Khris Loux and his company, Echo, have always had a tentative relationship with the lowly blog comment. Echo launched in 2009, described as a "blog commenting platform" much like Disqus. Right from the beginning, however, Echo went beyond the comment and aggregated all sorts of real-time data from around the Web to pull into the section normally reserved for comments. Now, Echo has gone beyond declaring the death of the comment and re-launched as a "real-time as a service" platform.

At its re-launch event today, the company brought out the big guns to show off just how useful it thinks its new incarnation will be. We got a chance to talk with them beforehand to go beneath a bit of the flashiness and we got a glimpse of a service that adds a new building block onto the Web and could bring the real-time Web to previously untouched corners of the Internet.

When we spoke to Echo CEO Khris Loux the other day, he laid it out for us quite simply.

"In the ways that print gave way to TV, static pages will give way," said Loux. "The challenge for the rest of the publishers on the Internet is that they're running static websites. The revenue has moved on from those sites."

He went on to explain that the primary form of real-time interaction on most sites is through Facebook comments or "likes" or Facebook Connect and, while those are good and valid tools that publishers should still use, they are not enough. According to Loux, the main problem there is that "Facebook and Twitter still control the experience and ultimately control the revenue."

The answer to all of this, of course, is the new version of Echo, which acts as a "real-time as a service" platform. It can help aggregate all manner of real-time data - from Facebook posts to Tweets to comments to blog posts on your own site - and help you and your users to interact with the content.

"Real-Time As A Service"

"We are putting forth the notion of 'real-time as a service.' Just like a start-up would no more build their own data center, a publisher or start-up should no longer build real-time. You could build Plancast with this. You could build Yammer," said Loux. "The Web is becoming designing blocks and Echo, real-time as a service, is the new block in town."

In many ways, Echo has done this all along - it has allowed publishers to pull in and aggregate real-time content to display, in real-time, on their site. The big difference now is that the service is acting more as a real-time platform and less as a simple service to display real-time content. Once it pulls in the data, it stores it and lets you work with it. It "socializes" it. It lets you interact with the data in ways that are based on what users do with it. They can vote content up or down, comment on it, share it socially, and based on these actions the publisher can display it differently. And, of course, it's all in real time. As Loux put it, Echo "doesn't care" what type of content you're dealing with, once it's in the system it can be treated the same as any other.

What Can Echo Do?

If you want to see the new Echo in action, you can take a look at the Sports Illustrated World Cup site from last year, which uses the new service. It aggregates on-site content, tweets and photos to create a real-time site about the World Cup. Another site, set up for teen idol Greyson Chance, shows off the ability to pull in content and interact with it in different ways. In this case, the stream of pictures is created from Tweets using the #WOTL hashtag. But, as Loux pointed out, it would only take another step to turn the entire page into a contest, letting users vote on each others' pictures and displaying them according to votes. That's the type of interactivity that echo is trying to enable with its new service.

Will it work? The company is coming out today with a number of big names, from NBC to Sports Illustrated to Reuters and Newsweek. But these are all companies that could certainly afford to build their own real-time components. The real question is whether or not small companies will use Echo as the real-time building block that Loux envisions. If Echo can bring the real-time Web to publishers big and small alike, in a way that they can interact with and own the content, it could make a big splash. Stay tuned below to watch today's launch event, live from SF MOMA.

Evernote also launched a new product called Evernote Trunk today. Currently, this is only a showcase for third-party services that integrate with Evernote, though the company plans to turn it into a full-blown Evernote app store in the near future.

At launch, the Evernote Trunk will feature about 100 products from 75 different companies. The showcase currently features Evernote-integrated services like business card scanners and voice notes applications. While Evernote itself isn't very social (and Evernote isn't interested in adding this functionality itself), applications in the Trunk will allow users to share their data and pull data from social apps into Evernote.

One of the launch partners for this integration is Seesmic, which will first integrate Evernote's functionality in its mobile clients. Evernote is also working with SAP StreamWork. In total, Evernote currently has about 2,000 API partners.

To some degree, this update turns Evernote into more of a platform and the company plans to expand the number of applications in the store over the coming weeks. This new functionality will be available in updated versions of Evernote's desktop apps today and should come to the mobile apps in the coming days. For the time being, Evernote will just showcase these apps, but the company also plans to allow developers to sell their services right in the Evernote Trunk. Even though Evernote's CEO Phil Libin argued that this is just a showcase and not an app store, the company's plans to allow developers to sell their apps through the Evernote Trunk clearly points in this direction.

