Performance: Less JavaScript - More Hardware Acceleration

Looking ahead to 2011, Baker told us that she believes that we will mostly see more of what we've already seen in 2010. Mozilla plans to focus strongly on speed - especially with an eye on hardware acceleration. Baker believes that JavaScript optimization is reaching a plateau right now and that we won't any of the major performance gains there that we've become accustomed to in the last few years. On the other hand, though, she pointed out that the study of JavaScript performance is slowly becoming legit in academia, so there is a chance that we will see something new come out of university labs that will bring unexpected speed gains in the future.

2011: The Year for Open Audio and Video on the Web?

During her interview with Robert Scoble at LeWeb today, Baker also showed a demo of how the combination of HTML5, JavaScript and technologies like Canvas 2D and 3D can bring text, video and audio closer together on the Web, while pulling in real-time information from the open Web at the same time. As she noted, "the next time you hear that the Web can't do something, think again." Indeed, in our earlier interview, Baker pointed out that she thinks that the next year could finally fulfill the promise of video on the Web. The next year, she told us, "could be the year where we actually understand what these technologies can do." With these new technologies, developers will be able to sync video and text, for example, or create audio visualizations.

Mozilla's Vision: Control Your Online Identity on the Web

One area Mozilla has focused on recently is online identity. According to Baker, we are "at risk to be locked in with regards to identity. No matter how great Facebook is, I don't want it to own me." In Mozilla's vision, users should be able to control how they identify themselves to the Web. In our interview, though, she also noted that Mozilla doesn't want to replace existing solutions. As we put more and more personal information on the Web, however, Mozilla believes that we should be able to own and control this data. For now, though, this remains an interesting vision but Mozilla has not shipped any actual product that put this idea into practice yet.

App Stores for the Web

Of course, we also talked about app stores for the Web. In her on-stage interview at LeWeb today, Baker pointed out that the key problem that needs to be solved here is discoverability for apps. While Mozilla may run its own app store in the future, the organization is is more interested in creating specs for creating open stores that are compatible with each other. Web apps, Baker told us, should be compatible with the whole Web, no matter which browser vendor you choose. This focus on stores - which, as Baker told us, has become possible because Apple did such a great job at popularizing the concept - fits in well with her generally vision of the browser. According to her, the "browser is history. We don't browse the Internet anymore - we interact with the Internet through apps and social networks."

Evernote will charge these sponsoring organizations the same fee as individual users pay today (though educational institutions and users will get the same 30% discount they are currently getting). Businesses and other sponsoring organizations can upgrade the accounts of existing users. once an employee leaves the company, Evernote will not delete any data but will offer the user to either pay for an account or downgrade to the free tier.

Libin stressed that Evernote does not want to be in the business software market. Instead, he wants Evernote to focus on its current straightforward business model ("I don't like clever business models," he told us today).

The State of Evernote

Libin also gave us a quick update on the state of Evernote. The company currently has around 150,000 paying users and expects to reach the 6 million user mark by the end of the year. About 18,000 new users sign up for the service every day, coming from both the mobile apps and the web and desktop services. The majority of its users are currently in the U.S. (57%), but Libin expects that this number will drop as Evernote acquires more users in Asia (especially Japan where NTT DoCoMo now preloads its Android phones with free access to the premium version of Evernote). Libin also expects to see a lot of growth in Latin America next year.

Talking about Evernote's freemium model, Libin told us that users don't convert well from the free to the premium accounts in their first few months on the service. Users really only convert after about 6 months of membership and today, 20% of Evernote's oldest users (more than 2 years of membership) are premium users.

While he did not announce any new products for Twitter, Goldman did announce that he is leaving the company by the end of the month, though he will stay on in an advisory role for "the next few years."

While Goldman did not announce his future plans, he did point out that he wasn't looking to go to Facebook and Google and doesn't have any current plans for starting another company.

Third-Party Integrations

Talking about yesterday's new integrations with Instagram, Rdio, SlideShare and a few other companies, Goldman noted that he doesn't quite see the new right pane on the new Twitter interface as a new development platform, but in the future, he said, this will become a place where a lot of innovation can happen. Twitter will also ramp up the number of integrations that it will launch now that the frameworks are in place.

Indeed, he noted that the one area where Twitter could really improve in the future is the consumption of content on the site.

Twitter's Developer Ecosystem: We Try to Provide the Best Solutions for Users

Asked about Twitter's relationship with its developers, Goldman noted that the company wants to create the best experiences for its users. He does believe, though, that there is a role for apps like Seesmic and TweetDeck in the long run, especially not that Twitter has started sharing revenue it receives from its Promoted Tweets product with some developers. Goldman also thinks that a lot of innovation will happen around how developers will surface the most interesting content on the service.

Siegler asked Goldman about Twitter's biggest product mistakes in the past. According to Goldman, his own user interface decisions in the early days of Twitter were not always optimal. As an example, Goldman pointed out a feature he tested that would forward tweets to phones by text messages whenever a user was signed out from his Jabber account. This, he noted, is an example for Twitter trying to be "too clever" in the early days.

No Facebook Phone

Asked about the mythical Facebook phone, Beard noted that he could categorically deny that it exists. Instead, Facebook is more interested in working with partners to integrate Facebook into other phones and platforms. Windows Phone 7, being a phone that features a deep integration with Facebook, is a viable platform, according to Beard, though Microsoft's own Charlie Kindel refused to provide the LeWeb audience with exact sales numbers earlier today.

Privacy

Asked about the public perception of Facebook as an "evil" company that often disrespects its users privacy, Beard noted that Facebook wants to give its users control. Facebook's users, Beard pointed out, has a different definition of the level of privacy and Facebook wants to give them control over their own settings. According to Bear, "no other company in the world currently spends us much time and resources on privacy as Facebook."

Why are Googlers Defecting to Facebook?

Arrington also asked Beard about the fact that a lot of Google employees are defecting to Facebook and other companies today. Google, according to Beard, is not the same company it used to be a few years ago. "It's not exactly a fast-flying high-growth company anymore," Beard said. On the other hand, "what's going on at Facebook right now is really, really excited," he noted. What Facebook does, said Beard, will change how people will use the Internet in the coming years.

The Facebook Platform

Talking about the Facebook platform, Beard pointed out that 250 million Internet users now use Facebook Connect. Some of the biggest partners for Facebook there are Bing, Pandora, AOL, Yahoo and other large web properties. "Everything should be using Facebook," Beard said without a lot of irony in his voice.

SCVNGR and Coke

Coke, of course, is not directly tied to a location, so the two companies are also working with a group of 10 large malls, including the Burlington Mall in Burlington, MA, the Florida Mall in Orlando, FL and the Mall of Georgia in Buford, GA. Unlike most location-based social networks today, SCVNGR's game mechanics are not just based around checking in, but also around performing specific challenges at a given location. For this partnership, a set of "Coke Secret Formula Challenges" will give SCVNGR users the ability to win mall gift cards and Coke merchandise.

Foursquare and Pepsi

Foursquare's integration with Safeway's Vons stores and their partnership with Pepsi is a bit more intricate. Foursquare's users can now link their accounts to their Vons loyalty and automatically check in every time they use their card at one of Vons' stores.

For brands that are not tied to specific locations, both the Foursquare/Pepsi deal and SCVNGR/Coke deal make perfect sense, especially given that both of them also work with specific shopping outlets (Safeway and Simon Malls). This gives companies like Coke the opportunity to test the waters of location-based marketing and the location services get access to a new group of potential clients and advertisers. What remains to be seen, though, is if these deals can help bring these services to a more mainstream audience.

Clearly, Ping is not going viral on Twitter yet. Indeed, users barely ever retweet a Ping like. Only 1.4% of the Ping likes we analyzed were retweets. By comparison, almost 6% of links to the increasingly popular Instagram mobile photo sharing site were retweets. While we can't compare the two directly, it is also worth noting that we regularly saw more than 400 Instagram tweets within half an hour, while we barely saw more than 50-60 Ping likes on Twitter in the same time period. While that's great for Instagram, that's not a good sign for Ping.

Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick described Ping on Twitter as a "non-starter" earlier this week and judging from this data, a lot of Twitter and iTunes users feel the same way.

Note: The data for 11/19 is incomplete. We also only looked at tweets in English.

A Few More Observations:

• Those who used Ping's like function to sent Tweets to Ping only used it a few times from what we could see. There are some power-users who sent over 100 Ping likes to their Twitter friends over the course of the week, but those are in the minority (and probably annoyed their followers to no end).
• It doesn't come as a surprise that the top words in these tweets (Beatles, Box Set, John)have to do with the Beatles - after all, the full Beatles catalog came to iTunes earlier this week and quickly dominated the charts there.

Given that Amazon now makes Kindle apps for all major mobile platforms (iOS, Android and BlackBerry), as well as desktop apps for Mac and PC, the chance that you could give an e-book to somebody who doesn't have the ability to read it is pretty slim.

What About E-Book Lending?

More so than gift giving, we also hope that Amazon will soon allow users to lend e-books. Barnes & Noble's Nook already has this capability, and Sony Reader users can often lend e-books from their local libraries. The Kindle remains one of the more closed e-book ecosystems, though earlier this year, Amazon announced that it was definitely working on this feature, and the company's CEO Jeff Bezos told The New York Times that he thought current e-book lending schemes were too restrictive.

Just like in other countries, Google also blurs faces and license plates in its Street View images for Germany. The most recent pictures on the site are from February 2010 and the oldest from 2008.

The controversy around Street View kept many Germans from allowing images of their houses to be shown on the service, the mayor of Markt Overstaufen - the first town to appear on Street View - told the Germany's c't magazine that he did not receive a single complaint about the service from his constituents. Overall, though, the reaction to today's expansion is anything but positive.

Resistance Grows

Google is clearly hoping for a positive reaction to this expansion, but looking at the current online discussions around this topic, it quickly becomes clear that there is still a lot of resistance - even among Germany's most Internet-savvy users. Just like in the early days of Street View in the U.S., users are concerned that thieves could use the service to scoop out new targets or that government bureaucrats could use it to snoop on citizens.

From the American perspective, it seems somewhat odd that people would want to hide images of their houses from the Internet and that this could stir up such strong emotions, but it also doesn't help that, as Spiegel Online reports, some of the houses that were supposed to be blurred are still visible from some perspectives.

Numbers Can Only Go Up

Looking at the latest check-ins from Disney's park in Anaheim, CA, it's clear that check-ins at the parks could use a boost and that location-based services still have a long way to go. Only 10 people used Gowalla to check in to the main park in the last 24 hours. Two people checked in at the Pirates of the Caribbean ride - one of the most popular attractions in the park. Compared to Disney's park in Orlando, FL, these numbers are actually quite high. Only one person checked in to Space Mountain in the last two days.

Judging from these numbers, Gowalla can only profit from this partnership, which also includes the sale of actual pins in Disney's stores across the parks. But by tying its product so closely to these destinations and experiences, chances are that those who encounter Gowalla because of this deal will only think of it in context of this Disney experience and aren't likely to continue to use it outside of the parks.

Also, while collecting badges would be fun for the younger kids in the group, chances are that they are far too preoccupied with everything else that is going on in the parks to worry about checking in. For most adults, these badges aren't enough to motivate them to check in consistently (especially without coupons and other discounts).

Will Disney's Mainstream Appeal Rub Off on Gowalla?

As ZDNet's Larry Dignan notes, "there's nothing more mainstream than Disney World. Disney could introduce Gowalla and geolocation services to a much broader population." While that is true, we have to wonder if the broader population will care about checking in to attractions or if most visitors to Disney's Parks would rather just enjoy the rides without having to deal with their phones.

RIPE currently runs a relatively small network of complex traffic measurement boxes - consisting of a PC and a GPS antenna - but the non-profit group hopes to expand its measurements by introducing small autonomous USB-powered probes across Europe (50,000 sensors) and then later the rest of the world (250,000 sensors). RIPE works with large Internet carriers, so the organization probably expects these sensors to run on their servers. As far as we can see, RIPE doesn't expect individuals to host these sensors at home.

To finance this program, the organization is asking its member organizations to host probes and donate a small fraction of their bandwidth and electricity to run them. In return for paid sponsorships (starting at 2,000 euros for 8 probes), sponsors will be able to run a certain number of tests on the network. The data from all of these measurements will be public, though, and should allow scientists and engineers to better predict bottlenecks and online traffic jams.

Apple originally argued that the apps' functionality was too similar to its own native phone app and could potentially confuse users. Apple never outright rejected the app, but it remained in limbo until today. Today's approval comes slightly less as a surprise, though, given that Apple recently clarified its App Store rules and has generally relaxed its stringent requirements for similar apps.

The Google Voice app allows users to make cheap international calls from their iPhones and send free text messages to any U.S. number. Just like the HTML5 web app Google debuted earlier this year, you can also see your voicemail transcriptions in the app. In addition, the native app now allows for push notifications when you receive a new voicemail or text message.

The new app also features Google's Direct Access Numbers, which make connecting calls through the company's VoIP system just as fast as dialing directly from your phone. In earlier versions of Google Voice, the system would actually call you back and then connect the call after you picked up. Now, your phone will just call a central number and connect the call immediately. Sadly, though, these calls take you out of the Google Voice app and back into your native phone app.

The two new tags that Google introduced today are syndication-source and original-source. The syndication-source tag can be used to indicate the location of the original story. The original-source tag should be used to highlight the URL of "the first article to report a story." A story that uses material from a variety of original sources can include more than one original-source tags to point to these. Both of these tags can also point to the current page URL, so publishers can call attention to their own original reporting. You can find more details for how to implement these tags on your site here.

For now, Google still calls this an experiment is only using the syndication-source tag in its rankings to distinguish among groups of duplicate articles. The original-source is "only being studied" and doesn't factor into Google's rankings yet.

It is worth noting that the hNews microformat, which was developed by the Associated Press and the Media Standards Trust, already offers a similar functionality, including a tag for identifying the originating organization for a news story. According to Google, though, "the options currently in existence addressed different use cases or were insufficient to achieve our goals."

Can You Trust the Internet?

The problem with this system is that it is based on trust, as Search Engine Land's Matt McGee rightly notes. Nobody can stop a spammer from marking unlicensed copies of a story as original sources, for example. In it's FAQ for these tags, Google says that it will look out for potential abuse and either ignore the source tags from offending sites or completely remove them from Google News.

As Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft's corporate VP of the Office Product Management group, notes, this new integration will allow Facebook users to share "ideas and documents - serious or entertaining." Microsoft envisions that Facebook users will use this integration to send personalized dinner party invitations to their Facebook friends with the help of Word, and that your kids will use it to share that PowerPoint presentations they created for their last school project. While Microsoft points out that this integration can also be used for "serious" business, business users aren't likely to share their documents through the Facebook platform, after all.

For Microsoft, this is a major win, as its flagship Web productivity apps will now play a central role on the Web's most popular social network. Microsoft already integrated Facebook into Bing last month and the Office Web apps were among the first service to use Facebook's Instant Personalization feature.

According to CTAM's president and CEO Char Beales, viewers are using the Internet to supplement their regular TV viewing and not to replace it. The study also found that those who are streaming TV shows and movies to their TVs often first discovered new shows online.

As much as the CTAM tries to spin these current results as positive, though, the current discussion feels somewhat reminiscent of the debate over the "death of the newspaper." The CTAM's study and press release completely ignores that bringing the Internet to your TV was barely worth the hassle until just a few months ago. Now, however, with the arrival Google TV, cheap boxes from Roku and the Boxee Box, bringing the Internet to the living room is getting easier and with online services like Hulu+ and Netflix, getting interesting content to these devices is also pretty straightforward. DVRs are now a standard feature in most households, so switching from time-delayed viewing to online TV is a relatively easy transition for many households, though the fact that a lot of live sporting events and a number of prominent shows aren't available yet is surely holding some potential cord-cutters back. The CTAM study ended in August. It'll be interesting to see what these results look like 6 to 12 months from now.

As we noted earlier this week, the iOS 4.2 update is the first major new version of Apple's mobile operating system for iPad users. Rumor has it that iOS 4.2 is coming out slightly later than planned because of a WiFi bug in the latest version that went out to developers and testers. As usual, though, it is hard to confirm this and we still expect to see iOS 4.2 within the next week or so.

This new version of iTunes also enables video streaming through AirPlay, which allows users to wirelessly stream videos, pictures and music from iTunes to the new Apple TV. Until now, AirPlay only worked for audio and photos. Besides this, there are no major new features in this new version of iTunes (the release notes also make no mention of AirPrint, by the way). If you are using iTunes to sync an iOS device, we recommend you update as soon as you can, especially if you plan to update to iOS 4.2 as soon as it is released.

As The Register's John Leyden notes, Symantec's numbers fall in line with similar data from Kaspersky Lab, which reported that spam dropped to 82.3% in the third quarter of 2010.

Dutch authorities took down several servers associated with the Bredolab botnet at the end of October (though there is some evidence that this botnet is still active). Symantec cites this, as well as the takedown of the Zeus ring and spamit.com, as the main reasons for this decline in total spam volume.

Phishing on Social Media on the Rise

While, according to Symantec, phishing scams on social media sites only comprised about 4% of all phishing attacks, the total number of phishing sites on social media increased by about 80% compared to last month. The security firm also notes that one of the most popular phishing scams in October involved emails and messages that claimed to come from a social media site's security service and asked users for their login credentials. These scams told consumers that they had to reenter their credentials (on a phishing site, of course) to ensure continued access to the service.

These curated modules will appear on the top right side of the Top News, My News and Upcoming pages.

As far as we can see, these editors' decisions won't directly affect the content that appears on the front page, but their recommendations will surely influence the stories that the Digg community will vote for. After all, these modules are in a very prominent position on the most popular pages on Digg.

Votes, Algorithms and Editors: Taking the Hybrid Approach

This approach is similar to how the popular tech news aggregator Techmeme handles breaking news stories. While Techmeme's algorithms decide most of the content that appears on the site's front page, a group of editors also ensures that breaking news stories are posted to the site as quickly as possible. Asked about Digg's new approach, Techmeme's founder Gabe Rivera told us that he believes that "all bottom up approaches for surfacing news like voting and link analysis can benefit from curation from the top. Voters and linkers are critical, but they mainly care about the stories they're pushing or writing about, not the overall mission of the news aggregator, which isn't their job."

Will This Help Digg to Get Back on Its Feet?

The recent launch of Digg v4 quickly turned into a major disaster for the site, as as the new infrastructure turned out to be rather fragile and unhappy users decamped to other sites. Throughout this time, though, the Digg team continued to state that it wants to make the site a more interesting destination for mainstream users. By adding a more curated experience that can break stories faster, Digg could be on its way to achieving this goal.

How Will Digg's Users React?

On the other hand, though, Digg's power users are extremely sensitive when it comes to anything that looks like it could manipulate the site's democratic voting system and the editorial team now wields a lot of influence over which stories get popular and which sites get traffic from Digg. We will have to see how Digg's users react to this, but the first reactions from the site's users are actually quite positive.

Google's researchers Pedro J. Moreno and Johan Schalkwyk note, "that the speech research community needs to start working on many of these underrepresented languages to advance progress and build speech recognition, translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies." To bring this research up to speed, Google collaborated with local researchers to collect audio samples and developed lexicons and grammars for these languages (for English, Google used 411-GOOG to collect samples). You can find more detailed information about Google's research efforts here.

Google's official mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." While this effort obviously fits right into this, Google is not just financing this research out of the goodness of its heart. The insights the company gathers by tackling hard problems like speech recognition for Zulu - which is not widely represented on the Web and is only spoken by about 10 million people - will also help its researchers to improve other aspects of its services and refine its algorithms for more widely used languages.

Microsoft released the latest version of Messenger with a deep integration of Facebook and Facebook chat less than three months ago. In order to allow both Microsoft to connect its 300 million Messenger users to Facebook without running into performance issues, the two companies decided to roll this partnership out slowly. At this point, Microsoft tells us, only about 20% of Messenger users have access to it, making these numbers even more impressive.

When we talked to Dharmesh Mehta, Microsoft's Director for Windows Live product management, earlier last week, he also noted that there have now been over 250 million chat conversations between Messenger and Facebook, lasting over 1.5 billion minutes in total. He also noted that there are just over 5 million active Messenger users on iPhones and 10 million on BlackBerry. Windows Live Messenger is part of Microsoft's Windows Live Essentials suite. According to Mehta, 80% of new consumers PCs are now shipping with the Live Essentials pre-installed, so the user numbers for Messenger will likely continue to grow.

Update: Microsoft also just posted an update about these numbers with more details.

Users Want Useful Apps - Not Marketing

The problem here is that brands often approach app development without even considering their customers' needs. Most users, for example, are not interested in apps that are just marketing vehicles for a brand and will leave negative reviews when they encounter such an app. Given the nature of mobile app usage, customers expect to get some value out of the app that is related to the brand and its products.

As Anthony Franco, EffectiveUI's co-founder and president, told us yesterday, a lot of companies still think of apps as "microsites" and don't consider that mobile apps have to offer more than just great visuals and good copy. That doesn't mean that users don't want good design, too, though. The majority of respondents (57%) noted that apps should be well designed and 74% said that they want apps to be easy to use (leaving us to wonder if there are users out there who want apps that are badly designed and hard to use...). Even more importantly, though, 73% of those surveyed by Harris Interactive think that mobile apps should be easier to use than the brand's website.