ReadWriteWeb

Facebook's social graph of you isn't you. It's an approximation and an extrapolation based on little clues you've left lying around the Web. Using your Facebook or Google identity gives those services more data points about what you do, but that doesn't mean it substitutes for whom you are.

The central thing wrong with the social Web is that users don't own their identities. Users share themselves with identity services - like Facebook and Google - that then act as representatives of the people using them. Facebook and Google allow other sites to rent those identities. But when you log in to a new service using Facebook Connect, you are actually constraining your identity to the Facebook version of it, though you're expanding Facebook itself. Do you want to be the same version of yourself everywhere else as you are on Facebook? Or Google?

The term "reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing" or "RAND" (which may or may not include the "F" for "fair," depending on one's whim) was evidently coined long before any group of people came to a mutual decision upon what constituted "reasonable." At any rate, the debate over what's reasonable and what's "F" has now gone full-throttle, with Google's revelation Wednesday that it perceives prospective partner Motorola Mobility's (MMI) definition as reasonable enough, and that it's 2.25% of retail sale price minus subsidies.

That might not sound like much, but if you compound all the essential patents for which a manufacturer may need to obtain a license just to produce an ordinary smartphone, the sum total may become quite a chunk. That's the argument Apple made to European telecom regulators last November, in a letter revealed only last Tuesday. With Apple and Google now on the record, Microsoft could not afford to be left out of the discussion.

When RWW webmaster Jared Smith sent me screenshots of yet another change to Google's top navigation bar, I thought it was a bug. Then I got it, too. It's a weird hybrid of the old, black nav bar with plain, gray text and the new, light one with the icons and Google search box. Sure enough, just now, Google announced the change, so it will be rolling out to all users soon.

The black bar, sometimes called the "sandbar," only appeared in the middle of last year as Google began to redesign its interfaces, and the gray Google Bar was launched in November. Some users still have the sandbar, and others have the gray one. Now there's a strange hybrid appearing, and it's sort of the worst of both worlds.

The next version of Chrome will help older computers catch up with rapidly accelerating Web-based graphics. The upcoming Chrome release will improve the performance of hardware-accelerated 2D animations using Canvas, which include many Web-based games and other graphically-intensive sites.

It will also let systems with older GPUs use SwiftShader for 3D graphics instead of WebGL, which older GPUs can't handle. It won't look quite as good, but users with older systems will still get more 3D content than they currently can. The new Chrome beta with these features is available today.

The Wall Street Journal has revived rumors about Google launching a cloud storage service called Drive. The comparison everybody wants to make is to Dropbox. The thinking is that Google will challenge everyone's favorite start-up by releasing a native desktop and mobile Drive app with the same syncing features Dropbox users know and love.

Google Drive rumors have been around for many years, and they've always conformed to the understanding of "The Cloud" that has prevailed at the time. If it's not like Apple's iCloud, which is integrated into Apple's devices, then it must be like Dropbox, which lives on the Web but syncs through a client. But think outside the box for a minute. Google has new and unique cloud services that Dropbox and Apple don't. There's room for a third, stand-out option here.

If all goes according to plan, the same company which last year asserted that patents were essentially legal weapons in an unfair war against the Android operating system, will find itself the owner of one of the largest technology portfolios anywhere in the world. Today, Google took steps to assure many of Motorola Mobility's (MMI) existing licensees that it would adhere to that company's existing reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing practices for mobile technologies.

This after Apple sent a letter to a European Telecommunications Standards Institute last November 11 - as first reported by Dow Jones this morning - complaining that Google had not been forthcoming about what constitutes "reasonable" with respect to royalties.

Google just launched a page for Google+ developers. It will post news updates and info about events, conferences and hackathons. host weekly video hangouts to share updates, tips and tricks about the platform. Office hours are on Wednesdays between 11:30 a.m. and 12:15 p.m. Pacific. Hopefully, this is a sign of upcoming API releases, so Google+ developers can start, you know, developing.

The Google+ Platform Blog has been pretty quiet. Google SVP Vic Gundotra said in October that Google+ doesn't "want to make the same mistakes of others," - referring to Twitter - by opening the API too quickly to developers and then having to clamp down later. He said to look ahead to Google I/0 (since rescheduled for June 27-29) for major platform announcements.

Google breaks ground today on the super-fast fiber optic network it plans to build for the lucky residents of Kansas City, Kan. They'll get a 1 gigabit-per-second Internet connection, which will offer downloads 100 times faster than what most Americans get. Uploads will be a thousand times faster than average.

Kansas City won this privilege over 1,100 other cities in March 2011. Since then, Google and the city have been surveying, planning, and eating "way too much barbecue," says Google's manager, Kevin Lo. Today, they start laying cable. A few months behind the Kansas side, neighbors on the other side of the river in Kansas City, Mo. will get the hook-up as well.

If you're interested in Google's Dart as a potential replacement for JavaScript, you might want to take a peek at Dart Synonym. The Web app was hacked together by Aaron Wheeler and Marcin Wichary of Google to "map common JavaScript idioms to Dart."

Wichary is best known for his playable Pac-Man Google doodle. Wichary and Wheeler were curious about Dart, and decided to check out the language and libraries during a Dart hackathon with the team.

Microsoft gloated on its official blog today about the oodles of coverage of Google's new privacy policy. The post uses the word "discussion," but it only linked to the vigorous freak-outs in which many sites engaged. It mentions "concerns and worries" and "lack of choice," but it never explains what Microsoft is talking about. The central thesis is that "Google... made it harder, not easier, for people to stay in control of their own information."

The post then goes straight to the list of Microsoft products to which Google users can switch: Hotmail, Bing, Office 365 and Internet Explorer. How are these products better for users' "own information" than Google? Well, they don't read it to target ads. What else do they do with users' information? No explanation here. "We've left the light on for you. :)", VP Frank X. Shaw writes. You have to hand it to Microsoft for being so forward, but by rushing to the sales pitch, this post misses a huge opportunity to be informative. Is that because the information might be more complex than Microsoft (and the press) would care to admit?