I used Jux, because it lets me design the whole experience out to every edge of every screen. Jux just launched crop control for photos, so the Jux album of my trip looks just right on every device. A Jux isn't a blog. It's more like a portfolio. Each piece stands on its own.

Jux appreciates how sensuous and tangible the Web can be now. We've got so many ways to push and pull and play with the content. It flows onto different screens with different input methods. Some we touch with our fingertips. Others we click with a cursor. The stories have to live in all those places.

But to do a great job of that on our own is hard work, over the heads of most of us. Jux does the hard part for us and makes our decisions easy. We just choose the stories we want to tell and the objects with which we want to tell them. Jux puts them where they're supposed to go.

It launched on the Web in August. It was optimized for the iPad in October. In December, the full-screen iPhone view arrived. Now, regardless of which device you use to visit a Jux, you see a version that fits the screen and responds to the right clicks, taps or swipes.

It uses a mixture of smart algorithms and basic cues from the user to shift around the content ever so slightly, so you don't have to worry much about how your Jux will look on the different screens.

Jux has six kinds of posts so far: BlockQuote, Article, Photo, Video, SlideShow and CountDown. You can upload photos from your computer, grab them from a URL, or log straight into Flickr, Facebook or Instagram and get photos from there.

You can choose the colors and typography, as well as the basic shape of the layout. You can also apply some interesting photo effects. Jux will rearrange all these things for different devices while being true to your design decisions.

When you're done, you can share the URL of your Jux, or you can embed it straight into a blog post or webpage. It's smart enough to reflow into any screen.

Jux is still a little slow on handheld devices. But the promise of the tool is still exciting. There's no need to surrender your stories to Facebook's lightbox and other cruft anymore. You don't have to worry about blogging your exploits on a regular basis. You're free from the concept of a timeline. Jux is a hint of the true promise of computerized storytelling.

My Jux SlideShow from my trip to San Francisco:

It does all of this by analyzing the billions of page views it tracks anonymously across its whole user base. Parse.ly started as a feed reader for pros in 2009, and Dash expands its capabilities with predictive analytics for one's own site. The software gets a sense of what topics and stories are most important and whether they're trending up or down. That's a great thing for publishers. Is it good for readers? I can't wait to find out.

Online Omniscience

It's no secret that blogging is a game of page views. Without good analytics, blogging is all about watching, intuition and guesswork. After you've done some of that, you write some spaghetti posts, throw them at the wall and see what sticks. Dash gives publishers the motherlode of data about page views and how to get them. It shows them the past and the present of their site, and its ability to measure Web-wide trends offers a glimpse of the future.

Dash offers three tiers of services starting at $499 per month. The basic "Track" tier enables internal tracking of authors, topics, sections and referrals, as well as predictive analysis of trends and real-time site stats. Tier 2, "Plan," adds the Web-wide trend analysis, search and filtering within the analytics, customizable dashboards for editors and downloadable reports. The top tier, "Promote," measures shares and impact across the social Web, and it sends email alerts to editors and writers when something urgent comes up.

Installing Dash requires nothing more than dropping some JavaScript into the site's footer. That's enough to capture the traffic and put the dashboard to work.

A tool like Dash gives a site a huge advantage in the short term. While some sites putter along without this kind of detailed feedback, the ones who have it could dominate. The ability to see exactly which topics and events need covering, and exactly how to cover them for a particular audience, is a sort of online omniscience.

Vision, Voice & Tactics

But hopefully, in the long term, this will lead to a new generation of content sites that all have these abilities. If every publisher could know its audience this well, there would be no more spaghetti-against-the-wall, side-boob-heavy, all-caps-headlines blogging tactics.

This week, Gawker is experimenting by letting writers go crazy with these old-school page view tricks, hopefully to prove the point that they aren't what the market really wants. But if all publishers had Dash or something like it, we'd all know that. Then the differences between sites would be all about editorial vision and voice, not just tactics.

It will be even clearer who's playing to the crowd and who stands out. Sites who just play the predictive analytics game will all start to look the same. But the gift of a tool like Dash is that it helps sites get to know their audience. It highlights the surprising things. The sites that stand out will be the ones who know their audience so well that they can consistently surprise them.

