Webware

An example of Brizzly's new tweet translation.

(Credit: Brizzly)

Web-based Twitter client Brizzly made a dual announcement Friday: first, it's opened up into a full public beta mode (previously, an invite code was required); and second, it can now translate tweets into your default language on the site.

To translate a tweet in Brizzly--which already expands links, videos, and photos posted to Twitter, creating a more visual experience--you can click on a question mark for an instant translation. This is interesting, as Twitter has made its first moves recently in launching translated versions of the service (starting with Spanish), meaning that there will potentially be many more non-English tweets flowing through the system. It uses Google Translate, so needless to say, it's not totally perfect.

Brizzly added Facebook Connect support last month.

Location awareness is hot, from gamelike social services such as Foursquare and Gowalla to platforms such as Google Latitude. Now one start-up is hoping to make it as easy for any company to integrate into a Web or mobile service as it is for retailers to use PayPal. Meet SimpleGeo, which on Thursday is launching into a private beta.

Boulder, Colo.-based SimpleGeo, co-founded by former Digg engineer Joe Stump and Socialthing founder Matt Galligan (who sold the would-be FriendFeed competitor to AOL), started out as a company called Crash Corp. earlier this year. The goal was to make augmented-reality applications for mobile devices like the iPhone, but the founders said that building the location-aware infrastructure for their first game took a whopping three months.

So they changed their company name and angle: SimpleGeo's purpose is to build that infrastructure for other companies to eliminate the development hell, hoping to do for "geo" apps what PayPal did for sites requiring payment systems or Facebook did for sites requiring logins and social-networking features. The complete offering, which can also build in augmented-reality features, encompasses storage, analytics, and a software development kit (SDK).

Three versions are available: free, $399 per month, and $2,499 per month. A public version is slated to launch in the spring.

Nobody's really doing this yet, though apparently a few other start-ups are toying with similar business plans, and SimpleGeo is still new enough that it has not yet closed a round of venture funding. Because it's in private beta, we also haven't yet seen just how powerful it is (though Galligan has posted some test video to Flickr) so it's not yet possible to answer the big, glaring question: what if Google makes a big, developer-focused Latitude push that could snuff out smaller competition?

(Credit: Mozilla)

It's been just under four months since Mozilla launched its pilot program for contributions, a way for users to donate to add-on developers for their time and effort.

The program was launched in tandem with a redesign of Mozilla's add-ons site that gave developers their own profile pages. Many add-on makers were already running donation programs through their own sites, but wanted the option to show up in Mozilla's catalog too.

Already it appears to be working, but on a smaller scale than some developers might have hoped. For the half dozen developers that CNET News talked to, none has made enough from it to, say, quit their day job. While Mozilla would not reveal specifics on which developers are getting the most contributions, it did provide us with the total amount given: around $20,000. An organization spokesperson said that most of that came in September and October.

Of the 500 or so developers who are participating in the program, the average contribution falls somewhere between $5 and $6, with the largest thus far being $150. All have gone through PayPal, which is the sole way to pay through Mozilla's add-on site. PayPal then gets a small fee out of each transaction, something that comes out of the developer's pocket, although this varies based on how much the user gives.

Other ways to make money

Some developers believe Mozilla has gone about the payment problem in reverse. With the current contributions program developers are given the chance to ask for money before the user even downloads the free add-on. So why not give them a way to ask for a contribution after a user has downloaded and installed it?... Read more

Don't like something about an app? Don't just sit there--pitch a fit.

(Credit: CNET)

Want great software for your mobile phone? Keep up the complaints. That was the message at a Tuesday session of the BlackBerry Developer Conference here in San Francisco aimed at developers. But it's a dictum that applies to all smartphone owners.

In the symbiotic relationship between the application developer and the user, a well-placed critique is key to a good programmer improving their mobile application. The motto of the squeakiest wheel getting the most grease may seem obvious, but the importance of user feedback becomes even clearer when articulated in dollar signs and numbers.

A single-star rating for an application on a review site or storefront can severely limit its chances of getting downloaded, and therefore of making money.

"This is the curse of the one-star," said session speaker Stephen King (not that Stephen King), CEO of app testing company Mob4Hire.

