Arrington laughed at me, just like he had laughed at me in the conference green room when I showed people photos on my phone of the chickens I was raising in my backyard. Just as I was vindicated when the TV show Portlandia later demonstrated that it is perfectly reasonable to raise chickens here in my home town, so too do I feel a little vindicated by the reported acquisition in the works of Rapportive by social network LinkedIn. OK, so both are a little silly. But the point is: Rapportive is awesome and I was right.

It wasn't a big acquisition (TechCrunch was told around $15m) but it was a validation of some big ideas.

Rapportive is a simple thing, and yet it's founded on some complex and potent technology trends. Trends like: identity as platform, harvesting of social network user data and APIs for cross-site functionality. On top of profile data and email adresses, you can build awesome tools.

Rapportive is magical; it's one of the first things I show people when I am excited to show them something about the internet. Many people immediately see the value of it. When we first wrote about it here, we titled our post Stop What You Are Doing Right Now and Install This Browser Plug-in. No one objected, it was clearly awesome. (The line Stop What You Are Doing is something best reserved for when you can really back it up.)

Since that time, Rapportive has served as one of the most compelling elements in the still-unfullfilling ecosystem of CRM applications floating around the internet. None solve all your problems, most are hard to make the time to come back to. Not Rapportive, though. Not if you're a Gmail user, anyway. It delivers relationship management value in almost every email you send and recieve.

Much of that value comes from the integration of 3rd party services. There's a whole list of apps built on Rapportive. They sit in your email, look at who you're corresponding with and then let you interact with that person or their content on other social networks. Twitter and LinkedIn have been the best in my experience, but enterprise Rapportive users may have prefered other apps on the platform.

Woe, woe to LinkedIn if they screw with this. If LinkedIn is to Rapportive as Twitter has been to Tweetdeck then I am going to be one unhappy user. If LinkedIn treats Rapportive as well as it has treated CardMunch (which is a miracle app) then we're in good shape.

LinkedIn may serve up less data in Rapportive simply because this is probably the end of Rapportive's relationship with the super-controversial social data mining service Rapleaf. Update: Rapportive contacted me to say they haven't been using Rapleaf for more than a year now. Noted! Many people hate Rapleaf, but they love the Rapportive interface that serves up some of that information. Fortunately Rapportive does not surface some of the information Rapleaf makes available, like home and car ownership and family status.

Rapportive was the best example of what could be done with aggregated user data though! All too often, when you ask someone about aggregated social network user data they immediately say "I'm opposed to it!"

As a platform for the creation of products, services, new ways to relate to the people and the web arround us though - Rapportive is a beautiful example of what the future of the web could be. It's not about apps like Path sucking your phone's contact info into its servers without telling you; it's not about services like Pinterest surreptitiously changing your shared URLs to capture affiliate revenue.

No, the future of user data as a platform, in its best form, is to show you the faces of the people you're meeting by email. It's about helping you connect with them. Hey, you might say, I see you sent me an email. I haven't had a chance to reply yet, but you'll notice that I just started following you on Twitter. (A person can also guess another person's email by guessing at variations of their name @ their company domain.com.)

I sure hope Rapportive can grow and thrive in its new home. And I hope that it will inspire whole new worlds of startups building

Applications built with tools like Alpha Five will work the same on all your devices. The forms, dialogs and security features, as well as the calendars, video players and image galleries, are backed on the server side. Users won't have to worry about which device to use, and developers won't have to reinvent the wheel for each one.

Alpha Five provides developers with reusable components, from text forms to animations to location data mapping, that they can use without worrying about compatibility. The components are supported by its Codeless Ajax technology from the server side, providing a persistent connection so the user doesn't even have to know about it.

Alpha Software's goal is to reduce the burden on software development teams, so they no longer have to make difficult choices about which platforms to support.

"Mobile and tablet computing are great for users, but they've added cost, complexity, and uncertainty for companies," says Richard Rabins, co-chairman of Alpha Software. "IT has been forced to choose between investing in apps for the desktop or laptop, the web, mobile, and new form factors such as tablets. Development teams are burning out."

With a development tool like Alpha Five, companies can build once and deploy everywhere. Check out this demo of how the Alpha Five image gallery component works across platforms:

The Business of Platforms

Incompatibility across platforms is troubling for developers and users alike. Since the devices and operating systems we use are built by competing companies, it's inevitable, though annoying, that they won't always work together. But it's too easy to assume that the reason major platforms are incompatible with each other is purely due to competition. Sometimes there are good reasons for platforms to drop support for proprietary technologies.

Why Doesn't The iPad Have Flash, Anyway?

For example, Apple's portable devices don't support Adobe Flash, which powers lots of Web content and applications. That causes a headache for Flash developers and users who want to access Flash content. But Apple has made its reasons clear for not supporting Flash. It's proprietary, whereas HTML5 - which Alpha Five uses - is standard. Plus, it performs slowly on mobile devices and drains the battery.

There are selfish reasons for Apple not to support Flash, too - supporting Flash games on the Web would compete with the App Store - but performance and battery life are important for all users, and Apple wants to protect that part of the experience.

For a mixture of good and selfish reasons, platforms are always going to push and pull on each other with the technologies they support. But projects like Alpha Five that can bridge platform divides using common technologies help keep developers sane and users happy.

For the most part, the use of traditional computing platforms such as Windows, Linux and Macintosh follow a similar pattern, demonstrating that your habits don't really change regardless of which you choose.

The iPad's usage pattern is drastically different. Usage dips after breakfast, remains low during traditional working hours and does not peak until much later in the evening. During the weekends iPad usage between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. is higher than it is during the week at those same hours. No other device sees a heavy increase of use during the weekends, showing that the iPad is used as an entertainment device and differs from both smartphones and browsers.

We next investigated where in the world these devices were being used and whether these patterns were consistent. We looked at 222 distinct countries, with Windows devices used in all of them and Macintosh computers in 215. According to Apple, the iPad is available in 39 countries worldwide. However, we observed iPad usage in 203 countries during the course of the week. Android, BlackBerry and Linux were used in 202, 181 and 201 countries respectively during the same time.

The iPad is different from the other devices, not so much in the content being consumed, but in the hour of the day and the day of the week in which consumption is occurring. As more tablets become available on the market we will be able to determine if that is indicative of the tablet form factor or just the iPad.

