Taking a look at some of the other "new" features shows MySpace continuing to play catch-up in a race that may well already be over.

• Sharing music tends to remain the big draw for the site, so it only makes sense that MySpace will improve that service. Now they offer a Music Playlisting feature which allows users to share playlists publicly the same way users have shared songs in the past.
• MySpace has added more than 90 new themes under "Profile 2.0," a feature designed to improve the layout of MySpace pages and the management of the information therein

• In addition to trying to make MySpace look better, they're also trying to make it easier to use. The development team has worked on "systematically changing the way features work around the site." That means fewer steps to get things done.
• Moving MySpace content from online to offline - by printing. You can now print practically everything on the site. Now those embarrassing photos on your co-worker's MySpace page don't have to remain stuck on the site - you can post them in his or her cube.
• More than one person in the TO: line. That's right. Being able to send mail to more than one recipient. It's a feature.
• Show full name. Running neck and neck with the TO: feature.

Unfortunately, for those well versed in social networking there isn't anything new here - which doesn't come as much of a surprise. But it is new for MySpace. And the MySpace community seems to be liking it. As of this writing, the features post was approaching 2000 "kudos" from the MySpace community.

Truth be told, the most interesting part of the announcement had nothing to do with the features. It had to do with a seemingly innocuous comment about the improved usability, "Plus you see less advertisements. Yay :-)" That's an interesting position for a company that finds its revenue by showing those advertisements.

Are we missing something? Is there a more poignant take of these latest MySpace features? We'd love to hear your take.

Why not just use the RSS feed? According to the NYT, the API is better:

"Better than RSS, the Times Newswire API offers chronologically ordered cross-site results, including rich metadata. The response data fields include headlines, summaries, URLs, sections and subsections, bylines, date fields (created, updated, published), indexing terms, media and more. In the words of NYT developer Michael Donohoe, this truly is 'One Feed to Rule Them All.'"

Think about that for a second: every article the NYT publishes, instantaneously. And every one of those articles is coupled with structured data that makes it easy to mix and match with other data sources. That's pretty forward thinking for a publication that, not so long ago, was still blocking access to their content on the Web. And that's why we find this so compelling.

The potential opportunities for applying this information are mindboggling. It will be interesting to see how it's employed by the development community - and what the NYT has up its API sleeve next.

Now, we know what you're thinking. But this had nothing to do with Twitter. Rather, it had to do with an aptly named server "justworkplease.handbrewed.com." A server that supports a service called SocialSite, which - in their defense - is still "in private alpha." The service probably seemed like a good bet, given that it was also used for the Obama inauguration. But be that as it may, the service is still in private alpha. It's not the safest bet for adding a server-melting Twitter stream to your site.

ABC News learned that lesson in a very public way.

If at First You Don't Succeed

Hopefully, this event doesn't scare ABC - or other news outlets - too far away from trying things like this again. It's online. These things happen.

Other news outlets - like CNN - have learned how to incorporate Twitter into the work that they do - and they've had their own stumbles as well. Properties like Twitter have had their scalability issues, but they have learned how to scale for the sheer volume of users that descend upon sites during events such as these.

ABC may have to weather a bit of snark for it, but it's a great learning experience for them. And a testament to the sheer volume of users who share their opinions via Twitter - and the potential the service holds.

Here's hoping the next endeavor is more successful for them - and the users who expected to share their opinions with other ABC viewers.

Screenshot courtesy edubyad.

As the current Vice President of New Business Development, Smith is a proven deal maker for Google, having led the acquisitions of Keyhole ( which became Google Earth), Where2Tech (which became Google Maps), and Picasa as well as co-leading discussions with publishers surrounding Google Book Search.

Bear in mind that she retains that Vice President position in addition to taking on the General Manager role - and that's what makes this reorganization so interesting.

What Does This Move Mean?

Clearly Google discovered that doing good was good business - perhaps even better business than "Do no evil."

According to Dr. Brilliant's post:

"[O]ur greatest impact has come when we've attacked problems in ways that make the most of Google's strengths in technology and information; examples of this approach include Flu Trends, RechargeIT, Clean Energy 2030, and PowerMeter. By aligning Google.org more closely with Google as a whole, Megan will ensure that we're better able to build innovative, scalable technology and information solutions."