His company's research suggests that the bulk of users feel comfortable downloading new mobile software that gets four stars or above. With 69 percent of people discovering apps based on rankings, reviews, and friend recommendations, and the mobile app industry growing 26 percent year over year, according to Juniper Research, there's real money to be made or lost. Addressing peoples' complaints isn't just a best business practice; it may directly affect the bottom line.

(Credit: Xobni)

A few months ago, e-mail search app Xobni told us they were creating a version for BlackBerry. At the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco on Monday, we got a look at it.

Xobni on the Windows PC is an Outlook add-on that quickly finds e-mail messages and attachments. On BlackBerry, Xobni will integrate with your e-mail account, where it will extract addresses, phone numbers, and social networking details to automatically create a secondary address book for your phone. You'll be able to use Xobni for BlackBerry to quickly find contacts--including those you have not physically added to the native address book yourself. That expanded address book goes for everyone who has ever sent you an e-mail, been cc'd in an e-mail, or even mentioned in a message.

With the premium Xobni Plus Outlook add-on, you can access this secondary address book by typing into the Compose field. Integration isn't quite so tight in BlackBerry. On the Bold, Tour, and new Curve 8900s, you'll access contacts by flicking up on the track pad to get to to the stylized Xobni address book.

Then search by a contact's name, domain name, or by a keyword to speedily find the person you're looking for. As with Xobni on the desktop, you'll be able to send your calendar availability to a contact, get Facebook to supply contacts' Xobni profile picture, and view Twitter feeds and LinkedIn and Hoovers information from the BlackBerry.

In creating its own address book--instead of adding contacts to the native address book--Xobni makes a statement. Unlike Gwabbit, which adds the information from a signature block into a new record, Xobni finds e-mails and phone numbers anywhere in the message. Besides that, Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte believes that inserting contacts into your native address book means "you've already lost the battle." Instead of adding contacts one-by-one, Xobni builds you a social roster behind-the-scenes, and adds social networking plug-ins in the process.

As far as time lines go, Xobni is looking at a closed alpha release sometime in December. Bonforte expects a beta early next year, and the final release a few months after that. The pricing model is still undecided.

Xobni for BlackBerry will first be available on the Bold, Tour, and Curve 8900. Storm users will have to wait a little longer.

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.

In the wake of a firestorm over just how much of social-gaming companies' profits can be attributed to potentially scammy offers and incentives, News Corp.'s MySpace has taken a stand (and, it could be said, taken advantage of the PR opportunity) by coming out vocally against them.

"We're adding a fifth principle (to our developer terms of use) that clarifies a specific use case that we feel is particularly damaging to the user experience: promotions that include hidden renewals without specific opt-in will not be permitted," a company blog post by CEO Owen Van Natta read. "Because it's our belief opt-out offers are misleading and do not have the best interests of the users in mind, we will be updating our Terms of Use this week to better clarify this for users and developers."

What exactly is he referring to? In many of the most popular (and profitable) games built for big social-networking platforms like Facebook and MySpace, players can progress faster in the game by either buying virtual goods with "real" money, or by completing offers and surveys from a partner company like the prominent Offerpal Media. Critics say that many of these offers aren't actually free, and unwittingly can sign users up for expensive subscriptions or programs.

After a public confrontation between TechCrunch's Michael Arrington and Offerpal CEO Anu Shukla at last week's Virtual Goods Summit event in San Francisco, game makers like Zynga and RockYou put out statements saying that they're cracking down on offers that are potentially misleading.

Could this lead to real industry changes? Yes. But keep in mind that Facebook, the biggest destination for these social games, already bans this stuff in theory. "Ads cannot be deceptive or fraudulent about any offer made," the company's advertising guidelines read, and adds "if an ad includes a price, discount, or 'free' offer...the destination URL for the ad must link to a page that clearly and accurately offers the exact deal the ad has displayed (and) the ad must clearly state what action or set of actions is required to qualify for the offer."

But judging by the amount of sketchiness that allegedly takes place on the platform, it seems like advertisers aren't necessarily following these guidelines. Whether MySpace's stance against them can lead to a legitimate crackdown has yet to be seen.

iStockphoto's Kelly Thompson

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google's Gears technology may not have caught on widely in the world of Web programming, but operators of the iStockphoto photo sales site have become believers.

Among other things, Gears enables browsers to store data on a local computer, which most notably means that Web applications can be adapted to work even while offline. But for iStockphoto's purposes, it primarily means better performance for people using the site and secondarily lower operating costs for the Getty Images photo sales subsidiary.