The Current State of Evernote

Currently, Evernote users create about 312 memories every minute and the company's servers handle 42,000 requests per minute through its API. The majority of Evernote's users tend to use the service for both personal and business purposes and almost 20% of its users access the service on 3 or more devices.

With regards to Evernote's business model, CEO Phil Libin called the company a "freemium success." Evernote now has about 80,000 paying users. Taking a swipe at Facebook, Libin also noted that the company doesn't want to make money from mining its users' data.

"Where we're going from here is a platform strategy. We're going away from a one-off app strategy,"

In other words, OpenGraph's going mobile, in more ways than one.

First, Facebook considers and will approach further development of OpenGraph as a platform with infinite reach. Second, you'll soon see OpenGraph elements, like the Like button, growing out through unconnected mobile apps, as they already have through the non-mobile space. Facebook, after all, counts its mobile users at 150 million.

The "'Like' button for the entire Web" has now become the Like button for the post-Web world. Whether that is a good thing is highly debatable. That it is in fact a reality is not.

Social Intelligence

One of the examples Tseng gave, according to CNET, was of a location-aware coupon program that would gather feedback from friends and acquaintances. (Though if the current state of that technology is any indication, this example may remain just that for a while.)

The melding of app and social is happening apace. If Facebook's intuition is right, it will continue, especially in the area of marketing and commerce. Tseng was quoted on VentureBeat.

"If you can actually layer on top of [location] some kind of social intelligence -- not just the fact that I'm near Starbucks, but the fact that 30 of my friends really like this frappuccino over the last couple months -- I've got an interesting use case."

For a certain value of "interesting" anyway. Not necessarily thrilling, but maybe profitable.

"The creative potential of junaio is vast: AR Mashups, multiplayer games or scavenger hunts, interactive, indoor and outdoor exhibitions, tours with animated 3D characters, eduainment right on the spot and location independent gaming," the company expressed in press release. "It is up to the developer to challenge his imagination and become as much creative as he wants to."

On June 16, the top five channels with the most subscribers will become finalists in the contest, and the winner will ultimately be chosen by a panel of AR and IT aficionados, including Robert Scoble, Thomas Carpenter of Games Alfresco, and Dr. Christian Geiger, professor and mixed reality researcher at Düsseldorf University. I will also be participating on the judges panel, and am very excited to see the innovative AR channels that could come from this contest.

I am also thrilled that metaio and junaio are pushing the creative side of the contest. It is much easier for gimmicky AR applications to become popular, but these kinds of applications don't benefit AR as much as actual useful implementations. The subscriber threshold will merely be used to shorten the list of applications that will be considered for the prize, but that doesn't mean the most popular one will win.

For more information on the contest and on the junaio platform, check out their website, or if you happen to be in Germany, stop by at AR DevCamp in Berlin this Friday. There will be free sessions available for developers to learn the capabilities of the API and will provide a jumping-off point for those new to the platform.

Prepare for your mobile apps to get a lot more pushy.

With Xtify-enabled applications, messages can be customized and sent to users based on their exact location. For example, local search and discovery applications could send you messages about businesses close by. Shoppers could be sent mobile coupons as they walked through the mall. Restaurant guide applications could ping you with recommendations about top-rated nearby establishments. Travel apps could pop up interesting facts about landmarks, historical sites and other points of interest as you went sightseeing.

While obviously marketers are going to glom onto the opportunities a local-aware messaging platform like this offers, Xtify's SDK, as you can see in the examples above, could be used for more engaging mobile messages than just coupons, ads and geo-spam.

Why on Android First?

It's not surprising that Xtify launched first on Android instead of iPhone. Just prior to the platform's debut, Apple announced that location-aware ads would not be allowed in all of its mobile applications. Likely concerned with the potential for abuse, Apple posted a notice to their developer center reading:

"If you build your application with features based on a user's location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user's location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store."

Android has no such restrictions due to its nature as a more open platform where apps don't have to go through a review process prior to arriving in the app marketplace. That should help Xtify get a head start since developers can simply take the SDK and run with their ideas without fear that their app will be rejected.

The Demo Video

A few weeks ago at the CTIA Wireless conference, Motorola had the chance to demo the Xtify geo-aware push notification platform for Android and recorded a video of that experience. Motorola Program Manager Randy Ksar has just now posted the demo to the Motodev blog here. As the video shows, notifications can be completely customized and then tracked on the backend, displaying what notification was sent, when, to who and what actions were taken after it was sent. (Skip to minute 4:10 if you just want to see the message demo on the Android phone itself).