Yesterday we saw the launch of Gmail's new Priority Inbox, which automatically sorts inbound messages by priority. That's something we've been expecting since hints of it emerged 18 months ago. This Spring, Gmail began offering secure, programatic access permission for the contents of your inbox - a move we said heralded a new era of inbox applications. Now we're finally seeing that flood of services emerge. Here are three of the best new email apps that you don't want to miss. Following screenshots and a screencast, we discuss what it all means and how these are just the beginning of the coming era of email as a platform.

Rapportive is a browser plug-in we wrote about this Spring, but we still see people saying "I don't know how I lived without this" months later. For now it's simple: the program looks at the adress you've received an email from and displays social network data, job titles and locations in the sidebar of your browser. Rapportive has a lot more planned, but you'll be amazed to see how much even this adds to your email experience. The one down side? It's not very easy to correct the information Rapportive shows about you or other people.

You may have already added Rapportive, though. Read on for more applications you probably haven't begun using yet.

How This Leverages Email as a Platform

Email as identity indicator, plus that identity as hub for data aggregation, equals awesome.

WiseStamp

WiseStamp is a browser plug-in that makes it easy to automatically add dynamic content to your email signature. TechCrunch just wrote about the service opening up to the public today.

In five minutes, I set up WiseStamp to automatically add a link to the most recent article I've written here on ReadWriteWeb, the most recent post I've written on my personal blog , my most recent message from Twitter and my next published plan via my Plancast account.

How This Leverages Email as a Platform

WiseStamp mashes up the communication platform of email with streams of our personal syndicated published content. This is a great example of how feeds of content can enrich our everyday lives. In this case, there's nothing in our emails being analyzed, but email's communication capabilities (and what really beats email for communication, still?) are built upon and added to by WiseStamp.

The Killer App: Greplin

Also first written about on TechCrunch today (grrrr....) is Greplin, an incredible cloud-based search service that indexes and adds to a universal personal search box the contents of your emails, calendar, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, BaseCamp, Evernote, Salesforce and more.

It is, if it works as well as it says it does, a dream come true. Don't remember which communication service a message came through? Greplin will solve that problem.

Uber-geek Stephan Wolfram has a service he had built for him personally that allows him to search through 25 years of emails and 20 years of his clicks around the web, papers written and more. That sounds incredible. If Greplin indexed the full page text of every link I clicked on and the messages sent by all my friends on services like Twitter and Facebook, then organized search results in a way that was easy to use - I would totally pay for that.

For now, I'm just waiting for my access to be granted to the basic service.

How This Leverages Email as a Platform

Search may not be the ultimate platform - recommendation probably is. This service reminds me of SystemOne, an incredible product that analyzes the semantics of text that you're typing and recommends related content from your email, documents and selected RSS feeds. That product was probably ahead of its time, it's not fully in the cloud and it's not free.

Greplin searches a whole lot for free, and if it can do this much at launch - it's exciting to think about what it could do in the future. Recommendation would be my request, in a browser plug-in. Imagine typing out an email and getting a little notice somewhere that Grepplin has found some emails that are genuinely relevant to what you're typing at the moment. That would be awesome. The sky's the limit when you can quickly process huge stores of your own personal data, though.

Why These Are Only the Beginning

We've been waiting for years for email to emerge as a platform. The key enabling factor that has now emerged is a secure way to grant temporary access to the contents of your email to trusted developers out in the larger ecosystem of people and companies who want to build these new services - all without ever giving them your precious email password.

That's what OAuth (the Open Authentication Standard) has enabled: it provides one standardized way for any email provider and any application developer to grant or request secure, temporary access to your personal information without giving away your password. OAuth lets your email provider, in this case, vouch for you to these other apps and give them your info, while never exposing your password.

OAuth is an incredible platform enabler. Just yesterday Twitter began enforcing the requirement that its ecosystem of developers use it instead of ever asking for your account password. Gmail has OAuth for IMAP email access and Yahoo! is working with them to turn that, too, into a standard.

Oauth has been in development for some time and in the Spring of 2009, the protocol had a close scrape with a big security vulnerability related to Twitter's initial implementation. Fortunately, the technical community acted fast and fixed the problem before it blew up in the faces of OAuth's advocates.

The man who led those efforts to save OAuth from that problem was Eran Hammer-Lahav, at Yahoo! ("How the OAuth Security Battle Was Won, Open Web Style")

Hammer-Lahav took a step back from his key work on OAuth earlier this year - and can you guess what he's working on now at Yahoo?

Email as a platform.

Hammer-Lahav is one of the smartest developer advocates in the consumer web business, and here's how he explains the potential and the pitfalls of email as a platform:

It's pretty clear that email provides a huge potential for extensibility, given the wide range of ways people use it. The inbox is much more than just a place for incoming mail, it is the primary dashboard for many web users - it is how they manage their lives.

So when looking at email as a platform, the opportunity of making it more useful and productive reaches most areas of online activities.

So far the focus has been on taking social information to help better manage email overflow, but the platform has much more potential beyond that.

We are constantly looking at how we can help Y! Mail users be more productive and connect to the people they really care about. For example, sharing photos is a big email experience - using email as a platform to make private photo sharing easier (as easy as sharing photos on Flickr or Facebook) is the tip of the iceberg.

The tricky part, like any platform, is how to manage your developer community, and how to safely distribute applications. This is particularly tricky in mail which is the most critical and private part of your online identity (all password resents, most private communications, etc.)

In addition, the lack of a standard way to extend email leads to a fragmented market - one which has yet to emerge as a profitable destination for third party developer.

At Y!, we are constantly looking for ways to provide deeper access to our mail platform, both using APIs and as an application framework for extensions. It is also how we develop mail experiences internally, such as inline image and video views, image sharing, invites, and many other use-case specific applications.

Personal data, securely shared, is an untapped gold mine for both literal business development and incredible new user experiences. The services highlighted here are exciting - but they're just the beginning.

As for the campaign as a whole, Posterous' VP of Marketing Rich Pearson says the company is "thrilled at the results."

"It's too early to gauge the long term bump, but in the short term, it's been huge," Pearson told ReadWriteWeb.

With today's import tool launch, Wordpress joins services like Flickr, Tumblr, Movable Type, Ning, SquareSpace and Blogger - all which full under Posterous' definition of a "dying platform." At the launch of the switch campaign, Posterous used the phrase to openly call out its competition - an action that some saw as a misstep and a gross overstatement.

