Sherbango soup

Phonebooth.com, a VOIP service for individuals and small businesses, just launched a free version of its service. Phonebooth, just like Google Voice and Ribbit Mobile, provides its users with a free local phone number that can be forwarded to any cell phone and landline. Phonebooth also offers voicemail transcriptions. What makes it stand out from it competitors, however, is that it offers an auto attendant feature that allows you to route callers to different employees.

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It's worth noting that Bandwidth.com, the company behind Phonebooth, has been providing infrastructure services to other VOIP services, including Voxeo and Yext, for more than three years. The company's VOIP network delivered almost 4 billion minutes in 2009. Bandwidth began a beta test of the paid version of Phonebooth.com last year and now has over 1,000 customers.

A Free VOIP Service that Will Grow With You

Starting today, Phonebooth will offer a free service geared towards individuals. The company also announced the general availability of its $20/month/user option, which offers a fully featured phone system in the cloud. One of the advantages of using Phonebooth over similar services like Google Voice or Grasshopper is that the company allows users to upgrade their phone system over time. Once your company outgrows Phonebooth's basic plan, you can easily switch to a higher-end phone system (Phonebooth on Demand) with hardware IP-based phones.

Phonebooth's users will be able to choose local numbers from virtually everywhere in the U.S. (the service us U.S.). Sadly, though, there is no way to make your Phonebooth number appear on the caller ID for outgoing calls from your landline or cell phone. Phonebooth doesn't currently offer any mobile apps, though the company told us earlier today that mobile apps are definitely on Phonebooth's roadmap.

Contact Plus Widget

In addition to the free VOIP service, Phonebooth is also launching a new widget for small businesses - Contact Us Plus - that allows potential customers to use Phonebooth's VOIP service to initiate a call right from the website. In addition to initiating phone calls, the Phonebooth widget can also feature additional contact info (Twitter account, email etc.), as well as your address and a map. Phonebooth's users can also opt to show phone numbers for different departments in their company in the widget.

Google launched an application marketplace today comprised of services from third-party providers that integrate with the Google Apps ecosystem.

The news has been anticipated for some time. In particular, it shows how much Google is embracing open-standards and leveraging its search and Google Apps platform to attract third-party developers.

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Google made the announcement at its Google Campfire One event tonight. The emphasis Google is putting on the enterprise is apparent in how much attention the company put into the event tonight. Over and over we heard that Google passed the 25 million customer mark over the weekend.

It is that mark that Google is using as its hook for attracting developers to its platform. Developers will be charged $100 to join the program. With that entrance fee, the developers may add as many apps as they wish to the Google Apps Marketplace.

The marketplace supports OpenID to provide a single sign-on for developers. Authorization is integrated into the platform. The customers get access through OAuth, the open standard for authorizing users.

A "manifest page" is the foundation for the service. The developers provides information when adding the application to the marketplace that identifies it. Developers then provide additional information about the product.

The system is a controlled marketplace. Application developers submit the app for approval, which might take a few days.

Intuit provided an example of how the system works by showing how payroll would be managed. The customer accesses the account. With Google Apps integration, the customer accesses their account where they have the employee information. It's that collected contact network that is then integrated with the payroll application.

Atlassian showed how Studio, its project management application would integrate with GMail and Google Apps. Again, if the company is standardized on Google Apps, the information is available through the network. It is this network availability that demonstrates the effectiveness of the Atlassian application.

Manymoon is another project mangement application that was demonstrated. It is using Google Apps to develop features such as a calendar feature, showing how a startup can leverage Google Apps to add features to its service.

Other companies part of the initial launch include Socialwok and Appirio, which demonstrated perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the marketplace.

The apps in the marketplace can be integrated with contextual information. An email can show information about the sender that gives the recipient business intelligence that can help determine what action to take.

In all, the Google Apps Marketplace shows the modern view that Google is taking with its approach to the social Web. It integrates with OpenID and OAuth.

But at its core, the marketplace at its base is built upon Google's search capabilities. Google Apps can be extended with the applications in the marketplace. In turn, developers have access to the built-in capabilities of Google Apps.

Perhaps the greatest value to customers will be if they are centralized on Google Apps. If so, they can get some pretty powerful capabilities of the Google Apps Marketplace.

It never ceases to amaze me how many high-tech industry elites get ensnared in every Twitter phishing attack. (See our November story 7 High-Tech Twitter Users Who Fell for Phishing Scams) This evening Twitter announced that a new program will intercept links sent out by Direct Message and through email, checking to make sure they are safe. Phishing prevention is no small matter.

Twitter's is a good move but a lot more is needed all over the web. If we want a transactional developer ecosystem of distributed identity and portable user data, there are both user education and technical changes that need to be made.

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It's only because there is a big developer ecosystem creating interesting new services on top of our Twitter identities that any of us would ever consider logging in to Twitter while on another website. That ecosystem is great, and it's the kind of thing that an interconnected web that leverages portable user data would be filled with. But if user data is a form of currency and even people who are professional technology analysts (paid hundreds of dollars an hour for their technology advice - and many of these people are falling for Twitter phishing scams) - if even these people can't tell the difference between a good transaction and a bad one, then what does that say for the future of distributed developer ecosystems and data portability?

Apparently, though, fooling people these days into handing over their Twitter login through an unsafe transaction is like taking candy from a baby. It's really easy.

That's a failing of user education and of the design of distributed authentication transactions, isn't it? (Though it's tempting to blame the users who fall for it, it really is!)

Remember when debit and credit cards were first introduced and many people didn't trust them? Aren't you glad we figured out how to make that work? Similarly, we need a combination of user education (don't give out your credit card number to random people who call you on the phone) and practical measures - credit card transaction receipts have two copies, your copy is the one with the full number printed on it - take it with you. Little things like that and more made plastic a viable platform for commerce. Distributed online identity needs similar measures taken.

You know what also doesn't help? People who try to be helpful by urging users to not even click on phishing links. It's not like these are mysterious poisonous substances that will kill you if you touch them. Go ahead and click on them! Just don't give the resulting spoof pages your username and password. That's the problem!

It's early days in all of this and more moves like Twitter's tonight will be needed. For the good of user security but also for the good of all the innovation this web has the potential to deliver.

Soon, you will be able to share your location with your Facebook friends. According to the New York Times' Nick Bilton, Facebook plans to reveal this new feature during its f8 developer conference at the end of April. As Bilton notes, Facebook updated its privacy policy last year to incorporate language about location sharing. Facebook, according to this report, has been working on this feature for over a year. The company will offer location-based services through its own mobile applications and developers will be able to use this data to develop their own location-based apps on top of a new Facebook location API.

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How Will Facebook's Users React?

It will be interesting to see how Facebook's users - who are famously averse to change - will react to the arrival of location as a status update on the service. According to Bilton, Facebook "has been trying to figure out how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, as it has in the past with new features and redesigns."

When Facebook introduced the newsfeed (which is now an integral part of the service), a large number of users considered this to be an invasion of their privacy. Location-based services have long suffered from the impression that sharing your location online can be dangerous and services like the Foursquare-based PleaseRobMe have only strengthened this sentiment among many users. Even though Facebook offers relatively sophisticated privacy controls, it will be interesting to see if the service's users will warm up to the idea of sharing their location with their friends. A lot of the success of this service will depend on how well Facebook can educate its users and how it implements this feature and the privacy controls around it.

Will Facebook's Users Care?

It will be interesting to see if Facebook's users are even interested in sharing this information. While services like Foursquare and Gowalla are slowly but surely gaining new users (in part thanks to offering incentives for checking in at various venues), Twitter, which introduced a geotagging API last year and just introduced some location features on its website today, hasn't seen a very strong response from users and developers so far.

Not Competing with Foursquare and Co.?

According to the New York Times report, Facebook isn't trying to compete with location-based networks like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare, however. Instead, Bilton argues, the company is far more interested in competing with Google for small-business advertising. This will surely raise additional privacy concerns among Facebook's users.

It's also important to note that Facebook's API, will allow intrepid developers (including Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt) to develop interesting location-based services on top of Facebook, however.

The Blackberry outage that RIM does not want to talk about continues to affect people on both sides of the Atlantic with outages reported in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Some people have not been without service for more than 24 hours.

The outage is a peculiar one, Data Outage News reports:

"Again, this is affecting devices on all North American carriers, BIS and BES, and it appears to be only devices on WiFi, wherein data works "sometimes" when connected via WiFi; no data when WiFi is disconnected."

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RIM has not yet made a statement about the outage and we have to believe that this is not a smart way to handle an issue that has customers wondering if it their phone that id causing the problem.

T-Mobile has been keeping its Twitter account updated for customers affected by the outage.

We posted yesterday about the news. It was difficult to get a read on the extent of the outage but by this morning commenters were reporting a number of problems.

On Monday, Simon Benson in the United Kingdom said:

Seems to be affecting the UK as well! We've been out since around noon GMT on Sunday! Bit difficult remote working without access to email...

Some are considering dropping the Blackberry. Danielle Ricks posted:

"I've had MAJOR problems with my T-Mobile Blackberry 8900 for the past 12 hours!!! What is most disturbing is the fact that the T-Mobile techs didn't even know there was a problem. I spent a half hour doing trouble shooting with them... after doing my OWN trouble shooting... just to FINALLY find this post telling me we ONCE AGAIN have a nationwide Blackberry outage.

I'm on my way to SXSW and I HAVE to get my emails. I LOVE T-Mobile customer service but if the Smartphone doesn't work it won't do me a whole lot of good. I've been a loyal Blackberry customer but this is my third RIM outage and I'm done! Thank you ReadWriteWeb for being on top of things *calling AT&T to inquire about an iPhone*"

The outage can't be helping RIM right now. How many outages can users face when there are an increasing number of alternatives to their service?

We'll update the blog when we have an update about the service being restored.

StatusNet, the open-source microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, just announced the launch of the public beta of its StatusNet Cloud Service. Thanks to this, you can now easily host your own Twitter-like community for your blog, club or company.

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Getting Started

To get started, just head over to status.net, sign up for a free account. You can choose between a single user account (good for bloggers and brands), a private network for your company or a public community site. After that, you can customize your site with your own logo and colors. You can also set the character limit for status updates from your users.

Connect to Twitter

Just running your own microblogging network isn't too exciting unless you are running an internal site for your business, but you can easily connect your Twitter account to your StatusNet site, so that every update from your personal site gets syndicated to your Twitter stream as well. Sending local StatusNet @replies to Twitter is optional.

StatusNet in the Enterprise

StatusNet also offers paid enterprise solutions, with costs ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 per year depending on the features and level of service the customer expects. Our Own Alex Williams just took a closer look at the service's future in the enterprise last week and argued that it "has the features that the enterprise customer wants and it has a strong developer community."

As of now, StatusNet's free offering can't quite replace Yammer or similar products in a business setting, but if you always wanted to set up your own Twitter-like environment, StatusNet now makes it as easy as choosing a URL.

Sooner or later, every popular web service with an API spawns a Google Maps mashup. FourWhere, which launches today, combines data from the increasingly popular location-based social network Foursquare with a Google Maps-based interface. Thanks to this, you can now easily find Foursquare venues around your current location or a location you plan to visit. The site was developed by social media analytics service Sysomos.

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The FourWhere service itself is pretty basic. You simply browse the Google Maps interface and a right-click anywhere on the map will bring up a menu that allows you to either see nearby venues on the map or user comments about these nearby venues. In the future, Sysomos also plans to add additional services based on the company's extensive database of social media sources.

First Step Towards Integrating LBS Analytics Into Sysomos' Main Services

As Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal told us, the company plans to bring location-based sources - including Foursquare - to Heartbeat and MAP, Sysomos' professional social media and analytics and media monitoring applications. For Sysomos, launching a free service is just a first stop towards learning more about this space.

As services like Foursquare, Gowalla and others continue to gain momentum and slowly inch towards the mainstream, social media monitoring services like Sysomos or Radian6 need to give their customers to monitor these communities. If these services go mainstream, a bad comment on Foursquare about a restaurant could easily have the same effect as a negative Twitter message or Yelp review.

The Blackberry just doesn't seem to have the luster it once did. Today, it had another nationwide outage.

According to Data Outage News:

"A number of users are reporting and an escalated RIM tech support call has confirmed data issues affecting WiFi devices NOT connected to a WiFi network. The outage is sporadic and issues are confirmed on at least on Verizon and T-Mobile on both US east and west coasts. Again, if you are connected to WiFi, you likely won't notice any problems until you are out of WiFi range. This is not affecting ALL WiFi users, the reports are sporadic, but across all carriers, BIS and BES included."

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What's going in with the Blackberry? Once the enterprise stalwart, it is now looking like a struggling behemoth. Its interface almost seems antiquated. An analyst group is now saying the iPhone is expected to beat out the Blackberry in 2011 for the number one spot. And now we have another outage.

Twitter users are all over today's outage. Some people are saying their service has been out since the morning. There have been some reports that the outage is international in scope.

The last Blackberry outage came in December. Reported outages also came in 2007 and 2008.

Blackberry has been facing a lot of of market pressure. The iPhone, the Android and the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series all present challenges to the Blackberry.

A report by Trefis shows the iPhone beating out the Blackberry by 2011.

The iPhone's surge into the business community is a major reason for it overtaking the Blackberry.

A Trefi analyst write in Forbes:

We expect Apple's market share to overtake that of RIM by 2011, and for Apple and RIM to have 11% and 8% market share, respectively, by the end of Trefis forecast period. We believe sales of the iPhone will eventually outpace BlackBerry sales for the following reasons:

1. Apple's ecosystem of consumer products (Macs, iPad, Apple TV) and services (iTunes, iPhone apps) make the iPhone a more attractive phone for many consumers compared to the BlackBerry

2. End of AT&T exclusivity will give Apple's iPhone wider distribution in the US (comparable to BlackBerry distribution)

3. iPhone is making inroads with business customers that have traditionally preferred the BlackBerry

Part of the complexity in the cloud comes down to how the data is managed within a cloud computing environment.

But even a bigger challenge is how to move applications to the cloud. How is all the data associated with an application moved to a cloud computing environment? And can you get it out?

The cloud computing world is still a bit like the Wild West. No standards exist for moving applications, much less data, which opens opportunities for companies like CloudSwitch.

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CloudSwitch is a drag and drop service for the cloud. According to the MIT Technology Review, CloudSwitch provides an intermediary layer between the data center and the cloud.

It's a service designed to simplify the process for moving to the cloud but it still comes with its complexities. CloudSwitch requires virtualization software to port the customer applications to a cloud environment.

With the virtualization software in place, the customer installs the CloudSwitch technology. CloudSwitch takes the data from the customer's virtualized environment and places it on the cloud platform using a "cloud fitting" algorithm. The algorithm compares the two environments to determine how the application runs on the CloudSwitch platform.

CloudSwitch should thrive in this world, where the complexity for moving applications can make it seem not worth the trouble to make the switch.

This is a huge market opportunity. It's not exactly a priority for cloud computing providers. Cloud computing services would prefer that a customer move its data to the cloud and keep it there. If it's as easy to move data to the cloud, it should mean that CloudSwitch can provide a service that allows for the application to move out of the cloud, too.

We find it troublesome that vendor lock is emerging as an issue in cloud computing. It's why we need more standards based initiatives like what is proposed by the Open Cloud Consortium.

Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera just launched Mediagazer, a new memetracker for topics related to media news. This new site will be based on the same technology as Techmeme, memeorandum, the gossip site WeSmich and the baseball memetracker Ballbug. The content on Mediagazer will be edited by Megan McCarthy.

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As McCarthy notes in her announcement, "media business is in tumult" and this is a news vertical that lends itself to memetracking. Not only are there lots of interesting news stories from a large variety of sources, but these sources all tend to link to each other a lot, which makes it easier for the algorithm to find related stories.

Mediagazer is the first new service that Rivera's team has launched in four years. As both Rivera and McCarthy note, the team has spent the last four years learning about what works (and what doesn't). Based on this experience, the team has "outfitted the site with the latest iteration of our automation engine, and have launched it from the outset with a dedicated human editor."

It will be interesting to see how Rivera's team will manage the overlap between the tech news and media news sites. Currently, for example, this VentureBeat story - which is about both the tech and the media business - is featured on both sites.

Unlike Techmeme, Mediagazer doesn't feature a leaderboard, but there are mobile sites for smartphones and feature phones.

Judging from what we have seen so far, Mediagazer will surely become another must-read site for anybody interested in the media business, be it blogging, e-book or the state of the newspaper industry.

Portland has a fast emerging tech culture that is seeing a number of new technology startups.

Today, $225,000 is on the table for one of the year's biggest events: The Oregon Entrepreneur Network's annual Angel Oregon.

One of the major contenders is ActiveTrak, which tracks lost or stolen devices. The company is launching a SaaS service in the next three months for the enterprise.

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You may know the company for its consumer service: GadgetTrak. The software is installed on laptops or mobile devices. It uses WiFi to track the device. For mobile devices, the service may use GPS. If that's not available, it will triangulate using WiFi hotspots or cell towers. The software will also take a picture of the person who stole it.

The software has been used to track stolen computers that has helped break up criminal rings. Recently, Portland schools had a number of laptops stolen that had the software installed.The software tracked the devices, leading to arrests and recovery of the laptops.

CEO Ken Westin said the enterprise service will be available as SaaS or on-premise offering. One of its pilot accounts is with a major chemical company.

People will install the software on the device, which syncs with the application in the cloud. Mobile devices will allow for over the air updates such as with iPhone or Android applications.

Security is obviously a priority. ActiveTrak will store its databases on dedicated servers. The application layer will reside in the cloud. The on-premise service will reside entirely As demand increases, it will increase or decrease its number of application servers as demand peaks and ebbs.

Westin said they are trying to avoid issues with propagating data across a number of servers. Data, in Westin's view, is easier to secure in one place.

The news that Google is buying DocVerse is now official.

The reasons why Google bought this small company can be learned by taking a look at the people who started this small company out of Seattle.

Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui worked at Microsoft before launching DocVerse in 2007.
Sinha ran product strategy for Sharepoint and SQL, 1.6B and $3.0B products, respectively. DeNeui served as program manager on the SQL Server Strategy Team and the program manager for the WinFS ISV Team.

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The two have built a strong company that will help Google in its battle with Microsoft. Sinha and DeNeui know Microsoft products. They know the Microsoft processes and its culture.

DocVerse understands the challenges of working on deeply collaborative technologies. That's a goal for Google as it continues to develop Google Apps. The DocVerse application installs a lightweight plug-in that is installed in the background of the user's machine.

The plug-in opens a widget in the document sidebar that includes a unique link. Any time a user makes an update to a Microsoft docment, the plug-in syncs the web page that is associated with the document. Every modification gets synced. When multiple people work on a document, the updates are made through the plug-in and versions are stored online.

Syncing will become increasingly important for companies as more of the workforce uses smartphones. Google does a good job with email synchronization. But enterprise collaboration tools have a higher level of complexity. Co-editing, for instance, has to carry from the PC to the mobile device among mulitple users.

Interestingly, Jive Software uses the DocVerse functionality for their product add-on: Jive Connects for Microsoft Office.

The competition is getting fierce in the enterprise space. We wonder how this competition will affect the DocVerse relationship with Jive.

Just about a month after acquiring the popular iPhone email client reMail, Google and the reMail team have decided to open source the application's code. While current reMail users were able to use the app, Google decided to pull the application from the App Store after the acquisition. Given that the reMail team was joining Google to work on projects unrelated to reMail, this looks like a smart move. The source code is already available on Google Code under the Apache 2.0 License.

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When Google acquired reMail, we noted that this was a rather strange acquisition for Google, given that reMail is a native iPhone app and that Google is moving away from native apps. If anything, today's move towards open-sourcing the application clearly shows that Google acquired reMail for the team behind it and not for the application or the technology behind the app (which makes it easier for iPhone users to search their emails).

Open Source and the iPhone

As reMail's Gabor Cselle notes in his blog post today, open-sourcing this app will hopefully allow other developers to take some of the app's core features (handling IMAP, attachments etc.) and use it for their own ideas without having to reinvent the wheel. If You are interested in getting in touch with Cselle about using the source code, head over to the reMail Google Group.

Currently, there are only a few open source iPhone applications on the market. The most well-known open source iPhone project is probably the WordPress iPhone app.

Google just launched the latest developer version of Chrome, which now includes preliminary support for Google's geolocation API. Google's Geolocation API allows developers to pinpoint your computer's location by looking at the WiFi networks around you, similar to SkyHook's technology that is part of Apple's OSX and iPhone OS. For now, this new feature is still hidden behind a command line toggle and only available in the developer builds for Windows and OSX Leopard (it doesn't work on Snow Leopard yet).

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To enable these built-in geolocation features, you have to run the browser with "--enable-geolocation." It's typical for Google to first hide these features behind a command line toggle before exposing them to a wider group of testers. The Chrome team also notes that the geolocation UI is still incomplete and that Chrome will forget the permissions you set.

Preparing for Chrome OS?