Parse.ly was co-founded by CEO Sachin Kamdar and CTO Andrew Montalenti and is based in New York City. Check them out at Parse.ly.

First, you need an account. Go to Calepin.co and register your user name. It's early; you can probably get whatever you want. Next, log in with Dropbox. Calepin will create a folder in your Dropbox that it will watch for text files written in Markdown. When you click the big 'Publish' button on the Calepin site, it will publish all the documents as a blog at [user name].calepin.co. Here's mine, for example. The blog's appearance is spare and relaxing. It's a great place to just stick your thoughts up on the Web. Don't know what a Dropbox or a Markdown is? Don't worry. You'll quickly get the gist.

What The Heck's A Dropbox?

If you don't have a Dropbox account, you'll want one. Think of Dropbox as a folder on your computer that syncs to the cloud. Our editor-in-chief, Richard MacManus, just wrote a great tutorial about cloud storage services that will teach you all the reasons you'd want Dropbox or something like it.

As you'll see in that post, there are several choices, but I recommend Dropbox, especially if you want to use Calepin. You can use Dropbox.com to manage it from the Web, but it's also a free desktop application that lets you treat it just like a normal folder on your computer that syncs automatically. You get 2GB of space for free, and that's plenty for a blog.

Ready to sign up now? I did refer you, so you could consider signing up through my referral link (winky face), so I can get a little more space in mine. If you don't want to indulge me, just go to Dropbox.com to sign up.

Markdown? That sounds scary.

I promise Markdown isn't scary. It's an easy, human-readable way to format text for the Web. Daring Fireball's John Gruber invented it. For our purposes here, all you need to know about it is that it's much cleaner and easier than HTML. But it's important to know that Markdown understands HTML. If you forget how to do something in Markdown, you can always do it the old-fashioned HTML way. Here's an example of what Markdown looks like:

To write:

Hello, there! This is an introduction to Markdown. It's really easy to use, and I promise you'll LOVE it!

This is all you need:

**Hello, there!** This is an introduction to [Markdown][1]. It's *really* easy to use, and I promise you'll ***LOVE*** it!

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

Isn't that nice and easy to read? It's also really powerful; you can do pretty much anything you'd need HTML to do, and Calepin will turn it into Web-ready HTML without you having to worry about it. You can learn everything you need to know in Daring Fireball's Markdown tutorial. I write all my RWW posts in Markdown, and I write faster, less stressfully and with fewer errors than I ever had in HTML before.

Now Put Them All Together!

To post to your Calepin blog, you just write up your post using any plain text editor you want and save it as a .md file in the Calepin folder in your Dropbox. Want to use images? No problem. You can at least insert an image using Markdown, or you can just use HTML if you need more control over it. You can host the image on a free service like Imgur, or you can even put it in your Dropbox public folder. Either way, just grab the URL and put it in your blog post. Then log in to Calepin.co and click the big 'Publish' button, and your posts will go right up on the Web.

That's it! You've got a blog. Mine's jonm.calepin.co. What's yours?

Calepin is powered by Pelican, an anagram of "Calepin" that is also an open-source weblog generator written in Python. If you're interested, you can view or fork the source code on Github. Future features include a few themes, as well as respect for a /theme folder for your own, and custom domains.

Oceans of thanks to Merlin Mann, the Internet wizard who turned me onto Calepin. He recently made fun of me on this podcast. Back To Work is a show that will teach you about writing, the Internet and getting better at stuff. I listen every week, and you should too.

When I covered Jux's desktop launch, I called it "post-blogging." I intended some irony then, but now that I've touched Jux on an iPad, I take it seriously. Very seriously. The experience is continuous between the desktop and the tablet. For all its media-heavy intensity, Jux is a responsive design. This is no boring WordPress Onswipe theme for a blog. This is the publisher coming to life through every screen.

