Digital Media

Facebook plans to announce at a developer event Monday that it will open up user-contributed information to third-party developers, according to a report Sunday in The Wall Street Journal.

The move would allow developers to build applications and services that--with users' permission--access user videos, photos, notes, and comments. The move would be a significant change for the social-networking site, which had previously retained tight control over the site and how developers interact with it.

To allow developers to take advantage of the free feature, Facebook users would have to give the companies access to their data, and users' privacy settings would extend to new services built, according to the report.

Allowing developers to track shared data would be another salvo in its assault on micro-blogging site Twitter, which allows third-party developers to build applications and services on top of its service.

The move seems a continuation of APIs (application programming interfaces) Facebook launched in February that let developers access content and methods for sharing in Facebook apps including Status, Notes, Links, and Video.

Of course, all this hinges on persuading Facebook's 200 million users to share their personal data, a topic that ruffled some feathers in February. Facebook users threatened to revolt after the company announced changes to its terms of service that had meant that its license on user content--a longstanding but little-publicized claim to an "irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license" for promotional efforts--would no longer expire if a member deleted his or her Facebook account.

But facing a rebellion from thousands of users and a possible federal complaint from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the social-networking service returned to its previous terms.

More than 800 digital-media enthusiasts in New York RSVP'd for a Tuesday night "meet-up" held by Boxee, the TV browser software company that's ambitiously (and controversially) aimed to make it possible to have a full Web content experience in your living room.

Right now, Boxee sources content from outlets such as Comedy Central, Netflix, CBS (which publishes CNET News), and Web video content hubs such as Blip.tv and Next New Networks.

In conjunction with the get-together, Boxee (still available only for Mac and Linux) made a few notable announcements: First of all, it's overhauled its application program interface (API)--which was only three weeks old to begin with--so that developers can build more complex applications for the platform.

There are a few new ones at launch: streaming-radio provider Pandora now has an application to bring its content to Boxee, as well as terrestrial-radio hub RadioTime. A third-party company called BoxeeHQ has also created an app to stream content from PBS.

Boxee's content-browsing software is now built on the XUL framework, which makes it a "remote cousin of Firefox," CEO Avner Ronen said. It will detect a video in a regular Web page and then attempt to pull it into a full-screen view. Guess what this means: Content from Hulu will be back, at least for now.

For those who stepped in late: Hulu, the joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., had been available as a channel on Boxee until access was blocked at the request of content partners. Boxee brought it back by pulling in Hulu's RSS feed, but then Hulu blocked that too.

Still in alpha test mode, Boxee has gained a loyal following among geeks who love its hackability, futurists who see it as the best hope for the why-won't-it-happen-already convergence between TV and the Web, and people fed up with subscription cable services. But on the flip side, it's still unclear as to how the start-up will dig through the complicated stratigraphy of media industry regulations, and it's also unclear as to how it will make money.

Ronen hinted that an "app store" format will be part of its strategy, letting developers charge for their applications and taking a cut of sales, in addition to advertising. Also down the pipeline: an improved search feature that will let members search all Boxee content at once rather than only within individual content providers one at a time.

Boxee also released its first iPhone app this month. It's not a video app, though--it's an app to remotely control the Boxee browser over a Wi-Fi connection. Ronen says the company's received "great feedback" on it.

Update at 1:36 p.m. PDT: Details added.

Despite announcing 10 percent layoffs and a weak financial outlook earlier this week, Yahoo plans to build a new data center and open a customer care center in Nebraska, according to an announcement Friday by Nebraska's governor.

The project will entail building a 150,000 square-foot data center in La Vista, a suburb of Omaha. And the Internet search pioneer will open a customer care center in Omaha.

Under the state's Nebraska Advantage Tier 4 business incentives package, Yahoo will apply for various business incentives and tax breaks. And, in return, Yahoo would need to invest at least $100 million in capital and create 100 new jobs.

"These two projects present an extraordinary opportunity for Nebraska. It leaves no doubt that Nebraska can successfully compete for technology jobs," Gov. Dave Heineman said in a statement.

Yahoo began searching for a data center site in the Midwest in January, and Nebraska officials said the state's Nebraska Advantage program played a key role in wooing the Internet company.

