Let's not kid ourselves, dear readers. P2P's best use cases all revolve around the liberation of data, software, music, movies, and other copyrighted and rather expensive content. You may direct your angry emails to Rep. Edolphus Towns (NY-Dem.), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

At the outset, the bill proposes the banning of P2P software use for government employees and contractors "and for other purposes." The bill mandates the long-term examination of "each open-network peer-to-peer file sharing software program" that might currently be in use by government and law enforcement personnel.

Towns cited the exposure of sensitive information via such networks as the reason for the bill. He cited the following leaks as proof of the need for stricter P2P regulations:

• Schematics for the President's helicopter, Marine One.
• Financial data on Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
• Location of a U.S. Secret Service safe house for the First Family.
• Specifics of a House Ethics Committee document containing a list of ongoing investigations

But let us be realistic: Copyright claims, Creative Commons concerns, and IP violations are the molten core at the center of any legislation on P2P networks. And based on recent internationally agreed-upon efforts to uphold the claims and wishes of copyright holders, the U.S. government seems to be introducing yet more legislation to restrict piracy.

Are P2P networks truly responsible for such serious security breaches? Or are these claims merely politically motivated scapegoats for government to crack down on user behaviors - behaviors that may need more examination than legal discipline?

Most importantly, if this bill is made law, will it act as a precedent for stricter policing and eventual shutdown of P2P networks altogether? Or are we reactionary skeptics who need to calm down and quietly resume our download of our Hello, Dolly torrent files? Choose your own adventure in the comments.

Standardized legal documents for technical specifications may not seem like the sexiest thing in the the world - but this is actually pretty exciting news. Developments like this could be a key part of the foundation that online service providers need to move forward on a long list of great ideas for ways to serve their users.

People come up with crazy ideas for making the web work better all the time. This agreement aims to provide an easy way to make it safe to implement those ideas. The companies participating have spent large amounts of time and money negotiating the agreement, now anyone can take advantage of the fruits of that labor at no cost.

Existing specifications that will be placed under the Open Web Foundation Agreement, per the announcement today, include:

• Syndicated media delivery spec Media RSS (currently controlled by Yahoo!)


• Secure 3rd party authentication spec OAuth Core and Wrap (from Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft)


• Real-time feed protocol PubSubHubbub (Google)


• Comment aggregation protocol Salmon (Google)


• Web Slice Format (Microsoft)


• And several others.

As Google points out in the announcement, finding these legal opinions has typically been difficult. Now, the company makes it very easy to find any legal opinion about Napster, for example. Google notes that it hopes that access to this information will allow regular citizens to "learn more about the laws that govern us all."

It's interesting to see that Google continues to add more and more public data to its repositories. Just last week, Google added data from the World Bank to its search results. Earlier this year, Google also started to include data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Division. Google didn't go as far as integrating these legal opinions on its search results page yet - though for searches for Roe v. Wade or Miranda v. Arizona, these results could really enhance the current search results.

This GPS app is built to work on the cheapest cell phones available. It brings to mind every petty-but-illegal transgression the casual user could commit and stretches the boundaries of the permissibility of tech's uses for plausibly illegal means. The next time you use P2P or bit torrent clients to download media or use an iPhone app to detect police radars, think about this mobile application and how it reflects on American law and the Internet.

On startup, the app finds GPS satellites. Once the user begins moving, the app acts as a compass that shows the direction the user is heading and also shows the direction a user must travel to reach a "safety site."

The app seems to originate from a hacktivist group out of UCSD - hardly a historical hotbed of technological innovation, but close enough to the US-Mexican border to have a significant impact on the politics of technology in that area. The group also advocates DDoS-like digital sit-ins to bog down the resources of websites it deems offensive.

In an interview with Vice Magazine, the app's creator, Ricardo Dominguez, said, "We looked at the Motorola i455 cell phone, which is under $30, available even cheaper on eBay, and includes a free GPS applet. We were able to crack it and create a simple compass-like navigation system. We were also able to add other information, like where to find water left by the Border Angels, where to find Quaker help centers that will wrap your feet, how far you are from the highway - things to make the application really benefit individuals who are crossing the border."

Hundreds of would-be immigrants are killed each year while trying to enter the United States.

Check out this Border Patrol YouTube video on the newly installed double-layered fencing between the U.S. and Mexico, a fence that stretches between 700 and 800 miles along the Rio Grande.

The application is currently in an alpha state of development. Dominguez hopes that, through working with Mexican communities, churches, and other organizations, the app will be ready to use soon.

So, what do our readers think? Is this Dominguez a political dissident or a legitimate academic researcher - or both? And is a mobile app enabling illegal Mexican immigration to the U.S. a live-saving tool for those who seek better opportunities, or is it simply another law-breaking tool developed by tech hackers for life hackers, a workaround to cheat the system?

According to the pending class-action suit, Storm8 used a well-known backdoor method to "access, collect, and transmit" the wireless phone numbers belonging to their software's users.

