MySpace, in an all out war with Facebook over this year’s prize (socializing the web), is relaunching their Data Availability product today under a new name and announcing some snazzy new partners.

Goodbye, Data Availability. Hello MySpaceID.

Along with the renaming ceremony, MySpace is also announcing two new partners: Netvibes and Vodafone (the latter is an interesting mobile play for MySpace).

MySpaceID is roughly analogous to Facebook Connect, which had their own coming out party last week. Sites can add various elements of MySpace ID to allow their users to log in via their MySpace credentials, display their profile information, and find MySpace friends who are using those sites. Starting early next year, MySpace says, they will add the other features that Facebook Connect has now, such as publishing activities from partner sites to MySpace, and syndicating MySpace activities to partner sites. MySpace will also allow partner sites to take new user registrations beginning with their MySpace credentials and basic profile information.

The crucial difference between MySpaceID and Facebook Connect is the software stack. Facebook uses proprietary software and methods, although they say they will open up over time. MySpace has embraced open standards across the board, including OpenID, OAuth and Open Social. The benefit, they say, is that sites will be able to implement other competing services that are also on the open stack with few implementation changes. Yahoo, for one, is rumored to be taking a similar approach.

MySpace also plays nicely with Google Friend Connect, allowing users to log in to sites that have implemented Friend Connect with their MySpace ID. Facebook stubbornly refuses to play ball with Google – they seem to want that direct software connection with partner sites.

It’s clear that small sites are eating this stuff up (hey, we launched Facebook Connect the first chance we could). But the larger guys are taking their time. MySpace’s original launch partners – Twitter, eBay and Yahoo – are yet to implement it. And few of Facebook’s original launch partners have shipped the service, either (Digg is rumored to be waiting until at least the middle of next year).

But one key feature of both products – the ability to tell MySpace or Facebook a user’s email address and get back all of their friends on those services – is likely to quicken the adoption rate by large partners. They want to fill out their social graph as quickly as possible and link up all those users as friends. Both of these services make that happen.

Screen shots of the details of MySpaceID are below. I’ll be interviewing MySpace COO Amit Kapur on Tuesday morning in Paris at the Le Web conference as well, and MySpaceID will be one important area of the discussion.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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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JanRain, creator of some of the most popular OpenID software libraries and a forum-like communications tool called Pibb, has released a new SaaS offering for websites that want to become relying parties for OpenID.

We’re told that the service, simply called RPX, makes it possible to start accepting users with OpenID accounts within one day. This is actually the second SaaS solution provided by JanRain, the first being the similarly named OPX, which lets websites do the opposite: provide OpenID accounts to users, who can then sign into any other websites that accept them. JanRain also provides OpenID accounts to users directly through its myOpenID service.

Helping websites become relying partners is more important (at least at this point in the game) than helping them become providing partners. That’s because few popular sites accept OpenID and, consequently, consumers see little reason to set up OpenID accounts for themselves. This is an even bigger problem than the user experience issues that have plagued the movement over the last few years.

RPX is being marketed toward medium sites that want to increase their registration conversation rates, import user information from elsewhere, and build out connections to other social services via oAuth. It’s not meant as much for big internet sites like Blogger, Plaxo and AOL, who have become relying parties using their in-house technical resources.

The question stands as to whether OpenID will gain momentum through the long tail or adoption by a critical mass of the big players. It will probably take a few very popular services, such as MySpace and Facebook (through their respective Data Availability and Connect services), to popularize the protocol. But once they do, services like RPX should help the long tail take advantage of it.

RPX comes in two flavors: “plus” for smaller sites and “pro” for bigger ones. Pricing starts at a flat fee and then increases based on how many people sign into your site using OpenID during the span of one year.

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In this post, guest author Ryan Carson goes through some of the lessons learned from building a Web app in four days. Carson is the co-founder of Carsonified, a web shop in Bath, UK. They’ve built four web apps, created ThinkVitamin.com and run events like Future of Web Apps. If you’re bored you can follow Ryan on Twitter.

