Who owns the kind of information collected by Craigslist? The classifieds site has staked its claim in a series of lawsuits against apartment listings mapper PadMapper and Craigslist data scraper 3taps. On Monday, 3taps will file a bold counterclaim, aiming for a victory that would bring a new era of pubilc information.

ReadWriteWeb has learned that 3taps plans to file an answer to Craigslist's lawsuit on Monday, September 24, denying many of Craigslist's claims. Alongside this response, 3taps will file an antitrust countersuit, alleging that Craigslist maintains a monopolistic control over numerous markets related to online classified advertising. If successful, 3taps could open up the market to numerous innovations atop Craigslist data  and bring about the user interface and search features, whose lacking seem to be exemplified by the popularity of sites such as PadMapper and others who have fallen to Craigslist litigation.

Before we get into the details of 3taps' answer and countersuit, let's look at the events and details leading up to this point. In June, Craigslist sent a cease-and-desist letter to PadMapper, the Google Maps mashup that aggregates apartment and rental listings from a number of sources, craigslist included. At first, PadMapper founder Eric DeMenthon acquiesced, announcing that all craigslist content would be wiped clean as he "wasn’t able to get a meeting or convince Craigslist’s lawyer that PadMapper was beneficial to Craigslist and apartment hunters in general." Several weeks later on July 9, after first urging users to replenish the site's listings on their own, DeMenthon announced that he would be bringing Craigslist listings back to the site.

"I’ve found a way to include them that I’m told is legally kosher since it doesn’t touch their servers at all," wrote DeMenthon, "but it still seems somewhat dickish to go against their wishes in this, and I’ve always had a lot of respect for what they’ve done for the world."

Craigslist seemed to agree that it was dickish and responded in kind with a lawsuit on July 20, arguing that both 3taps and PadMapper violate copyright laws in their use of Craigslist's "protected content." In the suit's introduction, Craigslist argues that it "has worked hard and invested heavily for many years so that its users can use its local community sites largely free of charge, and free from third-party advertising and marketing" and that PadMapper and 3taps work to "misappropriate wholesale and commercially exploit" Craigslist content. The suit goes on to describe Craigslist as "the world's largest online forum for free local classified advertising and community discussions," noting that "more than 60 million Americans visit Craigslist each month, and they collectively post several hundred million classified ads each year."

3taps Answers Craigslist

This exactly the fight 3taps founder and CEO Greg Kidd has been seeking ever since he launched 3taps in April 2011.

In a manifesto-esque essay against Craigslist's claims, titled "3taps Defense Against Copyright Trolls," Kidd argues that "the choice by [Craigslist] to litigate rather than innovate to respond to completion in search and display methods for big data is a chilling hairball laid at the foot of the open Internet."  The "liberation" of data that Craigslist cites in its lawsuit has been a common refrain for the early Twitter investor, Square advisor and one-time member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, where, Kidd argues, "the notion of preventing the free flow of information pertaining to prices or offers of supply and demand in public markets is anathema."

Central to 3taps' response to Craigslist's lawsuit are the ideas that "public facts are public property" and "open access requires equal access". The company argues that it is not bound by Craigslist's Terms of Use, since it claims that it never touches Craigslist's servers to obtain the data it provides to its customers via API. It also argues that the data that it does acquire does not and cannot belong to Craigslist in the first place.

"The [Craigslist] data in question is indexed by public search engines and is made available in the public domain," writes Kidd. "One does not have to belong to or even go to Craigslist to find this information on the description, price, and time of availability of a posting. The information is freely available in the public domain and is a fundamental component of transparency of supply and demand and price discovery that are the foundation of free markets."

This issue of copyright, however, is a sticky one and not clear cut for either side, according to Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. While Opsahl says that Kidd’s argument that facts cannot be copyrighted is already commonly accepted as law, what may not be clear cut in this case is whether or not a Craigslist ad is pure fact or contains an element of creativity that can be copyrighted.

