As one of the primary co-creators of Firefox, Hewitt single-handedly built the Facebook iPhone app. and when he left Facebook fed up with Apple's approval process for apps, he announced that his next aim was to build tools for mobile HTML5 developers. Apparently that work has led to some frustrating experiences trying to support the open web. It's not surprising, but it is pretty heartbreaking. It's hard to imagine a decentralized platform like the web evolving to make as many things possible, as quickly and at scale, as the big centralized app platforms.

Hewitt says standards bodies are debilitatingly slow, that Web-first evangelists are guilty of staggering arrogance that puts principles above relevance for users and developers and that apps just won't run on the web in the future unless something changes dramatically.

The web needs an owner, Hewitt argues. It needs a single code repository and a strong leader to push it forward.

"Can't believe I'm saying this, but 2 years later, I'm seriously considering developing for iOS (natively) again," Hewitt Tweeted today.

The Other Side of the Story

So far it seems that most people are in dissapointed agreement with Hewitt. One who's not is Portland, Oregon internet marketer Uriah Maynard. "Arguing for 'an owner' of the web is like winning the American revolution and then arguing that we need a king," Maynard says in articulating a counter-position well. "No owners, no masters. That is a killer feature of the web, and the reason it will never die, even if it fades in popularity. What we need is to learn how to efficiently run truly democratic organizations." Uriah's in Portland and clearly needs to put a bird on it.

Chris White, one of the co-founders of the Android OS, puts it a little bit differently. "The web is only interesting because it's a standard," White writes, on Google Plus.

"As new experiences become commonplace, they get rolled into the one standard platform Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, et al agree on. The cutting edge will always occur on proprietary platforms first. Asking for a private entity to control the web is like asking for a sovereign country to control the United Nations (or the world).

"The web is suppose to be lowest common denominator. That's what makes it work."

What do you think, readers? Do you think the future will be one where the open web is just a shadow of what it is today? That proprietary platforms will steal the world's heart away? Or is this just how it goes? The innovation comes from the corporate world and then defuses?

Personally, I don't feel qualified to venture a guess on such a big question. But I'm going to read the conversation closely and keep an eye out for clues that indicate things are going one way or the other. I hope Joe Hewitt is wrong. I imagine that there's a healthy dose of truth to all the perspectives above.

But the news could be all bluster and roadshow theatrics. The China-based site is also looking to replace Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as the IPO-backing banks, the report said. Groupon recently pushed back its impending public market launch due to swings in the market.

Groupon has also suffered setbacks recently due to a leaked internal memo that has gained the attention of the SEC. Groupon is actually a local challenger to Lashou by way of its tie-in with Gaopeng, backed by Jack Ma-run Alibaba.com, a successful eBay for the China market.

According to Bloomberg, Lashou raised $110 million from investors, including Beijing-based GSR Ventures in a funding round last April that valued the company at about $1.1 billion. In December 2010, it raised $50 million at a valuation of around $500 million.

Alibaba is also cutting into the China search market. At a recent Web conference in Beijing, Ma announced that his company's main preoccupation was to "cause sleepless nights" to native search giant Baidu.

Alibaba, China's biggest e-commerce company, started its eTao search engine last year, as it attempted to increase its revenue potential. Baidu already faces stiff competition from Google.cn, which unexpectedly had its license for running search in China renewed last week. Baidu accounts for over 80% of Chinese language search traffic in the country.

Lashou.com image from Dailydeal.com

Over the next several weeks, we will be showcasing many of the other ways the Web is untangling logistical nightmares for companies large and small. Here's a look at what to expect as we explore the rapidly evolving global choreography of goods and information.

Internet of Things

We are no strangers to the Internet of Things (IoT) here at ReadWriteWeb, and this growing field of tech plays a large role in the logistics world today. Many fun consumer IoT implementations have already begun to change the way customers interact with businesses, and a lot of that is due to the growth of smartphone penetration.

Hotels have already begun to let visitors unlock their room doors with smartphones, and RFID chips are looking to help schools keep tabs on the whereabouts of students, faculty and equipment. In the coming weeks, we'll look at how the Internet of Things is revolutionizing logistics and supply chains and is helping businesses get more done.

Mobile

Another key trend we have covered extensively is the growth of mobility, particularly how it helps businesses achieve higher efficiency out of the office. In no surprise that business large and small are investing in mobile enterprise solutions with the big boost it provides to accessibility, as well as the new data that can be captured and analyzed to tighten the loose pieces of the well-oiled business machine.

The benefits of mobility go far beyond communications. With the spread of smartphones, mobile solutions are not just a way to keep business operations in line, but also to reach customers in personal ways right from their pockets. Later on in this series, we will look at how mobile technologies are helping supply chain efficiency with the help of things like sensors and always-on Web-connectivity.

