ReadWriteWeb

A few months ago, MySpace began to reveal details about its answer to Facebook Connect - MySpace Data Availability. At the time, we were left to guess what the offering would contain. What we did know was that - in stark contrast to the proprietary nature of Facebook Connect - MySpace had chosen to rely on the Open Stack, using OpenSocial, OAuth, and OpenID to build its service. Now, MySpace has released that functionality - renamed MySpaceID - and, in so doing, it has helped Open Standards take another step forward, as well.

Former ReadWriteWeb network blog last100 has produced a screencast showing the web browser in Google's Android phone the G1. last100 editor Steve O'Hear remarked that the bundled browser is "fast, renders the full web flawlessly (aside from the lack of Flash support), and does a fantastic job of re-flowing text when you zoom in on a specific part of a web page, therefore eliminating the need for horizontal scrolling despite browsing on such a small screen." Check out Steve's short video review below.

Gmail has been limping along for days, with scores of people reporting down time, super slow responsiveness and other troubles. With no communication from Google about the problem - what are users to think? Perhaps that we should put more of our lives in the hands of the Gmail team!

This afternoon the GMail team announced the addition of a new feature in the Gmail Labs - a Task Manager, or to do list. It's quite an elegant little feature, when it and the rest of GMail work. Below we've got a two minute video tour that shows how the feature works, in case Gmail is down for you and you can't see it for yourself!

Greasemonkey is a powerful Firefox extension that allows users to change the layout and functionality of web pages. Every month hundreds of people write and release Greasemonkey "scripts" that anyone can add to their browser with a single click.

A good Greasemonkey script will change your daily use of the web in ways you can't imagine being without. In the post below we highlight our seven favorite scripts published in the last month and offer a quick screencast that will show you how to use Greasemonkey in less than 5 minutes.

When BlogRize, a blog community and aggregator, first launched earlier this year, we gave it a very positive review. BlogRize is an interesting mix between Digg, Techmeme, and ReadBurner, though with a stronger emphasis on individual communities around blogs (like the RWW community here) and recommendations.

During the last few months, BlogRize's founder Jesse Spaulding has been working on a major redesign of the site, which he is rolling out today. The new design features an enhanced voting system, updated ranking algorithms, and a lot of updates to the user interface that make using the site a lot easier and more fun.

A-ha moments often come when the conventional method lets you down and you need to try something new. That happened on Saturday when Gmail was unavailable to me for over an hour. The outage was long enough for me to have to set up a Yahoo Mail account to send an urgent email. I also used Basecamp to communicate with my ReadWriteWeb colleagues; through that, I learned that Gmail was fine for them. So I started my research online to see what was happening. Of course I started my search with Google, which was not of much use. Then I tried Twitter.

As we have reported before, the reCAPTCHA service, which is based at Carnegie Mellon University, is not only an easy way to keep spammers away from your web sites, but is also an interesting experiment in harnessing human intelligence to transcribe old texts. To enable those with visual impairments to access those sites that utilize this system, the reCAPTCHA team has now also launched an enhanced audio version of the service, which will be used to transcribe old radio shows that speech recognition technology is not yet able to transcribe.

Google today announced that it has added a new option for AdWords advertisers to specifically target iPhones, T-Mobile's G1, and other mobile devices that have 'real' Internet browsers. Unlike the standard mobile AdWord ads that were targeted to appear on mobile web sites, this new feature will allow advertisers to target any mobile device with a full HTML browser. Google also points out that it is seeing 'a lot' of searches from iPhone and G1 users and the iPhone drove more traffic to Google.com during last year's holiday season than any other mobile platform.

Film director Jesse Dylan, the co-creator of the Emmy award winning Barack Obama support video Yes We Can has released a new work, this time explaining the Creative Commons Foundation's science initiative, Science Commons.

Dylan, who coincidentally is the eldest son of folk legend Bob Dylan, uses his familiar style to aggregate a quick selection of scientists explaining why a web-based revision of copyright policy is so important for the advancement of scientists. "Scientists are the ultimate remixers," one interviewee says, and we agree that Creative Commons in science is a very exciting idea.

SlideShare remains one of the most popular networks for uploading, sharing, and embedding presentation files. But for the longest time, it's had one unresolved enhancement request sitting on the waiting list: accepting native Apple Keynote files. Now, SlideShare has announced that the wait is over. Users can now upload Keynote files directly to the service.

Is a new upload format terribly newsworthy? Not exactly. But there are a couple of interesting tangents to this news that make it worth a mention.