Nebraska, while far away from Silicon Valley, has attracted some technology players, such as telecom companies and eBay's PayPal, to the eastern region of the state.

AOL's Edwin Aoki

(Credit: ZDNet UK)

Edwin Aoki is a technology fellow at AOL, and an alumnus of Apple and of Netscape, where he worked on enterprise products as well as the Communicator browser.

On Thursday, Aoki spoke at the Future Of Web Apps conference in London, alongside figures such as Digg's Kevin Rose and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. He urged developers to create applications out of passion and for the community, rather than just doing it for money.

ZDNet.co.uk spoke to Aoki just after his speech, to talk about the impact Web applications have had in the enterprise and what trends are emerging.

In the speech you just gave, you suggested that developers should develop applications out of passion, rather than for money. Is this not an idea that is more applicable to the consumer, rather than the enterprise, developer community?

Aoki: Folks have been able to take whatever their passion or their expertise is and apply the technology to writing that, or to disseminating that, through whatever organization their interest is in. We see that a lot in nonprofits, but we also see that a lot in the enterprise.

Wikis are a great example of a technology that often comes in because some folks inside the enterprise want a more efficient way of spreading knowledge and information, and all of a sudden it becomes this great corporate resource. Messaging is another example of something that, we found at our AIM network, often starts with people wanting to have a better way to communicate inside the enterprise. They bring that in, and all of a sudden they find it's a way they can communicate not only inside the intranet, but also with customers and suppliers as well.

I think it is one of these things where the ubiquity and the low cost and the ease of deployment of these technologies really is the supreme environment where you can bring that into an enterprise, just as you can bring that to consumers or even a non-profit.

Those are examples where a trend started in the consumer sector and moved into the enterprise. Is that going to continue?

Aoki: I think that enterprise software is a slightly different beast. I used to do some of that in my time at Netscape and typically they have fairly long sales cycles, they're centrally administered, they are deployed by an enterprise IT department on behalf of a company, and a lot of those folks are starting to embrace those technologies and bring that in on a corporate level as well.

But I think the rapidity of adoption really does start with individuals. It may start from a consumer focus, and it may start from more of a professional focus, but the common thread is that it does tend to start with a person or a small team or a department that is really interested in deploying that technology.

How much do you think the global financial crisis is going to hit the developer community?

Aoki: We're already starting to see, in some sense, the capital markets and some of the venture funding start to be more cautious. Certainly in (Silicon) Valley, there is still an outgrowth of the lessons learned during the first dot-com bust. People are being a lot more cautious. They're scrutinizing the balance sheet a little bit more; they're looking more for those revenue ideas.

At the same time, a lot of the things I was talking about are fueled really not out of money, and they don't cost that much money to start. Both within AOL and with a number of the folks here at the conference, they just start something on a weekend. And they say well, they'd love to just try out how that works. And they find that it's an idea that catches on, and it's an idea that resonates with people, and all of a sudden they're writing something that is larger than they imagined it would be.

We had products that were launched that way in AOL, from the initiative of an individual engineer. We've had enterprise initiatives that have launched that way, because somebody said there's got to be a better way to...whatever.

Such as?

Aoki: Well, I mentioned wikis earlier. Our internal wiki was started by one of our engineers as a way to incorporate a more decentralized approach to documenting the kinds of things that we do. It's been completely embraced by the organization--hundreds of thousands of pages--and it's now an IT-supported function. We have an internal search agent that goes through our intranet that helps aggregate and organize all the information from our myriad sites--that was an employee-started function.

A lot of these things start off as an idea and all of a sudden the organization realizes, hey, this is really helping, this is a great productivity boost. How can we bring this in, how can we help manage that, how can we incorporate it into our corporate systems and bring that into our security and enterprise policies in a way that's not going to stifle that innovation, but in a way that's going to help it grow and help nurture that.

A lot of organizations have been very cool on social-networking sites such as Facebook. How will social networking win over the enterprise crowd, given that many such sites don't yet have the perceived longevity of instant-messaging applications?

Aoki: Social networking--whether it's Facebook or LinkedIn or any specific instance of it--the notion of the social network is going to stick around. You mentioned instant messaging and, if you reduce that back to its bare bones, you have a social graph, that's just graphed through that buddy list there. And that morphed into the Facebooks and LinkedIns of the world, where you're able to check that and see that a little more transparently. That will morph into something else again, I'm sure, as our understanding of those technologies matures.

So it's there. It's something that's part of that. IBM did a study, again looking at wikis in particular, in terms of the number of people that contribute to a wiki and the number of people that are really involved in that. You can trace domain knowledge through that, by looking at who it is contributing to an area, who the comments are coming from, where the edits are going. Wikipedia has a similar phenomenon on the global consumer web.

But again, that also forms a sort of social network, because you're able to understand who your domain experts are in a particular area. If you feed that out onto a graph, you have some additional metadata on your organization there.

So I do think that those kinds of things will evolve organically out of the way technology is used, and frankly I don't think that we know how that will manifest.

A number of organizations have tried to have these social networks on the intranet, creating internal social networks. I don't know that that works unless you have a very large organization, because the value of a social network is in being able to tease out some of these relationships that aren't necessarily obvious. If you have 25 people and know what everybody does and what their skills are, a social network isn't going to layer a whole lot more on top of that.

But for larger enterprises or geographically distributed enterprises, they can have a lot of opportunities where that network is able to expose information that's not necessarily obvious. And I think that IT organizations will realize that and understand that there's value there.

Perhaps one reason instant messaging became more acceptable in organizations was that the networks became interoperable. But this is still not the case with social networking. How important do you think interoperability and the portability of personal data between sites will be? We haven't yet seen the fruits of initiatives such as OpenSocial, for instance.

Aoki: Not yet, but these things take time. There's been a number of folks who have been working very hard on data-portability standards and protocols. Obviously there's that balance between what you want to expose and (conceal), and there are privacy concerns about that, making sure that we have iron-clad authentication and authorization that goes with that.

We talk a lot about data portability and its need, and it's clearly an important aspect for the industry, but it's easy to overlook how deep that rabbit-hole goes sometimes. In order to have good data portability, you need to have strong authorization. In order to have that, you need to have a strong notion of authentication, and in order to have strong authentication, you need to have identity management that everybody agrees on. These are frankly initiatives that people have been working on for the best part of the last decade.

I think that it will come--it's really important--but really what we're starting to see is the depth of how much there is to solve.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Click here for ongoing coverage from CNET News, 'Tough times for tech'

The Google Chrome Channel Chooser lets people get the latest updates to Google's Web browser.

(Credit: CNET News)

Through a new developer program, Google is letting people try the latest versions of its Chrome Web browser, and the first update is available.

Those who want the newest Chrome versions can install the Google Chrome Channel Chooser software from Google's Chrome Dev Channel site. The switcher lets people choose whether they want the latest cutting-edge Chrome builds or the less frequent but more stable beta versions.

"Google Chrome now provides a way for people to get early-access releases automatically: the Dev channel," said Chrome Program Manager Mark Larson in a Chrome mailing list posting late Monday night. "The Dev channel lets you test the latest fixes and get access to new features as they're being developed. We will release new builds to the Dev channel about every week so that you can preview--and provide feedback on--what's coming in Google Chrome."

The 'About Google Chrome' dialog box lets people update to the latest version.

(Credit: CNET News)

The first update available through the program, build 1251, is geared more for programmers and willing guinea pigs than for those who merely are curious.

Build 1251 fixes bugs with areas including Microsoft's Silverlight software, tab behavior, video playback with YouTube and other Flash players, and scalable vector graphics, and it suppresses full-text indexing of sites accessed with encrypted Web connections, according to the release notes. It also enables two switches that can be set when the software boots that let users activate two developmental features, new technology for networking and for managing Chrome windows.

How to update
After running the Google Chrome Channel Chooser software, users can find if there's a new version by clicking the wrench icon in the upper-right corner of the Chrome screen, then selecting "About Google Chrome." If a new version is available, users can update there, then reboot restart to enable the changes.

The newest Chrome version is 0.2.152.1.

