Yahoo! announced this morning that it is adding Facebook Connect across many of its properties. This afternoon Google Friend Connect announced the inclusion of Twitter as a top-level log-in option. These moves will be convenient for users, but may not be good for the future of the web. People have always said that Google does what's good for the web, because what's good for the web is good for Google. In this case I'm worried that the Royalty of the web's last generation has crowned these two leading social networks as the Royalty of the current generation in a deal that offers traffic and money but that could suffocate the most creative developments of the open, distributed web. That could be called the web's next generation. Sponsor The Importance of Identity Identity is a very important matter online, particularly as everything becomes more social. Online identity is your address book, it's your wallet, it's your reputation and it could become a lot more. Increasingly, you take that Identity from site to site, leveraging on the next site what you did on the last one. If a particular company provides that Identity for you, it sets the rules, regulations, "interest rates" (eg. use of your info for advertising) and determines things like what parts of your identity you can use on different sites and what parts you can't. Facebook and Twitter are becoming big Identity providers. Google and Yahoo! have wanted to be leading Identity providers themselves but today cried Uncle with a big nod to the supremacy of the two leading social networks. At this point they have an interest in doing so, because they want you to share what you do on Yahoo and Google sites with your big link-clicking network of friends on Facebook and Twitter. Google didn't add Facebook Connect, just Twitter, because Facebook is now Google's leading challenger. The Rest of the Identity World But there are far more parties in the world of Identity than Twitter and Facebook. The Internet works because it is decentralized and there are scores of small companies, services and developers building out Identity infrastructures that are decentralized as well. Infrastructures that leverage the network-effect of the decentralized internet to provide the benefits of a large group, but are independent and interoperable in order to provide the benefits of personal freedom and control that can come from owning your own Identity. Those small players, people working on things like OpenID, ActivityStreams, the distributed social graph and other components of distributed, independent and interoperable social networking - those players may have been sold down the river by today's deals between Yahoo and Google and Facebook and Twitter. How could that be? After all, the OpenID logo appears on the login screen for Google Friend Connect and Yahoo! has been a big supporter of OpenID. I would argue that by putting the best known brands, with the easiest log-in experiences, at the very front of the parade - Google and Yahoo have further marginalized the distributed web. The PR email to journalists about the announcement was even titled "Google Friend Connect and Twitter Get Cozy Together." The Consequences of Today's Deals By choosing to favor branded log-ins and making standards-based systems an afterthought, websites using these systems are disincentivized to leverage the innovations that come from the open standards community and big Identity brands stay in control. Those websites might be Google and Yahoo! or they might be other big sites with all the more reason to favor incumbent leaders in Identity because of the support Google and Yahoo! have given them. People have talked about combining OpenID and Friend of a Friend data for spam control on blogs. "We'll just require Facebook log-in, thanks," I can imagine big websites saying. People are working on implementing cross-network standards for user activity data so sites can understand the activity feeds of other social networks and users of small, innovative sites can still communicate with their friends on other, larger sites. That means people will use small innovative sites and give them the support to grow. "Most people just use Facebook or Twitter," I can imagine big websites saying. People have talked about using things like content category tags and bookmarks to build cross-site user Attention Profiles . "We'll just look at their Facebook profiles," I can imagine big websites saying. A distributed social web, communicating through interoperable, standards-based language, offers as much opportunity for innovation as a common tongue does for poetry, universally visible pigments do for art or cash money and free time do for a self-determined afternoon. Your clicks, your contacts, your measurable behavior and content online are like fuel to burn, cash to spend. You'll either be able to spend that resource on things like recommendations, privileges, trust, recognition, greater efficiency and unforeseeable innovation - or those resources will be handed directly and exclusively to advertisers for the benefit of those who broker your Identity. The identity and activity payloads that come with most systems of identity don't seem to be of much interest to sites leveraging Facebook and Twitter as primary identity providers today, though. It's hard to think about anything else when all that potential traffic from enabling broadcast of your content is dangling in front of you. "All you little sites are interested in making it easy to do cross-site photo identification/ comment re-aggregation / book recommendation based on charecteristics of multiple social networking profiles (etc.)?" Big Website might say, "Well, Facebook and Twitter don't do that and they are good enough for us. We're excited about people broadcasting links to our site out to their Twitter and Facebook friends. That's enough for us. Isn't that innovative?" This may be more cynicism than is warranted, but I don't think so. When dealing with hundreds of millions of peoples' identities, the future of human communication and trillions of dollars - it's probably good to lean a little toward cynicism when considering collaboration with incumbent industry leaders. I appreciate the ease of Facebook and Twitter login around the web as much as anyone, but every big Identity login action I take feels like an economic transaction where the change and the interest slip through my fingers and land in the pockets of Facebook and Twitter. Wouldn't it have been better for the web to say "no, we will not simply take the easy solutions when it comes to Identity, in exchange for traffic and money. We will instead look for ways to make it easier for users of any Identity provider to engage with our websites." The short-term trade of giving more control to two big social networks, in exchange for traffic and ad money, may not serve anyone well in the long run. Discuss

