As expected since yesterday, Facebook has launched the Open Stream API, which lets third-party developers use Facebook’s activity stream inside their own applications and services.

Developers will be able to filter and remix the stream – consisting of status updates, photos, videos, notes, as well as likes and comments on all the above – as they see fit. They will also be able to create content directly in the streams; for example, an application will be able to change the user’s status update.

Such an open approach did wonders for Twitter, and it means that we can soon expect hundreds of new applications developed for Facebook. We’ll see advanced applications like Tweetdeck applied to Facebook. For many advanced, tech-savvy users, Facebook’s homepage will become obsolete as they move on to applications that offer even more options. It also means that Facebook will get even more free PR as all these new applications start hitting the mailboxes of technology oriented blogs.

All of this will, however, work only for users who give the individual application access to their stream. From the official documentation (emphasis mine):

“Instead of prompting your users for the status_update, photo_upload, video_upload, create_note, and share_item extended permissions, you can simply prompt them for the publish_stream extended permission, and that single permission lets your users update their statuses, upload photos and videos, write notes, and share links all from your application or site.”

Twitter does not have this restriction, and although it probably won’t stop developers from creating applications on the Open Stream API, ultimately it will always mean that all these applications aren’t perfect; i.e., they don’t necessarily deliver all the data you see on Facebook itself.

Beta partners include Adobe, which has created a stream Notifier, and Seesmic Desktop, an advanced Twitter and Seesmic AIR desktop client (and the successor of Twhirl), which now also includes Facebook support, but this latest version is not yet publicly available (some details can be found here however).

More Facebook Resources from Mashable:

- 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page

- 5 Tips for Optimizing Your Brand’s Facebook Presence

- New Facebook Pages: A Guide for Social Media Marketers

- HOW TO: Survive the New, New Facebook

- 30+ Apps for Doing Business on Facebook

Tags: facebook, Open Stream API, twitter

Amidst all the talk about data portability and net identity, all that end users want to know is: how can I use this, and is it any good? Now both Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect are open to everyone; we’ve looked into these two services to see what they offer and which one is easier to use.

So, what’s the main difference here?

In the simplest of terms, both Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect let you create applications on your website that allow your visitors to interact with the site and their friends by logging in with their Google, Facebook, or OpenID credentials.

The key difference between the two services is the fact that Facebook is one social network, while Google Friend Connect is open to any site, service or social network that uses OpenID for identification. For example, with Google Friend Connect your visitors can log in using their Gmail credentials, meaning that they don’t really have to be a part of any (strictly defined) social network at all. Facebook Connect, on the other hand, is useless to anyone who’s not a Facebook user.

Available widgets

Let’s say you want to add either Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect functionality to your web site or a blog. What widgets are there at your disposal? Google calls their widgets “gadgets,” and there’s already a wide assortment at your disposal, with members of the community constantly adding more. They aren’t all Friend Connect ready, though; you can currently only choose from a small selection.

As far as Facebook Connect goes, you must create your own application, which is not that easy (see below). Logic tells me that there must be a gallery of apps you can readily add to your site, but I don’t see one; if I’m mistaken here, please correct me in the comments.

Ease of use

If you’re a web site owner, there’s a significant difference here. Both services require you to add some snippets of code to your site; however, adding Facebook Connect apps is a much more convoluted process. In short, the entire process is aimed at developers, not casual users, and it will scare away anyone without adequate technological knowledge.

This is a big, and important difference. Anyone can add Google Friend Connect to their site; as far as Facebook Connect goes, I’m convinced that many users will find the process too complicated.

On the user end of the equation, ease of use is nearly equal: a site which has either Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect enabled will have a form that lets you login with your OpenID or Facebook credentials, and the usability from there depends on the individual widgets and applications.

Two way communication

There’s one other subtle difference between Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect: the latter is much more about two-way communication than the former. A Facebook Connect application can send your activities back to Facebook; Google Friend Connect has no such central place, although in theory it can have many (e.i. all the social networks that support OpenID).

Therefore, I reckon that in general, Facebook Connect will primarily be interesting to bigger sites who will want to engage Facebook’s huge audience. Google Friend Connect will also be used by smaller sites who’ll simply want to add a fun widget to their site.