Xtify can also be integrated with existing content management systems or CRM systems, or it can run independently. On the platform, developers can create campaigns, trigger rules, run scheduled events, create personalized, dynamic messages, set geo-fences (e.g. apps know when you're at "home" versus at "work" and adapt accordingly) and access advanced reporting and analytics for evaluating a message's success and the campaign's ROI.

According to Xtify's VP of business development, Joshua Schiffman, the company has several very large media companies that are close to launching, but is not permitted to announce who and when at this time. He does note, however, that Xtify has seen interest from some "online and mobile publishers with tens of millions of users each month and location-relevant content," including those running movie booking services, restaurant review services, city event finders and travel services. They've also fielded inquiries from some big-box retailers, national brands, mid-size companies with a few million users and traditional publishers looking to deliver news updates.

Image credit on original post: FoneHome.

All platforms allow developers to create games for PCs, Macs, Nintendo Wiis, and iPhones. The free version, formerly known as Unity Indie, was previously priced at $199. Broke and/or stingy devs are welcomed to download the platform here. The pro version of Unity's platform will continue to sell for around $1,500.

In a statement released today, CEO David Helgason said, "With the explosive growth in new platforms and performance improvement in our Unity suite of products, we believe that there are no technical hurdles remaining for high quality interactive content everywhere.

"Now we are removing financial hurdles as well. Unity is mature enough and easy enough to use that it can be the entry point for those developers taking their first steps with the technology."

With the 2.6 release of the platform, Unity provides full support for external versioning tools such as Subversion, Perforce, or any other version control system. Unity has also added Visual Studio integration and can automatically sync a VS project to source code so all scripts are in the solution and IntelliSense is configured.

In the past, ReadWriteWeb has looked at Twitter's platform potential. The service has already been used to create meme trackers, emergency alert services, news feeds and brand monitoring tools. As the infrastructure and search have improved, Twitter has become the go-to site for real time media. But can the company make a Facebook-like leap?

In late May, Facebook had a valuation of $10 billion dollars based on a $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies. And like Twitter, while we've seen huge traffic numbers, Facebook only yesterday announced becoming cash-flow positive. If Twitter is attempting to become the "pulse of the planet" as suggested by the widely criticized leak of the company's internal documents, then perhaps $1 billion dollars isn't entirely off. Does Twitter have the assets to warrant such a high valuation, or are we looking at the makings of a speculative investment disaster? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

But what can be done? It's not like you can just quit Facebook, right? No - and you don't have to either. You just need to take a few precautions.

The problem in implementing these privacy options is that they're just too confusing for most non-tech savvy people to handle. And often, folks don't want to bother to take the time to learn. To simplify the process, we're offering five easy steps you can take today to help make your Facebook experience safer, more secure, and more private.

Step 1: Make Friend Lists

Yes, it will take some time, especially if you're connected to a couple hundred friends already. But this step, while not the quickest, is fairly simple. And it will be one of the most useful things you can do on Facebook.

Friend lists, like they sound, are lists for categorizing your friends into various groups. The nice thing about this feature is that once you set these lists up, you won't have to do it again. We suggest that you put your work colleagues and professional acquaintances into a friend list designated "work," personal friends you're not very close with into a list called "Acquaintances," and people you're related to into a list called "Family." Those three main categories will separate out the groups of "friends" who you may want to hide some information from.

To create a friend list, click on "Friends" at the top of the Facebook homepage. In the left-hand column, click "Friends" again under the "Lists" section. Now you'll see a button at the top that says "Create New List". Click it. In the pop-up that appears, you can name your list and pick members. If you've ever shared an application with your friends, the process of doing this will be very familiar.

When you've finished making lists, you'll be able to use them when selecting who can see what (or who can't!) when configuring the security settings described below.

Step 2: Who Can See What on Your Profile

At the top right of Facebook, there's a menu that many people probably ignore: "Settings." But this menu is now going to become your best friend. To get started, hover your mouse over the Settings menu and click "Privacy Settings" from the list that appears. On the next page, click "Profile." This takes you to a page where you can configure who gets to see certain information on your profile.

Before making changes, think carefully about the sorts of things you want public and the things you want private. Should "everyone" get to see photos you're tagged in? Or would you like to limit this only to those you've specifically chosen as Facebook friends?