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Identity Wars: Google & Yahoo! Bow to Facebook & Twitter

Zoho is now offering full integration with Google Apps, allowing users to access Google Docs seamlessly from within the Zoho environment. It's another move by Zoho to compete in the big leagues with the giants of the business through integrations that allow for seamless interplay.

The do-it-yourself website space is so crowded right now that it's amazing to see anyone launch a product and cut through the noise. Still, we were captivated by the simplicity and design of Flavors.me . Similar to Card.ly , instead of forcing you to use Facebook, LinkedIn or your neglected blog to represent you, Flavors lets you to build a basic vanity site in less than 10 minutes. As of this evening non-designers will have a chance to revel in their newly found web sex appeal. Sponsor Flavors.me from Jack Zerby on Vimeo . ReadWriteWeb spoke to co-founder Jonathan Marcus to get an early look at the service. The basic premise is that Flavors lets you produce a well-designed springboard to portfolio pieces, current work and profiles. Users add links, edit fonts and colors, and upload a background photo. Rather than fiddling with cascading style sheets or modifying blog templates, this service offers a fast and easy way to create an elegant web presence. Under the banner of Hii Def Inc. internet incubator, brothers Jonathan and David Marcus and former Vimeo design lead Jack Zerby created Flavors as just one of three companies to launch in 2009. Prior to Flavors.me, the group produced online sneaker shop Superkix . As a hybrid of both Flavors and Superkix, the team will soon release an online storefront tool by the name of Goodsie . Says Jonathan Marcus, " We wanted to sell Superkix t-shirts online but weren't satisfied with Yahoo Stores, Shopify or BigCartel and realized there were enough re-usable elements from Flavors to make it feasible to build in parallel." While Superkix is an obvious revenue generator as a retail storefront, the group plans on offering a domain redirect feature to Flavors in mid-December as well as a yearly subscription fee after a 30-day trial. Upon launch, Goodsie will be available with a monthly subscription. Says Marcus, "Both [services] will dramatically reduce the cost and complexity associated with maintaining a web presence. Any other monetization model such as advertising would introduce competing and distracting interests." Users can test Flavors later this evening at flavors.me . In the meantime, you may want to check out the company's design gallery here . For those interested in a fuller feature set check out ReadWriteWeb's Tools for Codeless Website Creation . Discuss

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Flavors: 10 Code-Free Minutes to a Sexier Web Presence