"We think this is really going to surprise and delight some people," says founder Ted Metcalfe. I think that's true. Even before the iPad launch, I found that Jux's in-your-face formats elicited some jarring, personal, intense content. I find browsing Jux refreshing, actually. Web content can be so sterile, polite, composed. Jux is like holding a megaphone up to the ear of Web 2.0 and shouting "BE INTERESTING!"

The iPad gestures take that further by making the experience more intuitive and exploratory, but the best part is that the content is actually exactly the same across platforms. "It's the exact same experience you'll have on the desktop going forward," Metcalfe says, "only totally touchable and that much better."

The six post types - BlockQuote, Article, Photo, Video, SlideShow, and CountDown - help Jux pre-define and format posts to suit their purposes. Some posts should focus on text, others should be a full image, half-page or whole-page, and so on. Metcalfe also says more post types are coming soon.

"It's totally HTML5 and Web-based," Metcalfe says. It supports all the videos, animations and fonts from the desktop version, and it handles rotation neatly (for the most part). There is no future Web without responsive design, and Jux is already there. The Boston Globe had to pay handsomely for this kind of responsive publishing. Jux is free, and it's no mere newspaper, either. No matter who you are or what you publish, Jux will handle that for you.

Visiting jux.com on the tablet takes you straight to the gallery screen. Every Jux has a tablet cover screen as an introduction that allows the publisher to put in a bio and add some links. Yeah, you know About.me and Flavors.me? That's just the cover of a Jux.

"It has that kind of quality of a portfolio or an album," Metcalfe says. And that's what a blog is in theory, right? It's chronology of your past work. Compare the experience of scrolling back through a typical blog to that of swiping through Jux portfolios in the gallery.

Inside, each Jux has a swipe-able table of contents. That's your Flipboard, Onswipe, Pressly, take your pick. Everyone realizes how important tablet publishing is. That's why so many services are climbing over themselves to take care of tablet formatting so publishers don't have to. But unlike those services, Jux really knows what content it's serving, because it's all made right inside Jux. From top to bottom, Jux knows how to show off the stuff people make with it.

The tablet gestures are mostly what you're used to, and there are subtle clues for the unusual ones. There's a diagonal swipe to move through SlideShow and CountDown posts, which is indicated by a small arrow in the corner. It also uses a pinch-out gesture to go back to the gallery.

One challenge for all tablet apps is teaching users any new gestures. Jux doesn't want reminders to get in the way of the experience. "We're assuming people know the basic iPad gestures," Metcalfe says. But it uses subtle cues when appropriate, and it also offers alternative navigation options like on-tap menus in less intuitive situations.

Life After Blogging

"It's tough making a Web app scream on the iPad," Metcalfe says. "We can always package this up as a dedicated app and get a little more speed out of it that way... but what we really want to do is be cross-platform, instant publishing, no download. We're here for the leading edge of individual content creators. We think it's the right overall technical strategy to be everywhere with a responsive design."

Jux is radical. Publishers who are established on other platforms would have to reinvent themselves to take advantage of it. But Metcalfe wants Jux to be for the next wave. "Whetting appetites by pushing the medium is our MO," he says.

Let me put it this way: Can your content management system publish any kind of post type you can dream of in a dynamic, Web-standard, responsive format with all the touch gestures a toddler wants it to have? Ours can't. Jux can.

Up Next: Mobile Jux

There's no posting or editing from the tablet yet, but Metcalfe says it's almost ready. That let me down, but Metcalfe was ready with a response that made it all better: The existing editing tools (which you can see in the previous post) will work on the tablet soon, but Jux is also building dedicated mobile apps for capturing and posting from anywhere.

Try it out. Visit jux.com on your iPad and browse the gallery.

What are some of the best responsive Web designs you've ever seen?

In another announcement for Android users, WordPress for Android 1.5 is now available, and its major new feature is a blog reader for the WordPress blogs you follow. You can even follow non-WordPress blogs using RSS.

WordPress is a little late to the following party. Though the platform is doing great for publishers and developers, Tumblr, which is built on a following model, is reeling in much more traffic. The new Posterous refresh is also centered around this model, and its new iPhone app emphasizes following and reading the same way today's WordPress for Android update does. Even Facebook has given in to the following model. Don't say "I told you so," Twitter.