Underneath each section on this page (basic info, personal info, status, etc.), you can designate who gets to see that particular bit of information. For anyone not using custom lists (see step 1), the best thing to enter here is "Only Friends." Anything else opens up your profile information to people you may or may not know. For example, choosing "Everyone" makes that info public, "Friends of Friends" lets your friends' friends see it, "My Networks and Friends" opens up your info to anyone in your networks - that means anyone in your city, your high school, your college, a professional organization you listed, etc.

You can also block certain groups from seeing these sections, too. On any item that offers an "Edit Custom Settings" option, you can click that link to display a pop-up box where you can choose people or lists to block (see where it says "Except these people"). If you haven't made custom lists as explained in step 1 above, you can enter individual names here instead. (Sorry, mom, dad, boss - this is where you get blocked.)

Step 3: Who Can See Your Address and Phone Number

Did you list your address and phone number on Facebook? While that's a handy feature, you may not want everyone you friended to have this information. To access this configuration page, you follow the same steps as above in step 2 to display the Profile Privacy page. You'll notice that the page has two tabs at the top - click on the one that reads "Contact information."

As previously described above, you can again use the drop-down lists provided to designate who gets to see what and/or block certain people or lists from viewing this information. The sections on this page include "IM Screen Name," "Mobile Phone," "Other Phone," "Current Address," "Website," and your email.

Step 4: Change Who Can Find You on Facebook via Search

Sick of getting friend requests from old high school pals? While for some the beauty of Facebook is that it lets you reconnect with everyone you ever knew throughout your life, others find this intrusive and annoying. You're not friends with any of these people anymore for a reason, right?

As it turns out, you can still enjoy Facebook without some folks ever knowing or finding you thanks to the search privacy settings.

Click on the "Settings" menu on Facebook's homepage and then click "Search" on the following page. You'll be taken to a Search Privacy page where you can specify who gets to find you on Facebook. Want to be wide open? Change the "Search Visibility" drop-down box to "Everyone." Want to keep it a little more limited? Select "My Networks and Friends," "Friends of Friends," or "My Networks and Friends of Friends" instead. Don't want anyone finding you on Facebook? Change it to "Only Friends." That means only the people who you've already friended can find you in a Facebook search.

On this page, you can also configure what information displays when your info is returned as a search result (e.g. your profile picture, your friend list, etc.). In addition, you can check and uncheck the boxes for network-based searches too. For example, if you don't want anyone from high school to find you, uncheck the box next to "people in high school networks."

Step 5: Stop Sharing Personal Info with Unknown Applications

Remember when we told you about what Facebook quizzes know about you? Using Facebook's default settings, you're unknowingly sharing a plethora of personal information (and your friends' info too!) with various Facebook applications and the developers who created them. The problem is so bad that the ACLU recently created their own Facebook Quiz to demonstrate how much information an app has access to.

It's time to take back control! From the Facebook homepage, hover your mouse over the "Settings" menu and choose "Privacy Settings" from the drop-down list. On the next page, click "Applications" then click the tab that reads "Settings" which is next to the "Overview" tab. (Oh, and if you want to really be freaked out, read that overview!)

On this page, you can check and uncheck boxes next to your personal information (picture, education history, wall, religious views, etc.). This controls what the applications your friends are using can see about you. Yes, your friends' apps can see your personal info if you don't make this change! Believe it or not, you don't have the same control over your own apps. The best you can do is head over to the Applications page and delete the apps you're not using anymore. (Use the "X" to remove them.) You see, once you authorize an application, you're telling it that it's OK to access any information associated with your account that it requires to work. While some developers may only pull what's actually required, many others just pull in everything they can. Scary, isn't it?

Conclusion

While this is by no means a comprehensive guide to Facebook security and privacy, these five steps can help you get started in creating a safer, more secure, and more private environment on the social network.

However, if you choose not to take any precautions, then you'll only have yourself to blame when an errant wall post or naughty photo makes its way online and straight into Grandma's News Feed, or worse, your boss's. These days, it's better to be safe than sorry, so go ahead and delve into those settings!

Unfortunately, there seemed to be a problem with the new security feature: it wasn't working...or at least, so it seemed. As it turns out, the problem was that users weren't informed as to how to properly activate the anti-phishing protection, an issue that points to a poor implementation of what could and should have been a major breakthrough in mobile computing technology.

Although Apple touted the anti-phishing protection back in March when they announced their 3.0 update, the new feature didn't actually materialize until this month when the company released the OS 3.1 iPhone/iPod Touch software. According to Apple, the anti-phishing protection feature will display an on-screen warning message when you attempt to visit a known malicious website.

