Facebook is hosting its second f8 developers' conference today in San Francisco. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to give a keynote at 1:30 p.m. PDT. I'll be live blogging his talk here. There will be video of the talk as well, which I'll embed in this post if I can.
Highlights of the talk will likely be Facebook's new design, a discussion on openness, mobility, and monetization.
I'll also be talking to developers at the conference to get the skinny on how well the platform is doing for them, and what the recent changes mean for their businesses.
Come back to this URL at 1:30 p.m. to catch the live blog. See you then!
My prediction: nothing. Not a damn thing. If Google acquires Digg, which many sites are reporting as a done deal, it’ll be a little something I call a vanity buy. Which would mean that Google doesn’t really need Digg; it wants it. And if Google is smart, it’ll just leave Digg as it is.
The thing is, Digg and other social media sites are very much dependant on having an active, vibrant community. I might be proven wrong, but history has shown that these types of sites never get enormous; and their users are not too keen on clicking ads. In short, they’re not the goldmine everyone thought they would be (hence the thousands of Digg clones out there).
So - if the rumors are true - why is Google buying it? Because it’s cool. It has formidable traffic, yes, but the main reason why anyone would want to own Digg is influence. Let’s face it, it’s a very influential site: some are trying to game it, some are trying to win it (it can be a game, you know), some are trying to understand it and profit from it. But the fact that it’s such an enigma, with its users constantly redefining what works and what doesn’t, is one of the reasons it’s so popular.
The other reason why Google would want to buy Digg is the simplest of all: because they can. Digg is the first and best site in an entirely new niche, and if the price is not outrageous, Google can afford it, so why not own it? If nothing else, it’ll give them a great opportunity to find out about the inner workings of this specific and complex social media ecosystem.
Therefore, I think that it would be dumb from Google to try to do anything to Digg, especially immediately after the acquisition. It could cause a backlash from the community. If they acquire it, they can move some ads around and try to leverage the influence in some ways, but the best thing they can do is enjoy it and go with the flow.
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Patent law is confusing. I’ve filed for and received a couple patents filed under the names of companies I’ve worked for in the past, and I’m still not sure exactly how that worked. I know I wrote up a pretty complex description of the process (which was a combination of hardware and software - it had to do with the automation of fax receipt and transmission on a bulk level), and I drew out a number of charts, graphs and illustrations. I signed on the dotted line, handed it to the company attorney, and presumably the company I worked for received a patent on my work.
Additionally, I’ve written about patent abuse here at Mashable before. It’s easy to spot abuse, particularly when companies like Amazon patent things like “one click” or Z4 Technologies patents the usage of two passwords as a security method. I suppose I could learn more about it fairly easily, if I wanted. Marshall, Texas is the town where a large portion of patent lawsuits end up being tried due to a reputation for being kind to patent trolls (Marshall is about 45 minutes down the road from where I live).
The problem is that I, like most of you probably do, find patent law very confusing, tedious and boring. That’s why I’m not sure if the analysis being pitched over at Patently is spot on or not, but judging by the comments from regular readers, it doesn’t appear to be far off the mark.
The analysis? Patents on software may be a thing of the past, and furthermore all existing patents on software might be useless or invalidated.
Warning: Legalese below. Possibly boring. From Patently:
In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in § 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three-the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal-the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine.”
The logic of the PTO’s positions in Nuijten, Comiskey and Bilski has always threatened to destabilize whole fields of patenting, most especially in the field of software patents. If the PTO’s test is followed, the crucial question for the vitality of patents on computer implemented inventions is whether a general purpose computer qualifies as a “particular” machine within the meaning of the agency’s test. In two recent decisions announced after the oral arguments in the Bilski case, Ex parte Langemyr (May 28, 2008) and Ex parte Wasynczuk (June 2, 2008),[3] the PTO Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences has now supplied an answer to that question: A general purpose computer is not a particular machine, and thus innovative software processes are unpatentable if they are tied only to a general purpose computer.
In essence, it seems to be saying (if I’ve got my legalese option on Babelfish working properly) that in these particular cases (where Google’s patents are at stake), it is the opinion of the US patent office that unless a software patent is particular to a unique machine that physically transforms it or if the software in question only works on some proprietary platform, it isn’t unique enough to patent.
The object of this rule shift obviously is to keep folks from patenting silly things that are mundane and commonly found in a wide variety of software (see one-click checkout).
To further translate it from legalese to geekish, it sounds like just about any piece of software or algorithm you write won’t be patentable. If you do a hardware or hardware/software hack, so long as it isn’t written on a commonly used computing platform (i.e. PC or Apple architecture), it just might be patentable.
What I Think Of It. Probably Less Boring.
I’m initially inclined to speak out in favor of this opinion. On the whole, software gets written regardless of what patents may or may not be in existence. I know that when I have a hankerin’ to write a piece of code to fill a need for myself, my company, or my community, the first thing I don’t do is check the patent office for something that may cover my idea. I just write it.
That’s the process for most folks. It’s only when that software gets particularly popular and profitable do the folks who had the idea (but not the gumption to do the work) come out of the woodwork and start suing.
It’s unfortunate, but from where I sit, it looks like that patent system functions currently in the opposite manner it was meant to. It was meant to protect and reward innovation, yet it seems that the only times I hear of a patent in the news is when a deep pocket is being sued by a corporate entity that does little else than collect patents. The exception to this rule, of course, is when deep pockets use their overly broad patents to force threatening upstarts out of business.
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SitePoint Blogs » Study: Why Most Online Communities Fail
A key study on why most online communities fail. The finding that lack of dedicated management (and in our experience, capable community management) jibe well with what we've encountered.
Facebook Asks Developers to Agree to Social Contract
Good analysis on how Facebook is evolving its social architecture as their enormous developer community provides a great deal of engagements and lessons learned.
An ESB for the Web? - O'Reilly Radar
An interesting exploration of the use of ESBs to the Web space. Used judiciously, frameworks like Gnip can enable radical scalability scenarios.
As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve been using a pretty rare platform for our video podcast series Mashable Conversation. The platform is called Episodic, and it’s amongst the best I’ve tried (and I’ve tried quite a few). I don’t often fawn over a company, so I hope you’ll indulge me for a moment. They’ve got one of the most responsive customer service teams I’ve ever worked with, with the aim to really make the usage of the system as transparent as possible for the producers.
Given that I preach very often about the features and services that video platforms should be providing for their customers, when I’m auditioning services for my own use (or in this case, the company’s usage), I send the unfortunate company representative through a long list of hoops they must jump through. Noam Lovinsky was the unfortunate soul assigned to explaining the platform’s capabilities to me.
They Have What I Need
My requirements were that the platform must: generate an iTunes compatible podcast RSS feed, must have an embedded player that has viral elements (remote embedding, and such), have detailed analytics, have dynamic advertisement insertion capabilities, and must be able to generate an iPod compatible MP4 file.
There are a few platforms out there that we’ve tried that get about 90% of this done, but Episodic’s was the first that got 100%, and then some. Their transcoding options support a variety of standardized formats, and allow you to upload your program in multiple segments so you can change out elements of the show without going back and re-rendering the entire back-catalog (for instance, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve changed out the intro to something a bit more aesthetically pleasing this week).
The ability to dynamically assemble an episode also allows for a whole new level of analytics to get accustomed to. I can run side by side comparisons, for instance, on the two versions of the introduction to the show (interestingly, the one with the higher quality seems to perform about 1% poorer in terms of drop-offs).
The advertising options in the system are particularly advanced, as well. It supports pre-rolls, mid-rolls, post-rolls, and overlays across all of your content.
As an added bonus, the system also integrates with another favorite video service of mine: TubeMogul. After your files have been transcoded on the service, you’re able to with a click upload them directly to your TubeMogul account (which then of course blasts them out to YouTube, Metacafe, Yahoo Video, and the wide assortment of other embedded video hosting websites out there).