The debate was heated even further when posts discussing the issue were deleted from the popular news discussion forum, Hacker News. Some accused moderators of the forum - part of Y Combinator, a startup incubator from which Posterous graduated - of intentionally removing the anti-Posterous discussions.

Pearson says the company didn't intend to offend anyone with its campaign, but that the wording was no accident.

"As for the switch campaign, we knew we had to make some bold statements to break through the clutter but weren't intentionally trying to piss people off," he says. "We believe we have the best product so any type of head-to-head comparison was going to benefit us."

Posterous may have seen a bump in usage over the last few weeks, but its reputation may have been damaged by its choice of language. Whether or not it was wise to go toe-to-toe with over a dozen large competitors by calling them "dying platforms," potentially alienating thousands of users of multiple services - the company seems pleased with the outcome.

"We have nothing against our competitors - we're just playing to win," says Pearson.

Shoutem: Niche Networks for Communities

Having recently exited its beta testing phase, Shoutem's globally available service lets users easily create private mobile social networks without needing programming and development skills. With their platform, anyone can control the access and the design of their network and launch it as a mobile application for the iPhone, Blackberry and soon, Android.

Shoutem recommends using their product to build specialist niche sites for sports fans, clubs and events. Already, some companies have launched their own small networks using the service. NFL Shouts, for example, lets game fans communicate with each other during football season. Ranch and Rodeo, meanwhile, connects an international audience to a destination site where fans can interact.

Socialight: Better for Brands, Businesses...and Mom?

The other company to recently launch something in this space is Socialight. With their new Socialight Community Platform, anyone can create networks which are accessible via the web, a WAP site or an iPhone app. The company seems to have more of an enterprise focus than Shoutem, noting how their tools have helped "companies and brands" create their own apps. However, the tools Socialight provides can be used by anyone, even individuals...even your mom as explained in this video on Vimeo.

Not Just Mobile, Location-Based

What's interesting about both launches is their focus on location-based services. In Socialight's case, they offer tools for sharing geo-tagged photos and other location-based community content, all of which can be viewed on a map interface. From the mobile application, users can upload and share anything - whether that's a photo, video or text - and have it posted to the network.

Shoutem does much of the same thing with tools that enable file and photo uploads. They also target their app to local communities like colleges, cities, restaurants, bars and clubs.

Why Niche Networks for Mobile?

Considering that there are already several popular mobile social networks out there, including Brightkite, Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare to name a few, you may wonder why people would need to join yet another. The answer to that question is two-fold. One difference is access. These niche networks can be closed communities for just a select group of people working on an invite-only system. The second difference between those publicly available services and the ones designed with these new toolkits is that they are laser-focused on a single purpose. You may not want to spam up your Twitter account where you promote your business to discuss things related to your local book club for example, but you could easily do so via a niche network.

But perhaps an even better example involves how local businesses could use these tools in building apps for their customers. On Socialight's homepage, they're currently featuring "Socialight Concierge," a toolkit for the hotel and tourism industry which lets companies create "curated concierge experiences" where "guests access location-based information about restaurants, shops, and places to visit, together with city tours and historical points of interest, all in a branded environment." The richness of this mobile application goes far beyond anything we've seen with the simplified DIY mobile app building tools. These are no mere informational apps, they're comprehensive networks where some content is managed by the business, but the real value comes from the customers socializing within the community.

You can start building your own network today on Shoutem here or Socialight here.

As we noted in last year's round-up, a web platform can be as simple as an API (like Twitter's) that allow external developers to tap into a company's data. It can also be software and services, like Amazon's Web Services. Or it can be a fully fledged development platform, such as iPhone SDK and Adobe AIR. Whatever the case, platforms on the Web allow people to build on top of another company's product, so we think it's an appropriate way to close our Top Web Products series.

Twitter

As Twitter's director of platform, Ryan Sarver, repeatedy pointed out during his presentation at this year's LeWeb that Twitter and its ecosystem of third-party developers have a highly symbiotic relationship. Twitter's APIs are still rate-limited and Twitter won't make the full firehose of feeds available to all of its developers until early 2010. There can be no doubt, however, that Twitter has managed to create one of the most vibrant developer communities around its platform.

Over the course of the year, Twitter introduced a number of new APIs, including a geolocation API that makes it easy to attach geodata to a tweet, and the controversial retweet API. With Twitter Connect, Twitter also released a competitor to Facebook Connect, although this tool hasn't found widespread adoption yet.

Facebook

Just like Twitter, Facebook's success has increasingly become dependent on the third-party ecosystem that has grown up around the Facebook platform. According to Ethan Beard, who manages development of the Facebook Platform, over 500,00 applications have been developed on top of the Facebook platform and over 250 million users use at least one of these.

The Facebook platform is not just about letting users play games like Farmville and or novelty apps like SuperPoke. Facebook Connect, for example, is becoming increasingly popular as a sign-in mechanism on third-party sites. Over 80,000 sites now utilize Facebook Connect, 60 million Facebook users use it and two-thirds of all the sites in the Comscore 100 index currently use it.

WordPress.org

Without any doubt, the world of blogging would look very different today if it wasn't for Automattic's open-source version of WordPress. The core open-source WordPress project is driven by a passionate group of developers, but a majority of development happens in the community that builds plugins for WordPress.

Earlier this year, WordPress released version 2.8 of its self-hosted product - a major overhaul of its core product. It includes a new interface and new options for plugin developers, including the ability to install and search for plugins from within the admin interface. Among some of the most popular WordPress plugins are an image gallery, an SEO tool and an analytics package.

iPhone

We admit that our choice of the iPhone as a top web platform could be somewhat controversial. After all, Apple's less than efficient approval system and the closed nature of the platform have even led some developers to abandon development for the iPhone altogether.

There can be little doubt, however, that Apple has created one of the most successful mobile developer programs. The App Store now features over 100,000 applications and an increasing number of web services now offer versions of their products that are specifically geared towards the iPhone's Safari browser.

This year, Apple extended the SDK with a number of new and improved features when it released version 3.0 of the iPhone OS. These updates include better support for 3D gaming, augmented reality apps, easier access to maps, in-app purchases and support for push notifications.

Android

Android came of age in 2009. It was still a relatively unknown mobile operating system in the consumers' conscience in 2008, but this year not only saw a large increase in developer activity, but also a strong interest in Android phones like the Motorola Droid.

Thanks to the open-source nature of the project, Android made it easy for developers of augmented reality applications to test their ideas long before Apple offered the necessary APIs on its platform. While the Motorola Droid features Android 2.0 already, most other manufacturers don't offer this update for their customers yet.

Next page: Top 10 Web Platforms of 2009, 6-10

Data.gov

2009 saw a number of interesting developments in the Government 2.0 movement. One of the most high-profile backers of this movement was - surprisingly - the U.S. government. With Data.gov and similar government projects that feature APIs, developers can now find a wealth of information that was previously hard to access.

By providing API access to this data, the U.S. government has opened itself up to more scrutiny, as citizens can now analyze this data with unprecedented ease.

New York Times APIs

No other news organization offers as many APIs as the New York Times - although the Guardian's Open Platform was also a strong candidate for this list. Over the course of this year, the New York Times opened up an API for accessing an archive of all the paper's stories since 1981 and APIs to access information about the U.S. Congress and the New York State legislature.

There can be little doubt that the newspaper industry needs to find new ways to monetize its product. For some papers, this has meant making it harder for consumers and developers to mash up their content. The New York Times, however, has decided that increased openness is a better strategy. [disclosure: RWW syndicates content to NYT]

Google App Engine

With App Engine, Google gives developers an easy way to develop and deploy cloud applications through a comprehensive set of services and APIs. This year, Google introduced Java as an additional language in the App Engine's repertoire. App Engine now also supports XMPP, which has allowed a number of developers to create services that push real-time updated to IM clients or third-party applications.

In addition, Google also announced a pricing structure for App Engine in February.

In November, Google had to face some negative publicity around App Engine when it became known that some hackers were using the service to host a bot net. Overall, however, the service has not suffered from any major security issues so far.

Azure

Azure is Microsoft's big push towards cloud computing. While it is still too early to judge the success of this platform, we think it would be wrong to underestimate Microsoft's commitment to this space and the size of its developer ecosystem. While Amazon and RackSpace's cloud services are clearly more popular than Microsoft's new service, there can be little doubt that the arrival of Microsoft in this market will help to push the incumbents towards more innovation.

Adobe AIR

While Adobe AIR is nowhere near perfect, very few other platforms have the same cross-platform reach as AIR. It allows developers to create one application and distribute it for all the major operating systems. Thanks to its auto-updating features, AIR also makes it easy for developers to keep their install base up to date.

This year, Adobe launched AIR 2, which now allows developers to access mass storage devices, drag-and-drop support for remote files and rudimentary support for P2P networking. In addition, AIR 2 also enables developers to use the multi-touch capabilities of modern screens.

Those are our picks! In the comments let us know your thoughts or what we may have missed.

He notes that the service-level agreements (SLAs) for all the hosted applications are the same as those offered in the operation's traditional on-site computing environment - that is, 99.999% uptime. Google only offers 99.9% as does Amazon S3...and yes, those extra digits make a world of difference.

In addition, DISA also uses the same information assurance process (the process of managing information-related risks) for the RACE applications as it does for any apps running on the traditional, on-site computing platform. They've even cut the security accreditation process from 80 days to 40 thanks to built-in information insurance controls in RACE. 

One of the most obvious benefits of a cloud computing infrastructure, though, is the speed of deployment. The cloud platform has cut the acquisition time for a new server from 6 months to 24 hours - a change that means DISA will now be able to rapidly deploy new applications to the military in record time. "That's a must for worldwide missions with ever-changing computing requirements," says Sienkiewicz.

RACE runs using VMware on HP blade servers. Defense Department customers can choose either Microsoft Windows or Red Hat Linux and are able to configure their server with up to 4 CPUs, 8 GBs of memory and up to a terabyte of storage. Test servers are $500 per month and production servers are $1200 per month. Next year, RACE will be deployed on the DoD's classified network (SIPRNet) as well. 

Blue Spruce is a project within IBM that is only about 5 months old. Up till now it hasn't been shown publicly. Blue Spruce isn't yet complete, but conceptually it is two different things:

• Project Blue Spruce Client Toolkit
• Project Blue Spruce Co-Web Server

Here's a summary of what we know so far about the Blue Spruce platform:

- Uses the WebKit Open Source Browser Engine (in the demo we saw, Safari was the browser being used)
- Uses the following Open standards: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, (All Ajax), XMPP, H.264
- Server runs on Linux, MacOS X
- Utilized OpenAjax Metadata Specification, so it can utilize any widgets
- It's being ported to IE 6+ and Firefox

NOT a Web Browser, But is a Platform

To be clear, IBM is not developing another browser. The client part of this project is based on a set of browser-based open standards technologies. They will in time (2010 timeframe) be integrated into existing browsers such as Safari, Firefox and IE.

The grand plan for IBM, we think, is that it wants the browser to become the platform for applications - thus putting pressure on companies like Microsoft and Adobe, which still rely heavily on desktop applications (albeit these days connected to the web).

It's also worth noting that this isn't (yet) an open source project. Rod Smith described it to us as a "community-sourced" project, meaning that it's built on open standards and so others in the developer community can contribute. Smith said it "may" become an open source project in future, but it's too early to say.

Why is IBM Heading to the Browser?

We asked IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, Rod Smith, why IBM is moving to browser-based applications. He replied that customers have been consistently telling them for 1-1.5 years now that they don't want to do installs anymore. Their customers want the rich experience that desktop apps have traditionally provided, but they want to have it in the browser. Collaboration and sharing data is also a trend that IBM is tapping into with Blue Spruce.

Proof of Concept Applications

At this time, Blue Spruce is in a closed beta period. IBM is creating applications for a number of customers, including Reuters and hospitals in Boston and New Zealand. They're focusing on 3 main areas right now: finance, health and "heavy industry" (defined as utilities, rail, steel, etc). As the project matures, we can expect to see IBM stepping up its application development efforts - services are after all a key part of IBM's business.

ReadWriteWeb was shown a number of 'proof of concept' demos. The functionality included Ajax-based mashups being used simultaneously by users in different locations (one in San Francisco, the other in Boston), audio and live streaming video (VGA currently, but HD is on the way) integrated with mashups, IM and feeds on the one browser page, and more rich functionality.

In other words, there were many different components (mashups, video, audio, etc.) all happening on the same browser page. Multiple users can interact with these components in real-time and see each others changes. As IBM explained it, all of the components are live and all participants can cause change that will be propagated. This will enable customers to have 'live meetings' and collaborate on applications - all within the browser.