Sustainability

And finally, one of the other areas of the new logistics we will delve into is how these new methods can increase business sustainability. Technology is at the front lines of the fight to make businesses and the world a more eco-friendly place, and a recent collaboration between Columbia University and IBM is one example of that.

For businesses, jumping onboard with the "new logistics" can mean increasing not only environmental sustainability, but business and financial sustainability as well. With the Web and the other technologies mentioned above, business operations are becoming increasingly more efficient, and sustainability challenges are continually being met.

Look for these topics and more as we explore the changing logistics landscape for businesses worldwide in the coming weeks. Have ideas on how technology is helping to shape new logistics? Leave us a comment below and look out for our "new logistics" continues.

Webinos' end goal is to create a framework for Web applications across mobile, PC, home media (TV) and even in-car devices which doesn't require the apps to be reprogrammed for each platform.

Already the project has support from several industry giants, including EU operators like Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), Spain's Telefonica and Telecom Italia, hardware makers Samsung and Sony Ericsson and standards body the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

According to the project's homepage, webinos "will define and deliver an Open Source Platform and software components for the Future Internet in the form of web runtime extensions, to enable web applications and services to be used and shared consistently and securely over a broad spectrum of converged and connected devices."

In other words, webinos goes beyond simply touting the Web and its coding language, HTML, as the standard for apps, and instead wants to develop a common set of APIs (APIs, or application programming interfaces, are developer tools) that would allow applications to run in a Web environment. To do so, webinos offers a single "virtual" device that can consist of all the devices owned by a user. Services running on this platform could then take advantage of the capabilities of any given device, without having to be specifically coded for that system.

Fragmentation is Bad for Business

Project head Stephan Steglich explained to the BBC how extreme platform fragmentation is becoming a costly matter for business. "Companies can afford to have an app on two or at most three platforms," he said. "They're extremely costly to develop and ensure the user experience. That's what we want to address - to provide a system that runs on all these platforms and domains, where the developer comes up with one application for one platform and lets you run it on all these devices - mobiles, automotive, gaming, and so on."

On the mobile front, the fragmentation issue was also recently highlighted in an interview between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and tech news blog TechCrunch. The young exec admitted that the numerous platforms are even a problem for a company of Facebook's size, saying "[fragmentation is] kind of a disaster right now. I really hope that the direction that this stuff goes in is one where there's more of a standard...it's pretty hard for us to build a lot of new products and build them all for these different platforms."

Other Efforts, Little Hope?

Webinos isn't the only project attempting to address fragmentation issues, however. Earlier this year, mobile operators joined forces to create the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) project, a more commercial effort with many of the same players involved. WAC is reportedly doing much of the same thing as Webinos, and is also collaborating with the W3C on its efforts.

Unfortunately, despite the big name participants and funding, some industry insiders are doubtful that Webinos will be able to revolutionize anything. The BBC cited content delivery provider Saffron Digital's chief, Shashi Fernando, as saying that there is no interest in standardization of platforms because companies need to differentiate their product. He specifically called out Apple as the "big bear in the room," who won't likely participate in these efforts.

That said, even if Apple remained a holdout going forward, a semi-universal standard holds promise. And the more bodies that participate in the effort, the better for developers, business and end users alike.

Berners-Lee began his keynote by discussing the improvements we've seen in technology in recent years, most notably the ability of our devices to be location-aware. However, he says, "location-awareness is just the tip of the iceberg." Devices already know so much about you: your geographical position, which way is up, which direction you're headed, etc., but future devices may know more than this. For example, they may know about your medical information and your physical state. Perhaps they could tell when you're excited by measuring heart rate increases, he said.

Another major improvement which is impacting the Web is the explosion of data available online, a project which he has heavily contributed to, here in the U.K. with data.gov.uk and its U.S. counterpart data.gov. Not so long ago, less than 10 years ago, in fact, "data" on the Web consisted of governments uploading a scanned document, like a spreadsheet that would be posted as a PDF on a government-hosted website. If anyone ever wanted to do anything with that data, they would have to re-type the information. Today, that same type of data is more accessible - the raw data itself is available and, says Berners-Lee, there's a race between governments and other organizations as to who can provide the best and most interesting data.

As for how data access relates to mobile, Berners-Lee explained that data drives development on mobile, just as it does on the Web as a whole. Even a basic calendaring type of application is data-driven. By combining the aspects of mobile technology, like location-awareness, with the semantic Web of data, entirely new types of mobile applications can exist. Most recently, augmented reality applications are an example of this pairing, tying together location with data to identify points of interest just by aiming your mobile phone at something like a landmark or building.