Google just announced that it has acquired Teracent , a display ad company that specializes in creating customized display ads in real-time based on machine-learning algorithms. While regular display ads always look the same for every user, Teracent's ads are automatically created from multiple creative elements and can change according to factors like geographic location and language, as well as the content of the website, time of day, and the past performance of different ads. As Andy Beal describes it , this is basically "multi-variate testing for your banner ads." Sponsor Teracent also offers solutions for optimized video and mobile display ads. Interestingly, Teracent is currently working with Yahoo to offer its Mobile SmartAds on Yahoo's mobile properties. It will be interesting to see if Google will continue this partnership. According to Google, Teracent's offerings will help the company to improve display advertising on the Web. Since acquiring DoubleClick in 2007, Google has released a number of new features to improve its display ads. Earlier this month, Google also acquired mobile advertising company AdMob. Neither Google nor Teracent released any information about the financial details of the transaction, which is "subject to various closing conditions." Teracent's most well-known competitor is probably Dapper , which also offers dynamic display ads based on factors like a company's inventory or a user's location. While Google was on a buying spree in 2007, when the company acquired 16 companies, it only bought 2 companies in 2008. So far, Google has acquired 5 companies and products in 2009: reCaptcha, On2, Gizmo5, AdMob and Teracent. Discuss

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Google Acquires Teracent: Wants to Offer Smarter Display Ads

