Cloud computing platform service provider Joyentis today announcing the availability of 3500 free hosting accounts for Facebook application developers. Joyent has partnered with Dell to offer Facebook developers the free one-year accounts, which include 500GB of bandwidth, 512MB of RAM, as well as 10GB of storage. The accounts retail for $75/month, making the total value of the accounts Joyent is giving away about $3.2 million. Facebook developers can sign up for the program at this link.After the free year is up, Joyent will offer developers the accounts at a discounted rate of $45/month, no strings attached. I was told that the account that Joyent is offering as part of this promotion should be able to handle most apps up to 10,000 users -- i.e., the majority of Facebook applications. Anyone whose app grows larger will be offered an upgrade path by Joyent.Because what Joyent is offering are on-demand virtual appliances ("accelerators") operating in a cloud, they can be deployed almost instantly with very little hassle. That means that scaling both vertically and horizontally to handle increased load can be done rather painlessly within minutes by purchasing more accelerators. Joyent is hoping that a small percentage of apps created on its free accelerators will become popular enough to need to scale larger on their hosting platform."Facebook is one of the hottest platforms for developers right now and Joyent wants to allow them to create the next viral application and scale without anxiety and effort," said Joyent CEO David Young in a press release. "We designed Accelerator to partner with developers and give them everything they need to build, experiment, evaluate and scale their applications without spending a small fortune to do so."The company points to Kinzin, makers of the very popular Are Your Normal?app, as proof of their platform's ability to scale. Kinzin started developing Are You Normal? on a small accelerator, and was able to scale the application by adding accelerators as their hosting needs grew very rapidly and the app added 150,000 users in just three weeks. Now adding tens of thousands of new users per week, Kinzin relies on four large sized accelerators (at a cost of $500/month) to keep their application online.The only requirement for Facebook developers is that they actually be actively developing (or have deployed) an application. Anyone whose account sits idle for 60 days will have it revoked and returned to the pool for another developer to use.Joyent's goal is to make life easier for Facebook app developers. The company has created server templates for Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python and Java specific to the needs of Facebook application deployment that should make the tricky process of being a SysAdmin much easier. Rather than focusing on server management, by using on-demand virtual hosting appliances, the set up and management is taken care of for you.In all, this is a great deal for fledgling Facebook developers -- you can't beat free, and Joyent's service is top notch.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Hyped_New_Platforms_Explaining_the_Difference_Between_One_and_the_Other';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Platforms here, platforms there - everyone's launching a platform it seems. Today's newest platforms, a content storage platform from Box.netand a content publishing platform from social network Bebo, are just the latest. Facebook, OpenSocial, Android - who can tell them all apart?What is a platform? It's a technical welcome mat that allows developers from outside of a company tie their software to the software offering the platform. How's that for an explanation? Feel free to share your one-line explanation, too.Comparing Five Recently Announced PlatformsEach of the platforms above has a flavor and in order to clarify all the talk about platforms, I decided to make a chart. These are the things I look at when trying to understand where a new platform lies in the landscape. All of this is so new that it's hard to know how to compare them for sure, but I think most of the following is from a user's perspective. It's also mostly prediction as almost none of these platforms are live yet. These comparison charts are always a challenge, and they're usually pretty subjective - but please let me know of any details I've gotten wrong and I'll correct any mistakes.OpenSocialThe Google-lead but open-standards based initiative could be huge, or it could just be for cross-site widget publishing. It's all about the applications, it appears so far. It is open to any participant and many companies are announcing that are building apps that leverage OpenSocial to travel freely from one social networking site to the next. Developers will build apps that can be published on any OpenSocial supporting site, like MySpace, LinkedIn or Bebo. For more analysis see our post on concerns about OpenSocial. For a more indepth introduction, see Jeremiah Owyang's post Explaining OpenSocial to Your Executives.FacebookThe original platform, at least as far as this wave in concerned. It's a walled garden application-wise, those apps aren't going anywhere but Facebook. Anyone can create a Facebook app, they can pull content in from offsite but cannot publish offsite and it's not really about cross site identity, either. The Facebook app platform is pretty limited, really, and those who treated its arrival like a divine act are liable to feel silly shortly.AndroidGoogle's open mobile OS was just unveiledto the developers of the world and probably only belongs on this list because it's a