Developers can contribute to the project by uploading creations to the Developer Dashboard here. If you need ideas, a good place to start would be to look at the "Most Shared" in the Firefox Add-ons Gallery and think about how you can port some of those gems over for the Chrome experience.

LinkedIn holds an incredibly useful body of data about its users - not just because of the relatively high net worth it brags about its users having but because employment information is a very useful way to put a person in context on the web. That data is now available for an ecosystem of other developers to incorporate; TweetDeck, Posterous, Ribbit and several other applications already have.

1. It's easy to get started. After two years of waiting, unreplied emails and heartbreak - developers should now be able to get an API key within minutes and start building on the LinkedIn platform. That's great news and not something that could have been taken for granted.
2. The API allows search. That's great because with a little disambiguation done on the client side you can find the LinkedIn accounts of people you're connected to on other networks. Unfortunately, no one is doing exactly that yet - but isn't that the biggest value proposition here? I see a person on Twitter, on Facebook, on some other social network and I want to see what they do for a living. Let the app collect and expose that data from LinkedIn!

   Disambiguation of people with the same name and privacy limitations regarding who gets to see who's information are both complicating factors. The coolest use of the search API we've seen so far is Salim Ismail and Rohit Khare's Knx.to. That service is limited to your own connections so far, but it's definitely a keeper.



3. The API uses OAuth. That means that 3rd parties can offer fast, secure, standardized authentication into your LinkedIn user account. That's great.
4. Activity updates are now parsable by type. The API allows developers to pull in just one type of the many updates a person gets on LinkedIn. Will someone please build an app that just shows me when my contacts change jobs and leaves out all the status messages, friend connections and other cruft? That kind of granular control has a lot of potential and is reminiscent of the vision behind the proposed user activity data protocol Activity Streams.

And Now For the Bad News...

1. The first use-cases make it look like LinkedIn is trying to be Twitter. Tweetdeck and Posterous are the most high-profile early adopters of the new API; Tweetdeck will give you a LinkedIn column (too bad LinkedIn contacts can't be integrated into other columns) and Posterous will let you publish links to updates on that platform over to your LinkedIn contacts' streams. Jobdash looks like Tweetdeck just for LinkedIn and job-hunting, but it doesn't yet offer features like limited display of notifications by type - it's just a big stream of updates.

   LinkedIn is not Twitter! LinkedIn's Adam Nash told us this morning that he loves the Twitter and Twitter-like integrations but "integrating messaging isn't the goal, there's a wide range of business applications that will benefit from it. Twitter is hot so people are jumping to that but there are far more compelling business cases."

   Two years after the business-oriented platform was announced tiny Tweetdeck was just so hot it out-maneuvered all the business applications that could have been built to showcase? I don't buy it. Just like the formal partnership between Twitter and LinkedIn earlier this month, I worry that this API is built with marketing, promotion and broadcast functions best served.
   

   

2. Terms and Conditions are unclear, restrictive and changing. The API terms say that you can't build applications that compete with LinkedIn. API management service Mashery CEO Oren Michels (disclosure: RWW sponsor) had this in response to say: "It appears that you can't create a new experience around LinkedIn, an iPhone app for example. You might create some interesting bolt-ons to other services that might drive users to linkedin.com - but that's a very 5 years-ago approach to an API."

   "The signal from this is that they aren't encouraging developers to take the social graph and deep knowledge of peoples' professional lives and create new UIs for interacting with LinkedIn because they are explicitly concerned about competition," Michels said. "LinkedIn has amazing assets and a great business model - get out of the UI business!"

   Likewise several developers have expressed concern around the commercial limitations on the API. LinkedIn's Nash clarified with us that those terms simply prohibit charging people extra money for access to the free LinkedIn service and building an advertising network on top of LinkedIn profile data because of privacy concerns.

   Finally, the terms of the API aren't always clear. Michels points out that rate limits on accessing the API aren't made explicit - only that there will be rate limits and that a developer can email LinkedIn to request a personal expansion of their limit.

3. Not playing nice with others: LinkedIn is exposing what it calls an Activity Stream, but it's not at all related to the standardized format that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others are now publishing. LinkedIn publishes some Microformats but has been entirely absent from the wide-ranging community discussion of Activity Streams formats, we're told.

Michels may have said it best: "There are some really smart people over there at LinkedIn. If this is what we waited 2 and a half years for, it's a bit disappointing."

