Social media essential for IT service management

Companies that do not or have no plans to provide access to social media tools in their IT service management architecture will be making "a big mistake", according to research firm Ovum.

In a report released Thursday, lead analyst Mark Blowers said it is now essential for organizations to integrate social media elements into their IT service management to meet user expectation.

"IT users are coming to expect similar levels of interaction in their corporate lives as they do when conducting online life as private consumers," Blowers noted, adding that social software are now "a must-have" within the corporate environment. "Social media tools can work well in IT service management, especially in bringing about improvements in the service provided to users."

"Delaying an organization's participation in incorporating social media IT service management related functions could be a big mistake," he cautioned.

As IT service desks become an increasingly important component for businesses, the absence of social media integration could produce inefficiencies, for example, when employees find workarounds, and these would lead to compliance issues, he explained.

Some organizations are already using mainstream social media channels to relay information about IT issues, the Ovum analyst said, pointing to how Twitter is used to push out information about incidents and alerts. This is especially critical for small enterprises which typically do not have customized systems, he said, though larger enterprises such as Internet service providers also leverage social media for a wider reach.

Blowers added: "Integrating IT service management with Twitter feeds allows business users to turn a tweet into a customer support ticket, known as a 'twicket'." This will allow personnel from IT service desks to quickly respond to the Twitter account, or use the Twitter Message function to communicate privately with the user.

Ovum recommends that enterprises adopt such ad-hoc use and integrate their IT service management facilities with the appropriate social media.

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Windows Phone 7 Tools Downloaded 1.5 Million Times

Microsoft Windows Phone 7 (WP7) mobile devices have been on the market for more than five months so far, and the company is touting that its app store now has some 11,500 apps available.

While that's well behind the 350,000 or so apps available via Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) App Store, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) officials claim that isn't bad for just a few months of availability, while playing down the importance of comparisons regarding the overall numbers.

"We recognize the importance of getting great apps on our platform and not artificially inflating the number of actual apps available to customer by listing 'wallpapers' as a category, or perhaps allowing competitor's apps to run on the platform to increase 'tonnage'," Brandon Watson, Microsoft's director of developer experience said in a post to the Windows Phone Developer Blog, Wednesday.

So, instead of focusing on app numbers, Watson chose to point to the number of times the free developer tools for WP7 -- Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone and Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone -- have been downloaded -- more than 1.5 million times.

"The number of downloads equates to the size of the entire population of Philadelphia," Watson said. He went on to complain that some other app stores inflate their numbers by counting apps that are available in multiple languages as multiple apps.

Watson said that the quality of the developers and their apps is more important than the quantity, however. Despite the number of downloads, the important number is that 36,000 developers have signed up to be paying members of theWP7 app developer program.

Of course, the value of such comparisons is often in the eye of the beholder.

"There are currently over 350,000 apps available on the App Store, over 65,000 specifically optimized for iPad [as well as] ... over 10 billion downloads to date [and] over $2 billion paid out to developers," an Apple spokesperson said in an email to InternetNews.com. As far as developers signed up to write apps for iOS, Apple claimed it had 200,000 in October.

However, as many analysts have said, the market for smartphones and other intelligent mobile devices like tablets is still nascent and fast evolving. Anything -- almost -- can still happen.

For instance, earlier this week, researcher IDC, issued a Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker that predicts WP7, due in large part to the recent deal with Nokia, will be in a strong second place among the major smartphone operating systems in 2015 with a market share of 20.9 percent.

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EBay Buys GSI Commerce for $2.4 Billion

Online auction site eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) is acquiring ecommerce vendor GSI Commerce (NASDAQ:GSIC) for $2.4 billion. The proposed acquisition will see eBay paying $29.95 per GSI share for the deal which is expected to close in the third quarter of 2011.

The deal will enable eBay with new ecommerce backend capabilities as the online auction site scales up for the next generation of its growth.

"We intend to lead the next generation of commerce innovation. The acquisition of GSI, which offers the most comprehensive integrated suite of online commerce and interactive marketing services available, will significantly strengthen our ability to connect buyers and sellers worldwide," said John Donahoe, eBay Inc. President and CEO in a statement. "Combined with eBay Marketplaces and PayPal, we believe GSI will enhance our position as the leading strategic global commerce partner of choice for retailers and brands of all sizes."

GSI has over 180 retail customers including the National Football League (NFL), Toys R Us and Ralph Lauren, for its commerce services. EBay sees GSI as providing complementary strengths that will help to extend the overall eBay portfolio.

"With eBay, PayPal, GSI and our global platform capabilities, we are focused on delivering new ways for retailers and brands of all sizes, from sole proprietors to large merchants, to drive innovation, engage customers and help people shop anytime, anywhere and on any device," Donahoe said

The deal could help to give eBay more capabilities as it scales up its business to compete against rivals including Amazon.

"The acquisition gives eBay more competitive weapons to minimize the market share shift to Amazon," Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan told the Wall Street. Journal. "This is a big hole strategically that eBay is trying to plug."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

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MySQL Reference Architecture Provisioned

Deploying MySQL at scale isn't just about having a LAMP stack anymore.

Remember when LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) was enough to run just about anything? Times have changed.

In an effort to help keep up with change, services vendors SkySQL is now out with a new reference architecture for MySQL to help enable modern scalable deployments.

Kaj Arno executive vice president of products at SkySQL, told InternetNews.com that the SkySQL Reference Architecture is delivered to SkySQL end customers in the form of a web service. Core open source software components of the Reference Architecture are delivered for free, whereas closed source components and services will require a commercial relationship.

"The reference architecture is a best of breed collection, not the loosely fitting collection of disparate solutions that many production environments end up in, for mere historical reasons," Arno said. "MySQL is today being deployed together with proper high availability solutions, replication, and appropriate scalability and monitoring."

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Adobe Extends Flash Builder for Mobile and PHP

Developing code for multiple mobile platforms at the same time is no easy task. Adobe is aiming to make that task easier with the new Flex 4.5 and Flash Builder 4.5 platforms.

Adobe Flex is an open source development framework that was created to help developers build rich user interfaces on top of applications.

"With the announcement today, we've extended the Flex Framework and the associated tooling, which is the Flash Builder, to allow developers to build mobile applications," Dave Gruber group product marketing manager at Adobe told InternetNews.com. "Mobile apps can now be built using one tool, and one codebase to build applications for Android, Blackberry or iOS."

Flash Builder is built on top of the open source Eclipse IDE platform, though Flash Builder itself is not open source. Gruber explained that Flash Builder is a mature IDE itself for builder rich user interfaces.

Developing for multiple mobile platforms is not the same as developing for multiple browsers or desktop operating systems. It is not possible to write once and have code run everywhere, though Adobe is trying to make it a whole lot easier.

"Using the Flex Framework with Flash Builder enables developers to build one app and then share the code for the app to build for other platform-specific apps," Gruber said. "This is write once and then share a ton of your code for other platforms."

The reason why it's not feasible to write once and then run everywhere mobile is because each mobile platform has its own unique characteristics. Things like form factors, screen resolutions and hard or soft buttons are different from device to device.

"You can share a significant amount of your code from app to app," Gruber said.

The glue is the Adobe AIR runtime, which Gruber said becomes the translation layer for the mobile apps across the various platforms. Gruber explained that a developer would write an application using Flash Builder, compile the app into a native package format and then AIR takes care of the translation to the specific characteristics of the mobile platform.

"The way that works is AIR as a runtime will already be pre-installed or users will be prompted to download on Android and Blackberry platforms," Gruber said. "For Apple iOS, we compile the AIR runtime right into the app and it becomes literally a native app."

Gruber noted that Adobe has managed to optimize the performance of the solution so the final app is fully optimized and runs at the same level of performance as a fully native app.

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IE10 Won't Run on Windows Vista

Microsoft confirmed this week that the next major version of its browser will not work with Windows Vista, but at least one analyst wonders if that's a problem.

Even though Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) just shipped IE9 a month ago, it continues to try to pick up the pace of browser development in order to try to regain some of the market initiative that it has lost in recent years -- largely by not moving fast enough to keep IE current with competitors offerings.

In fact, the company released the first platform preview for Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) earlier in the week at its annual MIX Web developers and designers conference in Las Vegas.

(Indeed, the first platform preview for IE9 was released at MIX at this time last year.)

However, the IE10 platform preview requires Windows 7 and will not support Vista, a discovery that has led to a controversy similar to complaints that IE9 will not run on Windows XP, although it does run on Vista.

"With IE9, we made the decision to help unlock the best web experience possible, which means taking advantage of everything around the browser -- including Windows 7 and modern PC hardware," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email to InternetNews.com.

"Windows Vista customers have a great browsing experience with IE9, but in building IE10 we are focused on continuing to drive the kind of innovation that only happens when you take advantage of the ongoing improvements in modern operating systems and modern hardware," the spokesperson added.

It doesn't take Bing translation to read the meaning -- Microsoft is not going to be looking back when it comes to new versions of IE.

"If you want the latest technologies, you have to stay up to the latest generation, and that's true for both Microsoft and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL)," Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group told InternetNews.com.

Enderle said that technology vendors that want to continue to be successful need to focus more on the future than on the past.

"Never support anything that's more than one generation back," Enderle added. Don't forget, he points out, that Windows 8, which aims to provide support for hardware accelerated graphics, is less than two years away as well.

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Mozilla jumps into Node.js server project

Mozilla, taking interest in the Node.js project to run JavaScript programs on servers, not just browsers, has passed an early milestone with its own flavor of the software.

Node.js is built with the V8 JavaScript engine from Google's Chrome browser, but Mozilla is transplanting Firefox's JavaScript technology in a project called SpiderNode. (The JavaScript engine in Firefox is called SpiderMonkey, and the hybrid technology used in SpiderNode is called V8Monkey.)

"We now have a Node executable running on V8Monkey," though it still crashes at this early stage, said SpiderNode leader Paul O'Shannessey on Twitter.

V8 is deeply integrated with Node.js, so Mozilla is taking the approach of building the V8 interface onto SpiderMonkey. That's been a useful project in and of itself, O'Shannessey said, generating ideas about ways to improve SpiderMonkey, but the larger goal is to provide a different version of Node.js.

"We think V8 is great and the fact that Node has become so widely used is a testament to that. But we also think there's room for competition here," he said in a blog post about SpiderNode.

Node.js, a project begun in 2009 by Ryan Dahl and funded by Joyent, runs tasks on a server in a different and potentially more efficient way than a lot of today's common technology. Specifically, it responds to requests--to deliver a Web page to a browser, for example--by waking up when notified of the request, then falling back asleep once the request is fulfilled. This approach is called an event model, and Dahl argues that it performs better under load than traditional servers that allocate tasks to computing processes called threads that take up more memory.

Sencha, a startup offering development tools to create Web applications that run in a browser, likes the idea of server-side JavaScript, too, since Web developers are likely already familiar with the language. It's building a higher-level package called Connect that combines Node.js with various plug-ins useful for Web servers.

"We're a big fan of JavaScript in the server," said Aditya Bansod, senior director of product management at Sencha. "For a developer, having the same language and the same event model on the server and on the client reduces the cognitive dissonance when working on each side."

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Yahoo Q1 Results Impacted by Microsoft adCenter

Yahoo is out with its first quarter fiscal 2011 results, showing a decrease in revenues.

Revenues for the first quarter were reported at $1.2 billion, a 24 percent decrease on a year-over-year basis. Net Income was reported at $190 million, for a 1 percent increase over the $188 million reported for the first quarter of 2010.

Yahoo noted that the decline in revenues was primarily due to the required changes in how they have to report revenues based on their Search Agreement with Microsoft.

Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz, was optimistic during Yahoo's earnings call despite the revenue decline. Bartz noted that Yahoo's global users were up 13 percent in Q1 and pageviews on Yahoo's media properties were up 8 percent. She added that time spent on Yahoo's properties was up by 17 percent.

Yahoo has also experienced a growth in pageviews across its' U.S. news blogs. Bartz reported that in Q1, Yahoo's U.S. news blogs did more than 400 million pageviews. She noted that the news blogs pageviews have increased by more than 50 percent over the last three months.

"The operating momentum we've been building continues as we modernize our technology platform, driving engagements through enriched content, introducing well-received new products and leveraging innovations in digital advertising to boost display revenue growth," Bartz said. "Overall, our turnaround is proceeding on schedule, and we are very confident Yahoo is heading in the right direction."

That said, Bartz admitted that the Yahoo Search marketplace is encountering some issues that are related to Microsoft adCenter technology.

"Advertisers are seeing strong ROI, but technical limitations in the current adCenter platform mean the click volumes just aren't there yet," Bartz said.

Bartz added that Yahoo is working very close with Microsoft on the adCenter issues.

"They understand the issues and they're hard at work on systems architecture, science models and better features and functions in adCenter," Bartz said. "They have an aggressive roadmap to bring those to the marketplace."

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How Will HTML 5 Affect Websites, Development?

With the final HTML 5 specification due to ratify this summer, it seems like the language has already become part of the landscape. Where could it take us and what obstacles lie ahead?

HTML 5 Clears House

With the news last week that Microsoft is shifting its focus from Silverlight to HTML 5, and that Adobe is making Flash HTML 5- (and iOS-) friendly), the last pieces of the jigsaw have fallen into place for the dominance of HTML 5 as the future of web technology and web development.

Just about every release we see these days touts CMSes as supporting HTML 5, every mobile site is packing HTML 5 features and the hype will only continue to grow. All this for a highly immature technology that has beaten industry giants and their alternatives - it has to be doing something right.

All the Right Moves

The next generation of web sites will certainly look better than their current counterparts (if coded properly). Media will play smoothly across any device, be it iPad, PlayBook or Android phone. Business users could move to an all-cloud environment via in-browser document editing. They can also use drag and drop just like on the desktop, making the browser more like the comforting UIs of old.

With some neat extensions, font use could go wild on the web, which is a bit of a double-edged sword. Templates and design tools could become dramatically easier to use and, with templates like Boilerplate, all of your HTML 5 features can run happily in browsers all the way back to IE6, for those who, for whatever legacy reason, can't upgrade.

Sticking Points Ahead

There are, of course, a few potholes on this road. The three leading browsers aren't quite compatible, nor do they offer a universally identical experience yet, and there are many ways for one or other of the players to muck things up. At least Microsoft is promising big things for its Internet Explorer 10 browser, the site for which promises and demonstrates all kinds of HTML 5 goodness.

There are also areas where HTML 5 is lacking, such as in adding objects over video, working with webcams and so on. These can be fixed, over time, but leave holes in the portfolio that third parties can exploit - which may be good in the short term, but make for fragmentation later on.

Thank the Mobile Future

Whatever sites end up looking like, the good news is that, whatever device you happen to browse them on - be it an iPhone, iPad or Android - HTML 5 should help produce an equal, egalitarian experience. The success of these devices seems to be what has really pushed HTML 5 to the fore - if we were still creaking along in an all-desktop world, things would be years behind where we are now.

For developers, life gets made a little simpler, without a million platform tweaks to worry about, and they can concentrate on the important things such as user experience and progressing with cleaner code. That does ignore the massive amount of sites rewrites and refreshes that the industry faces, but for coders, as long as they're getting paid, it should all be good.

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Zend Advances PHP Development for the Cloud

Deploying PHP to the cloud is about to get easier thanks to a new partnership between commercial PHP vendor Zend and cloud management firm RightScale.

The new RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack integrates RightScale's Cloud Management Platform with Zend Server for scalable cloud PHP deployments. The new effort is part of Zend's overall move to advance PHP in the emerging Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) marketplace.

"This is an open PaaS that is elastic and customizable," Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend told InternetNews.com. "We want to enable our customers to deploy this platform on the cloud of their choice."

Zend's cloud focus began to ramp up during the Zendcon event in November of 2010 . At the time, Gutmans announced the development of a Zend PHP Cloud Platform initiative. The new RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack is part of that overall cloud initiative. In fact, Zend Server, which is an integrated PHP middleware server, is a key part of the RightScale solution.

Gutmans noted that the RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack can be acquired from either RightScale or Zend and is being sold on a pay-as-you-go basis. The solution enables developers to manage, provision and deploy PHP servers in the cloud as well as providing the ability to scale capacity elastically as required.

While Zend also sells Zend Server for on-premise deployments, Gutmans said that providing Zend Server in the cloud on a pay-as-you-go basis does not cannibalize his on-premise business.

"In some cases we'll make more money, while in other cases we'll make less," Gutmans said. "Customers are getting a very rich solution here. They're not just getting the PHP platform, they are also getting RightScale to manage their entire IT infrastructure in the cloud."

Cloud Portability for PHP

Zend's cloud strategy is to support multiple cloud efforts and technology including Amazon as well as the OpenStack open source cloud effort. Zend has been working on its own Simple Cloud technology to help deliver cloud portability at the API level.

"We're building a customizable platform that will be integratable," Gutmans said. "My goal is to make sure that the platform is running everywhere."

Cloud portability is ultimately a route that Gutmans believes is necessary for application developers.

"I think there will be some appeal for the Google App Engines of the world, especially when it comes to the SOHO market," Gutmans said. "But when I think about ultimately which platforms are going to win it will be the ones that run on multiple clouds. One size doesn't fit all."

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Oracle Advances NetBeans for Java 7

Not everyone in the open source community has had a positive experience with Oracle. The NetBeans community however is thriving under Oracle, with multiple releases and nearly a million active users.

This week Oracle continued its support for NetBeans with its third release since the Sun acquisition. NetBeans 7 provides new support for the upcoming Java 7 language release, in a move that is all about fostering Java adoption.

"The high-level of goal of NetBeans is to have a strong tooling solution and one that can track the latest and greatest in Java development," Duncan Mills, senior director of product management at Oracle told InternetNews.com. "We want to encourage the adoption of Java."

Mills noted that the NetBeans community under Oracle's stewardship is extremely healthy. According to Mills, there are as many as 900,000 active users of NetBeans.

The key focus of NetBeans 7.0 is Java SE 7 support. Mills explained that what Oracle has done is they've enabled developers to use Java 7 syntax as well as the new language contructs. He added that a lot of the work in Java 7 is around making the language more concise.

The Java 7 SDK is not included as part of the NetBeans 7.0 download. Mills said that developers will have to download the latest preview build from Java.com. That said, though NetBeans 7.0 introduces Java 7 support, developers can point the IDE at any version of Java that they want to run.

NetBeans 7.0 also boosts Swing development. Mills noted that there is a new layout tool called GridBagLayout for building Swing interfaces. NetBeans 7.0 also provides HTML5 editing support for Web development.

Mills explained that NetBeans 7.0 enables developers to target the HTML5 implementation in a specific Web browser, or for the lowest common denominator, to ensure the best cross-browser compliance.

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Google Offers Developer Tools for Websites

Everybody knows Google as a search engine. Everyone in this industry knows Google also does lots of other interesting things, from Google Earth to Gmail. What is less known is the wealth of resources and tools that Google provides for website development. Let's have a look at the most useful tools Google provides to help you build your next website.

Google Code is a site providing a wide range of developer tools, APIs and code snippets. The site also pulls together developer-related news, tutorial videos and developer events, and is a free resource for all. It can be a treasure trove for the mid to experienced web developer and it is well worth spending some time exploring its various sections.

One section that is particularly useful is "APIs and tools." Here you will find a directory of APIs for Google's myriad products and services. If you are looking to include a map on your website, your own image search or integrate with Buzz, you will find the information here. Each API page includes links to documentation and code samples, developer discussion forums and official blogs. While all of the standard and more popular Google services are covered, you will also find links to less well-known products such as Sidewiki, reCAPTCHA and Google Base.