It only makes sense for Google to bring these pursuits closer to the fold: they provide generous amounts of data for analysis and they continue to facilitate leading-edge engineering at a time when more traditional pursuits are beginning to soften.

It will be interesting to see what Smith brings to the Google.org organization, but it's safe to assume that there will be some deals in the works. Our guess? We'd say the first deals Smith brokers are with Google PowerMeter and the major power providers in the US.

Or do you have a better idea about where Google might be going with this move?

So how was the event received? In our estimation, it seems like another positive step forward for the NYT.

"The message is clear," wrote Times Open attendee Taylor Barstow. "The New York Times is, suddenly, a platform company."

He also offers:

"The New York Times recognizes the need for a news platform, and wants to fill that void. Their developers understand that Web 2.0 is about openness, and are committed to opening up The Times data to outsiders (whether or not the suits--and they do wear ridiculously nice suits--agree remains to be seen). They want to create a community of hackers around their APIs, and invite community feedback to drive future innovation. The Times executives should be supremely grateful for having employees with such vision at their organization."

Attendee Daniel Tunkelang sees promise in the Times Open strategy but still questions how far the NYT is willing to go:

"But there's a big catch: the New York Times is paranoid of diluting its brand equity by mixing up user contributions with their carefully vetted writing. As a result, all comments are moderated, and their aggregation of blogs linking to articles is a limited, proprietary system (Blogrunner). The New York Times wants to have its cake and eat it - all the benefits from users' active engagement without the costs of diluting their brand.

"I think their APIs make this possible, at least in theory."

But the big news coming out of the gathering - according to Allen Stern of CenterNetworks - is the release of a new API called TimesNewswire, which will "give developers access to live headlines. Attendee Kellan called this new API a New York Times firehose and noted, 'NewsWire API is the paper's stream of consciousness.'"

We definitely appreciate the direction that the NYT is taking. They seem genuinely dedicated to embracing openness and have created some momentum in that regard. We're especially looking forward to getting a chance to review the new API - which sounds like it may increase that momentum exponentially.

So where does the NYT get the motivation for all of this openness? For more on the thinking behind Times Open, watch the Yahoo Developer Network's interview with NYT's Derek Gottfrid, Senior Software Architect - the man behind the Times Open gathering. He offers some additional insight into the theory behind Times Open and hints at some of the development in the future - like how NYT will continue to leverage Hadoop.

"My short-term priorities are to build a foundation for growth. It's not sexy but 'plumbing' is important. So my immediate focus will be on making sure the Foundations' finances and governance issues are solid. The third priority is to begin planning for a major OIDF event later in the year."

Thibeau comes to the Foundation most recently as an independent consultant. He has a history of executive roles at companies like QSent (which was acquired by TransUnion in 2006) and LexisNexis. In the early '80s, Thibeau was a Presidential appointee to the US Department of Labor and served as White House liaison for the US Synthetic Fuels Corporation.

Thibeau succeeds Bill Washburn, the inaugural executive director for the organization.

For those providing feedback, the app is just as easy. All they have to do is follow the link the speaker provides at the end of the talk (hint, hint) or visit SpeakerRate and search by speaker or event. Each talk has two ratings: Delivery and Content. Dragging sliders allows the respondent to rate the talk on a scale of 0 to 5, with 5 being the best. There's also a text area for providing specific feedback on the talk.

Even though the application only recently launched, it's already filled with some interesting content. Current event Webstock 2009, which is being held in Wellington, NZ, until February 20, had a number of talks loaded into the system.

With multiple talks from the same event, users also gain access to an aggregate event rating. This is helpful for attendees or potential attendees to get a reading on conferences. And it helps speakers determine how they measured up against their peers. Webstock must be going well, because it's sitting at 4.07 overall, currently.

Upside? The app is easy to use and it boasts a very pleasant UI. Every turn brings some thoughtful AJAX elements that bring the app to life. The sliders, for example, provide context for the numerical ratings - on "Delivery," 0 is "Just awful" while 5 is "Awesome presenter!"

Downside? One thing that was bit strange occurs immediately following registration. When you return to the site to validate your account, you're immediately hit with a page pushing you to add SpeakerRate to your LinkedIn profile. Given that we hadn't even tried the product yet, we felt they were moving a little fast. So we skipped it. Our profile continued to admonish us for having skipped the step. A little guilt goes a long way.