Act Now, and You Also Get…
With all that, what else could they pile onto the deal to sweeten the pot? Well, pulling the service out of invitation only mode would be great (I can’t tell you how many requests I’ve had recently from fellow producers interested in giving Episodic a spin, lately). They’re doing a little bit of that today - it’s not exactly open registration, but they’re launching a new service that uses some of the transcoding technology they’ve developed.
Do you have an existing video feed? Would you like it to have an iPhone compatible website generated around that content so that iPhone users can check it out?
Simply fill out the form and set up your transcoding account. And while you’re there, you can also apply to be a part of the limited beta on the platform we use here at Mashable.
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Every day we hear about how the Web is going to change the movie industry, the music industry and even software usage along with its related data storage. We hear how the web is becoming that ubiquitous utility service that we will all be using at some point whether it be from a desktop, a laptop or our mobile phones. Of course though what isn’t being said that in order to have this ubiquitous access it has to be an access that we can afford as well as access that is capable of handling the heavy load of all this data transfer without any interruptions.
In the majority of the world this is something that is happening with some speed. Whether you are in Europe or any number of forward thinking countries of the Far East broadband speed is growing by leaps and bounds with costs of accessing those pipes well within reach of the average person on the street. In the United States however almost the exact opposite is happening. Whether it is Comcast getting caught traffic shaping or the fact that Time Warner will beputting caps on the broadband usage or in the most recent news that AT&T is looking at instituting tiered based pricing on usage the fact is that Americans are losing out on the same technological advantages the rest of the world is enjoying.
The fact that this is all happening during a time when there is real push to deliver video over the web, offer music downloading as a retail alternative, and the push the use cloud computing services should be of no real surprise I guess. After all, the players in this internet service provider game are companies that are well known for their preference of making as much money as possible while giving as little service as possible to the customer. The problem is though is that with every little increase regardless of whether it is being hidden behind caps and spin terms like “fair access for all” it is getting more and more expensive for people who want; or even in many cases need, the access to true broadband speeds.
Even though the companies involved like to spin as it being the fairest way to make sure that everyone has equal access to the Internet while at the same time they threaten that unfettered access is going to lead to service bottlenecks they have done nothing improve the systems. Already the US is being overshadowed by foreign countries who have invested heavily in all forms of broadband and whose populations enjoy services we only seem to be able to dream about. In the process the US is sliding further down the list of countries with broadband access but these provider companies like Time Warner, Comcast or AT&T continue to roll in the billions of dollars.
It doesn’t matter about all the talk of how fast broadband is in the US; or any country for that matter. If the people can’t afford what really is nothing but the most basic of access, you can have all the video for download that you want or have as many programs running in the cloud as you want - it won’t get used. The fact is that real access will all be out of the reach of the average user and broadband as it is meant to be will just be just another luxury we can’t afford.
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There’s no way, particularly with today’s gas prices, you can turn down at least a look at an idea for getting free gas. One of the interesting startups we discovered at the SummerMash Seattle stop is a local startup that sells the advertising space … on your car .. in return for free gas. They are aptly named GasForFree.
Introducing the clip today is my son AJ. I was a bit busy in the studio rendering the mountain of videoed interviews from the SummerMash tour, so he graciously at in with Sean today to introduce today’s Mashable Conversation.
On Friday, with Facebook experiencing some downtime, we asked you “When Facebook Goes Down, What Should its Fail Whale Look Like?,” a reference to the iconic Twitter fail whale you see when the microblogging service is having technical difficulities.
We received a lot of great submissions in the comments, but had to narrow it down to two winners for the $25 iTunes gift certificates. Without further ado, here they are, with a bunch of honorable mentions after the jump:
Submitted by mghwom
Submitted by balebond
Submitted by lowkey
Submitted by Amanda
Submitted by konko
Submitted by Joshua Kalle
Comments:
Seanford: A burglar’s eye mask you can print, cut out and ware to conceal your identity as you are going to have to stalk you ex-girlfriend from her bushes now instead of on-line.
Marni: They should sell advertising on this page at a super high CPM! Maybe they’ll be the first ads on FB to see major success?
