Google has just announced that its powerfully social Friend Connect features are now available for open-source content management systems Drupal and Joomla . Google Friend Connect (GFC) allows sites with these CMSes to integrate many social features without having to write any code. The impact of the integration has the potential to be significant, as Drupal in particular is one of the most widely-used content management systems in use on the Web today, powering sites from WhiteHouse.gov and NASA.gov to TheOnion.com and websites for celebrities and musicians like Britney Spears and Eric Clapton. Joomla is used by such institutions as Harvard, MTV and Citibank. Sponsor Friend Connect essentially allows site visitors to become site members by using profile information from services such as Google, Yahoo!, Twitter and more. With user accounts authenticated via OpenID, site administrators can add Friend Connect's social bar, a site members gadget, the Friend Connect comments gadget or recommendations in any part of the site they choose. In addition to adding social gadgets, Friend Connect also allows site admins to conduct polls, monitor community growth, create and distribute email newsletters, run ads through AdSense, export user data for a site's entire community (as XML or JSON) or create their own apps using the GFC APIs . "Even site owners without programming experience can add these plugins," writes developer and open-source aficionado Mauro González in Google's Social Web blog post. "Now that Friend Connect is integrated with these popular open source CMS platforms, site owners can make registration easier for users and offer them a set of social features - all without writing a single line of code." GFC represents an interesting - and perhaps underused - suite of tools in an increasingly competitive space. Many site owners are adding social features to blogs and sites through systems such as JS-Kit's Echo or Disqus , and Joomla and Drupal both have many extensions and plugins to allow for the same kinds of features and functions. Still, making GFC available for the CMSes that power many highly visible sites around the Web might do a lot of good for that product. Overall, we see this announcement as indicative of a set of trends: Portable user identities, highly interactive content, portable communities and open-source software. What do you think: Will more site users be integrating Friend Connect to allow for more social website experiences? Let us know your opinions in the comments. Discuss

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Google Brings Friend Connect, Social Features to Drupal & Joomla

AT&T has announced a new line of Android-based smartphones for 2010. Dell , HTC and Motorola will make the five new devices, which are scheduled to be released during the first half of 2010. Endgadget is predicting that AT&T will be using the Motorola Backflip, while Slashgear has confirmed that the Mini 3i will be the choice for Dell . The other three, Endgadget says, will most likely go to HTC. Sponsor The announcement is good for AT&T customers who wanted an Android phone but are held under contract with the company. Up until now, AT&T has offered the iPhone and a variety of Palm and Blackberry devices, but nothing operating the Android OS. The company made the announcement today at CES where they also announced new initiatives to increase the number of applications available to their customers. To this end, the company is offering a new software developer kit and is looking to sign new distribution deals in order to offer its phone apps worldwide. Nokia also announced today that its Ovi mobile application store will be available to AT&T customers in the United States. Full details can be found in the company's press release . Discuss

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AT&T Comes Over to the Android Side

Respected industry thought leader, Joseph Smarr, announced on his blog today that he is leaving Comcast-acquired Plaxo to join Google and help drive the company's next steps in the social web. Smarr has been a key innovator in the OpenID , Oauth and related technical movements. Smarr's work is all about enabling innovation by making it easy for users to move data from site to site. Sponsor While noting Google's support for specific open web technologies, Smarr also said: "Getting the future of the Social Web right - including identity, privacy, data portability, messaging, real-time data, and a distributed social graph - is just as important, and the industry is at a critical phase where the next few years may well determine the platform we live with for decades to come. " Smarr was the first non-founding employee of Plaxo, a dynamic contact management service that was once the darling of Silicon Valley, and then became its spammy boogeyman, and was finally acquired by Comcast 18 months ago . Plaxo was co-founded by Napster co-founder Sean Parker and was backed by Sequoia Capital, the fund that backed Google and YouTube. Chris Messina , fellow open-web leader and the self-described evangelist that helped turn Smarr from the dark side of Plaxo's early days ("champions of the open web can come from all corners," he told us), said of the move: "Smarr joining Google is a logical next step for him - I think he's done great work at Plaxo with John McCrea, but advancing the open web has not been able to be his priority since he took on the CTO role there." Kaliya Hamlin , who says she introduced Smarr to the Identity community, said of his move to Google: "His spirit and energy to get things done, work across company boundaries and a deep commitment to open standards innovation will be a great asset for Google. One thing that really stands out for me was his innovation with Microsoft on the Portable Contacts API. That idea originated at the Data Sharing Workshop seeking to make progress on what was possible and within six months under his leadership it was complete." OpenID leader Scott Kveton said this announcement is just the beginning. "That's great news," he told us, "and just the first of more to come I hear. It's going to be down to Google, Microsoft and Facebook. They are hiring all of the people building the open web. I'll be curious to see what kind of impact it has." Smarr photo by Adactio . Discuss

