Google News releasedits own official Facebook apptoday. Users can view the feeds of major topics by default and keyword searches for news in a full canvas page. News stories can be shared with friends easily, notes can be added, and there's tabs to view stories shared by and with friends. There's no profile page component, it's all just canvas page display.It's not bad at all, though I still believe the real gold in Facebook is in the user's home page and minifeed - where never an outside app is seen. Profile pages just aren't where you interact with your apps and a dedicated canvas page seems likely to receive even less attention.Despite my grouchiness, I was impressed with this app. See also FeedHeads, a newly-updated and fairly sophisticated Facebook app that works in conjunction with Google Reader and Newsgator.

  I'm here at the Semantic Edge panel at the Summit, moderated by Tim O'Reilly and featuring W. Daniel Hillis (Co-Chairman and CTO, Applied Minds), Barney Pell (Founder and CEO of Powerset), Nova Spivack (Twine - see our review here). The panel starts with demos from each of the three speakers. FreebaseDaniel Hillis starts with a demo of Freebase, which aims to "open up the silos of data and the connections between them". Freebase is a database that has all kinds of data in it and an API. He shows a wagon wheel like UI of VCs, centered around John Doerr. He says it is basically objects and relationships between them. Because it's an open database, anyone can enter new data in Freebase. An example page in the Freebase db looks pretty similar to a Wikipedia page (or a Twine page). When you enter new data, the app can make suggestions about content. The topics in Freebase are organized by type, and you can connect pages with links, semantic tagging. So in summary, Freebase is all about shared data and what you can do with it.PowersetBarney Pell is up next. Powerset(see our coverage hereand here) is a natural language search engine. He says the system relies on semantic technologies that have only become available in the last few years. He says that Powerset has imported Freebase, to improve the database. He says the system can make "semantic connections", which helps make the semantic database. He uses the example of Hulk Hogan and the list of wrestlers he's defeated (Ric Flair, Randy Savage, et al). He says these connections comes from "the way the language is expressed". He says that meaning and knowledge gets extracted automatically from Powerset.TwineNova Spivack is up next, regarding Twine. Our review yesterdaycovers this. Nova Spivack notes today that Twine automatically learns about you and your interests as you populate it with content - the "Semantic Graph". When you put in new data, Twine picks out and tags certain content with semantic tags - e.g. the name of a person. He says that an important point is that Twine creates new semantic and rich data. But it's not all user-generated. They've also done machine learning against Wikipedia to 'learn' about new concepts. And they will eventually tie into services like Freebase. Finally he compares Twine to Google, saying it is a "bottom-up, user generated crawl of the Web".Panel TalkTim O'Reilly starts by asking whether all of these Semantic Web apps are available now? Hillis firstly notes that some of this technology is not necessarily Semantic Web. But to Tim's question, Hillis says Freebase is "solid alpha". Powerset has about 16,000 people already signed up, and you can sign up now. Twine "is usable today", but it's still in learning and testing phase. Spivack says it's now an "invite beta".Tim then says that what ties these apps together is "semantics" (not necessarily Semantic Web, as Hillis noted). O'Reilly brings up Google, Flickr interestingness and how users can influence results (collective intelligence etc), but that it's usually passive and hidden behind silos. But these new semantic apps are more open and they're platform players. Hillis says that O'Reilly is on track, and eventually "there will be one Web of data". He says Web 1.0 was a "web of documents", and that it will be the same with semantic apps - it doesn't make sense to have silos of data.Nova said this is the value of open standards and the WC3. He says the Semantic Web is a certain set of standards, and that it where you get the (open) network effect. Barney says the real value is "making explicit what was once implicit" (in terms of data). Tim asks: where is the interoperability within the 3 platforms (3 apps above). Hillis said Freebase is a platform because it's specifically designed to be used by other apps. In summary, Spivack notes that data portability and connectibility is the key to these new semantic apps - the Web is the platform and they're just different services within the platform. Hillis though disagrees - he said Freebase isa platform! So the web is the platform of platforms (!).On that overly semantic note, the panel ended.Related:Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services, by Alex Iskold, which is a great overview of this new era of Semantic apps.