"In the U.S., copyright protects creative expression, and not facts. Let's use the 'Jesus Tap Dancing Christ' CL ad as an example," writes Opsahl. "Here, the facts include that a 5-speed teal 1995 Pontiac Grand Am is for sale, at $700, and its features include tires, doors, steering wheel, seats and radio. However, elements like the use of a picture of a Grand Am riding a blue-haired unicorn as a reason to buy the car are creative expression."

This doesn't, however, necessarily put Craigslist in control of the content, says Opsahl. Instead, "users own any rights to the creative expression in their posts. Thus, it is not Craigslist's right to assert." Craigslist briefly attempted to claim exclusive ownership over posts shortly after filing its lawsuit, but soon reversed its decision following a discussion with the EFF.

3taps on the Offensive

In addition to its response to Craigslist's July 10 lawsuit against it, 3taps intends to file a countersuit alleging that the classified ad site violates antitrust laws. This countersuit alleges that Craigslist enjoys monopolistic control over numerous markets related to online classified advertising. 3taps will argue that Craigslist has a monopoly on gathering, indexing and publishing the factual information contained within classified ads. 3taps will also assert that Craigslist has acted in an anticompetitive manner, shutting down potential competition through a series of cease-and-desist letters and lawsuits. Kidd says in an email to ReadWriteWeb that Craigslist's past actions in dealing with potential competitors and even users are "IMHO, deceptive, unfair, and now given CLs dominance in the marketplace, anti-competitive."

In Kidd's words:

We will file two counters to the CL sham litigation. One is a defense on the intellectual property grounds pointing out the CL copyright like claims are bogus. But the second response, will be a Sherman anti-trust claim filed by the leading anti-trust law firm in the United States: Skadden Arps. We will ask for discovery to unfurl a bunch of the stuff CL has pulled while representing itself as a not-for-profit .org community service (which is how most people know them). . . . CL revenues have grown from millions to tens of millions to hundreds of millions (we have the data now of course). Jim and Craig never profit shared or gave anyone else options or other equity. They have less than 50 workers. Their technology outlays are minimal because they haven't upgraded the system in a decade. . . . and have no other expense that we can discern (except suing people and eBay). It’s not clear where those hundreds of millions have gone. And to be clear, I've got no problem with people doing well. . .

As part of Craigslist's lawsuit, the company cited craiggers as part of 3taps injurious actions against it. Craiggers, which 3taps recently shuttered in light of the lawsuit, allowed users to access Craigslist content with a fully revamped interface, search across localities and even save searches. (I have reviewed the site, saying simply that it "blows Craigslist out of the water".)

It is this sort of innovation that Kidd hopes to support with his antitrust claim. Kidd also cites Kayak, which aggregates flight data from various sources to provide a singular user interface, as an example of what can be done when companies don't stand in the way of innovation around public data.

The EFF's Opsahl agrees. "The real solution for this would be follow on innovation," he says, "to allow the room for other innovators to come along and enhance the value of this information for the community."

Craigslist and its attorneys have not responded to requests for comment.

If there's any one thing that the real-time Web has changed about the way we work, it's in communication and collaboration. Sure, we've had phones, faxes and even email for ages now, but the Web puts the full range of media into our hands and makes the office seem like a thing of the past.

Every time someone asks where the ReadWriteWeb office is, I chuckle a little bit, because I've worked from a thousand different places over the last year and not one has resembled what most think of as an office. And I'm certainly not alone - one study predicts that the number of mobile, remote workers could increase to 1.2 billion by 2013. This would be impossible without the real-time, collaborative nature of the Web. Let's take a look a three simple areas that the real-time Web has changed our working lives.

Will There Be Lunch Served At The Meeting?

Do you remember when you used to go and actually sit in meetings, physically I mean? There would be a pot of coffee off to the side and perhaps some sandwiches. Cookies if you were really lucky.

At many businesses, especially those with virtual offices like ReadWriteWeb, the entire day can be one long meeting, with the water cooler and conference room combined into one simple thing - a chat room. Whether its Skype, AOL Instant Messenger, Campfire or any other group chat solution, the need to gather around in a single location is nearly a thing of the past. With services like these, text chat is at the core, but document sharing, voice and even video chat are just a click away. It's like being in that meeting, passing dossiers around...but without the cookies.

