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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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Highlights of this release:

• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
• Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

New User Features:

• New Theme Installer routines
• Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
• Add Documentation(function) lookup to Theme and Plugin editors
• Use “Custom Header” for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
• Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
• Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
• Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
• Don’t notify post author of own comments
• Fix comment paging for static front page
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
• Make titles into links in Dashboard Right Now module (this was in 2.7.1)
• Improved Admin icons (grey-to-transparent shadows)
• Update Blue Admin Color Scheme
• Press This improvements UI, quoting fixes, plus ability for Contributors to use Press This
• Add a Cancel Upload button and a Delete link to Administration > Media > Add New
• Add column “Rating” in Administration > Links > Edit
• Improve installer to help people entering wrong email addresses
• Improved Widget user interface
• Allow editing of all plugin files (Ticket 6732)
• Improved Plugin search (this was in 2.7.1) on Administration > Plugins > Add New
• Per Page option for plugins
• Move “Install a plugin in .zip format” to new Upload tab under Administration > Plugins > Add New
• Show absolute date instead of relative date for scheduled posts
• Fix tags suggest for post quick edit and bulk edit
• Permalink editor changes and fix for pages
• Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
• Add toggle all button to the Gallery tab in the uploader
• Support more than one gallery on the same page
• Add per page option to Screen Options for comments, posts, pages, media, categories, and tags
• Overhaul of LiveJournal importer (also add define WP_IMPORTING)
• Import category descriptions for Administration > Tools > Import > WordPress
• Show Tools menu for all users so they can access Turbo
• Check for new version when visiting Administration > Tools > Upgrade
• In upgrade process, provide better explanation for database upgrade message
• Fix most popular link category list
• Add description field for tags
• WAI-ARIA landmark roles to added to WordPress Default theme
• “Choose a city in the same timezone as you” for Timezone in Administration > Settings > General
• Remove My Hacks option from Administration > Settings > Miscellaneous
• Hide email addresses from low privilege users on Administration > Comments
• Allow case-insensitive logins
• Login and Registration pages noindex followed
• Give login screen proper iPhone viewport
• Enforce unique email addresses in Add/Edit users
• Make user_nicenames unique during registration
• Add “Send this password to the new user by email” option to Administration > Users > Add New
• Don’t set user’s Website url to http:// in Administration > Users > Add New
• Add password strength meter to Add User and Edit User
• Hide things that need to be available to screen readers via offscreen positioning
• Use invisible class for hiding labels and legends
• Use a semantic class name for text targeted to screen readers

Features that did not make it into Version 2.8:

• Some default shortcodes, maybe the most popular 10 from WordPress.com
• oEmbed support, tied in with shortcodes
• Better UI for post revisions, maybe an optional field to say what changed in a version
• OAuth support
• GeoData for posts, comments, attachments, etc.
• Template tags to do everything the custom gallery on ma.tt does
• Menu editor
• Unbalanced tags across more and nextpage tags (Ticket 6297)
• Sitemaps by default
• Refresh of the importers (LiveJournal was refreshed)
• Gallery post_type
• Versioning of template edits
• Documentation links for functions used in currently edited template
• MPTT (Modified Preorder Tree Traversal) for hierarchies

The complete (and much, much more exhaustive list) is available at WordPress.org. We are going to try the update on our various personal blogs and push it out to The Next Web in the next days. As Boris said in the comments: The Next Web is now running on WordPress 2.8. Took some 30 seconds to update!

It’s ironic that it’s Facebook that did it. Facebook is probably the most closed of all the major social networks (other than LinkedIn) and is so far ahead of everyone else in market share that traditional logic would argue that they have no interest in this kind of interoperability. This is the kind of step that was expected from networks more open and, frankly, far behind Facebook. Nevertheless, it has happened and it’s big news.

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New Facebook users will now be able to create Facebook accounts using their Gmail credentials and existing users will be able to associate and thus log in with Gmail or any other OpenID account that supports “automatic login.”

That means fewer passwords to remember. Just log in with your favorite OpenID supporting account and don’t worry about one just for Facebook. Single sign on is just the simplest benefit though.

Presumably, the friends you bring with you in your OpenID account will be searched for automatically on Facebook. “In tests we’ve run,” the company said today, “we’ve noticed that first-time users who register on the site with OpenID are more likely to become active Facebook users. They get up and running after registering even faster than before, find their friends easily, and quickly engage on the site.”

Contact lists are the second simplest benefit of this kind of data portability, but other payloads are possible and that’s when it gets even more exciting. We’ll see what Facebook does to move the ball even further up the court.

Nothing is live yet and we haven’t been able to test out usability (we just got a press release about the forthcoming announcement at 1:30 PM PST, which is latehere.), but Facebook is very good about things like that and has been working with the OpenID community on usability (its biggest challenge) for months.