It's unusual to see this level of functionality in a browser currently, so we think Blue Spruce could potentially be a big deal. It certainly will make big Internet companies like Microsoft, Adobe and probably even Google sit up and take notice of Big Blue.

We've written a lot of times about platforms for the Web. A web platform can be as simple as an API, like the one offered by Twitter, which allows external developers to tap into a company's data. It can be software and services, like Amazon's Web Services. It can also be a fully fledged development platform, such as iPhone SDK and Adobe AIR. Whatever the case, platforms on the Web mean allow people to build on top of another company's product, so we think it's an appropriate way to close our Top Web Products series.

• Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 International Products of 2008
• Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
• Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Real World Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 Digital Lifestyle Products of 2008
• Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008

Note: unlike some of our previous lists, we've attempted to order this one according to impact in 2008.

1. iPhone SDK

ReadWriteWeb named Apple as our Best BigCo of 2008, largely due to the iPhone platform. The iPhone truely reached a mainstream audience in 2008, when the 3G iPhone was launched to much acclaim in July. But more significant than the phone itself was the simultaneous launch of the Apple App Store. There were 552 applications available at launch and at time of writing that's risen to over 10,000 applications. So in less than 6 months, the number and variety of iPhone apps has expanded greatly. Indeed, any startup worth its salt has an iPhone version of its web app - the ultimate proof of a successful Web platform.

For many years now everybody (including us) has been predicting that the next year will be the one that the Mobile Web breaks through. 2008 was finally that year - and it's mostly thanks to the iPhone development platform.

2. OpenSocial

November was the first anniversary of Google's OpenSocial, an open API framework for social networks and websites. During 2008 OpenSocial gained a lot of traction; statistics released in November stated that OpenSocial had reached 675 M registered users at that time and there were 7,500 applications.

Most impressive is the list of organizations who signed onto OpenSocial and are actively developing apps for it. That high powered list includes MySpace, AOL, Bebo, hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, Orkut, Yahoo!. Of course still missing from OpenSocial are Facebook and Microsoft, but at the rate OpenSocial is ramping up - they may not need them.

3. Adobe AIR

As we noted in our Best BigCo 2008 post, this was a year in which Adobe's 'Rich Internet App' strategy bore some juicy fruit, with many compelling apps released that were built using AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). AIR is a platform that makes it easy to build attractive Internet connected applications that live outside the browser. Last year we noted its potential - AIR was called 'Apollo' for much of its beta - but in February 2008 AIR was officially launched and soon we saw a lot of stunning apps emerge. For examples, check out:

• 6 Adobe AIR Apps to Check Out
• 10 Adobe AIR Apps Bloggers Will Love
• Adobe AIR Goes to Work: 6 Apps for the Corporate Desktop

We've named it our number 3 Web platform of the year, because it breathed new life into Rich Internet Apps this year.

4. Twitter API

The importance of Twitter's API to its success this year can't be overstated. The number and variety of Twitter reader clients alone is amazing, let alone the many other ways Twitter's data is being used (e.g. for e-commerce purposes). It must be said that Twitter has experienced much downtime and many technical glitches throughout the year, but even so it has continued to expand its API service. As Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said a ReadWriteTalk interview last September:

"The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we've done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas ...

So the API, which has easily 10 times more traffic than the website, has been really very important to us. We've seen some amazing work built on top of it from tiny little mobile applications like an SMS timer that just allows you to set a reminder over SMS to call your mom or something like that, to more elaborate visual recreations of Twitter like twittervision.com, which shows an animated map of the world and what everyone's doing around the world with Twitter. ... The [Twitter] API has really been a big success for us, and it's something that we want to continue to focus our efforts on, looking forward."

5. Facebook Platform

Facebook continued to become more popular throughout 2008, reaching 140 million active users by end of the year and growing at a rate of 600,000 users each day. For that reason we gave it an honorable mention in our Best BigCo 2008 post.

However in terms of the Facebook platform, overall we felt that Google's OpenSocial overshadowed it in 2008. As we wrote in our mid-year review, Facebook Platform: The Fanfare Revisited, when the Facebook platform debuted last year it was touted as the next big thing. You no longer needed to bring the audience to your app. Instead your app could be delivered to one of the largest audiences around the web. And not just delivered, but injected into a massive social network. But while it started great, it turns out things are not that simple. Three fundamental issues surfaced:

1. Technical: Should the app be just a teaser that leads users to their site or should it be a duplicate and have full functionality?
2. Business: If e.g. New York Times builds a Facebook app, will it be economic for them (since there's little revenue in Facebook)?
3. Provider costs: Does it pay for Facebook to maintain the platform? As a business with a huge valuation, Facebook needs to maximise profit.

Despite these issues, Facebook's platform shows no signs of slowing and many startups have ported their web apps to Facebook. It may not be the bee's knees anymore, but it's still a very effective platform for startups to utilize.

6. Android

Google's open mobile OS platform, Android, burst onto the scene this year as a rival to Apple's closed iPhone platform. Google spent a lot of time this year encouraging developers to create applications for Android - and rewarding them for doing so with cold, hard cash with the Android Developer Challenge (see our previous coverage here). This led to many third party apps and multiple App Stores. The first Android phone - the "T-Mobile G1 With Google" - was launched in September, followed by a second Blackberry-like phone in December. Android apps are showing steady growth and we can expect to see this ramp up in 2009 as more handsets come on the market.

Android went open source in October, which starkly set Google apart from Apple's controlled platform. While iPhone was our top platform in 2008, Google has the opportunity to challenge for this mantle next year.

7. Amazon Web Services

Amazon's leading edge Web Services stack was first introduced to the world in 2006 and it continued to impress in 2008 - albeit with more of a business focus. Amazon Web Services basically became a more mature offering in '08 and it shored up its support services.

Amazon Web Services, led by Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), was the first major cloud computing platform and today it powers the backend for many startups. At the beginning of the year we noted that Amazon's web services now accounts for more bandwidth than all of Amazon's global web sites combined. Then in April, Amazon announced premium for-pay support packages for some of its core infrastructure services. S3, EC2 and Simple Queue Service (SQS) each received the gold and silver level support treatment. In October Amazon announced that EC2 was coming out of beta and that it now supported Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server (i.e. expanding beyond Linux distributions and OpenSolaris). At the same time Amazon offered a Service Level Agreement for EC2 and promised an availability of 99.95%.