Other recent WordPress updates focus on increasing reader engagement as well. The comments panel has been improved to keep track of the regulars, and easy, secure access to the WordPress API has enabled new third-party applications that go beyond simple plug-ins.

How do you like to follow your favorite publishers? RSS? Twitter? Or inside your own platform like Tumblr, Posterous or WordPress? Let us know in the comments.

The Posterous iPhone app has been updated to incorporate spaces, but the announcement doesn't mention the Android app. Posterous has also improved ways of finding and following spaces, adding a 'Popular' tab for real-time highlights from around Posterous and an 'Activity' tab showing likes, comments, follows and such from your spaces and those you follow.

Posterous Reborn

We used to think of Posterous as a light blogging service, and it wasn't clear how it distinguished itself from its competitors. Sure, it had nifty little features like custom domains and built-in Markdown support, but these weren't features for everyday users. Tumblr, the clearest competitor, began to leave Posterous in the dust. But after today's left turn, it's not even clear Posterous and Tumblr are in the same game anymore.

So, why share to your social circles using Posterous instead of Facebook or Google Plus? Well, does Facebook or Plus let you choose your own theme for each friend list or circle? Posterous does. Can each Facebook friend list or Google Plus circle have its own custom Web address? Not without more trouble than it's worth. Posterous has issued a challenge to the "silo" model. It lets you share the right stuff with the right people in the way that suits you best.

Posterous Users, Rest Assured

In the announcement, the change is described as a "brand new service for the Web, iPhone and Android that replaces the current service." That sounds drastic, and existing users could be forgiven for feeling a bit unnerved, but as it turns out, existing Posterous sites will survive the transition to Spaces just fine.

Clearly, while we've all been watching all the big Tumblr and WordPress news, the Posterous team has been busy in the kitchen.

What Exactly Is Blogging, Anyway?

WordPress and Tumblr are showing great usage numbers, and maybe that's why their competitors are moving to distinguish themselves. Blogger, Google's popular blogging platform, may be rolled into Google Plus in some way, and Google's social network is itself a fairly compelling publishing platform for medium-length posts. New startups like Jux are taking what might be called a "maximalist" approach to blogging, turning it into a bombastic, full-screen experience. Posterous, for its part, seems to be hanging onto its focus on simplicity and usability.

Which publishing tools do you like best? Let's discuss in the comments.

The app doesn't offer a full-fledged blog post editor, but instead it offers simple photo uploading, tagging and location services, concentrating on features that complement mobile blogging. Its features are comparable to the Android app, which went live in February. The previous iPhone client for Blogger was built by a third party.

Which free blogging platform do you prefer and why? Let us know in the comments.

The blog provider has also announced two new third-party apps for WordPress.com blogs to make them more social and shareable. Feedfabrik now allows WordPress.com users to turn their blogs into books, both in PDF and physical formats (and there's currently a 10% discount offer). Empire Avenue, the free "Social Stock Market" game, has also announced WordPress integration, allowing WordPress bloggers to incorporate their blogging influence into their share price.

The new apps can make WordPress blogs more shareable, but the updated Comments panel adds better social dynamics at a more basic level. Comments are the lifeblood of engagement on a blog, and the new tools will help WordPress authors keep better track of their most engaged readers. Last month, WordPress enabled automated sharing of posts to Facebook pages, which is another way to increase engagement, but as we've found at ReadWriteWeb, automated posting doesn't produce great results. Better comment management could help blog authors keep up conversations with a more authentic voice.

WordPress has reported major growth recently. It currently powers nearly 15% of the world's websites and sustains a thriving community of self-employed developers.

Have you used WordPress? Are you a WordPress developer? Tell us about it in the comments.

Power, of course, is not everything when it comes to publishing. Jux isn't lean like Posterous or clean like WordPress, whose publishing platform powers nearly 15% of the world's websites. Compared to blog posts that feel more like pages, a Jux post is more like a Times Square billboard. It takes some time to load. There's an animated loading bar between screens, especially when editing. But it's worth the wait. Perusing a Jux profile is like taking a deep dive into someone's ideas.

For pages that look this rich, the editing tool is remarkably easy to use. It appears in a drop-down window above the page, and changes appear live underneath as you make your tweaks. It has filters and effects for photos, as well as some clip-art (read: mustaches), it offers a decent range of snazzy Web fonts, and it displays finished posts in a dynamically laid-out, Tumblr-like gallery. And as amazing as these full-screen pages look right on Jux, you can also embed them elsewhere. It handles quick posts, short films, and epic rants with equal grace.

It's a bit hard to navigate Jux, though. The URL structure for posts is not intuitive or easy to share and sharing anything requires you to use the internal navigation bar and share buttons. But getting to a user's gallery page is easy enough (I got jon.jux.com). Jux is such an immersive experience that getting around it doesn't feel like you're on the normal Web anymore. That's not necessarily a bad thing; there's no question that Jux is trying to create a new kind of content.

Dive into the featured Jux gallery to see what this app is capable of.

Jux has the backing of Mark Gorton, responsible for LimeWire, and CEO Ted Metcalfe is the guy who "eats, sleeps and showers with the product. When he's not meditating." To meet the rest of the team, check out their Jux post. Post? Gallery? SlideShow? This is such a new kind of content, it's hard to know what to call it. I asked Ted what it is, in his words:

"Wherever they create, bloggers work to find a unique voice and their readers discover, and ultimately cherish, that voice. This happens so much more instantly and palpably on Jux. When you visit an individual post or check out someone's whole Jux, you get saturated with signals - full-bleed images, color, and type ... big brief blockquotes and long thoughtful articles and slideshows ... all with zero distractions. A world takes shape.

"And this has implications for how you create as well. You're inspired to try more style and tones and a greater variety of genres to give shape to that world. Some of the creative options lend themselves to quick sharing, some to deep, evergreen content. People push it in different directions. And also create multiple Juxes around individual passions and Saturday-morning epiphanies. It's all much more porous, yet really real. Between tiny tweets and full-blown websites or blogs, lies a huge, under-explored range of stuff to make!"

It's not just about the content in itself for Metcalfe, either. "There are also brute content politics," he says. "The major media are trying to own the tablet - and, by implication, every screen - with superior publishing tools." It's worth noting here that Jux posts look pretty spectacular on a tablet. "Jux and its peers need to help individual creators flood these devices with the sort of beautiful, immersive, fullscreen experiences that people wanna kick back with," Metcalfe says. "We need to ditch our spiral-notebook-style blogging in favor of high def."

What do you think of Jux? Can you see a use for it in your work? Tell us in the comments.

Spredfast wants to be a new player in the field of social campaign management, and it is set to compete with other big names like Objective Marketer and Radian6.

Like single-user tools of this variety, such as TweetDeck or Ping.fm, Spredfast is set up to work with any of the standard social networks. In addition to that, however, it will work with a number of content management systems, from Drupal and Wordpress to Movable Type. And with its user-role management, you can not only say who can post to what, but whether or not it can go live or needs to be reviewed by another user before being published. On-site scheduling and voice management allows a single tweet to be sent out and then be retweeted, in slightly altered forms, by any number of other accounts over time, creating the illusion of a discussion. We may never trust what we see people talking about on the web again.

In addition to multiple users, roles, networks and blogging platforms, Spredfast is also set to handle multiple campaigns. So, if ReadWriteWeb were to suddenly start using the system, for example, we could track activity for ReadWriteStart and ReadWriteEnterprise separately.

That brings us to the last point - tracking and metrics. As of now, the system has already incorporated Google Analytics and is looking to work with Armature and WebTrends in the near future. But even now, it offers full reports on the effectiveness of your message.

Campaigns are judged with three primary measurements - engagement, reach and activity. Put simply, these look at your interaction with your audience, the size of your audience, and how much you are pushing your message out onto the Web. Beyond these basic ranks, however, the system will give you detailed reports showing you how many "likes" you've gotten on a specific message on Facebook, or how many times a tweet has been retweeted. But that's even just the tip of the metrics iceberg, as it keeps stats on each individual tweet, blog post, status update, what have you offering a full variety of data on click-throughs, impressions and whatever you would expect from a traffic analytics service.