Now the company has publicly responded to the suit by posting on their forums a sort of mea culpa as well as their plans to ask for a dismissal of the lawsuit due to its "complete lack of merit."

The complaint, filed on behalf of Michael Turner (and available in its entirety here), states that all the games retrieved the user's cell phone number and sent it over to the company without informing the user that this is being done. The suit also points out that there's no reason for this to occur since playing an iPhone game doesn't require the developer to have access to this sort of personally-identifiable information.

While initially Storm8 claimed the harvesting of these phone numbers was due to a "bug" in their code, attorneys for the plaintiff were quick to point out that specific software code was required in order to retrieve the numbers - no bug could have done that. In other words, the collection was intentional.

Storm8's Response: We Erred, We Fixed It, Lawsuit is Meritless

Now the company is changing its tune - well, a bit. Instead of calling it a "bug," they're claiming that the phone number collection was due to legacy code that was put in place very early on in the software development process as a way to identify specific devices. Later, the company decided to use the iPhone's Unique Device ID (UDID) instead - a much more common and accepted practice for developers needing an identification method. UDID's aren't associated with a person's name or phone number - they just identify the iPhone itself. However, even though the company changed methods, they didn't remove the old code that performed the phone number collection.

Storm8 claims that they did nothing with those phone numbers nor did they provide them to any other company. They also say that the database housing the numbers was destroyed in August after they were alerted to the issue. At that time, they took voluntary actions to update their applications to new versions with the legacy code removed.

The company states that they plan to ask for a dismissal of the suit because no user "has incurred any damage or loss" as a result of their actions. Unfortunately, they may be right. As despicable as those actions were, the law may be on their side. According to legal news site FindLaw, the law requires that not only was a personal computer accessed, but that the computer was also damaged. Turner's lawyer then will have to prove that Storm8 caused damage because it "impaired the integrity of the data stored on a protected computer." Additionally, cell phone numbers are not considered "protected data" in the same way that social security numbers or bank account numbers are. In other words, despite how icky this privacy violation makes you feel, it may not actually be illegal.

In our opinion, that's terrible news. Of course we wouldn't want this to start some sort of "sue the programmer" trend, but we do need to have more control over who's doing what with the personal data stored on our mobile phones - especially if Apple isn't going to look out for us in this case. Shouldn't there be some way to punish developers who go after this private info without our knowledge - whether intentionally and maliciously or not? It seems like we have enough concerns over privacy issues these days, we shouldn't have to worry if our iPhone apps are spying on us, too.

I've written previously about how social search won't replace traditional search, how social relevancy rank can be used to deliver good results, and why the concept of social search is a return to a familiar state rather than something to fear. Today, I'll get more specific about the three flavors of social search that will improve user search experiences.

Collective Social Search

"Collective social search" is similar in concept to the wisdom of crowds, in that search is augmented by trends shared on a network (a la Twitter Trends) or results ranked against the real-time buzz of a group. Why might this be useful? Well, in some instances, we can't immediately find the information we're looking for; and pooled, aggregated data from the collective may point us to new avenues that expand our discovery process.

As of yet, no major search systems are doing this very well - and we don't know what type of interface would be optimal for sharing this information. The Cloudlet plugin inserts tag clouds (based on keywords) into search results; but tag clouds are known to be more of a distraction than a utility. BingTweets has been touted as such a resource, but it really only offers Twitter and Bing results on two separate pages. OneRiot shows only collective data from the real-time stream, although it may be integrated with Yahoo! results soon. And we are still waiting to see how Google and Bing integrate the Twitter firehose into their traditional search results - as opposed to merely including them as additional document-like resources.

Equally important will be understanding when collective social data should be shared with users: while performing the search or after? And for which types of searches?

My research on search strategies begins to address this question. Collective guidance may be useful when users are exploring a search space, possibly because the search domain is not familiar to them (i.e. they lack knowledge of how to drill down to an answer), or because they are passively exploring a problem. I find myself doing this all the time when I prepare recipes to cook. I want to browse recipes from many different sources before I decide what my own recipe will consist of. I don't have a specific recipe in mind (it's not an urgent, active request), and therefore I don't necessarily know when I've found what I'm looking for.

That said, it's hard to determine from keyword strings how active or passive a user's search is; i.e. it may be quite difficult to determine the type of search they're performing or how far along they are in their search process ("exploring" or "narrowing"?). Furthermore, the utility of collective social data for mainstream consumers will be limited, mainly because it doesn't come from trusted sources, unlike "friend-filtered social search" (see next section).

Friend-Filtered Social Search

Friend-filtered social search is approximately what Google is doing with its social search experiment: providing social data that your peers, friends of friends and wider "social circle" have shared. This data could appear alongside traditional search results (as with Google) or be exclusive results from within your peer network (as with TuneIn).