8. Live Mesh

The Live Mesh service launched in April as an invite only "technology preview". It is Microsoft's attempt to tie all of our data together. Live Mesh synchronizes data across multiple devices (currently just Windows computers, but theoretically it will extend to mobile and other devices in the future) as well as to a web desktop that exists in the cloud. It can sync data across devices used by a single users, as well as create shared spaces for multiple users.

Essentially, Live Mesh is a collection of feeds (which can be expressed as ATOM, JSON, FeedSync, RSS, WB-XML, or POX). Every piece of data entered into a user's Mesh -- be it a file, a folder, a message, a user permission, or a new device -- is rendered as a piece of information in a feed. The feeds are then synced with other devices that are part of that Mesh following rules for how to sync each particular piece of information (i.e., File A may sync with Users 1, 2, and 3, while File B may only be told to sync with Users 1 and 2).

9. Fire Eagle

Earlier this year Yahoo announced that the closed beta period for its location platform Fire Eagle had ended and that the service was now open for everybody. A number of high-profile services, including Brightkite, Movable Type, Dopplr, and Pownce have implemented Fire Eagle through the numerous APIs Yahoo provides for accessing the service.

As we wrote about Fire Eagle when the beta was first announced, it offers API kits in five different programming languages, it's got user authorization protocols already available for web, desktop and mobile apps and it's using the open standards community built oAuth to facilitate faster, more secure mashups. So this platform is leveraging universal open standards.

Note: also see our coverage of the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform, a collection of in-depth geo-location based APIs.

10. Mozilla Weave

This year Mozilla announced Weave, a new web platform that will store users' browser metadata in a cloud environment for access anywhere. Weave is a "framework for services integration" that will, according to Mozilla, "focus on finding ways to enhance the Firefox user experience, increase user control over personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences."

The basic idea is that browser metadata (things stored in your Firefox profile like bookmarks, history, RSS feeds, usernames and passwords, etc.) is pushed into the cloud and stored on Mozilla's servers. The data is available to users from wherever they get online and users can share information with friends, family, or third parties while retaining control over how, when, and if the info is shared.

Unlucky Not to Make Top 10

There were many other Web platforms that impressed us during the year. Google's Chrome browser is highly promising (but we felt it was too early to be in the top 10), Google Gears helped take the online world offline, meebo created an intriguing platform based on its core IM capabilities, Bungee Labs developed a great mashups platform, Salesforce.com had a strong year again, and on and on. It seems like every major Internet company nowadays has a platform, which is great for developers and users alike. Check out our earlier post listing 10 promising web platforms for other examples.

We hope you agree with our top 10 list, but we're sure there are one or two platforms you think should be here instead. So let us know in the comments.

Also for more about the theory and practice of platforms, check out these RWW posts:

• APIs and Developer Platforms: A Discussion on the Pros and Cons
• So You're Launching a Platform: After Ubiquitous APIs - What's the Next Frontier?
• Picking a Platform: 5 Issues to Consider
• When Web Sites Become Web Services

Demo Apps

We tested some of the demo applications that Appcelerator has created, and both the Twitter app and the 'Playtanium' desktop YouTube player worked just as advertised and felt as speedy as you would expect from a native application. Being demos, the apps were obviously not very feature rich, but clearly show the potential of the platform.

Money

Appcelerator also announced a $4.1 million Series A funding round, which should put the development of this platform on safe footing for the foreseeable future.

Bridging the Gap Between Web and Desktop

According to Jeff Haynie, Appcelerator's CEO, Titanium is meant to provide an open source alternative to other, proprietary platforms with similar feature sets. It is good to see more innovation in this space, which until now was more or less dominated by proprietary platforms.

The question, of course, will be if developers will adopt the platform for their own projects (looking at the documentation, it would seem that any Ruby programmer should be able to get a Titanium project up and running in no time). Appcelerator is definitely doing its part to help developers by providing them with ample documentation for the Titanium SDK.

Overview of two Titanium Demo Apps from jeff haynie on Vimeo.

• Project Blue Spruce Client Toolkit
• Project Blue Spruce Co-Web Server

Here's a summary of what we know so far about the Blue Spruce platform:

- Uses the WebKit Open Source Browser Engine (in the demo we saw, Safari was the browser being used)
- Uses the following Open standards: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, (All Ajax), XMPP, H.264
- Server runs on Linux, MacOS X
- Utilized OpenAjax Metadata Specification, so it can utilize any widgets
- It's being ported to IE 6+ and Firefox

NOT a Web Browser, But is a Platform

To be clear, IBM is not developing another browser. The client part of this project is based on a set of browser-based open standards technologies. They will in time (2010 timeframe) be integrated into existing browsers such as Safari, Firefox and IE.

The grand plan for IBM, we think, is that it wants the browser to become the platform for applications - thus putting pressure on companies like Microsoft and Adobe, which still rely heavily on desktop applications (albeit these days connected to the Web).

It's also worth noting that this isn't (yet) an open source project. Rod Smith described it to us as a "community-sourced" project, meaning that it's built on open standards and so others in the developer community can contribute. Smith said it "may" become an open source project in future, but it's too early to say.

Why is IBM Heading to the Browser?

We asked IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies Rod Smith why IBM is moving to browser-based applications. He replied that customers have been consistently telling them for 1-1.5 years now that they don't want to do installs anymore. Their customers want the rich experience that desktop apps have traditionally provided, but they want to have it in the browser. Collaboration and sharing data is also a trend that IBM is tapping into with Blue Spruce.

Proof of Concept Applications

At this time, Blue Spruce is in a closed beta period. IBM is creating applications for a number of customers, including Reuters and hospitals in Boston and New Zealand. They're focusing on 3 main areas right now: finance, health and "heavy industry" (defined as utilities, rail, steel, etc). As the project matures, we can expect to see IBM stepping up its application development efforts - services is after all a key part of IBM's business.

ReadWriteWeb was shown a number of 'proof of concept' demos. The functionality included Ajax-based mashups being used simultaneously by users in different locations (one in San Francisco, the other in Boston), audio and live streaming video (VGA currently, but HD is on the way) integrated with mashups, IM and feeds on the one browser page, and more rich functionality.

In other words, there were many different components (mashups, video, audio, etc) all happening on the same browser page. Multiple users can interact with these components in real-time and see each others changes. As IBM explained it, all of the components are live and all participants can cause change that will be propagated. This will enable customers to have 'live meetings' and collaborate on applications - all within the browser.