I'll Have That Back To You By 5 P.M.

It used to be that, if you were working on a report or a memo or a presentation, the back and forth volley of collaboration could take forever. As each edit was made, solidified and then passed on, the time in between just piled up. Now, real-time collaboration makes it possible to give feedback the moment someone presses that backspace button.

With online collaborative editing systems like Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365, document editing is no longer a back and forth, it's a real-time interaction. You can see the other persons cursor move as they make changes. You can lock down sections of a document to remain the same or leave it all as a free for all.

Let's Get Together At The Hilton At Noon

One of the big trends this year has been group chat, but some people have been in search of an application outside of constantly messaging teenagers. If you've ever been to a conference with a group of coworkers, however, you've stopped searching entirely.

Mobile apps, like Beluga or GroupMe, make it possible to keep in touch with all of your coworkers at once and end the eternal game of phone tag. Want to figure out who's going to what panel next? Send out a message and it goes to everyone involved, instantaneously. Want to meet up for a quick lunch and regroup? Open up the app and look at the map to find out where everyone is and pick a spot in the middle.

Photo by Daniel Cruz

Earlier this month, patent-holding company Lodsys started going after small-time iOS developers, sending them "notice" letters which claim the developers are infringing on one of Lodsys' patents for in-app purchasing technology. In these notices, Lodsys demands that developers license the patent from them for 0.575% of the U.S. revenue generated using in-app purchases and many companies have been put between a rock and a hard place, with the cost of fighting a potential lawsuit could be far greater than simply paying Lodsys.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the real problem isn't just that, but the fact that Apple actually requires developers to use the technology they could be sued for using and it's called on the company to stand up and shoulder the burden.

The EFF argued on its blog today that "Apple's failure to defend these developers is troubling and highlights at least two larger problems: patent trolls and developers' vulnerability when harassing and counter-productive patent litigation comes around."

While Apple is protected from liability via a patent it took from a Lodsys predecessor, developers are not. This is especially troubling, since Apple provides this technology with immunity while requiring its developers to use it in unknowing violation of a patent. As EFF's Julie Samuels notes, "even careful developers who hire lawyers to do full-scale patent searches on potential apps surely would not expect to investigate the technology that Apple provides. Instead, they would expect (with good reason) that Apple wouldn't provide technologies in its App Store that open its developers up to liability - and/or would at least agree to defend them when a troll like Lodsys comes along."

For a fuller look at the entire Lodsys debacle, take a look at Sarah Perez's round-up of "5 Links to Help iOS Developers Understand the Lodsys Patent Mess".

I don't know about you, but when it comes down to figuring out the "where" of my life on my smartphone, Google Maps is pretty much it. On the Android, the Maps experience is great and complete, but on iOS, the maps app can be a bit lacking. Thankfully, Google offers an equalizer in its mobile website - which comes complete with biking directions and places.

In comparison to the website, however, the Google Maps mobile website has been straggling and today the company announced that it is updating the site to a set of features parallel to those found on the Web.

According to the blog post, 40% of Google Maps usage comes from mobile devices and Google wants to ensure these users get a consistent experience. Before now, the mobile website was missing a number of popular and useful features that it will now include. While some of it (like seeing your current location - you could do that already, yes?) sounds familiar, here's what Google says it has updated on the mobile website:

• See your current location
• Search for what's nearby with suggest and auto complete
• Have clickable icons of popular businesses and transit stations
• Get driving, transit, biking, and walking directions
• Turn on satellite, transit, traffic, biking, and other layers
• View Place pages with photos, ratings, hours, and more
• When signed into your Google account, access your starred locations and My Maps

For you iOS users out there, you may be all too aware that the Google Maps app is sorely lacking many of these features. The biking directions feature, for example, takes into account terrain and bike path options when plotting your route. If you try instead to use the walking directions on the native app, you might find yourself on a terribly busy road that's fine for walking, but not so great for biking. The layers are also great for viewing different information overlays, such as bus routes and bike paths, and again far outpace the native app. The nearby suggest and auto complete feature is another great one for the mobile experience. Instead of typing in the full name, Google can beat you to the punch and save you from battling with your phone's auto-correction feature and the incompatibility between your short stubby fingers and the tiny keyboard.