  The now-EBay property StubHubhas lost a battle in court and handing over the names of 13,000 of its users to the New England Patriots American football team. The suit was filed last November - two months before the acquisition of the site was announced, so it probably didn't go down like some of the YouTube suits.It's never a good day when almost any website is forced to disclose the names of its users.The Patriots alleged, and the court agreed, that all participants in auctions for game tickets between 2003 and 2007 violated company policy and state law. StubHub says that the majority of the names belonged to buyers, not sellers. Season ticket holders on the list of names may have their tickets cancled and the team may hand the list over "to the authorities," the team told the Boston Globe, whose in-depth coverage is also worth a read.Who's a Bad Actor Here?Judging by the description of the case, I presume that many of the names handed over to the team were of people who didn't win auctions for tickets at all. If that's the case it sounds like all the more a privacy violation.The Patriots say that problems arose after the team canceled season tickets from ticket holders caught selling game passes in other settings. Some fans then sold their canceled tickets on StubHub, which lead to buyers "causing disturbances" at the stadium upon learning their purchased tickets were not good. Selling canceled tickets on StubHub sounds like the real low-blow in this situation.But Stealing is Wrong, Right?The above is an explanation of the team's perspective that anyone could sympathize with, but it may not tell the whole story, either. The Globe coverage also said that several teams in other leagues have struck deals with StubHub to be the official outlet for resale of tickets. The Patriots themselves are still dealing with a tarnished reputation for getting caught spying on opponents earlier this season. It's safe to assume they are hardly the only team in sports doing so, though.So the game on the field is full of cheating, people all over the country are buying and selling scalped tickets, some that get busted are reselling worthless tickets and some of those buyers are being rude at the gate into the stadium. Who'se the bad guy here? I feel least happy with the court who would demand that everyone's names be handed over to the authorities - but I suppose unlike everyone else in this mess of a situation, they're just doing their job.

  There are, by some accounts, about 3 billion mobile phone users in the world. That's more thanthe number of automobiles, more than the number of personal computers, more than the number of landline phones, more than the number of TVs, and more than the number of credit cards. The mobile Internet, however, has largely been a rather uninspiring experience. While many people, mostly in the developing world, use their mobile phone as their primary Internet or computing device, the mobile web is often looked at as a jungle of slow loading pages, poor design, and unoptimized content that is a pain to use on a tiny screen.In the US there are 237 million wireless subscribers, but only 32 million accessed the Internetin September -- a tiny fraction of the 210 million total Internet users. Compared to Japan, where just 100,000 less people accessed the mobile webthan did people log on from a personal computer, it is clear that in the US using a mobile phone for web access is not yet a mainstream activity.This year, a few potentially game changing devices have been released in the United States and elsewhere that could help push the mobile web (and the concept of accessing the web as a whole from your mobile) into the mainstream. The first, of course, is the iPhone (and iPod Touch). In August, Forrester Research talked about the iPhone as a mobile web killer, because of its large screen, fast wifi access, and ability to elegantly display the full Internet without having to bother with mobile optimized sites -- which not every web site offers. We were skeptical, saying that iPhone has more going for it than the mobile web, but "isn't quite a Mobile Web killer just yet."Even so, we've already sung the praises of the iPhone, listing its strong, full web access as one of our favorite features. Perhaps even more importantly for the adoption of mobile web usage, the iPhone also introduced affordable data plans for users. The cheapest iPhone plan (AT&T), which includes unlimited data, is $59.99/month in the US. Verizon Wireless, meanwhile, has plans (in my area) starting at $79.99 and data usage usually counts against your monthly minutes. Clearly, the iPhone lowers the barrier of entry for many users by making access cheaper.But, even though the first three months of sales for the iPhone have been good -- estimates range up to 1 million units sold since its late June launch -- the iPhone still only accounts for a very tiny percentage of the mobile market.Another important pair of devices launched this year were the Nokia N95 8GB and the Nokia N810, the latter being perhaps more compelling. The N810, like Apple's iPod Touch, is not a phone, but rather a smartphone-sized Internet device. Running an OS based on Linux, and with support for Flash (something Apple's devices can't boast), the N810, which will be sold starting next month, is built to be a portable Internet device.With a Mozilla based browser, Flash support, and a slide out keyboard, it can be looked at as a palm-sized computer (it's a bit bigger than most phones) that can be used to access the platform that is the web via a wireless connection. Some early reviewers are skeptical, however, wondering who would pay $500 for a palm-sized Internet device that isn'ta cell phone.ConclusionIt's true that the N810 and the iPod Touch and similar devices may fail on the first go around, but they're indicative of a trend toward mobile computing and acceptance of using mobile devices to access the web and the growing catalog of web applications to get things done. As wifi access becomes more ubiquitous and relying on cellular networks to get online via mobile devices becomes less important, I think we'll see a lot of growth in this market. As applications move online and access is everywhere, full-sized computers will be needed less, and will be less desirable, for many of our daily tasks. The mobile phone (or mobile Internet device) as your primary computer may become a less foreign idea over the next few years in developed nations.What do you think? Is the mobile web (or, rather, using mobile devices to access the web) finally coming of age? Are we set to see more of these devices flooding the marketplace in the future or will the idea never take off? At the end of last year, only 15% of R/WW prognosticated that the mobile web would be the biggest web trend of this year. Could the results for next year's predictions be different?

