ReadWriteWeb

Two of the first weeks include serializing a story called Slice through two LiveJournal blogs and two Twitter accounts, and placing a second story called The 21 Steps on a navigable Google Map. Three stories remain and the distribution formats to be used are unannounced. (Actually, we hear now that the next step will be live performance - we'll see what that looks like!)

You've heard a lot about OpenID, the decentralized framework for authenticating users across the web. OpenID is convenient for end users, allowing them to login to numerous web sites using one set of credentials - their OpenID. But how is OpenID doing today? Where can you get one? And more importantly, where can you use it? We took the pulse of OpenID to see how it's currently faring.

In our quest to provide comprehensive analysis of tech industry trends, most technology bloggers have become statistics junkies. To see what's popular we often rely on a bevy of metrics -- Google Trends, Technorati posts, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Compete stats, Facebook friends, etc. The list goes on and on. But comparing those statistics and trying to grok a trend isn't always an easy task. A new site called Trendrr is aiming to make that task easier by allowing users to manipulate a growing number of publicly available data sets.

When they say Craigslist is simple, it really is remarkably simple. The company finally launched an official blog and it's every bit as functionally pared down as the rest of the site. Maybe even more so - there's no way to subscribe. What's a blog without subscription? A blog that gets read a lot less than it would be otherwise!

That's a real shame because there's already some very interesting looking content there. This is a solvable problem, though.

After watching from the sidelines for almost a year while rival Facebook had praise heaped upon it by the press for the success of their application platform, it is no wonder that MySpace would be pushing its recently released developer platform hard. It has been just about 3 weeks since the first few apps were unleashed on the MySpace public, and over the past two days MySpace had made a pair of announcements that demonstrate just how much the company is committed to seeing their platform succeed.

A recent study at the University of Texas shows that you might not know your online friends quite as well as you think you do. The study, which utilized a Facebook getting-to-know-you type application, "You Just Get Me," showed that the typical information posted on social networking sites, like favorite books, movies, and music, favorite quotes, majors, hometown, and other similar personal information, does not always give others an accurate impression of you.

Last November we put up a guide to the most popular Twitter clients. For that post we looked at a random sample of 717 tweets from a handful of heavy Twitter users and identified 19 different ways people interacted with the service. Twitter has one of the fastest growing application ecosystems of any web service outside of Facebook. For this post, we looked at 37,248 tweets and found 142 different ways in which people interact with the Twitter service. Some of the results, which follow below, were rather surprising.

Entrepreneurs have learned that pitching anything to investors with "we can beat Google at search" is the kiss of death. This is like pitching against Microsoft in the PC world of yesteryear. None of the high profile, well-funded search engine start-ups with cool new interfaces, social search or natural language technology have made a dent in the real world. Not even Microsoft, with its army of smart researchers and piles of cash, has been able to halt Google's relentless market share gains in search. So why do I think that a bunch of engineers in Germany at a low profile company called FAROO have a chance?

When MySpace first launched, one of its main draws was the music offered by independent artists on the site, something which generated a strong following among new musicians and their friends. These young artists were using the platform as a way to get their name out there, share their tunes, and attract a fan base.