It makes sense for Google to enable geolocation for Chrome, especially given the impending release of the Chrome OS, which will also benefit from these new features. Mozilla already offers a built-in location API for Firefox and with Geosense for Windows, Windows 7 developers can now also make use of Google's Geolocation API in their native apps.

Location for Every Browser

Thanks to the current efforts by most browser developers, location APIs will soon become ubiquitous and hopefully more developers will make use of them. While a number of mobile apps for the iPhone, for example, now make use of the location feature in the mobile version of Safari, only a small number of browser-based apps are currently aware of your location. While using WiFi location isn't quite as precise as using a GPS, the precision is usually much better than relying on a user's IP address.

According to Gartner, the worldwide market for mobile devices with touchscreens will grow over 97% this year. Last year, consumers bought 184 million devices with touchscreens. Gartner predicts that this market will surpass 362 million units this year. By 2013, Gartner predicts, touchscreen mobile devices will account for 80% of all sales in North America and Europe. Once the domain of high-end devices, touchscreen are now finding their ways into midrange phones and a growing number of consumers now expects all of their screens to be touch-enabled.

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As Gartner analyst CK Lu notes, a touchscreen alone won't be enough to convince users to buy a specific phone, however. According to Lu, "Consumers won't buy a mobile device purely for the touch UI, Touch technology is just an enabler, and ultimately, it is a compelling user experience -- which includes good UI design, applications and services -- that will make or break a product." Indeed, Gartner advised manufacturers to double down on their efforts to create good touch-driven UIs. While Gartner doesn't mention the iPhone explicitly, it is clear that Apple's popular phone has set the standard for touch-driven UIs and most manufacturers are still struggling to catch up.

Bonus: What Does the Mobile, Touch-Friendly Web Look Like Today?

The mobile web, according to a new report from mobile search engine Taptu, is currently all about shopping and services. Taptu - which specializes in indexing mobile sites - surveyed about 326,000 sites that are optimized for mobile, finger-friendly browsing and found that the largest concentration of these sites falls into Taptu's "shopping and services" category. In total, Taptu found 83,000 mobile-enabled commerce sites, ranging from mobile shopping assistants to banks and mobile real estate sites.

According to Taptu, mobile shopping and services sites make up close to 25% of all mobile-friendly sites in the company's index, followed by sites in the "photo and design" category (17.7%). Social sites rank third with 9.2%. Personal blogs only make up 1.5% of Taptu's index, a number if is easily bested by adult sites, which account for 3% of all mobile-optimized sites.

It's worth noting that if we combine news and weather sites (3.3%) together with sites about world affairs (8.1%), this category would easily fall into Taptu's top 3.

Google is developing a system that will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published. Search industry analyst Danny Sullivan told us today that this could be "the next chapter" for Google.

Last Fall we were told by Google's Brett Slatkin, lead developer on the PubSubHubbub (PuSH) real time syndication protocol, that he hoped Google would some day use PuSH for indexing the web instead of the crawling of links that has been the way search engines have indexed the web for years. Google senior product manager Dylan Casey said yesterday at Sullivan's Search Marketing Expo in Santa Clara, California that the company plans to soon publish a standard way for site owners to participate in a program much like that.

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How The System Might Work

PuSH is a syndication system based on the ATOM format where a publisher tells the world about a Hub that it will notify every time new content is published. Subscribers then tell the Hub "when this Publisher posts new content, please deliver it to me right away." So instead of the Subscriber checking back with the Publisher all the time to see if there's new content, they just sit and wait to be told that there is by the Hub. The Publisher publishes something, then tells the Hub that it's available, then the Hub goes and delivers it to all the Subscribers. This can take as little as a few seconds.

If Google can implement an Indexing by PuSH program, it would ask every website to implement the technology and declare which Hub they push to at the top of each document, just like they declare where the RSS feeds they publish can be found. Then Google would subscribe to those PuSH feeds to discover new content when it's published.

PuSH wouldn't likely replace crawling, in fact a crawl would be needed to discover PuSH feeds to subscribe to, but the real-time format would be used to augment Google's existing index.

As Danny Sullivan told us today, Google would have to implement some sort of spam control and not just let content be pushed live to the index unvetted. That was what happened in the earliest days of search and it was a real mess, he told us.

The Advantages of a Real Time Google Index

PuSH is much more computationally efficient for Google but Slatkin says that even more important is the impact of such a move for small publishers. Right now many small sites get visited by Google maybe once a week. With a PuSH system in place, they would be able to get their content to Google automatically right away.