Starting today, the system is available on a monthly basis starting at $50 per month, per campaign, for a single user. The "Enterprise" plan, at $100 per month, per campaign, allows for multiple users. Social Agency plans to announce another plan in February that will allow for unlimited users and campaigns, but the details for that are not yet available. For a program with this many features at launch, we only see it getting better.

This hardly comes as a surprise to us tech geeks who spent our younger days alternating between writing critical theses on esoteric forums and getting assaulted by grammar Nazis on said forums. Although we may take it for granted that voluminous written communication online builds writing skills, others decry the lack of formality in most tween and teen lexicons. Is "text speak" as much a concern as enhanced writing skills are a benefit?

When researchers asked the children to rate their writing skills, 47 percent of those who were non-bloggers and didn't use social networking sites said that their writing skills were good. The online set projected higher levels of confidence; of those who maintained blogs, 61 percent said their writing was good or very good.

Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust, told BBC News, "Our research suggests a strong correlation between kids using technology and wider patterns of reading and writing."

He continued to say that online engagement can lead to offline creativity, such as story writing and song composition.

And what about the "LOL OMG c u l8r" informality of text and chat communiqués?

"Our research results are conclusive," said Douglas. "The more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills." Or at least, the more children are accustomed to using the written word, the more confident and comfortable they will be with written communication in general.

If you think regular bloggers get trolled in their comments sections, the discussion on Blogband is likely to get heated. Comments will be moderated before being posted and any off-topic rants will appear on the Off Topic Comments page. While the page is currently empty, depending on the decisions made about fiber, ISPs and infrastructure, it's likely to light up like a Christmas tree and read like The Best of Craigslist.

Like Clipmarks, Amplify works via a browser extension. When you click the button it adds to your toolbar, orange boxes appear on the page you're viewing allowing you to select the text you want to clip. You can also select text using your mouse. The boxes surround the text up until a paragraph break, so if you want to add more text to your clipping, you just have to click again on the following sections until you've grabbed all you want to save. Images can be clipped as well.

The next step is to click the "Click Here to Amplify it!" button. That brings you to your clip blog's "Save page" where you can fill in more info like the title of the post and any additional commentary you want to add. By the way, your clip blog is called a "Clog," which is kind of funny, but to be honest, we're not entirely sure the term will catch on.

The clip blog reminds us a lot of Tumblr site, a scaled down blog platform for sharing tidbits from around the web. (If you'd rather post to your Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, or LiveJournal site, you'd be better off using the Clipmarks solution instead.)

Before you post to your "clog," you have the option to check a box and post the clip to Twitter. You can even customize how the beginning of the tweet should read. If you look further down the page, you'll see a link that says "post this clip to Facebook, Delicious, or Clipmarks." Clicking here will take you to a new page where you can configure these services, too.

Once you've added the additional services, they'll be checked by default every time you clip something and post to your clip blog. If you don't want to always tweet or update Facebook, you'll have to uncheck the checkboxes on the "Save this Clip" page with each use of Amplify. We wish there was a setting that would let those boxes be unchecked by default for those of us who don't want to over-share.

If you decide later that you want to add or remove services, you can no longer do so from the "Save clip" page of your blog - you'll have to log into Amplify and access your Admin settings from there - a bit of an annoyance, but one we can live with.

Great Features: Groups and Sharing from Your RSS Reader

There are three features that make Amplify the better choice for clipping, in our opinion: Twitter sharing, of course, but also groups and the ability to share from RSS. The groups feature lets multiple users from a business, organization, class, etc. create a community site to which they all contribute. Because the groups can be synced with Twitter and Facebook, this can be an easy way to keep up a shared Twitter account or Facebook page.

The other great feature for voracious RSS users is the ability to share clips directly from your feed reader, be it Google Reader or Bloglines. When you use Amplify from either of these services, it will find the source URL and link back to the original page - not the feed URL. That makes Amplify a handy way to tweet, bookmark, or share the best content from your feeds without having to open up the article in a separate window.