Elliot: it should be a phishing page for myspace, and if anyone logs in, or registers, they should delete their facebook account.
Nicki: I believe that we should stay in the world of the big animals, so Facebooks fail whail should be a sleeping dinosaur that is about to get hit by an asteroid. why? Well because just like the dinosaurs is Facebook to big and clumsy to do anything about the fail / asteroid that is about to hit them when the users finds out that Facebook don’t have a 99% uptime.
If you’re one of the top two, please get in touch so we can send you your prize!
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Propeller, AOL's social-news site that's never really managed to catch on, has a brand new look Tuesday. It's the third major rehaul since the service was launched as Netscape.com in mid-2006. Gone are the drab blacks, greens, and oranges from the Netscape.com days along with the teeny, tiny text that made me reach for the Ctrl+ shortcut in my browser. In its place is a more retro scheme with vibrant colors and a banana-shaped mustached mascot.
That's not the biggest change though. The old voting system that mimicked Digg's one vote per user model has been turned on its head with a new one that ranks stories on a scale from 1 to 10 with some of the hottest stories getting play on the front page of Netscape (formerly Propeller.com's domain) and eventually AOL.com.
Propeller's new look is retro--to the max. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: CNET Networks)
The new scoring system is actually a hybrid of any story's play within the Propeller community, combining user votes (called "props") with clicks, user comments, and overall voting velocity. My guess is that while more transparent, this new system won't make a whole lot of sense to people who want to click on a voting button and see a noticeable change. At the moment, coming to the front door of Propeller yields an entire page of stories ranked 10. Newbie users who have come to expect a more standard ranking system on services like Reddit and Digg will be scratching their heads to find the good stuff.
Other changes that are bound to confuse users are the new commenting system and upcoming stories queue.
The comment system throws in a somewhat befuddling five-star ranking system that includes a karma tracker, along with two different ways to expand and contract comment threads to save space. For longer threads you'll have to expand the conversation 25 comments at a time, making it beneficial to jack someone else's thread if only to get higher screen presence.
Likewise, the upcoming stories queue called "Just In" is simply overwhelming. It houses upcoming stories in a similar fashion to Digg Spy, however you can't pause the stream to dig through it, or sort out what types of site activity you want to filter out. In perusing links, simply scrolling down the page made me lose track of a story I was going to come back to. With more users, that same story could fly right off the page.
There is light at the end of the tunnel for Propeller, and that light is groups, a feature that lets people submit and watch stories by interest just like the groups functionality found on FriendFeed. Each user can only create one group (ever), but can join as many as they'd like, something that's bound to change as the service adapts. For now you can browse through a directory of groups and contribute links and discussion once you've joined up.
Propeller still has one huge weapon on its side and that's two pages that get a lot of traffic (Netscape and AOL.com). These can be leveraged to promote some of Propeller's group activity and story promotion. As we've seen with Yahoo's Buzz community, smart leveraging makes people and publishers want to use your tool. In the case of Propeller, we just haven't seen that same system take off. (Pardon the pun.)
This is a guest post written by Waleed Abdulla, a software engineer and the founder and CEO of Ninua, Inc. You can follow his projects on his blog at selfdebugging.com.
At a technical meetup in Santa Clara a few days ago, I met Dave Westwood, a talented developer and 3D engineer who told me a fascinating story about the phenomenal growth of his recent application, BuddyPoke, which witnessed an explosive surge in traffic when Google released their Orkut platform to their Brazilian users on July 10. It was the kind of sudden growth that crashes servers and kills Web sites. Unless, of course, they’re hosted on a vastly scalable infrastructure that automatically adapts to handle what you throw at it; such as the Google App Engine. I’ll let Dave tell the story:
BuddyPoke is live on myspace.com, hi5.com and orkut.com. It has had the most success on Orkut, and is currently the number 2 application in Brazil. Orkut took 25% of their Brazilian users live on July 10th and went live to the remaining 75% of Brazilian users on July 15th. In the last eight days the rate of new installs per hour for BuddyPoke has grown by a factor of eight on Orkut, with sharp jumps on those two days. 500,000 avatars were personalized today (although some of them may be by the same user). The ability to grow rapidly and handle sudden jumps in traffic is all thanks to App Engine’s ability to scale so fluidly. And while all of this growth happened we were working on our next update, not frantically phoning up a hosting company to add servers.