Once the update was released, security researchers and other Apple enthusiasts began testing the new technology. The results were immediately disappointing. "I've not been able to get it to block anything," Michael Sutton, vice president of research at security firm Zscaler was quoted as saying. He had been testing the feature using known phishing websites identified by the anti-phishing database hosted at PhishTank. The Mac Security Blog also found after extensive testing that it simply "does not seem to work." MacWorld, however, found that the feature worked sometimes, but the inconsistency hinted that the technology was not "ready for public consumption," they reported.

What gives? Did Apple really release a broken feature? Were they even aware of the problem? Blogger Jim Dalrymple of The Loop decided to go straight to the source: he asked Apple.

Apple Says "You're Doing it Wrong"

Apparently, this was not a case of the anti-phishing technology being broken. It was a case of everyone simply "doing it wrong." As it turns out, in order for Safari's anti-phishing database to update, there are a few particular steps that need to be followed, explained an Apple spokesperson. After updating the phone to the OS 3.1 update, users need to do the following:

1. Launch the Safari web browser.
2. Connect to a Wi-Fi network.
3. Charge the iPhone with the screen off.

The spokesperson added that for "most users" this process should happen automatically when they charge their phone. We would have to disagree. "Most users" don't launch the Safari browser prior to charging their device - if anything, they close down any open applications before plugging in the phone to charge.

Poorly Implemented, Poorly Explained

If you follow the above steps, the feature will work. However, most users will never know to do this unless they happen to closely follow technology news and blogs. The general mainstream population - the very demographic Apple so craftily attracts via their billion dollar marketing campaigns - expects things to "just work." That is the Apple promise, after all.

Yet even on Apple's own website where they detail the various new features in the OS 3.1 update, there is no mention as to how the anti-phishing protection should be utilized. It simply lists that the feature exists. A helpful link to a "how to" guide would seem appropriate here or, at the very least, a footnote.

Having to perform the somewhat unintuitive steps to get the anti-phishing protection feature to function properly seems like an unusual miss for a company who generally makes things simple and straightforward. Why does it need Wi-Fi, for example? Apple claims that the Wi-Fi connectivity is required so as not to incur any additional data fees for the end user. But launching the browser? We almost wonder if it wouldn't have made better sense for Apple to implement the feature in the new iTunes update instead. The desktop software could retrieve the updated anti-phishing database from the internet upon launch and could then sync it to the iPhone or iPod Touch the next time it was plugged in. That would also alleviate another common problem with the current implementation - if the phone isn't plugged in long enough, the update won't complete and users will only be partially protected. On the other hand, the inclusion of the database via a sync would have ensured that all the data was copied over to the phone.

In the end, though, Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, reminds us that maybe we shouldn't be too hard on Apple. "Many other smartphones don't offer even the most elementary form of anti-phishing protection to their users," he says. That may be true but, unfortunately, the way Apple chose to deliver their anti-phishing protection feature means that most iPhone users won't be protected either.

Mossinac describes the implementation of "Facebook Connect for Mobile Web" as simple. With only four lines of code, developers can add a Facebook Connect button to their app in order to make it more social. The only requirement for implementation is that the handset has to have a web browser. In other words, "any site, any application, and any platform" can now tap into Facebook's APIs.

During the speech, Mossinac revealed how successful mobilizing Facebook's website has been for the company. In the past month, Facebook saw 65 million visitors accessing the site from mobile phones. This includes access via the mobile website itself as well as from SMS and other specialized mobile applications. It also represents a dramatic increase from December when only 20 million mobile users were counted.

Currently, the company has deals with 180 mobile operators worldwide. The U.S., U.K., and Canada are the biggest markets. However, Mossinac said emerging markets are growing fast. For example, "Facebook Indonesia is on fire," he noted. "The metrics are amazing."

Facebook's Goals

The announcement of the new mobile platform isn't just a play by Facebook to get more users to visit their site. The company's overall goal is to make applications - both mobile and otherwise - more social. "What we did for photo sharing, we are going to do for mobile applications," said Mossinac. He's referring to how Facebook introduced a way to make sharing photos a more social process. No longer do you have to visit a separate website and plow through photo after photo to find the ones of you and your friends. Instead, with Facebook's ability to "tag" photos, the addition of new and interesting photos to the social network are announced via messages posted to your News Feed.