Google Web Toolkit

Google Code is also home to the Google Web Toolkit. This starter pack of goodies includes code libraries, plugins, developer tools and a user interface design component. The included software development kit covers a set of Java API libraries, a compiler and a development server. The kit was put together with the aim of helping developers build complex JavaScript applications, written and maintained in Java.

"GWT designer" is a plugin for the popular Eclipse development environment, and generates Java code for simple forms and GUI components. The tool is used internally by Google and played roles in the development of AdWords and the now defunct Google Wave. Google Software Engineer Dhanji Prasanna, who worked on Wave, had this to say about the GWT:

The Google Web Toolkit has been a great success story for Google Wave. We are able to leverage Java testing, debugging and code development tools, which are very useful and familiar, and delivering this to a browser in a compact, performant and scalable form has been a real eye-opener for us."

Google App Engine

The "Google App Engine" is also part of the Google Code repository, and allows developers to run their applications on Google's own enterprise hardware. Similar in nature to the Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure services, the App Engine is a complete development stack for building and hosting web applications. Once your application is built and uploaded to Google, system administration is taken care of. Resources are allocated to your app as required and the architecture will scale as needed without manual intervention.

Applications can be built in either Python or Java, though there are limitations in the modules and classes available for use in both of these languages. The service is free up to a certain level of used resources, and, in any case, you pay only for the resources you actually used.

Conclusions

Google spends a lot of time on its stated aim of "organizing the world's information" and this remit has long seen it provide services above and beyond simple search. Developer tools and resources such as those featured here, in Google's mind, help to promote a strong and innovative web. This benefits users, which in turn strengthens Google's hand. What's more, due to the immense revenues generated by Google's advertising services, many of these developer services are offered at little or no cost. So if you are just starting out, or are a seasoned web developer, you are bound to find something useful to help improve your work.

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Facebook begins testing social-buying program

Facebook announced on Monday it is ready to begin testing its new local deals offering--the social-networking giant's effort to cash in on the feverish interest in social buying.

First revealed in March, Facebook Deals offers members local deals they can buy and also share with their friends on the network. The test will launch tomorrow in Austin, Atlanta, Dallas, San Diego, and San Francisco, but may be expanded to include other cities, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said in statement.

Users in the five test cities will be able to learn about offerings through e-mail and notifications, by clicking on the Deals tab on their Facebook home page, and through their News Feed when friends like or buy a deal.

Facebook is working with a passel of other deals sites in the venture, including Opentable, Gilt City, Tippr, PopSugar City, Plum District, ReachLocal, Zozi, Home Run, KGB Deals, aDealio, and ViaGoGo.

With 500 million members, Facebook brings a sizable user base in its challenge for dominance in the deals market, which brought in US$873 million in revenue last year and could bring in US$3.93 billion by 2015, according to a projection from consulting firm BIA/Kelsey.

Chief among those competitors is Groupon, which has been riding meteoric growth with half-price massages, discounted restaurant meals, and travel bargains. Chicago-based Groupon, with 60 million users and more than 39 million deals sold in its two years in business, is expected to beef up its muscle with an initial public offering later this year.

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Why Some Open Source Projects Thrive at Oracle

Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) has had a mixed bag of success with open source.

As part of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle inherited a long list of open source projects. Some of them, like OpenOffice and OpenSolaris have met with community opposition that have led to forks.

In the case of OpenOffice, the LibreOffice fork has emerged, while Oracle has now backed away from commercial support of the project. With OpenSolaris, Oracle has decided to focus on Solaris 11, while the community Illumos fork picks up the open source mantle.

The NetBeans IDE however is another story. Under Oracle's leadership, NetBeans is thriving with nearly a million active users.

Since acquiring Sun, Oracle has made three major NetBeans releases, expanding features and capabilities. The most recent NetBeans 7.0 release added support for Java 7.

What makes NetBeans different? Why is it succeeding under Oracle's leadership while other projects are not doing as well?

According to Duncan Mills, senior director of product management at Oracle, NetBeans' open source success is due to a mix of factors.

"One of them is that we have a development team which is very focused on building a great open source product and are very passionate about it," Mills told InternetNews.com. "We have a lot of commitments at the highest levels in Oracle to help NetBeans succeed."

Mills added that there is a very strong community aspect within NetBeans at Oracle.

"NetBeans has always had the idea of engaging with the community, early and often," Mills said. "So the community has a say in what goes on."

Going a step further, Mills noted that the community is also involved in the governance of the project as well. Mills said that elections for the NetBeans governance board were recently completed. The NetBeans governance board is the group that helps steer the whole product direction and it consists of both Oracle and external people.

"In the NetBeans case, there has always been a strong kernel of community in the NetBeans team that has been very vocal in the last year or so, to make sure that the voice of the external lover of NetBeans is listened too," Mills said. " I think the fact that we engage with folks regularly and give them a voice, is really the key to what has made NetBeans successful as a project."

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Google Releases Chrome 11

New browser release include voice to text engine and fixes over 25 security flaws.

Google is now out with yet another new browser release. Chrome 11.0.696.57 is Google's third major browser release of 2011, following the Chrome 9 and 10 releases earlier in the year.

Chrome 11 supports the HTML5 speech input API, enabling the browsing to support voice interactions. One of the ways that the new voice capability can be used is in combination with Google Translate providing a browser based translation service

"If you're translating from English, just click on the microphone on the bottom right of the input box, speak your text, and choose the language you want to translate to," Josh Estelle, Software Engineer at Google wrote in a blog post.

The Chrome 11 release also provides at least 25 security fixes.

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Web Optimization: Redesign Out, Continuous Improvement In

Big redesigns are a very dangerous strategy. Continuous improvement of your customers' top tasks is much better.

When Gawker Media launched a big redesign in February 2011, its traffic halved. That can happen because even when you do good things, people don't like change. It can take them a while to adapt to the new environment. So, assuming for a moment the Gawker redesign was a good thing, have things picked up again?

"Turns out, according to Gawker's public statistics, things are much, much worse than was originally reported," The Atlantic Online states. "Yes, the redesign cut traffic in half almost instantly, but instead of coming back, even more readers left the site behind."

Several years ago I wrote an article about the obsession many organizations have with website redesign. Over the years, for every successful redesign I've come across, I've come across 10 disasters. So why do organizations love redesign? Sometimes there are genuine reasons, for example if the old structure just isn't working anymore. But generally redesigns are done for all the wrong reasons.

We redesign because redesigns are projects. Organizations love projects. It is often easier to find $100,000 for a project than to find $10,000 a year to continuously improve the website. Why? Because organizations love to measure and a project is very measurable. It has a budget, a beginning and (hopefully) an end. It is a classic example of managing what is easy to measure rather than managing what is right to measure.

Another reason organizations do redesigns is because they're fun. Continuously improving a website is really boring work. All these seemingly trivial little changes; it feels like you're just grinding things out.

Continuous improvement implies lots of testing and observation of customer behaviour. This clashes with the ever present myth of Clint Eastwood design. That lone-wolf genius who comes up with the magic. That design agency that is just so cool. Everyone wants to be Steve Jobs. Continuous improvement is simply uncool. And it will never win you a prestigious design award (believe me, if you do win one of those, you really know you're messing up).

There are three central reasons why we should move to a continuous improvement of top tasks model of management. Firstly, the world is a very complex place. It is extraordinarily difficult to get everything right in one big design. Much better to try a little and test. Test a heading, test a link, test an image at one size, then another. Keep testing and learning and refining.

The second reason is because we can. Before the Web it was incredibly hard to measure how people reacted to content. The Web is an amazing laboratory of content where we can observe how people are behaving and reacting. That's an amazing opportunity for a content professional. We should grab it with both hands.

The third reason is about your career. Web redesigns may be good projects but they rarely deliver value. Continuous improvement delivers real value. We can prove that making a small change can make a big difference. We can show that a focus on quality delivers. If you can link yourself to quality and value delivery, then that's a really good career move.

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PostgreSQL 9.1 Syncs the Open Source Database

Two of the hottest features in the database world are coming to the open source PostgreSQL 9.1 database.

The upcoming PostgreSQL 9.1 release including in-memory caching by way its unlogged tables feature. The unlogged table feature is not intended as a high-availability caching feature. Rather, the use case is for the caching to provide a solution for data that has a high volume of writes, but is not very valuable.

"The new database release will also include synchronous replication that can be controlled on a per transaction basis.

"What that means is the database administrator can decide on a per-transaction basis which ones need to be replicated and which ones don't," Josh Berkus, PostgreSQL core team member, told InternetNews.com. "The advantage of that is that there are a lot of mixed load applications which might have a small amount of essential data and a large amount of data that is not as important."

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Adobe 5.5 Launches; Brings New Features, Mobile Focus

Adobe's latest monster design, creation and publishing package packs in plenty for the mobile and digital publishing set.

Adobe's Jumbo Suite

As we mentioned last month, Adobe has updated its Creative Suite, unleashing a raft of 5.5 products with the aim of being more relevant to web publishers and smartphone and tablet developers, with improved Flash authoring and HTML 5 support.

Adobe is also making the product range wider with a new digital rental scheme that will appeal to startups and small businesses. Adobe is also promising to boost its scheduling, with more regular updates and releases to keep pace with the latest in web and mobile developments, systems and techniques - something that the old monolithic release schedule really can't keep pace with.

High Fives All Round

Version 5.5 offers the latest Flash Builder and Flex 4.5 apps that Adobe reckons offers a 40% time saving in time-to-market, 70%+ code reuse across apps and rapid production processes. Apps are delivered as Adobe Air packages, making the suite tempting to existing coders in AIR.

The new Digital Publishing suite can be used alongside Folio Producer tools in InDesign to offer an end-to-end publishing system for traditional media content that can more easily be repurposed for web or digital publishing.

This should help blur the lines between the traditional publishing holdouts and the digital magazine era, with almost everyone expected to product rich, tablet-based versions of their newsstand titles. Will it offer enough to threaten the likes of Pixelmags, which already helps many major publishers produce their magazines in iPad and other device-friendly formats?

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DooPHP: Lightweight PHP Framework, Powerful Tool

Just because a PHP framework is lightweight it doesn't mean it lacks power. Take the DooPHP framework. Short for Do OOP in PHP, DooPHP is a self-described lightweight, open source framework that enables you to build simple dynamic websites quickly. In fact, Developer.com's PHP Contributing Editor Jason Gilmore identified DooPHP as one of his top 10 lightweight frameworks for PHP development.

Now, Jason has dedicated an entire PHP framework review to DooPHP on PHPBuilder.com.

He explains his focus on DooPHP and PHP frameworks in general like this:

I'm an advocate of framework-driven development in general, urging even beginning PHP users to explore the various available solutions and adopt the framework which best resonates with them as soon as possible.

He goes on to demonstrate how you can leverage the seven main DooPHP features (listed below) to create a simple yet dynamic, database-integrated website.

• MVC
• REST
• URI routing
• Object-relational mapping
• Template and view management
• Usability
• Performance

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Oracle Gives Hudson to Eclipse

Oracle remains committed to open source continuous integration (CI) system even after the Jenkins fork.

Oracle has faced intense scrutiny this year over its handling of multiple open source projects. In the case of the Hudson continuous integration system for Java, members of the community forked the project after disagreeing with Oracle.

Oracle remains committed to Hudson and today announced that it was moving the project to the open source Eclipse Foundation. At Eclipse, Hudson development will continue in a multi-stakeholder, open environment.

"We're still totally committed to Hudson, we are still behind it as ever," Ted Farrell, chief architect and senior vice president, Tools and Middleware at Oracle told InternetNews.com. "This move will help grow the community and relieve any concerns that people have about it being an Oracle-owned project. We welcome all people that want to contribute and have their voices heard.

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Red Hat Launches OpenShift PaaS

Linux vendor takes aim at the cloud with new PaaS and IaaS initiatives, but they're not all open source, yet.

Red Hat is expanding its cloud initiatives with new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) effort.

The new CloudForms platform is the IaaS piece providing compute resource management. CloudForms also includes application management tools that will help bring applications into the cloud as well as manage applications in the cloud.

The other key part of Red Hat's new cloud push is the OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology. The cornerstone of OpenShift is the Makara technology Red Hat acquired in November 2010.

"OpenShift is Red Hat's open source approach to platform as a service," Isaac Roth, PaaS Master at Red Hat said during the press conference.

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Microsoft Wants iOS Apps to Run on WP7

Microsoft takes the wraps off a translation effort to bring Apple iOS apps to Windows Phone 7.

Microsoft's needs more apps for its Windows Phone 7 (WP7) platform.

Microsoft sees one way to increase the number of apps available for its platform is to aid iOS developers in porting or at least rewriting their apps to work on WP7. That's where the new iPhone/iOS to Windows Phone 7 API mapping tool come into play. The mapping tool dictionary is aimed at providing information to help developers translate techniques, languages, and API calls from the programming models they're familiar with to those in Microsoft's fledgling environment.

"If you are a .NET developer, learning Windows Phone development is not really 'change.' ... [but] more of a continuum, where you just add new features to what you already know," Jean-Christophe Cimetiere, a Microsoft senior technical evangelist for Interoperability, said in a post to the Windows Phone Developer Blog.

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Azure Toolkits Coming for Mobile Devices

Microsoft may be desperate to succeed in the mobile marketplace with Windows Phone 7 (WP7), but that isn't keeping the company from coming out with development tools to help iPhone and Android developers write apps that work with its Windows Azure cloud computing platform.

In a move meant to assure higher adoption of Azure, this week, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced Azure Toolkits for Devices -- for Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iOS and Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android -- as well as a coming update for the WP7 toolkit the company released last month.

"Using the toolkits, developers can use the cloud to accelerate the creation of applications on the major mobile platforms," Jamin Spitzer, senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft, said in a post to the Official Microsoft Blog, Monday.

The toolkits use Azure's cloud services as a common back-end. All three toolkits also come with a "cloud ready" deployment package, Microsoft said.

"Developers can use cloud services to share common requirements like device notifications, authentication, storage and even higher-level services like leaderboards," the post added. "At the same time, developers can maximize the performance of each mobile device by writing client code that exploits each platform."

To that end, Microsoft is readying an update to a toolkit it released last month for WP7 devices that takes advantage of Windows Azure. The pending update, which adds integration with Azure's Access Control Service, provides support for Azure Storage Queues, and updates the user interface for the supporting Web application, is due out in the next two weeks.

The original WP7 toolkit, which shipped in late March, includes binaries for WP7 applications, project templates, sample applications written in C# and VB.NET, as well as a dependency checker.

Meanwhile, the Azure Toolkit for iOS provides compiled iPhone libraries for interacting with Azure, a sample iOS application, and documentation. The toolkit is currently available for download.

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Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion

In its biggest buy to date, Microsoft is betting the billions it's spending to get Skype will translate into billions of users down the line.

Microsoft announced Tuesday that it is buying Internet communications provider Skype for some $8.5 billion in cash -- the largest acquisition in the company's history.

The two companies said the deal was the result of an unsolicited offer from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and, if it passes regulatory hurdles, will make Skype a division of the software giant. The companies hope to finalize the purchase during the current calendar year.

Microsoft sees the acquisition as key to its vision of a connected world which will have, the two companies hope, billions of users over time.

"We want to stitch together the world," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said during a webcast press conference announcing the deal.

Microsoft is acquiring Skype from an investment group headed by Silver Lake, which purchased the company from eBay in 2009. Skype was founded in 2003 and acquired by eBay in 2005.

"The acquisition will increase the accessibility of real-time video and voice communications, bringing benefits to both consumers and enterprise users and generating significant new business and revenue opportunities," the companies said in a joint statement.

Skype currently has 170 million connected users who consumed some 207 billion minutes of voice and video conversations in 2010, the companies said.

While Ballmer and Skype CEO Tony Bates see a huge consumer opportunity, particularly around advertising, in the hook up -- they also said that they see immense synergies around business applications, particularly Microsoft's recently launched Lync unified communications server.

"This is a big day for Microsoft and the promise of universal communications [because] it's core to our mission and core to our technologies," Ballmer said.

Of course, the enterprise aspects do not undercut what Ballmer sees as other key synergies with Microsoft's Xbox and Xbox Live gaming offerings, as well as the Kinect game sensor, along with Outlook, Hotmail, and Live Messenger.

Key to it all will be video.

"Video is going to dominate [Internet] traffic in coming years ... [in fact] more than 40 percent of [Skype's] traffic is already video," Ballmer added.

Ballmer also tried to allay worries from critics and competitors regarding what they perceive as Microsoft's vaunted "Windows only" bent towards other technologies.

"We will continue to support non-Microsoft platforms [like iOS and Google] ... and we have a track record of doing this, such as Office on the Mac," Ballmer added.

Microsoft's previous largest investment was the purchase of online advertising firm aQuantive in 2007 for roughly $6 billion.

The company also made an unsolicited bid for then-search competitor Yahoo -- now search partner -- for $44.6 billion in 2008. That hostile takeover attempt ultimately was scotched by Yahoo's board, and Microsoft later negotiated a deal whereby Yahoo's sites are now underpinned by Microsoft's Bing search infrastructure.

Bates will become president of Microsoft's new Skype division and report directly to Ballmer.

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Why Cloud is Like Email in the 1980's

Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google took the keynote stage at the Interop trade show today. Cerf recounted for the audience how the early days of the Internet are similar to the early days of the cloud.

Back in the 1980's, email systems were siloed across service providers and were not connected to the Internet. Cerf was working for MCI in the late 1980's working on MCI's email system. Actually getting connected to the Internet was a process which at the time required permission from U.S. authorities.

"In 1988, we got permission to connect MCI mail to the Internet," Cerf said. "That broke the policy log jam."

Cerf added that as soon as MCI announced that they were allowed to connect to the Internet, other service providers asked for the same treatment.

"So they all got connected in 1989," Cerf said. "The side effect became that all email systems then became interconnected."

There is a lesson in the story in how email systems got connected and how the modern cloud is evolving.

"Today cloud is like email in 1980s, it's not interconnected and now you can't interface between clouds," Cerf said. "That will change as the same pressures that got to email to get to the cloud."

Cerf also discussed security on the Internet. The early Internet protocols did not have much if any security considerations. Cerf noted that work on the modern Internet protocol was happening in 1974 before public key cryptography was publicly available.

"So we ended up with a network that didn't have all the features that we could have had and can have," Cerf said. "There is nothing stopping us from adding stuff now, that's what https, dnssec are about."

Cerf added that having suspicious and paranoid web browsers that are aware of security risk are also a benefit to securing the Internet.

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Facebook admits hiring PR firm to smear Google

Facebook admitted on Thursday it had hired a public relations firm to highlight supposed flaws in Google Inc's privacy practices but denied it had intended a smear campaign against the search giant.

Facebook, which has taken privacy missteps of its own with users in the past, hired WPP owned PR firm Burson-Marstellar to focus attention on the use of consumers' personal information on Google Social Circles, one of Google's less known social networking features.

The revelation highlights the growing rivalry between Google, the world's leading Web search business, and Facebook, the largest social networking site with over a half a billion users globally.

Facebook and Google's skirmish shows how consumer privacy, particularly around sensitive data, could be a ticking time bomb for modern Internet companies who manage an increasing amount of information about their users such as credit card and social security numbers.

Burson-Marstellar contacted several journalists and privacy experts without revealing the identity of its client. Facebook said it should have presented the issues in a "serious and transparent" way.

"We wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles," the company said in a statement. "Facebook did not approve of use or collection for this purpose."

Google was not immediately available for comment.

Privacy and security analyst Christopher Soghoian was contacted on May 3 by Burson-Marstellar asking if he was interested in writing an opinion column on privacy issues related to Google Social Circles.