It is a bit, but not entirely disappointing. We look forward to seeing how the platform evolves and what kinds of applications are built on top of it. The web has been waiting a long time for a LinkedIn platform - now let's see what happens.

We called Google Maps Navigation a killer feature for Android 2.0 when Google announced it's release last month. Currently, however, there are only a few Android 2.0 phones on the market, so it only makes sense for Google to release this app for older phones as well.

Just like the Android 2.0 version, Google Maps Navigation for Android 1.6 will include voice guidance, traffic data, satellite and Street View imagery. The app will also show geographical information courtesy of the Google Maps Layers feature the company introduced earlier this year.

According to Google, Teracent's offerings will help the company to improve display advertising on the Web. Since acquiring DoubleClick in 2007, Google has released a number of new features to improve its display ads. Earlier this month, Google also acquired mobile advertising company AdMob. Neither Google nor Teracent released any information about the financial details of the transaction, which is "subject to various closing conditions."

Teracent's most well-known competitor is probably Dapper, which also offers dynamic display ads based on factors like a company's inventory or a user's location.

While Google was on a buying spree in 2007, when the company acquired 16 companies, it only bought 2 companies in 2008. So far, Google has acquired 5 companies and products in 2009: reCaptcha, On2, Gizmo5, AdMob and Teracent.

BNO News' founder Michael van Poppel also announced that the company will focus on doing more original reporting. According to today's press release, BNO News is also "in talks with other publishers." Given that the company is now closely aligned with MSNBC, however, it remains to be seen if other publishers will be willing to work with BNO News.

iPhone App

Daniel E. Shipton, CEO of BitMethod, the developers of the push-enabled BNO News iPhone app, was less than pleased with today's news. In a press release, Shipton states that he is "disappointed that BNO is choosing to leave behind their 1.4 million Twitter followers." Indeed, it will be interesting to see how the @BreakingNews feed will change under the new management. The iPhone app will stay under BNO News' control. It is not clear with it will continue to feature all the content from the MSNBC-managed @BreakingNews feed or just content from the new BNO news wire service.

Is This a Good Thing?

It was exciting to see the rise of BNO News over the last few months and today's announcement comes as quite a surprise. BNO News was founded by Michael van Poppel, a 19-year old student in the Netherlands. Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick profiled the company in great detail earlier this year.

We are not sure why BNO News didn't just make a deal with MSNBC to syndicate its feed. Given that BNO is a small business, chances are that the company just didn't have the resources to run the news feed and build a wire service at the same time. With a stable income stream from syndication and its iPhone app however, we have to wonder why BNO News would leave its 1.4 million Twitter followers in the hands of MSNBC.

Your Browser is Now Also a Server

Opera Unite allows you to easily turn your desktop into a web server and run a number of web services like photo-sharing, file-sharing, a web server, and an online media player right from your machine and access all of these services from anywhere. While this gives you control over your media, it also means that your data is only available online as long as your computer is running.

Starting a Unite server takes seconds (though you need an Opera account to make this work). Opera will assign an address to your computer based on your username. Users can choose if they want to protect their applications with passwords or if they want to make them available to anybody on the net.

Nothing New Besides Unite

Besides Opera Unite, this latest version doesn't sport any major new features. With features like Opera Turbo, bookmark syncing, and the sleek new visual tabs design that Opera introduced in the last update, Opera 10 does have a lot of things going for it. In our tests this morning, the browser was stable and fast. Even though we didn't run any benchmarks, Opera 10 felt just as fast as any other modern browser.

For more information about Opera Unite, also have a look at our more in-depth review of the service and the apps that Opera includes by default.

However, nearly everything else about the new Android application is the same as its mobile counterpart, including its search verticals of "web," "images," and "buzz" which sit above Taptu's search box on the app's main screen.

The "buzz" section contains real-time results pulled from sites like Twitter and Digg as well as from other social sharing websites, blogs, and data pulled from select panel of internet users who have downloaded the OneRiot toolbar and are anonymously sharing their web-browsing data with the company. This aggregate information is actually the most prominent source of real-time data for OneRiot's search service. As of September of this year, OneRiot claimed to have 3 million active toolbar users out of the 20 million or so who have downloaded the toolbar to date. Meanwhile, they're indexing around 20,000 links from Digg and 5 million from Twitter.