4 Concerns about the Future of Mobile

All that being said, Berners-Lee also mentioned that there are concerns which we need to be aware of when moving forward with mobile technology. They are as follows:

1. Privacy

The challenge of privacy is one many companies, both mobile and otherwise, have been dealing with in recent months. However, on mobile phones, the problem that has not been worked out yet is how to allow a user to share their location while still making it easy for them to understand when they're sharing critical information, how much control they have over that information and who can access that data. The challenge here is how to do all this without getting in the way of the user's experience.

The solution, says Berners-Lee, is that we may need to re-adjust our ideas about privacy. "I think that we'll end up having to think about privacy from a different point of view," he said.

2. Accountability

Along the same lines of user privacy, is the idea that companies that want access to our critical information have a responsibility to build systems that respect that data. "Responsible" companies that are accountable for how they use our data are key. Clearly, this is a struggle many companies are dealing with now, and no one has a winning formula yet.

3. Neutrality

A perennial favorite topic for Berners-Lee is the idea of network neutrality, referring to regulations that forbid prioritizing the speed or access with which one company's data is available over another's. Companies that want you to use their services have an incentive to end neutrality for their own benefits - for example, those that provide voice services may want to slow down access to VoIP services.

Here Berners-Lee was the most passionate, saying point-blank that "the moment you let neutrality go, you lose the Web as it is - you lose the idea that you can click a link and go anywhere."

4. Bringing Web Access to the Rest of the World

The last point also involved a project in which Berners-Lee is involved: providing Web access to the 80% of the world that doesn't go online. He works on this issue through the foundation at webfoundation.org, which examines the challenges in this area. Surprisingly, lack of signal with which to log onto the Web is not the main thing holding back the spread of the Web. 80% of the world has access to the Web, but, for some reason, chooses not to use it.

The cost of data is partially to blame in many cases for this, and for those who cannot afford data plans through their carriers, they're limited to SMS for sharing information. But SMS is very constraining, says Berners-Lee. What's needed instead are better, more low-cost data plans for mobile phones. Carriers should want to offer these plans because once people get a taste of what a data plan can provide, they're potential customers for an upgrade to a more expensive plan that offers even more data and would generate more revenue for carriers.

Affordability of Web access is an area which Nokia thinks about when building their technologies. For example, Nokia's Ovi Maps service uses compression so as not to need data access when zooming in and out, unlike competing service from Google Maps. Nokia's messaging services also compress data and as, Mary McDowell, Nokia's EVP of Mobile Phones, mentioned in the keynote speech following Berners-Lee's, Nokia's recent acquisition of mobile Internet company Novarra was primarily for access to its proxy-browsing browser technology, which saves on clicks, while also providing faster and more efficient access to the Web. This is an important technology for emerging markets where data plans are pricey, but needed.

Disclosure: Nokia paid for this reporter's travel and accommodations to Nokia World 2010.

"Cell phones," warns the company, "can be a great way for children to keep in touch with family members," but they can also "serve as facilitators for cyberbullying, sexting and other dangerous behaviors."

That claim may be true to a point, but is reading each and every text message the best way to counteract these behaviors? For that matter, should parents be spying on their kids to this extent at all?

WebWatcher cites data from the Pew Research Center that states some 75% of those aged 12-17 now own cell phones, and half of teens send over 50 messages per day. One in three sends more than 100.

(Hope you parents have a lot of free time on your hands, because that remote snooping is going to take you awhile!)

More importantly, the data point that's skipped over when touting spyware like this... err, I mean remote monitoring software... is that teens text instead of calling their friends in many cases. In fact, Pew says than teens are 10 times more likely to text someone than call them.

That means, for many teens, text messages are the primary form of communication among a child's friends.

And parents reading those texts? Well, that would be the equivalent of a parent in days past surreptitiously picking up the extension (you know - the phone attached to the wall with a cable?) in another room to eavesdrop on a child's conversation.

Parental Spyware: For Those Who Can't Handle Tech?

The WebWatcher Mobile product complements the company's standalone suite of monitoring tools, but it's hardly alone here. A whole crop of parental spyware applications have risen up to serve the needs of parents who can't figure out (or can't be bothered, or don't have the time) to understand the modern Web. The PTA-endorsed SocialShield product, for instance, is another recent entry into this field. Like WebWatcher, it works across a number of sites, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Photobucket and others. SafetyWeb does the same. And of course there are the old standbys like Net Nanny, SpectorSoft and CyberPatrol, just to name a few.

Is this level of spying the right way to parent, though? There are alternates of course: Parents could educate their children instead, do spot checks to keep them on their toes, friend them on Facebook and elsewhere across the Web, and keep the computer in a public area of the home.