On a side note, we have to love how Google notes that "when you visit maps.google.com on your phone or tablet's browser and opt-in to share your location, you can use many of the same Google Maps features you're used to from the desktop." The emphasis added is ours, but that seems to be a timely phrase to include given recent concerns over location sharing.

Pick up a book like James Joyce's Ulysses and you'll likely want a library at your side to help define, translate and help give the context needed to understand the plethora of heady content inside. Before the days of the Internet, reading some of the more scholarly literary texts involved just that - having a dictionary or other reference materials on hand.

Now, Google has brought these things together by adding search, translation and word definitions directly to its Google eBooks offering.

"When bookworms stumble across a word we don't know, we face the classic dilemma of whether to put the book down to look up the word or forge ahead in ignorance to avoid interrupting the reading experience," writes Google engineer Derek Lei on the company's blog. "Well, fret no more, readers, because today you can select words in Google eBooks and look up their definitions, translate them or search for them elsewhere in the book from within the Google eBooks Web Reader--without losing your page or even looking away."

Google does this, of course, using its in-house tools, such as Google Dictionary, Google Translate and its flagship Google Search technology. Readers can also search for the word or phrase not only in the text, but in Google and Wikipedia. When looking for a word definition, readers are presented not only with a basic definition, but the ability to hear the word pronunciation.

It's great what turning printed words into digital representations means for the reader experience, isn't it? Instead of flipping through a dictionary, all you need to do now is right click on a word and a world of context and information is immediately available.

Since Google's official unveiling of the Chrome Web Store six months ago, the company has been on a mission to redefine our perception of what constitutes an operating system, a browser and a program, blurring the lines between each. In Google's world, an OS is a browser and a program - one of those hefty pieces of compiled code we used to download or (gasp!) install from a CD - is now a Web app.

Indeed, even the tiniest, incremental changes point clearly in this direction as word comes that the next version of Google's Chrome browser will give users the ability to kill that final remnant of the fact that they're actually using the Web - the address bar.

According to independent technology news blog Conceivably Tech, the next version of Chrome - Chrome 13 - will give back 30 pixels of vertical screen space by getting rid of the address bar. More importantly, the browser will slide further into the background and out of plane view of the user.

Instead of showing a URL bar permanently, the user will have to double-click a tab to see a shortened version of the URL that is displayed with a hover effect, if you move the mouse pointer away from the field, the URL bar disappears. The feature has to be enabled via a flag in a recent Canary or nightly build version of Chrome 13. To activate teh hidden URL bar, users will also have to right-click a tab and select "Hide the toolbar"Besides killing the URL bar, the new feature also moves the tools menu, hides any extension and introduces new back/forward buttons.

The company made it more than clear at this year's Google I/O, the yearly Google developer conference, that Chrome would comprise a major focus for the company and that it will be much more than a "browser". In fact, it dedicated its second of two keynotes to the topic, pointing to the browser's more than 160 million active users and the variety of increased graphic and functional capabilities that take it beyond our standard expectations for browsers. In the same keynote, the company announced the soon-available Chromebook, which will center the user experience within Chrome.

With the address bar disappearing further into the background, Web apps will again take on an increased relevance, as users navigate by clicking on Web app icons, rather than typing in URLs - much as they are used to navigating OSX or Windows. In many ways, URLs are a holdover from a past time. Just as we don't type command line strings into a DOS window on a Windows machine very much if ever anymore, Google wants our Web experience to consist of point and click, not mistaken backslashes and misspelled domain names.

Apple has been clear on one thing for a while now - nothing resembling porn of any kind shall grace the screens of its iOS devices if it has anything to do with it. Of course, that's not a world that Playboy founder Hugh Hefner wants to live in and last January the robe-wearing, pipe-toting extravagant promised an uncensored version of Playboy for the iPad.

Today, Hefner has delivered on his promise, bringing a pure, unadulterated archive of the magazine's nearly 60-year-run to iOS devices.

