Google Friend Connect Is trying to catch up with Facebook Connect, and just now released its first set of APIs, which will let developers integrate Google Friend Connect more deeply into their sites and applications. Google Friend Connect offers a single sign-on service as well as several data portability features.

The new APIs will allow site owners to use both JavaScript and REST APIs to embed Google Friend Connect directly into the markup language of each site and make it easier for to combine it with their existing login systems. Google has also created APIs for developers who want to create plugins for content management systems such as Wordpress and Drupal. Gadget developers now have better authentication options as well. According to the API page:

Friend Connect API’s enable developers to

• Integrate social flows and data directly within a page’s markup, via the OpenSocial standard specification
• integrate existing login systems, registered users, and existing data with new social data and activities.
• Create social gadgets & services that are embeddable within millions of Friend Connect enabled sites.

Of course, Facebook Connect already has its own set of competing APIs (which are the same ones used by its 670,000 application developers). The Google Social Blog has more info.

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Google is now making it easier for Websites to surface Friend Connect features with what it is calling the Social Bar. This is a toolbar that Websites can add to their homepage or any other page they wish, and then they can add links for drop-down gadgets that lets site visitors do things such as sign in via Friend Connect, see who else has signed in recently, check out comments, or site members, all from Social Bar. Here is an example.

Basically, the social bar is a small strip that webmasters can layer on top of any web page, either at the top or at the bottom. That way, website visitors are provided with a bit of information, and the bar also lets them interact with any social feature the site incorporates through drop-down gadgets. As Software Engineer Christopher Wren explains in the announcement blog post, this is a good way to save on pixel space and keep putting the actual content of the site forward first.

Here are some of the gadgets Websites can include in the Social Bar, from Google’s brand new Social Web blog:

• On the far left, visitors can join your site, see their identity, and edit their profiles and settings.
• Your visitors can also delve into your site’s activity stream to see what’s happening throughout your site. It includes links to recent posts made anywhere on your site, helping other visitors quickly find where the hottest conversations are taking place.
• The wall gadget can host a discussion for the whole site, a section of pages, or each individual page, letting your visitors easily read and leave comments.
• Lastly, visitors can see the other members of your site, check out their profiles to see how like-minded they really are, and even become friends.

The toolbar approach is both an attempt at ubiquity and invisibility at the same time. Google wants Friend Connect to be everywhere, but at the same time it doesn’t want to seem too pushy about being everywhere. Hence, the seemingly innocuous toolbar. But that toolbar expands with pop-down gadgets, which takes advantage of Google’s strengths with creating gadgets in iGoogle and elsewhere. Can a Facebook Connect toolbar be far behind?

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There are way too many comment login systems out there. Each blogging platform (Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger) has its own login system, then there are the cross-platform commenting systems like Disqus and JS-KIT. But many of these will soon give way to Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect.

I am talking about just the ID people use to login, not the commenting systems themselves. We adopted Facebook Connect as a login option for anyone who wants to leave a comment on TechCrunch, and it already accounts for more than 20 percent of our comments. FB Connect is also now available to any of the 500,000 blogs and sites that use the JS-Kit commenting widget, and Disqus is planning on implementing Facebook Connect before the end of the year.

Other blogs are adopting Google’s Friend Connect (which lets people login with various email credentials, or even Twitter). JS-Kit is also working on adding Friend Connect, as well as MySpace ID as login options.

All of this choice is great, except that already there are six different login options in The JS-Kit widget (Guest, Existing JS-Kit, New JS-Kit, Haloscan, OpenID, FB Connect). Pretty soon we’ll need the equivalent of a “Share This” button, perhaps a “Universal ID” button, that will then open up to all the options. But I think that’s too much. Engineers may feel it is egalitarian, but consumers run away when they are presented with more than 3 or 4 options.

That is why I think Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect will win in the end (Sorry, MySpace). People may have IDs for the various blogging platforms or commenting systems, but most don’t identify with them. It is a necessary inconvenience. They identify with Facebook or their email because that is where they manage their personal and professional lives.

In addition to replicating the comments on your Facebook News feed, the JS-Kit implementation also supports embedding Facebook photos and YouTube videos directly into the comments. It makes commenting much more personal when you know your friends will see it in Facebook. It also has the potential to reduce the amount of comment trolling and general incivility that has taken over many blog comments (we hope).

Update: No sooner did I post this than I learned that not only is Disqus working on a Facebook Connect plugin, but so is Six Apart (for Movable Type), Wordpress, and MediaWiki. Here is an entire Facebook Connect plugin directory. Grou.ps is also adding FB Connect.