The time it takes to design, build and deploy web applications has been steadily shrinking, especially with frameworks like Django, Rails and Symfony. With that in mind, we decided to push ourselves and attempt to launch a web app in 32 hours. Four crazy days later, Matt was born.

The app we built is a simple tool that allows you to post to multiple Twitter accounts. We learned a ton during the experience so I’d like to share some of those lessons with you.

How we did it

We have a team of nine people which were divided as follows:

• Two developers
• One designer / front-end developer
• Two bloggers
• One copywriter
• Three PR folks

I would say you only need three people if you want to strip it back to the bare minimum, which would look like this:

• One developer
• One designer / front-end developer
• One blogger / PR person

Our app was built in Python using Django and is hosted at WebFaction. It uses the Twitter API, Git and Codebase for version control.

How much did it cost?

On a basic level it cost us a week of salaries (around $10,000). There are some other small costs which I’m not including like rent, electricity, coffee and taxes. We got hosting for free because of a connection we have with the company but if you paid for that you might expect to pay not more than $400 for the first month (for a simple app).

Team building

Building a web app quickly is not only a great idea if you need to get your idea to market fast but it’s also a great way to build team morale.

You don’t need to build a brand new app in order to benefit from this idea. You can actually take time off to work on a new feature or direction for your current app.

There are some serious benefits to stepping away from your normal work and producing something totally new and creative:

1. The best boost you can give you or your team is to provide the time to be creative. Turning off your phones and email and just focusing on something new and exciting will do wonders for your energy level.
2. It could generate some amazing buzz around you and your company or products.
3. You’ll come back to your current projects with a new perspective and renewed energy.
4. It will push your team to learn new skills. For example, Will, our head of sponsor relationships, spent the whole week doing PR – something new for him.

Tips on working wisely

Here are a few tips that you should keep in mind if you’re focusing on building apps quickly:

1. Limit meetings to one 10 minute chat in the morning and one 10 minute wrap-up at the end of each day. Meetings are the best way to kill productivity and crush creativity so keep ‘em short.
2. Get people away from their machines at lunch. Go for lunch together and maybe throw the frisbee or play Wii. The excitement and creativity will quickly deteriorate if you don’t have a break during the day.
3. Simplify the site and app as much as possible. Try launching with just ‘Home’, ‘Help’ and ‘About’.
4. Make sure to build on a great framework like Rails, Symfony, Django or Objective-J. Part of our experiment was playing with Django and comparing it to Rails and Symfony (a PHP framework). We’ve found that Django lacks the rigor of Rails or Symfony, thus might not be an ideal choice for future projects.
5. Go with the first logo idea and color scheme from your designer. You shouldn’t over-analyze the look and feel of everything as this process can go on indefinitely. Design the logo and move on. This is why you need to hire good designers and trust them to be good at what they do.
6. Be technologically agnostic. If your developers are saying it should be built in a certain language and framework and they have solid reasons, trust them and move on. Again, this is about hiring smart people and getting out of their way.
7. Coordinate how your designers and developers are going to work together. Our designer creates static HTML and then passes it to the developers who use the HTML as a basis for creating templates. These templates are then committed to a Git repository and from then on, the whole team works from that one repository.
8. It’s not enough to just have a designer and a developer. You need a dedicated person who’s focus is solely spreading the word about your application and working to get media coverage. There’s no way we could get the kind of coverage for Matt that we hope to achieve without several of us working full time on it. However, do not hire a PR agency for this – there needs to be an authentic passion for the app that can only come from your team. (For instance, I asked TechCrunch to cover it, and Erick came back with the suggestion to write this post).
9. Get your ‘Creation Environment’ setup correctly.

