ReadWriteWeb

This morning at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Jason Grigsby of Cloud Four, a mobile and web development firm, presented at a session about the mobile web's future. Specifically, he focused on the different types of mobile applications we have today - native apps, mobile web apps, and hybrid apps - and the challenges of developing across multiple platforms.

Today eBay is launching their eBay Selling Manager Applications beta, a new platform which allows third-party developers to embed their own custom applications within the Selling Manager at eBay. If you're not a heavy eBay user, you may not be aware what this is: the Selling Manager is the part of the site where sellers, primarily those using eBay professionally, can manage every aspect of their business from invoicing, to inventory tracking, to shipping and a lot more. With the new Applications Beta, these sellers will now have the capability to pick and choose from a number of third-party apps which will help them better manage their eBay business.

U.S. government agencies can now officially use YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, and blip.tv, using special service agreements that comply with federal terms and conditions. Today, the General Services Administration (GSA) announced that, after nine months of negotiations, the government has signed agreements with these companies that will allow federal agencies to officially post content to these sites. The GSA is also negotiating special terms and conditions with MySpace and Facebook, and it has already determined that Twitter's service agreement is in line with federal requirements.

Google has announced that the company now offers a secure way for third party websites to access any user's list of friends, with their permission, and based on a proposed new industry standard. No more giving away your GMail password and then having random services you want to try go into your account and scrape the information there.

Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.

YouTube launched a handy new page last night that aggregates all the videos from more than 100 institutions of higher education around the US. YouTube.com/edu now serves up campus tours, free lectures, research and other college news all in one place. Search queries can be limited to the Edu part of the site as well.

This is a great idea and we expect that young people who discover it will appreciate it. At first glance it looks better to us than iTunes University. This could genuinely help young people make more informed decisions about what schools to apply to. There's also a lot of great content on the site for anyone to learn from.

While most developers are proficient in several languages, today's economic climate coupled with advances in technology has meant that oftentimes developers need to pick up a new language quickly. And although most developers are typically fluent in the security issues surrounding their specific languages and do their best to ensure that the code they produce is secure, security vulnerabilities in new language environments may not be as well understood.

Enter Fortify, a software security company that has organized security issues by both vulnerability category and by language so developers can easily ascertain the types of errors that have an impact on security.

At its annual MIX conference, Microsoft today introduced a number of interesting new products, including a beta of Silverlight 3 and a preview version of Blend 3, its Silverlight development tool. Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform also received a number of major updates today. Microsoft also announced that Silverlight 2 has been installed on more than 300 million PCs since its launch in October 2008 and that NBC will use Silverlight 3 to power its online coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Are any application developers making money on Facebook? Not really, but they could be. According to Bruce Richardson of AMR Research, less than 2% of Facebook developers make any "real" money. Part of the problem is that Facebook has not had any decent e-commerce engine for monetizing applications - until now, that is. Instead, developers have had to rely on the advertising model, which isn't always a good fit for their type of application, nor is it all that effective. Z-Commerce, a new service launching today at DEMO 09, aims to address this problem. But the big question is this: are there any Facebook applications worth paying for?

Stack Overflow, the software developers' Q&A site created by rock star programmers Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, saw 3 million unique visitors last month - just the 4th month the site has been live, according to Spolsky in the latest episode of the Stack Overflow podcast. Now the team plans to create a spin-off site serving what they believe is an even bigger audience, IT professionals.

Traffic wise, the well constructed site appears to be an early and unqualified success. It's also a lot of fun to read. The people behind the long established but widely reviled paid Q&A site Experts Exchange must be struggling to control bodily functions.

Facebook senior engineer Charlie Cheever flew to Kampala, Uganda, a couple of weekends ago to lead a Facebook Developers Garage and teach 100+ East African students how to take advantage of the growing Facebook economy using the company's apps platform and APIs. Leila Chirayath (founder of Samasource) and I (from Appfrica Labs) were also involved. The three of us organized this event to offer not only a hands-on workshop, but a concrete path for any developer in the region to expand his or her network and develop for an international audience.

Mozilla has cultivated one of the most interesting and healthiest ecosystems for extension developers around its popular Firefox browser. The problems with this, of course, is that whenever Mozilla releases a new version of Firefox, developers have to make sure that their software is compatible. For the next release of its browser, Mozilla aims to make sure that 90% of those add-ons that make up the top 95% of add-on usage will be compatible with the latest version of Firefox. The release of Firefox 3.1 is still a while off, but currently only 28% of the top extensions are ready for the transition.

Microsoft today announced that it will give away software and services to qualifying software startups as part of its newly announced BizSpark initiative. To qualify for this program, a startup has to be privately held, in business for under three years, and generate less than $1 million per year in revenue. Once accepted into BizSpark, enrollment is free, but the startups will have to pay a nominal fee of $100 when they leave the program.

Facebook Connect - the service that allows developers to access Facebook data from outside of the Facebook chrome - has been met with both cautious optimism and healthy skepticism. And with good reason. The service holds the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with social sites the Web over. At the same time, it gives Facebook access to a great deal of information about how users interact with other social sites.

In a couple of reports released today, Forrester Research makes projections on the future of enterprise web technologies. Forrester predicts that social networking tools and internal wikis "will have the greatest impact on workplace collaboration". It is bullish too on forums and RSS, which Forrester claims "have a future in the enterprise but are currently underused". Mashups are also mentioned in the report - previously they'd claimed it would be a $700 million market by 2013. As for which technologies will decline, Forrester says that podcasts have "a limited future as an enterprise tool".

Salesforce.com was founded less than 10 years ago, in March 1999. This is hard to remember when you walk into the Dreamforce event at the Moscone and see all the companies, both large and small, proclaiming that they are part of their ecosystem. Salesforce.com, more than any other company, can claim to have popularized the SaaS concept with their catchy "No Software" logo. Today they are announcing their next step forward.

Yesterday, 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?

When Google announced Android, its software platform for mobile devices, it released an SDK for developers to work with, but it also promised to eventually release the code under an open-source license. Today, Google and its partners in the Open Handset Alliance did exactly that. You can now download the code and help Google and its partners to develop it further. The source code has been released under the Apache 2.0 license and consists of the complete codebase of Android, including all the libraries, media codecs, and applications.

The popular and quirky MOO.com is a print shop providing stickers, postcards, business cards and personal introduction cards, which are narrower and longer cards. The products can feature artistic images you select from the site's offerings or can be printed using photos you upload to the service. Notable for promoting the artwork of hip designers, the MOO service is a favorite among the young and hip as well as among those who want to stand out as being non-traditional.

The Mozilla Foundation announced this morning that it has hired Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, co-founders of Ajaxian and the Ajax Experience, to run a new Developer Tools Lab aimed to make Open Web development easier and more powerful. The term Open Web refers to a paradigm in which data and users can move easily from one standards-based application to the next, without being hindered by proprietary technology or vendors hording user data.

The all-too contentious relationship between Apple the developers who build apps for the iPhone has gotten a little friendlier this morning with an announcement that Apple will drop the requirement that developers sign a Nondisclosure Agreement regarding the software. NDAs are, by their nature, threatening, awkward and unfriendly. Sometimes they are necessary but when concerning software that thousands of people are developing on - an NDA probably isn't very realistic, either.

Shouts of joy rang out through the iPhone dev community this morning when the announcement appeared on the Apple site.