructure, and it’s time to share. Besides building on open API for critical platforms, we’re looking at many different ways to open Yahoo!," wrote Yang. "We’re excited about what could happen when a motivated community of publishers and developers starts plugging into our most popular services."That echoes the sentiment we expressed last July, when we said that a Yahoo! platform "should be a major part of their plans going forward." After the platform, social networking is the next step (this is obviously a reverse approach than the one that sites that were social networks first, such as Facebook, have taken). Yahoo! wants to connect people to what matters most to them -- these days that means they will have to figure out how to connect people to one another.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/SharePoint_Goes_Web_2_0_Microsoft_Partners_with_Atlassian_Newsgator';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Today Microsoft is announcing two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software company Atlassianand RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The partnerships link togther Microsoft's SharePointproduct with Atlassian's wiki collaboration product Confluenceand a new offering from Newsgatorcalled 'NewsGator Social Sites', a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key product for Microsoft - it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and "social computing" capabilities (Microsoft's term for 'web 2.0', according to this pageon Microsoft's website).The aim of the partnerships is to add more "social computing platform" capabilities to SharePoint, which up till now has mainly been promoted as an "enterprise productivity platform". In other words, Microsoft is adding more web 2.0 functionality (e.g. collaboration, personal publishing) to SharePoint, using best of breed web products from Atlassian and Newsgator. I sat down with Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes yesterday in San Francisco, to discuss their partnership with Microsoft. Essentially it involves Atlassian integrating Confluence, their enterprise wiki, into Microsoft SharePoint (and vice versa). According to Cannon-Brookes, their customers frequently ask them how Confluence can be used alongside SharePoint - e.g. how content can be shared or searched between the two products. It's important to point out that SharePoint already has wiki and blog functionality, but they are generally considered to be rather basic compared to more sophisticated enterprise wiki solutions such as Atlassian's Confluence or SocialText.SharePoint has a huge user base, so it's easy to see the attraction of this partnership for Atlassian. Microsoft has around 80 million users on SharePoint and is reported to be worth $800 M per year in revenue for the Redmond company. Atlassian has 4,100 Confluence enterprise customers.This isn't just another 'we promise to work together' type announcement - there is a new product being released today by Atlassian at http://www.atlassian.com/SharePoint, called the 'SharePoint Connector for Confluence'. It's a plugin that will be available for download on Atlassian's website later today. This plug-in pulls content from SharePoint to Confluence and vice versa. Cannon-Brookes explained that there were 4 main parts to the plug-in:1) Single search; Confluence is mainly used for "agile documentation", said Mike, which he defined as "in-between content" such as minutes to a meeting. For example, content that is more formal than an email, but not something you'd enter into Word. So the ability to search for wiki content using SharePoint (and vice versa) is being enabled by the plug-in. Cannon-Brookes said that this was the number 1 feature request for the plug-in.2) Single sign-on with security; every SharePoint user gets a personal space, including wiki and blog.3) Content Sharing; this means embedding content from Confluence into SharePoint, as a "web part".4) Linking; Within Confluence, users can access SharePoint document facilities. By including SharePoint lists and content within Confluence, users can (in a single click) edit Microsoft Office documents.In summary, Cannon-Brookes told me that the aim was to put as much of Confluence into SharePoint as possible; and the other way round too. For example SharePoint has great office integration (MS Office), so you can now have lists of Word documents in Confluence and effectively edit them inside the wiki product - or at least without having to switch programs.I asked Cannon-Brookes how Atlassian and Microsoft will promote the partnership. He wasn't sure how Microsoft will promote it, but from Atlassian's point of view they'll use their existing partner and consultancy connections - particularly those who are already customers of both companies - to promote the hybrid.What's in it for Microsoft? As is well known, Microsoft is a huge company that can be very slow to provide upgrades to its products. Microsoft probably can't iterate fast enough to keep up with agile startups in the wiki space, so they've decided that partnering is their option to keep up.ConclusionThis is another great example of big vendors partnering with more agile, and smarter, startups to create better Web Office functionality in their products. It's win-win for both companies, although it's worth pointing out that Atlassian is a Java shop. So perhaps in this case the partnership won't lead to an outright acquisition. Also Confluence is just half of Atlassian - they also run a development tools business (again Java based). Still, the deal will be great for Atlassian's business. By their own account Atlassian is the leading enterprise wiki vendor - and judging by their customer numbers this seems to be the case - so this will only cement that position in that market. For Microsoft, they get a 'best of breed' Web Office app to beef up their hugely profitable SharePoint product.