Apple began its crusade against porn and other racy apps ast year, banishing more than 5,000 "sexy apps" from its App Store in one fell swoop. Since then, the company has continued on its crusade against skin, banning apps from the App Store for suggestive screenshots and even the mere potential for porn. So how has Playboy bypassed Apple's now clear ruling against porn? Simple - a mobile Web app.

iPlayboy - found at i.playboy.com - is an iPad-optimized webpage where Playboy subscribers can access not only the latest issue, but the full archive of Playboy issues back to its 1953 origins. According to 9 to 5 Mac, the site will offer full access at $8 per month, $60 per year and $100 for two years.

Who needs to worry about App Store restrictions and in-app subscription fees when you have content people want to buy, huh? Who ever said mobile Web apps couldn't work?

Not Hef, that's who.

The latest battle in the land of search engines is social search - the addition of signals from social graphs to bring users increasingly personalized search results. To that end, Google has been working on its offering the longest, first introducing the idea back in 2009 when it launched in the U.S.

Today, the company announced that it is "bringing Social Search to more users around the globe" and that it has plans to bring its most recent social addition - the +1 button - with it.

According to the announcement, Social Search will be heading abroad and rolling out in 19 new languages in the coming week, with more languages soon on the way. It also says that it plans on introducing the +1 button "as soon as [it] can."

Social Search had previously been an experimental feature before finally becoming official in February 2011. The feature takes users social connections from a number of different sites and uses them as a signal when returning search results. You have to be logged into your Google account to see the feature, which pulls results from social networks, friends' blogs and shared content. Take a look at an example result:

When Google rolled out the feature officially, it also added increased user control, which allows users to go to their Google profile settings and determine which accounts they want to include and which they don't.

Social search has been heating up recently, with Bing announcing this week that it would add Facebook as a major signal in its own search rankings - something that could certainly give it a leg up on Google.

If you haven't yet seen the feature, the following video gives a bit more of an explanation:

RWW: When was the first time you really thought you were going to go into augmented reality? Has that always been something for you?

Lens-FitzGerald: I never thought of going into augmented reality, but cyberspace, any form of digital worlds, have always been one of the things I've been thinking about since I found out about science fiction. One of the first books I read of the cyber punk genre was Bruce Sterling's "Mirror Shades." Mirror shades, meaning, of course, AR goggles. And that book came out in 1988 and ever since, this was my world.

Almost 20 years later, when we started Sparks Mobile - that was the company preceding Layar - augmented reality was on our list of things that we wanted to do - and then I remember Android coming out with the compass and suddenly everybody could get a simple form of AR. And that's what really got it going.

In Verner Vinge's "Rainbow's End", he talks about somebody standing on top of a hill and he's flipping through all these versions of his ARs, or his realities, and that's literally where the name "Layar" came from - we knew that layers were the Web page metaphor for augmented reality. The other side of inspiration early came from Denno Coil. It's a Japanese anime that uses augmented reality in a great way that really is a near future scenario of what is about to come.

RWW: How do you define augmented reality? What's the simple definition?

Lens-FitzGerald: Reality enhanced with digital information, preferably immersive.

RWW: How far off from better image recognition are we are?

Lens-FitzGerald: I think this year, functionally, you'll see everyone coming out with image recognition one way or another. And then the years after that - 2012 and 2013 - you'll really get the big object recognition going. I think the key is not really the technology but what people do with content. I always say, "It's the format that's important."

The first time you guys in the U.S. ever had a TV on, it was a guy in front of a curtain doing a radio show and that was the TV show. Moving from there to American Idol, that's what it's about. It's about finding the right content. And of course you need more than one channel, you need a good remote and eventually color and stereo and HD. Technology will grow as it always does but it's more about finding the right content and format to have the people be engaged.

The good thing about a QR code is that it's sort of a call to action, although I don't have any incentive on average to point my phone at a QR code because I expect to be advertised to. One of the problems for augmented reality with a phone is, "When do I decide to point my phone at something to see if something is there?"

That's the million dollar question. That will be when your mom knows, and that will be because she [sees] some kind of benefit, fun, interestingness - and again there I'm talking content over format. Yes, it's around functionality, but there's something she has to like. That's when it crosses the chasm from a nerd thing. I think we're so much in the beginning. It's about timing and it's about pace, but we'll get there eventually. It's very early days.