It's this data which powers Taptu's "buzz" section where you can find breaking news and other currently "hot topics" being discussed on the web. And unlike Twitter's trending topics, for instance, OneRiot doesn't link to raw tweets but to the actual news stories and blog posts that are sharing the information.

The main Taptu homepage also links to these trending items by way of a tag cloud whose colorful blue bubbles take you directly to the buzz section when tapped.

If you're interested in trying the new Android application, you can download a free copy from the Android Market on your mobile phone. If you don't own an Android device (or iPhone), you can still use Taptu via its mobile website available at www.taptu.com.

In this post, we review the past decade of e-commerce and the key trends. Advances in recommendations technology, together with the emergence of social media and mobile commerce, have combined to change the way e-commerce is transacted.

Recommendations Technology Advances

Over the past decade the online retail industry has seen great strides in the use of recommendations technology. Amazon has consistently led the field in this, with its sophisticated blend of personalized, social and item recommendations.

Many of the retail recommendations in use today rely on implicit user data. These systems typically track user data, which is then analyzed with a set of usually proprietary algorithms. The end result: recommendations for users. Earlier this year we looked into Baynote's recommendation system:

"Baynote observes real-time user behavior on a site and looks for implicit, emergent patterns. It uses collective intelligence and an affinity engine to analyze the data. Common behaviors which it tracks include page refers, queries, mouse movement, time spent on a page, peer behavior."

Other similar recommendation technologies we've profiled include MyBuys, ATG and richrelevance.

Social Media Takes Retail to Blogs, Social Networks

As with nearly every other industry, shopping sites have increasingly used social media to promote their wares.

According to Shop.org's recent eHoliday Study, 47.1% of retailers surveyed will be increasing their use of social media this holiday season. Specifically, more than half of retailers have "added or improved their Facebook page (60.3%) and Twitter pages (58.7%)" this year. Nearly two-thirds (65.6%) have "added or enhanced blogs and RSS feeds" over the same time period.

One result of this has been a big increase in implicit social recommendations data across social networks and blogs.

Another trend with ecommerce sites is distributed sales. Anyone can embed an Amazon store into their blog or social network these days. As Kurt Collins of social commerce vendor Cartfly told us in December, this won't replace "end destination e-commerce" - but it will "augment sales tremendously" at the edge of the network.

Mobile Commerce Arrives, Albeit Slowly...

The growth of mobile phones has been a big trend this decade. However, as Sarah Perez wrote in September, mobile commerce in the U.S. market has struggled for momentum.

According to data from eMarketer, more than 70 million U.S. mobile phone users will access the internet from their devices this year. Despite this, the m-commerce market remains immature. In an April 2009 survey by RIS News, privacy and security concerns are still at the forefront of both shoppers' and retailers' minds.

There is some promise that mobile commerce will finally gain traction in the coming decade. Mobile payments firm Billing Revolution found that on-the-go consumers are happy to purchase small ticket items like pizza and movie tickets, for example.

One market that has shown strong signs of mobile commerce growth is Japan, according to Morgan Stanley.

See also our analysis of mobile payments.

Conclusion

New recommendations technologies make it easier every year for consumers to find what they want, social media has driven a lot of retail activity to small websites and social networks, and mobile commerce has slowly but surely gained a foothold in e-commerce.

These are just some of the trends in e-commerce over the past 10 years. While Amazon.com and eBay continue to be the giants of online retail, the Social Web and advances in web technology have both had a big impact this decade.

See also:

• Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music
• Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media

For Internet companies sitting in the US, news reports that chronicled the President's every move in China were a visible reminder of the business opportunity that may seem a click away.

So, why not export social media to China just like KFC and American Idol? After all, seeing Yao Ming, arguably China's grandest international star, on Facebook and Twitter, one naturally figures, aside from the language and periodic blocking of websites, "What's the diff?"

But Facebook has gained little traction in China (with only 390,000 users), and tweets have virtually ground to a halt since the government started blocking Twitter, and these factors point to the "diff."

Simply flinging an American product into the Chinese market won't succeed, because every social media category has a Chinese equivalent that is tuned to the particular needs of the mainland Chinese market.

One of China's "Facebooks," Kaixin001.com, has already secured over 40 million users since launching only last year. The platform gained its initial popularity through applications that you would recognize from the real Facebook, such as "Friends for sale" and "Parking wars" - but with a Chinese twist.

Take, for example, the application called "Xingming Yuanfen," in which you type in a friend's name to test your "yuanfen" (i.e. your predetermined relationship with that person). Another application explains who you were in your previous life. It turns out I was a bandit, much to the chagrin of my parents.

These "fortune-telling" applications enjoy incredible popularity on computers and mobile phones. While fortune-telling jars Western sensibilities, it remains a part of Chinese culture.

The B-B-what?

But the best example of China walking to the beat of its own drummer is the continued popularity of the BBS.

That's not a typo.

That is the same bulletin board system that went by the wayside in the US with dial-up modems and US Robotics. Chinese students - who, like their counterparts in the US, are more open to experimentation than other segments - established the foundation for BBS' to flourish in China.

All major universities operate their own BBS. Peking University and Tsinghua University (which are the Harvard and MIT of China) host the Weiming BBS (named after Weiming Lake at Peking University) and Shuimu Tsinghua BBS, respectively.

With 10+ years' worth of graduates who grew up on BBS' now driving the Chinese Internet market, these same people have fueled a range of BBS sites tied to their interests and professions. According to the latest CINIC (China Internet Network Information Center) report, roughly 30% of Chinese Web users spend a significant amount of time on a BBS. So, these sites certainly transcend geekdom.

55BBS, for example, is an online community where users share discount information, coupons and other creative ways to land a good deal. Users also share news of what they got from their latest shopping spree, showing off a photo of skin care products as if it were a trophy.

Perhaps the most unique phenomenon in China is Tianya, the #1 BBS, with almost 30 million users.

What is Tianya? Think of it as a gathering place for an eclectic blend of intellectuals, journalists, freelancers, professors, researchers, gadflies, etc. Users write on and comment about sensitive social issues that may be off-limits to mainstream media. People also head to this forum to gossip about celebrities (okay, some things don't change between cultures).

A Chinese word has been coined for BBS evangelists: "Da'rens," which roughly means "people who really know how to do something." We're now starting to see some "Da'rens" parlay their popularity into commercial success. The famous makeup Da'ren known as Arora started out writing about cosmetics on a BBS before launching a blog for the mega-portal Sina.com.

From a Chinese perspective, the fundamental difference between a blog and BBS is that a BBS allows for anonymity, which appeals to the introversion of many Chinese. Blogging is also more of a solitary activity, with readers chiming in with comments later. The BBS, on the other hand, is more of a collaborative undertaking, which also appeals to the Chinese.

This all means that Internet companies from the US looking to crack the mainland Chinese market need to do their homework and tailor their products accordingly.

Here's an easy litmus test when planning your market entry in China: "What's the difference between the US and Chinese version of your product?"

If the answer takes more than 60 seconds to explain, then you've got a fighting chance.

Wei Wang is a digital consultant with The Hoffman Agency, a communications consultancy with offices in Beijing (where Wei is based) and Shanghai, as well as throughout Asia, the US and Europe. She can be reached at WWang@Hoffman.com.

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Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

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Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

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Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. Rackspace Cloud Hosting offers a suite of services which combines a scalable web and application hosting platform (Cloud Sites) with a cloud storage solution (Cloud Files) and on demand server instances (Cloud Servers). The addition of SliceHost a popular cloud computing and hosting provider and JungleDisk, a favorite online backup service that supports Cloud files, makes the Rackspace Cloud a powerful cloud hosting solution.

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Aplus.net

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Hakia

Hakia is a semantic search engine. It delivers a new search experience based on focus, clarity, and credibility. You can compare Hakia to Google and Bing here.

Hakia currently powers the contextual advertising link engine at ReadWriteWeb with its semantic advertising module, Contexa. Contexa provides page-level contextual analysis (in this case, of blog posts) on the fly and outputs keywords that represent the meaning of the page along with their meaning score. The Contexa system then matches ReadWriteWeb sponsors' requirements with the contextual representation of the page to provide relevant ads for readers. Contexa is offered as a service and can be integrated into any ad system.

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Domain.ME

.Me is a true phenomenon among TLDs. With its unforgettable meaning and limitless word combination possibilities, .Me gives a truly personal tone to your domain name. If you are looking for a name that speaks for itself .Me is your best choice. Let .Me speak for your online business or personal blog.

.Me potential is enormous and it simply asks for you to be creative and coin the name that suits you best. If you have a great, original idea for a domain name, register .Me before it's taken. To check out other ideas, explore the world of .Me.

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Codero

Codero is a former division of Aplus.net. Codero became a separate entity focusing on dedicated and managed hosting solutions after the acquisition of Aplus.net's shared hosting, web design, and domain registration services by Hostopia. "Codero" stands for collaboration, engagement, focus, reliability, and flexibility. It means a more secure computing experience for email, shopping, and data transfer.

Codero is a dedicated and managed hosting company focused on the real needs of today's small and mid-sized businesses. The company believes in supporting robust websites, storefronts and online communities that will grow and adapt.

Groupsite

Groupsite.com is a self-serve platform for creating social collaboration communities called Groupsites. Groupsites combine the most useful features of social networking and collaboration tools enabling groups large and small to communicate, share and network. Groupsites are currently in use by more than 30,000 groups as user communities, intranets, member communities, team workgroups and social networks. Each Groupsite can be branded and customized and includes discussion forums, calendaring, file sharing, member profiles (professional or social), activity feeds and full-featured sub-groups among other group-centric features.

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NaviSite

NaviSite is a leading provider of enterprise hosting and application services for a diverse client base. Leveraging a diverse network of 16 enterprise-class data centers across the US and UK, NaviSite offers a predictable technology environment and a complete suite of infrastructure and application solutions.

NaviSite's product and service offerings include:

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Faroo

Faroo is a peer-to-peer Web search engine that has no centralized index and crawler. Each web page visited by users is automatically included into the distributed index. Search results are ranked based on distributed usage statistics of Web pages visited by Faroo users, which leads to more democratic, user-centric ranking.

Faroo protects the privacy of users by encrypting search queries and anonymizing its distributed architecture. The decentralized peer-to-peer architecture scales with Internet growth and requires no infrastructure or operational cost.

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MyDomain.com

MyDomain is a leading ICANN-accredited provider of domain name registration and online business solutions. For over 10 years, MyDomain has offered low-cost domain names and free domain services including complete DNS management. Today, sub-$10 domains without the constant upsells you'll find at some competitors are the norm at MyDomain. MyDomain's complete range of solutions include Web hosting and VPS hosting, email, SSL Certificates and more.

Search Engine Strategies

From social media to local search to video SEO, Search Engine Strategies Chicago puts you in front of the experts who will help you sort which technologies and channel will take you to the next level and which are just hype.

Search Engine Strategies is the pioneer of educational conference series in search engine marketing. It's the venue where the industry visionaries and thought leaders gather each year to discuss the newest trends, share insights and present the strategic action plans you need to grow your business.

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Backupify

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Know of an event taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.

Under the Radar

Featuring the most cutting-edge mobile startups from around the globe, Under the Radar will get you dialed in to what the 2010 mobile innovation marketplace will look like. It's a must-attend event for dealmakers from global carriers, brands, media companies, and handset manufacturers responsible for helping their companies leverage new mobile technology and innovation in the fast-evolving digital landscape.

Save $200: book by 2 October 2009, and get the early-bird rate.

30 November 2009

New Way to Work

Do you have a great story about your work environment? Job marketplace Elance and Vator.tv have partnered to host the "New Way to Work" competition, with a grand prize of $10,000 in cash or health insurance for the most compelling story. You can tell your story on Vator.tv, the premier platform for entrepreneurs to broadcast their voice, by uploading a video, posting an update, linking to a blog entry, or sharing a photo. Hurry, the competition ends on 30 November 2009.

1 – 3 December 2009: London, England

Online Information & IMS 2009

Online Information and IMS together create the largest event dedicated to the information industry. Consisting of an exhibition delivering over 9,000 visitors from 70 countries, a conference and a show-floor seminar program, the event provides an annual meeting place for the global information industry.

Online Information is once again set to play host to thousands of information professionals, information end-users and publishers from around the globe, meeting suppliers of online content, e-publishing, and library management solutions. IMS provides a forum for IT, business, and information management professionals to find unlimited, relevant advice, educational content and compare solutions under one roof. Attend IMS and meet suppliers of content management, search solutions, and Web 2.0 technologies.

1 – 3 December 2009: Boston, Massachusetts

Gilbane Conference Boston

Join us at the sixth annual "Gilbane Conference Boston: Content, Collaboration and Customers."