That said, there are some parents for whom monitoring software may be the right choice: the technologically un-savvy, for example. If the intricacies of Facebook and Twitter are confounding or if you still haven't figured out exactly how to type a text message yourself, you may be a good candidate for remote monitoring software.

A Warning to Parents Behind the Times

But keep in mind that your inability (or refusal?) to keep up with the times in terms of technology while allowing your children to outpace you by leaps and bounds is not only doing you a disservice - it's doing one to your children as well.

Sure, they may know their way around the social Web and cell phones better than you, but they haven't fully developed their interpersonal and social skills in a way that allows them to handle the issues that will inevitably come up.

As a new parent myself, I believe my job is to help my child learn and grow on her path to independence, which includes staying informed on all trends, both tech and otherwise. Parents who can't be bothered to figure out what that "tweet thing" is all about or what "sexting" is should not think this is a badge of honor to wear proudly, as if it makes them more mature somehow. It should be a signal that the world has surged ahead and they've been left behind in its wake.

And please, let's not make this a socio-economic issue, either. If you can't afford a computer or cell phone, then neither can your child. However, he or she may have access to them at friends' houses or at school. You have have access to them via your public library. Many public libraries offer free computer classes, too. You and your child could even take one together. Let your lack of technology comprehension guide you to a learning experience that helps you both, instead of being an issue where you child is left unparented because you don't know what you're doing.

Parental spyware, however, should be a last resort at best.

But that's just my opinion. What's yours?

With this new version, Seesmic Web continues to blur the line between desktop and web-based Twitter clients.

The nicest new feature in Seesmic Web is the ability to drag and drop contacts to any list. Compared to TweetDeck and other desktop tools, this makes managing and creating lists a lot easier and makes for a more efficient workflow.

Contact Manager

Another interesting new feature is the contact manager, which allows you to quickly get information about your followers. The contact manager displays the basic information from the user's profile: number of followers and tweets, favorite tweets and information about the lists this user follows. In addition, Seesmic also displays the names of this user's top 3 most publicly contacted friends on Twitter.

Better Integration with Third-Party Tools

One area the Seesmic team has focused on for this release is the integration of third-party tools. A small icon appears next to every shortened link now and clicking on this link will bring up some basic information about the link, including the name of the site the link will take you to and the number of retweets (powered by Tweetmeme).

Seesmic Web now also allows users to share pictures from the web interface and also offers picture previews right inside the app for pictures that were shared on most of the popular Twitter photo services.

Geolocation

As long as you use a browser that supports Google Gears, Seesmic Web now also makes it easier to share your location. Whenever you write a new tweet, you can choose to attach your location to this message. Just make sure you have the location feature turned on in your Twitter settings. As we reported last month, only a very small number of Twitter users currently makes use of this feature, which isn't a surprise, given that only a handful of Twitter apps currently support this functionality. It's good to see that Seesmic is making this feature a priority in its apps.

Verdict

Overall, the experience of using Seesmic Web comes very close to using a desktop client. There are a few features that are still missing in the web version (resizable columns, for example), but otherwise, Seesmic Web is a very good replacement for a desktop Twitter client.

Using a web-based client brings a number of advantages with it, including the absence of any Twitter rate limits. If you like the Seesmic interface give it a try in a site-specific browser like Fluid on the Mac or Mozilla's Prism.

The project's lofty goal is to essentially create an open web of books where anyone can publish their books and make their content available via search.

Although still in the early days of development and potentially taking years to complete, the BookServer project will allow search engines to index books from all over the web. What that means for an end user is that you could type a title into a search engine and the engine would return results listing everywhere you could get that book in digital format including online bookstores, libraries, or a direct method from the publisher itself. Depending on your needs, you could borrow the book or purchase it and then download it to your digital device.

While the project isn't exactly a direct effort to take down Amazon's online bookstore or Google's upcoming online eBook store called Google Editions, it will provider book publishers and online libraries with the means to more effectively compete with those companies. By allowing publishers to set their own pricing and manage the distribution of their books, they will be able to take back control from Amazon and Google who would rather dictate those terms for them.

An Open Marketplace for eBooks

A secondary goal of BookServer's open system is to fight back against the proprietary marketplaces, such as Amazon's Kindle Store, where books are only sold in a copyright-protected format (.AZW) that only works on the company's eReader device, the Kindle. Elsewhere, some book sellers use other proprietary formats, others use the open ePub format, and still others distribute books as Adobe PDFs. For consumers, this multitude of choices only leads to confusion. People don't know what formats their particular device can read or where to get them. It brings to mind the similar issues consumers have had with digitally distributed music. To this day, many are still confused about whether their iTunes purchased music can play on other devices or whether tunes purchased from other online MP3 stores will play on their iPods.