platform that's open to anyone. Otherwise it's like apples and oranges - hard to compare with the other platforms here.Box.netOnline storage startup Box.netreleased today some limited access to their new platform, OpenBox. OpenBox will in time let any application access your media content stored at Box.net. It's not as ambitious in scope as the other platform plays, but it might prove to be one of the most utilitarian. This platform makes me think of an Amazon web service, but direct to consumers. For more in-depth coverage of today's announcement from Box.net see Josh Lowensohn's post on the platform.BeboBebois big in the UK and New Zealand but readers from elsewhere may not think much of it. None the less, its userbase is substantial (40 million) and today Bebo announced a platformof its own. It's called Open Media but it doesn't appear terribly open. It looks like a white listing of professionally produced, big media content. While it won't get nearly as much hype as some of the other platforms, and perhaps is only loosely deserving of the platform title - it's probably going to be another very smart move for this growing social network. If you've got users and you're making money, who needs geek hype? MySpaceNote that MySpace isn't included here, but they appear determinedto continue developing their own platform in addition to participating in OpenSocial. It will be interesting to see if they do anything that pushes the envelope.ConclusionI hope that this brief comparison will prove helpful in comparing these darned platforms. They are popping up like weeds, so I'm sure this list will seem woefully short by the end of the week.Platforms are good, standards are better - data portability is some peoples' ideal, others see superior service even in walled gardens as the ultimate goal. There's every reason to believe that more platforms are on the way, though.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/soccer/50_000_Fans_Acquire_English_Football_Club';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Earlier this year MyFootballClub.co.ukwas launched with the intent to gather together a crowd of football-obsessed Internet users to pool resources and buy a minor English football club. About 50,000 members paid £35 (US$72.42), creating a fund of about £1,375,000, and today the site announced that they had parlayed that cash into a deal in principle to acquire a majority stake in English minor league football club Ebbsfleet United for US$1.45 million. The site's members will have the option to buy the entire club in the future at a fixed price."MyFootballClub members will own the club, vote on team selection, decide which players to buy and sell and guide the club up the leagues," proclaimed the web site this morning. According to Reutersthe club welcomes the fan involvement, with management looking forward to using the influx of cash to expand the club. "During and after matches, Ebbsfleet supporters often give me their opinion on which players should or shouldn't start games. Now they can have their say," Coach Liam Dash told the BBC. But the excited Brits need only look Stateside to see that the wisdom of crowds is not always so wise when applied to professional team sports.In June of 2006, the Schaumburg Flyers, a minor league baseball team from a small town outside of Chicago, Illinois, decided to try an experiment. They handed control of the clubover to fans for the second half of the season. The idea wasn't new. In 1951, St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck, a man known for his crazy publicity stunts, engineered "Grandstand Manager's Day," in which thousands of fans directed his club to a 5-3 win over the Philadelphia Athletics by using "yes" and "no" placards from the stands to dictate on field decisions.In the Flyers' case, the team partnered with MSN to launch a web site called Fan Club: Reality Baseballat which fans could vote on managerial moves such as setting up the roster. Unfortunately for the team, unlike the 1951 Browns game, of which Veeck later said, "Never has a game been called better," the Flyers' season went bust in the hands of its fans.In the first half of 2006, the Flyers were a respectable club. They had a record of 31-17 and lead the Northern League's Southern Division. In the second half, under the guidance of armchair managers, as MSN called fans who participated in the Fan Club site, the team went 15-33, the worst record in the league, and turned a promising start into a disappointing fourth place finish.By the end of the season, manager Andy McCauley, who was initially wary of the idea, had grown tired of it. The fans routinely made oddball decisions -- like batting the team's slow, low on-base percentage catcher in the two spot -- and the team was losing. "No one, I don't care what your job is, likes to be told what to do, let alone from 10,000 guys sitting on their couches," McCauley said.So what does the Schaumburg Flyers' miserable experiment tell us about the future prospects for Ebbsfleet United? There is at least one major difference between these two ideas (besides the sport) that make it harder to draw conclusions: in the case of MyFootballClub.co.uk, the fans actually own the team, so they have a vested financial interest in seeing the team succeed. This is a significant difference between Ebbsfleet and Schaumburg that might result in better decision-making by the fan-owners. Beyond that, though, there are a lot of similarities. Can football fans have more success than baseball fans in guiding a team via crowd wisdom? We'll have to wait and see.Photo credit: FootballConference.co.uk.