It's the morning after the big Chrome OS event where Google executives and engineers revealed a myriad of details about the company's first attempt at creating their own operating system. The highly anticipated news conference was tracked all over the web, liveblogged by technology sites, and Twittered so much that it's still listed as a "trending topic" as of this morning. But now that the news is out, has Chrome OS lost its shine? People had high expectations for Google's new operating system but the end result doesn't look like the revolutionary, "change the world" product many had hoped for. Sponsor Yes, Chrome OS is Different Don't get us wrong - Google's OS is different than whatever Windows, Mac, or Linux build you have running on your computer today. The new OS does away with desktop applications entirely - everything you use on Google Chrome OS runs on the web. Of course, the company hopes you'll use a lot of Google products like Gmail and YouTube , but it doesn't limit you to just Google-branded services. In the built-in applications area, there are also links to other web apps like the online TV streaming service Hulu.com and music sites Lala and Pandora . To be fair, Chrome OS even links to Yahoo and Microsoft's webmail offerings right out of the box. Google's major goal with Chrome OS is to moving computing off our personal hard drives and into the cloud...the Google cloud. To accomplish such a feat, they've made the web browser the OS. Everything you need (in theory) is accessible through the included Google Chrome browser , the same browser the company currently offers to Windows users with Mac and Linux versions expected by the end of this year. As exciting as that vision is, we have to wonder if people - especially the mainstream netbook users the OS is aimed at - are ready for this big of a switch. And more importantly, is the technology itself ready to make the change a comfortable and seamless experience? ...but is it Better? After digesting yesterday's news, some lingering questions remain. Was this the OS everyone was hoping for or has Google let us down? You Can't Just Install Chrome OS - You Have to Buy a New Netbook To begin with, one of the more surprising reveals that came out of yesterday's news is that the OS cannot be installed on your own computer. Oh sure, there are downloads available that use Google's open-sourced code to create bootable builds tech-savvy users and developers can play with, but the official word from the search giant is that anyone wanting to use the "real" Google Chrome OS will have to purchase a new netbook to do so. You cannot simply download it from the web and install it on any machine. Part of the reason for this restriction is driver support. Google is working with carefully selected manufacturers to offer a handful of netbooks running the OS in the coming year. By going this route, they don't have to provide an entire ecosystem of drivers for every piece of hardware out there - they can pick and choose which ones to support. They'll likely limit the number of peripherals supported, too. According to what was said yesterday, the company will support "mass storage devices" (think USB flash drives and digital cameras) but were cagey on how they plan on offering printing support. All they would say is that they're planning on an "innovative approach" when it comes to printing, whatever that means. Hopefully, they're planning to do something more than just integrating with Kinko's and FedEx's online document services, for example. Printing, (sorry Google) is not a web app just yet. No Other Web Browsers Supported Another big disappointment is the company's decision to limit all web surfing to the one included browser, Google Chrome. Firefox and Safari users are out of luck - no other browsers will be supported. But before you cry out "antitrust!," be warned - Google has this covered. The code base used to build the OS is open-source - that means anyone take the code and create their own version of Chrome OS. As was carefully - and haltingly - explained by Google's VP of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, other browser makers can take the code and build their own OS if they want to. But let's get real - Firefox Chrome OS? We don't think so. The reality is that fans of other browsers are simply out of luck if they want to use this operating system. Offline Access is Limited. Your New Netbook is Now a Brick. One of the questions that got glossed over during the Q&A session at the end of the event is how Google's OS plans to deal with offline access. The world is not blanketed in Wi-Fi yet, so what can this web-based OS do without the web? Surprisingly, the answer given didn't refer to any subsidized deals with cellular providers regarding deals to offer built-in 3G connectivity for the new netbooks. Instead, Pichai explained that the OS was built for use with Wi-Fi. Of course, a handful of Google products use Google Gears, a technology that makes websites available offline. For example, Gmail uses Gears to create an offline version of your webmail inbox which you can use to read and respond to email until internet connectivity becomes available again. At that point, all the changes are synced back to Google's servers. Although Google didn't specifically refer to Gears when answering the question, there's no reason to doubt that it will work in Chrome OS's web browser the same as it does now in the standard Chrome browser. However, Pichai did make note of Chrome OS's support for HTML5, an upcoming revision to the core markup language used to build the web. In the new specification, a key feature is offline support for web apps. However, web application developers will have to rebuild their apps in order to use HTML5, so users will be dependent on each individual company to make this change. While it's believed that one day this spec could make the whole web an offline app, the reality is that most developers have yet to implement this technology in their services yet. Even by Chrome OS's launch next year, there's no reason to believe the landscape will have changed significantly by then. Do You Really Need an OS or Just the Chrome Web Browser? Finally, the big question regarding Chrome OS is why ? What can the OS do that any operating system running the Chrome browser cannot? Based on what was shown yesterday, the answer is very little. Chrome OS's brand-new features consist of two things: application tabs and panels. The panels are persistent windows that pop-up in front of your web browser's main window. For example, Google Chat, the company's IM service, can live in a panel that stays on top no matter what window you're viewing. Application tabs, meanwhile, are special tabs that give you easy access to your most frequently used web apps from the browser. Any page tab can be made into an application tab with one click and the resulting "tab" is represented with the colorful icon for that site or service. While that's certainly a cool feature, it alone isn't a major selling point for the OS. That would be like saying you have to buy Mac OS X because of the dock or Windows because of the taskbar. You need a million of these little features combined to add up to a compelling reason to buy an OS. That's not to say that Chrome OS itself doesn't have worthwhile features of its own - like its built-in security mechanisms or its auto-update system, it's just that these aren't the kinds of things that sell it to an end user. The questions consumers want answers to are what does it do that's special? What does it look like? And for now, the answer is "it's basically just a web browser." Revolution? Maybe Not Just Yet. At the end of the day, Chrome OS is an exciting, but not fully realized, vision. Although it has potential, the world may not be ready for a web-based netbook right now. Also, the technology needed to make the Wi-Fi only netbook useful without an internet connection isn't up to full speed either. At the end of the day, the netbook will be marginally more useful than an iPod Touch - when connected, it's amazing. Offline, not so much. While you might not rush right out to buy a Chrome OS netbook when they first launch, there could come a time - sooner than you think - when it becomes a reasonable choice. When the majority of apps work offline and you've fully transitioned away from desktop apps, a web-connected netbook, especially one that's affordable, could easily become your everyday computer. That day hasn't arrived yet. For now, Chrome OS is an exciting glimpse at the future of computing, but not a practical device for the majority of users. Disclosure: Sarah Perez freelances for Microsoft's Channel 10 blog, but is not a Microsoft employee. Her primary web browser is, in fact, Google Chrome which she uses exclusively. Discuss

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Was Chrome OS a Disappointment?

The social media data company Rapleaf has just released the final parts of their 3-part study involving the demographics and online behavior of webmail users. In the first part of the study , gender and age data was examined and revealed some interesting findings...like the fact that Gmail has more female users than male, for example. In the final sections of the study, the company has turned its attention to social networking data to discover more details about webmail users' social media profiles, memberships and network preferences. Sponsor Social Network Membership Data In the latter parts of the study, the company looked specifically at social network membership data for users of the AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services. Not surprisingly, the study found that Facebook was the most popular network across the board. What's more interesting is how well MySpace fared in some cases. On both the Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services, Facebook only had a small lead. Here, around 20% of all Hotmail and Yahoo webmail users were found to be on Facebook and MySpace. What does this reveal about the Hotmail and Yahoo user base? That they're a little more behind the times? Or that they've been around on the net longer and at one time had created (and possibly now abandoned) their MySpace pages? Unfortunately, the study can't provide us with these sorts of answers. The study also showed that Twitter is far more popular among Gmail users than anyone else. In fact, on the other services, it's 4-5 times less popular than Facebook. We would like to think that's because Gmail users are just more web-savvy and cool, but it's possible that it's because they're just younger than everyone else. Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is the least popular social network, but as Rapleaf points out, many LinkedIn users may have registered with their business email instead. Participation Levels - Hotmail Users have Most Profiles, Gmail Users Better-Connected When it comes to how the webmail users participate on social networks, Rapleaf found that the majority of the users have only one social media profile. But the service where the average number of profiles is the highest might surprise you - it's Hotmail. There the average is 2.5 profiles per user. Hotmail is followed by Yahoo, then AOL, and it's Gmail users who have the least number of social media profiles. That finding seems odd considering that Gmail users are younger and more likely to use Twitter in addition to Facebook. In fact, it almost seems like this data doesn't even fit with the rest of the study. However, the discovery that Gmail users are better-connected than the other users makes more sense. On average, Gmail users have the most friends on social networks with 46.2 friends while Yahoo users have the least with 40.0. Since again, Gmail users tend to be younger than the rest, it goes to reason that they would be in a demographic where their peers are more likely to have social membership profiles. Older webmail users, meanwhile, are still signing up for these sites. Although baby boomers and other middle-aged folks are joining sites like Facebook in droves these days, social networks are still dominated by the young . Methodology For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age, gender and social networking data by collecting information from public social media profiles. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their original blog post . However, the sample size is large enough to form some conclusions about the members of these services, even if it relied on a particular subset of users. Discuss

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Gmail Users Better-Connected, More Likely to Tweet than Members of other Webmail Services