The Google App Engine (GAE), which is still in preview release, offers a free hosting quota that’s enough to serve approximately 5 million pages a month. Dave had to call a Google product manager at 3:00AM to ask for a much needed quota increase. Google obliged and opened the flood gates for him.
Free Hosting for Blogs and Small Websites
The allure of automatic scaling is not the only thing that GAE offers. Imagine that you’re starting a new blog and you want to have the full flexibility to install any plugin you like. The available free options, such as WordPress.com and Blogger, won’t do it for you because they restrict what you can install on the server. So you end up having to host it yourself and pay hosting fees.
But new open-source initiatives, like Bill Katz’s Bloog, which is an open source blogging platform written specifically for the App Engine, will let you host your blog for free on Google’s infrastructure. You pay only if you exceed 5M monthly page views. Sure, Bloog is still at an early stage and doesn’t have the wealth of plugins that established platforms have, but it’s a sign of where things are headed. Not only blogs, but soon we might see open-source products that allow us to create simple personal or business Web sites and host them for free without giving up the freedom to customize them beyond the options offered out of the box. This might be a threat to companies that offer limited versions of their blogging or personal site design products for free in the hope of getting customers to pay for advanced features later.
Globally Distributed Infrastructure at Your Fingertips
There is more to hosting than having servers that scale well. Distance matters. The closer your server is to your customers, the faster your pages load. On the App Engine, if your customers happen to be in Brazil, your application will automatically be moved to a server closer to where the demand is. Or it might be replicated on many servers in different parts of the world. All automatically. Before the App Engine, such infrastructure was only available to big companies with deep pockets. But now, individual developers, like Zaid Abdulla, can build services like BitPixels, a service to generate Website thumbnails, and offer Google-fast downloads from any part of the world, in one day. (disclaimer: Zaid is the author’s brother).
Where do we Go from Here?
The above examples are not unique. Already, startups are starting to utilize the new platform. Some do it because it’s a new cutting-edge technology, and others to use the free hosting and automatic scaling. Other interesting examples include TweetWheel which tells you which of your Twitter friends know each other, Jumbra which merges multiple RSS feeds into one, and Mobaganda which helps you create events online. And there are many more.
Obviously, if GAE takes off it puts Google in control of a big and critical part of the Web infrastructure. Not only will it bring revenues from hosting fees, but it’ll also make it easier for Google to buy startups and integrate their code rather than having to rewrite most of it like they do today.
So here is the big question: will companies trust Google enough to host their applications? My guess: a few will jump at it right away, and others will hesitate for a while, but eventually sign up. Startups and open source projects will probably lead the way because they love to be on the cutting edge, they don’t have much to lose, and they need any leverage they can get. After a few successes start making headlines, more and more companies will consider GAE seriously, at least for their less sensitive applications that could use easy and reliable scaling. GAE is definitely a great option to have and it’ll be very interesting to watch how the landscape unfolds.
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If you have a story you'd like to contribute, or have a feed you'd like to see included, simply drop me an email at mark [at] ramskill.net
I'm also looking for regular contributors, so if you like all things 'Web 2.0' and feel you've got something to say, drop me an email and we'll take it from there...
Every day we hear about how the Web is going to change the movie industry, the music industry and even software usage along with its related data storage. We hear how the web is becoming that ubiquitous utility service that we will all be using at some point whether it be from a desktop, a laptop or our mobile phones. Of course though what isn’t being said that in order to have this ubiquitous access it has to be an access that we can afford as well as access that is capable of handling the heavy load of all this data transfer without any interruptions.
On Friday, with Facebook experiencing some downtime, we asked you “
This is a guest post written by Waleed Abdulla, a software engineer and the founder and CEO of Ninua, Inc. You can follow his projects on his blog at 
The allure of automatic scaling is not the only thing that 
