Web 2.0

Google is among the biggest proponents of a collection of Web technologies that reproduce many important features of Adobe Systems' Flash, but it's not yet time for regime change at YouTube.

One of the most important parts of the upcoming HTML5 standard is support for video that can be built directly into Web page without requiring a plug-in such as Flash Player. Other open standards such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for formatting, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and Web Open Font Format (WOFF) for typography can mimic Flash features, but Flash's ability to deliver streaming video to multiple … Read more

Listening to marketing messages from companies such as Apple and Google, one might think HTML5, the next-generation Web page standard, is ready to take the Net by storm.

But the words of those producing the specification show an HTML governance process that can be stormy, fractious, and far from settled down. The World Wide Web Consortium's return to HTML standardization after years of absence has produced tensions with the more informal Web Hypertext Application Working Group (WHATWG) that shouldered the HTML burden during that absence.

Some examples of language that's cropped up this month on the W3C's HTML Working Group mailing list: "childish," "intolerable," "ridiculous," "shenanigans." And there's a concrete manifestation of the divisiveness: The WHATWG and W3C versions of the HTML5 specification, though both stemming from the same source material, have diverged in some areas.

Some of the differences are relatively minor, and there are strong incentives to converge the two drafts of the HTML5 specification so that browser makers and Web developers aren't faced with the prospect of incompatibilities. In the meantime, though, the overseers of the Web are clashing during a time when their important new standard is just arriving in the spotlight.

"It's not an ideal situation. You want as much energy devoted to improving the spec and as little lost to the friction costs," said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering. In the long run, though, Shaver said, it's like writing software, where improvements cause temporary disruptions: "Sometimes you add something new, you have stability problems, you clean them up before they ship." … Read more

Updated at 4:57 p.m. PDT with a statement from a Facebook spokesperson.Updated at 6:31 p.m. PDT with a statement from a Twitter spokesperson.

A new feature within Twitter's Facebook app that let users find who among their friends has a Twitter account has been put on ice by Facebook.

The feature would cull through Facebook contacts and compare the list of names to users on Twitter, offering up things like Twitter profile information and a link to follow. Now, trying to use the app on the popular social network brings up a message that … Read more

Aggregators are good not just for things like news, movie, and game ratings, but also for local knowledge. Yelp, Gowalla, and Foursquare have all made a business out of this, but up until now you've had to spend time bipping back and forth among them to glean knowledge from each service's members.

That's changed now with Fourwhere, a service that launched during South By Southwest, which now combines reviews and check-ins from all three services in one place. The end result is a single page you can visit to see the most recent local user activity at … Read more

One month after releasing its open-source, royalty-free VP8 video compression technology, the company already is working on significant revisions to the technology.

VP8, combined with the Vorbis audio technology, form the WebM codec with which Google is trying to unfetter Web video from the patent and royalty encumbrances of rival codec H.264. To make WebM a stronger competitor, Google is beginning work not just on ways to speed up encoding and decoding of the VP8, but also deeper changes to the format itself.

"Like every codec, WebM is not immune to change; the difference in our project is … Read more

Flickr has added a new option by which people can turn their images at Yahoo's photo-sharing site into revenue.

In Flickr's initial partnership with photo licensing powerhouse Getty Images, Getty representatives cherry-picked Flickr photos and photographers they liked. Later, Flickr members could offer their own candidates for evaluation by Getty for licensing.

The new option, called Request to License, lets photographers nominate photos in a way that those who want to license figure into the transaction.

Here's how it works. A photographer can label a photo to be part of the Request to License program. When somebody … Read more

In a significant philosophical shift, Google has added a basic video-editing system to YouTube, giving a new creative aspect to the video-sharing site.

The YouTube editor isn't going to put Apple's Final Cut Pro or Adobe Systems' Premiere Pro out of business anytime soon, but the tool is useful. With it, you can trim videos and combine multiple videos into a single composite.

Google is arguably the biggest advocate of cloud computing, one variety of which shifts tasks that once were done on personal computers to Internet servers reached with a Web browser. With Google Docs, Google's acquisition of online photo editor Picnik, … Read more

Mozilla released a new Firefox 4 prototype late Monday that builds in support for Google's WebM video technology and several other changes planned for the open-source Web browser's next major version.

With WebM, Google hopes to liberate Web video from patent-related royalty constraints of today's prevailing video compression technology, H.264. Mozilla and Google are working to make WebM's VP8 codec a standard part of the new specification for built-in video being added to the HTML5 Web page design technology.

But the situation is complicated: Apple prefers the H.264 codec and has built that codec into its Safari browser, and Microsoft is doing so with IE9, its upgrade to Internet Explorer now under development. Google's Chrome is supporting both H.264 and WebM, whose video codec is called VP8.

Lending a bit of weight to the Mozilla and Google camp is Opera Software, the fifth-ranked browser in terms of share of usage. On Monday, it released an Opera developer version that adds WebM support among various other HTML5 additions.

The browser market is feistier than it's been in more than a decade. Back in the 1990s, the competition came down to Netscape vs. Microsoft. This time around, Netscape's Navigator has morphed into Mozilla's Firefox, Apple has launched five versions of Safari, Opera has kept the pressure on the bigger players, Google has entered the market with Chrome, and, most recently, Microsoft has fired up IE development after a long period of quasi-dormancy. … Read more

Twitter warned users that a failed upgrade Monday night has left the site unusable for many.

The problem began past 8 p.m. PDT, the company said, and might last for hours. "Our infrastructure and operations engineers are currently working to resolve this. The site could be down until approximately 3 a.m. PDT," company spokeswoman Carolyn Penner said.

The Twitter status page blamed the problem on "the failed enhancement of a new approach to timeline caching."

Signs of problems included the infamous "failwhale" image indicating problems, another image signifying "Something is technically … Read more