The awareness of OpenID continues to grow. At the same time, the OpenID Foundation - the organization founded to promote, protect, and enable OpenID technologies and community - has been growing too, adding new board members and sustaining sponsors. Today, another piece of the board came together, as the OpenID Foundation introduced its new executive director Don Thibeau.
Facebook launched its first social widget for use outside of Facebook's own site today: the Comments Box. The Comments Box is a comments widget that was built on top of Facebook Connect, and that will allow bloggers and publishers to easily implement a Facebook Connect enabled commenting system on their sites. A number of sites already used Facebook Connect to make it easier for their users to sign in to their services and leave comments, but this is the first time that Facebook itself ventures into this business.
Earlier this week we ran a competition to win a free ticket to Google I/O, Google's conference for web developers being held May 27 - 28, 2009 in San Francisco. We had 10 tickets to give away and so we asked you to give us your feature requests for current Google products, or if the product has an API what third party app you would like to see. We got a great response, well over 100 comments on the post, with feature requests for popular Google products such as Google Reader, Google Health and the new Google Latitude. In this post we announce the 10 winning entries; and we find out how our readers want to see Google innovate!
Ben Goodger, who leads the UI team of Google Chrome, presented today at the Webstock conference about browsers. He said that Google decided to build Chrome simply because "browsers suck". Existing browsers were too slow (especially with javascript heavy apps), there are too many crashes, too easy to get pwned (security issues), and UIs were becoming more and more bloated. He said that Google has a history of improving on browsers and creating add-ons - including contributing to Mozilla's Firefox, where Goodger used to work before Google. But Google wanted to re-architect the browser and do something more ambitious than current browsers, including Firefox.
Next month Austin, Texas will fill to the brim with geeks from all around the world gathered to attend the South by Southwest Interactive festival. While smaller than the Music part of SXSW, Interactive is very big and very fun. One part of the event that always goes over our heads, though, is the annual Web Awards. Everyone gathers into a big room and hears a well-known host announce the winners of this Adobe sponsored design contest.
Almost no one has any idea who any of these companies are! It's pretty strange, so this year ReadWriteWeb decided to dedicate a good chunk of time to finding out. Below you'll find brief scannable explanations of who and what is behind the 80+ companies and projects that have been named as finalists for the awards.
Did you know that the U.S. intelligence agencies use a wiki to share information? The Intellipedia project was launched in April 2006. Sixteen agencies of the U.S. intelligence community have access to it and use it to share information. According to a new report, however, the Intellipedia project is going through a bit of a midlife crisis right now. Until now, the wiki has mostly been curated by early adopters and enthusiasts, but a lot of the agencies have not been able to make it a part of their regular workflow, as many potential users are not comfortable with contributing to it yet.
Flickr hosts a wide range of beautiful images, but a new project built on top of Flickr's API only focuses on photos of the night sky from amateur astronomers. The Astrometry.net project constantly scans the Astrometry Flickr group for new images to catalog and to add to its open-source sky survey. At the same time, this project also provides a more direct service to the amateur astronomers, as it also analyzes each image and returns a high-quality description of the photo's contents.
Hint: They're Using iPhone Apps
The newspaper industry is in a downward death spiral, having been severely impacted by new technologies, the ubiquity of internet access, and a rise in citizen journalism. Here in the U.S., some papers are filing for bankruptcy, others are close to doing the same, and there's even a proposal to give the newspaper industry a bailout plan of its own. Elsewhere in the world, it's more of the same. In Japan though, the country's high population of elderly citizens is keeping the papers afloat...for now, at least. But like everywhere else, they will soon have to face the future: young people don't do newsprint.
Best-selling crime author James Patterson will release a new kind of novel next month - one that's been collaboratively written with the crowd. Called AirBorne, the upcoming novel will feature 30 chapters, each written by a different author except the first and last - those will be written by Patterson himself. With the release of this book, it appears the Web 2.0 movement of collaborative writing is about to hit the mainstream.
While Matt Mullenweg was in France for WordCamp Paris 2009, the team from ReadWriteWeb France took the opportunity to catch up with him and ask him a few questions about open source, WordPress, and the future.
