Webware

Trillian IM is finally available to iPhone users.

(Credit: Trillian)

It took a few months, but finally, Trillian IM is available to iPhone and iPod Touch users through Apple's App Store. The application costs $4.99.

Cerulean Studios, the company that created Trillian, said that Trillian for iPhone sports several features users will already find on the company's desktop software. The app displays contacts, grouped and sorted by their respective categories. Users can also view multiple chat windows in a tabbed display. Thanks to updates Apple has made to the iPhone and iPod Touch, Trillian for iPhone also supports copy and paste. As with Trillian for the desktop, users can set their status, choose an avatar, and set up different status messages.

Because the app is always connected to Cerulean Studios' Astra server, users can synchronize content across multiple IM clients. In other words, any changes made on the iPhone version of the app will immediately be reflected on the company's Windows client and the user's Astra profile. Any contacts users add will also be synchronized with their other clients.

According to Cerulean Studios, all chats are maintained on the server, so they are kept in case of a lost connection. The app will also alert users when they receive an instant message, regardless of whether Trillian for iPhone is open or not. When an IM is received, users will see a dialog box, hear the Trillian IM-notification sound, and be able to start Trillian and reply to the person.

Those interested in using Trillian for iPhone will first need a Trillian Astra account. Luckily, the iPhone app allows users to sign up for Astra from within the app.

The industry P.R. frenzy over scams in ads and offers on social networks goes on: Facebook announced on Thursday evening in a post on its developer blog that since it updated its developer platform terms of service this summer, it has disabled two ad networks that it says were running deceptive advertisements.

This comes in the wake of allegations that some companies that power offer- and survey-related moneymaking operations for social-gaming applications on platforms like Facebook's have effectively been scamming users into paying for services without disclosing those costs. One of them, Offerpal Media, has been particularly visible in the crosshairs.

"This battle is not new and it's far from over," the post by Facebook's Nick Giano wrote. "We faced stimulus scam ads on our own system earlier this year and pushed them off the site with rigorous enforcement. We did the same months later when deceptive ads from third-party ad networks appeared in applications. We're doing that again now as we see them appear in the form of offers."

Additionally, Facebook--which has said for quite some time that many of the activities highlighted in the "app scam" controversy are already banned by its terms of service--included in the post that more than 100 developer applications have been either "suspended or brought into compliance" over advertising issues, and that more than half of them were used by at least 1 million Facebook members per month. It's not clear whether these were all related to scams, or to other advertising-related infringements like the Burger King marketing campaign that encouraged users to "unfriend" their contacts in exchange for a free cheeseburger.

Facebook representatives declined to name which ad networks or applications it has banned. But the company did ban two companies in June, Social Hour and Social Reach, citing ad network policy violations. It's possible that the two ad networks mentioned in Facebook's blog post were banned months ago, given the "since July" language.

Earlier this week, MySpace--another big destination for social-network apps--announced that it had updated its terms of service to ban app scams. Prior to that, several prominent application manufacturers announced that they had banned potentially deceptive offers, despite the fact that they are responsible for a big chunk of virtual-goods revenues.

An update was made to this post at 7:51 a.m. PT on November 6 to note that Facebook banned two ad networks in June.

With a project called Closure Tools, Google plans on Thursday to start helping developers who aspire to match the company's proficiency in creating Web sites and Web applications.

Google is a strong proponent of using JavaScript to write Web-based programs, part of its Web-centric ethos. Indeed, the company has pushed the language to its limits with services such as Gmail and Google Docs, and it developed its Chrome browser in part to enable JavaScript programs to run faster.

But writing, debugging, and optimizing heavy-duty JavaScript can be difficult--in part because a given JavaScript program sometimes works differently on different browsers. Google's open-source Closure Tools project is an attempt to help with some of these challenges.

The first in the suite of tools is the Closure Compiler, a software package designed to boil down a JavaScript program so it's smaller and runs faster. For example, a function named DisplayAddress() could be replaced with just a().

Along with the compiler come some extra tools that run in the Firefox browser. One, Closure Inspector, is an extension for Firefox's Firebug add-on designed to help programmers understand and debug the rewritten JavaScript--linking a() back to DisplayAddress(), for example. Another add-on for the Google Page Speed extension lets programmers see how much the compiler helped.

Google also plans to make the compiler available as a Web application hosted on its Google App Engine service.

The second element is called the Closure Library, a collection of prebuilt JavaScript code that lets programmers handle relatively sophisticated technology--arrays and string manipulation, for example.

Last are Closure Templates, more prewritten code to ease creation of JavaScript and HTML user interfaces.

In an earlier era, programming tools were expensive packages bought by a select few, but open-source software, new marketing strategies, and new business methods have made that approach the exception rather than the rule these days. Now programming tools are often a means to another end--encouraging programmers to produce the software that will make Windows or the Palm Pre useful and therefore popular, for example.

In Google's case, the objective is often to make the Web more popular because it sees more activity on the Web as corresponding directly with more activity on its revenue-generating search site. Among the high-profile projects to this end are Chrome, Chrome OS, and Android, all subsidized by Google's powerful search-advertising business.

One interesting contrast to Closure is another Google project called Google Web Toolkit. It's designed to accomplish some of the same goals as Closure, including paving over browser incompatibilities and producing high-performance JavaScript. But with GWT, coders write programs in Java that gets translated into JavaScript.

So one last question: why the name?

Google's reply: "Being a functional language, the concept of a function closure is fundamental to the JavaScript language."

How will Google manage growing demand for support for its free products, as people rely more and more on its services?

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

If you rely on a compelling service that happens to be free, what level of customer support are you entitled to receive?

Google is trying to figure that out. Known for using brilliant engineers, complex algorithms and speedy servers to organize online information in a simple and accessible fashion, Google is learning how to add the human touch to its repertoire as customers look for answers that can't be found on an FAQ.

Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy with the results. Some advertisers have been complaining about Google's Web-page-first approach to customer service issues for years, with the most common gripe that they find it exceedingly difficult to reach a real live human being when they have a problem that isn't answered on a product Web page. More recently, Katie Braband, who reported problems with Google Checkout's handling of transactions at her company, Datto, was just as frustrated by Google's response to her issues as she was the issues themselves. "The only e-mails we've received response to are pre-generated, it's very clear there's no person writing the e-mail," she said in September.

Google is aware that customer service will play a large role in its growth as it offers more paid services, and seems committed to improving services for those kinds of customers over time. "The first thing a CIO is going to say is, 'where is that person and how do I wring their neck?'" said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in an interview earlier this year. Schmidt knows a thing or two about traditional enterprise customer service: he ran corporate software maker Novell before joining Google. And before Novell, he was an executive at Sun Microsystems.

For many users of Google's free services, support is limited to a series of Web pages, FAQs, and user forums. That's not that surprising, since Google can't realistically offer phone support to every Gmail user who can't figure out the conversation-based design.

But as Google continues to push forward with free advertising-supported services that people and small businesses increasingly rely on in their personal and professional lives, the company appears to be banking on its ability to train those users to expect a healthy dose of relatively low-cost support. Web pages with hints, troubleshooting tips, and discussion forums are the first level of support across virtually all of Google's products and are pretty much the end of the line for those who do not pay to use products or services. That's not unusual in technology; even businesses that charge customers for their products have moved in that direction in a bid to cut support costs.

When it comes to Google's main profit engine--the AdWords search keyword ads--there are two basic kinds of customer service, said Deanna Yick, a Google representative. High-roller customers enjoy access to a personal sales team they can reach out and call, but almost everyone else relies on Web-based resources like the AdWords Help Center.

For a while, Google also offered phone support to a proportion of those advertisers without sales team connections. However, it recently reduced the amount of phone support it provides for those not supported by the sales team, leaving e-mail as the sole contact method for a larger segment (Google won't say exactly how many) of its most important customers.

"AdWords is an effective, self-service online advertising platform for advertisers of all sizes worldwide," Google said in a statement regarding the reduction in phone support. "Some clients work with our sales teams, while others prefer to manage their accounts independently. We also provide email and phone support to some advertisers, and have worked hard to build out a robust set of online resources (such as the AdWords Help Center, AdWords Learning Center and user forums) to help advertisers find the answers to their questions around the clock wherever they might be located."

Is this an issue? Google argues that in many cases e-mail and Web support can be faster than sitting on hold waiting for the next customer service representative to answer your call in the order in which it was received. The company can track the most common queries and therefore answer the most commonly asked questions on the Web much more quickly than a telephone-based system would allow, while also developing fixes for commonly reported problems as to cut down on the need for support in the first place.

But on the Google Apps side of the world, the company knows it doesn't have the luxury of pulling back on phone support with its most important customers, said Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise.

Here, as well, Google tries to encourage its users to solve their issues through forums and troubleshooting pages. It turns to the solution Google employs for just about everything--an algorithm--to get the most relevant information regarding support issues on those pages and before the people who need detailed answers, and fast.

But Google Apps Premium users--who pay $50 a year per user--can also talk to live Google support personnel anytime day or night when they encounter issues. Years of phone-based IT support has trained system administrators and IT executives to expect the human touch when it comes to advanced support, Glotzbach said, echoing Schmidt's comments last month.

Glotzbach--like any true Googler--believes there are efficiencies just waiting to be discovered that could be greatly improve the customer support experience for both Google and its customers.

"I think this is a fascinating technology and innovation challenge that's properly underappreciated as such," Glotzbach said. "When people think of support, they think of large call centers. But underneath that there is a massive opportunity to innovate." Left unmentioned were the cost savings that accompany automated support.

With innovation comes friction, however, as new ways of thinking about old problems grate on the status quo.

Google is pushing into a whole host of businesses in which it is a newcomer, such as Google Apps, Google Voice, and now Google Maps Navigation. In many cases, those products are free, which reduces expectations for premium support (usually). But those products compete against paid products and services that do provide some level of support.

As more and more people rely on these free services--and Google crowds out competitors who can't compete with free--support issues will grow. Even products that "just work" fail from time to time, and those failures present opportunities for companies to build loyalty if they handle the support encounter the right way, and resentment if they don't.

Can Google train those customers to expect a passive Web-based support experience? Or will Google's free strategy evolve into two groups, those willing to tolerate passive support for free, and those willing to pay a little extra for more service?

Either way, managing the customer experience has been a relatively easy task for Google up until now; basic search requires little customer support. It's about to get a lot more difficult.

It seems like everyone has an application directory these days, and now Flickr is no exception. While not offering up paid third-party services (yet), Flickr on Tuesday unveiled a reworked services section dubbed the "App Garden" that better showcases photo tools, and the people who have created them.

The new apps directory page manages to squeeze just about as many applications into a smaller space than the old one did. It also gives each app its own page where users can add descriptive tags and leave feedback in the form of comments. In fact, these new pages act just like Flickr photo pages, including giving registered users a way to favorite certain apps, which goes towards promoting up-and-coming apps higher up in the showcase. They also double as a shortcut to viewing other apps made by that same developer.

Flickr's new "App Garden" as the company calls it, is much more compact than the services directory that came before it. It also adds user interaction to the mix with comments and favoriting.

(Credit: CNET)

One area where the new app system has not permeated just yet is in letting users see what apps their friends and contacts are using. For instance, Flickr's activity feed--which gives Flickr users a bird's eye view of what their friends are up to, does not show when a user has favorited one of these tools. Users will only be able to see what apps they themselves have favorited from within the App Garden, and not alongside their photo favorites. There is also no way to create collections of apps you like to share with others, as you can do with the recently-released gallery feature.

These things may come in time, but for now it's already a much better system than the previous API services page. Developers have more of a chance to try to convince users to give their app a spin before they ever leave the site, and other Flickr users are now able to chime in and recommend it, either through the new favoriting system, or in the comments. Whether Flickr decides to make some of this user activity a little more public is unclear.

After the jump: The before and after of the API services menu, and what's now the App Garden.

Despite increasingly better software, blogging on phones is still a real pain compared with doing it on a regular computer. However, credit is due to WordPress, which has gone to great lengths to make the latest version of its iPhone app much better for users to both create and manage their blogs on a small screen (and without a keyboard).

Besides a new look, one of the biggest changes is that the app remembers exactly what you were doing between sessions, so that if you quit it, or get a phone call, it will take you right back to the page or menu you were looking at. This also keeps you from losing anything you hadn't saved if you're interrupted--even if you were in the middle of a writing a sentence when your phone rang. This should change the beginning of such a conversation from "I am so mad at you right now" to a simple "hello."

In addition to remembering what you were doing, the app does a much better job at letting you manage user comments. The approval screen itself looks almost identical, but the app now lets you quickly switch between the ones that have been approved and the ones that still need to be looked at. It also displays each users' Gravatar (user icon) next to their username and URL, which ends up taking up a little more space than it did in the previous iteration of the app but adds a sense of familiarity with its desktop sibling.

Other small changes include the app remembering which order you uploaded the photos in so that they display in that same order in your post. Although the app still hasn't been updated to include videos, which means 3GS owners will have to add whatever video they shot through WordPress' Web interface instead. The app also now stores passwords in a user's keychain, which means those credentials could be accessed by other applications you may want to give access to later on down the line--like, say an app that lets you post videos to a WordPress blog.