(Credit: CNET News)

My update to version 0.2.152.1 went smoothly--but afterward, the browser couldn't figure out whether another version was available. Instead, it said "checking for updates..." for a few minutes until I closed the dialog box.

Chrome is an open-source project, meaning that Google may draw on other work from Firefox, WebKit, and Microsoft, and that others may help Google. Judging by a couple of "thank yous" in the release notes, outsiders are in fact starting to submit patches.

Such submissions require programmers to extend copyright to Google, which means Google can have its way with the Chrome code, for example changing the open-source license under which it's offered.

Also, either Google is still hiding details of security-related Chrome fixes in the release notes, or some of the links are missing in the release notes.

It looks like social music site iLike will launch its developer platform early next week.

The Seattle-based company, which announced plans to build a third-party developer platform in July, has begun notifying news outlets that it will have a "significant technology announcement" on Wednesday.

Two weeks ago, iLike's President Hadi Partovi, wrote an e-mail to third-party developers notifying them that the company was "gearing up to prepare for launch" of the platform. According to Partovi's e-mail, the iLike Developer Platform is designed to add "interactive music features to Facebook apps and Web sites."

"We'll open up detailed information very soon," Partovi said in his August 29 e-mail. "In the mean time, we'd love to encourage a few Web sites or (Facebook) apps to be early adopters."

"If you're working on a Web site or Facebook app and are interested, shoot me an e-mail and we'll get you into the early preview. And if you're interested in being referenced as part of our launch and PR efforts, let me know too. We're considering picking a short list of launch partners to promote to our 15mm Facebook users."

An iLike spokeswoman declined to comment.

A source close to the music industry, who requested anonymity, also said that iLike's platform was opening next week.

iLike is making this announcement in conjunction with the Web 2.0 Expo, the O'Reilly Media-organized confab set to hit New York next week. But conferences aside, this is a particularly notable time for iLike, which rose to fame as an application on Facebook's developer platform, to make this move. The News Corp.-owned social network MySpace will be launching its much-anticipated MySpace Music service soon, and has confirmed that on Monday it will be announcing the program's initial brand advertisers.

This is a time when other social music businesses, iLike among them, are scrambling to make their own moves and snag a bit of the limelight. The rapid-fire, competing-announcement phenomenon is something the tech industry saw last spring when the press was barraged with data-portability announcements: Google Friend Connect, MySpace Data Availability, and Facebook Connect all were announced within a week of each other.

Next week, likewise, should shape up to be a big one for digital music. iLike already has a partnership in place with RealNetworks' Rhapsody music service so that members can stream full-length songs, and the company announced this summer that membership has surpassed 30 million users.

CNET News' Caroline McCarthy contributed to this report.

It's hard to think of Apple and Facebook as obstructions to innovation and the free flow of information, but that's exactly what the companies could become one day, according to Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor and a proponent of free speech on the Web.

Apple and Facebook have generated lots of consumer satisfaction by each creating environments where third-party developers can tailor software for the iPhone or Facebook's social network. Part of their success is due to the quality control the companies maintain over the applications running on their platforms, Zittrain said. But he also worries that Apple and Facebook--as well as other companies that might be tempted to follow their lead--will begin to exert more control over independent software development than ever before. He's skeptical this would be good for anyone.

Harvard professor is skeptical that platforms similar to those built around Apple's iPhone and Facebook provide the best environment for developing software.

(Credit: Jonathan Zittrain)

In an interview with CNET News.com last week, Zittrain said his fears were stoked recently when Apple and Facebook each made news for booting software apps off their platforms.

Last week, Apple banned the bloody electronic comic, Murderdrome. The comic's creators wrote on their blog: "This is due to the part of the SDK that suggests content must not offend anyone in 'Apple's reasonable' opinion.'" Some of the other apps axed by Apple include Box Office, which provides movie information; Tris, a Tetris-like game app and PhoneSaber, a feature that simulates the light-saber sounds from the film Star Wars.

Last month, Facebook disabled Scrabulous, the digital game that looks a lot like the popular board game Scrabble in numerous countries around the world including the United States. Mattel and Hasbro, which share ownership of Scrabble, pressured Facebook to remove Scrabulous, citing copyright concerns. To sidestep the copyright issue, the brothers who created Scrabulous modified the game's look feel and relaunched it in North America as Wordscraper.

"What I object to is that these companies have put themselves into a position where they can be bullied into making decisions that leads to taking stuff down," Zittrain said. "It's becoming commonplace that code is either prevented from reaching an audience, or once it reaches an audience it can be yanked back because of the architecture."

Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society who calls himself a "happy Facebook and iPhone user," said he doesn't believe that Apple or Facebook created the platforms with the intention of asserting heavy-handed control over software development. He suspects that they control their platforms the way they do for sound business reasons.

But Zittrain warns in his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, that anyone who creates these controlled environments is vulnerable to pressure from outside parties. Some requests to remove an app will be made for legitimate reasons while others may be made to gain a competitive edge, according to Zittrain.

"You can see where outsiders might want to force (Apple and Facebook's) hand for business reasons," Zittrain said. "The last thing Apple and Facebook want is to be embroiled in court fights for some app that hasn't taken off yet with a big audience. So it's rational for the platform owner (to remove the app), but it's not good for the ecosystem."

As supreme rulers over their platforms, Apple and Facebook hold unchecked power over what apps live or die. This harms consumers, entrepreneurs and the Internet by making it harder for disruptive software to survive. Often such controversial applications turn out to benefit software, Zittrain argued.

Would Kazaa or Skype have flourished in a platform similar to Apple's, asks Zittrain? Or would the music and telephone companies have forced Apple to ban them by threatening legal action?

Zittrain reminds anyone who will listen that all of the major operating systems of the 20th century; Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS, never sought to impede third-party applications written for them. "Nobody ever asked Bill Gates to kill BitTorrent," Zittrain said.

Apple may need to follow Facebook's lead
Apple declined to comment for this story, but Facebook defended its procedures for removing applications.

Chris Kelly, chief privacy officer at Facebook, said Tuesday that the social network has established a set of rules and standards for developers designed to protect consumers. "The idea that there are some rules at the margins I don't think significantly hinders the ability to be generative," Kelly said.

To protect developers accused of breaking rules, Facebook has a system to listen to their side of the story. A "platform team" assesses rules violations and makes a determination, Kelly said, adding that Facebook also has an appeal's process.

It's important to note, however, that the people who hear the appeals are not independent parties but Facebook employees. Still, this is more than what Apple currently offers. At this early stage in the iPhone platform's development, it appears Apple is without any formal process to allow developers whose apps are removed a chance to challenge the decision.

"Apple will remove your app without telling you why they're doing it," said Cyrus Najmabadi, a software developer whose application, Box Office, was taken down in July for over a week without warning. He brought it back under a new name, Now Playing. "This is frightening, given the traditional open nature of the computing market. Apple needs a notification system and to be more transparent."

Najmabadi said he couldn't detail why the app was banned, citing the non disclosure agreement Apple makes third-party developers sign.

One important question is why, if Najmabadi is unhappy, doesn't he develop elsewhere? The reality is that iPhone and Facebook's platforms have become enormously influential and potentially lucrative for developers, Zittrain maintains. Walking away isn't easy, Najmabadi said.

The more successful the platform, the more control they can assert over developers, said Colin Sebastian, a video game analyst with Lazard Capital Markets.

Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo operate walled-garden environments in the videogame sector, Sebastian said, but developers haven't complained much about the console makers throwing their weight around. That's due to the intense competition in the sector, which prevents the companies from issuing too many demands on developers. "I suspect that could change if any one of them ever became the dominate player," Sebastian said.

In the case of Apple and Facebook, Zittrain wants to see developers band together to pressure those companies to provide guarantees. He would also like to see platform creators get some protection under the law.

"There's plenty of people who argue to let the market solve the problem," Zittrain said. "That's fine. It's not like I'm racing to have the UN to send in the helicopters. The market will sort it out once they know the problem. They just have to know. I've been trying to bang the drum and rally the nation's developer communities because I think the platforms aren't yet fully dug in. So you could actually see flexibility."

Yahoo's Widget Channel software lets TVs run network-enabled applications such as this one for Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing service.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Yahoo on Wednesday announced an effort to provide the software underpinnings of network-enabled TV, a move that could transform not only what it means to watch TV but also what it means to advertise on it.

Though the TV experience has been spiced up by voting for American Idol contestants, it generally has retained its famously passive character. Yahoo wants to change this by bringing a version of its Yahoo Widget Engine, a software foundation that can run small applications called widgets, to network-enabled TVs.

This new version, called the Widget Channel, will resemble the version that's available for PCs, but will come with a different user interface to let programmers build widgets that can be controlled from a distance with a remote control, said Patrick Barry, Yahoo's vice president of connected TV at Yahoo.

Yahoo's hope is the move will bring its clout on the Internet to a new domain.

"Our goal is to aggregate a very large, multimillion-person audience across a number of devices with our standard platforms so we can start to address the audience in a unified consistent way, and ultimately create a liquid advertising market," Barry said.

Yahoo is working on partnerships with TV makers to have the software built in and integrated with TV functions. "I'm quite sure there are going to be products on this," Barry said. "I expect to see some things next year."

A first example of the technology emerged at the Intel Developer Forum on Wednesday during a speech by Eric Kim, general manager of Intel's Digital Home Group. A demonstration of the technology showed widgets for monitoring eBay auctions, using the Twitter microblogging service, and viewing Flickr photographs.

Natural allies
Intel and Yahoo are natural allies in the technology effort. Both companies are powerful in their current markets, but as much in the giant consumer electronics market. Intel wants to sell processors--in this case the newly named Media Processor CE 3100 that had been code-named Canmore, and Yahoo wants to expand the reach of its content and ads.

But history shows the effort won't be easy; the consumer electronics industry has withstood years of attempted incursions by computing companies employing various "convergence" strategies.

One of Intel's chief advantages is that so much existing software and programming tools already are compatible with the widely available x86 processor family used in all of today's PCs. "We see the PC architecture coming to consumer electronics over the next few years and that driving a ton of value," Barry said.

Though the Intel-Yahoo demonstration used a system based on Intel's processors, the Yahoo technology will run on other hardware, Barry said. And because it uses platform-independent standards such as HTML and Flash, programmers won't have to worry about having to adapt their widgets for the underlying hardware, he added.

The software can work in different modes, including a sidebar that overlays part of the TV image and a full-screen mode that takes over completely.

A new ad market
Naturally, Yahoo is eyeing the ad business that it expects will come with the Widget Channel, though it won't be the sole conduit for advertisers. Yahoo believes the Widget Channel will come with the best features of both TV and Web advertising, Barry said.

"We're not getting into this game for our health," he said, pointing out that television ad spending is still five times that of online spending. "Yahoo will provide advertising services to this platform, but we're not going to be the only ones. And we're not going to be a gatekeeper or tollkeeper," Barry said.

Users will be able to select TV widgets from a gallery, but the Widget Channel software will be built into the TV, Barry said.

Among those developing TV widgets are Blockbuster, CBS Interactive, CinemaNow, Cinequest, Disney-ABC Television Group, eBay, GE, Group M, Joost, MTV, Samsung Electronics, Schematic, Showtime, Toshiba, and Twitter, Yahoo said. (CNET is a division of CBS Interactive.)

Click here for full coverage of the Intel Developer Forum.

In conjunction with the App Store that launched earlier this morning, there's an upgrade available for iPhone users to bring their devices up to speed with the compatible iPhone 2.0 software.

There's not an easy path to it yet, but the firmware is on Apple's servers, MacRumors.com reported Thursday.

Twitter users reported that the software is 225 megabytes in size. The download is free for iPhone users and $9.95 for iPod Touch users.

The iPhone 2.0 software allows existing iPhone and iPod Touch owners to have access to the software features that will be available on the new iPhone 3G that hits stores Friday morning (but not to the hardware upgrades, which include 3G Internet access and GPS). This means not only the 500+ third-party applications already in the iPhone App Store, but also support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync.

Third-party applications range from games and electronic books to iPhone versions of big social networks like MySpace and Facebook. Facebook and MySpace's iPhone applications will let users seamlessly upload photos to albums on the social networks, and Facebook's will let members with location-aware iPhone 3G devices see which of their friends are nearby.