User base

If you look at these two services from an identity perspective, deciding which is better can be tricky. Yes, Facebook is huge, but Gmail and all OpenID supporters put together are bigger. Will Facebookers be more willing to log in with their credentials into a third party site than Gmail users? It’s hard to say, but in general, my opinion is that FC and GFC are tied with this regard.

Conclusion

So, there you go: although seemingly very similar services, Google Friend Connect is (currently) aimed at a wider user base, while Facebook Connect is (currently) for developers only. There’s a difference in focus, too; Facebook Connect is more about bringing data back to Facebook, while Google Friend Connect, lacks a central place to bring back data to.

If you’ve got anything to add, or you’ve tried one of these two services and want to share your experience, we’d like to hear your comments!

Image courtesy of iStockPhoto, bns124

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Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:

Facebook Blocks Google’s Friend Connect. There Goes the Open Web.
Plaxo Moves to Support Google Friend Connect
Google Friend Connect: Try it Now on Mashable
Google Wants To Be Your Universal Profile Too; Announces Friend Connect
Google Sings Its ABCs About Friend Connect
Friend Connect And The End Of The Fragmentation Era
Facebook Connect: The News is the News

For those of you who have been struggling to understand what Google’s latest service, Friend Connect, really is, and how it relates to the competitors, I’ve found a simple answer: it’s MyBlogLog on a global scale.

MyBlogLog is a great little service (later acquired by Yahoo) with a simple idea: give a name and a face to your website’s visitors. In a way, it takes your visitors and creates a social network out of them. Unfortunately, I think that Google’s Friend Connect has just rendered them obsolete by doing the opposite, as it brought all social networks to your website’s visitors. MyBlogLog has a relatively big community – 140,000 registered members is the latest number I’ve seen – but it’s not as big as Facebook. Or MySpace. Or LinkedIn. And it’s definitely not as big as all those sites put together.

The problem with MyBlogLog is that its community consists mostly of bloggers. Most bloggers, however, are also members of larger social networks, and now that Friend Connect enables them to tap into all those socnets, without any programming knowledge, MyBlogLog isn’t really necessary anymore. The only thing it can really do is join the party.

John McCrea, vice president of marketing at Plaxo, provides a good quote on Friend Connect:

“Instead of widgetizing apps and bolting them on to some corporation’s proprietary social graph, why not widgetize the social graph and socially enable any Web site or Web page?”

The implication of this is that widgetizing, outside of bigger, meta-networks like OpenSocial, might be coming to an end. What good is a widget which only taps into one service or network? Take a look at the current state of affairs:

Each arrow represents a widget which moves data back and forth between a single website and a bigger network. It’s a bit messy, because you need a lot of widgets to cover all bases. Now, with one big sweep of hand, Google introduces the following situation:

Sure, you can go around the big Friend Connect cloud, but chances are you’re going to be left behind. Of course, Friend Connect is just one implementation of a bigger framework; a sign of times to come, if you will.

OpenSocial marks the end of the fragmentation era. Friend Connect is the first big application of OpenSocial, immediately showing its strength: suddenly, it’s pointless to create a website widget that’s dependent only on one service when Friend Connect lets you tap into all of them at once. As new frameworks that connect more fragmented networks emerge, we will see less and less isolated applications. The standards are still in the making, though. Facebook, MySpace and Google all know this, and they’re all trying to grab a big chunk of the pie now while it’s still hot. It will be interesting to see how the cookie crumbles in the end.

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Related Articles at Mashable! – The Social Networking Blog:

Google Wants To Be Your Universal Profile Too; Announces Friend Connect
FriendFeed Brings Twitter Back
Petition to Bring Back Facebook’s “Skip This Step”
Martha Stewart Is Your Friend… And It’s A ‘Good Thing’
Podcast: Paul and Bret Talk of FriendFeed’s API
FabFemme Launches Professional Network for Gay Women
Sony Connect Music Service Shutting Down

Oh my. The latest words from Radiohead’s quirky frontman Thom Yorke aren’t about how much money they earned by giving away their music. (Sounds weird, but that’s how things work in this crazy 2.0 world.) It’s about how they don’t plan to do that again.