"We're not requiring anyone to install Google Gears," the company said on an explanatory Web site. "If you do install Google Gears, though, iStock will work much faster."

Google launched the open-source Gears software in 2007, but so far, the sites that use it--among them Gmail, Google Reader, WordPress, and MySpace--are the exception rather than the rule.

Speed and money
The main motivation for the change was getting a faster site, which benefits iStockphoto's financial results, said Kelly Thompson, iStockphoto's chief operating officer.

"It was 95 percent performance and end-user experience, but let's face it: if I can get more pictures pumped out faster, with more searches, we sell more," Thompson said. "Cutting down a page load time for a user is more valuable to me than the money I'll save on bandwidth."

The company adopted Gears with no prompting from Google, he added. "We did this on our own," with Web programmers jumping on the project because "it's sexy for them to work on it."

iStockphoto activated its Gears support September 30, Thompson said. In the first 16 days of use, Gears saved the company from paying for the transfer of 132GB of data over the network and lightened its Web servers by 8.7 million communication requests--and that's with only 19,000 Gears-installed users, a "tiny portion of our traffic," he said. Those without Gears benefit, too, since iStock's Web servers are unburdened somewhat by those who do use it.

The technology works by locally storing various Web page ingredients--photo thumbnails, JavaScript program code, Cascading Style Sheet formatting files, for example. Older files are flushed periodically so the users' hard drives don't get too cluttered.

"It's a pretty basic implementation right now: the second time a user sees any image or requests a JavaScript file, it loads instantly," Thompson said. One of his developers described it as "the opposite of a drug dealer: the first hit isn't free, (but) every subsequent hit is."

Google is trying to propagate Gears, which is available as a browser plug-in. In a more aggressive move, it built Gears into its Chrome browser. And in the longer term, the HTML5 standard under development reproduces the local storage abilities of Gears, a move that stands to spread the technology more widely.

HTML5 good, IE 6 bad
Thompson is a fan of another HTML5 technology: built-in video. iStock licenses video content, as well as photos and other content, and currently streams it with Adobe Systems' Flash technology.

"We'd love to be able to ditch Flash on the video side, but it's probably a ways out," Thompson said, citing widespread use of Internet Explorer.

IE is widely loathed among Web developers for its slow performance and lack of standards compliance, and even Microsoft wishes that people would upgrade from IE 6, but it's still the single most widely used browser out there, even though Microsoft released it in 2001, just before Windows XP arrived. Microsoft released IE 7 in 2006, and it tried to improve standards compliance and security with the release of IE 8 this March.

People are gradually shifting away from IE 6, but not fast enough for Thompson's taste--or plans.

"We announced we'd drop official support for IE 6 in 2010 back at the beginning of the year. I'm not sure we're going to be able to it: the percentage of users is dropping--just not quite fast enough," he said.

From August (top) to September (below), Internet Explorer lost a bit of usage share, compared with rival browsers.

(Credit: Net Applications)

According to Net Applications statistics, IE 6 is used by 24.4 percent of people on the Web today, followed by IE 7, IE 8, Firefox 3.5, and Firefox 3, in descending order of popularity. Overall, IE has 65.7 percent share of usage.

iStockphoto has more early adopters in its population and therefore different browser preferences. The top five browsers on the site are Firefox, with 37.8 percent; IE, with 34.4 percent; Apple's Safari, with 22.3 percent; Google's Chrome, with 3.4 percent; and Opera, with 1.7 percent.

Among iStockphoto's IE traffic, the majority of people use version 7, but the tide is turning.

"We've seen an almost 2 percent migration of (IE) 6 to 8 in the last 60 days alone. We're hoping Windows 7 will push it even more quickly," Thompson said. "For us, even though it's a shrinking percentage, it still represents over 1 million visits per month, so I can't cut them off at the knees."

"I think we're dominated by geeks, designers, and small businesses, all who move more quickly than the enterprise--not to mention we're 35 percent Mac, with the iPhone about to overtake Linux for third place" among operating systems, Thompson said.

Facebook's Ethan Beard outlines what the company is up to in the next six months.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Facebook on Wednesday took the wraps off its brand new development road map, unveiling changes and features the company is planning to implement within the next three to six months.

Many of the changes are smaller, simply rearrangements of certain parts of the user interface. However, the company is also making some radical moves like enforcing badly written applications and enabling developers to acquire user e-mail addresses as well as create Facebook-like sites outside of the social network's walls.