By socializing mobile applications, you'll be able to share more about your off-site activity with your friends in much of the same way. This will be especially helpful for the mobile games market, as it allows you to invite Facebook friends to play with you while also sharing scores, stats, and other information to your profile. For game developers, it means one person playing a mobile application can spread the word about it among hundreds of their friends. In addition, Facebook Connect eases the sign-in process for apps by using your Facebook identity instead of forcing you to create a new account.

"Facebook Connect for Mobile Web" is only one way the company is expanding to other platforms. They plan to integrate their technology on every screen, including that of your TV (already available thanks to Verizon FiOS's new widgets) and your game console (another new arrival via Xbox 360's recent update).

Mossinac also announced the introduction of a new Facebook app for Nokia's Series 40 devices. The app will allow for status updates from a homescreen widget.

But there's still a small problem here. Most Facebook applications aren't worth paying for. "It's sort of the chicken and the egg scenario," says Zuora chief executive Tien Tzuo, "we're providing the chicken, but are hoping it will hatch an egg."

It's not as if there isn't potential for a paid application marketplace. Facebook hosts some 50,000 apps and there are more than 600,000 developers on the Facebook platform. The problem is that a good bit of these apps are time-wasters, games, trivia, quizzes, and other somewhat non-essential applications - hardly anything worth your hard-earned money.

Z-Commerce, though, can imagine all sorts of applications that could take advantage of this new e-commerce platform. We would love to see professional, useful applications such as they ones they've envisioned - things like LinkedIn Recruiting, Relationship Managers, and other imaginary - but exciting - application ideas.

To get the ball rolling, Zuora is launching a contest for which they're seeking five Facebook developers to be the very first to build a subscription-based application with Z-Commerce for Facebook. Selected developers will receive free access to Z-Commerce for Facebook for one year. For more details, visit http://developer.zuora.com/facebook.

Editor's note: Looking back over 2008, there were some posts on ReadWriteWeb that did not get the attention we felt they deserved - whether because of timing, competing news stories, etc. So in this end-of-year series, called Redux, we're resurrecting some of those hidden gems. This is one of them, we hope you enjoy (re)reading it!

Web sites are only one kind of presence that companies can have today. Social Networks like Facebook and MySpace, mobile platforms like iPhone and Blackberry, browser extensions and RIA Applications all have an equal - sometimes considerably larger - share of users attention. Figuring out which presence should be delivered by the website vs. a third party is an important question that each company should ask.

User Experience is King

User interface innovation is a major part of the ongoing web revolution. As we've recently written in The Rise of Contextual User Interfaces post, static user interfaces are 'dead'. The new interfaces are simpler and more contextual. Instead of revealing choices upfront, they present them based on user gestures and context. The new user experience is about fluidity.

The innovations have set the bar for UI high. Users demand simplicity and elegance and want to know how to use the product without a manual. They expect the software to work perfectly, for it to be helpful and smart. No company can afford to ignore usability, or it will lose users to someone doing the same product with a better UI.

Today the user experience is not just a set of widgets or a website design. As Leander Kahney explained in his book Inside Steve's Brain, for Steve Jobs design is the function.

This is increasingly true about any modern web application. Users perceive all elements of the service as the service itself. They don't distinguish particular widgets inside Twitter or Twitterific; the vertical conversational faceroll defines Twitter. The way the service is delivered is why users like it.

Why Controlling User Experience is Important?

Each service that we love, whether Twitter or Digg or Flickr or del.icio.us, has its particular look, feel and philosophy. Passionate users enjoy these services because of the elements, choices and collective experience that the services deliver. The clients built on top of the API would not necessarily channel the secret sauce. For example, RIA applications for Twitter are built for people who don't work for Twitter and don't regularly communicate with the Twitter team. They're not going to preserve the user experience philosophy.

Third party clients create new user experiences, which are at times confusing. As a user, on web, desktop and iPhone, ideally you'd like to experience the service the same way, but if the iPhone application is delivered by someone else the experience might not be the same.

In addition to user experience, there's the issue of branding. Larger companies are strict about their identity. When a couple of guys build an Amazon application for iPhone, they won't pay close attention to Amazon branding. Some will argue it doesn't matter as long as it drives transactions for Amazon. Yes and no. Yes because the users will buy. No because the users will accumulate imperfect user experience and associate this with Amazon, which might add up to a big negative.

Monetization Factor

A strong reason for investing in user experience is monetization. Many consumer services today are monetized via advertising. Having additional presence on different platforms increases the potential volume of advertising.

