Facebook Connect launched to the public less than a year ago, and already it’s seen an incredible amount of traction. Unfortunately, for those people with little to no coding experience, implementing Facebook Connect has seemed like more trouble that it was worth. Today, Facebook has an answer: Facebook Connect Wizard and Playground.

Facebook writes that “you can now incorporate Facebook Connect into your site in 3 easy steps.” The process is simple. First, you enter the name of your site and its URL. Then Facebook asks you to download and then upload a special file to your site’s main directory. And.. that’s about it. Once you’ve done that, Facebook will present you with its Playground — a list of code snippets you can embed on your site to round out the functionality, including Login buttons, profile photos, publishing items to News Feeds, and rendering photos of a user’s friends.

Deciding to put their little wizard to the test, I tried to implement Connect on one of my personal sites (note that I’ve never tried to implement Connect before so I really didn’t know what I was doing). And to my surprise, it worked: I managed to have a very basic form of Connect up and running on my site within all of two minutes. It will obviously take longer to make sure the new icons and buttons play nicely with your site’s design, but it’s really surprisingly easy.

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One of the most fundamental reasons for Google’s success is the site’s speed — search queries typically take a fraction of a second, and most of the company’s other services are usually very snappy as well (save for Gmail, which occasionally bogs down). Part of this speed can be attributed to the company’s obsession with minimalist design and its vast server farms, but you can be sure there’s no shortage of optimization that’s going on to make sure pages load as quickly as possible on the front end, too.

To help streamline its sites, Google has been using an internal tool called Page Speed, and starting today it’s opening up the tool to the developer community. The newly open-sourced tool is a Firefox plugin that integrates with Firebug, making suggestions on how to speed up your site based on best practices.

From the Google blog post:

For example, Page Speed automatically optimizes images for you, giving you a compressed image that you can use immediately on your web site. It also identifies issues such as JavaScript and CSS loaded by your page that wasn’t actually used to display the page, which can help reduce time your users spend waiting for the page to download and display.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Yahoo offers a similar tool for Firefox called YSlow, which is also meant to help developers streamline their websites.

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The record industry has approached Apple’s App store with a somewhat amusing amount of hesitation. When the App Store first launched last summer, a few major artists tested the waters with some obnoxiously basic apps, sometimes consisting of little more than a splash screen and a handful of their songs. But things are beginning to change. Leading the charge has been Nine Inch Nails, which partnered with Tapulous last fall to release a special NIN version of Tap Tap Revenge and more recently launched a robust ‘NIN Access’ app that offers fans a library of rich media, news, and social features. The app’s reception has been overwhelmingly positive, with over 75% of reviewers giving it five stars.

Now the major record labels (and countless indie bands) are looking to get in on the action. Enter Mobile Roadie, a new application platform that allows bands to quickly deploy their own custom applications to the App Store. For a relatively small fee, bands can use Mobile Roadie’s mostly-automated system to build their apps and have them posted to Apple’s App Store in as little as a week (and the majority of the wait is from Apple’s still-mysterious approval process).

The application supports a wide range of content, including photo galleries, streaming music (which can be linked to songs for purchase on iTunes), YouTube videos, a list of upcoming shows, and interactive features, like a ‘fan wall’ where users can post comments and photos in real time for all to see. On the backend, bands will have access to an intuitive CMS, where they’ll be able to update photos and video, manage comments, and post news stories. They can also choose what price they’d like their app to sell for on the App Store.

CEO Michael Schneider acknowledges that there are other media platforms available, like Kyte, but says that these can run thousands of dollars apiece. Mobile Roadie is substantially cheaper, running $399 for intitial setup and then $29 a month after that. For larger bands that receive over 1000 installs, there’s an additional 1 cent per month, per install charge. The company is currently in talks with every major record label (some of which are already testing the app), and has forged an exclusive partnership with The Orchard, a leading indie distributor.

I’ve tried out a few of Mobile Roadie’s apps, and for the most part they seem to work quite well (though if a band doesn’t upload many media assets the app feels a bit barren). The company has positioned itself well in a space that is about to really take off, especially once the iPhone 3.0 software hits and users will be able to see updates in realtime from their favorite bands without having to open the application manually.

If you’d like to check out a band’s app built on the Mobile Roadie platform, you can see a directory of their apps here.

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Picasa, the popular free photo management software made by Google, has finally made its way to the Mac. The application has long been noticeably absent on the Macintosh – especially given the fact that it has been available for Linux (which typically lags behind Macs and Windows) since 2006. It’s also a direct competitor to Apple’s long running iPhoto product, which has come with all new Macs for years. So how does it stack up?

In my brief testing the application seems to be very snappy (much faster than iPhoto), though it lacks the sleek look of Apple’s products. Photos import quickly, effects are easy to find and apply, and most things are intuitive, though the folder browsing can be a little confusing. It might not be as pretty as iPhoto, but I won’t be surprised if power-users make the switch (or at least consider it).

One of the biggest differences between Picasa and iPhoto is that Picasa doesn’t move or reorganize images, but instead keeps track of where your images are scattered across your hard drive and allows you to view them in one place. For users that manually manage their photos by sorting them into folders, this is a very welcome change. In contrast, iPhoto has long transfered your photos to its own library, and encouraged users to sort their photos through the app itself.

Given that iPhoto has come preinstalled on every Mac for years, Google is doing doing everything it can to make Picasa play nice with your existing library. While users can typically modify any image on their hard drive directly from Picasa, all images in iPhoto’s library are treated differently: the application will copy these images to a new location, and only then apply edits. The application also allows users to revert back to previous versions.

Picasa is a welcome alternative to iPhoto, but it’s still premature to drop iPhoto entirely. It’s highly likely that Apple will unveil a new version of iPhoto at tomorrow’s Macworld keynote, and you can be sure that it will include some significant enhancements.

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We have stumbled across a flaw in iPhone security that allows third party developers to update and execute arbitrary code from their applications at will, totally circumventing Apple’s App Store approval process. Normally, applications (and all of their updates) have to go through a lengthy review process before they’re posted to the App Store, as Apple combs through them to ensure they don’t do anything malicious or otherwise violate its Terms of Service. This exploit may give developers free rein.

The exploit stems from a benign trick that would otherwise seem trivial to most iPhone users. Whenever you launch an iPhone application, an image called ‘Default.png’ is briefly displayed while the app loads in the background. Applications developed in-house by Apple are able to use dynamic ‘Default.png’ images, which can be modified to do a number of things, like show the current date or display the contents of the app before it’s done loading. Until now third party developers have been stuck with static ‘Default.png’ images that could not be changed after the app had been installed. To get around the restriction, developer Patrick Collison figured out a workaround that tricks the iPhone’s code signing mechanisms into giving devs access to these dynamic launch images (for a full description of the trick, read his blog post).

But after digging deeper into this trick and consulting with a few iPhone developers, we believe that this could have much more significant (and potentially harmful) applications. Typically the iPhone’s API prevents developers from loading code in unsigned areas, but this image hack (which manipulates symlinks) makes the iPhone believe that the code it is loading came from a “trusted” (i.e. permitted) source. Using the same technique with arbitrary code would likely allow a developer to update and execute whatever code they’d like at will.

We should note that developers generally have the freedom to arbitrarily update and execute code on other platforms that don’t have an approval process, including desktop Windows and Mac machines. But consumers have long been trained to be wary when downloading new software to these platforms – on the App Store, everything has Apple’s stamp of approval, so this discretion is often thrown to the wind as users get promiscuous and try out every app they can get their hands on.

Fortunately, it’s unlikely that any apps currently on the store have already implemented this exploit, so if Apple can fix things quickly before accepting any more applications, your iPhone shouldn’t be at risk.

Update: We’ve gotten a number of comments stating that this may not be as serious an issue as we thought – while it is a legitimate bug, there are other ways to bypass Apple’s screening process to later invoke malicious code, and none of them have been an issue thus far. We did verify the exploit with a number of experienced iPhone developers, but may have overstated its significance.

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Clickpass, a startup that has simplified the OpenID login platform, has built out support for additional third parties that brings the promise of a universal login even closer. Users will now be able to use their Google, Facebook, Yahoo, or Hotmail passwords on any site that includes the Clickpass authentication system.

The new Clickpass system requires almost no effort from the end user. Supported sites simply embed a button on their login page which prompts users to login with their credentials from one of the aforementioned services; you don’t even need to have a Clickpass account. On supported sites, creating a new account is as simple as logging in with your preferred service (I use Gmail), and picking a display name to show other users. This is what OpenID should be.

So what’s the catch? At launch the service only works on a handful of sites, but CEO Peter Nixey says that implementing it on a website is easy – we can expect to see the number of supported sites skyrocket in the next few days. Developers need only implement the standard OpenID protocol along with the Clickpass system and they’re good to go.

One problem that Clickpass will soon face is that it is really a temporary solution to a problem most of these companies are already working on. We can expect Google, Yahoo, and the rest of the lot to implement their own version of OpenID, which will effectively take Clickpass out of the equation.

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TimeTube is a new mashup from Dipity, the interactive timeline site, that takes the mostly unsorted mess of videos that is YouTube and arranges them by date, offering a useful (and often unexpected) perspective on recent events.

Links to each video are situated across a horizontal timeline, with emphasis placed on the most popular videos (they appear bigger). Users can expand or contract the timeline to isolate a particular time period, and the viewing window features a handy “next event” button.

The site is a great diversion. The featured searches, ranging from Global Warming to David Hasselhoff, are all impressive, but half the fun comes from finding your own gems using the keyword search (recent scandals work best). I’m particularly fond of Eliot Spitzer’s TimeTube, which provides a nice contrast between his cheery political ads and the infamous Client Number 9 debacle.

TimeTube seems like it could be a handy reference for getting quick overviews on current events, but at this point it won’t be much more than a novelty for most people. Videos are placed according to when they were uploaded, which isn’t always indicative of when the events shown were actually taking place, making the validity of the timeline shaky at best. That said, if the site can figure out a way to keep dates consistent, TimeTube could evolve into a powerful tool.

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