RWW: At what point in the grand evolution of augmented reality are we right now? What's the next step? Is it hardware, software, both or none of the above?

Lens-FitzGerald: Suburban people - if Facebook somehow found a way to their life then we'll find a way too. We're not there yet, but that's where it'll go and right now, augmented reality, how many users would you guess it would have? Maybe a million, a million and a half? Layar has a million and a half active users in the last month and we're the biggest, so hardly anybody knows about it yet but it's getting there.

RWW: You're going to be speaking about "Lessons from building a digital layer on top of the world." What is that going to be about? What type of lessons are you talking about?

Lens-FitzGerald: We have thousands of developers - people creating cool AR content - and millions of users and I'll be going through some examples of what we see, what works, what categories we see that work, but I think most important is what we see happening right now.

That's what we call the democratization of augmented reality, meaning, it was very difficult a year and a half ago to make augmented reality. You had to be able to program. You preferably had to know how to do 3D and then you also had to be able to tell a story with that. All of that is pretty difficult. Not everybody can do that. What we see now is that more and more tools are being developed on top of our platform with which it is easier to make augmented reality, or even better it's cheaper.

I'm not a programmer myself. I recently made my own layer about the neighborhood and the water tower that disappeared in 1920. I put it back in 3D and I can do that because there are tools for that. That's a trend. If you think about TV again, TV was the domain of the big producers, the big networks in the U.S., until you started seeing video cameras. Video cameras slowly turned into YouTube.

That is, in the end, the way that augmented reality is heading. It's going from the heavy duty people who can do a lot to everybody augmenting anything they want. Imagine that. I think that's where it's heading somehow. You can create the world that you want and I can create the world that I want.

Lens-FitzGerald: I wouldn't call it information, because that makes it sound boring. It's not just ATMs. It's history, it's me being able to look back in time, it's 3D so you can see the Berlin Wall or the World Trade Center towers.

If you see that then you, in one glimpse, get how big that change was now that those things aren't here anymore. It's about that impact. They always say that if you read a book, you have an idea about how something happened or what happened; if you see the video [you] have an idea of what it looked like. But if you are on location and can look back in time using augmented reality it really hits home. You really get it, you really feel it, you get an insight instantly.

That is the unique thing for this medium. That's with history, also with art, with entertainment - you can come up with all kinds of concepts that are so deep in the experience that you can't do it in any other medium.

RWW: So right now, you have the phone, you have the direction the phone is pointing and you have a video camera and that's the basic medium, that's like the clay you use to build something. Will we see any drastic changes in that? What's the vision beyond the phone?

Lens-FitzGerald: The vision is vision. I mean, the key thing is that the camera will actually be able to see. And that's what everybody's working on. In your room you can see the lines in the room. Now what if the phone sees that and it can stabilize and image on that? And it can actually hang a picture there on the wall? That's where it's headed.

RWW: Any predictions on how far off we are from things like glasses that do this or other devices?

Lens-FitzGerald: Glasses, in a way, are there but they're kind of clunky still. I think they'll definitely come and it could be next year already. I wonder though, if you want glasses. It could be the car with wings, the flying car - we always think that we want it but looking back we can see that loads of version have been developed but nobody really liked them. We just thought we did. I think this could also be the case with the AR glasses. Of course, if you're a fighter plane pilot then you really want them, but for everyday like I think the phone is perfectly suited to do whatever we want.

RWW: Looking backwards, instead of forwards, what's the biggest challenge you've faced at Layar?

Lens-FitzGerald: Growing with the company. I remember in the beginning, when we were like swooped up by this tidal wave of attention and people offering stuff or wanting stuff, staying grounded, free of distractions - that was very difficult. It's about the product. It's about the company. That's always been the challenge.

RWW: One last question - putting aside all the barriers that exist right now, what's the ultimate future of AR?