While Google promises its Google Editions store will allow anyone to access digital books as long as they have a web browser and internet access, it's still unknown at this time how the company plans to make the digital content available offline. Will it require the use of special web browser plugins to do so? Until Google reveals more about the technical details, it is not possible to know how truly open their online store will be. And even if their store is 100% open, they are still a company whose ultimate goal is to profit from their work of digitizing books. BookServer's goal, on the other hand, is to provide universal access to book data made available in open formats.

Today, a few booksellers have partnered with the BookServer system including Feedbooks, O'Reilly, Adobe, and the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project.

In total, the average viewer watched about 135 video clips. While full-length shows are becoming more popular, it is still important to note that the average video is only 3.7 minutes long. Hulu, which focuses on full-length TV shows, also recorded its best month yet, with 457 million views.

Another Record-Breaking Month

June, according to comScore, already broke most records, but at that time, the company credited the surge to the large number of high-profile events (including the death of Michael Jackson and the elections in Iran). ComScore argues that TV viewers are turning to the Internet right now because most of the shows on TV are currently on summer hiatus. While this probably plays some role in this current growth in interest in online video, we would also argue that a lot of viewers are simply changing their viewing habits and have moved away from watching shows on traditional TV and cable networks. Instead, they are watching popular clips on YouTube and full-length shows on Hulu.

At the very least, the service represents a good first step in bringing the web to the TV without losing that essential "TV experience" which has more to do with passively holding a remote than it does with actively typing onto a keyboard. That psychological barrier between participation levels involved in surfing the net and watching TV is probably what led early internet-enabled TV experiences to fail...like "Web TV" for example. People just don't want keyboards in the living room. Verizon seems to understand our need for more passive interaction and has made nearly everything about their web-enabled TV service easy to perform with the Verizon FiOS remote control.

Hands-On: Facebook on the TV

First things first. Before you can have any fun with the Widget Bazaar, you have to configure a parental control password. This may seem a bit odd, but it's understandable given some of the Twitter hashtags we've seen become trending topics lately. To set up the parental control passcode, you have to delve into settings. It's not really that difficult and the process was complete in a matter of moments.

Now you can enter your new passcode to access the Facebook widget, but before you begin you still have to scroll through pages and pages of an end-user agreement and select "I agree" at the end.

Once you're past these initial setup configurations, you can proceed with logging into your Facebook account. The Facebook widget only appears on one half of your screen, so you can play around with it while still continuing to watch whatever program you have on.

On the next screen, you're presented with boxes to enter in your Facebook email address and password. There's a handy option to "Remember Me" so you don't have to re-enter your email each time. You're also prompted to set up an optional numeric passcode which you can use in the future in lieu of entering in your password. I recommend doing so - pushing numbers on your remote is a lot easier and faster than using that on-screen keyboard.

Once logged in, your new Facebook sidebar appears with your current program still playing to the right. There's an option at the top to "switch user" which will probably introduce a whole new way to fight over the remote control (it's my turn on Facebook!). The first option - the one to view your "Profile" - is actually quite boring. It just displays your current profile photo and status, two things you probably don't need to see. Unfortunately, there's no way to use the on-screen keyboard to post a custom status update from within this area.

Both the "Friends - Status Updates" and the "All Friends" section looked exactly the same to me. I thought the "All Friends" section would be more like the News Feed (so-and-so posted a photo, so-and-so requested help in Mafia Wars), but that didn't appear to be the case. It's possible that all my friends were just surprisingly inactive on Facebook at the time I launched this section, but I'm not so sure. In any event, both sections looked exactly the same: a list of friends and their status messages.

The "Albums" section was particularly fun and probably the most useful of all the options. Here, you can launch a list of your Facebook photo albums and then scroll through the pictures they contained in a slideshow-like format. Another tap on the "OK" button would launch the pictures full-screen.

Finally, the best part: updating your Facebook status. An option at the bottom allows you to update your status with a pre-configured message that says what show your watching. Although I still wish that I could customize my message, this simple, one-button post option is a great feature to have.

Hands-On: Twitter on the TV

Before you can start using the Twitter widget, you have to agree yet again to another Terms of Service. Besides the typical lawyerly stuff you'd expect to see, there was an interesting section that pointed you to www22.verizon.com/terms to read more about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for info on how to contact Verizon with claims. There was also a section that informed you how to report child pornography posted to Twitter. (I wasn't even aware that Twitter had that problem, but I guess Verizon's lawyers were just covering all their bases).