It's unusual to see this level of functionality in a browser currently, so we think Blue Spruce could potentially be a big deal. It certainly will make big Internet companies like Microsoft, Adobe and probably even Google sit up and take notice of Big Blue.

Web Trends

Why Platforms Are Letting Us Down - And What They Should Do About It

In good times everyone wants to be a platform. But when times are bad and platforms are just an expense, the resources suddenly shift away. The recent re-design of Facebook, the slow down of Google's Open Social, and Flock closing its extension site - these are all part of the same pattern. Platforms that don't have monetization wired in are only good for marketing. This is why the platforms of the future need to think about not just short-term marketing and buzz, but long-term sustainability and monetization.

AOL Quietly Launches One of the World's Biggest App Platforms

AOL announced the new developer site for MyAOL this week to almost no fanfare, but at a time when some are declaring the Facebook platform "dead" - AOL's new platform warrants some serious attention.

The new MyAOL platform is an OpenSocial container based on the gadgets.*API, meaning developers shouldn't have to do much to get their widgets up and running on it. A fair number of MyAOL gadgets already have millions of users, so the new developer site seems like a real opportunity.

The Future of Web 3.0 According to Yahoo!

At the Web 3.0 Conference and Expo in Santa Clara this week, Dave Beckett (principal software architect at Yahoo!) and Tom Hughes-Croucher (technical evangelist, Yahoo! Developer Network), answered questions about the recent consumer release of Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) and discussed the company's future plans to open up almost everything.

"The open source, hacker attitude has been part of our culture for so long; now we're opening up the different pieces," Hughes-Croucher told the packed room. "We're taking data from across our sites and sharing it."

Resisting Change: iGoogle and Yahoo Profile Updates Shock Users

Our review of the new iGoogle homepage was generally positive. For a large number of users, however, the latest updates, including the stronger emphasis on the full-screen canvas view, were simply unacceptable. Just this weekend, the New York Times reported about the difficulties of making drastic changes to popular web sites without alienating users. Judging from the reaction of some of iGoogle's users, Google's switch to the new iGoogle layout is a textbook example for how not to update a popular product. If Google had made these changes incrementally instead of foisting a completely new version of iGoogle onto its users without warning, it could have surely prevented the current outrage.

RWW Live: Online Personal Finance

You can't turn on the TV, visit Yahoo Finance or pick up the Wall Street Journal without hearing about the economic crisis we're in. It's caused most of us to step back and look at our own financial situation. In this week's episode of RWW Live, we looked at how you can use Web tools to improve your personal finances. We had executives from Mint, Wesabe and Tip'd on the show.

Here's the audio:

Download MP3

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• FreshBooks offers professional online invoicing.
• SocialText provides an enterprise wiki platform.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
• Calais brings semantic functionality into your site.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• The Web 3.0 Conference is on October 16 - 17 in Santa Clara.
• Direct Media Exchange is a solution for managing ad networks.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• SmartyPig is Simple. Smart. Savings.
• Quintura is a visual-based search engine.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

Web Products

Three Places To Shop For Android Apps? How Confusing!

This week, T-Mobile stocked their stores with G1 handset, the first smartphone to feature Google's mobile operating system "Android." Along with the device itself, the Google Android Market also went live. There, developers are offering a number of applications for installation on the new phone. However, the Android Market isn't the only place to get apps. Both Handango and MobiHand have app stores of their own. Will this open ecosystem be good for the "Google phone" or will it lead to consumer confusion?

See also: Android Goes Open-Source

Bloglines Returns to Challenge Google Reader - Thank Goodness

Popular RSS reader Bloglines says it's solved the much publicized recent problems with feed updating that lead smaller services to pursue its users and Google Reader triumphalists to declare the RSS reader market all zipped up. It's true that Bloglines has a lot of problems, but all software does and competition is incredibly important in any sector, including among RSS readers.

Despite its shortcomings, Bloglines is worth a look and when it works it works very well for many people. RSS is such a powerful media that it's essential that the market leader, Google, be kept on their toes.

Twine Launches 1.0 Version - Eyes Facebook, Google Reader, Delicious, Digg, ...

When Twine announced itself to the world exactly one year ago, it claimed to be "the first mainstream Semantic Web application". However despite raising millions of dollars in its quest to bring the Semantic Web to the mainstream, Twine has been beset by usability and performance issues in its beta period. Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote probably the most brutal review. The post title said it all: Twine Disappoints After Semantic Web Hype.

However Twine has just launched publicly, confident that it is ready for prime time. We spoke with Twine founder and Semantic Web proponent Nova Spivack this week to find out what's changed, who's been using Twine up till now, and where the service is headed in the future.

Make Your Own iPhone/Android Apps With New App Generator

Today AppLoop launched a mobile application generator which lets you turn any RSS feed into a mobile application for either iPhone (available this week) or Android (coming soon). The company, which competes with the analytics and advertising solution MediaLets, wanted to provide everyone with the tools to make a mobile app, even if they didn't have any programming experience. To do so, they've created their new Mobile Application Generator, a tool which creates a mobile-ready application in less than two minutes.

Adobe's Ichabod and The Headless Search of Flash

While Adobe Flash has remained popular with Web developers who want to deliver fluid user interfaces, database-driven content, and nonstandard typography on the Web, it has suffered from one glaring shortcoming: search engines have been unable to effectively index the content held within the Flash file. With Ichabod, Adobe is hoping to fix that problem for Flash.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

Caspio: Gritty and Profitable In a Tough Market

As part of our Gritty Entrepreneurs series, we interviewed Frank Zamani, Founder/CEO of Caspio. Their pitch is "no more programming for custom web applications". That is a tough market, which we will explore in this post. But Caspio is bootstrapped, profitable and can point to some real case studies. So they must be doing something right. Let's tell you this entrepreneur's tale and assess their future prospects.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

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

The justification was that Mozilla was doing a better job hosting and promoting the add-ons, and the majority were the same for Flock and Firefox. Since Flock does not have enough resources to support the extension site, Evan announced the decision to "cut the fat that is our unwieldy extensions system". (Note the keyword 'fat', it will be important in the rest of the post).