A richer, faster, more efficient internet would be good for everyone, but the benefits in search wouldn't be limited to Google, either. The PubSubHubbub is an open protocol and the feeds would be as visible to Yahoo and Bing as they would be to Google.

"I am being told by my engineering bosses to openly promote this open aproach even to our competitors," Slatkin says. That's a very good sign.

We expect this will be a very big deal and we'll be covering it more extensively in the coming days, as well as whenever Google has something to announce more formally.

Socialtext is one of the smarter companies we cover in the enterprise space. The people there have an intellectual bent. Co-Founder Ross Mayfield is a thought leader and one of the original pioneers of the social Web. He's one of the thought leaders. And the CEO, Eugene Lee, is one of the more eloquent people we run across in the interviews we do.

Socialtext came into the market in 2002, long before blogs bloomed and years ahead of what we know of as the real-time web.

As a result, they have an established client base. They were one of the first, if not the very first, to offer wiki technology as an enterprise product.

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Today, they announced a new version of its software: Socialtext 4.0. It's a far cry from its original technology. This is the era of the real-time web. And Socialtext has had to adapt.

Socialtext has done a pretty decent job of keeping up with the pace, which seems to be quickening in the Enterprise 2.0 space. Most noteworthy is its new group capabilities. It's like a threaded, real-time stream. Groups can be organized so there are main group hubs with additional groups that come out of it. Group can be public or private. We are seeing this kind of approach more often from companies like Yammer, Socialcast and Jive Software.

It just makes sense. A real-time stream is useless if it is one river of news. You need to channel the real-time flow so you can see its context. It's why people use desktop products like Tweetdeck to follow Twitter. By setting up channels, you can follow specific communities and keep in context the real-time stream flowing by you at any one moment. In the enterprise, the needs are different. You need more capabilities so groups can interact and people can move quickly between conversations.

Mayfield takes it a step further. He says Socialtext is making it ridiculously easy to add groups. Of course he has a vested interest in promoting Socialtext. But true to his roots, he traces the concept back to the early days of the social Web, providing context for where we are today:

"Back around the time in which social software was defined and when we started enterprise social software, Seb Paquet introduced the notion of Ridiculously Easy Group-Forming.

Weblogs have a potential for group-forming like no other medium. However I'm convinced that much of it to this day remains untapped. I'd like to explain an idea that I have been bouncing around for a while. It might well be a reformulation of what others have said previously. I believe that implementing this properly would give a nice boost to the blogosphere's social aggregation capability.

Basically the goal is to push the threshold for group creation to an unprecedented low. I think Reed's Law should be refined to state:

The value of a group-forming network increases exponentially with the number of people in the network, and in inverse proportion to the effort required to start a group."

That's a context for anyone to consider in the enterprise space these days.

If you like Electronic Music, you might like Musique Concrète. If you like Cartography, you might like Map Projection. Into Head-mounted displays? Check out Organic light-emitting diodes! These are a few of the recommendations I've received this week from semantic, social recommendation service Get Glue and I'm pretty excited about it. If you like books, music, movies or wine, then Glue could be the social network for you. I just like to browse Wikipedia entries and it's making a big impact on my day.

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This long-running browser extension, prominently featured in both Firefox and Chrome official extension galleries, recently created a companion website that made use of the service skyrocket. Today Glue announced a new version of its extension that inserts links to see recommendations for related content on pages all around the web, from Google search pages to Facebook. Anywhere you find a link to a known website, that link will be augmented with a Glue link. There is one privacy setting you should change from the default, but do that and you'll be ready to roll.

Get Glue recognizes when you're looking at a website about a musician, a book, a bottle of wine, a movie or many other types of stuff. Then it makes it easy to look up additional info about that item across other websites like Last.fm, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. It does all of this unobtrusively, with social streams, recommendations and a game.

The newest version of the service recognizes links on search results and social networks, allowing you to invoke a handsome pop-up overlay on those pages as well. Check out the little grey "G" below. Hover over it and you'll get a pop-up filled with options for learning more quickly and easily, without leaving the page.

Privacy Concerns

Glue tracks the pages you're visiting, which is ok, but by default it exposes topics you look at on your public profile. You can turn that off and only expose the topics you interact with on Glue, like giving them a thumbs up or thumbs down. Yesterday I found an entry for a disgusting medical condition on my public Glue profile, because someone else (I swear) used my computer to look the condition up on Wikipedia. I wasn't very happy about that. I now have the setting to expose visits turned off, but the company could explain even that better.