Unlike with Facebook, you don't configure your own Twitter account within this widget. That means you can't see your replies, direct messages or your friends' timeline. In other words, this widget isn't a Twitter client. That's disappointing because I'd like to be able to tweet from my TV...at the very least I think you should have the same option as in Facebook to tweet what you're watching. Sadly, that's not the case.

Instead, the Verizon Twitter widget provides more of a read-only experience. You can check out a list of the latest trends and see the related tweets, perform keyword-based searches, or even configure "favorite topics" for custom saved searches of your own. (Hint: set up a favorite search for your Twitter username to keep track of replies).

The interface to all these options looks the same: tweets on the right, TV show playing on the left - just like with the Facebook widget. The tweets don't update automatically, but you can press "OK" on your remote to refresh them. You can also scroll up and down through the list to see more.

The absolute coolest option within the Twitter widget is its ability to display tweets about the current show. In my case, I was watching "Pan's Labyrinth" on HBO (which is, by the way, an odd but interesting tale). Surprisingly, there were a few others tweeting about this movie, too. Of course, had I been watching something more common - like American Idol for instance - there surely would have been tons more tweets to see. The only problem with the way these tweets are displayed is the lack of a timestamp. I really don't know if these folks were watching Pan's Labyrinth with me right now or if they were watching it sometime in the past.

Conclusion

Overall, I'm thrilled to have this sort of functionality on my TV, but I'd like to see a few improvements. I'd like the option to make the Twitter widget more of a client so I can tweet an opinion about what I'm watching or at least that I'm watching something. Although the on-screen keyboard is cumbersome and slow, what better way to kill time in between commercials? I'd also like to type in custom Facebook status messages in the same way.

The only other major complaint was speed. There was a bit of a delay when scrolling through photos in my album, for example, and hitting the scroll button again and again only led to the selection moving way too far ahead of where I wanted to go. I should have known better than to keep mashing it, but with TVs, you expect instant reactions. Channel Up changes the channel immediately, for example, without any delay.

Also, when viewing tweets, scrolling up and down through the list did a weird refresh of the entire screen which was distracting. I didn't see the same type of refresh when scrolling through Facebook updates, so it seems like something is really off there. Perhaps the widget also doing a search to look for more current updates...I'm not sure. In any event, it needs to be fixed.

But at the end of the day, despite these issues, having Facebook and Twitter on my TV is truly incredible.

Oh, I should also mention that the Widget Bazaar introduces two other widgets: Sudoku and ESPN Fantasy Sports. More widgets will launch in the future. I've only included a selection of images in this post, for all the photos from my TV, you can visit the online album here.

Because it can't. It does not understand. It has no access to most sources. It lacks the semantic understanding and common sense to build bridges between information.

It is critical that machines gain a new level of understanding. Instead of statistically computing how well a search term matches a document, a machine must literally be able to understand. Therefore, knowledge bases are needed to look things up. Examples of these knowledge bases include:

• an encyclopedia containing knowledge to look up the semantic meaning and context of a particular term (e.g. to understand that Berlin is a city, how many people live there, and where it is),
• Yellow Pages or a service pool to query often-changing and more complex information (e.g. a route from Berlin to Porto by car, or the current temperature of Porto in Celsius),
• a people database to look up profile information, with user permissions, which could improve personalization and recommendations.

The Web of Data

The idea of the Web of Data originated with the Semantic Web. People tried to solve the problem of the inherent inability of machines to understand web pages. Initially, the aim of the Semantic Web was to invisibly annotate web pages with a set of meta-attributes and categories to enable machines to interpret text and put it in some kind of context. This approach did not succeed because the annotation was too complicated for humans who had no technical background. Similar approaches, like microformats, simplify the markup process and thus help bootstrap this chicken-egg problem.

These approaches have in common the effort to improve the machine-accessibility of knowledge on web pages that were designed to be consumed by humans. Furthermore, these sites contain a lot of information that is irrelevant to machines and that needs to be filtered. What is needed is a knowledge base for machines to look up "noiseless" information. But wait! Who said that machines and us humans need to share one web anyway?

The idea of the Web of Data came about as a result of both this limitation and the existence of countless structured data sets distributed all over the world and containing all kinds of information. These data sets are the property of companies that trend to make them accessible. Typically, a data set contains knowledge about a particular domain, like books, music, encyclopedic data, companies, you name it. If these data sets were interconnected (i.e. link to each other like websites), a machine could traverse this independent web of noiseless, structured information to gather semantic knowledge of arbitrary entities and domains. The result would be a massive, freely accessible knowledge base forming the foundation of a new generation of applications and services.