Put simply, many Twitter clients, like Twitterrific, are already monetizing the service by adding a single ad on top of each result set. If Twitter owned the RIA client, it would be able to monetize it in the same way.

Any service that is transactional or advertising driven benefits from multiple interfaces. Whatever it takes to reach the user to deliver value and drive the transactions is what services have to do. In the world of APIs, we at times forget that service should tap into all its major channels to build the business.

Which Platforms Are Critical?

Which platforms are important to tap into? There are 4 major venues for companies to consider seriously: iPhone, RIA, Facebook and Browser Extensions. All these platform plug into the same audience, but in a different context.

iPhone is great on the go. With the opening of the App Store, increasingly iPhone is going to be our personal computer. RIA clients are popular, particularly among early adopters who want richer, snappier experience compared to the web. Facebook, despite its recent scaling back on the platform, remains a major way to reach mainstream audience. Browser extensions enable the user to access the service from around the web.

Tapping into these platforms is not cheap. Building a specific and correct solution for each platform requires product management, development and testing resources.

If the company has correct API, the exercise is simpler. Instead of duplicating the application, the company builds a client for each platform and benefits from common API and common back-end architecture. It is not trivial to maintain presence in all these places, but it's likely to pay off.

Conclusion

APIs offer an amazing way for companies to scale, to create an ecosystem of innovation and tap into a wider audience. Companies should consider building and managing their presence on major platforms like iPhone, Facebook, RIA and Browsers. The way that people perceive and interact with the service is increasingly important; just rolling out an API and having a third party take care of the client could be dangerous. In addition an opportunity of being in front of the audience driving monetization could be missed.

And now tell us which of your favortire services you want to see build presence on different platforms?

The SMC is meant to supplement, not replace, the face-to-face interaction that occurs in the classroom. According to Howard, when he tried to introduce new media tools into his first Wi-Fi-equipped classroom, he was surprised by the blank looks on so many of the students' faces when he told them that he expected them to blog and edit the wiki. Since he was so familiar with the power of Web 2.0 tools and was surrounded by people who felt the same, he hadn't realized how many college students didn't actually have experience using these types of 21st century tools. This sparked an idea to build a new social media platform designed specifically for use in an educational setting. And thus, the Social Media Classroom was born.

What's Included

The SMC includes all the familiar social media tools from blogs to RSS to videos and wikis and even microblogging. All are integrated into one seamless environment where the different applications are available from navigational tabs at the top of the page just like any ordinary web site has. Everyone who is a member of a particular instance of the Social Media Classroom will initially see a personalized start page upon login that aggregates their own different posts to the various parts of the site.

The SMC will be available to educators both an installable version for self-hosting and as a hosted version (coming soon) for those less tech-savvy.

The Classroom and The Collaboratory

The project itself has two components called The Classroom and The Collaboratory. The The Collaboratory (or Colab) is simply the web service part of the project which is also made available to anyone, even non-educators. It includes both the downloadable install file and the soon-to-launch hosted service.

The Classroom, on the other hand, is the entire web site available at www.socialmediaclassroom.com which contains, among other things, the curriculum materials. In these materials you'll find all sorts of information about the different types of social media as well as links to various resources across the web.

21st Century Education

Social media and the participatory web have had a greater impact on our world beyond just how we connect and socialize with our friends online. The base concepts surrounding how these interactions take place has influenced a whole new generation of web users who now expect to participate in discussions and not be dictated to...whether online or offline. We've seen this influence occur in the workplace, where millennial employees demand to know "why" they're being asked to do something instead of just doing it. We've also seen it effect the business of marketing as social media users now feel strongly that brands (companies) should be listening and conversing with them in an open, transparent matter. So why not bring the social media revolution to the classroom, too? It only makes sense.

Those involved with this project believe that today's students need more than a class where a professor lectures for an hour - that has no hope of engaging their interest. Students need a classroom where learning is a more participatory experience and where the tools they use in their everyday lives - social networking, videos, chat, aren't checked at the door. The Social Media Classroom is an important project to make those types of tools available to educators who might not be as up to speed with the latest technology, while also simplifying the use of those tools through the introduction of a single platform that integrates the best of the Web 2.0 world.

Perhaps the project doesn't introduce anything new that hasn't already been available to the tech-savvy, but its ease-of-use and educational slant make its introduction an impressive and potentially game-changing move for the educational system as we know it.