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Google’s universal sign-in system, Friend Connect, which just opened to all Websites two weeks ago, now accepts Twitter IDs as a sign-in option. That means when you visit a participating Website that accepts Friend Connect as a log-in option, you can sign in using your Twitter account. If any of the people you follow on Twitter are also members of the third-party site, they will automatically be added as your friends.

Friend Connect also supports IDs from Google, Yahoo, AIM, and OpenID. For instance, I tried this on the Go2Web2.0 blog, which has implemented Friend Connect, and it gave me the option to use my Gmail or Twitter accounts (I could also use Orkut or Plaxo). I used my Twitter sign-in without a hitch. (Update: Actually, this is a little confusing, but it signs you in first using one of the four credentials above and then asks you if you want to add Twitter).

The race is on between Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, and MySpaceID to sign up the most third party sites. Adding Twitter as an issuing party is a big win for Friend Connect because sites are going to choose the sign-in system that gives their visitors the most options and broadest reach.

There is nothing stopping sites from implementing more than one sign-in system, but at some point presenting visitors with too many options becomes confusing. For instance, we use Facebook Connect, in addition to our own sign-in system. Should we add Friend Connect? Probably. MySpaceID?

It’s only been a couple weeks since these have become widely available, and already universal sign-in is anything but. Here is a list of sites that are live with Facebook Connect, and some example Friend Connect sites can be found here (if anyone has a more comprehensive list of sites live with Friend Connect, please add to comments).

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Papervision – Augmented Reality (extended) from Boffswana on Vimeo.

A digital design shop in Australia, Boffswana, shows off a neat parlor trick in the video above. It places a 3D Flash character made with Papervision into a regular Webcam video using nothing more than a paper printout. (Update: Oh, and you can print it out yourself and add the character to your own video).

Eat your heart out, George Lucas.

(Hat tip to Cory O’Brien).

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I want you to stop what you are doing right now and go try Presdo. It is a deceptively simple online scheduling assistant that is a prime example of what a modern Web app should be. It only shows you what you need to see at the moment that you need to see it. And it understands what you want to do based on normal (and not-so-normal) English that you type in.

“We actually threw a lot away,” says founder Eric Ly, who previously was a co-founder of LinkedIn and its first chief technology officer. He wrote most of the code himself and bootsrapped the entire site with only $35,000 of his own money. “I left LinkedIn on a Friday, and started Presdo on Saturday,” he tells me. That was back in April, 2006. He had to develop his own natural-language algorithm to deal with events, times, and scheduling, and the words people use to describe those things. The whole site is built with Ruby on Rails, Ajax, and the LAMP stack.

The home page is a plain, Google-inspired box. But instead of typing in what you are looking for, you type in what you want to do and with who: “Coffee with Eric in SF,” “Movie with Nadia Fri night,” “Meeting with Henry at 2:30 pm.”

It then takes you to a page with pre-populated fields based on what you typed in: when, who, where, what. You can refine the details further on this page. If you typed in the person’s email in the first box, it appears in the “who” field. If you didn’t, you can enter it at this point.

Presdo lets you pick a location by searching through local listings on a Google map. You can pick one near you, near the person you are meeting, or in between. (It helps if you first register with your own email and location.)

Or you can look at a list view of nearby places instead.

Presdo guesses what day and time you meant and puts those in as well. But you can offer up alternative times and allow the other party to pick the best one or suggest their own.

When you are satisfied with what you have, you hit “Send Invite.” The other person gets an e-mail with the details and a link back to Presdo, where they can change the time or place. You can also add a message. All the messages back-and-forth are recorded on the event page.

Once everything is set, you can export the meeting to your calendar (Presdo supports Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, and Yahoo Calendar).

Every time you schedule an event with a new person, Presdo remembers who they are for the next time. You can also use Presdo as a to-do list. There are some obvious features Ly needs to add, such as support for other forms of messaging beyond email including mobile text messaging and Twitter. But he is off to a good start. The service is free, and he hopes to eventually charge for premium subscriptions. You can try it out now, and tell us what you think in comments.

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Here are some slides from Pricewaterhouse Coopers and the National Venture Capital Association illustrating the trends in venture capital deals last quarter that Duncan mentioned yesterday. (Click on them for a bigger image). The overall amount venture firms invested dropped both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter to $7.1 billion (less than any quarter in 2007, but still above the level of investment every quarter in 2006 and 2005). The average deal size is still healthy at $7.7 million. So things aren’t so bad. The concern is whether this is the beginning of a steeper decline that we will begin to see over the next few quarters, which it may very well be.

VC money going into the software sector (broadly defined) declined 9 percent quarter-over-quarter (flat year-over-year) to $1.264 billion and was about even with the amount invested in biotech ($1.267 billion). If you cut the numbers a different way and look at Internet-specific deals, those declined 7 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to $1.310 billion, but were slightly up year-over-year. Meanwhile, the craze over clean-tech investments looks like it may have peaked in the third quarter of 2007 when $851 million was invested. Or, at least, it is taking a breather. That number has now gone down for two quarters, and was at $625 million during the first quarter of 2008.

Finally, here is a breakdown of the money going into early-stage versus later-stage deals. About 23 percent of the money invested in the past four quarters went into seed or early-stage deals, which seems to actually be a slightly higher percentage than was typical over the previous two years.

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Peter Gabriel knows a thing or two about music, and he thinks he’s come up with a better way for you to find new music that will rock your world. The latest digital music company he is backing is called The Filter. It is essentially a meta-recommendation engine for music, movies, and Web video. Right now, it works best for music. The site was announced today and we have beta invites. There are only 100 of them. So sign up here. You probably have about 30 seconds before they are all gone.

The site (which is a little bit buggy right now) is designed as an entertainment start page, with music, movie, and Web video recommendations that change daily. There are also RSS feeds that link to music and movie reviews. Explains David Maher Roberts, CEO of Exabre (the British company that runs the Filter):

The idea of the Website is the world of entertainment filtered for you. We go out and find lots of information, and filter that according to your taste. The more we know about you, the more we can give you a daily dose of entertainment content.

For now, though, the company is focusing mostly on getting the music recommendations right. Click on the music tab and you are presented with a list of songs selected for especially for you, as well as a list of songs that “everyone is into right now.” You can play each list, but only 30-second samples from each (a major drawback to the site that could be rectified through a deal with We7, an ad-supported, full-track online music service that Gabriel is also an investor in).

The Filter combines together a number of filtering approaches based on purchase, listening, browsing, and rating histories. It tries to collect as much information about musical tastes as it can, both yours and other people’s—overall music purchases, your iTunes history, how you rate songs and artists on the site, and the listening habits and ratings of your friends. In a sense it combines Amazon’s collaborative filtering with Last.fm’s behavioral filtering. Says Roberts:

Amazon’s recommendations are based on purchase data. Last.fm’s are based on consumption data. We are based on both.

The Filter gathers your listening history through an iTunes plug-in that you need to download (also called The Filter) that scans your music library and keeps track of your listening habits, similar to iLike’s iTunes plug-in or Last.FM’s Scrobbler. Then the Filter adds to that by comparing it to overall digital music purchase data. It gets this from OD2, another Gabriel-backed startup that was bought by Loudeye (later bought by Nokia) and powers the digital music stores for Nokia and MSN Music. (When Gabriel sold OD2, he invested in Exabre, which has raised $8.5 million in venture capital). All in all, the company’s database is filled with information about 4.5 million songs, 330,000 movies, and 50 million music transactions and playlists.

The Filter’s data, however, is skewed 80 percent towards European markets, so it ends up recommending songs that are more popular across the pond (they still love The Smiths over there). You can fine-tune the recommendation engine by rating individual songs or artists, or tweaking the engine with sliders that bring up “more expected” or “more surprising” matches. You can also filter by new or old songs. The recommendations seem a little hit or miss. (The Smith’s “How Soon Is Now?” and Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” Okay. But Van Halen’s “Jump”?). These should get better over time.

Every filtering approach has its issues. Collaborative filtering has a cold start problem. Until someone build up a purchase history, you don’t really know much about her tastes. Filtering based on the music people own or listen to runs into what Roberts calls the “Beatles Problem”:

There are several problems with the Beatles. For one thing, there is no purchase information. But the real problem is that everybody owns or has the Beatles in their collection. The algorithm thinks it goes with everything. If you leave an algorithm to its own devices, it keeps on recommending the same thing.

To get around these issues, the Filter’s algorithm recognizes super-popular songs and handicaps them with anegative bias so that they don’t dominate the recommendations. It also takes into account inertia. If you haven’t listened to the Rolling Stones in a while, their weighting starts to decay. The system learns about you, but also forgets about you. It gives purchase information the most weight, followed by consumption data gathered from the iTunes plug-in, followed by your ratings and other data.

The Filter has a long way to go to be competitive with Last.fm, iLike, or many other online music services. But its technology-agnostic approach and strong music ties could help it distinguish itself. Definitely what needs strengthening is the social aspect of the service. You can add friends, but they all need to be members right now. This summer, members will be able to take The Filter with them to Netvibes or iGoogle as widgets that show a recommended playlist. A Facebook app is also in the works that will let you mix your musical taste with a friend’s to come up with a musical taste mashup.

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As Mike reported earlier today, Fring is launching a downloadable app for the iPhone that will allow people to make Skype and other VoIP calls over the data connection instead of using up talk minutes. Fring supports Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, SIP, Twitter, Yahoo and AIM services.

It is now live. (Warning: You will need to Jailbreak your iPhone to make it work). The Fring blog has more details or you can download it at the Fringcubator. With so many minutes on most cell phone plans, most people won’t be using this to make local calls. But it could come in handy for international calls or simply keeping up with IM on the go. The latter is really the killer app.

And here’s a video of how it works:

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Crowdsourcing may work for Wikipedia, but few commercial companies have figured out how to make it work for them. The basic concept is to get outsiders, preferably customers, to swarm together to design a product or complete some other project. Crowdsourcing is quickly becoming a crowded field—there’s Innocentive, Cambrian House, the soon-to-launch CrowdSpirit, and Ideablob, to name a few sites. But Ben Kaufman, the CEO of a startup from Burlington, Vermont called Kluster, thinks that what is missing are market-like incentives to motivate contributors and push the best ideas forward.

Kluster, which is supposed to launch later today in a public beta (Update 2/19: the site just went live a day late) and will be used by attendees at next week’s TED conference, is designed so that companies can offer cash rewards for each phase of a project. Participants who back the winning idea get to share the reward. Projects can range from creating logos and marketing campaigns to designing a product.

Participants start off with points, or “Watts,” that they can invest in different projects. Explains Kaufman:

Our Watt system is like a currency. You get a certain amount of Watts. As you do more things you get more Watts. Instead of voting on ideas, you invest your Watts in concepts you like.

So if a company decided to offer $5,000 for the best new logo to come out of Kluster, some graphically-inclined members might upload a few sketches. Other members could then invest Watts in the design they think is best suited for the company’s product, make suggestions for improvements, or upload their own variation of the logo. Whichever logo gets picked by the company at the end wins the $5,000, which is distributed to all the members who backed that particular logo based on how much they contributed to the idea, how early they got behind it, and what percentage of their total Watts they put at risk. Kluster computes what your stake is in any given project.

Watts are never directly convertible into dollars, but they do influence how much of a cash reward each member is entitled to. At the end of each phase, all the Watts invested in the losing ideas are redistributed proportionately to the investors in the winning idea. As people collect more Watts, they gain standing in the community and have more to invest in subsequent projects.

Kaufman came up with the idea for Kluster at his last startup, Mophie, which makes iPod accessories and was recently sold to mStation for an undisclosed sum. One of Mophie’s hit products is the Bevy, an all-in-one iPod Shuffle case, bottle opener, cord-wrap, and keychain. The company designed it at last year’s MacWorld conference in 72 hours with input from 30,000 customers using software that was a precursor to Kluster. According to Kaufman, Mophie sold hundreds of thousands of the $15 cases.

He took the proceeds from the sale of Mophie, plus $1 million from Village Ventures, to capitalize Kluster. The business model is to collect fees from the participating companies. For each cash award that is distributed to members, Kluster collects 15 percent on top of the award. If a company wants to run a crowdsourcing session for a private group, Kluster charges for that separately based on the number of participants (public projects are hosted free). Kaufman is also exploring other ways to make money: recruiting users with particular skills to a project ($5 a head for each experienced graphic designer, for example); selling sponsored “feature” spots on the homepage to promote a project; user surveys, analytics, and targeted advertising.

Kluster’s success or failure will depend on the quality of talent it can attract to its site, and how active members become in contributing to projects. Members can debate different ideas, upload photos, videos, and even CAD files. Everyone has their own profile page, and can keep track of how many Watts they have. Unfortunately, the site doesn’t offer any Web-based product-design software, which is what a crowdsourcing site really needs.

But Kluster seems to get the economic incentives right which is half the battle. The other half is convincing companies that this is worth their while. For now, admits Kaufman, most companies see this primarily as a marketing exercise to engage their most avid customers and maybe generate some viral buzz. It will take a hit product to come out of this process for them to look at it as an actual source of innovation.

Rather than offer a cash reward up front, Kaufman initially wanted to structure the economics so that winning products get a $1 royalty per unit that is eventually sold. That turned out to be too hard to sell, but it is the direction where all of this is going. For crowdsourcing to really take off, the market needs to decide which are the best products. Not some brand manager.

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