A somewhat vague quote from The Hollywood Reporter goes as follows:

“I think it was a one-off response to a particular situation. It was one of those things where we were in the position of everyone asking us what we were going to do. I don’t think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again. It was a moment in time.”

On one hand, it’s only logical. No one really expects them to let people choose what they’re going to pay for their music till the end of eternity. However, it raises certain concerns, depending on what exactly Yorke meant, whether Radiohead really gets this thing or not.

Radiohead was criticized once already by Trent Reznor, who also gave away parts of Nine Inch Nails’ new album, Ghosts I-IV, but in a slightly different fashion. Reznor called Radiohead’s effort a “marketing gimmick,” and Yorke’s latest statement does nothing to disprove it. Reznor did it right. He set out his plan very clearly, and he’s doing well, earning 1.6 million dollars from album sales in the first couple of weeks, according to him.

There’s a number of opinions on how bands should distribute (and profit from) their music; here’s mine. A band should:

a) charge very little or even nothing for the actual digital copies of their music, especially if it’s quality is lossy (MP3). Digital copies of music can be infinitely copied at zero cost, and therefore their actual value is inherently very small.

b) make sure to offer a variety of choices for purchasing their music, including some added value – CDs, LPs, limited editions, signatures, t-shirts, stickers, concert tickets, vouchers – for the more expensive versions.

c) cut out any middlemen which don’t really provide value to the customer.

It’s very simple. Nine Inch Nails did exactly that, and it worked. Hopefully, Radiohead will do some version of this with their next album. It would be a huge disappointment to see them go back to the “traditional” ways of selling music for their next album. There are other models, too. Einsturzende Neubauten, for example, have let fans that paid a subscription to their web site create their music together with them.

What matters, ultimately, is that people will not and should not pay for something that’s free anyway. Instead of decreasing value of music with DRM (the era of which is, hopefully, behind us), the value should be increased, and users should stop being harassed for sharing. Radiohead and NiN helped pave the way; hopefully they’ll stay on the right track.

Read more of my ramblings about the music industry, distribution of music, and piracy here:
Wanna Beat Piracy? You Have to Do Better Than Them!
RSS and Giving Away Music – What’s The Difference?
Preemptive Piracy Tax: Will Everyone Have To Pay?

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Related Articles at Mashable! – The Social Networking Blog:

Yahoo Adds Wikipedia to oneSearch Mobile Results
Mozy Online Backup – Don’t Spam Us, We’ll Spam You!
SmugglersMusic Launches Band Sales & Promotion Site
Poll: Which Online Video Site Pays Best?
I Do…Now I Don’t. It’s Like a Break Up Club.
AOL Purchasing Ad Company Quigo For $300 Million?
Tagged Readies to Emulate Facebook’s Platform

I’ve accidentally stumbled into several music-related mashups today, and I thought I might share them with you. The thing is, sometimes I’m just into chilling with my favorite tunes, but sometimes I’m in research mode, and I want to find as much as I can about whatever I’m listening to. The six mashups described below are perfect for this purpose.

WikiFM – not the most beautiful site to look at (let’s be honest here, it’s ugly), but I love it. The premise is very simple: divide the page into two frames, load a Last.FM player in one and show the related Wikipedia page in the other, according to whatever is playing at the moment. I’ve found this one an hour ago and I’m still having fun with it, hopefully it doesn’t lead into another internet addiction, because I have more than enough of those. You can search by artists, tag, user name, group; alternatively you can simply enter a Last.FM URL. I can already see a beautiful, black background, AIR-based music player based on the idea…I’m dreaming, right? BTW, for completeness’ sake, I need to mention that Last.FM is by itself a fantastic place to read about music while you’re listening to it, due to their detailed info pages for each artist. But you already know this.

MusicMesh – this is actually a solid Pandora clone, mashup-style: search for an artist, and get a tree of related artists; you can listen to music if MusicMesh can find a video for a particular track on YouTube, which doesn’t always work too great. But, you can also read user reviews, Wikipedia info, or even buy music on Amazon. Pity the design is such that everything is cramped into small boxes, which severely diminishes the usefulness of this otherwise solid site.