Your content is your business, and you need to make your Web content part of an integrated platform for customers. You need to know solutions and technologies that are ready to be implemented today. Gilbane Conference Boston is built around the four major areas of how enterprises use Web and content technologies:

• Web business and engagement;
• Managing collaboration and social media: internal and external;
• Enterprise content: searching, integrating and publishing;
• Content infrastructure.

Visit www.gilbaneboston.com for conference details. ReadWriteWeb readers, use the discount code "GILBANE" to save an additional $200. Register today!

1 – 3 December 2009: San Francisco

Supernova

7 December 2009: San Francisco

SF MusicTech Summit

The SF MusicTech Summit brings together 600+ visionaries in the music/technology space, along with the best and brightest developers, entrepreneurs, investors, service providers, journalists, musicians and organizations who work with them at the convergence of culture and commerce. We meet to discuss the evolving music/business/technology eco-system in a proactive environment, highly conducive to deal making. Register with a great ReadWriteWeb 15% discount.

7 – 11 December 2009: Chicago, Illinois

Search Engine Strategies 2009

From social media to local search to video SEO, Search Engine Strategies Chicago puts you in front of the experts who will help you sort which technologies and channel will take you to the next level and which are just hype.

Search Engine Strategies is the pioneer of educational conference series in search engine marketing. It's the venue where the industry visionaries and thought leaders gather each year to discuss the newest trends, share insights and present the strategic action plans you need to grow your business. Sessions include:

• SEO Through Blogs and Feeds
• Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues
• What's the Link Between Search and Social?
• Online PR: Where to Next?
• Search Analytics

See more at www.SearchEngineStrategies.com/chicago. ReadWriteWeb readers receive a 15% discount when registering here using RWW15 code.

11 December 2009: Mountain View, California

Add-on-Con

Add-on-Con is a single-day conference focused on the future of the browser and its emergence as a platform.

Developer sessions will cover best practices, cross-browser development and mash-ups. Marketing sessions will focus on monetization opportunities, distribution strategies and stats. Join 200+ individuals involved in add-on development to help define an emerging new market in the Web's eco-system.

ReadWriteWeb readers save $50 by using the discount code "addoncon09RRW."

11 January 2010: Nashville, Tennessee

Social Fresh Nashville

This is the social media conference that comes to you. Social Fresh is a one-day, case-study-rich conference targeted for marketers. Social Fresh Nashville will have 30+ speakers, including Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer, Gavin Baker of Ruby Tuesday and John Andrews of Collective Bias (formerly of Walmart).

ReadWriteWeb readers get a 15% discount with the code "RWW15".

27 – 28 January 2010: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Enterprise Social 2.0: Rip or ROI?

This senior executive event will bring together decision makers from the Top Fortune companies to discuss innovative strategies on how to maximise business performance through social media engagement. The event will include keynote speeches, best-practice presentations as well as interactive discussion sessions.

The summit will provide excellent opportunities for you to hear international experts discuss best practices on how to drive business performance using Web 2.0 and social media. Key issues to be discussed include:

• How to integrate social media programs successfully into business strategies?
• Building business momentum, visibility and market growth through social media
• Measuring success and influence using metrics and analytics: what are the tools and techniques
• Integrating viral marketing and social media into traditional marketing mix
• Developing and activating audiences using social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs

8 February 2010: Tampa, Florida

Social Fresh Tampa

This is the social media conference that comes to you. Social Fresh is a one-day, case-study-rich conference targeted for marketers. Social Fresh Tampa will have 30+ speakers, including Chris Barger of GM, Maggie Fox of Social Media Group and John Andrews of Collective Bias (formerly of Walmart).

ReadWriteWeb readers get a 15% discount with the code "RWW15".

18 February 2010: Silicon Valley, California

Future of Funding

Active limited partners, top rated venture capitalists, and successful entrepreneurs are invited to Silicon Valley on February 18, 2010 to discuss the Future of Funding. The venture capital bubble has burst, and change is coming. Now is the time to have a constructive dialog about the future with all of the stakeholders at the table.

Don't miss the opportunity to partake in this exclusive event hosted by TheFunded. Please visit www.futureoffunding.com to see speaker and event details.

ReadWriteWeb readers use the code "RWW" and get 10% off.

15 – 16 March 2010: London, England

2nd Annual Social Networking World Forum — London

The 2nd Annual Social Networking World Forum takes place at the Olympia Conference Centre in London. The two-day event features four dedicated conference streams:

1. Social Networking World Forum
2. Enterprise social media
3. Social TV World Forum
4. Mobile Social Networking Forum

The event features key speakers from global brands, organizations, social networking publishers and developers, pioneering social media leaders, top agencies, content producers, and more.

• Full workshop program within exhibition area
• Evening networking reception
• Pre-show online meeting planner for delegates
• Free pass for exhibition only

Download this entire events calendar in iCal format.

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Web Trends

Obama: "I Have Never Used Twitter"

Barack Obama spoke to a group of Chinese students this week at a town hall in Shanghai. The meeting was streamed live, worldwide on the Whitehouse website and on the Whitehouse's Facebook page. He was asked a limited number of questions by the audience and one was about Twitter, which has been blocked in China since July. President Obama has never used Twitter, despite his account being the most followed there.

Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media

It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440.

How Blogging Has Changed Over The Last 3 Years (Stats)

Reader engagement with blogs has changed dramatically over the last three years, primarily because of the rise of online social networks, according to new numbers released by analytics firm Postrank. Postrank published an analysis based on metrics for signals like comments, trackbacks, shared links and online bookmarks for the top 1000 most-engaging feeds online and for 100,000 randomly selected blog posts in each year since 2007.

Unfriending: Are People Online Shedding Friends? (Debate)

The New Oxford American Dictionary announced its Word of the Year this week. Its selection? unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook. Has Oxford Dictionary made the right selection? ReadWriteWeb's Founder Richard MacManus thinks not. Marshall Kirkpatrick disagrees with him. Both make their cases in this post and invite you to cast your vote in a poll.

The Top 10 Mobile Applications of 2012

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

Google Sites Offers Templates; Claims It's Easier Than Sharepoint

Google Sites is getting an upgrade. Starting this week, Google will provide templates that make it possible for users with no technical background to create web sites with a degree of functionality that includes page layouts, adding links for navigation and embedded gadgets. Templates are available for intranets, project sites, team sites, employee profile pages and other sites that people would use within the enterprise.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Future of Music Coalition's Brian Zisk: The Do's of Streaming Music

In 2008 the idea of another subscription-only music service was enough to get your knickers in a torrent. Sure Rhapsody was doing well, but they'd been around for forever and in 2008, freemium was the music model du jour. With a year to reflect, co-founder of the Future of Music Coalition and longtime San Fran Music Tech Summit organizer Brian Zisk tells us what it takes to survive in today's music environment.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

The Google Chrome OS Press Event

Google held a press event this week outlining more details about its Google Chrome OS. Google plans to launch Chrome OS next year. Google is positioning Chrome OS as "just a browser" - that is, all of your data is in the cloud. Chrome OS will be focused on speed, simplicity, security; every application on Chrome OS will be a web application. Google sees Chrome OS as targeting 3 trends: netbooks, cloud (everything is a web app today), phones getting computing capabilities.

Twitter.com Is Still the Most Popular Twitter Client - TweetDeck a Distant Second

Twitter's own homepage is still the most popular tool for users to update their status on Twitter. Around 46% of all updates are made directly on the site. Social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos analyzed 500 million tweets it collected over the past 5 months and found that TweetDeck is the most popular third-party client. TweetDeck has a comfortable lead with a 8.48% share of the market, followed by Tweetie, Twitterific and Seesmic.

A Central Nervous System for Earth: HP's Ambitious Sensor Network

HP Labs has joined the race to build an infrastructure for the emerging Internet of Things. The giant computing and IT services company has announced a project that aims to be a "Central Nervous System for the Earth" (CeNSE). It's a research and development program to build a planetwide sensing network, using billions of "tiny, cheap, tough and exquisitely sensitive detectors."

Microsoft Launches Pivot, A Radically New Visualization of Online Objects

Microsoft Live Labs' latest creation has just launched. Pivot is a fun, powerful discovery tool, built on Seadragon and powered by Silverlight, that runs in Vista or Windows 7 with IE8. It looks impressive and allows for truly intuitive exploration of information.

Droid Becomes Fastest-Selling Android Phone to Date

The Motorola Droid is the newest smartphone on the market to compete for the iPhone's crown. Released by Verizon Wireless on November 6th, the Droid's advertising campaign has been a full-frontal attack on the popular Apple smartphone with a heavy focus on what the iPhone doesn't do. "iDon't run simultaneous apps, iDon't have a real keyboard, iDon't take 5-megapixel pictures," taunts Verizon's Droid ad.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

HTTP Content Negotiation

To do this, Van de Sompel and his colleagues are exploiting a feature in the HTTP content negotiation specs that allows them to add date-and-time negotiation to the standard negotiations that already happen whenever your browser connects to a web server. Instead of just asking for the current page, a Memento-enabled browser can also ask for an older version of that page. Some servers and content management systems already offer this feature and the Memento project has developed a demo that shows how this feature would look. According to Van de Sompel, it only takes four extra lines of codes in Apache to make this work.

While it is relatively easy for browsers to ask for an older version of a web page, content owners would have to store these older versions of their sites on their servers as well. With static sites, this is easy to do, but today's highly dynamic web doesn't make it easy to create an archival version of every page.

You can find more technical information about how the team envisions the future of the Memento project in this paper.

However, with the rise of the social Web, we see that what truly makes our online experiences meaningful is not necessarily the Web's ability to approximate human language or to return search results with syntactical exactness. The value of the semantic Web will take time because the intelligent personal agents that are able to process this structured data still have a long way to go before becoming fully actualized.

Rather, meaningful and relevant experiences now are born out of the context of our identities and social graph: the pragmatics, or contextual meaning, of our online identities. My Web experience becomes more meaningful and relevant to me when it is layered with contextual social data based on my identity. This is the pragmatic Web.

We need to better understand our identity as it begins to define our experience of the Web and the networked-enabled world we inhabit. Our online identity will increasingly be defined by three "pillars": who I say I am, what I do and say, and who I connect to (and who connects to me).

To clarify, our online identities are comprised primarily of three specific kinds of data:

• Explicit or prescriptive data (i.e. the data that I input about myself: name, age, occupation, etc.);
• Activity or behavioral data (i.e. what I do and say online);
• Relationship data (i.e. my social graph and what my connections say about me).

If we consider the power of this pragmatic Web (a highly relevant and individualized Web experience based on the ubiquity of our identity data), we find that it not only impacts individual user experience, but that it opens up entirely new opportunities for business online. The future is not "business as usual." Business models will be based on what Elias Bizannes of the Data Portability Project calls the "information value network-economic value," derived from services that focus on activities with comparative advantage and that leverage free access to data.

Consider this: as media companies scramble to identify new and innovative ways to advertise to the sea of nameless, pixeled users who graze through their content each day, a rich supply of highly valuable identity data lies just beneath the surface, left unmeasured and unmonetized.

Facebook is nothing more than perhaps the largest single database of this kind of online identity data: explicit, activity and relationship data. With the development of Facebook Connect, which allows for the "open" exchange of Facebook user data between Facebook and third parties, Facebook could conceivably (and will) create an Facebook Connect ad network (read: data exchange), supplied by the valuable and highly targetable user identity data that is currently siloed on Facebook's servers. This identity data within Facebook is what makes the activity in "social media" so valuable.

But the centralization of identity data on one or two major networks (such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace) won't realize the vision of the pragmatic Web. So, how will the pragmatic Web come to be? How do we realize the power of a dynamic Web that is based on our identities? We do so by empowering individuals to access and control their identity across any site or service, through standards that enable data portability and open Web inter-operability. The resulting vision is that of a highly personalized, dynamic, relevant and remixable Web experience, yielding greater access to information through discovery, communication and collaboration. For enterprise, this could mean the rise of innovative new business models, based on data-driven value exchange.

One final note on identity data as it relates to enterprise. As Bizannes points out, the value of this kind of identity data rests on the key factors of time and timeliness. Essentially, identity data is valuable only if it is recent. Facebook wouldn't be able to sell your (permissions-enabled) data to advertisers if it used your explicit data from a year ago rather than from today. So, Bizannes argues that real-time "access" to someone's identity matters most, and it's no longer about data "capture." Thus, as new business models arise out of monetizing permissions-enabled identity data, the value of the business models will depend on these entities having real-time access to the data.

Guest author: Alisa Leonard-Hansen is a digital strategist and Social Media Evangelist at iCrossing, a leading global digital agency. She is also the Communications Chair for the Data Portability Project and blogs about the social Web on her blog, TheWebisSocial.com. Follow her on Twitter @alisamleo.