Expect MySpace, Digg, Twitter and maybe some Yahoo sites to start accepting OpenID from other companies by the end of this summer at the latest. It’s only a matter of time now that Facebook has.

Note: Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch argues otherwise:

“Facebook has really been a relying party since its inception – there’s never been a “Facebook ID” because you’ve always used your university Email (or more recently, your personal Email) to log in. So the site isn’t really sacrificing anything by enabling OpenID support. The likes of Google and Microsoft have built many services tied to their own proprietary accounts, and they’re going to be far more hesitant to give those up.”

We can see some strong logic here, but we also suspect there will be additional factors that emerge, like an increasing number of websites deciding to become OpenID providers so their user data can be used in Facebook, that will keep the current flowing in this direction.

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If you’re still skittish about being locked in for a lengthy contract and don’t mind the fact that new hardware will almost undoubtedly be hitting the streets in only a couple of short months, and if you have money lying around not doing anything useful, Buy.com has a deal for you, for the low price of $799. That’s the price you’ll pay for a brand-new, in-box, unlocked Apple iPhone from Buy.com. In fact, it’s better than unlocked, it’s never been locked in the first place, so you won’t have to worry about sketchy jailbreaking/unofficial unlocking procedures if you’re not tech-savvy.

The never-locked 16GB iPhone 3G comes with a full Apple warranty, which is probably not the case with most unlocked units you’ll find on eBay, but Buy.com does warn that you might not be able to understand your product’s instruction manual, since the devices come from all over the world, and not necessarily English-speaking countries. That means this is probably a case of an overstock buy-out from a variety of global carriers in preparation for the June WWDC ‘09 iPhone hardware refresh.

Apparently you can easily swap out SIM cards using these models, so if you’re a globetrotter, this might just answer your prayers. And maybe Om Malik, over at our sister site GigaOM, can finally come back to the iPhone fold using a more dependable network than AT&T’s.  T-Mobile, or any of the 30 different smaller GSM carriers in the U.S., will work with these phones out of the box, according to Buy.com’s product information site. Plus, unlike with unofficially unlocked phones, you can connect to iTunes and update without worrying about being locked out and having to jailbreak again.

I’ve been wanting a second device so that I can devote one to testing, and it’d be nice to have something I can travel with and use pay-as-you-go SIMs with so as not to get charged massive roaming fees, but my heart flutters every time I think about that $799 price tag. Plus, I’m already going to be sufficiently gouged when the new iPhone hardware comes out in June and I have to try to talk my carrier into allowing me an upgrade when I still have two years left on my contract.

Buy.com may just be trying to move more units, but they are claiming that they have very few units left in stock. Anyone planning on picking one of these up? If so, what for? Is the $799 price justified, considering the freedom you get by avoiding a contract/AT&T’s spotty network?

Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.

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According to the Portable Contacts website:

we’re seeing major Internet companies making contacts APIs available, such as Google’s GData Contacts API, Yahoo’s Address Book API, and Microsoft’s Live Contacts API (with more to come). Not surprisingly though, each of these APIs is unique and proprietary. We believe this creates the ideal conditions for developing a common, open spec that everyone can benefit from.

Why is This Important?

The social web works best when it’s truly social. New applications that use social sharing can be much more useful when new users can port in their existing network of friends and see who they know is already using a site. That’s much better than starting cold.

These types of standardized approaches to passing that data are secure (that’s good) and allow developers to write code once to use all the supporting sources of data. You’ve heard the old illustration about railroads? When all the railroads in the US accepted a standard size of rail, all the trains were able to travel much farther than ever before. That’s where we’re headed with all this information on the web. When we give it standard methods of transport, it can go further and do more than ever before.

That’s a pretty big deal and it’s fantastic that Google has moved to support the Portable Contacts standard. Hopefully sometime soon everyone will and then we’ll wonder what took the web so long to enable social interoperability.

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Apple’s latest round of updates have seen an immense number of notable improvements and features.

Let’s go through the new features, grab a coffee…this may take a while.

Cut, Copy and Paste
You can also copy and paste web content as well as regular text you might be typing. If you didn’t mean to paste something, shake your phone in order to Undo (or Redo) your paste.

MMS
You can send and receive Photos right over the network. Contacts (VCard). Audio files. Or your location. No word about video yet though.

Mail Search
You can now search inside all of the major default iPhone applications, including Mail. In Mail you can also search email now downloaded, i.e. still on your server!

Email Multiple Photos
You can now send multiple photos by tapping the action button, selecting a bunch of photos, copying, and then pasting it into Mail.