Research firm Gartner has just put out a list of the top ten mobile applications of the future. Well, not the distant future, but the far off year of 2012. Nothing on the list is all that surprising or, in many cases, even all that new. Instead, the list includes the sorts of technologies that are just now coming into their own and haven't yet seen widespread adoption as well as the already common technologies that are still experiencing growth. Sponsor For many of the categories on this list, there are a number of mobile apps that are already available today. But what Gartner makes clear is that we're just getting started when it comes to their use. For example, location-based services (LBS) - there still isn't one single app which everyone uses to find each their friends out in the real world via their mobile phones. Instead, we have a number of similar but competing applications all vying to be the Facebook of location-based apps. Another example is money payments - this type of service is having more of an impact in the developing world right now where access to banks is more difficult than here in the Western world where people just want the convenience of paying through their mobiles. When was the last time you paid someone or paid at checkout through your mobile phone? Never? That sounds about right. The List The full list is as follows: Money Transfer: This refers to people sending money via SMS messages. Like mobile payments, this service has more appeal in developing markets for now. However, there may come a time when even using your debit card seems passé, while paying for something with actual cash seems downright ancient. Location-Based Services: As mentioned above, there are still far too many services to choose from when it comes to location-based social networking, fragmenting the market. Your friends on Loopt are often different than those on Brightkite and that list is different than those on Foursquare . But LBS extends to more than social networks - it includes any application that taps into your phone's GPS capabilities to offer up location-based services of any kind, whether that's local business reviews or directions to the nearest Starbucks. Gartner says this will be one of the most disruptive technologies in the future, with a user base growing from 96 million in 2009 to 526 million in 2012. Mobile Search: No, mobile search isn't new, but on the mobile platform, it may get shaken up a bit. Gartner predicts that consumers won't necessarily be sticking with the search services they know and use on the Web (think Google, Bing, Yahoo) and instead experiment with using a few different search providers that have "unique technologies" for mobile search. While that statement is a little vague, it sounds like good news for services like Taptu who have entered this field with search offerings designed from the ground-up for mobile devices. Mobile Browsing: Saying that mobile browsing technologies will be heavily used in the future sounds a little bit like stating the obvious. But as Gartner notes, mobile browsing capabilities currently exist only on 60%+ of handsets today. By 2013, that number will climb to 80%, meaning that those who are still using the app-less,more basic feature phones will still be joining the mobile web in mass numbers over the coming years. That's also good news for web developers who can build mobile web applications to cater to this bunch as opposed to focusing all their efforts into building apps for the numerous mobile platforms like the iPhone, Android, RIM, and others. Mobile Health Monitoring: Another technology whose impact will be felt more heavily in developing markets, mobile health monitoring is still at an early stage of maturity and implementation says Gartner. Project rollouts have been limited to pilot projects for now, but in the coming years the industry will begin to monetize these efforts by offering mobile healthcare monitoring products, services, and solutions to various care delivery organizations. Mobile Payments: Like mobile transfers, mobile payments are more common in developing markets at the moment, but that is quickly changing. Yet even as this type of service grows, Gartner admits there will be challenges. Mobile payments will be a "highly fragmented market" where there will not be "standard practices of deployment," notes the report. That makes it sound like this is one technology that will still need some work, even when 2012 rolls around. Near Field Communications (NFC): More popular in some European and Asian markets than in the U.S., NFC still isn't a standard feature on many of today's phones. That may be about to change, too. In late 2010, Gartner says that NFC-enabled phones will begin to ship in volume, with Asia leading deployments, followed by Europe and North America. Mobile Advertising: Also not new but growing fast, mobile advertising is one of the most important ways to monetize mobile content. Total spending on mobile advertising in 2008 was $530.2 million and it will grow to $7.5 billion in 2012. And mobile advertising will also be used by companies alongside their other campaigns including TV, radio, print, and outdoors. Mobile Instant Messaging: Gartner says that latent user demand and market conditions are conductive to mobile IM's future adoption. It will appeal to developing markets where mobile phones are often the only connectivity device a user owns. But will it be a major app by 2012? It seems that SMS is still the service to beat, especially in the developing world. We'll have to wait and see on this one. Mobile Music: Sure, you have the iPhone, but what about your other options? What about mobile music services - especially those for non-iPhone devices? We're still waiting on Spotify in the U.S., for example, and their competition too. Gartner says that we're beginning to see new innovative models in this area that will include both device (think "Comes with Music") and service bundles. What's Missing? A glaring omission from this report is that of Augmented Reality. Gartner had even placed this technology on their " Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2009 " report earlier this year . Do they not think that AR will have a major impact by 2012? Considering that's only a little over a year away, it could just be too soon for AR to see the widespread adoption that we hoped it would have by then. Or it's possible that - as some have suspected - AR is simply a "cool" way to see and interact with the world around you, but hasn't produced any "must-have," highly useful applications just yet. For example, seeing AR views of local businesses and user recommendations is fun, but is it a markedly better experience than using a service like Yelp ? For many, that answer today is "no." AR needs to grow out of being an technology you use "because you can" to one you use "because you have to." Until it's the best option to perform a particular task, it may not make Gartner's next list, either.