To get started with Amplify, sign in from the main page using your Twitter account. If you don't use Twitter, you can create an Amplify account instead. You'll then see the option to install the browser extension (Firefox only) which is the last step before you can start using the service. For more info on Amplify, you can view the YouTube video embedded below.

Looking just below the surface of this big news, though, there are a number of things going on that make absolutely no sense to us. Facebook's management appears to have lost its grip on reality. The population of Facebook dwarfs that of scores of countries in the physical world; these foundational documents are of immense importance and raise big red flags.

We're excited about the prospect of increased openness and transparency at Facebook. Facebook is immensely important as a sociological phenomenon. We have a lot of questions about the document. Unfortunately today's press call ended after only 5 questions were asked. Imagine a government body presenting its founding documents at a press conference and taking only 5 questions!

Here are the big problems we've seen so far with how things are going down. The contradiction between goals to change the world and promises to obey local laws is the most important.

Facebook is Delusional About its Relationship With Users

Today's announcement came in large part from the controversy earlier this month about the Facebook Terms of Service. The company cut its TOS from 15 pages to 5 pages, it said today, and it made some mistakes when it did so. Users alleged that Facebook's new Terms claimed ownership over their photos, videos and other content posted to the site. Facebook quickly backtracked and said again today that users, not Facebook, own the content on the site. (Though we can't export it elsewhere yet.)

What's delusional about the company's position? Multiple company officials on the call today said that the controversy showed how much of a sense of ownership users have over Facebook and that they wanted a sense of participation in its governing. (You complain about us because you love us!) We'd argue that it is pretty clear people have a sense of ownership instead over their content and want Facebook to keep its hands off. Ownership of content, not the lack of input on policy, was what people were upset about.

Facebook appears to forget that it's just one of many ways people use the internet. It's wildly popular today, but just as people have used other social networks in the past - they have other options for social networks to use in the future. It reminded us of the obnoxious post Zuckerberg put up announcing the Facebook Connect service, instructing users who visited other sites without Facebook Connect to contact those sites and "tell them you want to Connect." We grumbled under our breath at the time that connecting is a fundamental part of the human experience and not a Facebook specific word. The smarminess was nauseating.

Let's keep everyone's place in this situation straight - Facebook is fortunate enough to have won millions of users, but it's for the connection with each other and self expression that they come and stay - not because of any loyalty to Facebook.

Did You Say Data Portability??

Part of the new Facebook Principles document reads as follows:

They should have the freedom to share it with anyone they want and take it with them anywhere they want, including removing it from the Facebook Service. People should have the freedom to decide with whom they will share their information, and to set privacy controls to protect those choices. Those controls, however, are not capable of limiting how those who have received information may use it, particularly outside the Facebook Service.

That flies in the face of years of stonewalling on the part of Facebook around the issue of Data Portability, the ability by users to move their content in and out of Facebook (not delete it from Facebook, export it someplace else). Facebook has made a lot of good points about overlapping privacy concerns, something we've hoped they would come up with innovative solutions for. Now they say we have a fundamental right to move our data around? Surely they don't mean that, not like many users mean it.

As Mark Jaquith said this afternoon on Twitter, "wake me up when FB TOS doesn't forbid exporting your profile. Until then, I don't control my data in any real sense."

Voting May Not Be a Good Idea

Facebook said today that policy changes in the future will be voted on if they stir up enough comments to warrant it. There is no clear public standard for what will be voted on, no details about how the voting will work, etc. Perhaps more important, voting about changes to Facebook may not always be a good idea.

Facebook is a trailblazer, the company is changing the world with technologies like the newsfeed, Facebook Connect, Beacon, etc. Many of those changes were wildly unpopular when they were first made. Product changes will not be put up for a vote, but surely the most dramatic product changes have policy implications. The creation of the Facebook Newsfeed saw huge, vocal protests for weeks. If any part of that change had been put up for a vote it would never have passed. And that would have been a terrible loss because the Newsfeed is very important. Sometimes the technologists at Facebook know what's best; crying Uncle and putting important decisions up for a vote could in some cases be a very bad idea.