"What struck me as odd was that this email wasn't pitching for a company but against it," said Soghoian. "They said if I don't have time they can write the column for me and get it into places like Huffington Post and The Hill."

Soghoian, who has advocated against both Google and Facebook for lax privacy practices posted the Burson-Marstellar email on his blog on May 3, but it was not until after USA Today published similar emails some days later that details of the mystery client were eventually confirmed to be Facebook.

Both Google and Facebook offer free access services for the most part which rely on their users' trust. That trust has helped Google build a business with a market value of $172 billion, while Facebook has been valued at more than $70 billion by private investors in recent weeks.

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IPv6 Usage Now at 10 Percent

The available free pool of IPv4 spaces is now gone and with it has come new urgency to move to IPv6.

The question of how and where enterprises should move to IPv4 was tackled in a panel discussion at the Interop conference here this week. While the need for more address space is obvious, there are a number of challenges involved in moving to IPv6.

One of the biggest is the fact that IPv4 is not compatible with IPv6.

"People ask me, how did you screw that one up?" John Curran, President & CEO, ARIN told the Interop audience.

Curran noted that as result of the lack of backward compatibility between the two protocols, there is a need to run both IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel. The length of time that both systems will need to run in parallel is not known, but it's likely to be many years if not decades.

In terms of where current adoption is for IPv6, Martin Levy, Director IPv6 Strategy at Hurricane Electric noted that there are lots of IPv6 enables services. He said there are IPv6 enabled service providers, operating systems and hardware all in the market today.

According to Levy, on May 3rd, IPv6 usage hit 10 percent of the Internet, which is the first time that IPv6 has hit double digit usage. Going out a step further, Levy argued that 50 percent of well connected network service providers today are already IPv6 enabled. Levy defined "well connected" as service providers with connections to eight or more networks.

"But what about the other 50 percent?" Levy asked the audience. "Ask your service provider or maybe pick another one, you don't have an excuse anymore."

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"Big Data" Offers Big Challenges - And Big Rewards

'Big data' is roaring through enterprises and you better be prepared or risk being completely overwhelmed by it.

Big data is a term for immense amounts of data that are so large as to be difficult to nearly impossible to store, analyze and manage using current technologies - ranging from millions of real-time data feeds to streaming video to medical imaging.

"The sheer volume of data is a global phenomenon - but what does it mean? Many citizens around the world regard this collection of information with deep suspicion, seeing the data flood as nothing more than an intrusion of their privacy. But there is strong evidence that big data can play a significant economic role to the benefit not only of private commerce but also of national economies and their citizens," the McKinsey Global Institute found in the report entitled, "Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity."

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Why Bing Could Beat Google in Social Search

Google was the first of the big search engines to introduce the idea of social search, bringing social context to search results back in October 2009 and again updating the feature in February 2011. So far, though, Google's search results have relied primarily on Twitter data and then secondarily on sources like personal blogging platforms. It has been missing one major element however: Facebook.

In case you haven't noticed, Google and Facebook notoriously just don't get along, with the most recent scrap involving Facebook allegedly hiring a PR firm to smear Google's good name.

It seems clear by now that Google will likely be the last company on the planet to gain access to the wealth of social data held close by Facebook.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has been buddy-buddy with Facebook for some time now. Just yesterday Bing, Microsoft's top-tier and second place search engine, tied its search results to Facebook's massive social graph. According to an article in Fast Company, the addition of social to Bing's search results isn't going to end there. Stefan Weitz, director at Bing, told Fast Company that Microsoft has plans to bring in social signals from a host of other sites, such as Twitter, Yelp and more.

"There are more signals than just 'Likes,'" said Weitz. "There are tweets, check-ins--when I'm at Spur restaurant in Seattle, and I say it's the best lamb tartare and post that on Yelp, that's a signal as well. There's a world where all these social and personal signals--whatever you want to call them--are consumed and indexed and made sense of."

The question now is whether or not you think social search really is the all-important future and holy grail of accurate search results. If it is, then Bing could have a leg up on Google in the form of around 600 million avidly "liking" and constantly connecting users - something Google isn't likely to see any time soon.

After all, Microsoft just isn't angering the masses like it used to. It doesn't seem like that much of a stretch for Microsoft to bring in Twitter data. And besides, remember, Twitter is NOT a social network.

Which network would you want in your attempts to provide social search - the not very social Twitter or Facebook, the site with its "like" button on more than 2.5 million websites worldwide? We'd put our money on Facebook.

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Perl 5.14 Improves IPv6, Unicode

Perl 5.14 is now available, marking the first major release of the open source development language since Perl 5.12 in 2010.

The new release provides improved Unicode support and expands IPv6 capabilities. While Perl 5.14 is now generally available, the release follows 12 incremental releases in the development tree.

"Like Linux, Perl follows the even/odd versioning convention that has an odd minor version number [e.g. '13' in 5.13] indicate it is a development release that will become 5.14," Jeff Hobbs, Director of Engineering at ActiveState told InternetNews.com. "There were actually 12 releases [through to 5.13.11] for 5.13 that were used to experiment with, test and harden the new features that became part of 5.14."

The improved Unicode support is a key new feature for Perl developers and for ActiveState's customer base as well. ActiveState develops the ActivePerl distribution as well as commercial Perl development tools.

"Those customers that require full Unicode compliance will now be able to rely on Unicode 6.0 support in their applications," Hobbs said. "This is primarily an update of the existing Unicode support in Perl."

Hobbs added that one of the key features related to the Unicode support is the new regular expression engine for ASCII-, locale- or Unicode-specific matches.

"Prior to this, the engine would rely on internal parser flags to decide what variant of the engine to use, which was not always accurate," Hobbs said. "The important part is that everything can now be explicitly under the user's control."

Perl 5.14 also makes network facing improvements with enhanced IPv6 support. Hobbs explained that the IPv6 enhancements are primarily to Socket.pm, a core module for network communication, which used to be IPv4 only.

"This provides a better foundation upon which other modules rely, such as the various networking modules," Hobbs said. "The extended set of modules still require some updates, but it will be easier with this core foundation."

Additionally, Hobbs noted that Perl 5.14 improved exception handling to be more reliable and consistent.

"Previously the special variable for eval block handling could be clobbered by destructors, but this has been corrected for 5.14," Hobbs said.

Perl 5.14 also aims to be a more efficient version of Perl with the promise of using less memory and CPU than previous releases. Hobbs noted that he didn't have exact metrics on the performance delta as it depends on the actual user application.

"One of the key speed improvements (up to 100x faster string appends) we had already backported to our ActivePerl 5.12 series," Hobbs said. "Others are smaller memory or performance gains that can add up over the lifetime of a larger application, covering various aspects such as regular expression match to function call to threads."

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Firefox 4 Races Further Ahead of IE9

Mozilla may still be weeks away from automatically upgrading users of its aging Firefox 3.5 browser, but even without the benefit of those additional users its latest browser version continues to blast past Microsoft's competing Internet Explorer 9 in usage.

In fact, early this month Firefox 4's usage began to show a sharp increase while IE9 continued on a much more gradual climb, Mozilla's Asa Dotzler pointed out on Sunday.

"Since activating the Firefox Update system and alerting Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 users to the availability of Firefox 4, the line has really picked up some speed," Dotzler wrote in a blog post with an accompanying graph.

"Internet Explorer 9's trajectory looks very similar to what we saw with IE8 and IE7 before it," he added. "Microsoft pushes new versions at an excruciatingly slow pace."

12 Million More Users

According to the StatCounter data Dotzler based his analysis on, Firefox 4 accounted for close to 16 percent of the browser market on Monday, he said, while IE9 was approaching 5 percent. "IE9's steady progress should put it around 10 percent in a couple of months," he predicted.

Mozilla recently announced that in June it will begin automatically upgrading users of its Firefox 3.5 browser to a newer version--preferably the latest one, but at the very least Firefox 3.6 instead. The move--which will be the first time it has undertaken such a step--could potentially bring an additional 12 million users into the Firefox 4 fold.

Several weeks ago Mozilla released the last security patch for Firefox 3.5 as the release approaches its end of life. The software made its debut back in 2009.

100 Million Downloads

It will be interesting to see reactions to Mozilla's new automatic upgrade plan, not to mention the overall effect on Firefox 4 usage.

In the meantime, there seems to be no end of good news about the winning open source browser, including the new IonMonkey just-in-time (JIT) compiler as well as speed improvements for those using Firefox on Linux. Firefox 4 also recently announced that it had surpassed 100 million downloads in its first month.

Will Firefox 4 win this round of the browser wars? Only time will tell. As of today, though, things are looking pretty good.

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 Adds Identity

Red Hat is updating its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform with a new 6.1 release (RHEL).

The RHEL 6.1 release provide improvements to networking connectivity, virtualization, performance and hardware support.

RHEL 6.1 also includes a technology preview of Red Hat Enterprise Identity (IPA) services. IPA is based on the open source FreeIPA project which has been part of the Red Hat sponsored Fedora Linux project since 2008. IPA provides identity and authentication services.

"We've also made improvements in operational flexibility with enhancements in the systems scheduler to more efficiently use the latest generation of CPU's, as well as improvements in the developer and compiler tool sets," Tim Burke, vice president of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, told InternetNews.com. "This is really a very broad sweeping release with a lot of enhancements across the board."

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Google Android Now the Smartphone Leader

Google Android dominated the smartphone operating system market, selling more than 36 million units to customers globally, up from 5.2 million in last year's first quarter to 36 percent market share. That's a shift from 9.6 percent share last year, according to Gartner.

In comparison, Symbian sales were at 27.6 million units, up from 24 million in 2010's first quarter, but an overall decline of market share from 44 percent last year to 27.4 percent in 2011's first quarter.

In firm third place is Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iOS. The iPhone and iPad vendor sold 16.9 million units in the first quarter for a total market share of 16.8 percent, up from 8.4 million units or 15.3 percent in 2010.

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Software AG Acquires Terracotta

Acquiring Terracotta enables Software AG to offer cloud computing solutions that will boost the performance of its PaaS-based business process management solutions.

Software AG will acquire Terracotta, which offers some of the most widely-used software for application scalability, availability and performance.

Terracotta is the developer of Ehcache, the open source distributed data cache for Java applications, and the Java add-on for Enterprise Ehcache called BigMemory. Terracotta makes its software available as both open source projects and commercial products.

"The integration of Terracotta's technology with our product portfolio is a major step in ensuring that our customers can fully benefit from the convergence of cloud computing, the mobile web, complex event processing and real-time, multi-party collaboration through unprecedented levels of performance and scalability," Software AG CTO Wolfram Jost said in a statement. "Software AG is also committed to fully supporting Terracotta's open source communities in further developing this next generation in-memory technology."

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W3C HTML5 Draft Specification is at Last Call

After three short, or long depending on who you ask, years the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML Working Group (news, site) has decided to transition the HTML5 draft specification to Last Call status. This might be surprising to some given the standard's existing presence on the web - including the mobile devices. But with a standard consisting of more than a hundred specifications, something was bound to be consumed before it was fully baked.

W3C Stages

The HTML5 working group published its first draft within the W3C. Documents go through several stages:

• any number of working drafts
• Last Call Working Draft
• Candidate Recommendation with a call for implementations
• Proposed Recommendation
• Recommendation

The Last Call Working Draft is a public invitation to comment on the technical soundness of HTML5. Those who care about such things have about 10 more weeks to report bugs and then the W3C has until January 2012 to correct the issues. Although there are 48 hours left for voting to move to Last Call status, it's pretty much a done deal.

But is HTML5 Really Ready for Last Call

But, maybe not. In further political contention with the working group, co-chairman Daniel Glazman and the Accessibility Task Force are raising red flags about the long contentious longdesc attribute, which was introduced in HTML4 and provides a long description for images. HTML5 is supposed to maintain backwards compatibility, but Glazman believes that until longdesc is added back it shouldn't go forward,

The longdesc discussion is not reflected in this document. The lack of longdesc itself is enough for me to refuse this document to move to LCWD. FWIW, there's is proposal from the HTML-A11Y Task Force dated 16-may. Longdesc should be in. I don't think this is reasonable to move to LC before this is resolved and fixed."

A complete record of feedback for the HTML5 is available on the W3C site. Anybody who has been following the development of HTML5 knows that if there were no politics at Last Call - that would be surprising. We will likely see a few more years of the HTML5 show since the final recommendation isn't due for delivery until 2014.

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Rails 3.1 Nears Delivery

Rails 3.1 is now at the RC stage. What's new in the open source Ruby framework, and why should developers be excited?

The open source Ruby on Rails community is gearing up for their next major release.

This week Rails 3.1 was released as a release candidate, debuting new features for streaming, JavaScript integration and security. Rails 3.1 is the first major update to Rails since the 3.0 release in summer of 2010.

"There is some very important stuff in Rails 3.1," Nic Williams, VP of technology at Engine Yard told InternetNews.com.

Williams noted that the new asset pipeline is a key feature. He explained that the asset pipeline makes JavaScript a first-class citizen on Rails.

"Treating JavaScript as a first-class element -- rather than having it off in a public folder -- represents an important improvement," Williams said. "While Ruby is my preferred language, if you're going to be writing JavaScript you want to treat it sensibly."

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Citrix launches OpenStack-based cloud platform

Citrix this week launched its major cloud infrastructure initiative, one based on OpenStack.

At its annual conference known as Synergy, Citrix announced Project Olympus, which consists of a Citrix-certified version of OpenStack and a cloud-optimized version Citrix XenServer.

Citrix's platform is based on Xen, the open source hypervisor and open source project it sponsors. By supporting OpenStack, the Ft Lauderdale, Fl-based company ensures that its SaaS platform will support all top virtualization hypervisors. Virtualization is a key enabler of cloud computing.

The platform will be available later this year. OpenStack is an open source cloud project founded by Rackspace and backed by Dell.

Cirix announced several cloud-related products and services at synergy.

Netscaler Cloud Bridge, which will be available in the first half of this year, "transparently connects enterprise datacenters to any off-premise cloud, making the cloud a seamless extension of the enterprise network," Citrix maintains.

It will be available as a VPX virtual appliance or MPX physical appliance, and will be available as part of the NetScaler Platinum Edition.

Cloud Bridge improves upon the L4-7 traffic management capabilities of NetScaler with "four key network services that make the cloud appear as a native extension of the enterprise datacenter: L2 network bridging, a secured tunnel via encryption, network acceleration, global server load balancing and application flexibility, Citrix said.

The company also announced major enhancements to its HDX technology, which improves the performance of video, audio and 3D graphics when delivered over wide area networks or from external cloud environments, Citrix said.

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When It Comes To Online Success Passion Is A Key

It isn't just how great your search engine optimization is, or how much advertising you buy, and not even how many back links you can get, that can make your site successful. It is how passionate you are about what the core of your site is that is the biggest key to making your site the place to go for similarly interested users.

Take a moment to let that sink in because I know there are a million articles and marketing programs that tell you otherwise. They put the idea in your head that all you have to do is find some niche, market it for a bit, then watch the dollars roll in. I won't say that that can't work, it's just not that likely if you don't have a real personal attachment to what you are trying to deliver to people.

Imagine this scenario. You do some keyword research and find that 'custom motorcycle seats' gets a fair amount of searches and has little competition. You however know nothing about motorcycle seats or just what a custom one is. You spend weeks doing research, develop some good original content for your site, and marketing it. Not to long afterwards you start to see some ok traffic and some sales. Now that your site is kicking off you need to develop more content to get people coming back, the problem is you have no idea what to write about next and it's back to the research to write your next article. After awhile you are just going through the motions and your content is either culled from other sites, giving you duplicate content problems, or becomes generic and uninteresting to your followers.

This will usually lead to a drop of in visits to your site and its eventual demise.

On the other hand you have an idea for a site all about quilting, perhaps the searches are not quite as good or the competition is stronger, but you have been quilting for twenty years and whenever you get together with other quilters you can talk about for hours on end. This passion allows you to write quality articles quickly with very little research needed, and you always have another good idea for the next one. This will come across on your site and will probably lead to more organic linking and return users. It might take a little longer to get off the ground but in the long run it will pay off in the usefulness of your site and the loyalty you will develop with your clients.

Don't get me wrong SEO and how well you market your site are vital the health of your business and you should devote a substantial amount of time to them, but why give yourself two jobs (promotion and development) when you can focus on one as work and one as a hobby.

In short, don't make adding content to your web site a chore, make it something you look forward to doing. In the end it will show.

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FatWire Offers New Tools For Rapid Implementation of Content Server

There's no doubt that organizations need to constantly be updating their website to content fresh, relevant and displayed in ways that customers expect. This means work not only for marketers and editors, but also for developers and system administrators who work behind the scenes to ensure the website is running as expected and offers the right capabilities.

Which is the reason for the FatWire Content Server 7.6(FatWire's Web Content Management System) announcement today. According to FatWire's VP of Product Management, Mariam Tiraq, this release is a focus on the tools for developers and adminstrators.

For the Developer

FatWire now offers its own Eclipse IDE plug-in that integrates FatWire templates and sites for quick and easy development and testing. Developers can now also integrate FatWire templates with version control systems.

Tiraq told us that some customers had already built their own integrations but FatWire felt it wanted to own that development tool integration and provide better support around it.

In addition to the Eclipse integration, there is also an Asset Processing API. This is an extension that can trigger any kind of process on an asset (any asset in FatWire) - a call out to an external process, such as creating renditions of an asset, validating fields, etc. This API could be used as part of a workflow process, or separately.

For the Administrator

There are some new tools/reports for the System Administrator who's responsibility it is to ensure the website stays up and running and performs well. These include:

• Log Viewer - to view production log files
• Performance test Tool - Tests file system performance and lets an admin look inside the cache (cache is an important component of FatWire Content Server)
• Logging Levels - Admins can turn on additional logging levels without having to restart the server
• Collect System Info - bundles up system information that can be used for reporting/troubleshootingm

FatWire Content Server 7.6 is the heart of its Web Engagement Management solution, so it's important to ensure the right tools are provided to both developers and system admins to put new features and functionality on the website as quickly as possible and ensure it is performing as expected.

This is a fairly minor release for FatWire, the big one - Content Server 8.0 - is expected sometime this year and is the release we are patiently waiting to learn about.

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WordPress 3.1.4 Gets Clickjacking Protection

The open source WordPress blogging application is being updated to version 3.1.3 this week adding multiple security fixes and improvements.

Perhaps the biggest security improvement is the inclusion of clickjacking protection support in WordPress. Clickjacking was first discussed as an attack vector back in 2008 by Whitehat Security researcher Jeremiah Grossman. In a clickjack attack, an element from a third party website is hidden behind or above an item on the website a reader is viewing. When the reader clicks on an item they believe to be legitimate, they are in fact also clicking on the secondary item as well.

Browsers began implementing specifications to protect against clickjacking in 2009. The key technique is named X-FRAME-OPTIONS and provides a mechanism by which website owners can prevent a page from rendering inside of a frame on another site.

WordPress 3.1.3 release now supports X-FRAME-OPTIONS for the admin and login pages of a WordPress site.

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Mozilla developers are pushing forward on Firefox 6.

That's right - Firefox 6 - and no that's not a typo. As part of the Mozilla rapid release mantra, Mozilla has Firefox 5 in its beta channel and now has Firefox 6 in the Aurora channel.

The key new item highlight by Mozilla in Firefox 6 is the inclusion of the progress element. We've all seen progress bars for software that is loading and there are all kinds of ways of achieving that affect.

Now Mozilla is baking in one way with <progress>.

"This element can be used to give a visual cue of something in progress in the page," Mozilla stated in a post describing Aurora 6.

Another key area where Firefox 6 will progress is in the area of Flash security. Starting with Firefox 6, Adobe Flash Cookies will be cleared out when clearing out cookies from the browser. That's a big deal and one that will make Firefox 6 much safer. Google Chrome directly integrates Flash Player and can already do the same thing.