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Google Hires Open Web Leader to For Social Initiatives

A storm of news points to a future of frictionless publishing and subscription, across platforms. Google just announced that its FeedBurner RSS publishing service now supports automatic publishing to a Twitter account. If you're among the many people who use the service Twitterfeed (like CNN, the WhiteHouse, ReadWriteWeb, etc.) then you may very well find that startup expendable starting now. That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this and a series of related announcements over the past few days. Sponsor The new feature looks relatively sophisticated and will use a new URL shortener, goo.gl . FeedBurner has not proven the most reliable service in recent years and is now part of the ad network AdSense, but the little startup Twitterfeed isn't always reliable either. It does, though, have more incentive to innovate and work in user's interests. Ultimately, the service you use to publish content updates to Twitter is just a small part of a much bigger story. The Twitter/FeedBurner integration uses secure OAuth authorization, so you don't have to give Google your Twitter password. It will check the links coming through that shortened URL for malware and bad sites. Right now other apps won't be able to use Goo.gl, just Feedburner and Google Toolbar, but that might change in time. Consider this announcement side by side with the WordPress announcement this weekend that WordPress blogs can now be posted to and read from Twitter clients , the rumor today that Facebook is experimenting with its own URL shortener , this afternoon's announcement that the ability to expose your geographic location is now live in Google Toolbar and now longer a Labs product and last week's go-live of real-time search on Google. All of this combined says one thing to us: the web is getting a whole lot faster and much more free of friction, quickly. WordPress, Google, Twitter and Facebook will force each other to agree to common standards for reading and writing content updates, those updates will be delivered in real time and the standards will allow an ecosystem of 3rd party client software to proliferate and play along with the big guys. Authentication is being done by OAuth, real-time feeds by RSS, Atom, PubSubHubbub. WordPress is the wild card because it is huge, more supportive than anyone else of Open Source and it could force everyone else to open up to interoperability. The next step? This morning Google's Marissa Mayer said in an interview that Google is working hard on intuitive search , the ability to show users what they want before they even have time to search for it. Publish once and your content is everywhere, immediately. Open your browser and it will show you just the kind of content you need, from all around the web, targeting your particular circumstances like clickstream, social graph and geographic location. If that's the kind of platform that's coming - how will people innovate on top of it? The foundation is being laid right now for a whole new web in the near-term future. Discuss

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Google, Twitter, WordPress & Facebook: Publish/Subscribe Matrix Could Explode Into Glass-Smooth Platform

Facebook announced this morning that its 350 million users will be prompted to make their status messages and shared content publicly visible to the world at large and search engines. It's a move we expected but the language used in the announcement is near Orwellian. The company says the move is all about helping users protect their privacy and connect with other people, but the new default option is to change from "old settings" to becoming visible to "everyone." This is not what Facebook users signed up for. It's not about privacy at all, it's about increasing traffic and the visibility of activity on the site. Sponsor Information like your email address is recommended to remain limited to friends, but make no mistake about it - Facebook wants you to make the status messages you post visible to the entire internet. According to the video explaining the changes, the new default for status messages is "everyone." That's a huge change. Of course it's not hard for people to keep their existing privacy settings, but confusion around what those settings are is hardly resolved by the phrase "old settings" and a tool-tip phrase appearing when you hover over that option. A substantial backlash has already begun in comments on t he Facebook blog post about the announcement. Previous moves by the company, like the introduction of the news feed, have seen user resistance as well - but this move cuts against the fundamental proposition of Facebook: that your status updates are only visible to those you opt-in to exposing them to. You'll now have to opt-out of being public and opt-in to communicating only with people you've given permission to see your content. Will users go for it? If Facebook becomes a lot more like Twitter, will users stick around? The network of friends you've created on Facebook can't be taken anywhere else - access to those people off-site is limited due to "privacy concerns." This is an amazing move that was announced with limited press attention. A Facebook group message to press was sent out at 6am, two hours before a press phone call. The announcement is a long, wordy and unclear text putting undue emphasis on Privacy when the new options clearly favor going public. Earlier this week the company made an announcement about forthcoming privacy policy changes and Open was not the recommended setting . Facebook confirmed to us in a press call earlier this year that the company does in fact want users to post more publicly and we expected a site-wide call for users to loosen privacy restrictions - but not like this. This announcement was couched in language of user control and privacy. A much more honest approach to privacy would be to encourage users to create lists of contacts and encourage them to select which list any update was visible to . Instead, that's greatly underemphasized. Expect to see this story blow up for the rest of the year. It's a very big move. See our previous coverage for context: Facebook Wants You To Be Less Private - But Why? A Closer Look at Facebook's New Privacy Options Is Facebook a Cult? Discuss

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The Day Has Come: Facebook Pushes People to Go Public

Google unveiled its real-time search interface today and it looks much, much better than what rivals Yahoo and Bing have done so far. The new Google real-time search functionality will appear on selected search results pages, below News results, above or below top ranking natural search results - sometimes just above the fold of the page. The new type of results are well-integrated, unobtrusive, diverse in contents and formatted simply. It appears to be a job very well done. It's hard to believe that neither Yahoo nor Bing have created an experience anywhere near as compelling. Sponsor Bing is a Bummer Bing's "real-time search" comes in the form of a special page for Twitter results . On that page you see a tag cloud of popular terms on Twitter, links shared regarding those terms and a few recent tweets in which each link appeared. It's not very visually appealing. In fact, it's downright ugly. It's also not integrated extensively into the main Bing site. Search results on Bing come only from Twitter and links share on Twitter. There are a lot of low-value retweets displayed. Twitter is of course just a small part of the real-time web. Yahoo is MIA Yahoo! on the other hand, displays Twitter as a tab in a select few news search results pages. That tab offers links being shared on Twitter, not tweets themselves. It's very hard to find a search result that uses Twitter results, though, on Yahoo! Google Is The Winner So Far Google's implementation, at least in this demonstration, brings real-time search front and center, displays commentary from Tweets, links being shared through a variety of channels and will soon display messages from MySpace and Facebook. It's broader, the User Experience is better and it's more prominent. Are There Still Alternatives? There are countless real-time search engines that have to be disappointed to see Google going its own way instead of acquiring a real-time search startup, and its unclear how many of those services still offer something unique that Google hasn't now captured in this announcement. Aardvark is one and its now reported that Google is looking to buy that company. We'll still await the full public roll-out of Google's real-time search, its integration with the company's new Social Search, with localization and personalization. So far it looks like Google has done what neither Yahoo! nor Bing have, though - create a compelling, serious real-time search experience. Discuss

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Google is Beating Bing & Yahoo Again, Now In Real-Time Search

Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake launched a new startup this Spring called Hunch and today announced that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has joined the company's board of directors. Hunch is a social Q&A service that, in effect, says, "people who are like you and who have preferences like yours tend to be happiest with the following answer to that question you're asking." The company reports seeing one million unique visitors last month, and in his own blog post about the announcement, Wales calls the intersection of community and algorithm "the future of the web." "This," he writes, "is what we are going to come to call Web 3.0." Sponsor Hunch relies on users providing information about themselves, something they do by answering a series of fun multiple-choice questions. The company says that 28 million of these "Teach Hunch About You" questions have now been answered, and all kinds of interesting correlations can be drawn as a result. Hunch went so far as to write a 13 page report all about the differences it has observed between the self-perception of Mac owners vs. Windows owners. In another report about the intersection of food choices and political ideologies, the company says it found the following: When it comes to choice of lettuce, everyone likes romaine, but conservatives trend heavily towards iceberg and liberals trend heavily towards arugula. For kitchen styles, conservatives vote for the wooden, country look and liberals lean towards sleek, stainless steel. Conservatives are more likely to drink sugar soda but less likely to drink wine; liberals are more likely to eat vegetarian options and more frequent portions of fruit. These questions and answers are ostensibly not the point of Hunch, though. The point is to help users make decisions about things like what blue jeans to buy or what neighborhood to move into. The site has undergone some recent design changes and it's unclear that the main Q&A is as compelling or interesting as the Teach Hunch About You part. Hunch says it aims to become the "Wikipedia for decision making." The sites are clearly similar: both are user-created and curated collections of knowledge. While that's a laudable goal, I haven't found myself going back to it regularly after our initial review. I'm more of an Aardvark kind of guy when it comes to social Q&A. Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise then that Hunch says Jimmy Wales and I have a lot in common demographically but very little in common in our ways of thinking. Discuss

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Wikipedia Co-founder Joins Flickr Co-founder's New Startup