Linking Open Data

One promising approach is W3C's Linking Open Data (LOD) project. The above image illustrates participating data sets. The data sets themselves are set up to re-use existing ontologies such as WordNet, FOAF, and SKOS and interconnect them.

The data sets all grant access to their knowledge bases and link to items of other data sets. The project follows basic design principles of the World Wide Web: simplicity, tolerance, modular design, and decentralization. The LOD project currently counts more than 2 billion RDF triples, which is a lot of knowledge. (A triple is a piece of information that consists of a subject, predicate, and object to express a particular subject's property or relationship to another subject.) Also, the number of participating data sets is rapidly growing. The data sets currently can be accessed in heterogeneous ways; for example, through a semantic web browser or by being crawled by a semantic search engine.

To get a feeling of how this machine Web of Data feels like, you may want to look up:

• the company Yahoo! on CrunchBase,
• the city of Berlin or the game Tetris on DBpedia,
• the book iPhone: The Missing Manual on O'Reilly Media.

With every fact available on the Web of Data, more general and specific knowledge is made accessible to machines that will enable a whole new generation of services to be created. Highly sophisticated queries become machine-processable and accessible to the next generation of, say, search services.

Check out Tim Berners-Lee's talk at TED about the Web of Data. How do you think about it? Do you encounter the same issues being overloaded by information or too much noise?

(Photo by zorro-art. Graph by the Linking Open Data project.)

Any serious Twitter user will tell you that half the fun of watching a major television event or popular show is tuning into the backchannel provided by those twittering their thoughts and reactions to what's being broadcast. An excellent example of this type of live backchannel was seen during President Obama's recent public address - a hotly tracked item on Twitter where the hashtag to follow was #NSOTU (aka "Not State of the Union.") Even lawmakers were getting in on the action by twittering from the House floor while listening to Obama speak.

This real-time view into the reactions of the crowd has been at times insightful, at other times humorous, but is always an interesting and interactive way to participate in any event, including something shown on TV. Yet when it comes to Twitter and the television, it's often a two-screen experience involving a web-connected laptop or phone and the TV itself.

But with Verizon's new widget platform, developers will be able to build widgets like this one which displays Twitter updates on your TV. But unlike Twitter's own search tool that only lists the trending topics, Verizon's widget demonstrates how Twitter could enhance your TV-viewing experience in a whole new way. When launching this widget, for example, one of the options is "current channel." Select that and all of a sudden you're seeing the tweets related specifically to the program or movie that you're currently viewing.

Another widget, this one for Facebook users, lets you update your status with a message about what you're watching. It also provides access to your friends and your photo albums.

These two widgets were built in-house by Verizon engineers and won't necessarily ship with the upcoming update to the DVR... but they could. In a recent demonstration of the software's capabilities, Joseph Ambeault, Director of Consumer Product Development Video, hinted that the company had talked to various internet companies about their providing widgets for the new platform. However, he would not confirm any specifics. (There were some very cagey head rolls - half nods, half shakes - when providing the non-answers, though!). We specifically asked about Twitter, but the Verizon representative said he could not comment. We're taking the decided ambiguity to mean talks began but nothing is official.

In fact, seeing the widget in action makes us wonder - is this a part of Twitter's mysterious business model? It very well could be. Verizon's widgets, which could potentially reach several million customers here in the United States, will be monetized through on-screen advertisements like banner ads. These ads, similar in look and feel to those seen on the web, will launch a quick TV commercial when selected with the remote control.

The Widget Ecosystem

At present, Verizon has widgets for weather, traffic, headlines, horoscopes, and community information. There's also an ESPN Fantasy Football widget which provides stats on your players and scores. But when the widget platform goes live, the potential for an entire ecosystem of widgets will explode. However, the questions as to how this ecosystem will look and behave are things Verizon is still figuring out as, up until now, they've solely focused on the technical aspects of the solution.

What they can say now is that widgets will be programmed using LUA, a standard technology which many game developers will be familiar with already. The process for signing up to create a widget won't involve any laborious steps, either. Instead, there will be a quick web form to fill out and then developers can gain access to the company's SDK (software development kit). According to Verizon, they're not interested in tightly controlling which widgets become available to their FiOS customers - they just want to provide tools for widget creation and sharing. As Ambeault describes it, the ecosystem's level of openness will be "somewhere in between Apple and Google" - a reference to the variation between the App Store approval process for the locked-down iPhones versus the wide-open Google Android platform.

Also of note, Verizon seems less interested in competing with the other newly launched widget platforms, like the Yahoo/Intel TV widgets that are being integrated into new televisions themselves, and are more interested in working to port those widgets to their platform. But when asked if they were working with Yahoo, the only answer was yet another cryptic head roll.