This is useful if your friends have shared relevant links, blog posts or tweets about a topic that you're searching for. If you were gathering ideas about, say, "the future of the desktop," you would see thought pieces, write-ups and links to projects from the main search algorithm, as well as stuff your friends are saying about applications they've encountered recently. If you trust your friends, they may serve as reliable filters, pointing you to relevant information.

The three major limitations of this approach are:

1. Your friends may have no archived social content that's relevant (or available) to your query. Searching within your Facebook network quickly demonstrates this problem. For this reason, augmenting traditional algorithms with friend-filtered social data may be better, rather than relying exclusively on data from one person's small exclusive network.
2. Current implementations are limited to keyword matching; whereas, searches that retrieve related posts based on topic, theme or timeframe might expose a wider set of results and combat the niche-social-network problem. This approach would be computationally harder than keywords alone, and exposing enough of the appropriate context remains a problem (see next item).
3. Understanding the context in which a post or link was shared is important. Without this, keyword- and even topic-matching might not convey to the user the relevance of a search result. Google provides limited context at the moment (showing only how you know a user, the source of the post and a short snippet). More testing is needed to learn how much and what kind of context is appropriate for social search content.

Similarly there is the issue of when friend-filtered social search would be relevant during a search. My instinct is that it will be useful throughout a search and for many types of searches (it is, after all, just another type of search result). This is critically different from collective social search and collaborative search.

Collaborative Search (a.k.a. Question-Answering)

"Collaborative search" is when two or more users work together to find the answer to a problem. This could look like IM-based question-answering (a la Aardvark ), Yahoo! Answers (which is relatively passive and asynchronous) or over-the-shoulder two-person search. In all of these cases, people speak to each other using natural language, which is incredibly useful for open-ended queries (e.g. "What is 'design thinking'?") or queries about unfamiliar domains (e.g. law, health, business, depending on your background). Such conversations, even not real-time ones, can assist people who don't know the right keywords to use (what's known as the "vocabulary problem").

My research has looked at the benefits of question-answering and at people's processes and preferences during search. Many users report that they want to attempt to search on their own first, or don't wish to interrupt their colleagues before they have given it a shot independently. This suggests that early social support should be passive (as with presenting collective or friend-filtered social data).

But later in the process, if the searcher gets stuck on a problem, they often turn to a colleague for help. If systems had a way of identifying difficult queries or search-process inefficiencies, they could offer more explicit social support to searchers. Perhaps the system could identify a domain-specific expert from the user's extended social circle. Information that this person has shared could be presented to the user, or this person could be suggested as a resource to chat with or email (depending on availability and preferences).

It should be clear by now that these three flavors of social search are complementary. Each has its pros and cons and is appropriate for different kinds of searches and during different stages of the search process. A powerful "social search engine" would be "smart" by making use of all three, while also exploiting the value of traditional algorithms.

Photos by: Who Wants to Be?, Claudia Lim and brewbooks.

Guest author: Brynn Evans is a PhD student in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego who uses digital anthropology to study and better understand social search.

"What we want is to see people use this to build web apps," Infochimps co-founder Flip Kromer told us today. "You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps - and you've got a web app."

This is particular, extracted data though - not the full text of Tweets. "We're trying to be careful," Kromer says, "we are not yet exposing the contents of tweets." And this data isn't cheap if you want the numbers broken out by the hour instead of the month.

This is a very big move because most developers struggle to get access to a large quantity of data from Twitter.

Here's what InfoChimps is putting on sale:

1. Hashtags, links and smiley emoticons used across Twitter on an hour-by-hour basis.


2. @ messages, RT and favorites and who they came from: 1 billion relations, making what the company calls a "conversation metric."


3. A useful if less exciting set of data that will help developers map user ID numbers from search.twitter over to the different ID numbers used in the primary Twitter API. These systems were never merged and it can require a lot of API calls to merge user data.

The company believes it is capturing about 10% of the total data on Twitter right now, but Kromer says that he believes he can ramp that up to 30%.

Data as a Pot of Gold

InfoChimps is a bulk data marketplace with more than 5000 data sets in its catalog so far. The vast majority are free and were added by the company's own staff, but not all. The decades-old polling firm Zogby International, for example, is selling some Iraqi polling data through InfoChimps. Cross-reference that polling data with publicly available data about civilian casualties in Iraq and you can see some interesting patterns, InfoChimps' PR rep Josh Dilworth told us. (Dilworth is known as the most data-savvy PR guy in the Web 2.0 world and also represents Wolfram Alpha and Twine.)

The company hopes that it can sell the data derived from sitting on the Twitter API as a demonstration of the value that this and other data sets have. InfoChimps says it can help companies monetize data that they'd otherwise be paying to serve up through repeated API calls, if at all.

From sentiment analysis (not yet an option with the current InfoChimps data set) to social graph discovery (definitely an option), we've written extensively here before about the impacts that social data could have on business, social and political policies in the future.

John Zogby, founder of polling firm Zogby International, spoke to us at length (in a separate phone interview several months ago) about the value of using online social networks to measure public opinion. "We've been particularly known for innovating and polling new technologies," he said.

"83% of all households are online today and 92% of likely voters, so with online polling we are today about where the country was with telephone penetration when telephone surveys started. Social networking is not as representative as online access [in general] yet, but I'm comfortable with caveats: that you can do a random sampling, so long as you claim that's what your universe is, as long as you don't extrapolate to all Americans, etc. It has tremendous, tremendous value.

"I know that the landline era is coming to an end - not today or tomorrow but we've got to find new and different ways of doing our work. It's the same kind of crossroads as the '70s, when we moved away from the door-to-door and mail-in results to the landlines.

"Online, frankly just like telephone, doesn't have the minority population, but for market surveys you may be looking for a different kind of consumer.

"We know that the landline phone is pushing us away; we know that we can't use the cell phone in the same way; and we know that we've got to reinvent this industry [of measuring public opinion]. What's happening are simultaneous new technologies and at the same time growing penetration of these new technologies. We're riding a bucking bronco."

Use Cases

The conversation metric data that InfoChimps is selling is the most exciting to me. Imagine a third-party app using historical social-conversation data to filter Twitter or other messages based on the strongest social connections that I or other people have. Imagine, for example, social Q&A service Aardvark combining the Twitter Lists API with this InfoChimps data set for a scenario like this: "You have a question about stock options? How would you like us to find a person who knows about that, is regularly conversed-with by people on Robert Scoble's Twitter list of Venture Capitalists and is available right now?" That sounds pretty great to me.

The possible applications are many. "I see Twitter as a data acquisition device for what people talk about and how they relate to each other," InfoChimps' Kromer says.

Right now InfoChimps is selling the hashtag and link dataset for $8,000 and the social metric data set for $9,500. Eventually the company will likely move to a subscription model.

How They Got the Data

How did InfoChimps get the data? The company hits the Twitter Developer API 20,000 times an hour (the standard for developers) but takes big swaths of data each time it does. "I have a priority queue," Kromer told us.

"I can set a search term, and for each search term I can get 1500 tweets per API call. If I get 1500 tweets at a time, then the number of wasted tweets at the end of a series of searches is the smallest. If I'm searching for a term and get less than 1500 results back, then I forecast how long it will take to fill that number of results back up to the maximum and move it down the priority queue accordingly. On the lowest priority I have searches for RT or http. There will always be 1500 results for that. It's only API calls that limit me. As is, it's like a fisherman setting nets: what matters is that dinner is tasty."

Does that sound so hard? Worth thousands of dollars? Here's what Kromer says:

"It's not magic. If you talk to people who use Hadoop and do social networking analysis, this is underwhelming. You take 30 million users, 1 billion links, adorn each link with info at the end of the link and acrue it with the person at the head of the link. That breaks conventional databases; the plumbing is hard. The math is easy but when you do it a billion times, it starts to get interesting. You have to be careful and clever. We plan to do stuff that is structural - a clustering co-efficient true pagerank."

Ultimately it's about specialization and data as a service. "The people we need to come in and connect this info with human beings," Kromer says, "aren't the people who should be wasting their time on the math. And the guys who are good at doing these things should not be building Web apps."

But Can They Get Away With It?

There's some question whether Twitter will allow InfoChimps to sell data based on Twitter data. Kromer says he'd much rather resell the data on a commission than have to do all the work he's done to set up the extraction system. But it was a year ago that InfoChimps caught the eye of people who love data: by releasing a large collection of scraped Twitter data.

The InfoChimps blog post for that read: "Big huge thanks to twitter.com: they have given us permission to share this freely. Please go build tools with this data that make both twitter.com and yourself rich and famous: then more corporations will free their data."

But then Twitter founder Evan Williams asked InfoChimps to take those data sets down until a Terms of Service for them could be figured out. That never happened, and communication between the two companies hasn't progressed very far over the last year.

InfoChimps does not have Twitter's permission to do what it did today, but Kromer says Twitter hasn't contacted them either. No one from Twitter headquarters has responded to our request for comment yet.

"We talked to our lawyer about this a lot," Kromer told us, "we are on absolutely solid ground with regards to copyright, user privacy and use of the API. This is clearly for the benefit of their community."

That's nice that Kromer feels so assured, but his attitude seems a little unrealistic.

We asked technology journalist Robert Scoble what he thought of the dilemma, and his opinion is pretty clear. "If Twitter wants to be a platform, they have to behave like a platform," he said. "Don't be king-makers. Let the marketplace choose the winners. If they are going to say nobody should study the data because we're going to sell that, that's not being a platform. Twitter tries to pick the winners and it pisses me off. They admit that they are king-makers. All that does is make everyone vote against them and hope a competitor comes around."

Perhaps time will tell. But these are very early days in what looks to be an era of widespread innovation built on top of social data analysis.

We're starting with online music. No industry, except arguably the newspaper one, has been rocked (pardon the pun) more by the Internet than the music industry.

The online music decade started with Napster, a music file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning that operated between June 1999 and July 2001. Napster enabled people to freely share MP3 files over the Internet; however it quickly ran into major legal trouble. Napster was the subject of lawsuits in 2000 by touchy metal band Metallica and others. It was eventually shut down by court order, after several major record labels went after the service.

After Napster's demise, a P2P application called Kazaa became the most popular service for music file sharing. But it too eventually succumbed to record industry attacks.

Curiously, both Napster and Kazaa were recently reincarnated as law-abiding services. After years of re-launch attempts, Napster was acquired by Best Buy in September 2008 and was born again in May 2009. Meanwhile Kazaa turned into a legit music subscription service in July this year.

iTunes / iPod: Digital Music Goes Commercial

While Napster and Kazaa tried to skirt around the commercial imperatives of music, like paying artists, Apple took on the record industry in an entirely legal way. In January 2001, Apple launched a digital music player for music called iTunes. Then in April 2003, the iTunes Store was launched. It offered the ability to buy songs for 99 cents each, which had a major impact on the music industry.

Soon after Napster's demise in 2001, Apple launched what was to become a revolutionary device in the music industry. The iPod was launched in October 2001 and it became the most popular portable music player since the Sony Walkman in the 1980s.

Fast forward to 2009 and iTunes continues to evolve. In January Apple announced that iTunes would go DRM-free. In September 2009 Apple launched version 9 of iTunes, which included a Genius-like recommendation feature for apps and 'iTunes LPs' - a feature that brings liner notes and artwork to digital albums.

MySpace: Music & Social Networking

MySpace was launched in August 2003 and soon became a popular hangout for local bands, especially indie rockers. MySpace provided a way for those bands to promote their music and reach a wide network through social networking.

As ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez wrote last month, it was a virtuous circle for MySpace. The bands' presence on MySpace "began to attract a young, hip crowd of users who were interested in following pop culture, and, in particular, the up-and-coming artists they discovered while browsing through the network. Only eight months after its launch, MySpace began to experience exponential growth, as its users created profiles and friended others who would then, in turn, invite more users to join the social network. Thanks to the "network effect," MySpace soon became the place to be online. Everyone was there."

However by 2008, MySpace had ceded the social networking crown to Facebook. In 2009, MySpace is once again trying to reclaim its heritage as a music service. In October MySpace launched "Artist Dashboards" and integrated its music video vault with recent acquisition iLike.

Pandora & last.fm: Online Music Discovery

Online music services have flourished in the 'web 2.0' era, when the ability to find new music and share it with others via the Web became increasingly sophisticated.

Two services in particular stand out. One is Pandora, a free online music discovery service. Pandora was founded in 2000 and continues to grow, despite various legal issues over the years. As ReadWriteWeb's Frederic Lardinois noted earlier this year, Pandora derives its revenue from targeted audio advertising in its music streams and affiliate sales through Amazon's MP3 store and iTunes.

Last.fm is another online music discovery service. It was founded in 2002 and was sold to CBS in 2007. It continues to innovate in 2009, for example in May this year last.fm announced combo stations, allowing a user to create a station with up to three artists or tags.

Conclusion

This post and series was inspired by one of my favorite blogs and podcasts, NPR's All Songs Considered. They're currently looking back at the decade in music and much of the discussion is about how the Internet helped define it.

And it's true, when you think of music at the end of 2009 you think of iTunes, Pandora and last.fm - MySpace even. The record industry is still coming to terms with these and other changes.

Tell us your online music memories of the past 10 years. What's been your favorite online music product or service during that time?

With all the news from the event, one thing was clear: RIM desperately wants developers to build for Blackberry and is now actively enticing them with a slew of new offerings designed to win them over.

One of the biggest announcements made yesterday involved the launch of new APIs (application programming interfaces) for third-party developers. The APIs offered include a new advertising service, a payments service, location services, and the general availability of Blackberry's own Push service, which had never before been made available to outside developers. What this means is that developers now have the tools to build applications that rival those already available on many other smartphones today, most notably, the iPhone. In some cases, the Blackberry APIs even offer something the iPhone doesn't such as is the case with the payments service which allows you to pay for apps on your next mobile phone bill.

The location services include a geo-location API that will use cell tower triangulation as a backup for when GPS fails, making location-based applications more reliable. There are also services for determining your phone's location on a map and another that helps estimate travel time for driving directions. It's obvious to see how these types of services could help build new and useful mobile applications for the Blackberry.

Also revealed was the new Blackberry Advertising Service, an offering designed to help developers generate revenue from their mobile applications. Through partnerships with ad networks, developers can easily integrate mobile advertising within their apps and track the ad's effectiveness with an included analytics package. It's even possible for these ads to access the phone's core features. For example, you'll be able to initiate a phone call from an ad or add a calendar entry from an ad. That's an innovation that many other mobile handhelds are not yet offering. These types of interactions should have a clear appeal to the many business-minded corporate Blackberry users who are often more interested in getting things done than they are with playing mindless games.

That being said, the game-playing crowd isn't being ignored either. Also announced was support for OpenGL ES, a graphics API for 3D games. While this doesn't quite put the Blackberry on par with what's available for iPhone, it's a move that's designed to keep Blackberry at least somewhat competitive in the field of mobile gaming.

Other announcements included new support for mobile developers looking to build applications with the languages and tools they already know and use. Java developers will get a new GUI builder that lets them create mobile interfaces using a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor with drag-and-drop capabilities. Adobe developers will be able to use the company's Flash Platform technology and Adobe Creative Suite tools to build rich, mobile apps as well. This is another area where Apple falls short - Flash still doesn't work on the iPhone. Instead Flash developers have to use special Adobe software to convert apps written in Flash to a format that's iPhone-compatible. Also, designers can now use Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver to build both themes and widgets using the new Blackberry Theme Studio 5.0.

Apps, Apps, Apps!

In addition to the RIM-specific announcements, a number of companies also used the Developer Conference as the launching pad for new Blackberry applications and related announcements.

Ebay, for example, unveiled a brand-new mobile app that lets you search for items, view descriptions and photos, bid, watch items, and more. It will also tap into Blackberry's now open Push services API to deliver real-time alerts as to when you're outbid on an auction. Considering that the company has already generated $400 million this year using eBay's iPhone application, this new Blackberry app should be a big hit among mobile users when it launches next month.

The popular location-based social networking service called Loopt also revealed a major update for Blackberry which includes something the iPhone can't offer due to the nature of the device: it runs in the background to continually update your location in real-time. This is one of the iPhone's biggest flaws according to critics, since so many mobile applications take advantage of always-on connectivity to track your location for the benefit of specific mobile apps. In Loopt's case, the app knows where you are in order to show you nearby friends and local businesses which you can rate. It even offers mobile coupons for the retailers and restaurants in your vicinity.

Finally, Xobni, the Outlook email search plugin that discovers social connections in your inbox, revealed their new Blackberry application, too. As with the desktop software, Xobni for Blackberry will let you find contacts in your address book quickly using Xobni Rank technology which returns results ranked based on frequency and freshness of your communication. The application will be made available sometime early next year.

The Blackberry Developer Conference continues until Thursday, so stay tuned for even more news over the coming days.

Annotation startup Reframe It, a 14-person team, claims that Google's hot new product Sidewiki crosses the line between competitive innovation and IP infringement. And with a few Googlers caught with their hands in Reframe It's cookie jar, there might be some validity to this claim.

Fast-forwarding to this fall, Google launched Sidewiki in September, almost a full year after the debut of Reframe It. Looking at these demo videos back-to-back, the similarities are obvious:

For an in-depth side-by-side comparison of both apps, see Google Watch's post on the subject. The basic conclusion is that the products look similar enough that Google's source code had better be drastically different from Reframe It's if they are to avoid a major lawsuit.

But if we had a nickel for every time we spotted disgraceful similarities between web products, we'd be... Well, never mind what we'd be doing with that stack o' nickels. Here's the interesting part: Reframe It CEO Bobby Fishkin, who claims his company has neither the time nor the resources to take on tech behemoth and pop culture darling Google, told eWEEK that there were several attempts to learn and assimilate his startup's technology and interface, right down to the icon designs.

According to eWEEK, Fishkin claims that one of his board members, Terry Winograd, sat in on a Google meeting in July 2008 and told a top Google exec to take a look at Reframe It. The as-yet unnamed Googler said the startup looked interesting and that the info would be passed along.

In the months that followed, at least six Reframe It accounts were registered to Google employees, which would allow engineers "plenty of time to explore every nook and cranny of our functionality," said Fishkin.

But the real kicker is Google's alleged attempt to hire Reframe It co-founder and lead engineer Ben Taitelbaum just days before Sidewiki launched.

And what was the official Google response to these reports?

"The variety of existing products in this space and the increasing number of sites that enable user generated content shows that there is growing demand for allowing users to contribute to the Web," a Google rep wrote to eWEEK in a measured but definite dismissal of Reframe It's claims.

Certainly, Google has been talking and thinking about annotation for years. And its end product has many differences from others on the market. And the market has a few notable competitors aside from Reframe It, all of which Google probably explored in due diligence processes. But if and when these two products face off in court, attorneys will be arguing whether the Google product - which, if only because it came after Reframe It's version, is without question a knockoff - is in actual violation of Reframe It's patents. And since Reframe It's patent application is still pending, they can amend the language to include Sidewiki's UX, technology, etc.

The situation is, indeed, fraught with run-of-the-mill, workaday, tech IP drama. And we look forward to following up on these reports accordingly.

A U.S.-drafted chapter on Internet use would require ISPs to police user-generated content, to cut off Internet access for copyright violators, and to remove content that is accused of copyright violation without any proof of actual violation. The chapter also completely prohibits DRM workarounds, even for archiving or retrieving one's own work. Read on for details and implications.

As with other sections of the treaty, portions of this element have been leaked online. As it stands, the leaks suggest Internet users around the world are headed for a new regime of IP enforcement - a culture of invasive searches, minimal privacy, guilt until innocence is proven and measures that would kill our normative behaviors of file-sharing, free software, media downloading, creative remixing and even certain civil liberties.

Allegedly modeled on sections of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, the treaty would require ISPs to police user activity for possible copyright violation, and ISPs would be held responsible for any infringing content being uploaded or downloaded. This all spells a huge boon to the established entertainment industry and a huge burden for ISPs.

"In order for ISPs to qualify for a safe harbor," writes Michael Geist, who has published the substance of the leaked material, "they would be required establish policies to deter unauthorized storage and transmission of IP infringing content. Provisions... include policies to terminate subscribers in appropriate circumstances." That means a three-strikes rule would apply to anyone who was accused of violating copyright in any way; ISPs would be required to terminate the user's account after three complaints from the content owner. For something as culturally accepted as downloading music, a user's entire household could be cut off from the Internet and access to information, communication, personal account management, et cetera.

Geist continues, "Notice-and-takedown, which is not currently the law in Canada nor a requirement under WIPO, would also be an ACTA requirement." In other words, whether or not a piece of content or media violates copyright would be arbitrary; the content would be removed by the ISP as soon as a takedown notice was issued. The takedown would be enforced regardless of considerations such as fair use. This policy, which mirrors the DMCA, would be enforced for all nations participating in the treaty.

Finally, the treaty includes a ban on circumventing DRM and other copyright-protecting measures in hardware and software, as well as a ban on the manufacture, import and distribution of circumvention tools. Again, this ban is irrespective of circumstance or content ownership and is inflexible.

Our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, arbiters of freer use of copyrighted material, have this to say:

U.S. negotiators are seeking policies that will harm the U.S. technology industry and citizens across the globe. Three Strikes/ Graduated Response is the top priority of the entertainment industry... The ACTA text appears to leave the door open for major changes to the existing national Internet intermediary liability regimes that have been the global status quo since the mid 1990s, and which have underpinned both tremendous Internet innovation, and citizens' online freedom of expression and the rich world of user generated content that we take for granted today.

European citizens should also be concerned and indignant. As reported, the ACTA Internet provisions would also appear to be inconsistent with the EU eCommerce Directive and existing national law...

Are international treaties governing Internet content and intellectual property even necessary? Insofar as they fly in the face of normative cultural practices and contradict or tighten existing national laws, we find these suggested measures inflexible and unrealistic. But whether they become reality and shape the landscape of the Internet-to-come remains to be seen.

The company plans to roll this redesign out slowly over the next few weeks - though all users will be able to switch to the new site through a link on the old homepage.

Fewer Links - Less Clutter

To make the site less busy, Microsoft has reduced the number of links by 50%. In the old design, the categories were organized in dozens of boxes. This gave the page a very busy look. Microsoft now uses tabs that give the site a more modern look and which also reduce clutter.

The new MSN puts a lot of emphasis on search. The new homepage doesn't just feature a Bing search box on the top. The new MSN has another search box at the bottom of the page and Microsoft also integrated Bing shopping and travel search in other sections of the site.

MSN Users Don't Want Customization

When we talked to Lisa Gurry, Microsoft's senior director of MSN, she told us that only a very small number of MSN's users actually wanted to spend a lot of time customizing the site. Because of this, the MSN team decided to automate this customization as much as possible through a reverse IP lookup. Through this, the homepage automatically displays local news and weather reports based on a user's location. Those users who want to customize their MSN experience extensively can continue to use the MyMSN homepage.

Flawed Execution: Facebook and Twitter Integration

Microsoft also added some new social networking functionality to the MSN homepage. Users can now track updates from their friends on Twitter, Facebook and Windows Live. MSN's users can also send status updates right from the MSN homepage. According to Microsoft, 52% of MSN users are on Facebook and 14% are on Twitter.

A few key features are missing from the Twitter integration, though. There is no character count, for example, and no easy way to shrink URLs. There is also no way to see or send direct messages or @replies.

While the Facebook widget at least features a 'comment' link, users are still taken to Facebook's own site to write their comments.

Overall, the social network integration could be a lot more interesting if the MSN team just added a few features. MSN is obviously trying to attract mainstream users who don't follow thousands of Twitter users, but even the most mainstream Twitter user expects to see a reply button in a Twitter client. AOL's homepage allows users to reply right from the Twitter widget.