Lens-FitzGerald: That is when AR is dead, when we don't really know that it's augmented reality anymore. You use it, you can't live without it anymore - maybe by then it's in our lenses. With a flip of a finger we change from the real reality to the bubbly version or with the flip of a finger I go to see your version that you're seeing right now, like a Skype call but through your eyes.

Imagine that - we don't even know it's augmented reality. It's integrated in our everyday life, in our everyday routine. You take it for granted like today you take for granted that all the computers are connected together and you have instant access to everything. It's about the connectivity of people and objects and places and the visualization of that. AR will disappear.

RWW: What is the hardware there? Is the hardware us? Is the hardware the object?

Lens-FitzGerald: In the end, I think the hardware is the object. It could be a phone, it could be glasses, it could be lenses but I think that's beside the point. It's that it works. Of course your car is nice but it's fun that you can go to your parents at Christmas with your car. It's about that latter part, not how you get there.

Want to learn more from Maarten Lens-FitzGerald? Register for the 2WAY Summit using this link and get $200 off select ticket levels.

Interview has been condensed and edited.

When you look at the numbers, there's no doubt that Google is the clear leader among search engines. But if recent moves by Google and Bing, in which both added social indicators to their search algorithms, are any indication, then social search could be the thing of the future.

We have to wonder then, if social search is indeed the next big thing, if Bing could have found some solid ground to stand on in taking on the big G.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you were a child of the 1990s (and even the early 2000s), then you might remember pagers, those silly little vibrating devices you would clip to your supa-fly JNCO jeans that either flagged you as a teenage victim of overprotective parents, drug dealer, bike messenger or working stiff.

Such is the birthplace of Twitter, way back in 2001, according to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Oh, and in case you were wondering, Dorsey is cut of the bike messenger variety.

Jack Dorsey has come a long way from his bike messenger past back then, but without it, Twitter might simply be a twinkle in someone else's eye. Dorsey told Gizmodo's Mat Honan that it was from these days, when his pager sat securely attached to his hip - just as he and everyone else in the 90s was attached to their AOL Instant Messenger clients - that the idea for Twitter was born as a hack merging the two.

"I loved seeing at a glance my friends status updates. But I also really appreciated at the same time the dispatch aspect, where you're out in the world doing something away from the keyboard and IM did not allow that," Dorsey told Wired. "I had a RIM pager, the 850, the first email device. I programed a system where I could fire off an email from that and set my status from anywhere. And it worked! And I was able to also at a regular interval pull my buddy list and get those updates sent to my email address. It was awesome! But the number of people who had those mobile devices was so minimal that the timing was just not right. This was 2001."

Five years later, Dorsey joined up with Evan Williams at Odeo and rehashed the idea. Another five years later and Twitter has become a force to be reckoned with.

There's just something about the Internet that makes people go meta. Want to write a blog post? Why not write a blog post about writing blog posts? Or how about check-in on Foursquare to that Foursquare meetup? Take an Instagram of Instagram? Better yet, why not make a documentary film about Twitter using the site and its users in nearly every aspect of the film's creation?

Tan Siok Siok, a documentary filmmaker from Singapore, is doing just that with Twittamentary, an "experimental documentary about the everyday people who use Twitter."

Much like Twitter asks a single question - "What's happening?" - Twittamentary is focused around a single question as well: "How Twitter has affected your life and the lives of those around you?"

The most interesting part of Twittamentary, however, may be how the film's creators went about putting it together, distributing it and showing it. "The movie fuses together a Documentary with real time Social Media interaction - where viewers can interact with the cast and production team, in real-time, while watching the movie. [...] The entire movie," they explain, "is being evolved through interaction with Twitter users."

• The movie is comprised of stories gathered via Twitter
• The final stories were chosen using feedback on the web via Twitter
• The contributors were filmed on a road trip from NY - Chicago - LA: with a production crew sourced via Twitter
• Social Media users are interacting with - and shaping the narrative - via Twitter at live beta screening Tweetups
• Virtual beta screenings are "unlocked" on this site with every 1,000 new followers of @Twittamentary on Twitter.
• After this final round of crowd sourced feedback we'll have a final cut ready to premier later in the year
• Promotion will primarily be via... :-)

Until just the other day, I had resolutely withstood the Angry Birds phenomena. I hadn't downloaded it and I hadn't even tried it out. I also hadn't yet learned that burning desire to know what tortuous assembly of blocks, planks and pigs awaited me on the next level until I began playing the other day when Google announced the game was coming to its Chrome browser.