Building your Creation Environment

If you want to build quickly and creatively, you need to set up an environment that encourages and facilitates that process. If you don’t have the following basics down, your team will be constantly battling annoying issues instead of getting on with building. You’ll need:

1. Good version control. I suggest Git.
2. An easy-to-use source and changeset browser. We use Codebase.
3. Solid server infrastructure. Why not build on Flexiscale, Grid-Service, Mosso or EC2 and let the big boys worry about uptime and server load?
4. A ‘one-click’ deployment system. This means that deploying the code from your repository should take just one click. If it’s any more complex than that, there is potential for complications and downtime. Capistrano is brilliant if you’re using Rails.
5. Printers, chalk boards and meeting space. People need the physical space to throw around ideas. We’ve painted an entire wall with blackboard paint so the team has room to sketch ideas.
6. Coffee, water, music and healthy snacks.

If you really get these right, it makes building and creating so much more enjoyable and fast.

So that’s it …

Thanks for listening to the Matt story. Please share your advice and experience by commenting below. If you want to see a whole day of development squeezed down into four minutes, watch the video below. Enjoy.

Matt Week – Day Two Time Lapse – Music by MGMT

Related reading, ideas and tools

• Contest to build an app in 48 hours: Rails Rumble
• Post about the danger of too much functionality: Features are a one-way street
• Powerful web frameworks: Django, Rails, Symfony, Objective-J
• Version Control: Git and Subversion
• Source and changeset browsers: Codebase and Beanstalk
• Cloud hosting: EC2, Flexiscale, Google App Engine
• Easy deployment: Capistrano

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The following guest post was written by Dan Birdwhistell, founder of people directory Bigsight (reviewed here) and creator of Hacking Facebook, a website that teaches developers how to pull user data out of Facebook.

There’s one thing about Facebook that most people still seem to have wrong: that it’s a walled garden. Quite the contrary, the Platform allows for full data portability and has since its inception. It actually isn’t a walled garden at all.

The problem is that this knowledge is buried deep within the FB documentation, a place few developers have wandered. For whatever strange reason, legal documents are like amusement parks for me, so I’m now fairly well acquainted with the ins and outs of porting data (and users) out of FB. So that’s what this whole post is about: To show you how it’s done.

Background

Once we got our heads around the Platform back in October, 2007, we hacked together FriendCSV as a demonstration. This is an app that allows you to export your full social graph (and all friend data) to your hard drive. This is all done in accordance with FB policies. After people got comfortable with this, we took it a step further by allowing users instantly port their own personal data into bigsight to create a new profile and account. Test out our importer here.

Why Facebook and the Platform are important

We believe FB is architecting the next version of the web. This is a bold claim – no doubt — but here’s the thinking:

1. FB has the users: 80mm and growing, with huge international membership and no age bias.
2. Users enter their real information: Users enter their real name and affiliations. This moves the web away from (and makes users comfortable with abandoning) aliases.
3. Users express themselves by connecting to entities that are “outside”: Users articulate their identity by claiming lasting elements like cities, companies, schools, and groups (or pages) that exist outside of FB.
4. These entities are increasingly moving “in”: These groups are connecting to the same users and establishing broad footprints through ads, Pages, and Applications.
5. The Platform and FB Connect are building the “between”: All the nice-happy-fun going on between Users and entities inside FB will start to extend back out into the web as developers learn how to build data/interaction bridges with the Platform and Connect.

The result is a web based on users and not content, with an individual’s FB ID ultimately serving as his chief tour guide, passport, and keymaster (but not like Vinz Clortho) around the rest of the web. So if I am right, FB will become king – not as a social network, but as the architect, owner, and manager of the next version of the web. So the point: you need to know how FB works and how you can leverage the Platform to grow your site or business. So here we go…

Understanding how FB Data is structured

Before you go messing around in the pool house, you’ll need to get your head around how everything is structured. It’s best to first focus entirely on non-user data given that these are the permanent structures users “claim”. Each of these elements has a unique ID and entry fields are typically auto-complete to ensure data alignment.

• Location: There are ~540 regional networks and ~24,000 city/state/country listings. Cities in the US are expressed as “City, State abv.” while cities in other countries are expressed as “City, Country Name”. Regional networks outside of the US, Canada, and the UK are typically expressed just as a country. Users claim locations through networks, current city, hometown, work cities, groups, pages, events, and photo albums.
• High Schools: There are ~23,000 worldwide high schools in FB. Users can enter up to two high schools, with graduation year for one of them. High school name and year is expressed on the profile.
• Colleges and Universities: FB recognizes ~5,000 institutions. To streamline search during data entry, FB allows for multiple aliases for the same school. For instance, a user can search/find/select “UCLA” or “University of California, Los Angeles”. Whichever one is selected displays on the profile, though both are linked to the same ID. This makes data integration a bit dicey, but there’s a fix we’ll get to later. Users can enter up to five schools and can ascribe graduation year, type, concentration, and degree type (if it is a grad school).
• Companies: You’ll find ~25,000 different companies. FB allows for multiple aliases during search, but it filters them out to the same display name across all profiles. We’re clueless as to why they did this for companies but not schools. Users can enter up to 15 jobs and can ascribe position, description, location, and duration.

So exactly how much data can you export?

Stated simply, you can touch basically everything but a user’s contact information. So here’s the list, including how the data is structured in its output. We’ll address friend lists and data in a moment.

In addition to these core profile elements, you can also make calls for and then export huge amounts of data through:

• Events: Title, location, date (duration), picture, type, members, etc.
• Pages: Name, type, location, hours, members, etc.
• Groups: Name, type, description, location, members, etc.

Now about friend lists: As you’ll see when you use FriendCSV, you can not only access all of the above for a single user, but you can also access the same data from their friends. Pretty crazy, right? This means that by touching one user you can instantly touch thousands more. But hold on now…time to talk Privacy.

Understanding FB Privacy, Terms of Service, and Platform Documentation

There are five key documents that come into play re: data portability on FB. Taken alone, each is hard enough to understand – taken together, it’s downright labyrinthine. As a developer, though, there are really only four things you need to know:

• The Onus of Privacy is on the User: While FB puts restrictions on how you can access and store information, they ultimately put the onus on the user when he interacts with an application. This means that users interact with apps at their own risk. From the Privacy Policy:
  

  “If you, your friends, or members of your network use any third-party applications developed using the Facebook Platform, those Platform Applications may access and share certain information about you with others in accordance with your privacy settings…

  …in addition, third party developers…may also have access to your personal information (excluding your contact information) if you permit Platform Applications to access your data.”

• The 24-hour Clause: Most of you have heard of this. It basically states that you can suck out any data, but you can’t store it for more than 24 hours; however, there are two key things that people overlook: 1) There are some elements that can be stored indefinitely and 2) if there is a disclaimer on the application, the developer can do almost anything with the data.
• The “Storable Indefinitely” Properties: FB allows us to store User ID, Network ID, Event ID, Group ID, and Photo ID.
• The Gold in the Mountain — “Full Disclosure Opt-Ins”: As a clear extension of FB putting the onus on the user, they have included a clause in their documentation that says that developers can do almost anything with the data they touch if they have full disclosure. Taken from 2.A.6 of the TOS:
  

  “You may retain copies of Exportable Facebook Properties for such period of time (if any) as the Applicable Facebook User for such Exportable Facebook Properties may approve, if (and only if) such Applicable Facebook user expressly approves your doing so pursuant to an affirmative “opt-in” after receiving a prominent disclosure of a) the uses you intend to make of such Exportable Facebook Properties, b) the duration for which you will retain copies of such Exportable Facebook Properties, and c) any terms and conditions governing your use of such Exportable Facebook Properties (a “Full Disclosure Opt-In”).”

  This is a bit wordy, so we’ll translate: If you outline which data you’ll use, how you’ll use it, for how long, what other terms the User might be subject to, and get User consent, then you can keep and use profile information for as long as you want.

So the main lesson here is that you shouldn’t be afraid of the various policies and documents because they are outlined to help you rather than restrict you. But again… a note about friends’ data. FB has been incredibly aggressive in policing how developers are accessing and using these data, and rightfully so. Last week they shut down the Top Friends app for allowing too much data access and earlier this year they canned Google Facebook Connect because it didn’t operate in accordance with their policies.

