Today, Facebook has published a developer roadmap outlinining upcoming relevant changes and a rough timeline for each.
Changes include developer access to user emails, more prominent app displays on user profiles, all-new homepage dashboards for apps and games, and improvements to Open Graph and Analytics APIs. Facebook Connect libraries will be "smaller, clearer, and faster," and app policies and principles will be streamlined and uniformly enforced. Read on for details and screenshots of the new faces of Facebook apps.
Google has just announced the launch of Google Music. This new service is powered by Lala and MySpace's iLike. Other partners include Gracenote, iMeem, Pandora and Rhapsody. Google has also partnered with the major music labels: EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music. Through Lala and iLike, Google will also be able to feature music from a large number of independent labels. This new service will be available only in the US for now and will be integrated in the default search results page.
Starting today, social bookmarking service StumbleUpon is allowing users to beta test a shiny, happy redesign of their site.
The new interface is streamlined and more social with an updated relationship system. A focus on consistency (e.g., limiting user control of visual elements) and removal of clutter (e.g., presenting tags in a drop-down menu rather than a cloud) characterize the design changes made. Also, a few tweaks to group sharing were made to help reduce share-spam.
YouTube has begun warning users that they will soon be required to login with a Google account, instead of their old YouTube accounts. Just as people freaked out when Flickr changed the locks on the doors and required a Yahoo account to get in, you can bet that this is going to make some people very angry.
User generated content communities tend to have a very particular culture. If and when they get bought out, all kinds of issues arise around cultural differences and control. Seldom is this as clear as when old logins at a site are no longer accepted and users are required to get an account with the big powerful company that bought the community.
Update: YouTube contacted us after publication to clarify that this change is only required of people who previously chose to associate an additional Google account with their existing YouTube account and have continued to sign in with their old YouTube username and password. Those users will now be able to use either their YouTube username or their Google username but will be required to use only their Google password to log in. This is the kind of thing that happens sometimes when companies have to merge associated accounts for a single service - but people who haven't tied a Google account to their YouTube account will see no change. We apologize for getting the story wrong.
Brizzly wants to be to microblogging what Blogger.com was to blogging five years ago. Currently, Brizzly offers a user-friendly browser-based interface for Twitter and Facebook. The Facebook integration went live today and more social media applications will be added as the product evolves. Brizzly was founded by Jason Shellen, one of the original developers of Blogger (acquired by Google in 2003).
Currently Brizzly is in private beta, but ReadWriteWeb has scored 2000 invites for our readers to test it out! (see the bottom of this post for the code).
At the US Department of Defense, open source and proprietary software are now on equal footing. According to Defense Department guidance issued yesterday (PDF), open-source software (OSS) should be treated just like any other software product. The document also specifies some of the advantages of OSS for the Department of Defense (DoD). These include the ability to quickly alter the code as situations and missions change, the stability of the software because of the broad peer-review, as well as the absence of per-seat licensing costs.
Android 2.0 just got its first killer app: Google Maps Navigation. Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 will be available for free and will be part of the default Google Maps app on Android 2.0 phones. The service offers all the features that users expect from a modern GPS app, including traffic data, 3D view and turn-by-turn voice guidance. Because it's connected to the Google cloud, the app can also display street view images, satellite imagery and real-time traffic data. Google also implemented a voice recognition feature.
From the company called Peek, the makers of handheld devices dedicated to checking email on-the-go, there now comes another single-purpose gadget, this one for checking Twitter. The new TwitterPeek is a mobile device that lets you access the microblogging network from anywhere in the U.S. with no hefty data fees or contracts to sign, just as the company's original Peek devices let you do with email.
The idea of a standalone Twitter handheld seems so far-fetched that we almost thought it was a joke - at least until we stumbled across this Amazon.com page listing the device for pre-order. Now the question is: who will buy this thing?
New data released from Experian Hitwise reconfirms what we've known for some time: Facebook is killing the other social networks. Nowhere is that more true than here in the U.S. where they found that the visits to the site have increased 194% from September of last year to September 2009. However, it's Twitter that's seen the largest year-over-year increase in visits - during that same time period, they're up 1170%. But one of the oddest findings being reported is how the social network known as Tagged is beating out Twitter for the number three spot in terms of visits.
The Internet is a mess these days.
Conversations are distributed and fragmented; a blog post's comments will almost surely appear on a number of sites other than the author's blog. Considering factors from Facebook shares, likes, and posts to comments on Google Reader or even content curators such as Hacker News, site owners have found it increasingly difficult over the past year or so to efficiently and effectively collect all the sentiments, media, entities, and data associated with any given piece of content. Salmon is a protocol that addresses this specific issue, and engineer John Panzer has begun an open-source project to help unify the conversations of the synaptic web.