  It's time to announce the winners of our contestthis week. Congratulations to AJ (comment 32) and Anne Helmond (comment 13), who won a free ticket to Under the Radar | Mobility eventand a Microsoft software pack, respectively.We got a lot of great comments on your favorite Mobile Web apps in the contest post, which we will analyze soon. Keep telling us the Mobile Web apps you use, e.g. in this comments thread too, because it's great to know.

  In the hit movie The Truman Show, the 24-hour, commercial-free television show that chronicled the lead character's life (Jim Carrey, unknown to him) was monetized in a clever way: everything you saw in the show was available for purchase via a companion catalog. Or in other words, product placement.Yesterday, our friend Ryan Stewart posted aboutthe soft launch of San Francisco-based Ooyala's new video management, delivery, and advertising system, Backlot.Founded by a pair of ex-Googlers, Ooyala Backlot is a sophisticated content delivery tool built on the Adobe Flex platform. It allows content creators to publish HD quality video, control syndication by specifying which domains can embed the video, and gather detailed analytics on who is playing videos. The reports give some very useful information for content producers, such as how often videos were viewed, at what point people stopped watching, how many people watched more than once, etc.Image from ZDNet.Ooyala uses something they called "connection sensing" that allows them to scale the bitrate of the video up or down depending on what a user's connection can handle. Their Flash player is very slick, and has some nice features, such as the ability to flip through chapters in videos with an iTunes CoverFlow-like effect.But perhaps the most compelling piece of Ooyala is the piece that hasn't yet launched: their video advertising network. According to Stewart, the network will be based around some sort of product placement. "The basic premise is to give people HD-quality interactive video with advertising hooks," he wrote. "Watching a show about fashion and want to buy something you see? Ooyala allows you to grab that item and purchase it from an advertiser. Watching something about Tahiti and decide you want to go? With Ooyala, advertisers could give you subtle touch points that get you started creating your dream vacation."To me, that sounds a lot like what was presented in The Truman Showand is a very creative way to monetize web videos without causing the advertising to get in the way of the content. Product placement has long been a major revenue stream for Hollywood (there's a reason they drink Coke in some movies and Pepsi in others), and as I understand it, Ooyala will allow web content producers to sell product placement to advertisers that takes the concept to a new level by letting viewers interact with those products while they're still watching the video.

  Online reputation company Rapleafsent us some interesting statistics about the most prominent OpenSocialcompanies, along with Facebook. Rapleaf gathered data on users of MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo, and Hi5 – five social networks on the OpenSocial platform – and also gathered data on Facebook users. Some highlights, followed by full details below:The greatest overlap between OpenSocial container sites exists between Myspace and Hi5, in which 43% of Hi5 users also use Myspace.Facebook users are 63% female and 36% male whereas the sites integrated with the OpenSocial platform are 61% female and 38% male.52% of Facebook users are 18-25, whereas 40% of the users are 18-25 for the five container sites on the OpenSocial platform.Facebook users tend to use 2.9 major social networking sites on average whereas users of OpenSocial container sites tend to use 2.7 major social networking sites.Facebook Users- 2.6 million users identifed in Rapleaf- 63% female, 36% male- 17% 45 yrs- 2.9 major social networking sites used on average- 62% are on Myspace, 5% are on LinkedIn, 9% are on Friendster, 10% are on Plaxo, 22% are on Hi5Myspace Users- 11.3 million users identifed in Rapleaf- 63% female, 36% male- 20% 45 yrs- 2.4 major social networking sites used on average- 15% are on Facebook, 2% are on LinkedIn, 9% are on Friendster, 6% are on Plaxo, 17% are on Hi5LinkedIn Users- 0.8 million users identifed in Rapleaf- 38% female, 61% male- 2% 45 yrs- 3.2 major social networking sites used on average- 16% are on Facebook, 25% are on Myspace, 12% are on Friendster, 16% are on Plaxo, 8% are on Hi5Friendster Users- 2.3 million users identifed in Rapleaf- 58% female, 41% male- 12% 45 yrs- 3.0 major social networking sites used on average- 10% are on Facebook, 44% are on Myspace, 5% are on LinkedIn, 5% are on Plaxo, 26% are on Hi5Plaxo Users- 1.3 million users identifed in Rapleaf- 62% female, 37% male- 16% 45 yrs- 3.6 major social networking sites used on average- 20% are on Facebook, 53% are on Myspace, 11% are on LinkedIn, 9% areon Friendster, 15% are on Hi5Hi5 Users- 4.5 million users identifed in Rapleaf- 60% female, 39% male- 21% 45 yrs- 2.8 major social networking sites used on average- 13% are on Facebook, 43% are on Myspace, 2% are on LinkedIn, 13% are on Friendster, 2% are on Plaxo

  PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Interactive Advertising Bureau released their 3rd quarter numbersestimating total ad buys online today. Big growth continues, but take it with a giant grain of salt. Last quarter the number exceeded $5.2 billion according to the study, up 25% over Q3 last year.According to the IAB, the glory days are here. "Marketers large and small have come to accept digital media as the fulcrum of any marketing strategy," says Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. That seems like a real exaggeration to me. In fact, Google reported Q3 revenues of $4.3 billionjust by itself, that up 57% from Q3 2006. The vast majority of that is in advertising sales, so industry growth is based on Google growth, apparently. Either someone's numbers are off or we're all insane trying to make a living in this industry. All of us but Google, that is.As time on the television continues to drop and time online rises, I think we've only seeing the beginning of the online advertising economy. It's hard to get too excited about the health of the industry, however, when one company's own growth makes up so much of the story.

  In July, when this blog ran our Facebook Week, there was one article that I had planned that never made it to press. The article, called "The Facebook Office," was going to take a look at how to use Facebook as a groupware app for your team. Unfortunately, except for a handful of applications that didn't really seem to play nice together (such as the ones I highlighted in in my Top 10 Facebook Apps: Worklist), there was no way to create a cohesive groupware environment in Facebook.The best I could come up with was to use a private group to keep everyone in the loop, use 30 Boxes's Calendarapp to share important dates, and Zoho's Online Officeapp to share documents. Hardly a Basecampkiller.Today, AllFacebookpoints to a new application from DivShare called Projects. Basecamp it is not, but we're getting there.Projects is more or less a private wall for anyone in your project (you can invite any of your friends) and a file sharing tool. Yeah, that's it. No shared planning tools, no lists, no milestones, no calendar, no chat. The project page promises that you can "view your documents, video and audio in Flash, without a download," but I couldn't get it to work for documents (I tried txt and doc files). It did work with audio, though (I didn't have any video files under 300mb handy to test out) and images displayed in browser. Documents it asked me to download.The Projects app is really just a private message board in Facebook (one with oddly differing timestamps for the Wall and Files sections). It's certainly nowhere near robust enough for professional teams to use, but it could be helpful for college students collaborating on school projects to share notes and files and chat asynchronously about their work.However, this is a wide open area that I am really surprised no one has tried to get into. It would be very helpful to have a full fledged project management application in Facebook. Remembering multiple passwords to various web apps (if your team uses an ad hoc solution) or multiple passwords to Basecamp (if you have more than one team) is a pain. Keeping it all under the Facebook umbrella would be very convenient. With 6000 applications, it is hard to sort through them all, so if you know of any project management or groupware apps on Facebook already, or if you're developing one, please let us know.

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/YouTube_Premium_11_Say_They_d_Pay_Could_Yield_100m';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';IBM has released a survey of 2400 consumers, called the End of Advertising Survey, that found that %11 of respondents would pay a small fee to remove advertisements from their online video viewing experience. A YouTube Premium subscription option? It could make sense.The ContextIt's widely believed that the web 2.0 era marked the end of paid content and software - that advertising would now fund all future media if not online activity in general. As online advertising begins to take hold meaningfully, though, some number of people wish they could go back to the good old days of paying a small sum.This will likely be an even more pertinent question when the wall separating billions in TV advertisement comes down, flooding the world of online video. Online video is already a lot more mainstream than many web-heads admit, and the mainstream is more savvy than we might think. Tivo has been a paradigm changer and I have no doubt that a substantial percentage of people will pay to remove ads in a media future increasingly centered on online video. Give me access to my viewing history, preferences and recommendations and I'll happily pay too. Likewise, some users may be willing to pay for an ad-free publishing platform, increased length limits and higher quality playback. I've long been an advocate for paying for software, but now the 89% of the people who say I'm crazy can know that IBM says I am not alone!The MoneyE-Consultancy.comdid some math and argues that at $2 per month, or $24.95 per year, 10% of YouTube's 50m unique users per month would equal a $137 million annual revenue stream from subscriptions. We did a little more math over here and found that advertisements, on the other hand, at a very generous rate of $10cpm would equal $38m in annual revenue from those 11% of YouTube's viewers. In other words, if (and this is a big if) all these numbers were correct then YouTube could increase its proffits by $100m annually by offering a premium subscription.

  Yahoo!, who has been a key contributor to open source distributed computing framework Hadoop, today announced an academic research partershipwith Carnegie Mellon University that will give students access to Hadoop and other open source tools running in a supercomputing-class data center. The data center, named M45 after the Pleiades star cluster, is a 4,000-processor cluster supercomputer with 3 terabytes of memory and 1.5 petabytes of diskspace. Yahoo! claims that the M45 cluster is one of the top 50 fastest supercomputers in the world, capable of performing at 27 teraflops.According to Yahoo!, universities have not had access to the type of hardware and software infrastructure necessary for web-scale distributed computing research. Yahoo! intends for Carnegie Mellon to be first school in a broader academic research partnership program. CMU and Yahoo! also plan to hold a Hadoop Summit in the first half of 2008, to which they say they would invite major Hadoop users such as Facebook and the University of California at Berkeley."Yahoo! is dedicated to working with leading universities to solve some of the most critical computing challenges facing our industry," said Ron Brachman, vice president and head of Yahoo! academic relations in a press release. "Launching this program and M45 is a significant milestone in creating a global, collaborative research community working to advance the new sciences of the Internet."The search and portal company is following in the footsteps of rival, Google, who along with IBM announced in Octoberthat it was building a 1,600 processor data center that would be used to help teach cloud computing concepts to students at six American universities.

  Google today announced a $10 million challenge for developers to build mobile applications for its forthcoming Android mobile OS. Android was announced last Monday, instead of the widely expected GPhone handset. The SDK is here and information about the challenge are here.Earlier this fall, Google dedicated $30 million to the X Prize to get to the moon. Today's Android announcement may be more modest, but it's exciting none the less.Read on for details and a video with a demo of some in-house developed Android apps.The contest will run in two parts. In part 1, the 50 most promising applications submitted between January and the third of March 2008 will receive $25,000 to fund further development. Top applications from that list of winners will then receive 10 prizes of $100,000 and 10 prizes at $250,000. Those are not insignificant sums.The list of topics Google says it is interested in seeing apps developed for include:* Social networking* Media consumption, management, editing, or sharing, e.g., photos* Productivity and collaboration such as email, IM, calendar, etc.* Gaming* News and information* Rethinking of traditional user interfaces* Use of mash-up functionality* Use of location-based services* Humanitarian benefits* Applications in service of global economic development* Whatever you're excited about!Apparently "ad serving" is one part of Android that Google can take care of on its own.The company announced details of the contest on its new Android Developers blog(zero subscribers as of today, that's an unusual sight on a Google blog!).There's also an already active Google Groupdedicated to discussing the challenge.

  Angel-funded ActiveSymbolsis a privately held company that was founded in 2003 to develop a visual search platform. Four years and six key patent filings later, the company is ready to release phase one of that platform, focusing on facial recognition.The Bellevue, Washington-based company, which enjoys a healthy research partnership with the University of Washington, is not aiming to create a destination site. Instead, ActiveSymbols aims to provide the technology for integrating facial recognition and image detection into image intensive web sites, or in the enterprise (for example, searching a large news photo database).The company has released a tech demo, however, called Eyealiketo show off their facial recognition platform. The site features two rather whimsical applications designed to put ActiveSymbols' technology to the test, Celeb Match and Dream Date.Both applications step actually on the other's toes -- they each do celebrity and personals search. In one, users can upload a photo of themselves and find celebrities who look like them according to the facial recognition and matching software. Or, they can upload a picture of someone they find attractive and search personals for people who look similar -- for that demo, ActiveSymbols has 250k-300k images from Match.com and American Singles. The other application lets users do more or less the same two things, but starting with celebrity photos.While these applications may seem frivolous, they're nonetheless a good technical demo of the facial recognition technology. Company President Greg Heuss told me that eventually, ActiveSymbols will expand the platform beyond the online dating and social networking verticals. The company is hard at work converting their image recognition algorithms to video, which will hopefully result in more accurate automatic copyright surveillance software. Security and military intelligence applications of their software are another route that the company is exploring.The technology works by breaking faces down into elements, identifying common features like eyes, nose, and mouth. The platform then attempts to extract data on the orientation and shape of the face, the skin tone, and the color and texture of the hair. Heuss told me that skin tone has generally proved to be the most difficult part of the facial recognition to master, an observation that bore out in my own testing of the platform. Using the "Celeb Match" application, I was oddly matched with a number of people whose skin tone was several shades darker than mine, likely due to the dark beard that obscures most of my face.Heuss said the company is constantly tweaking the algorithm, and with more data the matching will improve.The Eyealike demos probably make a lot of sense as a feature on dating sites, but they aren't very compelling. Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't any worthwhile uses for good facial recognition technology (and it's probably important to note that ActiveSymbols isn't actually showing off any perfect face matching, but rather showing the ability of the platform to compare similar faces).Imagine, for example, if instead of having to individually tag the face of each person in every single photo you upload to Facebook, the site used facial recognition software to learn what you friends look like via the photos of them it has already seen and tagged your new photos automatically. That would be pretty compelling.

  The Under the Radar | Mobility eventis coming up this week. It's on November 15, 2007, at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, California. Read/WriteWeb has a couple of giveaways for our readers:1) One free ticket to the event, valued at $695.00;2) And for those of you who won't be in California at the time, we're also giving away a free Microsoft software pack, featuring Microsoft Vista and Office 2007.So we'll select 2 winners - one for a local Silicon Valley resident or someone in the area on 15 Nov, and the Microsoft prize for someone who can't make the Mobility event.To enter, all you have to do is tell us - in the comments here - what is your current favorite Mobile Web app, and why. It's that easy. I'm really curious to know what peoples favorite Mobile Web apps are - e.g. what is your best iPhone app, or what you play with most on your Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, etc! Simply leave a comment here and you're in the running for the two prizes. Please also tell us if you can attend Under the Radar Mobility, so we know whether to consider you for that prize. The two winners will be randomly drawn.Thanks Dealmaker Media for the two prizes. We also have a $100 VIP discountfor the Mobility event - click hereto get that.UPDATE:The winners have now been announced.

  Read/WriteWeb has a couple of jobs open currently:Silicon Valley-based Writer: we're looking for a writer based in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, to cover news and events happening in the Valley. We need someone who can attend all the Web tech events and maybe even go schmoozing at the parties on our behalf. We also need someone with an 'ear to the ground' in the Valley, who can pick up news stories for Read/WriteWeb. So if you're an enthusiastic webhead who would like press passes to all the cool tech events and news announcements, then contactthe Read/WriteWeb editor. This is a part-time writing position, but could easily turn into a full-time one for the right person. To reiterate, you mustbe located in SF or Silicon Valley to apply for this.Webmaster: we're also looking for a person to do web site management and design tasks, on an ongoing basis (part-time). This person needs Moveable Type and Wordpress skills, and must be familiar with HTML, Javascript. If you're interested in this position, please contact the Read/WriteWeb editor.