You Can't Always Play Nice and Change the World Too

This final issue is the most important one. One of the questions asked during the press phone call today concerned privacy laws. How would Facebook deal with different privacy laws in different locations? The company said they would follow whatever laws were in place where a user lived. On the face of it that might not sound so bad, but in practice a promise to always follow the law is in direct contradiction with the company's goals of changing the world.

The proposed Facebook Principles document begins with these words:

We are building Facebook to make the world more open and transparent, which we believe will create greater understanding and connection. Facebook promotes openness and transparency by giving individuals greater power to share and connect, and certain principles guide Facebook in pursuing these goals. Achieving these principles should be constrained only by limitations of law, technology, and evolving social norms.

Excuse me? How can a commitment to change the world towards openness thus mean anything when openness is against the law in many places around the world? When social norms often favor authoritarian control? As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said "Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted."

Presumably if King had lived at the time of Facebook and his local laws required the company to hand over the Friends Lists of black subversives, Facebook would comply.

We're committed to change towards openness but we'll follow local laws. As The Committee to Protect Bloggers said today, "That's what Google, Yahoo, Cisco & every other company that has helped imprisoned bloggers has said."

Facebook's grand gestures towards voting, participation, transparency and the like are empty words for millions of people who know that when push comes to shove the company has promised it will co-operate with authoritarian governments in controlling the citizens of countries like China, Iran and elsewhere.

Nice Try, Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg is a young man at the helm of a huge company, touching hundreds of millions of lives all over the world, at a time of dramatic social upheaval caused in large part by the kind of technology he is helping create. That's no small job. We hope he can pull it off.

See also: Our Open Thread discussion about today's Facebook news.

The concept behind Zcapes is somewhat reminiscent of the mobile social network Brightkite's feature called "placestreams." With Brightkite, users can post text and images surrounding a particular place or event directly from their mobile phone. Zcapes is very similar in concept - except instead of being a social network whose primary goal is connecting you to other users, a Zcape page is just the placestream, nothing more. However, Zcape pages aren't limited to a physical place in the real world or an event like a conference or concert. They can also be created for an activity, like "watching the Oscars" or a group - like your coworkers, for example. The pages you create can be set to public or private, as you choose.

If you want to tap into conversations surrounding a particular keyword, the service could easily do that. However, it's not limited to web chatter alone. In addition to tracking the real-time web of Twitter updates and Flickr uploads, the service can also track RSS feeds while letting you integrate messaging options, text boxes, images, polls, RSVPs, maps of a particular location, and other features that a traditional blog might have right into your Zcape page. (You can see Zcape in action by checking out this one for ReadWriteWeb: http://rww.zcapes.com or this one for SmartMobs, which recently introduced the service to us.)

How To Share Your Creation

Once you have created a Zcape of your own, you can share it via email, Twitter, or even QR code. Upon creation, the service provides an image of a QR barcode which you could easily stick somewhere in the real world - especially if you had one of these portable, ink-free photo/sticker printers. Make sure to save the image right way, though, because once we left that final page of the creation process, we had trouble finding the sharing options again.

To interact with the Zcapes created by others, you'll need to sign up for a free account. You can then "Favorite" Zcapes by clicking on "Love this!" which is found at the bottom of all Zcape pages. The pages themselves are designed to be viewed from a mobile phone, not a desktop/laptop PC, as you can see from the image below, captured on a laptop.

Where Does Zcapes Fit In?

To understand where exactly a product like Zcapes fits in, you can refer to the following diagram, which will either simplify the concept for you or confuse you, depending on how well you interpret diagrams!:

Zcapes was founded by Raimo van der Klein, Claire Boonstra and Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, who are mobile service architects from a strategic creative consultancy called SPRXmobile based in Amsterdam. Together with their technical partner Triple IT, they built this service which launched last week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

For more information about Internet-connected "things", see the following articles: "5 Companies Building an Internet of Things" and "The Next Node on the Net: Your Car!"