ReadWriteWeb

More and more web developers are earning their mobile wings. Mountain View-based Appcelerator just announced their beta release of Titanium Mobile - an open source, open standards tool that lets developers build applications with native UI elements, code compilation, device storage and geo-location APIs on both the iPhone and Android.

With Appcelerator's new mobile offerings, web programmers can avoid the pitfalls of Objective-C or Java, and use basic Javascript, HTML, and CSS to build their apps.

While OpenID is one of the more interesting online identity concepts, usability issues have clearly hampered its mainstream adoption. Flock, MySpace, and OpenID provider Vidoop have now come together to develop a browser extension for Flock that makes using OpenID a lot easier for Flock users. Besides managing your OpenID credentials, the extension also detects when a site supports OpenID and lets you sign in with the click of a button.

Update: We've been contacted by members of the OpenID community who argue that we've mischaracterized the controversy in this post. Additional complications not discussed here include the now-ceased process of whitelisting domains that could use Google OpenID.

After we wrote about Google becoming an OpenID provider yesterday, a number of reports suggested that Google was not following the OpenID guidelines closely and that it was basically forking OpenID to suit its own agenda.

Giftag may not be a revolutionary product, but it is kind of nifty. The product was created by Best Buy (BBY), a retailer that didn't have an online registry service. Instead of creating one, though, they decided to create Giftag instead: a browser plugin that lets you make online wishlists and share them with your friends. The technology will be integrated into Best Buy's web site in the coming months.

Just a few days ago, we wrote about OpenClip - an open framework for implementing copy and paste on the iPhone. Developer Zac White had found a loophole that allowed for the creation of a shared clipboard, as long as all applications followed the same guidelines. Today, however, Zac announced that the next generation of the iPhone firmware (2.1) will close this loophole. OpenClip will still work within a single application, but sharing between applications is now impossible.

What are the number one problems facing today's social networks? According to the young developer Vladislav Chernyshov they are: privacy issues, distraction and time-wasting, quantity over quality, ads, and lack of control over your identity. That's why he, Dmitry Gorpinchenko, and Andrew Chernyh, all students at Novosibirsk State Technical University (NSTU) in Russia, have founded Genome, an upcoming next-generation social networking service which addresses the main problem of Web 2.0: the ever-increasing quantity of Web 2.0 resources and the lack of tools to manage them.

Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog flipped the switch tonight on a major overhaul of user profile pages and now integrates activity data from other services around the web.

Less than a week after a small investment in the ex-Googler founded FriendFeed put lifestreaming on a lot of peoples' maps - the entry of a Yahoo! property could be a game changer in a market full of startups.

Ian Rogers, VP Video and Media Applications at Yahoo! (prior to that GM of Yahoo! Music) has just published an epic post based on a talk he gave at a music industry conference in December. In it he outlines his vision for an open Media Web. It's very long, but is an excellent overview of how current Web music and video trends are slowly usurping the 'old media' world of the record companies and TV networks. His central theme is that "there is more opportunity in leveraging the scale of the Web than trying to create scarcity." He says that we can "do this together by creating a loosely-coupled value chain including users as value creators."

An interesting new online video series, called Open Media Web, debuted today. The first episode is an interview with Yahoo's Lucas Gonze - who created music playlisting service WebJay, acquired by Yahoo! in January 2006. The interview was conducted by Chris Messina and Brian Oberkirch. In it Gonze discusses his thoughts on the Open Media Web, on user-respectful business models and coercive business practices, and business opportunities for open systems and data.

Earlier this week we announced our Best BigCo of 2007 as Facebook and our Best LittleCo of 2007 as Twitter. In this post we'll give you our pick for Most Promising for Web in 2008.

Originally we planned to pick the most promising Web company for 2008. But in the end the ReadWriteWeb team decided to follow the example set by Time magazine last year, when it named "You" as its 'Person of the Year'.