Local News

The new site now puts a lot of emphasis on local news. The new local edition features extended weather reports, movie times, concerts, restaurant reviews and information about local gas prices. For restaurant reviews, Microsoft takes users to Bing's local search.

Radical Change

The new design is a radical departure from the old MSN and some users who were accustomed to the old site will surely feel disoriented when they wake up to the new design.

Among the large homepages like Yahoo and AOL, the new MSN now sports the most modern look. This is not a highly customizable, Netvibes-style homepage, but MSN's users aren't asking for this.

Traditionally the champions of Creative Commons and other, more open methods of IP protection and creative sharing of content online, EFF is now calling out a bevy of big-name media corporations to make examples of them for takedown abuse. According to the EFF blog, "Some of the web's most interesting content has been yanked from popular websites with bogus copyright claims or other spurious legal threats." Read on to see who made the list and why.

"But that hasn't stopped thin-skinned corporations and others from abusing the legal system to get these new works removed from the Internet. We wanted to document this censorship for all to see."

Some of the entities that have made EFF's roundup are as follows:

• NPR, for attempting to stifle a video criticizing same-sex marriage
• DeBeers, for its humorless response to an online parody
• NBC, for issuing a takedown for a satirical Obama video that went viral
• And a personal favorite, Ralph Lauren, who shot out a few takedowns after our good friends at Photoshop Disasters pointed out that, even in already thin models, a woman's head is not likely to be wider than her pelvis

Other honorees include Warner Music Group, CBS News, Universal Music Publishing Group, and the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.

Is the EFF conducting a witchhunt here, dear readers? Are some of these copyright claims warranted? Or do you, in fact, have an egregious takedown of your own to report? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Gartner is the largest and most respected analyst firm in the world and much of what Schmidt said in his 45 minute interview was directed specifically at business leaders, but we've excerpted 6 minutes that we believe is of interest to anyone who's touched by the web.

Highlighted comments include:

• Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
• Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
• Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
• "We're starting to make significant money off of Youtube", content will move towards more video.

• "Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results."
• There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
• "We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?"
• It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

There's lots more in the full 45 minutes of Schmidt's interview, including a statement that a Google OS Netbook will be here in 2010, with HTML5 local caching for offline use.

That's the roadmap, though, that's guiding much of what Google is doing today. From Chrome OS to Google Social Search.

Does that sound like a compelling vision of the future? Not discussed were distributed social networking, structured data, recommendations, presence data and other factors that could complicate Google's plans. What do you think the web will look like in five years?

See Also: ReadWriteWeb's Top Trends Defining the Future of the Internet

Who says the web is all about pages that you view in a browser? Check out these three visions of a fast-approaching future where data is drawn from and overlaid on top of the real world around us.

The Eye Pet is a virtual critter that you can interact with through a webcam on your computer. Check out this demo where the Sony Computer Entertainment Europe pets the animal and spins through a 3D menu of toys to play use in playing with it. It's pretty awesome. The Eye Pet is expected to be released for the PS3 game system as early as next month.

That looks like a lot of fun for kids (who knows about the psychological impact) but imagine other interactive 3D objects with menus of options like this. Occupational training possibilities? Sports practice? There seems to be a lot of possibilities.

Thanks to Canadian PhD student Gail Carmichael for shooting that video.

The New AR Paradigm: AR Sketch

We wrote about this international project last week and the team behind it went on to win the Best Student Paper award at the ISMAR conference.

AR Sketch takes drawn images, processes live video capture of the drawings and turns them into 3D image overlays. Then it subjects them to a physics simulation. The team behind it just happened to hack into the private API for live video processing on the iPhone and make it available to developers around the world, too.

Popular AR apps like Yelp or Layar on mobile phones don't actually know what they are looking at, they just know where you are and which direction you're facing. Thus they can tell you what they believe you're looking at. Marker-based AR apps know only to look for one thing - a printed marker with a pattern on it that triggers display of an overlay. Sketch AR needs neither guesses nor markers - it processes and augments what you're actually looking at.

It's nuts. As Ori Inbar wrote about the Sketch AR team in an overview of ISMAR, "Their work is revolutionizing the AR world by avoiding the need to print markers - or any images whatsoever."

Here Comes Microsoft AR!

Oxford's Georg Klein, whom Inbar calls "the smartest Computer Vision guy on the block," just joined Microsoft this month, conference-goers learned. Is Microsoft going to make a major Augmented Reality play? They'd be fools not to explore the possibility. They don't want to be left out in the cold if AR does become the next version of the web. Here's what their new man's been working on.

These exciting examples of Augmented Reality have little to do with mobile location awareness, a nice reminder that there's a whole lot more to the field. Mobile AR browsers are the best known commercial services so far, but academic research on other forms of AR has been going on for years.

Ready to browse and interact with data on top of the physical world, through webcams, mobile phones and increasingly svelte AR glasses? A future when such experiences are mainstream may be fast approaching.