I’ll say again that they were right to do this and when thinking through how to port users, you should be mindful not just that FB might shut you down, but that a secondary friend who doesn’t opt-in to your site probably should be left alone. More than likely, he doesn’t want what you’re selling. Of course, there are ways around this if you want to brute force it, but we’ll just keep that to ourselves. So let’s keep going…

Setting up the Application(s) and managing the exports

Your importer can be inside FB as part of an application or it can exist as a standalone. We do it both ways. With FriendCSV, users install the app and we then direct them to their new profile as an add-on; meanwhile, out in the ether, we have a dedicated portal at http://fb.bigsight.org that directs users to FB for initial authentication, but then kicks them right back to our web app. If you already own a great app with lots of traffic, start there. If not, it’s probably best to set up your porter out on the web. Exporting the key data for a single user doesn’t take too long, so you can typically create a new page/account for them instantly. However, if you plan on exporting an element like friends lists (careful, hoss) or photos, you’ll need to batch up FQL requests when possible and also be open to allowing some processes to happen in the background.

The FB API is “REST-like,” which means it can be used by anything that handles standard HTTP requests. Libraries exist for PHP, Java, Ruby, and other languages that make the API easier to use. The following example code is for Ruby on Rails and the Facebooker library, as that’s what we use at bigsight. No matter which language you choose, writing FB applications to extract data is surprisingly easy. One line of code will tell your application to authenticate with FB. Simply add “ensure_authenticated_to_facebook” to your Rails controller and it will send your user to the FB login page if needed, and return them to your application. From that point on you have full access to the FB user and all exportable data. Here’s one example of how to extract educational history:

def gather_schools
# Create a local copy of the Facebook user
@user = User.create(:name => @fb_user.name, :fb_uid => @fb_user.uid)
# Load the user's schools
for fb_school in @fb_user.education_history
School.create(:name => fb_school.name, :user_id => @user.id)
end
end


For a full view of the FQL queries, check out this page in the documentation.

Integrating FB Data into an Existing Third Party Site

Ok so now you know what the data look like and how to access it, you need to think through a few things to figure out how to integrate it all with your site or widget. These are the questions to ask:

• What are the basic data elements you need for a user to interact with your site? Start by isolating the variables you need to a) successfully port a user to your site and b) give them enough active features that they instantly get a taste for your offering. Design your integration so that it is as simple (though complete) as possible. You might also consider including an “instant remove” link so that a user can quickly exit and take back his data.
• What deep database elements do you need to align? This might take a bit of work depending on what types of information you need. For instance, we suck out and integrate city, company, and school data. This sounds easy enough, but it gets dicey: There are quite often many names for the same entity. So if you want to align these elements, you need to: a) figure out what FB calls them and then b) use that naming system or make it line up with yours so that your importer can identify multiple aliases.
• How can you enrich user data in a novel way? There’s tons of win to be had if you can figure out a way to enrich a user’s data. We do this in two ways on bigsight:
  1. We match their school data against our own database and add the school logo to their profile pages. Furthermore, our school links go to pages that instantly show them people they may know. Here’s my alma mater, for instance: http://bigsight.org/school/wlu
  2. We built an algorithm that constructs full biographies based on a user’s profile data. This is fully dynamic and can have up to 140 different combinations depending on which school, company, and city data the user has and how he has structured it.

  Basically, get creative. It’s almost silly how many cool things can be done here.

• Is there any way to leverage group, page, or event data? Check this out: http://bigsight.org/city/nashville_tn/events. This is a display of the events that I RSVP’d to in Nashville over the past year. Sucking out this data is fully legit. It doesn’t take long to realize how entirely new sites can now be built based on even one or two User imports.
• How can you set up a User account? You might have to get creative when it comes to getting information (namely email) that isn’t directly available, though often needed to set up a working account. We ask for a user’s email up front and assign them a temporary login and pw based on this.
• Are you going to store their raw data output? We highly recommend your discarding their original raw data, even if you have a full disclosure. It’s just better for everyone involved and is better for the user and the web. Remember that you can keep the User ID and if you codify the information in some way, you’re in the clear.

Conclusion

Like I said above, we believe that FB is on the path to doing something amazing with the web, and we believe that everyone in the industry needs to know how to not just adapt to it, but also thrive from (and alongside) it. It should be an interesting summer re: the web as Facebook Connect launches and more and more people begin leveraging this and the Platform for utility rather than blind user engagement.

Our opinion is that while FB Connect will offer some amazing functionality in regards to quick user integration and synching, it likely won’t be as powerful as the Platform in terms of data access. Either way, these developments will not only change how users interact with third party sites, but they will also raise the bar for user experience as individuals accustomed to the FB UI will begin to demand increased alignment. Soon we’ll likely see businesses start to build sites on the back of FB rather than a) going out on their own or b) doing what could prove to be complicated integration. Additionally, we’ll probably also find resolutions to a few ongoing discussions and questions such as who owns a friends’ list and how what FB calls “dynamic privacy” actually works out in the wild.

It’s all pretty interesting stuff to think through and incredibly fun to see it all come together so quickly. Creative destruction all around, you know. Lots of warriors in the arena. ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

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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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It’s a Wii without the $250 console. It’s virtual Pong and so much more. Any object is now an input device, even your fingers. Bang, bang! But there’s no better way to introduce you to CamSpace than by letting you watch the demo video below:

CamTrax’s core technology is a pure software solution that allows nearly any ordinary PC webcam (95% are supported) to track up to four objects—even as small as 5mm—in real-time and with very high accuracy and reliability. (It works only on Windows). Locking and tracking (X, Y, and Z axes and angle) are all automatic. Yaron Tanne, founder & CEO of CamTrax Technologies, the company behind CamSpace, has been developing the technology practically single-handedly for three years in his apartment in Tel-Aviv.

Tanne claims that most of the algorithms used are in the public domain but have been enhanced. There are also completely new algorithms developed from scratch.

CamSpace requires an agent application to run locally in order to emulate a mouse, a keyboard, joystick, or other input device. Users can then program the emulation based on the game they want to control and the object(s) they want to control the game with. For example, one user could program a steering wheel for a racing game, where moving the wheel on the Z axis shifts the gears up and down. A different user can use two objects for the same game, programming the second object, say a coke bottle, to shift the gears.

Once a good portion of most popular games are emulated, the company will provide a portal where these emulations will be rated based on popularity and then offered for download.

Assuming there are no patent infringement issues, CamTrax could be a hit in several sectors, the most obvious one being gaming. While certainly the big game studios could take advantage of the technology, I can see a wider and quicker adoption among casual gaming entities such as Zynga and SGN. Cam-Trax could also find success in providing solutions for handicap individuals that cannot use standard input devices. Another application would be to emulate multi-touch control over media-centers. Some more ideas:

—Fitness programs using body movements
—Virtual instruments (air drums, xylophone, etc.)
—Drawing “in the air” applications for kids

These are just the tip of the iceberg… Remember, all you need is a standard webcam—that’s a VERY low barrier to entry these days.

I’ve had the chance to play with CamTrax’s technology on several occasions and it works like a charm. This is true even in low and changing light conditions—based on first-hand experience. It really is hard not to be impressed with the technology, especially seeing as it still has Alpha status.

The four-man team recently raised $200,000 in seed financing from angel investors and plans on raising a Series A round in the coming months.

In the meantime, the company is working on a developer platform which will allow the integration of CamTrax technology into casual games and mini-applications. Expect a follow-up post when this happens in the coming weeks.

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As we wrote last week, Facebook is turning parts of its application platform open source, the company announced today. It’s available here for download.

This comes a little more than a year after Facebook Platform first launched to allow third party developers a way to get their applications directly onto Facebook. The company says more than 24,000 applications have now been built on the platform and more than 400,000 developers are building these applications. 140 new applications are added to the directory each day. “Nearly all” Facebook users have added at least one of those applications.

Facebook Open Platform is licensed under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), except for the FBML parser, which includes Mozilla source code, which is licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL).