In terms of speed and network performance, Firefox 6 includes something called, Accelerated Connection Retry for HTTP. No this is not a Mozilla implementation of Google's SPDY. It's a feature that was supposed to land in Firefox 4 (though I don't recall when or why it was pulled). The accelerated connection is essentially a prefetched TCP connection which should make Firefox 6 faster.

Since Firefox 6 is still technically called Aurora at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if another feature (or two) lands in it before it gets branched off to become Firefox 6 Beta sometime in June.

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Google Drops Support for "Old" Browsers in GMail and Apps

Browser testing is a pain. There's nothing worse than completing your web masterpiece only to find it breaks in browser X, version Y on OS Z when the user's eating a tuna sandwich and facing North.

Google suffers the same distress but, within 2 months, they intend to solve the problem. According to their official blog:

Google Apps will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we'll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we'll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

Google's new policy has been determined by development teams who want to make use of modern HTML5 techniques such as file drag-and-drop or desktop integration. Older browsers should remain usable for a while, but certain application features will fail or be disabled. Eventually, an old browser may stop working altogether.

The policy raises a number of interesting questions. Both Google and Mozilla have implemented rapid release schedules and Firefox 5 is due within a few weeks. At that point, Google will abandon Firefox 3.x - a browser which was superseded only a few months ago and still enjoys a sizable 14% market share.

The bigger news is IE10. It could be released before the end of 2011 and, once that happens, Google will drop support for IE8 - the world's most used browser and the only version of IE which can be installed on Windows XP. According to StatCounter, XP is used by almost 46% of the net population and many corporations are entrenched on the aging operating system. If they're using Google Apps, they'll either need to upgrade or migrate to an alternative browser. Either way, that incurs staff retraining or OS purchase costs which could outweigh the savings made by switching to Google's products.

Given the rapid updates made to Chrome and Firefox, Google's definition of an "obsolete" browser could be a version that's been around for little more than 3 months. Few developers test beyond the current versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera but, like it or not, IE remains a special case.

It's a brave move by Google. I admire their reasoning, but I'd be nervous about implementing a similar policy.

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W3af Open Source App Vulnerability Testing Hits 1.0

The w3af Web Application Attack and Audit Framework is finally stable.

The open source w3af project released a 1.0 stable version this week after five release candidates and months of development. W3af enables developers and security researchers to audit, discover and test Web applications for vulnerabilities.

"This is our first stable release, named w3af 1.0-stable, and we're pretty confident on the quality of our code at this moment, so we've dared to tag it as stable," Andres Riancho, Director of Web Security at Rapid7 and w3af Founder told InternetNews.com.

One of the key features in w3af 1.0 is the infusion of Web application payloads. Riancho explained that the payloads are post exploitation "scripts" that allow the security researcher to keep elevating privileges on the remote system.

The w3af 1.0 release also includes a PHP static code analyzer (SCA) that can help developers to identify flaws such as SQL injections, remote file includes and OS commanding.

"For now, we've only developed checks for those vulnerabilities, but the plan is to keep improving the SCA," Riancho said.

That said, Riancho noted that the PHP SCA can be used to find some interesting multi-layered code flaws.

"There is a very interesting story we can tell about the PHP SCA, where a w3af user finds an arbitrary file read, uses the get_source_code payload to download the application's source," Riancho said. "The user then uses the php_sca payload to identify an OS commanding and finally exploits that vulnerability to gain full access to the remote system. All of that, using w3afand in an automated way."

While w3af can find PHP code flaws that can lead to SQL Injection attacks, the framework does not actually look at the underlying database.

"For now w3af is only focused on the Web applications," Riancho said. "At this moment w3af only talks HTTP to the remote server."

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LibreOffice Moves Forward without Apache

The LibreOffice open source office project issued a new release today, further demonstrating the viability of the OpenOffice.org (OO.o) fork. The LibreOffice 3.4.0 release comes in the same week that Oracle announced its intention to move OpenOffice to the Apache Software Foundation.

With the move of OpenOffice from Oracle to Apache, the potential for collaboration with LibreOffice could potentially be improved. Though Novell Distinguished Engineer and LibreOffice Contributor Michael Meeks notes that it remains to be seen if the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) will incubate the very large, complex and unwieldy code-base that is OO.o.

Meeks has a positive view of the ASF as an organization with very well designed governance, and a very experienced team, and some excellent licensing for specific situations.

"However, I do not believe the ASF is likely to provide a good home for the OO.o project in the long run," Meeks said. "They are sufficiently confident and comfortable with their model that attempting to negotiate over changing any core aspect of it (such as the non-copy-left stance) is unlikely to be fruitful work. So - only time will tell."

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Conduit Mobile Platform Now Supports iPad App Creation, Social Features

Mobile apps are increasing becoming the delivery method of choice for both consumer- and enterprise-oriented publishers because of the popularity of smartphones and tablets. With this, tools that help develop apps without requiring knowledge of each platform's native programming language will help bring app creation closer to content creators. Conduit (news, site), one such platform, has recently announced the inclusion of iPad app creation and new social features.

Multi-Platform App Creation Now Includes iPad

Conduit Mobile boasts of a 260,000-strong membership and 230 million users of its multi-platform publishing system. The platform enables publishers to create applications on a build-once, publish-anywhere setup. This means content-based applications can be published on the major mobile platforms - iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Phone and even Bada.

While Conduit Mobile's iOS support was previously for the iPhone only, the service can now build apps native to the iPad. Aside from the iPad app being created automatically, users can customize styling for the tablet interface, which can take advantage of the iPad's higher resolution and bigger screen.

Social Networking, Other New Features

Apart from iPad support, Conduit Mobile has announced the inclusion of new sharing and promotional buttons. App users have access to quick sharing links so that the content can be promoted in their own social networks through Facebook, Twitter or email. This not only helps promote the content, but also the mobile app, because the forwarded email or message includes a signature linking back to both the original page and the source app.

Conduit Mobile also offers custom download pages for apps, meaning users can have access to the different versions of the app - including links to the mobile version and app download - when viewed from a desktop web browser. The latest version also comes with YouTube layouts for arranging and organizing videos within apps, and photo RSS, which enables importing of images from Facebook, Flickr or Picasa albums, among other sources.

Conduit Mobile involves a growing family of mobile and web engagement products, having recently announced its acquisition of Wibiya. The service enables publishers to push content via applications meant both for mobile and desktop browsers. The latest inclusion of native apps for the iPad is only the next logical step for Conduit to take, according to the company's president Adam Boyden.

Our mission is to provide our publishers with engagement tools for every platform on which their users spend time. Tablet usage is growing exponentially. It was only natural that we be able to extend the power of the Conduit Mobile platform to the iPad."

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Twitter launches automatic link shortening

Twitter has begun automatically shortening URLs pasted into tweets by its users, the microblogging site announced.

When users compose a tweet and paste a link of any length into the Tweet box, Twitter will automatically abbreviate the link to 19 characters when users hit send. In testing for almost exactly a year, the service--called t.co--is being rolled out incrementally and will wrap and abbreviate all links shared on the site in the same way other URL-shortening services, such as Bitly, do.

Twitter said user security played a major role in implementing the new service.

"Since we show a shortened version of the original link, people will know which site the link points to," Twitter said in a statement. "This service also increases security. If users click links that are reported as malicious, we direct them to a page that warns them."

Twitter said that while it is putting the squeeze on links, it has no plans to squeeze out third-party link shorteners; those abbreviated links will continue to work on Twitter.

However, because the link isn't shortened until the send button is hit, users still won't know how close they are to exceeding their 140-character limit. Third-party clients such as Seesmic and TweetDeck (which Twitter recently purchased) show users how far over or under that limit they are, making them more useful.

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CSS 2.1 emerges as official Web standard

Much of the Web world has moved on to CSS 3, but the World Wide Web Consortium has declared the CSS 2.1 standard for Web page formatting to be done.

In W3C standards lingo, CSS 2.1 has reached "recommendation" stage. Phillipe Le Hegaret, leader of the HTML working at the W3C group, announced the milestone on Twitter on Tuesday.

Browser makers, even longtime laggard Microsoft, have turned much of their attention to CSS 3, which offers glamorous new features such as animating the transition from one page to another, endowing boxes with rounded corners, and if Adobe gets its way, magazine-style layouts.

Completing the CSS 2.1 standard still is important, though, given that such technology has a shelf life potentially decades long and that an ever-wider audience of organizations must deal with Web publishing.

"This publication crowns a long effort to achieve very broad interoperability," said Bert Bos, co-inventor of CSS and co-editor of CSS 2.1, in a statement.

The recommendation stage brings some intellectual-property reassurance, too, in that the standards makers agree that using it won't incur patent infringement suits.

And don't discount the fact that the CSS Working Group will have a bit more spare time for CSS3. "Now we can turn our attention to the cool features we've been itching to bring to the Web," Bos said.

That's important, given its central role alongside HTML and JavaScript--not just in Web pages and Web apps, but in the coming Windows 8 "tailored apps" as well.

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Oracle Updates JDeveloper

Oracle is updating its JDeveloper Java IDE for Fusion middleware customers this week. JDeveloper 11g Release 2 is a free IDE for Oracle customers, though it is based on proprietary code.

JDeveloper is still focused on JDK 6, which is inline with the current deployment of Fusion middleware servers.

"When Fusion middleware as a whole revs up to the newer version of Java, at that point in time, we'll be providing the tooling for that," Duncan Mills, senior director of product management explained to InternetNews.com. "Needless to say, yes we're working on Java 7 stuff but it's not in this release." Java 7 is currently in the process of being finalized by the Java Community Process.

JDeveloper is one of many Java IDE's that Oracle supports. It also sponsors and supports the NetBeans IDE it acquired from Sun. NetBeans, in contrast to JDeveloper, is open source and also focused on supporting the bleeding edge of Java 7 standards. JDeveloper, meanwhile, is focused on enabling Oracle Fusion middleware.

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Google's Chrome 12 Debuts

While security fixes are always a major hallmark of a new stable Chrome release, so too are new features.

With Chrome 12, Google is extending its Safe Browsing technology to downloads. Safe Browsing has been available as a phishing website detection technology since at least 2006 when it was first included in Firefox 2.0 Related Articles

Back in April when Chrome 12 first debuted as a developer release, Ian Fette, senior product manager at Google told InternetNews.com that Safe Browsing in Chrome 12 goes beyond simple phishing site detection.

"A separate attack vector exists, which is a social engineering mechanism that attempts to convince a user to download and run a file," Fette said at the time. "This new feature is designed to protect against the latter type of attack, where a user is convinced to download and run a harmful file."

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Facebook expected to file $100 Billion IPO valuation within a year

Even with traffic falling around the globe, Facebook is expected to declare a very hefty IPO valuation within the next year.

Rumors have been circulating for years about when the private corporation would finally go public. CNBC reports, based on unnamed "people familiar with the matter," that the social networking giant will file an IPO valuation of $100 billion by the end of the first quarter of 2012.

Although, the decision might be forced upon Facebook rather than something the company has been planning on:

The company's IPO, were it to happen by next spring, would probably be triggered by a section of the 1934 Securities and Exchange Act known as "the 500 rule," these people say.

Essentially, the rule mandates that once a private company has more than 500 investors, it must begin releasing quarterly financial information to the Securities and Exchange Commission, just as public companies do.

Facebook hasn't commented publicly on the matter, but CNBC adds that Facebook will "cross the 500-investor threshold this year."

The closest Facebook has come to an official answer was when CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked at the e-G8 conference in Paris last month about whether or not he would be taking his company public. Zuckerberg coyly responded, "Not yet."

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Google Now Tracks and Ranks Authors

In a move that may shift the balance of power a bit, Google has begun indexing the attribution of content to content authors, rather than just websites.

Essentially, links can now contain the code rel="author" which Google will understand to mean that the linked name is the linking page's author.

This means that Google search results can show an author's content independently. Theoretically, authors could even be used as a way to rank different pages and sites.

One example cited by Google engineer Othar Hansson discussed The New York Times using the authorship markup tag to link every story by a particular reporter to his or her own bio page, which could then include links to other stories and information.

"We know that great content comes from great authors, and we're looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results," wrote Hansson in the blog.

The Internet giant has reportedly already worked with several websites to set up the necessary HTML code, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNET, Entertainment Weekly, and The New Yorker. Further, the authorship tag has been added to content hosted on YouTube and Blogger.

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Adobe Set to Auto-Update Acrobat and Reader

Adobe delivered its June quarterly patch update on Tuesday as well, fixing over 30 flaws across its product portfolio.

Flash is being fixed one critical flaw, Shockwave is tagged for 24 flaws and Reader/Acrobat get 13 flaw fixes.

Adobe is also helping users to stay up-to-date with the latest security patches. With the new update Adobe in now enabling an automatic Reader update by default on Windows.

"The vast majority of attacks we are seeing are exploiting software installations that are not current with the latest security updates," Brad Arkin, senior director, Product Security and Privacy, wrote in a blog post. "We therefore believe that the automatic update option is the best option for most end-users and strongly encourage users to choose this option."

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W3C Updates CSS Open Web Standards as Reality and Specs Converge

Cascading style sheets (CSS) has been in use now for over a decade for controlling web page appearance. However, the "standard" has long been a mess of implementations, specifications and varying levels of browser support that can, quite frankly, drive web designers mad, or at least to annoyance. The latest release of the CSS standard by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (news, site), CSS 2.1, should make styling sites a little less painful.

How Does This Page Look in Your Brower?

I admit it - I abhor user interface development. It's completely subjective. Even worse, a CSS layout that looks awesome in one browser is a jumbled mess in another; yes, we are looking at you, Internet Explorer. However, recent news by the W3C of an update to the cascading style sheet standard (CSS) just might lure me back for one more try to make a pretty site.

The W3C's CSS Working Group, implementers and contributors to the over 9,000 test CSS Test Suite have worked long and hard to create a more interoperable version of the CSS standard. The group effort should make it easier for designers to create style sheets that function properly across browsers, browser versions and devices. CSS 2.1 is an update to CSS2, which became a recommendation in 1998.

Version 2.1 has taken a long time to evolve, even for a community-driven open standard, but the enhancements are significant. The most recent version of CSS offers:

• Media-specific style sheets that allow presentation targeting to different display devices from handhelds to Braille devices
• Content position
• Table-based layouts
• Internationalization

In addition, CSS 2.1 removes CSS2 features from the specification that have not been widely implemented by browsers - in essence, a rejection by vendors and the CSS community. The team attempted to include only CSS features that were widely adopted for HTML and XML instead of for a specific XML dialect or only HTML. This strategy reduces the risk that features will only be available when using a specific language or device.

CSS 2.1 is intended to replace CSS2. Existing CSS2 style sheets may not be compatible with the new CSS 2.1 standard. While this may not be desirable, the CSS team believes that the advantages in 2.1 outweigh the negative impacts of breaking compatibility.

The W3C Working has long been questioned about why incrementing the version number by .1 was taking so long. CSS Working Group Co-Chair said

CSS 2.1 is a really large collection of formatting features, and we had to not only carefully review and specify all the potential interactions between them, but also learn from existing implementations and of course tests. Time ensured quality and interoperability."

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The HTML Email Boilerplate

Web developers often moan about having to support five mainstream browsers, a few mobile devices and quirky behavior in a certain applications. If you think we have it bad, spare a thought for those creating HTML emails. They must contend with:

• Dozens of email clients and versions.
• Multiple rendering engines.
• No HTML email standards.
• Little support for CSS.
• Tedious testing procedures.
• A certain popular email client which dropped browser rendering in favor of a Word processor engine.

Forget about stylesheets, floats, negative margins, positioning, background images, animated GIFs, PNGs or any other fun time-saving techniques. If you think it's tough making a site work in IE6 today, HTML emails must be coded like it's 1998. That means tables, inline styles and images.

Fortunately, Sean Powell has taken inspiration from Paul Irish's HTML5 Boilerplate and created the HTML Email Boilerplate. It includes various fixes discovered by industry leaders such as Campaign Monitor and MailChimp to produce a bullet-proof email template which works in Outlook, GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and other popular clients.

Sean admits it's not plug and play - you will need to get your hands dirty with coding - but it's a great first step which solves many of the common problems experienced when developing HTML emails.

The HTML Email Boilerplate code includes two HTML files: one with commented instructions and one without which can be used as the basis of your email. It's issued under the MIT License, is free and can be used for any commercial or non-commercial project.

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NetApp Adds New Cloud Features to OnCommand

Storage vendor NetApp this week announced updates to its OnCommand management software to control, automate and analyze shared storage infrastructure, particularly in cloud environments.

Additionally, to extend the new capabilities beyond storage, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) said it is signing up more cloud management providers to its Alliance Technology Partner Program (ATPP).

The purpose is to achieve integration between OnCommand and leading cloud management products to provide pre-validated solutions for end-to-end management of the entire cloud infrastructure, according to the company.

"Enterprises, government organizations and partners are turning to NetApp to help them transition to a flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure -- the foundation for cloud computing -- that will help them be ready for the future and enable IT to accelerate business growth," Val Bercovici, NetApp's "cloud czar," said in a statement.

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Mozilla Release Firefox 5

If you've been waiting to upgrade to Firefox 4, you're too late! As promised, Mozilla released Firefox 5 on June 21 2011 - just three months after version 4 was launched. The organization has embarked on a Chrome-like release-little, release-often rapid-update schedule.

If you're too excited to read further, download the installer from getfirefox.com or update by selecting Help > About Firefox > Check for Updates. You may be lucky enough to receive a fast incremental update - it didn't work for me and the full installer was downloaded.

Firefox 4 was a major update. You're unlikely to spot any immediate differences in version 5 since most of the changes are under the hood:

• support for CSS3 animations with the -moz prefix
• improved JavaScript and canvas performance
• additional HTML5, SVG and MathML features
• faster browsing

Developers should also note that setTimeout and setInterval events will only execute once per second or less frequently on inactive tabs. It replicates the behavior of requestAnimationFrame to save CPU and power consumption.

Great - but there's a downside. You may find several of your add-ons are disabled by Firefox 5. They should work, but many authors have not yet updated their add-on's version numbers. Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar are fine, but Console2 and HttpFox are blocked.

Not every plugin author has the time or resources to match the new schedule. It's unfortunate and I hope Mozilla can address the problem. Perhaps a less formal approach could be adopted which allows the community to test and approve plugins without relying on the author to hard-code supported versions. Alternatively, Mozilla could have simply released Firefox 4.1 - the numbering is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Despite the add-on hassles, it's good to see updates appearing more regularly. Let us know what you think of the Firefox 5.

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Google Chrome going after Skype next?

A post to the Google Chromium-dev discussion group indicates that the search giant is gearing up to add real-time video and audio chat functionality right into the Chrome browser. At the core of that initiative is Google's own WebRTC project, and if it's successful, Google could extend it to competing browsers like Opera and Firefox.

The WebRTC project is a joint effort by Google, Mozilla, and Opera, designed to enable real-time communication (RTC) with simple JavaScript APIs in a manner best described as "Skype-like." When WebRTC is implemented in the Chrome browser, developers - or even Google itself - should be able to build HTML5 web apps that let users make and receive video calls.

Now, Gmail and Google Talk users can already make video and audio calls from the browser. But by building it into the Google Chrome browser, it opens the door for all kinds of new chat services and apps. If it works, Opera and Mozilla Firefox will very likely follow suit in their own software.

Skype is the market leader in teleconferencing - it's why Microsoft bought them, after all. But with the backing of three major browsers, can WebRTC end Skype's reign?