In itself this move was not surprising. Flock's team has just released version 2.0 of its social browser and has other battles to fight. IE8 is coming out soon with innovative features. Mozilla is racing forward with Ubiquity and the upcoming Geo-aware Firefox 3.1. And Google threw its hat into the browser ring with Chrome, so competition is getting tight. For Flock to be a player in the browser market, it needs a razor focus on building a base of diehard fans. Extensions are not helping much in that respect, they're an expense, so it was logical to cut them.

Facebook Platform - The Big Up and The Big Let Down

When the Facebook platform was unveiled in 2007, it was called genius. Never before had a company in a single stroke enabled others to tap into millions of its users completely free. The platform was hailed as a game changer under the famous mantra "we built it and they will come". And they did come, hundreds of companies rushing to write Facebook applications. Companies and VC funds focused specifically on Facebook apps.

It really did look like a revolution, but it didn't last. The first reason was that Facebook apps quickly arranged themselves on a power law curve. A handful of apps (think Vampires, Byte Me and Sell My Friends) landed millions of users, but those in the pack had hardly any. The second problem was, ironically, the bloat. Users polluted their profiles with Facebook apps and no one could find anything in their profiles. Facebook used to be simple - pictures, wall, friends. Now each profile features a zoo of heterogenous apps, each one trying to grab the user's attention to take advantage of the network effect. Users are confused.

Worst of all, the platform had no infrastructure to monetize the applications. When Sheryl Sandberg arrived on the scene and looked at the balance sheet, she spotted the hefty expense that was the Facebook platform. Trying to live up to a huge valuation isn't easy, and in the absense of big revenues people rush to cut costs. Since it was both an expense and users were confused less than a year after its glorious launch, Facebook decided to revamp its platform.

The latest release of Facebook, which was released in July, makes it nearly impossible for new applications to take advantage of the network effect. Now users must first install the application, then find it under the application menu or one of the tabs, then check a bunch of boxes to add it to their profile (old applications are grand-daddied in). Facebook has sent a clear message to developers - the platform is no longer a priority.

Google's OpenSocial and The Me Too Syndrome

Apparently Google was threatened by the Facebook platform. Its quick response was OpenSocial, the open platform for social applications. Unlike Facebook, which was proprietary and closed, Google's was open to everyone. When OpenSocial was announced, techies raised their eyebrows - it looked raw and unpolished. Some of the existing iGoogle container APIs were mixed in with a new contact sharing library. But, being Google, a lot of people signed up to support it.

Fast forward one year later and how much has been done? Well some companies did implement some elements, but the overall buzz died. Why wouldn't Google put more resources and marketing behind it? Because now it doesn't matter. The Facebook platform play is over and so the marketing strategy called Opensocial is not a top priority for the search giant anymore.

Why Apple's App Store Will Be Different

Next we turn to the latest platform getting buzz, Apple's iPhone App Store. At first glance it's much like Facebook, but in reality it isn't. Firstly, the user profiles aren't visible - you can't see applications installed on your iPhone. Each user can decide which apps to get, based on a simple review-based dashboard. There's no promise of a massive network effect, although there's a simpler user experience.

Importantly, Apple wired the monetization into the App Store right from the start. Sure there are free applications, but for companies that want to invest resources and play on the iPhone for a long time, there is an instant, simple opportunity to monetize. Note that paid applications get priority listing in the App Store, which is no accident.

Apple took care of the most important part of the equation - the transaction. It was also able to insert itself in the middle and recoup some costs associated with building the App Store. In the future, if it takes off and sustains the growth, App Store will ring in significant revenue for Apple. Jobs and his team were smart to wire monetization into the platform at the outsert.

The Future of Platforms

Where does all this leave us? Certainly it's absurd to say that having Web platforms is a bad idea. Yet we're left with a bitter taste in our mouths after the latest moves from some big platform players. The platforms of the future need to think about not just short-term marketing and buzz, but long-term sustainability and monetization. Here are some questions that companies need to ask themselves before delivering a platform:

• Why are we building a platform?
• How will we monetize this platform?
• Will the platform make us money, and how much will it cost?
• How will applications be able to monetize the platform?
• Can we support the platform for years to come?

Our culture of sensation and free makes it much harder for platforms to think deeply and be disciplined. Google felt they had to come out with something to stop Facebook's momentum. Facebook rushed to create a completely open infrastructure; and it backfired both for users and developers. Having been burnt by Facebook, small and large companies alike will now think twice before investing in a presence on platforms. This is a shame, for we need platforms and we need them to work well.

Let us know what you think about the opportunities to plug into major platforms? What are your thoughts on the recent platform dynamics that we have witnessed?

The new MyAOL platform is an OpenSocial container based on the gadgets.*API, meaning developers shouldn't have to do much to get their widgets up and running on it. A fair number of MyAOL gadgets already have millions of users, so the new developer site seems like a real opportunity.

The new MyAOL platform enters the game at a complicated time. Widgets, little modules of content and functionality easily embedded into websites but built by 3rd parties, were supposed to be the future of the web, according to some advocates in recent years. The Facebook Platform was heralded as the widget Holy Land, but key site design decisions treated widgets poorly from the start and subsequent Facebook redesigns have banished them to near invisibility.

Defenders of the platform argue that the redesigned site just keeps really stupid apps from proliferating, making it all the more important to build widgets for actual utility. Scott Rafer, the genuinely brilliant if cynical co-founder of widget ad company Lookery, says the new Facebook is dead to him as a widget man. As a bulk-ad sales guy, Rafer's company deals in very large part with really stupid widget apps. So it goes. If your platform isn't supportive of stupid widgets, then your platform essentially doesn't support widgets at all.

MyAOL is Big

MyAOL is a good old fashioned startpage. An increasing number of AOL properties have recently started incorporating 3rd party content and moving towards a strategy of openness. AOL has a bad rap but is doing some innovative things.

The company's new platform gives third party developers access to a large group of users. How big is the AOL platform? 10 million people have installed the AOL Weather widget, 6 million have installed the Topix.net news app and there are 1 million AOL Pandora users. Those are very respectable numbers! In fact, they are much higher than almost all of the Facebook app numbers, though Facebook only exposes "active users."

The point is, it's a strange time for the much-hyped widget but the opening of the MyAOL platform represents a good opportunity. In Firefox on my Mac the site doesn't work very well, but it works well enough for millions of people. Widgets remain a promising paradigm, if only the host sites are truly comfortable promoting widget use for the long term, instead of burying 3rd party widgets and renewing their focus on in-house links.