Landscape
You can now you can use landscape mode in “all key applications” including Mail.

App Subscriptions
Applications will now be able to charge on a subscription basis.

Text Message Forwarding and Deleting
You can forward and delete messages–individual messages or multiple messages.

Spotlight for iPhone!
Instead of having to slide between screens you can now simply flick your finger left from your home screen and start typing whatever application you’re looking for. Superb. It essentially becomes your new home screen.

Calendar Updates
CalDAV has been added, particularly useful for shared calendars.

Notes Sync
You can now sync your notes between the iPhone and Desktop

Voice memo application.
Allows you to record audio.

Stereo Bluetooth A2DP support
High quality audio can now be streamed from your iphone to another device via Bluetooth.

Peer to Peer Connectivity
Two iPhones or Touch’s and any other supported device will be able to connect directly —peer-to-peer—via Wi-Fi, without needing any Wi-Fi network. They can discover each other initially using Bluetooth, and then start a Wi-Fi connection automatically. You can send files via both devices.

Accessories SDK
You can now communicate directly with other accessories. So you’ll be able to control your TV’s volume for example.

Maps API in Apps
Notice how in some applications your directed over to Google Maps whenever the application needs to show you a map? Well no more, maps can be integrated into applications.

Turn by Turn
iPhone app developers can now create applications that perform turn by turn functionality as you have become familiar with on its google maps application.

Push Notifications
So no background apps but Apple have introduced “push notifications” which will mean you can still receive notifications from applications even if they aren’t actually running – particularly useful for instant messaging clients.

Voice Communication within Applications
So say your playing a shoot em’ up on the iPhone. With this update you’ll be able to talk against your competitor from within the app. Just like you would do with a headset on your desktop.

Update apps from within apps
So games can “sell” you new levels for example.

…When and How Much??

iPhone OS 3.0 will be a free upgrade to all iPhone users, including the first generation iPhones. iPod touch users will be able to buy it for $9.95. The beta version is available to developers now but the final release won’t be until the summer.

With great thanks to Gizmodo for their awesome live coverage of the event!

Today we’d like to introduce to an interesting new CRM web application called Dashboard.

Dashboard joins an increasingly populated market of small business CRM apps including our favorites Tactile CRM, Highrise, Batchbook and PipelineDeals.

The reason why I thought this was a worthwhile mention? Primarily because I’m a sucker for a clean UI, but more importantly because it’s seems to focus on the absolute basics: converting leads to deals.

With just four main sections (dashboard, to-do’s, leads, deals) to the application, Dashboard appears to take the 37signals mentality one step further by making things ultra-clear and ultra-simple. To make the most of the tool, add your various leads, assign the todo’s required to each of them to convert them to ‘make things happen’ and once you’ve sealed the deal – convert them into “deals”.

As you would expect, each lead or deal can have notes attached to them, to-do’s and documents. There is a decent search facility which organises your searches by to-do’s, leads and deals.

There are other limitations, the most obvious being you can currently only add leads into the app manually or via CSV file, undoubtedly, other methods (email!) should be added shortly. There are minor bugs and the app cannot currently compete with the features other established players bring, however the app is free and looks to be so for the foreseeable future whilst new features and functionality are added. If you love your apps clean and simple, this is a must try.

via Carlos Granier-Phelps in The Apps Room on Friendfeed.

Ecamm Network have announced the world’s first webcam with Bluetooth wireless technology. The new BT-1 webcam combines top-notch video and sound with complete freedom from wires. This is the first Bluetooth webcam supported by OS X, and will be priced at $149.99 when launched in a few months time.

Technical Details

The BT-1 streams H.264 video and AAC audio, taking advantage of Mac OS X’s rich media capabilities to provide a truly seamless experience. The detailed specifications are:

• 640×480 H.264 video and 48 kHz AAC stereo audio
• Compact 2″ x 2½” x 5/8″ design
• Compatible with iChat, Skype and more
• Standard tripod mounting screw
• 4 hour talk time
• Includes a flexible mini-tripod and USB charging cable
• Works on all latest Macs with Leopard and Bluetooth v2.0+EDR or better.

(more…)

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You can find a whole collection of historical tweets over at historicaltweets.com. Most of them are hilarious. I loved the Elvis tweet “so comfortable, you’ll think you died and gone to heaven.” and the Benjamin Franklin’s “It’s all about the me’s, baby“. What would Jesus have Tweeted? It’s there!

Can you think of other historical figures and what they would have tweeted?

It works for videos as well – you can play a video on a wall inside your video. The technology can cheaply do some of the tricks normally performed by expensive commercial editing systems.

Can you imagine how much fun we are going to have with this? I can’t wait! More information at ZunaVision but first watch the demo video: