Generation Y, those that grew up with the web and many of which probably know of no life without it, is prime target for those looking for fresh blood in the Job Marketplace.  It is this generation that is just entering the marketplace, and which Employer after Employer is fighting to gain access to.  These are the founders of Facebook, the latest entries to the Google workforce, and the future of Microsoft.  These are those that will shape the ideas of our future.  Just recently, Brazen Careerist, a site targeted towards Job Seekers, became one of the first to jump at this market by building an entire Social Network targeted towards the Generation Y Job Seeker.

Brazen Careerist hits all the points that Gen Yers love.  Being a much more open audience than their older peers, the site focuses on this fact, bringing attention to a Facebook or Twitter-like stream.  The first question it asks you is, “What are you thinking?”, a question the Gen-Y audience is likely to be more than willing to share with employers.  The entire site integrates well with Facebook Connect, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other networks, enabling users to share across multiple networks, import from their favorite sites, and discuss the ideas their friends are sharing.

In my early 20s, working for startups such as Freeservers.com, and OneGreatFamily.com, I was known as the idea man.  At the time I didn’t have that much experience, but, being the entrepreneur that I am, I always had an idea that I was sharing.  I think you can still see this today on this blog, Twitter, and Facebook.

Brazen Careerist helps to highlight the less-experienced workers’ way of thinking by enabling thoughts, and ideas to be shared and discussed.  For an idea person such as myself, this service is a God-send in empowering the truly innovative minds of our society.  At the same time it is a great tool for employers to discover those bright minds, as, one of the first questions most employers ask in the interview process is “Tell me about yourself”.

Let’s face it.  LinkedIn is for old people.  It has hardly innovated over the years.  While still a great network for the Gen-Xers and more experienced workforce to network, it is just too hard for a new employee entering into the workforce to get the most out of such a site, especially in a group of people so willing to share information about themselves.  The new Brazen Careerist takes the LinkedIn Resume, but adds to it the ability for each potential employee to truly express themselves in a way history just hasn’t manifested yet.  In a much more open workforce it seems suitable a new entrant into the networking marketplace came forward.

If you’re one of these Gen-Yers looking to gain an edge with your peers and potential employers, Brazen Careerist is the perfect tool to accomplish that.  I encourage you to check it out and let me know what you think in the comments.  You can also “fan” me there at http://www.brazencareerist.com/profile/jesse-stay.

In a response to my article here, DeWitt Clinton of Google defined what he deemed the definition of “open” to be.  According to DeWitt, “the first is licensing of the protocols themselves, with respect to who can legally implement them and/or who can legally fork them.”  I argue if this were the case, then why didn’t Google clone and standardize what Facebook is doing, where many, many more developers are already integrating and writing code for?  Facebook itself is part of the Open Web Foundation, and applies the same principles as Google to allowing others to clone the APIs they provide to developers.

DeWitt’s second definition of “open” revolves around, according to DeWitt, “the license by which the data itself is made available. (The Terms and Conditions, so to speak.) The formal definitions are less well established here (thus far!), but it ultimately has to do with who owns the data and what proprietary rights over it are asserted.”  Even Facebook makes clear in its terms that you own your data, and they’re even working to build protocols to enable website owners to host and access this data on their own sites.  Why did Google have to write their own Social Graph API or access lesser-used protocols (such as FOAF or OpenID) when they could, in reality, be standardizing what millions (or more?) of other developers are already utilizing with Facebook Connect and the Facebook APIs to access friend data?  Google could easily duplicate the APIs Facebook has authored (even using the open source libraries Facebook provides for it), and have a full-fledged, “open” social network built from these APIs many developers are already building upon.  I would argue there are/were many more developers writing for Facebook than were developing under the open protocols and standards Google chose to adapt.  I’d like to see some stats if that is not the case.  Granted, even Facebook is giving way to Google to adopt some of these other “open” standards so developers have choice in this matter, even if they were one of the few adopting the other standards.

I still think Google is adopting these standards because it benefits Google, not the user or developer.  If Google wanted to benefit the majority of the audience of developers they would have cloned the already “open” Facebook APIs rather than adopt the much lesser-adopted other protocols they have chosen to go by.  This is a matter of competition, being the “hero”, and a brilliant marketing strategy.  Is Google evil for doing this?  Of course not.  Do I hate Google for this?  Only for the reason that I have to now adapt all the apps I write in Facebook to new “open” APIs Google is choosing to adopt.

IMO, if Google wanted to truly benefit the developer they would have chosen to clone the existing “open” APIs developers were already writing for.  This is a marketing play, plain and simple.  It may have started with geeks not wanting to get into the Facebook worlds, but management agreed because in the end, it benefits Google, not their competitors.  If you don’t think so, you should ask Dave Winer why Google is not implementing RSS or rssCloud instead of Atom and PSHB (I’m completely baffled by that one, too).

Image courtesy http://northerndoctor.com/2009/04/17/re-inventing-the-wheel/

“So it can benefit everyone.”

That’s what a Google employee said today as he tried to explain Google’s recent push to have websites use the ‘rel=”me”‘ meta HTML tags to identify pages a user owns on the web.  It’s not a bad strategy – index the entire web, know every single website out there, and when they change, and now the web is your network.  The thing is, since the “open” web hasn’t had a natural way of identifying websites owned by users, Google, the current controller of this network, needed a way to do it.  Why not make people identify their websites to Google’s SocialGraph network, and call it “open” so it benefits everyone?  I’m sorry, but the “open” web that we all grew up in is dead now that 2 or 3 entities have indexed it all.  This is now their network.

Let’s contrast that to Facebook, the “Walled Garden”, criticized for being closed due to tight privacy controls and not willing to open up to the outside web.  Of course, all that is a myth – Facebook too has provided ways for website owners to identify themselves to Facebook on the “open” web, making Facebook itself the controller of that social graph data, thereby giving Facebook a new role in who “owns” the “open” web.  Facebook has even made known in its developer roadmap its intention to build an “OpenGraph API”, making every website owner’s site a Facebook Fan Page in the Facebook network.  Don’t kid yourself that Facebook wants a role in this as well.  They’re a major threat to Google, too because of this.

Then there’s Twitter, just starting to realize how to play in this game, now starting to collect user data for search in their own network.  Don’t count them out just yet, as they too will soon be trying to find ways to get you to identify your website on their network.

So we’ll soon have 3 ways of identifying our websites on the “open” web.  I can identify my site through Facebook, as you see by the Facebook Connect login buttons scattered around.  I can identify myself in the Google SocialGraph APIs, which, if you view the source of this site you’ll see a ‘rel=”me”‘ meta tag identifying my site so Google can search it.  Who knows what Twitter will provide to bring my site into its network.  Each network is providing its easiest ways of identifying your site within their own Social Graph, and calling it “open” so other developers can bring their stuff into their networks easily, without rewriting code.

I think it’s time we stop tricking ourselves into thinking the web is open at all.  Google is in control of the web – they have it all indexed.  Now that we are seeing that he who owns the Social Graph has a new way of controlling and indexing the web, which we are seeing by Facebook’s massive growth (400+ million users!), I think Google feels threatened.  They’ll play every “open” term in the book to gain that control back.  Of course the new meta tags are beneficial – is it really beneficial to “everybody” though?  I argue the one entity it benefits most is Google.  Yeah, it benefits developers if we can get everyone to agree on what “open” is, but that will never happen.  I think it’s time we accept that now that the web is controlled and indexed by only a few large corporations, it is far from “open”.  ”Open” is nothing more than a marketing term, and I think we can thank Google for that.  No, that’s not a bad thing – it’s just reality.

Do these technologies really “benefit everyone” when no other search startup has a remote chance of competing with owning the “open web” network?

Further note:

How do we solve this?  I truly believe the only solution to giving the user control of the web again is via client-side, truly user-controlled technologies like what Kynetx offers.  Action Cards, Information Cards, Selectors, and browser-side technologies that bring context back in the user’s hands are the only way we’re going to make the web “open” again.  The future will be the battle for the client – I hope the user wins that battle.

Image courtesy Leo Reynolds

UPDATE: DeWitt Clinton of Google, who wrote the quote above this post is in response to, issued his own response here.  The comments there are interesting, albeit a lot of current and former Google employees trying to defend their case.  I still hold that no matter what Google does now, due to the size of their index, any promotion of the “open web” is still to their benefit.  I don’t think Google should be denying that.

UPDATE 2: My response to DeWitt’s response is here – why didn’t Google just clone Facebook’s APIs if their intention was to benefit the developer and end-user?

Today, PodCampSLC is excited to announce to new additions. Here are the new things happening with the event:

• New web site. Thanks to CrowdVine, we now have a new website for PodCampSLC. This site incorporates many of the social networking features you have grown to appreciate.
• New sponsors on board: PressDev, Mozy.com, eBay, Neumont University and SLUG Magazine. Please take some time to visit these companies, and we really appreciate the support.
• The schedule is really starting to come together. We are covering everything from audio and video recording, live streaming, social media, and a lot more.
• Phil Windley has agreed to hold the March CTO breakfast just before PodCamp.

Again, I really want to thank Tony and team at CrowdVine for the new site. We are working very closely with them to resolve any problems that may come up, so please be patient.

Please visit the new site and register today.

2 years ago I shared about a blogger and follower/friend of mine, Ali Akbar, who purchased the domain, googleappsengine.com (he still owns it) in order to create an AppEngine-related blog (since Google apparently forgot to purchase the domain).  Ali received a threatening Cease-and-Desist from Google shortly after asking him to immediately discontinue use of the domain and “Take immediate steps to transfer the Domain Name to Google”.  It would appear that Google needs to take a dose of its own medicine though.  To my surprise, I’ve realized recently that my articles from StayNAlive.com and other blogs are being shared, in their full text, on Buzz and having my ads stripped from them, without my permission.

For those unaware, there’s a “subscribe” button when you visit this blog that allows anyone to obtain the RSS of this blog and plug it into a Reader.  For those of you reading this in a Reader, thank you, and you’re already aware of this.  One thing I have done with those feeds if you haven’t noticed is at the bottom of each post in the RSS, I’ve added Google Adsense to my feeds so I can at least cover my costs of running this blog and make at least a few cents a day trying to re-coup costs of hosting and time spent writing posts.  If you visit http://staynalive.com/feed in a browser like Chrome, you can look at the raw feed and see the ads at the bottom of each post.  Or, if you’re reading this post in a traditional feed reader, look down at the bottom of this post and you’ll see the ad.

However, there’s a feature on Buzz that enables anyone reading my shared posts to expand the summarized content and view the entire post, right in Buzz.  For one, I didn’t give Buzz permission to do this on shared posts, and second, Buzz is stripping out my ads, depriving me of that potential revenue rather than either displaying those ads, or redirecting the user back to my site where I can monetize that in some other form.  This is blatant copyright infringement if you ask me!  Now, if you expand my posts, since it’s integrated into Gmail, look over to the right – see those ads?  Yup, I’m not getting a penny of that.

Google is now monetizing my content, and neglecting to ask for my permission in doing so, while removing what I had put in place to monetize my content.  Starting today, I’m removing my blog from my Google Profile, as well as my Google Reader shares so that I don’t help further the copyright infringement on other blogs I share.  The problem that still exists is that anyone who shares my content from Google Reader will also have my content available on Buzz in full format, and my ads stripped.  There’s no way to stop it, and Google is encouraging this wrong practice.

To be clear, I’m fine with them either displaying the ads that I put there (and allowing me to monetize off the other ads that are on the page), or just summarizing the article and encouraging users to click through to my site.  I’m not okay with Google scraping my content, stripping my ads, altering my content, and pushing it out for them to get 100% of the revenues off of something I spent time and money making.

Google, how is this not evil?  Maybe I should use Google’s own Cease and Desist letter to get them to stop this practice.  Or would that itself be copyright infringement?

Image courtesy Warner Bros. Entertainment – “The Ant Bully”

UPDATE: The Google Buzz Team did contact me on Buzz (Ironically, considering the content of this post), and they say they’re going to have the ad scraping issue fixed by next week.

By the time I hit publish on this 5 other bigger blogs will have probably already covered this, but this deserves some praise.  One reason I love the Facebook Platform is because they really seem to care about API developers.  They do things the “right” way.  For instance, they have a beta site where they always release new bug fixes and features before they go live on the site.  They always release new API features in “sandbox mode” before going live with them.  No other platform releases new features and updates in this manner!  Just today they upped their game even more, giving developers full control over this process by letting developers decide when new API features go live.

The service gives developers a new “Migrations” option in their application settings, enabling them to choose when things go live.  The first one of these they launched has to do with a bug they’ve fixed which formats empty JSON strings correctly.  To enable the feature you just go to your “Migrations” section for your app, and select “on”, and now all empty JSON strings will be formatted in the correct manner.  The power of all of this is that you get to decide when these features go live, but you can start trying them immediately!

Of course, all features will eventually go live, but what this shows is that Facebook is willing to keep developers aware of changes before they go live.  Facebook won’t be launching features into the wild out of the blue like many of their competitors do quite regularly.  Previously, changes would go live, and while they would often show on the beta site, developers had little notice and little time to test them before putting them into production.  These changes would break many apps the minute they went into production.

IMO, this small feature changes the game for many other app platforms.  NO OTHER major app platform does anything like this.  Kudos to the Facebook platform team for continuing to change the game in regards to API development.  Since the Facebook platform launched, they have always been ahead in changes like this.  I can only hope other API platforms can follow suite in giving developers more control like this.  No one likes their applications to break because of simple API changes.

I don’t do speculative posts like this too often, except around Facebook’s F8 developer events for the most part.  The last one I predicted was that Facebook would announce a Mobile Platform at F8 - the announcement did occur along with Facebook Connect.  The first F8 was the announcement of the Facebook API, which revolutionized Social Development and has left players like Google scrambling to play catch up since.  Now, 2 years since the last F8, the next F8 has been announced, and we are all wondering what the next big announcement will be.  If it is to be in line with the last 2, and, considering they waited 2 years to have another one, they have to be announcing something game-changing.  I predict it directly involves some of the FriendFeed team and it’s directly related to real-time.

First of all, let me preface this with the fact that I am not receiving this data from any inside contacts at Facebook, nor have I been told anything the rest of the world doesn’t already know.  This is pure speculation – I hope it’s taken as such.  I am also certainly not a psychic.  I think if you look at some of the hints though, you can see the potential for something big, perhaps FriendFeed 3.0-like (remember, FriendFeed 2.0 was the advent of their real-time stream you see now) about to happen at Facebook.  Here are my reasons for thinking such:

What is Paul Buchheit Working on?

Paul Buchheit, one of the founders of FriendFeed, creator of Gmail, and now working at Facebook after FriendFeed was acquired, hasn’t yet made it evident exactly what he’s working on.  We know Bret Taylor, also a founder, is now Director of Product for Facebook, and working heavily with the Facebook APIs and the new Roadmap Facebook has laid out for developers.  We know Kevin Fox, pretty much the man behind all the design of FriendFeed, has been working on the new Games and Apps dashboard that Facebook just launched (that you can see on the left-hand side of Facebook).

But what is Paul Buchheit working on?  He recently commented stating he is definitely not working on Facebook’s new e-mail product that they have been rumored to be working on to replace their current inbox structure.  I’m not sure anyone has specifically stated exactly whether he’s working on the Facebook developer platform now or not.  He seems to be doing something big, and he’s certainly been studying Google Buzz recently if you look over his FriendFeed stream lately.

Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee

Then there’s that “Butterfly” post.  Paul Buchheit specifically stated when Robert Scoble, Steve Gillmor, and others were all pressuring Facebook to make a statement on what they were going to do with FriendFeed that “the team is working on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world.”  He then continued, “Transformation is not the end. Consider this the chrysalis stage — if all goes well, a beautiful butterfly will emerge”.

The mystery in all this is that Facebook has not yet released anything even remotely similar to what Paul described yet.  Paul’s a really smart guy.  He’s not just going to work on something mediocre for Facebook – whatever it is, it has to be game changing.  I really believe that whatever it is will blow our minds away when it happens.  The FriendFeed team doesn’t just innovate.  They revolutionize.  I don’t believe they would still be at Facebook if they didn’t have that opportunity.

Facebook’s Needs

Then there’s the lack of any real-time APIs or architecture at Facebook.  I have to click on the page to have it refresh.  Frankly, I think that fits their current audience of 400 million+ “average Joes” well.  It doesn’t tap into the news-seeking, data-mining, and publishing audiences very well though.  That’s what Twitter does well.  It’s what FriendFeed and Buzz also do well.  All of these come with real-time APIs and real-time searches (or “track”).

Facebook needs a real-time interface for developers still.  It needs search.  It needs search to be real-time.  It needs a public view into all of that, supported by the powerful privacy controls Facebook already has in place.  Facebook has already built out the building blocks to launch this with their recent emphasis on encouraging users to open up their posts more and at the same time enabling them to have granularity in who sees those posts.  The next natural step is to finally open up those public posts to developers, and provide a real-time interface to it all.  With a 400 million user audience, that would be game-changing in the realm of real-time data.  We ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

The Lack of any Really Big Known Announcements at F8

Lastly, we know everything else Facebook could announce at F8.  Facebook has already started rolling out credits to developers, so a payment system wouldn’t be much of a “game changer” per se.  I’m sure they’ll talk a lot about it at the conference though.  Facebook has already started rolling out its Ads API to developers.  They’ve already announced the desire to open up websites as virtual 3rd-party “Pages” on the web.  They’ve let us know just about everything in their roadmap, except the fate of FriendFeed.

Doesn’t this seem strange to you that Facebook and the FriendFeed team have been so mute on this in general for almost a year now?  What’s going on behind the scenes?  Even when asking the FriendFeed team about plans to integrate better into Facebook they have remained mute.  How cool would it be if, while everyone is ranting and raving about Google Buzz and calling FriendFeed dead, the FriendFeed team along with the incredible talent that Facebook adds to the mix have all been working on FriendFeed 3.0 behind the scenes?  What if Facebook caught wind Google was working on Buzz and bought FriendFeed in response to that rumor?  Will the “Butterfly” emerge at F8?  The chrysalis stage takes patience – I’m not giving up on FriendFeed yet.

Louis Gray just reported a new way Google is trying to control the problem of mine and Louis’s and Robert Scoble and Mashable, and more of the more active feeds and streams on Google Buzz taking over the streams of our followers.  The problem that was occuring is that for those with a lot of followers, their posts would continue to dominate the streams of those following them because every time someone commented or liked the post, it would go right back to the top of your feed.  While I understand the problem, and agree there needs to be a fix, I argue Google is trying to fix this the wrong way.

The way Google decided to fix it is now they decide, based on some sort of algorithm, how often my feeds get thrown up to the top of your stream.  This ensures no active user will ever fully dominate your stream.  However, what if we want to consume this data?  The problem is Google is the one making that choice for you, not giving you the power to make that choice yourself, and I think that’s a very wrong approach.

Rather than Google making that choice for us, they need to focus on lists, the way FriendFeed and Facebook do it, and the way over 400 million people are familiar with.  This is the natural flow – if someone is too noisy, you take them out of one list and put them in another.  Let us choose which list is the default.  Give us an easy way to assign people we follow into different lists.  This isn’t that difficult a solution for someone Google’s size, and gives the users absolute, full control, rather than taking it away from them to make the decision on how active their feeds are.  This needs to be their 100% focus right now to keep my attention.

The way Google is approaching this is wrong.  I really hope they change their focus to lists, open up the flood wall, but give us filters, privacy controls, and put the control back in the users’ hands.  Don’t take our power away from us Google.

Image courtesy http://arbroath.blogspot.com/2008/03/let-me-out.html

Google’s big push recently has been on enabling open, real-time technologies to publish, read, and interact with its new service Buzz.  Reader, its RSS subscription and website reading service, is one of the biggest tools to integrate with the service.  So much that my Reader contacts are now my Buzz contacts.  Until now, Google Reader, while when it would share your posts, it would send updates to subscribing services via Pubsub Hubbub (PSHB), it did not support the reading end of it for supported blogs that publish via PSHB.

Just after my last post on Google ironically, I noticed immediately after publishing people were sharing my post, something very unusual for the service, which usually takes up to an hour for my posts to show up on the site.  Going into Reader, I noticed it had immediately recognized my post.  I quickly queried a friend of mine at Google, who stated, “They can neither confirm nor deny my suspicion” (that it was launched), but I was “observant”.  Sounds like they just launched Pubsub Hubbub support.

Wordpress-enabled Blogs that want to be seen immediately after publishing in Google Reader just need to install Josh Fraser’s Pubsub Hubbub plugin for Wordpress.  After hitting publish, your post should appear immediately afterwards in PSHB-supported clients, which, if I am correct, now includes Google Reader’s massive user base.

If this is true, you should see this post immediately after I hit publish in Google Reader.  Assuming I’m right (which it seems so), Robert Scoble’s concern of it taking too long to get news (#5) just went out the door today – he can now get this just as fast, if not faster than any service such as Twitter, FriendFeed, or Buzz, and this way, he gets to read the full content of the article.  When I hit publish on this post you will see it immediately.  You are subscribed to my feeds, right?

UPDATE: Just after hitting publish it appeared immediately in Google Reader on this post as well.  I’m 99.9% sure now that PSHB was launched on Google Reader today.

Image courtesy http://www.scotduke.com/getting-a-drink-out-of-a-fire-hose/

I’ve been openly critical about Google’s lack of privacy in their launch of Buzz (and I argue other things as well), and its’ opt-in attitude towards opening up contacts and settings people previously thought were private.  That doesn’t change.  However, I’d like to spend some time here playing devil’s advocate and share how perhaps, Google starting with an open approach may be a good thing for Google in the long term.  Let me explain:

There’s no doubt that Google opening up all our data at the launch of Buzz is making people think more about Privacy.  I’ve had a post in the back of my head for quite awhile now that I was going to write on how I think Facebook could have made a mistake starting with a focus on privacy, as now people just assume that everything they put online is private, when in all actuality there is no way that will ever happen 100%.  Because of Facebook, people are getting more comfortable with posting their lives online, and while, even if Facebook remains a private environment for those people (in many cases it isn’t), they are now becoming more comfortable posting that information elsewhere, assuming it will remain private in those places as well.

I think Facebook could have done their users a disservice by giving them that comfort.  What if, instead of starting out private as Facebook did, they instead opened up everyone’s profile by default, and enabled them to choose what elements they want private after that?  Make people completely aware their information is 100% public, and then it is up to those people to decide what they share online, and what they would prefer stays private.  I think there would be a lot more education amongst users this way, and people would think twice before sharing things online.  Of course, Facebook wants people to share in easier ways and in a more comfortable environment to make sharing as easy as possible, so this isn’t going to happen, but it may have been even more in the right by defaulting to public on more things.  Ironically, these types of moves are what is getting Facebook a lot of flack as is, regardless of whether there are privacy controls in place that users can still turn on.

So perhaps Google is doing a good thing here.  Even the optimistic Louis Gray says we’re all wearing tin foil hats by criticizing their lack of privacy.  By starting public (while I still argue turning what was previously private into a completely open environment is completely wrong, and it seems they’re backtracking to try and fix this), Google is encouraging each and every one of its hundreds of millions of users to think twice before sharing anything online.  Google is taking a risk here by making people think twice, since it makes money off of the content you share.

I fully predict Google will be adding more and more privacy controls as they move forward.  I agree, maybe they launched too soon before having these privacy controls in place.  One thing they may have done right though is that they are making us think twice about sharing.  They’re making each of us think about what goes online, and what stays off, and how comfortable we are with what we want public.  I think that’s a good thing, and more companies should be defaulting public, rather than private, until the general internet audience gets used to this type of environment where we know everything we share could very well be made public for the whole world to see.

I encourage you to step back and think about this – I agree, privacy is a good thing, but could the default to public be even better?  Are users being educated with this move?  It’s an interesting move by Google – let’s just hope they can get more privacy controls in place for users to choose from as they do it.

Man, just typing the title of this post makes me cringe with boredom.

However, I have used this technique many times over my career, and just recently the issue came up from a JibberJobber user who imported his Contacts.

His problem was that the first name and last name were in the same column, but we want that broken out when you do the import.

Fixing this is actually really simple. In my user webinars I talk about opening a csv file in Excel, so you can see the pretty columns and rows… but for this little exercise I recommend you open it up in Notepad.

I know, I know: opening it in Notepad will make it really, really ugly.  Almost unreadable.  Especially files that have a lot of “columns.”  Just remember, csv stands for “comma separated values,” which means that each “field” is separated by a comma.  The comma tells Excel to put the next thing in a new column.  For example, this csv content:

First Name, Last Name, Email Address, Phone Number
Jason, Alba, Jason@Jason.com, 801.800.8123

Will look like this when opened in Excel:

What if your file is formatted like this, instead? Notice the name is ONE column (not broken out)?

Name, Email Address, Phone Number
Jason Alba, Jason@Jason.com, 801.800.8123
John Doe, John@Doe.com, 555.555.1234
Sally Jesse, Sally@Jesse.com, 800.123.4567

Right now we aren’t parsing this for you – the best and easiest thing to do is to fix it in the file.  Again, go to Notepad, open the CSV file, and then make these very simple changes:

1. In the first row, which is the header row, change Name to First Name, Last Name.  This will make TWO columns instead of ONE (make sure to put the comma between the column names).
2. In all the other rows, simply put a comma between the first and last name.

That’s it – it is very simple. I’m guessing if I had a file with 100 records (names) I could put the comma inbetween the first and last name in about 4 or 5 minutes, or less…

This might seem like a pain, and when we redo the import we might accommodate for one name field, but for now this is really quite easy.  And YOU are empowered with the knowledge to manipulate your csv files!

Now when you import it will import the name values into the right fields (first, last).

It’s no secret Twitter has a desire to have a stronger search presence.  With business models that thrive on content publishing and organization, a strong search product is necessary to provide the most revenue down the road.  Just today, while announcing its 140th employee and celebrating to the music of BT, Twitter hired Michael (Michi) Busch, search indexing expert and committer to the Open Source Lucene search project to its team as a “Search Engineer”, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Busch brings with him not only strong experience in his contributions to Lucene, but also a firm background at IBM working on IBM’s eDiscovery Analyzer product, focusing on indexing and search technologies there as well.  Busch is a regular presenter at various ApacheCon conferences, so I’m sure this won’t be the last we hear of him while working for Twitter.

Just after Twitter’s announcement today of its focus on Open Source standards, the hiring of Busch just solidifies that there will continue to be a focus on open technologies at Twitter.  Lucene, perhaps one of the most widely used open source search indexing products in the world, we can now wonder if it will play a part in that process.  With one of its committers working for Twitter, we can hopefully expect real-world cases of search indexing technology integrated into the open source product in the future.

Twitter continues to expand its team of smart talent, and it seems almost weekly continues to add to its pool of geniuses from the likes of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and IBM.  As I said before, it’s this talent pool that continues to excite me about Twitter and have a strong belief in its future.  With Busch now working on the search product, there’s no doubt that Twitter has an interest in good technology, and helping the community as it grows.  I can’t wait to see what Busch can bring to Twitter.

There’s a new Buzzword in town that’s “Buzz” lately and as I mentioned earlier, some are already calling things “dead” because of it.  Most of this is due to the size of Google, the masses it can reach, and the overall usefulness of the service.  Personally, I think all the “dead” articles are all a ruse to build the numbers of those praising the service and feeling a need to abandon others, as well as gain favor with the Google team as they see strong potential in the service.  While there’s no argument there’s potential in the service (and I’m even spending more time over there and strongly hope for its success), it is far from a “Facebook killer”.  While I mentioned why before, I feel qualified, and I’d like to spend some time sharing some things it needs to get on level grounds to Facebook.

Buzz Needs a Central Place for all Social Activity

I’ve said this before – Google needs a central place for everything “Social”.  Facebook has grown so well because it has this organization.  I’m still unclear if Google is trying to make Buzz this place, or if Orkut, or another product should be that.  Contacts are not that place – Contacts should be the source of social graph data, but are not social connections.  Social connections can come from much more than just contact data – people search, other peoples’ buzzes, as well as other Social Networks can all be sources for Social Contacts between Buzz (see the need for Facebook import later).

Buzz Needs a Stronger API

One of the reasons Buzz has such strong potential is because of its foundation on open architectures.  There is so much more that can be done however – I’m sure they’re working on some of these, but I’d like to share my thoughts, in hope that if they haven’t been thought of, they can be added.  For instance, currently there is no way for any 3rd party app to gain access to the cool comments architecture Buzz posts get in Gmail.  What if I could get FriendFeed, or even SocialToo e-mails in the same format?  Buzz or Gmail could open an interface to this, perhaps built on top of SMTP (an SMTP header would denote it’s a formatted e-mail), Salmon, and OpenSocial standards, to give developers access to this UI.  The great thing about it – if Buzz sends new Buzz updates in an SMTP-supported format, other e-mail clients could adapt these standards as well.  It would no longer be limited to just Gmail to see these formats.

I think it goes without saying that we need better ways to read, analyze, and discover the data, as well as social graph connections on Buzz.  I’d like to be able to track who’s posting about what, how many likes or how many comments there are for specific posts mentioning specific keywords or links.  I’d like to be able to track who has followed an individual and who has stopped following an individual on Buzz.  I’d like to be able to embed Buzzes on 3rd party sites.  I’d like an FBML-like interface to integrate and customize content right in the Buzz environment.  I’d like RSS for every search I do, along with the ability to share searches and get notifications on new items from those searches (I believe Steve Gillmor calls this “Track”).

Buzz Needs Groups and Events, Deep Integration Into Those Events and Groups

To say just a social stream service is comparable to Facebook would be like saying Notepad is comparable to Windows 7.  It’s just not a fair comparison.  One is a feature of the other.  If Buzz really wants to compete (and I’m not saying they do), they need deep integration into Groups, Events, business Pages, and more.  They need the ability for groups of people to all collaborate around a single event, Buzz around it, share it with their friends via Buzz, RSVP via Buzz and Gmail, etc.  Google Calendar just doesn’t do this yet.

Groups are another key component.  E-mail is too private.  They need to enable “Groups” in Buzz that do more than just Buzz.  They need to enable sharing of photos, events related to that Group, and encourage communication amongst Group members.  They need to put that into a people search enabling you to find old High School friends and acquaintances through them.  Google already has some of the basics for this, but I argue they aren’t yet integrated across Google services yet, and are a bit more private an environment than what Facebook encourages.  The challenge Google will have is maintaining the “public feel” that Facebook groups and events provide, while maintaining the “silo’d feel” Facebook provides at the same time giving people a sense of security.  This will be no easy challenge, and may take a silo’d environment like Orkut to do completely successful.

Buzz Needs Better Privacy Controls

At the heart of most Buzz controversy currently lies their relaxed privacy controls.  Originally they automatically followed people for you, giving others potential access to your private list of contacts.  Your Google contacts were also all visible on your Google profile just by enabling Buzz.  Google has since enabled you to disable this, and has turned the “auto-follow” into more of an “auto-suggest”, but there is still so much more that I can get from Facebook that Google is lacking in regards to Privacy.

For instance, on Facebook, I get to decide how much of my own profile is visible to certain friends.  I get to decide if it’s visible to friends of friends.  I can even go to the extent of selecting specific lists I want to be visible to, and certain other lists of friends (or individual friends) I don’t want it to be visible to.  I can specify specific components of my profile I want visible to those lists.  I can set profile-wide settings that remain protected by the privacy settings I set, as well as specific targeted profile elements that remain protected by these privacy settings.  Facebook gives me complete control over what my friends see and don’t see.  With Google Buzz, not only is it all out in the open, but you’re revealing much more than your social contacts – you’re revealing e-mail addresses and Google account information.  It’s wrong the way Google approached this from the beginning, and I argue, even a little bit evil, whether intended or not.

Buzz Needs Lists

Which brings me to my next point – lists.  Lists have much further ramifications than just privacy settings.  On Facebook, I can click on the “Friends” link on the left-navigation and immediately have access to lists I have organized of my friends.  I can view the posts of just my close family members, or just the posts of the news makers and use it like a news reader.  Or I can look at just the latest comments of all my friends, or even a summarized view of the top posts for the day.  Buzz really needs this to be even remotely useful.  On FriendFeed, I have a list of “Favorites”, which I use most of the time to get the most relevant content from those I actually know, and then I can skim the rest of those I follow occasionally.

On every Social Network I belong, it should not be about giving, but how you receive content.  Each and every Social Network has the responsibility to empower its users to receive content in the way they want to.  Facebook has mastered this (although I argue FriendFeed has done, to an extent, even more than Facebook in this area).  No one should feel the need to unfollow me because I post too much, or post one or two things they don’t like.  They should be able to read the content in the manner they like, and filter out what they don’t like, without the ugly unfollow.  Lists are just one component of this.

Buzz Needs Better Filters

The other part of being able to receive content the way you like is via filters.  Each and every application that interfaces with Facebook has to identify itself.  This enables users to filter based on application if they choose to.  If I don’t want to receive Farmville posts, I just hide everything from Farmville, and I’ll never see another field plowed or beet grown again.  People argue they’re worried integration with Facebook will enable the Farmvilles to gain access, but the thing is, without filters, the Farmvilles will use Buzz regardless, but without Filters you will have no way to stop them.  Facebook has completely mastered this, and I can’t do this on any other service.

In addition to application hiding, I should be able to filter by feed type.  If I don’t want to see someone’s Twitter feed, I should be able to hide just their Twitter feed.  If I want to block all Twitter posts from showing, I should be able to do that.  If I want to hide a user but not unfollow them, I should be able to do that.  I shouldn’t have to worry about making anyone feel bad by unfollowing or blocking them.  I should be able to just control my feed in the way I want, just like I do on Facebook (and to an extent, FriendFeed).

Buzz Needs the Ability to Import my Facebook Contacts

Lastly, in order to compete with Facebook, Buzz needs my Facebook friends.  They’re not going to get those through my Gmail contacts.  Most of my Facebook friends are not in my Gmail Contacts.  The only way they’re going to gain access to my Facebook friends is via the Facebook API.  It’s time for Google to suck it up, work with Facebook, and find ways of integrating my friend list from Facebook into the Google environment.  We’ve waited too long for this with Google Friend Connect, and surely there’s a win-win option for both companies to allow this and work together.  Win-win for them is win-win for the user.

Let’s look at Aardvark (recently purchased by Google), for instance.  If you log into Aardvark with your Facebook login, it will immediately detect who in your Facebook contacts are also on Aardvark, and immediately add them as friends on Aardvark.  The site, Digg.com also does this well – all my Facebook friends are automatically added as Digg friends as they log into Digg through Facebook.  There should be no problem with Buzz following Facebook’s developer terms of service and integrating this into their own environment.  Facebook provides hooks into its APIs for doing this exact thing.

Assuming it agrees with the Facebook developer terms of service, Google could even submit each user’s contacts to Facebook and immediately prompt each user in your contacts list to connect on Facebook.  This would be win-win for both companies, as it would encourage the users of both services to build contacts in each and grow each service.  Considering Youtube and Aardvark have both integrated the Facebook API (Youtube could do much better), I don’t anticipate any issues with them doing this.  I will interpret any lack of Facebook integration as a failure on Google’s part, and Google itself playing politics, not Facebook.  So long as you play by their rules, I’ve never heard of Facebook deny a developer.

I really hope the Buzz team reads this.  I have a lot of experience in the Facebook environment.  I know intimately how Facebook works as an author of 2 books on the subject and writer of a plethora of documentation about Facebook on various sites around the web, as well as a developer of numerous apps on the Facebook API and consultant to many others.  Frankly, as a user and developer, I want to see both companies succeed.  The more Buzz succeeds, the more Facebook will compete and provide a better service.  The more Facebook competes, the more Buzz will compete and provide a better service.  Users win in both scenarios.

If Buzz is really trying to compete with Facebook, these are the things they need to implement to get my attention.

I’ve worked for various companies over my career.  Some of those very small (including my current startup), and some very large, international and public corporations.  I currently work with similar clients of various sizes and types.  Each and every one of them shared characteristics that come with the turf in managing a large or a small company.  In a small company, you’re dealing with issues like how to grow, how do you start to deal with a growing employee base, and how do you handle all the workload in front of you on such a limited budget.  Yet you have much more flexibility to get things done and build for the whole of the company.  With large corporations you’re dealing with politics, and budgets, and individual departments all fighting for control.  It’s common amongst every single organization I have come in contact with, and I believe that is starting to include Google, which we’re seeing evident in many of their new Social products.

Let me preface with the fact that I love the concept of Buzz.  As an avid FriendFeed user and Social Media addict, Buzz hits many points that are just sweet in my eyes.  I love that they’re embracing open technologies to build it, and working hard to empower individuals and even (soon) developers to have control over their own experiences on the platform.  With the size of Google, this will bring much more attention to these types of technologies, so what they are doing is a good thing.  I don’t think they needed to reinvent the wheel to do it though, and I think the reason they did it may be in part due to the size and politics of the company.

Enter Google Reader.  I’ve complained many times that I don’t think Reader needed to focus on Social.  I don’t think it needed to re-build your Social Graph all over again.  Now, with Buzz in the mix they are trying to cross-integrate the two, and I think it’s really the wrong approach.

What I think is happening is departments at Google aren’t working close enough together to make things work properly.  For instance, Orkut already has the strength of building social connections.  Its strength is in building Social Graphs and empowering users to share with their close friends and family.  They already have the tools to do it, and, in some countries this has proved to be quite successful.  I think the Orkut team knows that.

In the case of Reader, what I think is happening is in the product development cycle they realized they needed social features.  The Orkut team wasn’t available, or one of the two teams didn’t have the budget to cross-integrate, or perhaps politics got in the way, so Reader reinvented the wheel to do Social in the Reader environment.  They could have rather done something similar to Facebook Connect, and enabled users to connect to their Orkut Social Graph and brought in shares via that means.  Then Orkut continues to own the Social Graph, social interactions continue to happen through Orkut, and people can continue to build connections with Orkut as the main hub for Social interactivity.  My guess is that the Orkut team was too booked to create such a tool just for the Reader team.  Someone up the line said no to it, so the Reader team built their own tools to accomplish the task.

I think we’re seeing the same with Buzz, and many more tools like Friend Connect and OpenSocial and others at Google.  Sergey most likely assigned a team at Google with the task of building a FriendFeed or Twitter-like product that enabled people to communicate better.  Orkut does not yet have such functionality, and it made sense to do it as a separate product.  They decided to integrate it into Gmail, where your contacts are.  Rather than utilize the strengths of Orkut for organizing these contacts, it was probably easier due to the size of Google to utilize Gmail’s contact manager to do so, which Google Reader just so happens to also use.  The cross-integration with Reader just happened naturally, but thanks to the lack of expertise in Social Graph management, it was done poorly, now making it extremely hard for Google Reader users to manage their stream.

In large companies it’s very hard to cross-integrate.  I think had Google from the get-go started to find ways to build a Facebook Connect-like interface for Orkut, they could have very well created more activity in Orkut itself, while cross-integrating all their other products into the Social Graphs built on Orkut.  Now Google is stuck with an unorganized mush of multiple social graphs, multiple streams, and messaging and content going all over the place within those streams with little regard to privacy.

It may be too late, but if I were Google, I would look at taking a step back, focusing on Orkut, and building out from there before continuing further on any Social Graph-based products.  These social products Google is building should all be relying on Orkut for that social data and then they would have a true Social Network to build from.  They shouldn’t be reinventing the Social Graph every time they build a new service.  This is why Facebook has had such success in the social space – they’ve focused on the one product as the source for all their Social releases.  Google really needs to do the same, and they can still do it with open standards, but this time starting from the Orkut environment and building out.

There’s a lot of “Buzz” going around lately about Google Buzz being a Facebook or Myspace killer.  Jason Calacanis, Mahalo founder and lover of Tesla, goes to the extent of saying with Buzz, Facebook lost half its value.  Thomas Hawk, an amazing photographer and avid FriendFeed user, stated on FriendFeed that Google Buzz is going to “Kick MySpace’s A**”.  While I don’t doubt that Myspace is already having difficulties, I really don’t see Buzz being competition at all for the Facebooks or Myspaces or even Orkuts of this world.  It’s a matter of apples and oranges, or metaphorically speaking, just dust in an elephant’s trunk.

There’s a term I like to apply to the Twitter, Buzz, and FriendFeed phenomenas when compared to Facebook and Myspace and Orkut that I call, “Horton’s Megaphone”.  We all live in a personal world of friends, family, teachers, doctors, and pets.  That’s our reality.  We live in it from day to day and it is what we are most familiar with.  Yet, there’s another reality we all want to be a part of.  Without being heard we’re at risk of missing out on career opportunities, growing our businesses, or maybe even fame or fortune.  There’s a need beyond this current reality to get word about ourselves out to other realities beyond our inner circle of friends and family.  It’s a competition for discovery about who we are.

This is where Horton comes in.  In the Dr. Seuss book, “Horton Hears a Who!”, we see a completely different reality from our own, the “Whos”, whose entire reality exists in just a small speck of dust within our own.  They have mayors and doctors and family and friends and neighbors, and live a grand life.  But when tragedy strikes they are stuck trying to get an alternate reality to hear them.  Their final survival ends up relying on their voices, a megaphone, and an elephant named Horton who had the heart to listen.  ”We are here! We are here! We are here!” they shouted in desperation through that megaphone, trying to get the attention of reality.  Sounds familiar.

Buzz is simply that megaphone used to create contact with the real world.  It’s a way we can get word out to alternate realities beyond our own to ensure our own survival as individuals, businesses, and organizations on the internet.  Buzz, Twitter, and FriendFeed are where your own realities get to speak with other realities you would have never come in contact with before they existed.

There is no way Facebook should feel even a little bit threatened by Buzz (unless they’re trying to grow FriendFeed).  They are two entirely different communication mediums.  On Facebook I don’t need a megaphone to communicate with my close friends and family, which it was designed for.  On Buzz I can’t find old friends from High School or even Elementary School, or old clubs or groups I used to belong to like I can on Facebook.  I don’t have groups or shared events or life photos of all those close friends and family.  Facebook is where real life happens.  It’s the Elephant, the real world, reality.  Some call it a “walled garden”.  I call it reality, where everybody knows your name.

Buzz is (and Twitter and FriendFeed are) just an entity of individuals, most which do not know each other and each having their own realities, all trying to compete for the attention of real life.  It’s a different type of communication.  On these platforms it’s a competition for attention (which is why everyone wants to compete for the highest number of followers).  On Facebook (and Myspace and Orkut to an extent) that competition is already won.

Facebook has the holy grail of networks right now – real life connections and relationships that are all able to connect and share with one another.  It is where each and everyone on Buzz wants to be.  The real value is in those real-life connections.  Otherwise we are all just specs of dust in an elephants trunk.

“We are here! We are here! We are here!”

I’ve been following the Buzz about Buzz today (click on the link – get it?), and, wanting to try it (since I’m not of the privileged few bloggers given access at launch), I started browsing on my iPhone where I heard it was available.  Immediately I was presented with a list of people following me that I was not following back, so I went in and clicked follow on about 300 or so people that it said I was not following yet.  Big Mistake.

Later in the day I went to check Google Reader, which until today was my RSS Reader of choice, and lo and behold I had over 400 items from just the last hour sitting in my unread items box.  It turns out when you follow someone on Buzz, it also follows them on Reader, and who knows what else on the various Google properties.  Now, the only way to bring my volume of repeat RSS shares from friends down on Google Reader is to go into each and every one, mark hide, and manually move each into their own separate folders.  All this on an already slow Google Reader interface.  I’m not looking forward to that.

I have been critical ever since the Reader team introduced social features into Google Reader.  Now, rather than being a place where I can just go to ensure I’m getting the latest news from the blogs I want to subscribe to, as a traditional RSS Reader should be, I’m now stuck in a world with hundreds to thousands of shared items from friends, many of those repeat items, getting fed to me over and over again, even when I don’t want them!  Add to that all the likes, comments, ability to post “status updates”, and more, it occurred to me today that Google Reader is no longer an RSS Reader – it is now a Social Network!

I wish Google Reader would just stick to what it’s good at – being an RSS Reader.  I now need a place I can go just to get the news I want and don’t want to miss.  Some say those days are gone, but it’s still a need for me.  Today with the introduction of Buzz, Google Reader became useless to me.  If I want to skim the news I can go to Buzz and get all the features of a social network.  I don’t need Google Reader to do that for me.  But when I just want to read the news I want, Google Reader has lost its use for me.  Maybe some of this is the reason Google Reader’s former team lead just switched to the Youtube team?

I’m first to admit RSS is far from dead, though I think it’s time to find another RSS Reader.  Should I just switch to Mail.app?  Where can one go to get the news these days?

Every time I switch to jQuery, Yahoo’s YUI libraries seem to keep luring me back.  Just yesterday, Yahoo added one more tool to its arsenal of YQL libraries that actually makes the Twitter API intuitive, giving me another reason yet to switch back to yui, or at least consider using Yahoo a little more as I develop tools for the Social Web.  The new YQL set of tables for Twitter enables any developer to use simple SQL-like queries to retrieve and post Twitter data.

For simple user queries, getting a user’s twitter profile data is as simple as something like “SELECT * FROM twitter.status WHERE id=’8036408424′;“.  To insert data, you simply need to provide the oauth consumer key and secret, along with the user’s oauth tokens and you can do things like post new status updates for the user, all in Javascript!  A subsequent call to post a user’s status would look like:

“INSERT INTO twitter.status (status, oauth_consumer_key, oauth_consumer_secret, oauth_token, oauth_token_secret)
VALUES (‘tweeting from yql!’, ‘@your_consumer_key’, ‘@your_consumer_secret’, ‘@your_access_token’, ‘@your_access_secret’);“

The cool thing about Yahoo’s YQL Twitter interface is I can also choose to only pull specific information out for the user.  I’m not quite sure the benefit this gives you considering Yahoo is probably still retrieving the entire subset of data from Twitter (you can’t pull specific pieces of data out of specific objects in the Twitter API), but at least it’s possible, something I’ve been craving from the Twitter API for quite awhile.  It is unclear if Yahoo is caching this data, and if so, it could provide some significant performance benefits, with Yahoo doing most of the work on their own backend.

Yahoo’s YQL puts them one level above Facebook’s own FQL query language for accessing Facebook data by enabling developers to not only access data like this for Twitter, but also other environments like Facebook as well.  Yahoo has an entire database of “community tables”, where, if specific APIs aren’t provided, the community can create their own tables to that interface and give developers immediate access to those APIs via a simple, standardized SQL interface to those platforms.

This type of API is exactly what I was looking for from the likes of Google’s Friend Connect APIs (and Google has still failed to provide) – a standardized platform where one single API gives me access to all the different APIs out there.  Now with standardized SQL I can access almost any API, and if that API doesn’t exist yet I can create my own interfaces into each API that, once created will also have access via that SQL interface.

Yahoo now has my attention with this launch.  The API has a web interface, where a call as simple HTTP GET to http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?[query_params] returns an entire structure of XML data my application can access.  They provide a YUI Javascript interface into the table structure so you don’t need a backend if you don’t want one, and I get all this for all the APIs I interface with.

I will now be looking into the Yahoo APIs as I look to interface the limitless APIs available out there thanks to Yahoo’s focus on cross-platform integration of their YQL interface.  I like that Yahoo isn’t being selfish with this.  With YQL, Yahoo has finally created a glue that lets me access all the APIs I need to access as a Building Block Web brick builder.

A common complaint amongst Twitter developers has been that Twitter’s OAuth, the authentication process you see when you click the Twitter login button on a 3rd party website and go to a Twitter-looking page with a “Allow” or “Deny” button, is too complicated.  Mainly, from a user experience perspective, users are required to leave the 3rd party site completely in order to log into Twitter, then get redirected back to the 3rd party site again.  If anything breaks along the way, the user is left wondering what to do, and valuable logins, purchases, or registrations could be lost.  Facebook has solved this by enabling users to do all the login process via Javascript they provide that produces a popup.  Users can log into Facebook without ever leaving the 3rd party site.  It appears, based on a thread on the Twitter developers list, that Twitter is planning to one-up Facebook by allowing users to log in to 3rd party sites without ever even needing a popup or any type of redirect, and they’re already testing it with select partners.

The topic came up when other developers noticed that the site, TwitPic.com, was allowing direct Twitter logins right on their own website and somehow posts from TwitPic were showing up with the TwitPic name and link next to the post on Twitter.  This normally isn’t possible without enabling OAuth login because Twitter has disabled the functionality for any non-OAuth produced Tweet.  In fact they have said in June of 2010 they will be completely removing the ability to login through Twitter on 3rd party sites via plain-text authentication.  So how is TwitPic doing it?

According to Raffi, an Engineer on the Twitter API platform team, Twitter is currently working on a new “OAuth Delegation” standard that will allow applications to allow users to log in via Twitter on their own sites, while still maintaining the control over Apps that OAuth gives providers and users.  So, on TwitPic, for instance, you can log in to TwitPic.com with your own Twitter username and password right on the TwitPic site itself, yet you’ll still have full control on Twitter.com to revoke access to TwitPic at any time you want to.  In addition, Twitter, at any time, can remove TwitPic’s ability to publish or access the Twitter API since they still have to use OAuth to make Twitter API calls.

If the hints in the developers list thread prove true, developers will be able to take the plaintext username and password, still store them somewhere, but in order to make calls through the Twitter API they’ll have to somehow send an OAuth key with their requests to Twitter along with some way of identifying the user.  My guess is, in essence, the app will send a one-time login on behalf of the user to Twitter (most likely via a secure SSL encryption channel or similar), and Twitter will return to the app an OAuth token to make API requests with on behalf of that user in the future.  In my opinion, this is still no different than storing an OAuth Token in a database that would give apps the same access as their Twitter username and password.

Security Concerns

While storage may be no different, I’m sure there will still be those concerned about this approach.  For instance, what happens when users get used to entering their Twitter usernames and passwords on 3rd party websites and decide to do so on a malicious website?  We’ve seen how used to entering Twitter credentials people get with websites that look like Twitter itself with the rampant phishing attacks recently.

Maybe Twitter is feeling comfortable enough that they can be proactive about such misuses and password collection.  The risk is still there though and hopefully the OAuth Delegation Twitter is getting ready to launch will cover this problem.

Partners

Thus far, it seems TwitPic is one of the partners testing this new delegation standard Twitter is working on.  Several others were mentioned in the developer discussions about this as well.  For instance, Seesmic Look is also taking similar credentials without any OAuth redirect, yet still shows the “Look” source in Tweets generated with the app.  One developer pointed out the information that could be retrieved from the new requests, and the security of it all is a little concerning.

Whatever it ends up being, the winners will be desktop and mobile client developers.  Right now developing a mobile or desktop app involves deep integration into the browser in order to legally get the user logged into the app.  It is why we see so few native desktop clients and so many AIR apps.  AIR is a browser-based solution.

I’m very interested to see what happens.  The Twitter team is supposed to announce more details very soon and I’d like to find out more about what this means for developers, how secure it is, and how much recoding I’ll have to do to enable it in my app.  Whatever it is, you can bet it will be one step simpler than the currently more-simple solution which Facebook provides.  This is getting very interesting!  Let the API wars begin…

Recently here in Salt Lake City we had the opportunity to have Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google visit. While I didn’t have the chance to see it, reading about it, he seemed to talk about a common worry I hear throughout this State. Here in Salt Lake City and around the area we have a lot of successful businesses! From my Uncle’s Freeservers.com, to Omniture, to Mozy, to Novell, Wordperfect, and many others, there’s no shortage of success in this area. It’s a hotbed of talent and technology the world doesn’t give enough credit for. The problem is that we have no Yahoos or Googles or Facebooks or Microsofts to give us credit for that success. We have no home-grown success story that didn’t eventually sell out for big bucks to one of the big West Coast companies.  I think this is a common problem for many areas.  Why is this?

Eric Schmidt tried to come up with his own reasons in response to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, who (Hatch) stated, “We get a corporation going and it has some tremendous ideas and all of the sudden someone comes up from Silicon Valley and buys it and takes it back there.” Schmidt responded, saying, “I don’t know whether [improving the situation means] globalizing the business. I don’t know whether we need more venture capitalist presence in Utah or maybe just more experience building the businesses from the startup. It’s not that businesses aren’t getting started, it’s that once started they aren’t growing the businesses fast enough.” So what is it that keeps the Googles or Microsofts from staying in Utah (and other states) rather than staying here and growing to compete with the big guys?

I’ve suggested the PR problem before. That’s just one problem Utah has – a lack of enough tech bloggers to get the word out to Silicon Valley. One other common problem I see in Utah is we get greedy. I’m not even saying that’s a bad thing. Too many Utah startups are focused on the money rather than an underlying cause that motivates their revenue stream. That’s part of the reason Utah businesses have been successful – we have some of the smartest business people in the world right here. Even Eric Schmidt confirmed that, stating that “Utah is one of the best places to do business.” We know how to make money! Unfortunately that’s what differentiates us from the West Coast companies like Google however.

I argue it all revolves around cause. Let’s look at Eric Schmidt’s company itself, Google. Everything they do centers around one central cause, “Do no evil”. It doesn’t even matter if they have purpose. Everything they do must be done “the right way”, even if they lose money from it. Some even argue this has become a PR pitch for them as well. Google is willing to lose money for their cause, yet they are also making money because of it. It’s an amazing strategy.

Facebook also does this well. I’ve done a lot of work with Facebook with 2 books on the company and several apps written around their platform. When you interact with them and their employees, you get a common theme from them: They are doing all they can to enable people to share in bigger and better ways. Their vision is to help you share without risking privacy. Everything they do revolves around that – their revenue model is built around their cause.

Twitter is building “the pulse of the internet”.  They want to enable better communication between anyone in the world. They’ve forgone revenue to ensure that takes place (yet they’ve been able to raise a ton of capital, I realize, but I argue that’s part due to their cause).

I see the same thing from company to company in the Bay Area and even up in tech hotbeds like Seattle (home of Amazon, Microsoft). These guys all drive revenue based on purpose! While there are currently a few exceptions, I don’t quite see this in Utah and other states, especially amongst the larger startups. It’s all business.

Eric Schmidt also stated that “It’s not an attitude problem, it’s an availability problem. To me, it’s recruiting new talent into the state and growing new talent. It’s really people and expertise and that’s the way to make it happen.” Guess what drives and keeps talent? Motivation. If people have cause to work for they come, and they stay, and they work hard at it.  I remember at BackCountry.com (a Utah company), our mantra was “We use the gear we sell”.  Employees loved that because all kinds of incentives were given to get employees using their cool gear, and the employees loved that!

80% of Utah’s population is in the Salt Lake City area. Schmidt suggested this was an incredible opportunity for people to connect. I think we just need motivation to encourage that connectedness. Motivation is what makes the Googles and Facebooks and Microsofts of the world.

If you’re a startup, anywhere, what are you building on top of? Where are your foundations? Are you building for money or for purpose? I know as I build my business I’m going to be thinking much, much more about changing the world and less about the money I make as a result of that. The money will come naturally. That is how you build Google, and keep it there.

What’s your cause? What businesses do you think do this well? Please share in the comments.

EDITORS NOTE: 2 Companies in Utah that I think are doing really well at this are Phil Windley’s Kynetx and Paul Allen’s FamilyLink.  When you interact with them you can sense their cause.  It bleeds through the company.  People are sacrificing time and money just to be sure their cause is getting through.  As a result, Paul Allen’s company was recently ranked one of the fastest growing companies on COMScore, and recently, according to Compete.com, surpassed his old company, Ancestry.com in traffic.  Cause eventually pays off!  I encourage you to learn what they do – they won’t be going away any time soon.

Source of Eric Schmidt Comments: http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_13630231

I just got an email from Google stating that starting March 1st, their web applications will no longer support older browsers, instead, pushing the new HTML5 standard. Here is what they said;

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser

I applaud this. As a web developer, trying to create sites that work with a dozen web browsers is nearly impossible. I hope more companies take this stance, and help push new technology along. Google has a strong enough presence with their own applications (i.e. GMail and Docs), that they can control what browsers they will support and which they won’t. Here’s hoping others will follow.