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Now, Ning Network Creators – that is, users who administer their own social network on Ning – can finally embed these apps and make them available for all the users on their custom social network. Among the apps launched today are a service that allows artists to sell merchandise from Sellit, a BlogTalkRadio app for podcasters, Huddle workspaces, PollDaddy polls, as well as WordPress apps to display blog posts and a Ustream app for live video streaming. A complete list of existing apps is available here.

While other social networks have obviously provided their users with access to these kinds of apps and widgets for a long time already, this is a major step forward for Ning. Ning, according to its own stats, currently hosts over 1.5 million different social networks (how many of these are active is a different question, however) and has about 33 million registered users. If Ning wants to continue to compete with Facebook and other social networks, it simply needs this kind of open development environment to provide its users with the right set of features, though it also looks like Ning actually has an Apple-like approval process for new apps in place.

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We talked to Yahoo! Chief Technologist, Sam Pullara, (@spullara on Twitter) and Jonathon Trevor, the product lead for YQL yesterday. They specifically stressed that Yahoo was trying to stay as close to the SQL language as possible, as this would allow the largest number of developers to make use of YQL without having to learn yet another new language.

The Read/Write Web

While the earlier incarnations of YQL were mainly meant to read data, with the addition of these three new SQL verbs, the focus has now shifted towards writing data back to the net as well. Developers can now use YQL to write and modify data on web services and applications.

To explain how useful this can be, the Yahoo team used a few different examples. A developer can now easily use YQL to update a Twitter account (even authentication with OAuth is possible), for example, or add a new comment to a blog post, or insert any data into a remote database. Basically, developers can now use YQL to write data back to any web site that uses forms for data entry and to any API, including authenticated APIs.

To try this, here is an example from Yahoo (you will have to log in to the YQL console):

Try creating a new tweet from the YQL console, follow this link <a href="https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console?q=use%20%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yqlblog.net%2Fsamples%2Ftwitter.status.xml%27%3B%20insert%20into%20twitter.status%20(status%2Cusername%2Cpassword)%20values%20(%22Playing%20with%20INSERT%20UPDATE%20and%20DELETE%20in%20YQL%22%2C%20%22twitterusername%22%2C%22twitterpassword%22)">to run this</a>:

use ‘http://www.yqlblog.net/samples/twitter.status.xml‘;

insert into twitter.status (status,username,password) values ("Playing with INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE in YQL", "twitterusername","twitterpassword")

Pullara and Trevor also stressed that because Yahoo runs YQL on five datacenters spread over three continents (three in the US, one in Europe, and another one in Asia), executing commands through YQL is generally very fast. Yahoo also set some relatively generous rate limits for the service. Developers who use the service and who identify themselves with an access key can make up to 100,000 calls per day, while anonymous users are restricted to 1000 calls per hour, which is still a pretty good number.

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Amit Agarwal has been keeping a close eye on Friend Connect since it was announced and he assumes that the service could go live pretty soon. Just last week, Google published a new YouTube video geared towards users and now the support site for Friend Connect is available as well.

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Some of the gadgets Google currently supplies are a comment wall and a ratings gadget. Friend Connect will also work with third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community. To enable these gadgets, all a site owner has to do is to copy and paste some code snippets into their site’s HTML.

Google Profiles Meets MyBlogLog

Lately, Google has started to put a lot more emphasis on its own user profiles, and Friend Connect makes good use of them. Once you join a Friend Connect enabled site, other users will be able to see information from your profile, though you can set your privacy settings to disallow others from seeing your profile pages as well. In many ways, this is quite similar to MyBlogLog.

It’s Social, But is it Open?

When Friend Connect was first announced, we were concerned about the direction Google was taking with this implementation of the OpenSocial standards. Also, as we noted in our earlier posts, the Friend Connect apps are displayed in an iframe, which is basically a separate web page inside another web page. Because of this, these apps are black boxes that live on your site, but don’t allow the site owners to really leverage the data from these apps on their own sites.