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Cloud Computing with Microsoft Windows Azure and Sitecore

Many organizations are starting to consider moving their applications to a cloud platform. For those interested in how to work in the Windows Azure cloud using web content management platform Sitecore, here's a look.

The concept of cloud computing has been around for quite some time. Cloud computing can be thought of as buying into, and using, a part of the whole. The "whole" being a powerful environment packed with leading edge technologies, multiple redundancies and failovers to preserve the performance and up-time of the environment, and lower total costs of ownership due to combined efficiencies of scale.

Think about your Gmail, Hotmail or AOL email account - sound familiar? Even though you may not necessarily be buying into the use of your email account, each account is provisioned as a part of the total environment. That being said, the technologies used today are more sophisticated than early "cloud-like" offerings. Rather than one server being divided up into separate parts, think of an entire data center that operates as one environment, and by which can be configured with dedicated, shared or dynamic resources allocations as needed on demand.

Read full story here.

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Facebook to surge by Yahoo as No. 1 in display ads

Facebook is on the verge of becoming the largest display advertiser in the United States, displacing Yahoo.

The social networking site, which held off on running ads in its early days in order to avoid alienating its users, will grow its net U.S. display revenues by 80.9 percent this year to US$2.19 billion, according to a new study by Internet research firm eMarketer. That will give the social-networking giant a 17.7 percent share of the display ad market this year, blowing past Yahoo, which will hold a 13.1 percent share.

"Facebook's supreme popularity--both in terms of numbers of people and amount of time they spend there--creates a plethora of display ad impressions, mainly for its unique form of banners," said David Hallerman, eMarketer principal analyst. "And that popularity is also boosting what advertisers will pay for its display ads."

Facebook is rapidly distancing itself from its major display ad rivals, according to the study. The second fastest growing ad-seller among the top five is Google, which should grow at a 34.4 percent clip this year, eMarketer says. Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL will all grow at less than 20 percent, all below the overall growth of the market, which the firm estimates will be 24.5 percent.

In 2012, eMarketer believes that Google will make up some of the lost ground. The firm says that Google's display ad revenue will climb 58.3 percent, while Facebook will grow a more modest 31.3 percent. eMarketer, though, cautions that the Facebook estimate for 2012 "is likely on the conservative side" and may be adjusted upward when the firm revises its social network ad revenue estimates in August.

Even with that slower growth, Facebook will extend its overall share of the display ad market in 2012 to 19.4 percent. Yahoo will slide to a 12.5 percent share while Google will account for 12.3 percent of total revenue, up from 9.3 percent this year, according to the study.

Facebook's leadership in display advertising comes just a year after the company took over managing the sale of the graphical ads on its site from Microsoft. The software giant took on the task when it invested US$240 million in Facebook in 2007 and became the exclusive third-party advertising platform partner for Facebook.

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Google Apps Kicks Internet Explorer 7 to the Curb

The official e-mail went out to Google Apps administrators this week: As of August 1, Google will only support modern browsers across Google Apps. For Internet Explorer 7, Safari 3 and Firefox 3.5, this means the end of the line.

The move is reminiscent of one made in February in which Google dropped IE 6 support. Companies like Atlassian and Salesforce.com followed suit, the latter claiming the following in a mass e-mail:

"Multiple security vulnerabilities in IE6 have been exploited over the years. The most recent attacks against Google, Yahoo, and other companies specifically targeted vulnerabilities easily accessible in IE6 but much more difficult to exploit in IE7 and IE8-leading the Microsoft Security Response Centre to recommend that users of IE6 upgrade to a newer version of Internet Explorer.

And, the kicker:

"Of all of our supported browsers, IE6 provides the slowest and least rewarding user experience for our customers."

Blossoming Love for HTML 5

For Google, the reason behind the cuts this time around goes like this: "To give users the best experience with Google Apps, we need the capabilities of modern browsers to deliver features such as desktop notifications for Gmail and drag-and-drop file upload in Google Docs."

In other words, HTML 5 is needed for these little perks, and older browsers just aren't able to bright this to the table. Of course, not everyone agrees that cycling them out entirely is the way to go.

"Google Apps is a closed web application that you must register for," pointed out Aaron Gustafson, Easy Readers co-founder. "For that type of product, supporting really old browsers while simultaneously trying to innovate is a financially risky move. At this point, we're already talking about Firefox 6 and Internet Explorer 10, so sunsetting IE7 and Firefox 3.5 seems like a no-brainer."

On the other side of the fence sits designer Aral Balkan, who argues that designers should start being even more aggressive, claiming version numbers are meaningless when considering rapidly evolving web standards: "The web doesn't have version numbers. It is fundamentally incompatible with the concept. It is the now."

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Is Microsoft secretly bidding for Nortel's patents? (And if so, why?)

There's a report circulating that Microsoft may be among the bidders for Nortel's war chest of 6,000 telecommunications patents.

This seems somewhat surprising to me, given last I heard from Microsoft, company officials said they felt no need to bid on the patents which are up for auction. A spokesperson told me in April 2011 that Microsoft already has" worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to all of Nortel's patents that covers all Microsoft products and services, resulting from the patent cross-license signed with Nortel in 2006."

So what's up with the June 27 SOA World Magazine report that bidders for Nortel's patents now include Google, Apple, Intel and "two purpose-built syndicates," one of which is led by Microsoft?

I've asked Microsoft whether it is one of the entities bidding on the patents and was told by a spokesperson that the company had no information to share at this time.

It's worth noting that if the Softies are one of the cloaked bidders, it wouldn't be the first time Microsoft has kept its identity secret when bidding for patents. It did the same when it made a bid as part of a consortium for Novell's 800 or so patents. Microsoft's role in the Novell patent-consortium bid came to light via regulatory filings.

Patent expert Florian Mueller said he believed that "there's no doubt they (Microsoft) feel they have nothing to fear from those (Nortel) patents. That said, having ownership of them (together with other members of a consortium) would have additional benefits."

"Microsoft might also believe that up to a certain price those patents are simply a good financial investment for someone who understands the patent monetization business," Mueller added.

Nortel filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2009. The Nortel patents up for auction were said to cover wireless handsets and infrastructure, as well as optical and data networking, Internet, Internet advertising, voice and personal computers In 2007, Microsoft and Nortel announced a wide-ranging strategic partnership. Via that much-trumpeted alliance, the pair committed to take on Cisco by integrating and cross-selling their communications wares and by jointly licensing each other's IP.

In June, when it looked like Google might be the default victor for Nortel's patents with an alleged bid of $900 million, Microsoft officials told a judge the deal could give the proposed buyer, Google "an unfair competitive advantage." Microsoft asked for guarantees to protect its patent agreement if Google purchased the patents in question.

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What's New in Opera 11.50

Speaking as a developer, Opera's version numbering seems sensible. Unlike Chrome and Firefox's rapid updates or IE's ridiculously sedate pace, Opera normally release a new browser once or twice a year. The version number is incremented when it's right to do so.

Opera 11.50 is out now and it's brimming with lovely new features. Come on Opera - as the last bastion of logical updates, it should have been version 12! The most obvious change is the redesigned interface:

The differences are subtle, but 11.5 sports a lighter, sleeker and cleaner look. It's easier to concentrate on web page content and Opera claim it's faster. I like it.

Speed Dial Extensions

Perhaps the biggest change is speed dial extensions. Rather than simply providing quick access to favorite sites, extensions can add dynamic information to the Speed Dial page. Essentially, it's a personal home page or set of desktop widgets on the start-up screen. A few extensions will be available today including Read It Later, Webdoc and StockTwits.

To help you manage your favorites and extensions, a new flow feature provides an unlimited number dials. Sizes are automatically adjusted for your screen or you can specify your own zoom level.

Password Synchronization

Password sync has finally arrived in Opera Link. The browser implements strong security so passwords are encrypted on the client using your Opera account password and a randomly generated key. No password is ever stored or transmitted as plain text, so that should reassure those affected by the recent high-profile security breaches experienced by Sony, Nintendo, the CIA and other organizations.

For more information, see Security of synchronized passwords with Opera Link.

Under the Hood

The developers have fixed thousands of bugs and upgraded the rendering engine. It should result in a 10-15% speed improvement for CSS and SVG rendering.

The browser has always been on the cutting edge of HTML5 and it now supports Session History and Navigation, the W3C File API, classlist and the element.

Finally, if you're a Dragonfly fan, you'll be pleased to hear that version 1.1 will be available shortly (please, please, please can we have CSS line numbers and links!)

Opera 11.5 builds on what was already a great browser. If you don't have it installed, head over to Opera.com and become one of the many thousands featured on their live download counter.

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Microsoft Launches Office 365 for SMB Markets

Microsoft officially launched the general availability of its Office 365 cloud applications suite on Tuesday at an event in New York -- but instead of pitching it for use in the enterprise market as many observers had expected, CEO Steve Ballmer chose to promote it to small and medium-sized businesses (SMB).

"It is impossible to overstate how important the small and medium-sized segment is to the business world -- they are responsible for nearly two-thirds of global job growth and employ 1.5 billion people around the globe," Ballmer said.

Office 365 is Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) online suite of enterprise-level applications in the cloud -- Exchange Online for email, SharePoint Online for collaboration, Lync Online for unified communications, and the Web versions of its Office applications -- called the Office Web Apps. Customers can also optionally take out a month-to-month subscription for the full-blown Office 2010 Professional applications.

And to capture the SMB market, Microsoft has priced Office 365 subscriptions to be attractive to smaller companies that don't have the wherewithal to have an IT department or even a part-time IT-staffer.

"With Office 365 for small businesses, customers can be up and running with Office Web Apps, Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Lync Online and an external website in minutes, for $6 per user, per month. These tools put enterprise-grade email, shared documents, instant messaging, video and Web conferencing, portals and more at everyone's fingertips," a company statement said.

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Facebook May Mobilize on Web Apps

Rumor has it that Facebook is trying to sidestep Apple's App Store and Google's Android Market with a neat technical trick: a Web-based platform for apps.

Facebook has yet to confirm the existence of the effort, allegedly code-named "Project Spartan." But if the rumor is true, the effort could threaten Apple and Google's dominance in mobile software, and give a boost to Web applications over native apps, by appealing to Facebook's huge and captive user base and by leveraging the social connections between users.

Facebook already lets developers build apps to run on top of its platform, and they've created thousands of games, utilities, and even business apps. But these are designed for the desktop, not the mobile or tablet platforms that are growing rapidly in popularity.

Mobile Web apps built on top of Facebook, and that run entirely in the browser, using widely supported technologies like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS, would free developers from the need to create several version of their software for different mobile platforms. Developers could also use Facebook Credits, which the company is hoping to expand into a universal micropayment system accessible across the Web. Facebook takes the same cut from Credits that Apple does from its App Store: 30 percent.

"If the rumors are true, it means that Facebook is planning to use Web technologies to create a whole new app ecosystem for iOS-based and other mobile devices," says Ron Perry, chief technology officer at Worklight, a company that provides tools for building mobile applications.

Facebook could also increase its influence in the mobile market by creating a platform for apps that Apple would never approve, or giving developers more favorable terms than the current 30 percent cut.

All this might make it seem inevitable that Facebook would undertake something like Project Spartan. But to succeed at creating an alternate Web-only app ecosystem and payment platform that spans many devices, it will need to overcome a number of challenges.

For one thing, Apple is now in the position that Microsoft was in 20 years ago: it controls the software on its devices and has little incentive to make the environment more hospitable to competing models of application delivery. Indeed, in March, some developers accused Apple of crippling native apps that use Web content on the iPhone and iPad by saddling them with a JavaScript engine only half as fast as the Nitro engine that runs in mobile Safari, the default browser on Apple's mobile devices. It's debatable whether or not this bug was intentional.

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Social Software Solution Drupal Commons Becomes Simply 'Commons'

Acquia released an update of its social software solution Drupal Commons back in May, but now it releases something more, the name Drupal. That's right, Drupal Commons is now simply "Commons".

Why Drop Drupal From the Name?

The change from Drupal Commons to Commons seems to have happened a few weeks ago, but it wasn't really clear or widely talked about.

According to a blog post on the Acquia site, this is purely a branding change, designed to encourage organizations to look past the technology and focus on what the software can actually do. It seems the concern may be that only Drupal experts are looking at the Commons and Acquia wants to be sure that others see it for what it really is.

A customer engagement, employee enable and private external community platform - in other words, it's not a web content management system, it is social business software.

Commons 2.0

Commons 2.0 was launched at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week. It included Acquia's Social Business JumpStart package and Community Management Strategy and branded communities.

Commons 2.0 has a place among the growing number of social software solutions available today.

Whether or not dropping "Drupal" from its name will encourage more organizations to consider it is hard to say. It was already getting a fair amount of attention.

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WordPress Updates for Security

he open source WordPress blogging platform is out with a new update fixing a critical vulnerability.

The WordPress 3.1.4 release follows the 3.1.3 update that came out at the end of May.

"This release fixes an issue that could allow a malicious editor-level user to gain further access to the site," WordPress developer Ryan Boren blogged.

Boren noted that WordPress 3.1.4 also incorporates several other security fixes and hardening measures. One such update is identified in changeset 18356, which provides new hardening and sanitizers for WordPress language files (WPLANG) and new admin email setup.

There are also new santization elements for the order of get_bookmarks,get_pages and get_terms. Code sanitization is intended to help ensure that bad input can't make it into the system that could potentially be leveraged by an attacker to exploit the system.

The new WordPress 3.1.4 update comes as developers push forward on the next generation of the blogging platform. The third release candidate for WordPress 3.2 is now available, including the same security and hardening fixes that are in the 3.1.4 release. Additionally, WordPress 3.2 includes some additional JavaScript, and user interface fixes.

WordPress 3.2 is also set to provide performance gains for the server that will make the blogging platform run faster. In terms of user facing changes, the WordPress 3.2 release will have a focus on distraction-free writing. The new distraction-free visual editor user interface for composing blog posts is intended to help bloggers focus more on their content.

Another big shift with WordPress 3.2 comes in the form of the minimum requirements. The Microsoft IE6 browser will no longer be supported and the server requirements have also changed and no longer support PHP 4.

"As a reminder, we've bumped our minimum requirements for version 3.2 to PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0," Boren said.

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Google+ vs. Facebook: Which one will be the definitive contacts hub?

Facebook definitively won over MySpace as the dominant social network, and it really could only take a powerhouse like Google to present a challenge at this point in time.

But really, there are too many choices now as to where to look up contacts, share links and photos, and update status messages. Where will it all end? And who will come out as the de facto choice for social networking?

The easy answer would seem to be Facebook. It's the status quo of social networking with over 500 million members strong - possibly 750 million at this point.

However, Facebook isn't beloved by everyone, including its own subscriber base. In fact, it was just placed in a top 10 list of the most hated companies in America. You know it's bad when your company in that group includes airlines and cable companies.

Additionally, every time Facebook rolls out a face lift to its user interface or new features seen as threats to privacy, there's always an inevitable and very loud backlash.

On the other hand, Google has certainly found itself targeted by users and been criticized about privacy settings and issues. And not every Google release has found an fan base. Remember Google Wave? We'd prefer not to.

However, Google has presented the first serious challenge to Facebook in years with a platform that doesn't look that far off from Facebook itself. It also integrates several of Google's existing features, such as Buzz and Gchat.

Google+ has already caught on remarkably quickly for a new social networking tool set that is still running on an invite-only basis, but that's because it has the brand name and the force to roll out a complex (yet seemingly simple) platform.

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SpringCM Enterprise CMS Adds Offline Sync, More Case Management Features

pringCM has announced the latest release of its popular cloud ECM platform. The latest update to SpringCM's platform adds offline synchronization and improvements in its case management functionality.

What's New in SpringCM

New capabilities for Dynamic Case Management include the following:

• Automates more processes using SmartRules to create new tasks, update cases, or send messages based on best practices and corporate policies
• Captures case correspondence and drives communications consistency with the Email Task feature
• Facilitates getting more work done with fewer clicks and stays on top of upcoming work with the My Tasks widget
• Monitors team workloads and improves productivity using performance indicators with case reporting

In addition, the software now includes the capability to keep content available offline and synchronized with the SpringCM cloud repository.

Where Does It Fit In

It's interesting that this quarterly release of SpringCM focuses primarily on Dynamic Case Management, which was just introduced in April. One wonders whether these are features that didn't quite get completed in time for the April announcement, or if users found the features it was originally shipped with inadequate.

SpringCM, with its focus on the cloud, continues to defy industry predictions that only 10% of enterprise content will be cloud-based by 2015. This has also led it to be positioned in the Visionaries section in Gartner's most recent ECM Magic Quadrant.

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Zend Server 5.5 Beta Advances PHP Automation

Enterprise PHP vendor Zend is now testing a new version of its Zend Server in an effort to improve PHP application deployment automation.

Zend Server 5.5 will be the first major update to the PHP middleware platform since the 5.0 release in October of 2009. The Zend Server 5.5 release has a key focus on helping to improve automated PHP app deployment.

"Zend Server 5.5 continues a focus of ours on enabling the strong connection between development and operations," Zend CEO Andi Gutmans told InternetNews.com.

One of the new features in Zend Server is the enablement of management software that can automate the setup of clusters.

"So if you're using something like Puppet or Chef you can easily provision and use Zend Server and then programmatically register and un-register Zend Servers within a production or development environment," Gutmans said.

Gutmans explained that the server registration process takes care of replicating sessions and high-availability. He added that if a new server comes up and is registered in a cluster, Zend Server automatically deploys the application and configures the server.

"What we're really enabling is the automation of building Zend Server in a cloud environment or on bare metal," Gutmans said.

Gutmans noted that the new application deployment feature in Zend Server 5.5 is the most requested feature that his company has had for the product in the past few years. He added that in general he has seen a lack of best practices around deployment as well as a breakdown between how developers build and test versus how applications come into production.

"We've created a common package for your whole application that has metadata in it that defines what needs to be available in the production environment," Gutmans said. "For example, what extensions should be running and what php.ini directives need to be turned on."

Gutmans added that developers can now build an application exactly the way they want it deployed in production. The actual deployment can be done programmatically or though a user interface to the PHP cluster.

"We're storing the application and its configuration in a central repository and new servers that come up pull the information down and provision automatically," Gutmans said.

Going a step further, Gutmans said that there is a deployment tool that helps developers to build packages. Additionally, the system will be worked into the Zend Studio PHP IDE workflow.

"From our point of view, this is a must-have feature as we continue to push out our PHP application platform in the cloud," Gutmans said.

Zend Server 5.5 is currently in beta and is expected to be generally available before the end of the year.

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Facebook adds Skype video chat feature

Facebook has announced a partnership with Skype to add video chat to the social networking site.

The move is likely to be seen as a shot across the bow of Google, which recently launched a Facebook rival, Google+, also featuring video calling.

This is not the first time Facebook and Skype have teamed up - they already share some instant messaging tools.

Skype is in the process of being bought by Microsoft, which is a major shareholder in Facebook.

The new video-call service was launched by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who also revealed that the site now had more than 750 million users.

However, he said that the total number of active users was no longer a useful measure of the site's success.

Instead, the amount of sharing - of photographs, videos and web links - was a better indication of how people engaged with the site, explained Mr Zuckerberg.

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How many millions of people are already using Google Plus?

Some people, like yours truly, already love Google Pus (G+). There are also a lot of people who desperately want to be on G+ but haven't managed it yet. Some people have suggested that Google has been creating G+ hype with an artificial shortage of G+ invites, that Google could let the world in if they wanted too. I disagree. After all, would Google have left G+ go briefly haywire over the weekend if they really had the resources to keep everyone happy? I don't think so!

On Saturday, Google started spamming G+ e-mail inboxes with a flood of email notifications. What happened? According to Vic Gundotra, Google Senior VP of Social, which includes overseeing G+:

For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications. Hence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. Yikes.

We didn't expect to hit these high thresholds so quickly, but we should have.

Thank you for helping us during this field trial, and once again, we are very sorry for the spam.

That's a pretty mind-boggling admission. Google? Google!? Running out of disk space? Amazing!

So, how many users would it take to run G+ out of disk room anyway? It must have been a bunch, but, for now, we don't know how many uses G+ already has.

My friend Jason Hiner, better known to most of you as the editor-in-chief of TechRepublic, suggests, based on data collected by Mohamed Mansour, who created a tool to import Facebook friends information to Google, that G+ already had reached one million users. Not bad for a service that's not even two weeks old yet and is still in beta.

Actually, though, we now know thanks to Google Chairman Eric Schmidt that G+ has millions of users. How many millions?

Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com, a leading genealogy site, suggests, base on his research that G+ may already be closing in on 5-million users. By his preliminary calculations, Allen thinks in G+'s first full week the new social network is growing at a rate of 280%.

Perhaps the more interesting question though isn't how big G+ is now, it's "How big will G+ get?" On July 6th, Facebook claimed to have 750-million users. I wonder, I really do, if by this time next year G+ will have overtaken Facebook. I'm quite serious. G+ is that good.

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Oracle and Microsoft could cash in big on Android

With allegations that Google infringed on several patents in its Android operating system, two of the biggest beneficiaries of sales of mobile devices that use the technology could well be Oracle and Microsoft.

Both companies are seeking as much as a US$20 licensing fee per device from handset makers that choose to use Android. That'd be roughly double the amount that Google makes in search revenue, on average, from every Android device, according to Deutsche Bank analyst Jonathan Goldberg. Google gives away the Android operating system in hopes of generating that revenue.

Goldberg learned of Oracle's bid to get licensing fees over alleged Java patent infringement in Android by chatting with "various handset makers", he said. He declined to name them, except to say that "I think they are approaching everyone who has Android OS or apps".

Goldberg added that Oracle was seeking US$15 to US$20 per Android device as part of an early adopters program that would, in theory, indemnify those companies in the event that Oracle wins its patent infringement lawsuit against Google, filed last August.

"As far as I know, no one has signed up for this program," Goldberg said. "They are, and I am too, particularly impressed with Oracle's spirit."

Oracle did not respond to a call and e-mail. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on the claims, except to repeat an earlier statement that "Oracle's 'methodology' for calculating damages is based on fundamental legal errors and improperly inflates their estimates". (For a great primer on Oracle's fight with Google, read this article by my colleague, Stephen Shankland, from last summer.)

Meanwhile, Microsoft too continues to eke more money from Android device makers. Last year, the software giant convinced its longtime handset partner, HTC, to license Microsoft's patents to use in its Android devices. Citi analyst Walter Pritchard estimates that HTC is paying Microsoft US$5 per device.

In the last few weeks, Microsoft inked four more licensing deals with Android device makers, albeit much smaller ones than HTC. It's also sued two other giant Android device makers--Motorola and Barnes & Noble--which wouldn't capitulate to Microsoft terms.

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Indian IT services to hit $9.5B in 2011

The IT services market in India is set to reach US$9.5 billion in 2011, making it the third-largest domestic market in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a report by Gartner.

In a Monday statement, the research firm stated that the forecasted revenue is an 18 percent increase over 2010's US$7.6 billion. The market is expected to grow to US$15 billion by 2014, it added.

Gartner noted that while India's IT services market was small compared to the that of the United States and United Kingdom, market conditions are buoyant and it has the potential to expand further with "as a service"-type offerings.

"India's domestic IT services are a large emerging market in high growth mode," said Arup Roy, principal research analyst at Gartner. "Coupled with other factors such as openness to adopt technology and a maturing sourcing approach, it represents an attractive target potential for providers of all sizes."

According to Roy, the top 10 providers have a cumulative market share of 42 percent, indicating a highly fragmented market served by several small players and no large, dominant player. Yet, this scenario varies widely by verticals.

At the moment, four industry verticals account for 85 percent of IT spending: banking, financial services and insurance, telecommunications, manufacturing and government. Other industry verticals offer good growth opportunities as they begin opening up and engaging with external service providers, the analyst firm noted.

The Indian market, it noted, consists of a good mix of local providers and multinational corporation (MNC) players--six of the top 10 providers are Indian while foreign companies make up the other four.

India's growth fundamentals are on solid footing and could support sustainable growth and development in the future, Gartner added, citing the country's high GDP growth rate as key to its sustained IT services growth potential. In addition, government infrastructure projects will strongly drive IT, in conjunction with the expansion of the financial services and manufacturing verticals.

Roy advised new market entrants to be careful about the opportunities they pursue, given that the IT services clients tend to focus on cost rather than value for money. Another area to be wary about was scoop creep, he said.

"There is still room for new players and the barrier to entry is quite low," said Roy. "Hence, [the Indian] market presents an immense opportunity for any large credible player to consolidate its position and grab market share in a big way.

"The cost of labor and infrastructure in tier 1 cities had been rising but it still is one of the lowest in the world."

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WordPress 3.2 gets a dose of Zen

From the 'Freshly Pressed Open Source Goodness' Files:

WordPress 3.2 is now out (officially announced on July 4th), a little it more than four months after 3.1 came out.

The big deal this time around is the new zen approach to a minimalist user interface when writing content. It's a great idea.

After all, when you're in the system trying to post something why do you want to be distracted by other 'stuff'?

Sure, when you're doing site administration you want all the buttons, but when you're job to get content out the door, you don't really want any distractions.

Beyond the minimalist writing interface, this release is all about optimizations. WordPress 3.2 offers the promise of faster page loads and overall optimizations to to the WordPress filesystem. No I personally won't be uninstalling WP-Cache (or W3) anytime soon, but having the core system faster is always a feature that users want. Who wants a slow site?

Since at least the WordPress 2 release, updating WordPress installs has really been a simple point and click exercise (most of the time...). Now devs are providing support for incremental upgrades which hold the promise of even faster and easier updates.

Now with all this power there is a catch.

WordPress 3.2 is the first WordPress release EVER to not support PHP4. While this may not sound like a big deal to those of us who upgraded our servers four plus years ago, there are still plenty of shared hosts that run WordPress on PHP4.

Yes it's long since past the time that PHP4 should have been put to bed, but hey maybe by having WordPress finally stop supporting it, those old servers will start to disappear.

And oh yeah, this release won't run on IE6 either. Another nail in the creaky coffin that is IE6.

The other great thing that WordPress has been doing well for a long time is actually explain their features and new releases in a way that anyone can understand. Rather than paraphrase their message, check out their video below.

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Web Optimization: Managing Your Task List

The first step in top task management is carrying out a task situation analysis in order to understand the whole range of customer tasks that exist. I call this list of customer tasks the Longlist, and discussed longlist information sources last week. The next step is managing your task list.

Collect your task longlist in a spreadsheet with the following headings:

• Tasks: This is where we place the task word/phrase
• Duplicates: This column contains task phrases that are very similar to each other.
• Class: This is the broad classification the task phrase fits into.
• Source: This is where we found the task phrase. For example, "Top 100 Search Results".
• Internal Source: This identifies the person who put the task on the list. (Sometimes a number of people will be involved in the research process.)

As we assemble a longlist we may enter words that are exact duplicates or near duplicates. For example, when we were assembling the NHS Choices longlist we found that "Women's health" was on the BBC health website and on webmd.com. That is what you would call an exact duplicate and you would eliminate one of them.

Then, we found that we were left with a number of terms that were essentially duplicative.

Women, Women's health, Women's health information

At this early stage in the process, we don't need to delete any of these, but at some point we would have to choose one and delete the others.

A larger point here is whether we should have a task connected with "women" at all because women are a category or segment of the population. If we do, shouldn't we have "men's health" and "children's health", as well as "old people's health"?

Here are some things to consider:

• It's not a good idea to have a task name that is very heavily associated with one particular demographic. It will likely get a high vote from that demographic but may not get a high vote from other demographics.
• To identify the top tasks of a particular demographic we add a question that allows users to categorize themselves. (For example: 'What is your gender'?) That way you can segment the data later and see if the top tasks are very different for each category segment or if there is overlap.
• It's not a good idea to have a word/phrase in the final list that contains many tasks because if it gets a high vote you can't be sure as to what exactly was voted for. Remember, task identification is about action; it's about helping you change your website so your customers can more easily complete their tasks. You need clear results from this list so you can act on them decisively.

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Microsoft Drop Conditional Comments in IE10

Microsoft added many features to Internet Explorer over the years. Several revolutionized the web forever (XMLHttpRequest, the DOM, XML tools, font embedding, browser add-ons). Some never caught on. Some were truly awful.

The team intends to remove several of the less-successful legacy features in IE10 (perhaps they read #7 in 10 Ways Microsoft Could Make Us Love IE Again?) I suspect you've never coded XML Data Islands and Element Behaviors, but you've almost certainly used Conditional Comments. They're about to disappear from IE forever.

Conditional Comments 101

Ensuring you web site or application works in all browsers is tough. It's made particularly difficult when you have to support older editions of Internet Explorer. IE6 was released in 2001, IE7 in 2006, and IE8 appeared in 2009. Whatever your opinion of Microsoft, it's unreasonable to expect a 10 year old browser to render the same as Firefox 5 or Chrome 12.

Web developers are particularly scathing about IE6. Many months are spent building fantastic web sites and applications only to find they break in IE6 at the eleventh hour. Fortunately:

• IE6 bugs are well-documented and it's possible to overcome the majority of issues - especially if you test early and often.
• Microsoft provide Conditional Comments so developers can add custom CSS and script fixes which target a specific version of IE.

It loads a shim in IE8 and below which allows the developer to style new HTML5 elements such as header, article, and footer. It's not required in IE9 and other browsers with native HTML5 support - they ignore the script.

Conditional Comments are incredibly useful but, personally, I always felt a little uncomfortable using them:

• They smell a little like browser sniffing - which stinks.
• They're rarely necessary. The majority of IE6 problems can be solved with a display:inline; here or a position:relative; there. While competing browsers don't require those properties, they don't have a negative impact other than a few bytes of extra bandwidth. I prefer my CSS properties in one place rather than distributed between two or more files.
• Conditional Comments are abused. I've had the misfortune to work on systems where developers created three or four separate stylesheets which targeted individual browsers. Simple property updates required changes to every file.

Why Remove Conditional Comments?

IE8 is normally well-behaved and you'll only require the HTML5 shim (see above). With a few CSS3 exceptions, IE9 renders as well as any other browser. Hopefully, IE10 will catch-up - or even overtake - Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.

Conditional Comments are not required. There's no need for "[if IE 10]" because pages will render (mostly) the same in all modern browsers.

That said, it's not the end of feature detection and progressive enhancement. Not every browser supports CSS3 transformations, web sockets, geo-location and client-side storage. Even with support, the user can often disable or refuse permission for an operation.

In addition, Conditional Comments will not disappear from IE6, 7, 8 and 9. You can still target those browsers should the need arise but it will become less necessary over time.

I applaud Microsoft's decision. It's a bold move since they could have easy kept Conditional Comments and I suspect its removal will horrify some developers. However, the company is adhering to its "same markup" philosophy and ensuring HTML, CSS and JavaScript just work regardless of the browser or version.

It's the right thing to do. Let's hope the demise of ActiveX, Compatibility View and the old IE7 toolbars won't be too far behind!

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Google wields data openness against Facebook

Google is accelerating efforts to make its new social network look like a more open and attractive alternative to Facebook.

The latest: Google will allow users to export a list of Web sites that they've recommended through the "+1" button.

While only a modest change, it highlights how Google is trying to use openness--the ability to extract your data from its servers with the click of a button--to differentiate itself from its far larger and more established rival.

"When your users can leave you you're going to work as hard as you can to keep them," Google engineering manager Brian Fitzpatrick told reporters during a video conference today using Google Hangout. A service announced last month called Google Takeout makes it easy to move to rival services.

Facebook, on the other hand, has taken a different approach to who owns user data. Last week, it blocked a tool written by developer Mohamed Mansour that allowed users to extract contact information their friends have shared with them.

This week, it blocked another by Open-Xchange, which allowed people to reconstruct their Facebook contact list on Google+.

It's not exactly a new debate: Google tried to ratchet up the pressure on Facebook to be more open last November, although the discussion at the time was about searchability rather than the possible threat of Google+. An early round in the skirmish took place as far back as 2008.

Facebook, of course, is in the enviable position of being enmeshed in the daily lives of hundreds of millions of users. The hassle and inconvenience of reconstructing a social network on a rival's service, coupled with what economists call network effects, is a significant barrier to Google+ becoming as successful.

Facebook does allow users to download much of their data, but not instantly and not in a format that can be easily imported to rival services. It's "not in an open portable format at all," says Fitzpatrick, the Google manager. When asked why it wasn't, he declined to speculate: "I have no explanation".

A spokesman for Facebook did not immediately respond to ZDNet Asia's sister site CNET's request for comment.

Facebook has taken some positive steps in the past, says Steve Repetti of the Data Portability Project, which advocates for ready data availability in a useful format.

"Now what they're doing is they're picking and choosing and removing functionality," Repetti says. "'We did it. But now we're undoing it because we don't want to benefit Google.'"

Mansour's now-blocked Chrome extension allowed users to copy the information your Facebook contacts have shared with you--name, e-mail address, phone number, birthday, Web site, address--then letting you save it as a spreadsheet file or import it directly into your Gmail address book.

It arguably ran afoul of Facebook's terms of service, which says: "You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission."

Repetti of the Data Portability Project says: "There has to be an element of accountability. If you say you're going to be open, be open. Even if you say you're not open, at least I know that going in."

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Mozilla Challenges Google: Open Source Chrome Isn't Good Enough

"There are people who claim that Mozilla does not have the guts to openly challenge Google in the same way the company attacked Microsoft in the mid-2000s. Mozilla's official competitive strategy can be described as almost being mushy in a time when the company needs to be more aggressive than ever to make its case. But the company gets more confident and its chairman has just told us that, while Google is the lesser of two evils, Firefox will have to evolve to sustain its role as the Robin Hood of the open web.

"Mozilla's direction for Firefox has been quite confusing lately. Firefox 4 was a catch-up play that ended up to be, more or less, damage control in a market environment that is problematic Firefox: It is caught in the middle of a cut-throat competition for market shares between Microsoft and Google."

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Java 7 Release Nears

After years of development, delays and ownership changes, Java is ready for its next major release.

The first release candidate for Java 7 was released this week, with general availability expected by the end of the month. In order to help celebrate the launch of Java 7, Oracle hosted a global event on Thursday highlighting the key features of the new language release. It's a release that brings Oracle together with rivals IBM and HP to evolve what has become the most influential programming language for enterprise application deployments.

"Probably the most significant thing is the fact that we're finally shipping it," Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java platform group at Oracle said. "It has been almost five years now and for various political and business reasons this release has taken some time."

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Oracle Improves VirtualBox 4.1

Oracle is continuing to push innovation forward on the open source VirtualBox project.

VirtualBox 4.1 is being officially released today, debuting new features that expand the use cases and deployability for the virtualization software. VirtualBox came into Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) as part of the Sun acquisition in 2010. The technology is used both as a desktop virtualization tool on the client side and as a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) delivery server side.

Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president, Linux and Virtualization Engineering at Oracle, told InternetNews.com that a key new feature in VirtualBox 4.1 is support for cloning. VirtualBox had previously supported only snapshotting, which has a different use case.

"What VirtualBox has always supported is that if you're running a virtual machine and you want to install some new apps and be able to go back to an older version, you take a snapshot," Coekaerts explained.

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Customer Experience: Measure Negative Behavior, Not Just Positive Behavior

The Web is not just another medium, another channel. More than anything it is another culture, another way of living and thinking.

If you sat a mathematics exam and got 3% would you be happy? Probably not. But those who create banner ads think a 3% click-through rate is amazing. In fact, they'd be ecstatic with a 1% click-through rate.

"Readers hate online advertisements," Patrick B. Pexton recently wrote in The Washington Post. "I do, too. We know they pay the freight, but they are intrusive, incessant and irritating. Encountering online ads is like being at a carnival and playing whack-a-mole.

"Look out! On your right, your cursor just touched a rollover ad, which suddenly fills your screen. Quick, move the cursor away. Oh no, you accidentally clicked on a banner ad, and you're navigating away from the news." That's according to Patrick B. Pexton, The Washington Post Ombudsman.

Online banner ads are becoming more and more intrusive in order to trick us into clicking on them. They'll do anything for a click-through. "Call it banner advertising or call it display advertising," Mitch Joel recently wrote, "if you look at the data: consumers are just not that into it."

So why do advertisers keep doing it? For the same reason spammers keep sending spam. 1% can still represent a lot of people. But what about the remaining 99%? How many of those people did you annoy? If you're a spammer you don't care. If you're not a spammer, you should.

A number of years ago the Microsoft Excel website made a very important breakthrough in its management model. It had been measuring satisfaction with its pages and was finding that practically all pages had at least some level of satisfaction. However, the overall website was struggling.

Then it did something very clever. It started measuring satisfaction and dissatisfaction with its pages and comparing the two. Now, it was getting a very different picture. 15 people might have been satisfied with Page A but 300 people were dissatisfied with it.

The world has changed. People have changed. A great many people today live hectic and interesting lives. These people are not on the Web as passive, submissive consumers waiting for a banner ad to signpost where they should go with their lives. These are active, driven, highly impatient people who know exactly why they're on the Web and what they want to do.

When was the last time you went to Google and said: "Hey, someone give me a word. I just don't know what to search for."

There's nothing wrong with advertising once it's contextual. We don't hate Google ads because they appear in the context of what we have just searched for. These ads are often helpful. If you book a flight to Rome then you see an ad for hotels in Rome, that's perfectly fine.

Today's consumer expects you to fit into their world. They have no desire to fit into yours. They do not like companies who annoy them. The next time your ad agency trumpets its 1% conversion rate, spare a thought for the 99% you annoyed. Because they may remember you.

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Google Toolbar drops support for Firefox. Why now?

Google has decided to drop support for Firefox for the Google Toolbar.

No, that's not a bad thing at all. The toolbar is a relic of any older era. An era when Firefox Sync didn't exist, an era when the awesomebar wasn't truly aweseome.

Apparently however, Mozilla is seeing the Google Toolbar issue as being a potential barrier to adoption for Firefox 5.

"We know that a large amount of users are not taking update offers to 5+ due to Google Toolbar incompatibility," Mozilla's recent meeting notes state.

And that's where the problem is. Firefox 5 (heck even Firefox 4) does everything that Google Toolbar does (albeit in a different way with non-Google services). You can sync bookmarks and you can search.

Browser users, for better or for worse, get used to a particular add-on and won't upgrade until supported. I know I didn't make the switch to Firefox 5 until late in the beta process when my fav add-ons finally became available, so I can sympathize.

I don't think it would have been all that difficult for Google to update the toolbar (or make a jetpack version) that supports Firefox. Yet they haven't.

Officially Google has said, "For Firefox users, many features that were once offered by Google Toolbar for Firefox are now already built right into the browser." And that is definately true. But that was also true for Firefox 4 (and Firefox 5 really is just an incremental update).

Add this toolbar issue to concerns from enterprises around Firefox moving to fast, and it could add up to some trouble for Mozilla. Or not.

The magic of the Firefox add-ons is that they are extensible, Google's APIs are relatively open, and a programmer more skilled than I might be able to replicate some of the things that users think they might be missing.

Or they could just move to Chrome.