Oddly enough, the new WordPress app is completely different from the original, which still exists but will no longer be updated. The company attributes this to having switched between having an outside contractor make the first version, whereas this new one was built in-house.

The new look makes it simply to hop between comments, posts and pages. User Gravatars are now visible too.

(Credit: WordPress)

If you're as excited for the World Series as I am, you're probably looking for some resources that will help you stay up-to-date on all the drama surrounding the Fall Classic between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies.

I've compiled a list of different resources to help you prepare for the big games, which begin Wednesday. For iPhone users, I've thrown in a couple of apps for when you're on the go. So without further ado, let's get going on the baseball chatter.

World Series time

MLB World Series Major League Baseball's World Series page is a great resource for those who want to learn just about anything related to the Fall Classic.

When you get to the site, you'll be able to read the news, watch videos related to the game, and watch all the interviews you might have missed. When the game's playing, the site will give you some updates on the progress both teams are making. You can also play World Series trivia games, buy MLB merchandise, and more. It's a great place to learn more about the World Series.

MLB's World Series page is there for the taking.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

A look at the Facebook news feed in Brizzly. Check out the buttons at the top to toggle back and forth between Facebook and Twitter.

(Credit: Brizzly)

Brizzly, a Twitter client that's still private beta, on Wednesday added the ability for members to follow their Facebook contacts as well through the Web-based service (unlike many of its competitors, Brizzly has opted to not take the form of a downloadable desktop app)--and to post Brizzly updates back to their Facebook profiles. For those of you who have Brizzly accounts, it should be live later on Wednesday if it isn't already.

It's a natural move: Most Twitter clients, like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop, also support updates from Facebook to one degree or another. Brizzly, created by San Francisco-based Thing Labs and spearheaded by Blogger and Google veteran Jason Shellen, makes a Twitter feed look quite a bit like a Facebook news feed by expanding image and video links from services like TwitPic and YouTube.

Through Facebook Connect, Brizzly can pull in your news feed so that you can toggle back and forth between a Twitter view and a Facebook view. But it's a little bit limited for now: currently, it's just the revamped "top stories" news feed, not the live-streaming feed that had been Facebook's default until this week.

Of note: when you've clicked on Facebook view in Brizzly, the Brizzly bear mascot is wearing a Facebook-logo sweatshirt and waving a pennant. Now that's just plain cute.

UPDATE: We hear the bear's name is Phineas.

After Sid Meier announced on Thursday that a new Civilization title called Civilization Network was on its way to Facebook, it had me thinking: what other games could I play until I'm ready to take on Meier's new title next year?

To determine that, I've spent some time with several games on Facebook and narrowed that list down to the titles that are actually worth playing. If you want to have some fun on Facebook, check out these games.

Get your game on

FarmVille At first glance, FarmVille might seem like a lame game that isn't worth playing. But once you give it a few minutes, I think you'll find that it's extremely addictive.

The premise behind FarmVille is simple: build a farm that grows all kinds of fruits and vegetables. When you first start the game, you'll see a few patches of land where you can start planting. From there, you need to ensure that your farm is healthy as you continue to grow the items in your inventory. The game features simple point-and-click controls, making it accessible for any Facebook user.

FarmVille's "neighbors" feature is quite fun. Users can find other "farmers" in their friends list and grow a nice, bountiful farm together. It's a great concept that adds more value to the game. And the best part is, the more people who farm in FarmVille, the more money that will go to Sweet Seeds for Haiti, a charity that gives healthy meals to families in Haiti. Try it out.

FarmVille features some fun, farming goodness.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Mafia Wars If you're as much of a fan of movies like "The Godfather" and "Goodfellas" as I am, you might have some fun with Mafia Wars.

The object of Mafia Wars is simple: become a boss of a mafia family. When you first start playing the game, you'll see several different "jobs" that you can take on. They include (pretty much) any criminal activity you can think of. That said, you won't actually engage in those activities like you would in a Grand Theft Auto game. Instead, you'll simply tell the game that you want to perform a particular job and you will. When complete, you receive more cash and credibility. Think of it as a simple role-playing game.

Like the other games in this roundup, Mafia Wars has a social element to it. Your goal is to recruit members into your own family as you fight for mafia dominance. When that social element comes in, Mafia Wars shows its value. It's a really fun game when you play with friends.

Mafia Wars asks you to perform jobs to become a mafia kingpin.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)