  Last night we covered the announcement of Twine, which aims to be the first mainstream Semantic Web application. Twine founder Nova Spivack showed me a demo of the new app, which he described as a "knowledge networking" application. One of the things I asked Nova right at the end of the interview was his definition of "Web 3.0", a term he has been using in his blog.While people are (rightly) skeptical of another version number for the Web, I thought Nova's definition was a useful one. He told me that web 2.0 "is a decade and not a technology" - and that it's more about defining the characterof each era, rather than trying to define a Web era as a set of technologies. So in those terms, he said web 2.0 = social web and that web 3.0 will be the "intelligent web". By that he means that apps are getting smarter, because data is getting smarter. It's clear he was referring to the Semantic Web - his company is based on those technologies.As for 'web 4.0', Nova said that will be when AI (Artificial Intelligence) comes into being.I should note that Nova's definition of web 3.0 is self-serving, because his new product Twine is an "intelligent web" product that uses semantics. Also I am not a proponent of continuing the version numbers - just as 'dot com' is the term for the first era of the Web, and 'web 2.0' the second, there will be a new term that bubbles up at the right time to describe the next era (perhaps 2-3 years from now). Heck, it may even just be called the Semantic Web! However, I liked Nova's way of looking at the meta trends on the Web and I certainly see automation/intelligence coming to the fore in the next Web era - just as "collective intelligence" and socialness have come to the fore in web 2.0. What are your thoughts on this (and please don't focus on the version numbers, because it may well get called something other than web 3.0 when it actually happens).

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/microsoft/Microsoft_s_Me_Too_Strategy_Can_the_Tortoise_Beat_the_Hare';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Microsoft has lifted the lid this week on a number of products that compete to various degrees with popular Google services. While Google fans and blogosphere cynics have derided the Microsoft offers as "me too" knock-offs, at first look Microsoft 411 and Live Workspace look really nice. Virtual Earth 6.0also has a "newly open" SDK and the Popflymashup engine also made its first appearance this week.Much of this may be following in Google's footsteps - but fact of the matter, it could end up being better than what the search giant has already brought to market.Microsoft's 411 product, 1-800-CALL411, is based on the substantial acquisition of TellMe and was just released to the public this week. With extensive SMS delivery and sharing, geo-location and other features - this product looks substantially superior to GOOG411. I've used GOOG411 and always feel like I'm doing the company a favor helping its limping technology assimilate more spoken word into its giant databases for search and advertising.Live Workspace will be Microsoft's online document collaboration service. Some have insisted that it's not a competitor to Google Docs, but in fact it will keep the Office revenue stream flowing while adding a collaboration layer that will preclude customer loss to Google. The early screenshots released by the company this weeklook a whole lot stronger than the pared down and awkward Google Docs apps. Google Docs does a lot that broke new ground a year ago - but it's completely open to challenge. Live Workspace at least appears to have a lot of promise as a stable, integrated and powerful tool. If this debate is of interest to you, make sure to check out Microsoft's all-out PR attack on Google Docs from September.With innovation underway in opening up Sharepoint, exposing the .net code to facilitate bugfixing for developers, the release of the PopFly mashup engine and maybe SilverLight's challenge to the Adobe environments - there's no reason to begrudge Microsoft's late entries into these markets. In six to eighteen months, we may look back and say slow and steady won the race. I wouldn't bet on it, but I wouldn't presume it won't happen, either.

  For those of you who couldn't pay $4000 to get into Web 2.0 Summit - or didn't want to - the organizers have started to release videos of the main sessions on blip.tv. Below is the Mark Zuckerberg session (the Mary Meeker one is also online).Some quick thoughts on Web 2.0 Summit this year from my experience: similar to last year, business focus, Facebook is the hottest topic, there are iPhones everywhere. There aren't that many new startup ventures around, although Nova Spivack's Twineis promising. Overall the show hasn't been as interesting to me as Web 2.0 Expo was in April, but it is a different audience (Expo is more geek focused). I'll wrap up my thoughts on the Summit later today. Meanwhile here is the video:

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/programming/Java_A_Retrospective';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';It was 1995 and C++ was the language of choice for building large-scalesoftware systems. C++ was a powerful object-oriented programming language, thesuccessor of widely used procedural language called C. But not only was C++ powerful, it was also quite complicated. Seasoned programmers enjoyed the intricacies andthe possibilities, but newbies would get burned after the firstmishandled copy constructor.Enter Java - a language of great elegance, power and, most importantly,simplicity. Designed by James Gosling and his team at Sun Microsystems,Java became a phenomenon that won hearts and minds, changed the rulesof enterprise programming and seriously wounded Microsoft. Yet despiteits glory, Java lost one of the most important battles - the battlefor the web browser. In this post we look at what happened to Java inthe last decade, from its glorious rise, to market politics, to the battlefor the browser.The Beauty Of JavaThe first great thing about the core Java language was that it wassimple. The creators of the language made assumptions and compromises and decided to take away some power from programmers, but the benefits by far outweighedthe limitations. The second great thing was the virtual machine. To make a C++program run on another platform required a lot of effort. Java programs, on the other hand, wereportable automatically.Then there were the libraries. Java's libraries made a huge impact because they shifted developer focus from worrying about the infrastructureto worrying about the application. Some of the earlier Java librariestruly set the bar for innovation, flexibility and utility. For example,the JavaBeans framework showed that component development can be easy(unlike COM and ActiveX). And the collections framework delivered reusable and extensiblestandard data structures and algorithms.But probably the most important thing that Java taught many of us was to thinkabout interfaces. The power of any object-oriented language is abstraction, and by emphasizingthe interface, Java brought that power forward. Debunking the inheritance myth, Javanamed the interfaceto be a king of object-oriented programming.Java's Enterprise AmbitionsAs Java's popularity grew, so did the ambitions of its creators. Sun wantedJava everywhere: on the web, on the desktop, on mobiles and in the enterprise. The enterprise market looked particularly attractive because Sunwould have the opportunity to sell its servers as well.Thus was born J2EE - a powerful infrastructure for building large-scale enterpriseapplications. Unfortunately, unlike the earlier Java libraries J2EE wasquite complicated and even rather cumbersome.Nevertheless J2EE gave rise to numerousstandards, including probably the most important one -the modern application server. In a rather unexpected turn of eventscompetitors like BEA, IBM, Oracle and Sun converged to create a set of standardsthat benefited first and foremost, the customers. All this was accomplishedthough the Java Community Process (JCP) - an industry round tablefor generating standard Java specifications.The Java Community ProcessSince its early days, the software community has lacked standards.In the 1980s and early 1990s consulting companies made a fortune buildingadapters that transformed output from one application into the input for another.Among the remarkable things that Sun managed to do with Java was introduce a process for generating industry-wide standards.In a brilliant move, Sun shared its baby with everyone by inviting peopleto participate in the Java Community Process. The process consisted ofphases, starting with the introduction of a new specification. If the need was established and approved,the draft and review phase focused on generating the first version of the spec and doing a public review.Anyone could provide feedback during the process, and then a group of authors would incorporate it into the draft.IBM Hijacks Java With EclipseSun has done many wonderful things with Java, but it also fell short at a few critical moments in history.First, it was a shame when Java was running faster on Windows than on Solaris. Their case for selling Sparcs asmachines optimized for Java fell through. Sun recovered, but too late for people to buy into the benefits. Next,Sun did not develop a serious Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE) until late in the game.IBM took advantage of this mistake and released a product ironically called Eclipse. This open source IDEallowed IBM to not only take over the basic development shell, but also release and distribute its own version of Java.IBM then made another clever move: it added standard development applications includingtesting tools, profiling tools, version control, etc. to Eclipse. And all of this it gave away free. With this move, IBM effectivelycornered the developer tools market and cleared the path for selling more Web Spheres (IBM Application Servers) and Blades(IBM Servers).Java Loses The Desktop And The BrowserJust like IBM out-maneuvered Sun, so did Microsoft. Microsoft has long maintained that Java is slow.Perhaps it was in the early days, but certainly that is no longer true. In fact, in most cases it runs as fast asnative applications because of just in time compilation and various other optimizations. But Microsoft stuck to itsguns, saying continuously that Java was slow, and added that Java user interfaces were also poor.The image above is from Swing, written by Information Laboratory in 2003, and shows that Swing can draw its UI with thousands of objects.Unfortunately for Java its first UI toolkit, AWT, was indeed not up to par. Eventually Sun came out with Swing,which was a superb UI framework; much faster than its predecessor and capable of creating the same kind of applications as Microsoft's tools.However, the myth had already been spread and middle management throughout the country trumpeted Microsoft's tune:Java was not good for the desktop.And then there was the applet fiasco. Java applicationswhere little applets that everyone grew to hate, thanks to their initial slowness and later inertia. Because of people's hatred for applets,Java lost the battle for being theprogramming language inside the browser.That loss is huge, given that the web isbecoming more and more ubiquitous. What's sad is that Java lost to JavaScript (which has nothing to do with Java) and Flash -both inferior programming languages. The irony, of course, is that Java started with the web in mind. The Cost Of Language PoliticsThere are great lessons to be learned from Java's story. The first is the lesson of simplicity and elegance.Java taught us that software can be simple to write. But another side of the Java story is about politics. Java won over people's hearts and mindsand that alone made it a desirable target. IBM and Microsoft, both companies that have controlled dominant programminglanguages at different times in their histories, understood the value of Java and went after it.IBM executed perfectly. Microsoft pushed as hard as it could to block Java from the desktop and from the browserand succeeded.The problem with politics, though, is that it's the people that get hurt, not the politicians. The fact is thatAJAX, which has received a ton of positive press over the past couple of years, is a hacky, inelegant technology that pales in comparison to what exists in Java.If Java was part of the browser, it could manipulate HTML/DOM in exactly the same way that JavaScript does. But with Javawe would get a first class programming language, a set of standards, robust libraries and a wide range of development tools.Alas, that's not to be.ConclusionThe first decade of Java is a history of rapid rise and wide adoption.It is also a history of political battles and wrong choices made for the sake ofmarketing.It is difficult to justify using inferior languages and tools to develop modern software.Java has come a long way and to throw it away would be a big mistake. Before inventing new languagesand re-inventing new ways of doing things, the industry should pause and re-think the fate of Java in the browser.This is sure to be a contentious post with people falling on both sides of the fence. Please, do not hold back, bare it all! Let's have some great discussion on this issue - leave your thoughts in the comments below.

  On Friday Radar Networksis announcing a new Semantic Web application called Twine. Founder Nova Spivack showed me a demo today of the new app, which he described as a "knowledge networking" application. It has aspects of social networking, wikis, blogging, knowledge management systems - but its defining feature is that it's built with Semantic Web technologies. Spivack told me that Twine aims to bring a usable and scalable interface to the long-promised dream of the Semantic Web.Spivack went as far as to claim that Twine will be "the first mainstream Semantic Web application" - and it's certainly fair to say that we've heard lots of theory about the Semantic Web ever since Tim Berners-Lee defined it, but as yet there have been very few large scale success stories (if any). Will Twine finally be the Semantic Web app that breaks through? Let's find out more...First some background: Nova Spivack has an illustrious history in the Semantic Web and AI business, having worked for both AI legend Ray Kurzweil and tech guru Danny Hillis (Thinking Machines). The genesis for Twine, said Spivack, came from an R&D project about 5 years ago, which turned into a research project, then a Series A round with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2006. As of now the Twine team is 30 people working from San Francisco -- and they're finally ready to unveil their new mainstream Semantic Web product.What is Twine?The aim of Twine is to enable people to share knowledge and information. At first glance it is very much like Wikipedia, but there is a whole lot more smarts to the system. Spivack described it to me as "knowledge networking"- i.e. it aims to connect people with each other "for a purpose". It's not based around socializing, but to share and organize information you're interested in. Using Twine, you can add content via wiki functionality (there are many post types), you can email content into the system, and "collect" something (as an object, e.g. a book object). The screenshots below show of this in action -- note that the product itself isn't available just yet, as it's in private testing.Other features of Twine include: RSS feeds to track all kinds of things (topics, events, search, etc); commenting and viewing related things, sharing tags, and more. Also, and Marc Canterwill like this, Twine users will be able to import and exporttheir own data. Nova said that Twine will be an open platform - there will be a SPARQL API and a REST API.Semantic GraphWhere Twine is differentiated from the likes of wikipedia is that its underlying data structure is entirely Semantic Web. Spivack told me that the following Semantic Web technologies are being used: RDF, OWL, SPARQL, XSL. Also he said that they plan to use GRDDLin the near future. Spivack had an interesting term for what Twine is doing with Semantic Web technologies, riffing off the Facebook Social Graph. Spivack is calling Twine a "Semantic Graph", which he says will map relationships to both people and topics. So Twine's Semantic Graph actually integrates the Social Graph. Spivack said that his company has patents pending on this.Who will use it?So who is Twine aimed at? Spivack said that it's aimed at professionals and teams. Also he said content providers are expressing interest, because their data can be turned into Semantic Web data and re-used. As for the business model, it will be advertising and also subscriptions (for higher capabilities). The advertising part won't be in the first release and Twine hasn't yet decided how to run that - e.g. they may use a single ad network provider, or (as Facebook is considering) create their own ad network.ConclusionOverall, while the app isn't ready yet for the public, I was impressed with what I saw in Nova's demo. The proof will be in the pudding regarding whether this will be the first mainstream Semantic Web app - i.e. how much uptake it gets and whether there will be good use cases for all this semantic data. But it certainly looked like a usable and slick system - and one I'm looking forward to playing with.ScreenshotsClick each picture to see full-length screenshots.

  Though the name was only officially registered in the mid-90s, perhaps the most famous brand of notebooks in the world is Moleskine, who have been endorsed by writers like Neil Gaiman and Bruce Chatwin, and whose makers famously brag were used by Vincent Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Earnest Hemingway, and Henri Matisse. Whether those art and literary luminaries every actually used Moleskine notebooks or not, they remain massively popular with artists and writers today (my most artistic friends swear by them).But how many thousands of artists toil away in their oilcloth-covered cardboard notebooks, producing great masterpieces that are never seen? How many unknown talents are creating amazing piece of art in these tiny notebooks everyday? The Moleskine Project, which launched on October 8th, aims to discover some of these hidden gems of the art world.Art by Mattias Adolfsson.The Moleskine Project is a blog project that solicits scans or photos of Moleskine notebook pages from artists around the world. Submitted art is posted to the blog, along with the artists name, title of the piece, a link to the artists web page, and details about the method or technique used (used for categorization).In just a couple of weeks, the Moleskine Project has already gathered a small treasure trove of work from talented artists from all over the world. I love watching my friends (who have far more artistic talent than I) doodle in their Moleskines, so I was excited to get a peek into the sketchbooks of other artists. So far, the Moleskine Project does not disappoint. The quality of the artwork is high, and the site is well curated. It's definitely worth checking out.

  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 small companies mergingfor 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 San Francisco 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.