Is Google making a play for more Chrome users here? Of course they are, under the guise that Firefox doesn't need the toolbar. Will Firefox loose some users? Probably. But I suspect that Mozilla, being the user-focussed group that they is already doing everything possible to keep users happy and with Firefox, regardless of what Google does.

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Make Any Text Area Speech-Input Friendly (Chrome)

Want to draft emails, blog comments and other little bits of writing online by speaking to your computer? I'm certainly intrigued by the idea and a newly posted userscript makes it easy to do for Google Chrome users. Userscripts are wonderful little bits of code that developers write to bring new functionality or interface elements into any webpage. One of the newest posted at Userscripts.org today is a speech-to-text script which I am using to write this blog post right now.

Created by Josh Mandel, who says he coded it with a broken arm, Speakable Textareas works pretty well! With just a few clicks, you can install the script in your browser and it will insert a little microphone icon you can click on to invoke the Google Chrome speech-to-text API. It's quick and dirty but it's still pretty cool.

Over the long-run, all of Google's speech-to-text technology (Chrome, Google Talk and probably some other projects) are no doubt being used to teach its giant brain in the sky about what words real people tend to use together and what they sound like when pronounced. Apple, Microsoft and (I believe) Facebook are all working on the same kind of technology. Thus the future of natural language processing, machine intelligence and accessible interfaces may be built.

In the meantime, this little script is a pretty cool way to hit that Google API and speak blog comments instead of typing them!

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Facebook Makes It Easier to Opt Out of Facial Recognition Tagging Feature

Facebook is treading carefully with its facial-recognition "tag suggestion" feature and now is making it easier for users to opt out of the feature according to Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen, via Bloomberg. When last we heard from Facebook's facial recognition feature it had just been opened released as a global feature but remained opt out as opposed to opt in, upsetting many users and privacy advocates across the world.

According to Bloomberg, Jepsen said that Facebook will begin running online ads today that link users to their privacy settings, allowing them to opt out of the service. Have you seen the ads to which Jepsen refers? Have you or will you opt out of the "tag suggestion" feature?

Facebook does not tag people in photos automatically. It tries to recognize when people are in photos and suggests that users tag them. What upsets privacy advocates and government regulators like Jepsen is that Facebook has been sharing personal information by default. Facebook reportedly gave Jepsen assurances that the facial recognition software was used purely in the suggestion feature and that it was not a way for other users to glean more information from user profiles.

Facebook users upload more than 100 million photos to the platform on a daily basis. A company called Divvyshot and founder Sam Odio were acquired by Facebook to help institute the facial recognition feature. Odio, the product manager for photos, left Facebook in June to create a new company called Freshplum.

Bloomberg also reported that Jepsen responded to problems with impostor accounts, making it easier to report and delete them. Facebook added "new language and links to a contact form to help users trying to report an impostor or fake profile." Part of Google Plus's trouble around using real names and not allowing brands on the platform at first had to do with authentication and dealing with potential impostor accounts.

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Only One Month In, Google Plus Shows Promise For Online Marketers

It may have only launched a mere month ago, but Google Plus is already showing signs of promise to online marketers, especially in its ability to drive traffic to other Websites.

Google's brand new social product has a long way to go before it poses a realistic threat to Facebook's massive marketshare, but having surpassed the 20 million user mark in under a month, its growth has been impressive. By comparison, it took Facebook and Twitter a few years to reach the same milestone.

While businesses are still patiently awaiting the arrival of its official brand pages, some can count on Google Plus to drive significant traffic to their Websites.

In one case study, Google Plus was shown to comprise over 15% of referrals to Web marketing blog Wordstream, beating LinkedIn's 9.8% and trailing not too far behind Twitter. Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've also seen Google Plus makes its way into our top sources of referral traffic in just a matter of weeks.

In a more extreme case, technology blog LAUNCH saw 67% of its traffic come from Google Plus in a single day, according to a post by its founder Jason Calacanis on none other than - you guessed it - Google Plus.

These early numbers come with an obvious caveat: the sites mentioned above are all publishers, whose content is more common for people to organically share via social media than, say, the "Products" page of a small business's Website. Just as with other social media channels, businesses are going to need a content and social marketing strategy that makes sense and serves them and their customers well in order to be successful when Google Plus brand pages finally do drop.

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Twitter starts injecting paid tweets into the stream

Twitter has stepped up its advertising efforts with a new program that puts promoted tweets right in front of where users are likely to be looking.

The new system takes promoted tweets--which are paid marketing messages from Twitter's business partners--and puts them up near the top of users' timelines, where they'd typically find the latest updates from accounts of those they're following. Twitter says users will only see these tweets once, and only if they're following that brand or organization. The company has also included a way to dismiss these from the stream, something that can't be done with regular messages.

"From the start, our philosophy around advertising has been simple: we put our users first and strive to create products that enrich the Twitter experience for every Twitter user," the company said in a blog post earlier Thursday.

Twitter says the new program is being tested with just a handful of companies like Microsoft, Starbucks, Dell, and Groupon, as well as nonprofits. Those companies pay each time an action is taken on that tweet, like clicking on it, retweeting it to followers, or replying directly to it in the form of an @reply.

Twitter launched its promoted tweets program last April in an attempt to provide "non-traditional" advertising, giving brands a way to pay for tweets to show up in the service's search results based on keyword. Twitter then noted that those same tweets would eventually show up in user streams and on third-party client applications.

Earlier this month, AllThingsD reported that Twitter was set to launch the new service by early next month, suggesting today's launch comes slightly ahead of schedule.

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3 Ways to Keep Your Data With You At All Times

It always happens: When traveling for business, you always forget to send yourself an important file or drag a presentation onto your flash drive at the last minute. The result? Frantic phone calls to a distant office or rummaging through old files to find a replacement.

I have taken to moving almost all of my active files to cloud services and, in some cases, I even duplicate these files between services, ensuring that if one site goes down I still have a few options left. Here are some of my favorite services when it comes to maintaining data while on the road.

Pogoplug - Right now I have a Buffalo Cloudstor drive (shown) at home that offers cloud access to every single file, video, and MP3 on the drive. It is, in short, my data dump away from home and uses a sharing service called Pogoplug to allow me to access, view, and share files that I've left at home. The drive has become my de facto backup location and is a little over half full with data from my home computer in my attic office.

Most important, however, is that the drive requires no PC access so you can shut down most of your office gear and leave the drive on the network, thereby saving energy.

Dropbox - Dropbox is a file syncing service that allows you to sync a single folder (or folders) between multiple computers. Any time you change something on one machine, those changes are reflected on every other machine connected to your Dropbox account. You can also maintain backups of your current files.

Dropbox has become the home for files that I'm always working on. All of my important, current projects exist there and they are synced in all of my machines. This is also useful for syncing configurations files among all of your computers. For example, I synced a program called QuicKeys' configurations for all of my machines, thereby ensuring that all of my keyboard macros were the same on every machine. Nerdy, but useful.

LetsCrate - Crate is a simple, useful service that you can use in real times of need. It is dead simple - you drag a file into the service and receive a link to that file. You can then download that file anywhere in the world. It is perfect for larger files that you may not be able to email and the drag-and-drop simplicity ensures that the sender isn't confused by passwords or folders.

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Will You Use Google's New Page Speed Service?

Google has announced their new Page Speed Service. In essence, it's a combination of proxy servers, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), and web page optimizers which Google states will produce speed gains of 25-60% for most websites.

The service is being offered to a limited set of web developers at no cost. After the trial period, Page Speed will be released to everyone and, although there are no details, "pricing will be competitive" (source: Official Google Code blog).

To use the service, it's simply a matter of registering and adding a new DNS CNAME record to your domain. As well as providing a gzipped proxy server for static files, the service can also rewrite your pages for web performance best-practices:

• CSS files can be combined, minimized, and moved to the HTML head
• JavaScript files can be combined and minimized using Google's Closure Compiler
• images can scaled and optimized

All features are optional so you can, for example, disable the Closure Compiler if it breaks your JavaScript code.

Google provides a page test comparison service at www.webpagetest.org/compare. It estimated that SitePoint.com's home page would enjoy a 13% speed increase - I suspect that's primarily owing to JavaScript file concatenation.

Tremendous or Troublesome?

Depending on the price, the Page Speed Service could be ideal for inefficient static pages running on slow servers. It may be more cost-effective than spending money on further development or hosting.

Unfortunately, there are a few downsides:

• Bare domains are not supported, i.e. you must use www.domain.com rather than domain.com. That's a shame - I've been dropping the "www" from my sites.
• HTTPS pages are not supported.
• Flash, streamed audio, streamed video and files over 50MB are not supported.
• POST requests greater than 2MB are not supported.
• You're unlikely to experience significant speed gains on web applications running server-side code.
• Domains hosted on Blogger, Google Sites or Google App Engine are not supported.

Speaking as a web developer, the service makes me slightly uncomfortable. Like many, I ensure my sites are optimized by combining files, minimizing the code, reducing HTTP requests and using CDNs where possible. For Page Speed to be attractive, I wouldn't want to lose control, configuration would have to be easy, I wouldn't want my code to be rewritten, and the price would have to be cheaper than upgraded hosting.

Risk is another factor which needs to be assessed. Will Page Speed offer additional redundancy or two points of failure? I suspect it will depend on the quantity of static vs generated content on your website.

Finally, are you willing to hand your website keys to Google? Their services are more reliable than most, but this is a new product which could experience teething problems. Conspiracy theorists will also see this as another step toward Google's global domination. Google Search considers page speed factors so could the company become an all-powerful web host which undermines sites not using their network?

Technically, Google Page Speed an amazing solution which should boost the download speeds for most sites - especially those which are inefficiently coded. However, I'm not convinced many good web developers will adopt it. And would bad developers understand the service or care enough to recommend it?

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Internet Explorer users have lower IQs: study

Using Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) to browse the web? Your IQ score is likely to be lower than someone using Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera.

A new study published by online psychometric testing company AptiQuant Psychometric Consulting Co. has found that a user's choice of web browser is related to their cognitive ability.

"There was a clear indication...that the subjects using any version of Internet Explorer ranked significantly lower on an average than others," said Aptiquant. Out of all the IE versions, "subjects using IE 8 [fared] a little better."

People using Opera, Camino and IE with Chrome Frame scored slightly higher than their not-so-bright Internet Explorer-using friends, suggesting that people with a lower IQ "tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers."

"There was no significant difference in the IQ scores between individuals using Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari; however, it was on an average higher than IE users," said Apitiquant.

More than 100,000 people in USA, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand took the online Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (IV) test in the space of four weeks and their IQ scores were correlated with their browser choice for the study.

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SEO Consulting with Field Experts Have Rising Expectations Day-by-Day

SEO is no child's play and while you might have a DIY website creator that is integrated with SEO or have software to spin articles and provide offsite SEO content

Commerce, CA Internet marketing tactics are never the same and are certainly not getting any easier for the myriad of live websites fighting in the battle of gaining web traffic and acquiring positive leads. If you have a website, congratulations, you have just introduced your brand name in the vastest directory osf websites registered online. It is more like a fraction of a broken needle in a haystack. What do you do then to boost up the web visibility of your website to influence your web traffic positively? Well, you suffice in SEO also known as search engine optimization. You may take the help of SEO consulting from experts or spend weeks and months bringing up your own SEO solutions. What is the actual problem then, you ask? Staying up and ready for the forthcoming SEO trend and discarding what is obsolete and yet only a few days old.

Internet marketing is not the same anymore, it gets more and more tough by the day as search engines start judging the credibility and search engine worthiness of your website based on quality and quality alone. This could be the quality of the content on the website or the quality of the content outwardly linked to the website or the quality of links associated with your website. What you need to expect your internet marketing consultant to do for you is to foresee the SEO marketing trends and all the associated internet marketing strategies that involve the web 2.0 design of viral marketing and finally fabricate a custom package of promotional strategies for your online business.

Internet marketing consulting from some of the best in the industry might seem a costly affair, but SEO requirements of each website depends on the nature of the business and the online inclination of the target audience through various web channels and many such business prospects of internet marketing. However, you still have lucrative choices in affordable and cheap internet marketing consulting from independent SEO consultants who are spread all over the internet. Small businesses can effectively outsource their internet marketing that is essentially web traffic-targeted, to ones who have immense experience as well as firsthand knowledge of the changing trends. How do you distinguish the best of the lot? Well, it truly depends on the way these internet marketing consultants have portrayed their work on their own website. It also can be judged with the kind of content available in the website in the form of blogs or social media content that offers an in-depth analysis of their expertise and their

knowledge of what is trendy as well as futuristic. They must be competent and confident enough to procure case studies and also must rank high in the search engines for their own website.

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Adobe 'Edge' Tool Could Replace Flash With HTML5

Adobe Systems today released a preview version of an HTML5 development tool called Adobe Edge. The tool will allow Web developers to build those "little beautifully designed jewels on the Web featuring animations," Devin Fernandez, Adobe Group product manager, told PCMag last week.

The work on Edge, which is available for developers to download from the company's Adobe Labs site, is something of an acknowledgement by the premier design software house that the Web is moving away from Flash. It is instead focusing on open-standard HTML5 and its many sub-standards, which are capable of creating the same effects in a non-proprietary manner via compliant Web browsers, without a plug-in.

Adobe has made Edge available to developers far earlier than it usually does, even before the beta stage, because of the evolving nature of HTML5 and its support in current browsers. This will allow the company to quickly address feedback from testers. Fernandez told us that Edge was "not even close to feature complete." Where possible, monthly updates will be issued. He also said that the final release would come some time in 2012.

Edge has a definite focus on the mobile Web-the fastest growing segment of Internet use-as shown in the tool's inclusion of the WebKit browser engine, which powers today's dominant mobile platforms: Apple iOS, Android, WebOS, and Blackberry. Despite this focus, the tool will also be able to create content for traditional desktop browsers that support HTML5, such as Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 9, and Safari.

Edge uses the timeline development metaphor that will be familiar to longtime Flash programmers. Adobe Fellow Mark Anders showed us the ease with which a company logo animated with text could be created and embellished in a matter of minutes. But the tool's output has nothing to do with Flash, instead generating HTML5 constructs such as SVG, JSON, and CSS3 to realize the animations. During the development process, coders can see exactly what output will look like, in a WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") view.

"Over the last year Adobe has delivered on several significant HTML5 milestones including contributions to jQuery, submitting code to WebKit, and enhanced HTML5 output in Creative Suite 5.5," said Paul Gubbay, vice president of Design and Web Engineering at Adobe. "Now, with Adobe Edge, we're taking our HTML5 tooling to a whole new level and look forward to getting some really useful feedback from the community over the next few months, as we refine the product."

Pricing, and an exact release date, has not yet been determined, according to Fernandez.

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Developers believe Google+ can beat Facebook

Available since just more than a month ago and still only in a testing mode, the Google+ social network has already convinced some developers that it will eventually catch up with rival Facebook.

The new quarterly survey of mobile application developers by Web development tool maker by Appcelerator and market research firm IDC found that two-thirds of the 1,621 respondents to the question "Can Google+ catch up to Facebook?" replied yes. The reason: more than 68 percent of the respondents believe Google's other assets--search, YouTube, and maps, among others--trump Facebook's social graph lead.

Of course, Google+, which remains a "project" for the Web giant that only lets users in via invitations, has 20 million users, a far cry from Facebook's 750 million users. It's traffic may already be dipping as tech fashionistas look for the next big thing. But developers, cognizant of disruptive changes that trip up market leaders, are always keen to latch onto the next breakthrough. The survey suggests that many believe Google+ could be it.

"Developers are constantly going back and forth on the current real market need and on what's coming up," said Scott Schwarzhoff, Appcelerator's vice president of marketing and one of the surveys co-authors. "Google+ poses an interesting opportunity that catches their eye."

Never mind that Google+ hasn't given developers a set of application programming interfaces to write to yet. The developers in the Appcelerator survey are already keen to write programs for the new service.

The survey found that 72 percent of the respondents plan to write to Google+ APIs in the next 12 to 18 months. That's just one percentage point behind the number that plan to use Twitter's APIs, and only 11 percentage points behind Facebook.

Why so much enthusiasm for a brand-spanking-new service that doesn't even offer APIs yet? The respondents were bullish on Google's innovation with Google+, noting the Circles feature that lets users segment their friends into different groups, such as family, co-workers, or soccer team, and direct updates specifically to those groups. What's more, these are mobile developers and they believe that Google will bake Google+ into its Android mobile operating system, making it easy for them to create programs for devices.

Schwarzhoff believes that mobile developers will predominantly add Google+ features to existing applications, rather than gin up new programs made specifically for the service. But those programs will take advantage of features such as Circles that, the respondents believe, will improve customer loyalty by enabling more targeted use of their applications.

"What you want to do is drive reuse of applications," Schwarzhoff said. "Any feature that helps me do that stands tall."

Appcelerator and IDC conducted the survey Jun. 20 to Jun. 22. The companies surveyed 2,012 developers who use Appcelerator's Titanium application development platform. Appcelerator said that 30 percent of the respondents classified themselves as independent developers and the other 70 percent came from business. And 43 percent of the respondents live in North America, 33 percent live in Europe, the remaining 24 percent are scattered throughout the rest of the world.

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Firefox could get even more Chrome style

Early design concepts for Mozilla Firefox indicate that the browser continues to bend toward the light emanating from Google Chrome. Designs released for the interface-focused branch of the nightly version of Firefox reveal a look that brings the browser even closer to looking like its Google competitor, although it definitely has its own approach.

The most notable changes come to the search bar, tabs, and add-ons. The search-specific search box, long a staple of Firefox, finally has been removed. Most likely this is because the designers have merged the search feature into the location bar. Mozilla told CNET when Firefox 4 launched in March that it has been slow to adopt the combined function search-and-location bar because of privacy concerns. While the combined functionality is available through add-ons now, it's hard to tell whether the unified search and location bar will be ready when the currently nightly, version 8, goes stable.

The designs also show that the in-focus tab will get rounded corners, practically identical to tabs in Chrome. However, background tabs will not look like their Chrome counterparts, instead retaining the current rectangular approach.

Add-on implementation will also develop closer to Chrome's icon-based approach, with add-on icons appearing next to the Home button on the left of the browser, and in a drop-down menu that's hidden behind a machine gear icon. That's cribbed directly from Google as it looks now, so that can be expected to change.

More importantly than how add-ons land in the interface, the mock-ups also show the ability to search for add-ons without opening a new tab, and the ability to drag-and-drop add-ons directly into the manager. That functionality does currently exist in Firefox, in that you can drag add-ons from your desktop into Firefox to install them, but this would be a fairly big under-the-hood change that would allow the feature to be extended to add-ons that aren't stored locally.

Full-screen Firefox would also get a refresh under the new designs. It would sport a single interface bar that would contain the location bar, Home button, tabs, and menu buttons. The Firefox design team, which published the screenshots, noted that they were designed to spark discussion and that, "Some of them are already out of date."

While the designs might be nothing more than a work in progress, they do indicate two things about the current state of browser development at Mozilla. For one thing, the design team has not been inactive and continues to refine the browser's look and feel. However, it also indicates that more than three years after its launch, and with a market share percentage that has yet to stop growing, Google Chrome continues to influence browsers beyond a mere need for speed.

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Developers get iOS 5 beta 5 for weekend fun

Apple released a fifth beta version of iOS 5 to developers on Saturday, a change from its usual habit of delivering such betas during the work week.

According to MacRumors, the release notes include some fixes but no major additions, save for a Hearing Aid Mode designed to improve compatibility between iOS devices and hearing aids.

The MacRumors item also says that like the beta 4 release, beta 5 is available as an over-the-air download but that users must first erase all content and settings. Apple suggests, also, that before installing beta 5, users back up devices with iTunes 10.5 beta 4 or through iCloud, and then restore. MacRumors adds, however, that some users have skipped the recommended process and been able to install the new beta version with no problems.