It is interesting to note that the latest Google video about Friend Connect still prominently features Facebook as a supported service, even though Facebook has decided to eschew OpenSocial in favor of its own platform. The help pages for Friend Connect don’t feature a list of supported services yet.

Benefits

There are, however, also some clear benefits to using Friend Connect. Through this service, a site owner might be able to create more user loyalty and enthusiastic readers can evangelize your site by publishing their activity on it to their own social network. Visitors will also be able to invite their friends on social networks to join your site.

In an early press release about Friend Connect, Google stated that this initiative was about helping the 'long tail' of sites to become more social. While we might worry about  some of the details of Google's implementation, this by itself is a worthy cause, and it will be interesting to see how site owners will implement Friend Connect once it becomes publically available.

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Google will allow web services to join a limited test of an API based on the OpenID 2.0 protocol that will give Google Account users the option to sign in to websites with their Google credentials and without having to sign up for a new account at those sites.

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Among the launch partners for this new API are Zoho, Plaxo, and Buxfer.

Don’t Mention OpenID

One of the key results of Yahoo’s OpenID usability study was that users did not understand OpenID and what its logo stands for. Instead, Yahoo promoted the idea of giving users a sign-in button that simply said “Sign In with a Yahoo! ID” (though Chris Messina argues that this could be detrimental to OpenID in the long run).Google and its partners are taking a similar route and are basically bypassing any mention of OpenID itself in favor of a simple message saying “Sign in with a Google Account.”

More to Come

Google also announced that it is looking to combine the OAuth and OpenID protocol so that a service can not only request a user’s identity through OpenID, but also “request access to information available via OAuth-enabled APIs such as Google Data APIs as well as standard data formats such as Portable Contacts and OpenSocial REST APIs.”

Tipping Point?

Thanks to this announcement, a wide range of some of the web’s largest service providers now supports OpenID: Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, and AOL.

As John McCrea notes, the result of these announcements from Google and Microsoft this week should be “a massive adoption wave for OpenID all over the web.”

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Ning is a social networking platform that allows its users to create their own, custom social networks. Some of its high-profile customers include celebrities like 50 Cent and Ellen DeGeneres.

For now, users can only add OpenSocial applications to their profiles, but not to their networks. This will change, however, once future versions of OpenSocial are developed, as Caroline McCarthy reports.

By adding support for OpenSocial, Ning is joining a growing number of social networks that support this standard, including MySpace, hi5, Orkut, and Bebo. For developers, supporting OpenSocial makes good sense, as they can reach a far larger audience with an OpenSocial application than if they just programmed for a given network’s own APIs. The only hold-out with regards to supporting OpenSocial is Facebook, though Facebook is also considering the option of opening up its development platform to other social networks in the future.

Ning itself is growing nicely and just celebrated the creation of its 500,000th network. By supporting OpenSocial, Ning now gains the ability to offer its customers an even larger array of options, though it would have been nice if Ning already supported OpenSocial apps on network pages and not just on profiles.

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As Yahoo points out, there are already many image editing tools on the market that perform similar functions. Smush.it, however, automates this process and works for a variety of popular file formats, taking a lot of the hassle out of the process.

Crunching Numbers and Stripping Out Metadata

Smush.it works on two different levels. First, it strips all the metadata out of the file. For small files like logos or buttons, this data can make up a large part of their size and very few users will ever care what editor you used to create a button. After this, Smush.it applies a number of non-lossy, open-source image optimization algorithms to the image. Smush.it will also transform GIFs into more efficient PNG files when necessary and optimize PNGs and animated GIFs.

For most web pages we tested, Smush.it reduced the total image size by anywhere from 10 to 45%. For most sites, logos, buttons, and icons saw the largest improvements (often close to 90%), though we also noticed a lot of sites that did not optimize their screenshots and other images, which Smush.it was usually able to compress by anywhere between 10 to 30%. If you are a web developer or publisher, using Smush.it could potentially reduce your bandwidth bill significantly.

We only wish that Yahoo had picked a slightly less unfortunate URL for the service…

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Windows Only

When Microsoft first publicly showed a demo of Photosynth in 2006, it almost looked too good to be true. Now, getting started with it couldn’t be easier – as long as you have a Windows machine – there is no Mac version available yet. You first have to install both a browser plug-in and a desktop application (all done through just one installer). The installation was as standard as Windows installations get and finished in less than a minute. We tested the plugin in both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 without any problems.

One interesting aspect of the uploader is that you can choose a license for your creation. You can either choose a Creative Commons license, put the pictures in public domain, or mark it as ‘All Rights Reserved.’

Desktop App

The desktop application does most of the heavy lifting for creating the ’synths’ and seemed to make good use of all available cores. You only have to pick your photos, give your collection and name and click ‘Synth.’ After it has finished, it will create a score telling you how ’synthy’ your photo collection was. Obviously, your photos need to have common areas for Photosynth to be able to stitch them together. While Photosynth does a great job making these connections, it can’t work magic and our first attempts with relatively unconnected images were futile.

The more pictures you have, the longer the process of creating your synths takes, of course, and depending on your connection, the upload to Microsoft’s servers can also take quite a while. In the end, though, your patience will be greatly rewarded.

Online Viewer

The online viewer is quite intuitive and allows you to zoom in and out, move around the picture and also go through the pictures in a 3D slide show mode. One nice feature is that you can also go full screen, which is really the best way to showcase your photos.

You can also embed a copy of your synth on any website and email a link to your friends.

The animation in Photosynth is astonishingly smooth and our screenshots really can’t do it justice. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should watch Microsoft’s demo of Photosynth at TED2007, which will give you a good impression of what the final product looks like.

Different Way of Shooting

It really takes a different approach to shooting pictures to make the most out of Photosynth. If you often stitch together photos, you are probably already used to this, but Photosynth also gives you more freedom, as you can zoom in and out, or walk around an object and still have Photosynth recognize the common areas.

In our tests, Photosynth performed flawlessly, but we would recommend that you have a set of at least 10 to 20 photos to create an interesting ’synth’ and the more photos you have, the more interesting it will be.

Caveats

A couple of caveats:

• All synths are public – there are no privacy controls!
• Photosynth only runs on Vista and XP so far.

Verdict

Even though we only had a short time to test Photosynth, it has already changed the way we think about taking pictures. Suddenly, you can do so much more with your photos. But besides the cool factor, we can also see a lot of other interesting applications for Photosynth. A realtor, for example, could use it to create a more immersive virtual tour of a house.

If you already have Photosynth installed already, you can see a 3D view of Venice below – otherwise, clicking on the image will take you directly to the installer.

Tag Cloud

The idea of using a tag cloud to track memes on Twitter is obviously not new, but having the tag cloud update dynamically makes for a whole new experience. While testing Twitscoop this morning, for example, the news about Carl Icahn’s newest letter to Yahoo’s shareholders was breaking on Twitter and made it onto Twitscoop’s tag cloud within less than a minute.

Sometimes, the items on the tag cloud seem to appear more because of serendipity than because they are real memes. If five people write the ‘dumb’ or ‘w00t’ within 10 minutes of each other, for example, it will show up in the cloud, even though the tweets are not related at all.

If a tag cloud seems especially noteworthy, you can easily send a tweet with a permalink to the cloud. While this might only be useful in a very limited number of occasions, it is a nice feature to have nevertheless.

As of now, Twitscoop does not feature an API, nor does it have a widget for its live tag cloud that you could put on your blog or your desktop.

Search

Twitscoop is also a very capable Twitter search engine. While it is pretty basic, in that it doesn’t feature live updates like Summize, or organize conversations like Quotably, it does show a nice graph of how often a search term has been used on Twitter in the last 6 to 72 hours (see screenshot). Just like on Summize, you can reply to a tweet from the search page and there is a link to the original tweet as well.

Twitscoop picks up new tweets very fast – most appear in under one minute.

Verdict

The ideal Twitter search engine would combine the live updates and API from Summize, the live tag cloud from Twitscoop, and the conversation tracking from Quotably. As of now, we still have to wait for this, but Twitscoop’s live updates are definitely worth taking a closer look at and its search engine is a good alternative to Summize.