PitchforkMedia + Rhapsody – are you a fan of legendary indie (I know everyone hates that label) music review site PitchforkMedia? This uglyish site lets you browse the latest reviews (scores are included), and then hear the albums on Rhapsody. Not a bad way to quickly hear for yourself what the hell are those reviewers on Pitchfork are yabbering about.

FoxyTunes Planet – this great looking site combines many different data sources to bring you a very complete set of info about an artist. You get a biography, related news and info (from Yahoo search), related artists (from Last.FM), lyrics (from Yahoo Music) and the option to buy the albums from Amazon. The only thing I don’t get is why the music player opens in a popup; I’d prefer – as I think many of you would – to be inside the page.

Musiic – a very thorough music search site with all conceivable information thrown in, including tracks from Last.FM, YouTube videos, images from several different sites, related blog posts, Wikipedia entries and more. Unfortunately, the design of the site leaves a lot to be desired.

Elbo.ws – a bit confusing at first, this site gathers information about artists from various blogs. This usually results in a lot of information not directly related to the artist in question, but it’s great for learning new things. The layout is not too shabby either, once you get used to it. As for actually listening to music, you can check out the related videos for each artist, and many included blog posts carry embedded MP3 files, often of rare/live/unreleased tracks. Great tool for the true music connoisseur.

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Related Articles at Mashable! – The Social Networking Blog:

iLike Worth $50M, TicketMaster Buys 25%
Last.fm Partners with Sony BMG
Facebook Music?
Music Gifts Facebook App Sends the Real Thing
Music Nation Partners with Bug Music to Find & Sign Talent
MySpace Music to Add Paid Downloads
DRM Officially Dead. Sony BMG Drops It.

Here’s an interesting idea: why not have the entire contents of Wikipedia on your iPhone available to you at any time, online or offline? Impossible? Not really.

In fact, Wikipedia is not that huge when you turn it into gigabytes; its entire contents fit into 2.2 GB. Which, given the 16 GB capacity of the new iPhones, is not all that much. Therefore, a developer named Patrick Collison created an application which enables you to access Wikipedia’s contents from your iPhone. The application, according to Patrick, is still a bit “rough around the edges,” but it works.

The installation process is described in detail in the video below.

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Actually, it’s “How well Pete did“, because Mashable was only Pete Cashmore back in the day. Now, he’s got other folks at his disposal, like me, who can make fun…err, objectively assess the truthiness of his predictions for 2007, which you can read here. Of course, we want to hear your opinion on it, so after you’ve read them, please jump to the bottom of the page and grade them!

1. Online Contests Become Huge – I’d say that Pete was wrong on two counts here: first with the outcome of his prediction, and second with even considering online contests to be very relevant in 2007. Sure, there were online contests and new social networking sites based around them this year, but I don’t remember any of them making a particular impact. Grade: F

2. RSS Won’t Go Mainstream (But Widgets Will Explode) – I think I can safely declare this one a hit. RSS did not go mainstream in the sense that your grandmother is using it; widgets have gone mainstream in the sense that nearly every MySpace profile/blog has a couple. However, I must add that widgets haven’t exploded in the sense that every other widget creator got rich; quite the contrary, most tech sites won’t even mention them any more if they aren’t something really extraordinary. Facebook apps is (seemingly) where it’s at today.Grade: B

3. Online Video Fallout – interestingly enough, Pete also predicted that Metacafe will get acquired; he actually hit the nail on the head with this one, since many promising sites like Metacafe are merely lingering on. However, the huge ruckus created by Joost and Hulu revived the faith in internet TV and video, and therefore real online video fallout didn’t happen. It will some day; but so will every other overcrowded space. Grade: D

4. YouTube Becomes Bigger Than MySpace – This is another solid hit for Pete; back in 2006 this prediction was not easy to make, despite this Alexa graph (take Alexa graphs with a grain of salt, as always). YouTube was way below in terms of page views back then, and MySpace seemed unstoppable. Even though YouTube may still be a bit lower on traffic or the number of users, it did catch up. Also, the important thing here is relevance, and I think you’d agree with me that YouTube is more relevant today than MySpace. Grade: B