All in all, we're big fans of facilitating honest feedback, so we really liked the focus and intent of SpeakerRate. Even the slightly spammy LinkedIn element didn't turn us off - because it seemed to be coming from the right place.

If you're interested in getting some honest feedback on your next speaking gig, you might want to give SpeakerRate a shot.

Originally announced in May of last year, The NYTimes API selection continues to grow. The TimesPeople API joins other available APIs including Article Search, Best Sellers, Campaign Finance, Community, Congress, and Movie Reviews.

So What Does This Mean?

For The New York Times, this release marks a continued commitment to opening up data resources to the social Web, allowing developers to leverage NYTimes.com data to enhance their existing offerings - or to serve as the foundation for entirely new offerings.

Granted this news may not seem like much, especially to members of a community who see applications launching every day with open APIs. But for the traditionally sheltered and closed mainstream media, allowing readers access to full-text RSS feeds and publicly available user data tends to be a big deal.

Even if you're not excited about the traditional media becoming more open, it's still worth mentioning - if only for the fact that an entity like the NYT continuing to move in this direction lends additional credence to the vision for an open and social Web, as a whole.

Hopefully, more dead-tree publications will follow the Gray Lady's lead. If they do, we're all sure to win as creative developers find ways to mash data from disparate sources. (It doesn't take a huge intuitive leap to imagine the type of filtering availed by combining data from social bookmarking, social networks, and news APIs.)

This access to real data from real users is sure to give us a better understanding of what news is truly important - and what stories deserve placement on the front pages of the future.

While there remains an ongoing debate about how overbearing the terms legally were, Facebook has decided to revert back to its previous terms, according to a post by Mark Zuckerberg:

"A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised."

Who's right? Who's wrong? Who knows? One thing is for sure: we'll be keeping an eye on the Facebook Bill of Rights and Terms of Use page for the next chapter in this ongoing saga.

We love the simplicity of the alert feature. And we're hopeful that it proves to be an easy way to keep people informed about Kiva. But we're also fighting a constant battle with piles of email and overflowing inboxes. Hopefully, we'll have the option of pulling an RSS feed of alert information in the future. In the meantime, the Kiva Alerts emails will definitely be among the ones we're sure to read.

Collaborating for the Greater Good

For Kiva, opening the API also meant issuing a challenge to developers - to join Kiva in making the world a better place:

"It is going to take a lot of innovation, a lot of creativity, and a lot of passionate people bringing the opportunity of loans to places they've never been. Because we believe in the power of you as a part of this open and transparent community we are opening our digital doors today and asking you to help us change the world with loans."

BetterLabs, a small incubator focused on helping businesses create working prototypes of their product concepts, jumped at the chance to help Kiva spread the word:

"We believe KivaAlerts.com will remind every one interested in supporting the Kiva causes more proactively and we also hope that users will forward interesting loan alerts to friends and family and help grow the lenders at Kiva.org for global good."

It's great to see this collaborative development happening for a good cause. Here's hoping other developers are similarly motivated to take up the challenge. We can't wait to see even more applications leveraging the Kiva API.

Trying to spread the word about the dangers of Salmonella-infected peanut butter forced the HHS, FDA, and CDC to get creative. Leveraging social media to spread the word, proved to be the point on which the agencies could quickly combine forces. According to Nextgov, the various health agencies gathered to brainstorm ideas, propose various forms of social media outreach, and collaborate on launching the campaign.

"We tried to use every available form of media," said Dick Stapleton, deputy director of the Web communications and the new media division at HHS.

The avenues employed by the agencies included blogs, texting, mobile versions of agency Web sites, online video from the FDA and CDC on YouTube, podcasts, XML files and RSS feeds including "CDC Emergency Preparedness and Response," social network outreach on sites like MySpace, a variety of Twitter entities like @FDArecalls and @CDCemergency, virtual worlds, and widgets. The various channels carried both breaking news as well as education information on Salmonella.

Previously, inter-agency collaboration was all but non-existent, as Stapleton explained to GovHealthIT:

"Traditionally, [HHS] is a very siloed organization, with the CDC, FDA and other agencies doing their own thing and the public left to go to individual agency pages to find out about what is going on," he said. "We have a lot of potential resources, but they are scattered."

Social media not only enabled the agencies to accelerate outreach, it made the health organizations more social, themselves, by introducing a means of collaborating among the formerly disjointed departments.

And while it's hard to pinpoint how many potential illnesses or deaths were prevented, it's safe to say that far more people were aware of the dangers of Salmonella-tainted peanut butter thanks to the social media efforts of these agencies.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Hopefully, this is just the first step - rapidly disseminating information - of many for incorporating Web 2.0 technologies into these agencies.

With continued adoption, one can easily imagine the possible advances in protecting the populous from disease before it happens - like employing technology similar to Google's flu trends combined with social graph information. And that's only one example.

Here's hoping the health agencies continue to break new ground - and continue to collaborate - for all of our sakes. That's when social media will truly become a way of life.

Based on the performance of iPhone apps, it's highly likely that we'll see more applications aiming for the lower end of that pricing spectrum than the upper end. But it will be interesting to see if any developers choose to charge a premium price - which isn't nearly as ridiculous as the App Store's $999.99 threshold - for their development efforts. Thankfully, according to the Market, "Once you've set a price for an application, you may choose to change it at any time."

The option of listing priced applications is currently only available to developers in the US and the UK. However, developers from Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, and Spain are slated to be allowed access to sell applications before April 2009. The Android Market hints at additional countries being added before the end of Q1, as well.

In related news, Australia developers just gained the opportunity to upload free applications. Singapore developers will soon have similar options.

For more information on uploading priced apps or purchasing them, visit Android Market support.

Flickit is different. It's a beautiful little app that offers a simple - yet rich - Flickr uploading experience. Or as Lifehacker puts it, "the free Flickit application is [Flickr's] truest friend on an iPhone or iPod touch." We couldn't agree more.

While Flickit's functionality can be found in other apps, the look, feel, and usability give it something special. It has an aesthetic that matches the iPhone, with big chunky buttons and stylish animations. Long story short, Flickit just feels like an iPhone app.

And like the iPhone, it's easy to use. How easy? The IKEA-like instructions should provide a clue.

Once you've installed Flickit and logged into Flickr, you'll start with Flickit instead of your camera. Shoot photos directly from the app or grab pictures from your existing camera roll. Select a photo with which to work and you can edit title, description, and tags, add it to a set, choose its visibility, and geotag it with your current location. Press upload and you're done - fast. And it's all thanks to Flickit's streamlined uploading engine.

Downside? Flickit is an upload-only utility. So you're not going to be browsing your photos from it. That's unfortunate because given how they handle the upload process, we'd love to see how they handle viewing.

Want to give it a try? Download Flickit for free.

The "initial experimental prototype" features an impressive editing environment - with syntax highlighting, undo, import/export, and "preview in the browser," a command line, and a decidedly collaborative bent. There are also some thoughtful touches - like the blinking cursor.

All of that functionality stems from the Bespin team's goal of creating an HTML editor that mimicked existing editing environments and met developers' primary coding needs - while improving accessibility by divorcing it from the desktop.

Bespin's defining principles include:

• Ease of Use -- the editor experience should not be intimidating and should facilitate quickly getting straight into the code
• Real-time Collaboration -- sharing live coding sessions with colleagues should be easy and collaboratively coding with one or more partners should Just Work
• Integrated Command-Line -- tools like vi and Emacs have demonstrated the power of integrating command-lines into editors; Bespin needs one, too
• Extensible and Self-Hosted -- the interface and capabilities of Bespin should be highly extensible and easily accessible to users through Ubiquity-like commands or via the plug-in API
• Wicked Fast -- the editor is just a toy unless it stays smooth and responsive editing files of very large sizes
• Accessible from Anywhere -- the code editor should work from anywhere, and from any device, using any modern standards-compliant browser

Get Coding

"Even though this is a tech preview, where the goal was to share it with the community, we wanted to make the editor as solid as possible. It had to scale to a large number of lines and continue to remain very responsive."

All it takes is a browser - like Firefox 3 - that supports the HTML 5 technology that underlies Bespin. We were able to register, boot up the editor, and begin coding within a matter of seconds. The interface was incredibly responsive. We didn't experience any lag or delays - the one caveat being that we weren't trying any heavy coding either.

It's clear that a great deal of thought and attention went into this early version - and it's a safe bet that it will only get more impressive as time goes on.

Dig Deeper

We hope you'll take an opportunity to test drive Bespin. And then, we'd love to hear how close it comes to meeting your expectations of a "dream editor."