Internet Video with No Extra Box (Just a Computer)

Another aspect to the upgraded Verizon Web + TV experience is the introduction of internet content, searchable through their "Interactive Media Guide." When the new software launches, Verizon FiOS DVRs will stream software from YouTube, DailyMotion, Break.com, Blip.tv, and Veoh. The format conversion that makes this possible actually takes place on a computer connected on the home network running Verizon Media Manager software, not on the DVR itself. Verizon says they configure this software for consumers at the time of installation.

This Media Manager software also allows customers to stream videos and photos from their PC to TV.

Beyond the Net

Multiple upgrades to the DVR software will take place over the course of the coming year. The first upgrade, due out this summer, will deliver new features like the updated program guide with its richer contextual menus. Here, for example, customers will find things like colorful thumbnails of movies when searching through on-demand titles - an experience somewhat reminiscent of Netflix. Also included will be the ability to preview programs from channels you don't currently subscribe to and the option to then order the channel using your remote. Most notably, though, the summer upgrade (from version 1.6 to 1.7 of Verizon's 2nd-generation software) will introduce the internet video content. Later this fall, the widget SDK will launch.

Given Verizon's position as a TV company, phone company, ISP, and wireless provider, they plan to maximize their new software across all various platforms. Already Verizon mobile phones can access TV through V-Cast, but in the future they may be able to use the widgets too. Mobile phone users can also program their DVRs remotely.

Of course, this news is only of interest to Verizon FiOS customers - still a relatively small market here in the U.S. when compared to cable but one that's growing in key markets. However, Verizon's move is raising the bar as to what consumers will come to expect from their web-connected TVs in the future, whether the web content comes from Verizon, is built into the TV itself, or arrives as part of whatever comes next.

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.

Halevy, who heads the "Deep Web" search initiative at Google, described the "Shallow Web" as containing about 5 million web pages while the "Deep Web" is estimated to be 500 times the size. This hidden web is currently being indexed in part by Google's automated systems that submit queries to various databases, retrieving the content found for indexing. In addition to that aspect of the Deep Web - dubbed "vertical searching" - Halevy also referenced two other types of Deep Web Search: semantic search and product search.

Google wants to also be able to retrieve the data found in structured tables on the web, said Halevy, citing a table on a page listing the U.S. presidents as an example. There are 14 billion such tables on the web, and, after filtering, about 154 million of them are interesting enough to be worth indexing.

Can Google Dig into the Deep Web?

The question that remains is whether or not Google's current search engine technology is going to be adept at doing all the different types of Deep Web indexing or if they will need to come up with something new. As of now, Google uses the Big Table database and MapReduce framework for everything search related, notes Alex Esterkin, Chief Architect at Infobright, Inc., a company delivering open source data warehousing solutions. During the talk, Halevy listed a number of analytical database application challenges that Google is currently dealing with: schema auto-complete, synonym discovery, creating entity lists, association between instances and aspects, and data level synonyms discovery. These challenges are addressed by Infobright's technology, said Esterkin, but "Google will have to solve these problems the hard way."

Also mentioned during the speech was how Google plans to organize "aspects" of search queries. The company wants to be able to separate exploratory queries (e.g., "Vietnam travel") from ones where a user is in search of a particular fact ("Vietnam population"). The former query should deliver information about visa requirements, weather and tour packages, etc. In a way, this is like what the search service offered by Kosmix is doing. But Google wants to go further, said Halevy. "Kosmix will give you an 'aspect,' but it's attached to an information source. In our case, all the aspects might be just Web search results, but we'd organize them differently."

Yahoo Working on Similar Structured Data Retrieval

The challenges facing Google today are also being addressed by their nearest competitor in search, Yahoo. In December, Yahoo announced that they were taking their SearchMonkey technology in-house to automate the extraction of structured information from large classes of web sites. The results of that in-house extraction technique will allow Yahoo to augment their Yahoo Search results with key information returned alongside the URLs.

In this aspect of web search, it's clear that no single company has yet to dominate. However, even if a non-Google company surges ahead, it may not be enough to get people to switch engines. Today, "Google" has become synonymous with web search, just like "Kleenex" is a tissue, "Band-Aid" is an adhesive bandage, and "Xerox" is a way to make photocopies. Once that psychological mark has been made into our collective psyches and the habit formed, people tend to stick with what they know, regardless of who does it better. That's something that's a bit troublesome - if better search technology for indexing the Deep Web comes into existence outside of Google, the world may not end up using it until such point Google either duplicates or acquires the invention.

Still, it's far too soon to write Google off yet. They clearly have a lead when it comes to search and that came from hard work, incredibly smart people, and innovative technical achievements. No doubt they can figure out this Deep Web thing, too. (We hope).