5. Mobile Social Networking Takes Off, Mobile Becomes a Standard Social Networking Feature – I, personally, think that mobile social networking will never really take off because most people sit on their ass either at home or at work and have no time to be mobile, but its pivotal year will be 2008, with the coming of Android, iPhone and perhaps OpenSocial. However, I must admit that mobile Twittering and Google acquiring Jaiku were both pretty strong points in Pete’s favor. Grade: B

6. Social Networks Fail To Expand Internationally Due to Local Competition – yup, this one is pretty much spot on. As can be seen from this article, even the biggest player in this arena – MySpace – has had a great deal of trouble breaking into the Chinese market and beating the local competitors. Grade: A

7. YouTube Meets Dating – this falls in the same category as the prediction about online contests. The idea seems as good as any, but it simply didn’t happen (i.e., it didn’t become huge) in 2007. Grade: F

8. Metacafe Acquired – heh, it seemed like an easy prediction, since everyone was talking about it at the end of 2006. Guess what? Rumors sometimes don’t come true. Suits you right for taking the easy way out. Grade: F

9. End of Flock? – technically, he was wrong, but the fact that you’re probably wondering why the hell would anyone even mention Flock in their predictions shows that Flock really lost much of its flare since 2006. It’s still there; but has it revolutionized anything? Nope. Grade: C

10. TV Show-related Social Networks & 11. YouTube Celebrity Appears in a Hollywood Movie – I’m not sure about the latter, but Pete was definitely right about mainstream media starting to recognize the power of social networks: MySpace stars like Tila Tequila started to get serious TV air time; Twitter got featured on CSI and so on. This trend will only get bigger in 2008, too. Grade: B

So, there you go; it boils down to a C-. Not a fantastic average grade, but one that I will most certainly get fired for! Of course, if you think I was too easy on Pete, you can also have your say in this one, by completing the poll below.

How well did Pete predict 2007?

• A (great)

• B (good)

• C (solid)

• D (pretty bad)

• F (abysmal)

View Results

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Digg Explorer is not a completely new tool – it’s recently reached version 1.1 – but it has somehow slipped under the radar. It offers a visual representation of various Digg-related statistics: most popular Digg sections and subsections, often used words, most popular submitted domains and the like. It even has a tiny version of the infamous Digg top user list, which is not officially provided by Digg for quite some time now.

Although the actual visualization is a bit slow, which might annoy some users, the data that the service provides is quite useful. Want to find out which words are commonly used in the titles of popular stories? No problem (hint: Google sits on top, followed by Paul, Bush, Ron, and Gamespot). The statistics are based on the last 500 stories, so they mostly show shorter trends; for example, Gamespot is currently highly ranked because of the recent Kane & Lynch review controversy. Still, someone interested in the inner workings of Digg will find a lot of interesting information here. Let’s add this one to the list of 7 cool things build on the Digg API.

Check out some screenshots below.

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Can’t see the video? Click here

The cool thing to do if you have a famous blog, it seems, is raising funding – and more funding. The Huffington Post, world’s 5th most popular blog according to Technorati, has raised another $5 million in its second round of funding. The investors are the same as in the first round: Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners, CEO and co-founder Ken Lerer as well as Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group. This rounds it up at $10 million of funding total – not bad for, you know, a blog.

The Huffington Post is not just an ordinary blog, mind you. It was started in 2005 by writer and political activist Arianna Huffington, and has grown to be a left-wing political powerhouse with 43 full-time employees. Besides its politics section it has recently opened lifestyle, business, media and entertainment sections.

[via]

Recommended: Hi5 Stuff at Mashcodes!

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Remember those guys from iPhoneSimFree who claimed that they have software which can unlock any iPhone? The actual application was first given to chosen media publications, but now it’s available to the public, for a not-that-modest fee of $100 (or less, depending on where you live and which retailer are you buying it from).

The software is available wholesale from iPhoneSimFree, while us little guys can buy it from four online retailers: iPhoneWorldwideUnlock (Australia), 1digitalphone (Germany), iPhone4arab.com (Saudi Arabia), and Wireless Imports (USA).

[via Engadget]

Recommended: Hi5 Layouts at Mashcodes!

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