ReadWriteWeb

Late last night Yahoo! owned photo sharing site Flickr launched a new feature - the ability to search your Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail contacts list for people on Flickr so you can add them as contacts. Many services let you do that, but almost all of them require you to give up the user name and password for your email. Flickr did it right and it was exciting, for us at least. GMail users are taken to a GMail page, where GMail asks for their usernames and passwords - then asked if Flickr should be given one time access or ongoing access. That's great. We've been calling on applications to use best practices and emerging protocols to access user data without asking for passwords for some time. The risks are too great, otherwise.

Some Flickr users, though, are really upset. They don't want anyone who has sent them an email to be able to easily find their photos on Flickr. What some people call Data Portability, others call a privacy violation.

Overwhelmed with all the content coming through your Google Reader? Want to skim just the top stories from any feed you're looking at? Canadian RSS filtering service AideRSS today launched a new Firefox plug-in that lays the company's unique "filter by popularity" features over the top of Google Reader. Limited beta invites are available below.

AideRSS's "post rank" algorithm scores items in any feed for the number of comments, Diggs, tags in Del.icio.us and inbound links it's got. You can then view, or subscribe by RSS, to just the 50%, 20% or most popular items inside that particular feed. The new Firefox plug-in lets you apply these filters on the fly inside Google Reader with just two clicks.

Over the weekend, this post on Paul Graham's blog got a lot of attention. The title was "How to Disagree," and it focused on the different types of negative, or disagreeing, blog comments. As Matthew Greensmith of Geek News Central called it, it was "a true geek masterpiece." Paul listed all the different types of disagreements (as related to blog comments) on a hierarchical scale from DH0 (name-calling) to DH6 (refuting the central point). And while the varying levels of disagreement detailed in the post were right on target, the question that came to mind is "what about agreement?" Why is it that positive reactions to blog posts are so much harder to come by? And how can bloggers get more of them?

ReadWriteWeb has discovered the existence of a stealth Google project, called DreamAds. It is a very ambitious project, topping even the wireless balloons which Google is also looking into. Essentially DreamAds is Google's latest plan to extend AdSense - this time into our dreams. It may sound far-fetched, but an inside source at Google told us that it is very possible thanks to the latest in cheap magnetic resonance scanning and mind-reading techniques developed at Stanford University. Our source also revealed the thinking behind DreamAds: Google is aiming to become the first company to monetize a totally wasted period of time in human life: sleep, which takes up almost 1/3 of our lives.