Nate of NatesTechUpdate on YouTube has posted a quick video that looks at some of the tweaks made in beta 5. And BGR has posted the full change log.

The previous beta version of iOS made its way to developers in late July as both a download and an over the air update. It brought with it Wi-Fi syncing for Windows users, the feature that lets users sync their iOS device with their iTunes library minus the cord, as long as it's on the same Wi-Fi network, and plugged into a power source.

Apple typically seeds several beta versions of its major software releases to developers ahead of time to work out any bugs and give the developers time to integrate new features and APIs into their applications.

iOS 5 made its debut at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Its headlining feature is an overhaul of the notifications system, alongside a new messaging platform called iMessage that lets iOS users text and chat with each other free of charge. The software is also deeply tied to Apple's upcoming iCloud service, which will be used to ferry photos, applications, and settings back and forth between iOS devices, as well as serve as a free backup solution.

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WordPress Now Syncs With Facebook Pages, But That Might Be a Bad Idea

Putting social media on autopilot is very seductive, but is it a good idea?

Blog publishing platform WordPress announced this afternoon that its users can now automatically cross-post links to their new blog posts to a Facebook page. Previously, the feature only allowed publishing onto a Facebook account's Wall. Pages are where organizations are supposed to communicate with a large number of interested parties.

WordPress.com's Scott Berkun said that this was one of the features most requested by users. The new feature is fast and easy - but is it something that publishers ought to use? Experience and study of the results of this kind of automation don't always make it look so good.

This spring, for example, The New York Times dumped its bot that automatically tweeted out links to all its articles in favor of labor-intensive human curation and publishing.

Last week our new Community Manager Robyn Tippins posted the results of a study she did comparing how our articles performed on Facebook when they were posted manually vs. when they were posted automatically. The results very clearly favored one approach over the other.

Put simply: when we posted each story both automatically and manually, we found that manually-posted links saw twice as much traffic and more than twice as much engagement in the form of sharing and links.

Tippins concluded thusly:

"Manual posting is a chore. What takes the app seconds to post may take me 10 minutes. And, because I am not continually at the computer, some of our content isn't posted immediately after posting. There are definitely cons to manual posting, but the increase in engagement and page views back to our site is worth the additional labor."

Some readers said in comments that Facebook ought to help publishers publish automatically at times when they will see the most engagement. Something like what startup SocialFlow does.

In fact, Facebook's algorithm punishes publishers whose content gets little engagement by making future updates from that publisher less prominent in a user's experience. Ought Facebook instead help publishers publish better? Perhaps the answer is self-evident: publishers seeking maximum engagement and traffic from their Facebook Pages need to post to those pages manually and make an investment of time and energy in cultivating community there.

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Facebook rolls out standalone mobile-chat app

Facebook today doubled down on its mobile efforts with a new mobile application that breaks out its messaging service into a single app.

Dubbed "Messenger", Facebook is making the app available for both Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Users can log in with their Facebook credentials to get access to existing chats and message threads from Facebook for interacting with them on the go. Included is group messaging, along with a component that lets users share photos and their location.

"The Messenger app is an extension of Facebook messages, so all your conversations are in one place, including your texts, chats, e-mails, and messages. Whether you're on your phone or on the Web, you can see the full history of all your messages," Lucy Zhang, Beluga co-founder and Facebook engineer, said in a post on Facebook's blog.

For all intents and purposes, the app is the same as Beluga, a group-messaging app Facebook acquired in March. In fact, the team that made Facebook Messenger is the same one that made that application, and the feature set reflects that. Nonetheless, this app is not replacing Beluga, according to Facebook.

"Nothing is going to change for Beluga right now," a Facebook representative told ZDNet Asia's sister site, CNET. "The apps will remain separate. We're considering ways to possibly migrate Beluga messages over to Facebook Messenger but have no specifics to announce at the moment."

The move to break out messaging is of special note, given the murmurs of Facebook doing something similar for photo sharing. A report in June from TechCrunch pulled together screenshots of such an app in the works that would combine sharing elements akin to apps like Instagram, Color, Picplz, and others, while tapping into Facebook's photo servers. That differs substantially from Facebook's existing mobile strategy, which has been to pull the various site features together into one experience, similar to what's available for desktop users.

Notably missing from this iteration, and Facebook's other apps, is video chat--a feature it launched as part of a partnership with Skype last month. In a question-and-answer session following the unveiling of that feature at Facebook's headquarters, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the two companies would begin work to bring that feature to mobile phones immediately.

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New Apple patents cover touch-screen, voice mail tech

With a lull in the battle of words between Google and Microsoft over patents held by tech giants, Apple has been granted 20 new ones, including patents that cover integrated touch screens and parts of the visual voice mail tool found on the iPhone.

The full list, dug up by Apple patent tracking blog Patently Apple, is definitely on the technical side, including printed circuit boards, metadata processing, and a system for estimating where a computer is located to improve online shipping experiences.

Of special interest though is one for an "integrated touch screen". The system, which Apple applied to patent in September, 2009 describes a way of stacking together touch-sensitive circuitry into the pixels of an LCD display to use "fewer parts and/or processing steps", as well as having the end result be "thinner, brighter, and require less power".

Perhaps a more interesting patent granted is the one for a "voicemail manager for (a) portable multifunction device." This one, which was filed for on June 28, 2007 (just a day ahead of the first iPhone's launch), details Apple's visual voice mail system, though particularly the option to pick a voice mail from a list and control its playback with a running counter.

That's the very same system Apple and AT&T were sued over following the iPhone's release for infringing on two patents owned by Klausner Technologies that cover selectively listening to voice mail messages. The two companies later settled with Klausner, whose patents are listed in the newly granted patent's references section.

One other patent granted to Apple covers the behavior of launching a Mac OS X application from the dock when dragging a file onto it, even if you're not explicitly running that app at the time. That same patent also covers synchronizing a user's dock settings from one machine to another, something Apple introduced as part of MobileMe, that's being phased out with the move to iCloud

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Google begins rollout of games on Google+

Google's not-so-secret gaming ambitions for its new social network are no longer under wraps.

Google today announced a gaming element for Google+, the social network the company launched at the end of June. The new offering lets Google+ users play games from within the social network, including some that can be played with other Google+ users.

Some of the launch games include Rovio's Angry Birds, PopCap's Bejeweled Blitz, and Zynga's Poker. It's a tiny collection compared to what's offered on Facebook, which has made a booming business by offering social games that players can click away at while remaining within the social network's walls.

According to Google engineering director David Glazer, the initial batch of games was intentionally kept small so as to "get the kinks out of our APIs". Glazer said Google would be adding more developers and features "in small steps" ahead of a public release.

The release comes just a few weeks after a Google+ help page cropped up detailing a "Games Stream". Before that, snippets of site code were discovered that mentioned game invites, along with a Google Games logo that was being hosted behind the scenes. In addition, a Google job posting sought a product manager for a "brand-new business" called "Games at Google".

When will users get access to games? In a post announcing the feature, Vic Gundotra, Google's senior vice president of engineering, said that the feature is being opened up to the Google+ community "gradually" and that everyone would be getting it "soon". The social network itself remains invite only, requiring users to sign up for access as Google expands what it's called a "field trial".

To combat game-related score updates from clogging up user feeds, Google says people will only see updates if they play games on the service, keeping those who don't from seeing them at all.

"If you're not interested in games, it's easy to ignore them. Your stream will remain focused on conversations with the people you care about," Gundotra wrote.

Facebook offered a similar tweak to its own news feed late last year after noting that "tens of millions" of wall posts related to applications were being deleted by users who no longer wanted to see them. Both that and Google's approach keep it more limited based on the audience.

In related news, Facebook is said to be planning to announce updates to its gaming platform on Friday, according to AllThingsD.

Google+ hit 25 million users last week according to a report from ComScore. That report pegged Google's current growth rate at about 1 million users per day, growing at a faster rate than both Facebook and Twitter in each of those service's early years.

Update at 1:47 p.m. PT: Google has posted a promotional video of the new gaming portion of Google+. It demos how games show up on the service and how users can post information from those games to their circles.

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Most SSL Sites Vulnerable

SSL certificates and encryption are supposed to protect websites and users, but there is a catch. For SSL (secure sockets layer) to work properly it needs to be properly configured. According to new research from security firm Qualys presented at the Black Hat security conference last week, the majority of SSL secured sites are not in fact fully secured. The new Qualys research builds on a study that Qualys did last year that found configuration issues with SSL certificates.

"Initially we enumerated all public SSL servers and we looked at how they were configured, but there was always something missing," Ivan Ristic, security researcher at Qualys, told InternetNews.com. "That missing 'thing' was that we wanted to perform a deep analysis of how Web applications are implemented."

Ristic noted that there are many things that can be done incorrectly at the Web application level to negate SSL security. As part of the Qualys study, Ristic analyzed the 300,000 most popular SSL secured sites in the world, looking for SSL related flaws and found a number of SSL flaws including the use of insecure cookies as well as mixing insecure traffic in with secured traffic.

"In examining the 300,000 websites we looked for those that redirect to SSL immediately, since that's the only way to be secure," Ristic said. "If you have a mix between some portion of encrypted and unencrypted than you're at risk from session hijacking."

The Qualys survey found that only 20 percent of the surveyed sites properly re-directed to SSL, leaving 80 percent or 240,000 sites at risk. "We didn't have to try very hard to find problem when we did this research as problems are everywhere," Ristic said.

The other issue that Ristic found was that most forms on the surveyed sites, where users enter data were unencrypted. According to Qualys's survey, 54 percent of surveyed sites that had a login form, sent the form data over insecure HTTP.

"That means that if you're in a rogue environment an attacker could modify a form on the fly without you noticing," Ristic said.

The usage of declarative protection measures was another key area of Web application security that the Qualys study examining.

"Declarative protection measures are items that developers don't need to be aware of and are items that a system administrator can often configure," Ristic said. "Declarative protection measures tell browser what to do, and what not to do."

One example of a declarative protection measure is the use of the secure flag for cookies. Ristic explained that even for sites that are 100 percent SSL encrypted, if they don't set the secure flag on their session cookie, those cookies can be sniffed by an attacker.

"There is a trick that you employ as a man in the middle, where you basically force the victim's browser to give you the session value for a cookie," Ristic said.

Ristic explained that the secure cookie flag is supposed to be set in the application itself. Setting a secure cookie is as easy as adding the word 'secure' in the settings for the cookie. Qualys' examination only found that 14,506 or approximately six percent of their survey base had properly configured secure cookies. Put another way, 94 percent of SSL cookies could be at risk.

"There are so many of these problem and no matter how you slice it, so many sites are vulnerable," Ristic said.

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Getting Started with the Blueprint CSS Framework

embers of the Web development community tend to fall into two distinct competency categories: programmers and designers. Rare is the individual who can claim membership to both. Despite continued attempts throughout the early years of my career to join this elusive group of dual citizenship, it eventually became clear my design skills were so lacking that I would forever remain a member of the former class. Even given this realization, it is simply not possible for a programmer to completely avoid the Web design process. Some level of design proficiency is going to be required whether you're building a prototype, modifying an existing blog or CMS template, or are working solo on a client project.

In light of such inevitability, I tend to spend a fair amount of time searching for tools which remove many of the design decisions I'd otherwise be forced to (poorly) make. Once such tool which has been of inestimable value over the past few years is Blueprint CSS, and open source CSS framework which performs several crucial tasks, among them:

• eliminating cross-browser stylization differences by resetting styles
• providing useful typography defaults
• defining a typographic baseline
• providing a print-specific stylesheet

Additionally, Blueprint CSS provides a very intuitive approach to building grid-based layouts, and a pluggable architecture, which developers are using to extend the framework in interesting and useful ways.

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IE9 safest browser against malware

To provide a safer Web experience, browser makers today include reputation systems to filter out socially-engineered malware and according to a new study released Tuesday, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) offers the most robust protection.

Conducted by independent network testing and security consultancy firm, NSS Labs, the study revealed IE9 blocked off an "exceptional" 99.2 percent of live threats thrown at it globally, between May 27 and Jun. 10 this year. Comparatively, Google's Chrome 12, which came in second out of five browsers evaluated, managed to ward off 13.2 percent of the malware, while Mozilla's Firefox 4 and Apple's Safari 5 tied at third with 7.6 percent. Opera 11 came in last at 6.1 percent.

Socially-engineered malware is a widespread problem that afflicts about one-third of Internet users worldwide, according to NSS Labs.

To facilitate the research, the security firm created a "live" environment to simulate user experiences under real-world conditions and selected 1,188 malware-ridden URLs for the test.

Adopting reputation system filters

NSS Labs stated that all five browser makers made use of free, browser-based reputation systems--which feature a "strong use of cloud technologies"--to assist in the fight against socially-engineered malware. However, the study showed that not all vendor implementations and daily operations yielded the same result.

For example, Microsoft's development of its SmartScreen filter which has two components, URL Reputation and Application Reputation, paid off. The study revealed that with only URL Reputation turned on for IE9, Redmond's browser achieved a protection rating of 96 percent. With both components turned on, that number went up to 99.2 percent.

"The significance of Microsoft's new Application Reputation technology cannot be overstated," NSS Labs surmised. "Application Reputation is the first attempt by any vendor to create a definitive list of every application on the Internet."

This list of applications is "dynamically created and maintained", the consultancy firm said, adding that armed with this new capability, users can better discern malware and potentially unsafe URLs from reputable ones.

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LinkedIn launches HTML5 site, revamps apps

More companies are shifting to building mobile sites in HTML5. Adobe Systems recently debuted its Edge tool set in public preview mode for developers interested in creating motion and interactive graphics written natively in the language.

Although this isn't quite the same as Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and others being relatively forced into HTML5 by Flash-resistant Apple for selling products on mobile sites, LinkedIn is getting on board with HTML5 with a new "experience" that can be viewed in nearly any mobile Web browser.

The HTML5-optimized version, along with updated iPhone and Android apps, are getting entirely new user experiences that are touted to be faster, simpler, and better overall than previous versions.

Specifically, that means:

• Mobile apps will be between two and ten times faster across all features
• Apps are organized around four primary areas: Inbox,Updates, Groups & More (i.e. People You May Know feature), and You (i.e. user profile, connections, etc.)
• The Updates news stream is at the front of the app so that users can stay up-to-date more easily with connections

For those who would prefer to point their mobile browsers to the HTML5 page--which is actually still in preview mode--visit touch.linkedin.com. More features from the full site are expected to be brought over to the mobile versions in the coming months.

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Google's New Mobile Photo-Sharing App Groups Images By Theme

Photovine, Google's answer to the mobile photo-sharing craze, went live in the iTunes App Store today.

The app, which is only available on iOS to start, puts a somewhat unique spin on social photo publishing by grouping images into common themes, or "vines." Vine topics can be straight-forward, such as the currently popular "Cutest Dog" vine, or it can leave a little more room for creativity, like "Things I Love About Summer" or "What's Going On Here?"

Photovine foregoes the artistic, vintage-style filters of popular photo apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic and instead focuses on this thematic grouping of photos. Think of the role photo-tagging plays on a service like Instagram, but pull that feature foward and make it central to the way the app works and you have the concept of "vines."

You can start by browsing vines and finding ones you want to contribute to or by simply snapping a photo from within the app and then searching for a vine by name before you post it. Once published, your photo will be displayed publicly both within that vine and from your profile.

The app's interface is rather nicely designed, even if it does bear a striking resemblance to the UI of Piictu, another photo-sharing app.

If the design doesn't remind you of Google's usual aesthetic, that's because the app came from the team at Slide, a social startup they acquired last year.

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Firefox Versions 6, 7, 8 Available for Download Early

The latest versions of the Firefox (news, site) browser, following its new rapid-number versioning system, were made available over the weekend for download, a couple of days ahead of the official launch.

A Fox Out of the Box

The new official version of the Firefox web browser, badged as 6.0 is now available to download from the Firefox FTP site, ahead of the official launch on Tuesday 16. Using a new, more Google-like, numbering system, you can also jump into the beta stream and try out versions 7 and 8 (using the Aurora version) as well, which offer a small number of upgrades, depending on how brave you're feeling.

Version 6.0 offers a decent speed increase, reckoned to be around 20% in some instances, plus coloring of the domain to highlight secure or known sites. A permissions system will help users choose what information you want to share with certain sites.

Firefox 7 is due for release in September with version 8 out in November, making it look pretty numerically healthy compared to Internet Explorer 9 and Google Chrome 14, if you want to play their silly number games.

Developers should be checking their plugins and sites for compatibility, as a whole list of them appeared as incompatible during our test installation. Aside from the new color domain feature, there's little to ooh and aah over, suggesting you need to look at the likes of RockMelt if you want something new from your browser.

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Form a learning plan for an HTML5 future

The trend toward using Web technologies for application development, even outside of the Web browser, is here to stay. The recent revelation that Windows 8 will have provisions for writing apps using the HTML5 technologies merely cements this shift in the development world. So the question is: How are you going to deal with it?

If you haven't been following closely, it is easy to wonder why and how Web technologies are suddenly being cast in the role of desktop application development platforms. In the HTML5 standard that is being finalized, there are a number of new items that add on real application development capabilities to HTML's existing document formatting. In the past, big JavaScript frameworks and browser plugins were needed for some fairly trivial functionality.

HTML5 changes the game by adding support for things like video streaming, multithreaded and asynchronous processing (via the "Web Workers" message passing system), direct communications through sockets, and more.

While the idea that a document format standard has these capabilities may be horrifying to some (including myself), this is the direction that HTML is headed in, and it has backing from Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Adobe and more. In addition, the various frameworks out there make it very easy to directly connect Web applications to backend Web services. As a result, HTML5 is now as capable as technologies like Silverlight, Flash, Flex/AIR, and JavaFX for many tasks (though there are still some things that those technologies do better).

Here are the technologies that you will want to learn to get started:

HTML5: While HTML5 may not be a fully finalized standard yet, it is not changing very much at this stage. Right now, it is usable and has a decent amount of implementation in browsers. You should start learning it now.

CSS: If you are not already familiar with CSS, now is a good time to learn it. Browser support keeps improving, and Internet Explorer 6 is now a small enough portion of the market that many developers feel safe in ignoring it.

Web services: Every major server-side development language has a framework or set of libraries for easily producing Web services, such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in .NET. It should not take much learning to understand the basics. You will want to especially learn how to produce JSON output, which is quickly becoming the lingua franca of Web applications. Also make sure that you understand RESTful Web services. While they may be more work to consume than SOAP services are in a modern development environment, they are much more universally accessible.

JavaScript: The new application development paradigms require a lot more JavaScript knowledge than it takes for traditional ASP.NET or similar development requires. jQuery: jQuery has become the client-side development framework to use; it seemingly can do it all. With an extensive set of plugins, if there is a client UI trick you need to try, there is a good chance that jQuery can do it for you.

These technologies form the basis of a number of different development systems now. Mobile web sites are a good way to reach the most mobile users with the least amount of effort. Tools like Appcelerator's Titanium allow you to use web technologies within its system on a number of platforms, including mobile and desktop. Other systems, like OutSystem's Agile Platform (disclaimer: I have a number of ties to them that are explained in my disclosure) wrap libraries like jQuery to make developing web apps for desktop or mobile use extremely easy.

Windows 8, while details are still murky, looks like it will be using Internet Explorer 9 (or whatever version is current by then) as a runtime environment around HTML5 technologies to act as local applications outside of an obvious browser window. One would presume that these apps would have enhanced privileges, access to local resources, and other opportunities to behave more like native applications.

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