Facebook says they’re doing this “to give back to the developer community.” That may be somewhat true, but the key reason for fbOpen is to compete with OpenSocial, the Google/MySpace/Yahoo/AOL led open source competitor to Facebook Platform.

Competing social networks, including the still-larger MySpace, are lining up against Facebook via OpenSocial. This is their way of responding.

It may be too late. Tellingly, Facebook was unable to line up any partners to add to today’s announcement, although some social networks we’ve chatted with say they will almost certainly implement it in the near future.

More details here.

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Today marks another milestone for San Francisco based contextual search engine Powerset. They’ve launched a showcase for their user search experience – effectively the search engine minus the web crawl. For now, Powerset queries only Wikipedia and augments results with data from Freebase. The product launch comes just a day after reports that the company is being shopped to potential buyers by investment bank Allen & Co.

I have been able to test Powerset via their labs site for the last few weeks. I wrote about it last month, and the version that just launched is very similar.

There is no way to look at Powerset today and determine if it can be as disruptive to search as Google was when it launched almost a decade ago. That’s because it only queries Wikipedia, and so there is little need for proper ranking algorithms to sort the good from the bad results.

But what user can see is how effective a way it is to gather information quickly. For someone doing research, Powerset effectively removes a number of steps towards getting to the final information. It is particularly effective when the information needed is on many different web pages.

For example, a query on Powerset of “when did earthquakes hit tokyo” yields stunning results. Try this query at Google or even wikipedia to compare – instead of just picking out keywords that are in your query and on a web page, Powerset is actually making some sense of the content included in the wikipedia pages:

The way that Powerset returns queries means that answers are often found in the result snips, as above. They are also structuring a lot of the Wikipedia and (and already structured Freebase) data and inserting it into results. So a search for “Bill Clinton” shows results, but also shows Freebase structured data along with additional query refinements to get to more information. The important thing below isn’t the structured data in the results, its the fact that you can click on the action words and drill down into very specific queries (to find, for example, what bills he signed, or which Supreme Court justices he nominated, or who he slept with).

Powerset is indexing web pages much differently than normal search engines, which generally just record content to match against keyword queries. Instead, Powerset is trying to understand the content on the page so that it can be matched meaningfully to queries later. Even queries that don’t use matching words.

Indexing the web is expensive, though, and Powerset’s way of doing it requires even more time and computing power dedicated to a web page. That’s why they say they aren’t indexing the entire web yet – the company has raised just $12.5 million (plus another $8 million or so in bridge loans from investors). To index the web will require a new round of financing (see the first paragraph above about their sale/financing efforts).

Powerset is has taken a lot of criticism for their goal of trying to redefine how people search the web (including from us). But their lofty goals are what makes Silicon Valley so great – succeed or fail, Powerset is trying to do something pretty spectacular.

The company has also created a demo overview video – see below.

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Don’t they say good things come in threes? Well, regardless, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.

MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).

Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services. See my post on the Centralized Me for more of my thoughts on this.

The reason these companies are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).

If what we hear is correct, Google’s offering may not be as attractive as MySpace’s and Facebook’s. Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contract, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it (with strict terms of service in case they violate that trust). That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it.

We’ll have to wait until Monday for the exact details, though. But what’s clear is that Google wants to get in between social networks and the web sites that want to access their data. By controlling the flow through Open Social and the new Friend Connect product, they can effectively become a huge social network without actually having a, well, social network (unless you count Orkut).

Google’s been scrambling for partners to announce on Monday as well. So far our understanding is they have their own Orkut and Plaxo. Compare that to MySpace (Yahoo, eBay and Twitter, plus their own PhotoBucket) and Facebook, which announced Digg as an early partner.

Another limiting factor with Google’s product is that, unlike Facebook and MySpace, they do not already control user profiles for tens of millions of active users. That means they’ll quickly need to get big partners on board as well. Will MySpace help them? They may – MySpace is already part of Open Social and said on Thursday that they will adopt Open Social initiatives in this space once they are defined. We’ll see.

More details as they come in.

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