Ethan Beard, Facebook's director of platform marketing, who gave the presentation in Facebook's headquarters here, said that the one thing the company kept hearing from developers was that they needed to know what the company was working on ahead of time--and not just for short-term development, but a year down the line. "You want to know what's going on inside of Facebook," he said. "And today is to provide you with a lot more predictability."

That predictability revolves around the company's road map, which now sits on a new developer site. Beard says that it will remain updated with new items, planned changes, and APIs as they are announced. The company is also making publicly available a bug list, which will show developers problems with the site that Facebook is working on, as well as how they are being prioritized to be fixed.

The changes for users

The new user navigation menu takes place of the long bar that used to sit on the bottom of the page.

(Credit: Facebook)

So what are some of the big changes users will see? The first is that Facebook is doing away with many of the visual and organization changes it's made in the last two years. That includes the removal of the Windows Start bar-like app launcher and notification bar that sat at the bottom of the page. That's being moved over to the left side of the page where things like filters currently reside.

The new navigation bar will house new quick jumps to menus for both games and applications--something for which Facebook is making a notable distinction. Both will serve as a way for users to get a bird's-eye view of what's happening in games or the applications they've been using, as well as what their friends are up to. The company will also be making it easier for users to add third-party applications to the left side navigation bar with some new code that makes it a one-click affair.

Alongside the new left side navigation Facebook is also trying to make more of a distinction between notifications that are from apps and those that are sent from other users. This change involves taking notifications out of the sometimes-dreaded notification box (which will be soon be getting the ax) and giving developers a new way to notify users with alert badges that pop up as counters. And for notifications that are sent from other users, these will soon be found in users' Facebook in-boxes instead.

The changes for developers

One of the biggest upcoming changes for developers deals with Facebook's level of user privacy protection. The company will be letting users give app developers their e-mail address. In return they can remove their own Facebook in-box from app notification equation. This also applies to Facebook Connect, so third-party companies that use it for log-ins can send important messages directly to a user's primary e-mail instead of their Facebook in-box where it might get lost.

The Connect program will also be joined by a new developer API called Open Graph that essentially lets site owners create a page on any Web site that has the same features as one of Facebook's fan pages. These will allow users to sign up to be a fan with their Facebook credentials and use parts of the site as if they were on Facebook proper. In turn, their actions will be able to show up on their Facebook profile and news feeds. Beard said that the Open Graph API is simply a continuation of the move to add Facebook objects as well as people to third-party sites. "The graph does not necessarily have to exist in facebook," he said. "It can also live on the Web."

Facebook is improving its analytics with a new system that developers can use with third-party analytics tools.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Fan pages are not the only thing to escape Facebook's walled garden though. Beard outlined the company's plans to offer developers a way to view a deeper level of analytics for their apps. The reports, which Beard says are much better than the Facebook's current Insight system, will be able to be sent to third-party analytics engines where they can be stacked up alongside performance metrics Facebook wouldn't have otherwise been able to provide.

Keeping bad developers out

Besides some cosmetic and back-end changes, Facebook is also stepping up how it handles developers and applications that don't conform to the site's rules and regulations. Part of that is simplifying its platform policies from 14 pages to just three. Beard says the extraneous language has been cut down, so that hopefully more people will read it.

In addition to policy, Facebook is doing away with its six-month-old verified apps program in place of verifying every single app that passes a certain use threshold. This means that Facebook is going to be evaluating every app on its service to make sure it meets the company's guidelines and getting rid of ones that might have otherwise flown under the radar.

Other tidbits

•  Facebook canvas pages are now getting a special blue bar on top that removes much of the Facebook branding and user interface. Beard said that the move was largely to help developers make their canvas pages more immersive.
•  Profile boxes will be disappearing, and tabs will be slightly more narrow.
•  The new Facebook games tab may implement leader boards
•  Facebook is reworking its friends selector so that when a user is picking friends to invite or send a message, it will let them use the same filters they use to group their friends. Facebook is also working on a way to suggest a shortlist of users based on recent, or overall activity.
•  Developers will be getting a live view into the Facebook Platform status. This is kind of like Twitter's status blog and will show all known problems as well as how hard Facebook's APIs are being hit.

More information about the new developer APIs can be found on Facebook's developer site.