Habari Integrates With Flickr, Viddler

What's most interesting about Habari is the way it integrates with third-party services. Instead of having to download a plugin for things like Flickr integration, for example, in Habari you can browse Flickr for a photo to add to your post just as some other blogging platforms allow you to browse your computer's hard drive. As you search for a photo, you have the option to enter in a tag to better locate the picture you need. In this way, Habari the platform performs very much like Zemanta the plugin, an add-in which allows for a similar type of interaction.

Searching Flickr in Habari:

Another example of this platform-to-cloud integration is how Habari lets you record video blogs. From within Habari itself, you can click a record button to record a video. When finished, the video can be posted directly to Viddler's video-sharing web site as well as to your blog itself.

Although Flickr and Viddler are the only two sites configured at the moment, they are only the beginning. Just as how a service like FriendFeed can pull in data streams from sites all over the social web, Habari will be able to access other media silos as well. And for anything that's not supported by the platform itself, there are still plugins available just as there are in WordPress. Currently, some of the more popular plugins include Disqus comments, Feedburner integration, Twitter posting, and a lifestreaming plugin (example).

Habari Features

Also like WordPress, Habari supports static pages, Atom publishing, tagging, multiple authors, and multiple sites under one install. There are even importers for Serendipty and WordPress available to help make the transition easier.

Because Habari is still a work-in-progress to some extent, it may not be ready for the newest of bloggers just yet. One day though, the developers hope to appeal to both them and blogging experts both. They want to address the pain points that make blogging difficult for new users, but they also want to bring the focus of blogging back to content creation. That's why the compose page is clean and simple by default (see below). They also want to focus on ways to make your blog the place where you actually blog, not the place where you have store videos and photos.

Habari wants you to just write:

It's Not New, They Just Need Better Marketing!

The Habari Project has been around for a couple of years now, so you may have heard of it before. If not, don't worry - you're not alone. When one of the developers gave it a shoutout at this weekend's Blogorlando conference, neither the speaker nor many of the audience members had ever heard of it. "Come again?", and "How do you spell that?", people asked. And this was a blogging conference, mind you.

If you're looking to try a new blogging platform, Habari is ready for install today. You can learn more about the Habari Project on their homepage here: http://habariproject.org. If you're interested in getting involved, visit the community page here: http://wiki.habariproject.org/en/Getting_Involved.

In a presentation up on the mini-site, which we've embedded below, Google states that one of the benefits of this arrangement is that "Yahoo! remains a vibrant and innovative presence on the Internet". Which is putting Yahoo!'s position rather bluntly. The crux of the deal though is that Yahoo! will be able to better monetize the 'long tail' of their search, using Google's near invincible Adsense.

* This is a non-exclusive deal that will strengthen Yahoo!.
* Ad prices will continue to be set by competitive auction.
* The deal is win-win for consumers, advertisers and publishers: more and better ads.

That the deal will strengthen Yahoo! is, unfortunately for Yahoo!, not the contentious point of this arrangement. Indeed we at ReadWriteWeb have first hand experience of why Yahoo! needs this deal. We recently switched back from Yahoo Publisher Network (their attempt at an Adsense alternative) back to Adsense, precisely because the YPN long tail results were so poor. It's no coincidence that our CPC ads, which display as a backup to our CPM ads, have gotten much more relevant and contextual since we switched back. Unfortunately that told us a lot about the state of YPN.

Let's be frank, Google has got Yahoo by the short and curlies with this deal - and the presentation below isn't afraid to give it another twist.

The contentious part of the deal is whether it gives Google a dominant position in the online advertising industry, and therefore will it be bad for consumers and competitors (specifically Microsoft). The closest the mini-site comes to addressing this is slide 10, which has a list of things that the deal is apparently not:

What the deal is NOT

* Not a merger
* Does not remove a competitor from the playing field
* Does not prevent Yahoo! from making similar deals with others
* Does not increase Google's share of search traffic
* Does not let Google set prices for advertisers
* Does not give Google any equity stake in Yahoo!

It remains to be seen whether American antitrust authorities are convinced by these arguments, or not.

Another point of contention is that Google, once again, makes no mention of the percentage of ad revenue they take. In other words: if there is not enough competition in the market for Adsense, then publishers could end up getting a lower share of the revenue from Adsense as a result. Which is a valid concern for publishers and not one that the slideshow addresses adequately.

One interesting side-benefit of the deal is that it will also enable interoperability between Yahoo IM and Google Talk. This benefits Google more than Yahoo, given that Yahoo is one of the market leaders in IM and Google is not.

Here is the full presentation. Let us know in the comments what you think: