Last month we showed you some of the more popular and useful Adobe AIR applications (see "6 Adobe AIR Apps to Check Out"), but there are so many great Adobe AIR applications currently available, it would be a shame to stop at just those six. As we delved through he Adobe AIR directory, what became apparent to us is that there are a lot of AIR applications that will appeal to our fellow bloggers. So many, in fact, that it was worth putting together a list of our favorites. Here are the top ten AIR app that bloggers will love:
Twenty-two year old law student Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman marked the first of a four year sentence in an Egyptian prison last November. His crime was "defaming the President of Egypt" on his blog. His first year in prison included isolation and physical torture.
The one thing that's made a big difference for Kareem, his supporters say, has been international attention. Now those supporters are calling for a two week campaign of snail-mail sent to the jail.
We'll be liveblogging the press call for the OpenSocial Foundation, a joint announcement by Google, Yahoo! and MySpace's Newscorp that we covered earlier today. It starts in just a few minutes and we're being joined by two excellent guest commentators, tech analyst Steve Gillmor and OpenID Foundation chair Scott Kveton.
See below and refresh at will to keep up with the details announced in the call and the quick thoughts on it from our guests. Please add your own thoughts in comments, of course. Update: It was a quick call and is now over. In addition to our notes and commentary below, see our previous detailed coverage of the announcement. I thought the most important part of today's call was the discussion about splintering the OpenSocial standard.
Google, Yahoo!, and News Corp., parent of the web's largest social network MySpace, announced today that they had teamed up to form the non-profit OpenSocial Foundation. The foundation has the stated goal "to ensure the sustainable and open development of the OpenSocial initiative and related intellectual property." According to the three companies, it will work to uphold the founding principles of the OpenSocial project: public community involvement, specifications released under the Creative Commons, and the continued creation of the Shindig open source reference implementation.
Microsoft announced a partnership this morning with five social networks on data portability. Starting today, users on Facebook and Bebo will be able to add friends via their Windows Live address book. The functionality will be coming to Hi5, Tagged and LinkedIn in the next few months. Microsoft is calling this a "two-way street" and has launched a new site, invite2messenger.net, where users can invite friends from those networks to chat on Live Messenger.
Today, social news web site, Mixx, announced new features to their service that will help them break news faster by getting big news stories promoted to the home page in a timely fashion. On the Mixx blog post about the changes, they point out that timeliness has been a problem with social news sites, themselves included - until now. To solve the problem, they have created a "Breaking News" category, which will only contain stories that only "Super Mixxers" can tag. Although this change does allow for faster story promotion for now, whether it's a good long-term solution has yet to be seen.
Veteran Open Source businessman Bob Bickel will launch his new company Ringside Networks at the Open Source Business Conference tomorrow and he's set his sites high. Ringside will let developers easily port Facebook apps to any other website and it will integrate company websites with social graph and communication features back at Facebook.
Today's winning comment comes from our post about a Facebook security flaw that allowed people to access private photos - including some from Paris Hilton at the Emmys and others from Facebook founding CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vacation in November of 2005. In an excellent example of crowdsourced fact checking and research, Mark Jaquith noted that "this flaw has been publicly known for weeks". Wrote Mark: "Here is a tutorial, from late February (AP is reporting that the flaw was fixed, so hopefully this doesn't still work.)"
Yahoo! Pipes is one of the coolest apps on the web for messing around with data. You can use it to splice together feeds, filter them, pull photos from Flickr and do a whole lot more. Some usability improvements would be nice but a little bit of experimentation goes a long way.
One thing Pipes has not done before today is offer a way to display updated data automatically on another web page. That has finally changed with the release of some javascript badges from the Pipes team. They are nice, but they aren't really good enough, to be honest.
Major social networking site Imeem launched a developer platform tonight that will enable read/write access to user information and more. Imeem is a site where users can upload music, create and listen to any uploads and blog about music all for free. Imeem pays internet radio-style licensing fees for each time a copyrighted song is played.
The new platform is a Flex and ActionScript API that will let developers create customized music players, access activity data and build things like recommendation engines, smart playlists and music games.