Glue is smart enough that it ought to be able to tell when I'm looking at web content that involves health, sex, money or other touchy topics and ask me if I want to expose those visits. This is just another example of the running debate around passive tracking, over sharing, privacy settings and default social software design.

It's not hard to change this setting, though, and once you do you then you'll probably be pretty happy. It's a shame it's an all-or-nothing thing, though. I'd be happy to expose my browsing history to friends if the types of topics above could be excluded.

Get Glue is pretty awesome and the company adds new features all the time. My profile on the site is here. Come friend me up and we can be nerds together. Especially if you like looking up trippy stuff on the internet.

Disclosure: Glue CEO Alex Iskold is a long-time friend of ReadWriteWeb and one of the nicest, smartest people in the industry. (Read his heart warming personal story here.) His product was also something I disliked using for years until recent updates, so I feel pretty objective about my perception of it. Alex has particularly good taste in books and can be found here on Glue.

In the continuing effort to stop the bleeding, newspapers continue to try new ways to recover some losses and stop giving away all of their content for free. As online advertising has not proven sufficient to fully cover costs, some publishers, such as the Wall Street Journal, have turned to pay walls.

A new trend, however, seems to have taken hold - charging for a mobile app. The Washington Post has joined The Guardian in charging for its iPhone app, according to an article this morning in Paid Content.

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The Washington Post iPhone app will cost $1.99 for 12 months of mobile access to the paper's content, which will include offline reading. The Guardian recently announced that it had sold 101,457 downloads of its iPhone app, which, at $3.99 a pop, means over $400,000 for the British paper.

The interesting distinction to note here is that the Washington Post's app is more like a newspaper subscription of old. You aren't paying a one-time fee for the app, you're paying for a year's use, meaning if you like the content and want continued access, it's going to see another $1.99 from you in a year.

When you compare these sorts of numbers to the 35 subscribers to Newsday, the future might look brighter for newspapers. We're thinking that mobile users are used to paying small fees for quality applications and, while they could use their mobile browser to visit the free website, they'll likely pay the two bucks to see content tailored to the mobile platform instead.

CNN, as Paid Content points out, takes a similar approach, charging for its iPhone application, but its charge is a one-time fee. Offering an app as a timed subscription is a bit of a twist, but mobile may be just the environment to try out this sort of payment model.

The Washington Post iPhone app will be available for purchase today, but was not up by the time of this article.

Drupal's founder is calling for open source in the enterprise and in the cloud. This should be no surprise, coming from someone like Dries Buytaert. But it is still interesting, considering the source and the point he makes about the actual lack of open source in cloud computing.

Drupal is one of the most popular, open source content management systems. Buytaert created it initially as a messaging board. It went open-source in 2001.

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Dries, who is now the co-founder of Acquia, says the SaaS model need to be updated, modeled on open source values. He points out that SaaS companies for the most part are built on proprietary software.

Dries:

"....they might allow you to export your data, but they usually don't allow you to export their underlying code. While a lot of these services might be built on Open Source components, they have a lot more in common with proprietary software vendors than Open Source projects or companies."

It's in Dries view that this model can be disrupted by open source. For example, he says, the Drupal Gardens community improves the overall platform by contributing to it. The goal, as Dries says, is for people to export their Drupal Garden site in their entirety " the code, the theme and data -- and move the platform to any Drupal hosting environment."

His example points to a huge issue with cloud computing. It's not easy to export data from cloud computing services. Third-party services offer methods for exporting the data but for the most part, cloud computing services are proprietary. No open standards exist for passing data.

As Vint Cerf said in January to the Commonwealth Club: It's like 1973 for moving data around in the cloud. IBM, Google and Amazon have no way to interoperate. There are no cloud standards.

Open-source communities are faring well in the enterprise space. Matt Asay of the Open Road posted a story last week that illustrates the success of oepn-source enterprise efforts.

In particular, he referred to some of the most successful companies: Alfresco Software, Sugar CRM, Jaspersoft and Zimbra. Here are the numbers he presented:

Open-source communities thrive in all sorts of places, even the enterprise space. The next step is to bring this same community drive into the cloud community. Our bet is it will happen sooner than we think.