If you too are subject to this same burning desire, but just don't have the requisite bird-flinging skills, here's how you can unlock all the levels on the Chrome version of Angry Birds.

First of all, if you haven't yet installed the Chrome version of Angry Birds, you can find it here in the Chrome Web store or simply visit chrome.angrybirds.com.

So, how do you get past your apparent inability to just play a game and see all the levels without putting in the effort? Simply copy and paste the following line into your browser's address bar when you have the Angry Birds app open:

javascript: var i = 0; while (i<=69) { localStorage.setItem('level_star_'+i,'3'); i++; } window.location.reload();

Voila!

Now, if you decide that the cheater's life just ain't for you, copy and paste the following line of code into your address bar and hit "enter" and it will be locked up tight again:

javascript: var i = 1; while (i<=69) { localStorage.setItem('level_star_'+i,'-1'); i++; } window.location.reload();

The folks at the WebOS blog describe how they came about the hack on their blog:

In the talk Rovio did at Google IO, they mentioned they were using HTML5?s LocalStorage. If you open up Web Inspector in chrome, you'll see they are keeping track of your score and stars with localstorage. Lucky for us, that means we can use setItem() set all 70 levels to 3 and get access to them all.

Sort of makes you wonder what other fun hacks will become widely available as we move to more and more Web-based apps, huh?

Look around at predictions for what to expect with Apple's iPhone 5, expected to hit the market next fall, and you'll see one common point - the inclusion of a near field communication (NFC) chip. The chip enables quick, proximity-based interaction and is the cornerstone of many expected mobile payment systems, but relies heavily on critical mass.

According to a report by the Business Insider, however, the next version of the iPhone will not include such a chip.

The Business Insider quotes Wall Street research firm Bernstein as the source of the news, writing that "For the most part, the technology isn't that widespread yet in the U.S. So, Apple's decision to skip NFC on this iPhone probably isn't a big deal."

Predictions for the inclusion of the NFC chip have been made due to a number of factors, including Apple's 2010 hire of a notable NFC expert alongside some patents that pointed in that direction. Google has already included NFC in its latest Android phone, the Nexus S, and included NFC demonstrations at its Google I/O developer conference last week.

Predictions aside, earlier rumors had stated precisely the opposite - that the iPhone 5 would indeed include an NFC chip. The Business Insider article doesn't point to any reason that Apple wouldn't include the chip in the next version of it's iPhone. Apple-centric blog Apple Insider predicts that consumers may have to wait for the iPhone 6 in 2012, which it says "would jibe with other rumors that the next iPhone will not feature any significant changes to its hardware."

One of the bigger problem areas for Android users has always been the Android Market. As a matter of fact, Google didn't even provide a Web-based interface until just three months ago, meaning users could only browse apps directly from their phones.

While the website was certainly a welcome addition it still had plenty of room for improvement - especially in terms of app discovery - and this week Google launched a number of new features to help users find new apps.

Prior to the version of Android Market launched last February, it was actually impossible to search for Android Apps via the bare-bones Web presence Google offered for Android apps. Thankfully, the market has come a long way since then and Google has introduced five new features to help the best apps rise to the top.

First, Google has added a number of new "top app" charts, revamping the old lists and adding top new free, top new paid, and top grossing lists. It has also added an "Editor's Choice" section, which highlights apps chosen by the Android Market staff themselves. If having apps picked out by the people who matter most is what you're looking for, then you'll also enjoy the fact that 150 developers - who Google says are "creating the highest quality, most popular, and most notable apps available on Android Market" - will now be highlighted with a special icon wherever the developer name appears.

The final two additions will hopefully leverage some of that special Google juice that helps Google identify trends and buzz. First, Google will now suggest related apps whenever you view a specific app's details, showing apps frequently browsed by people who viewed the app, and apps that people tend to install alongside the app. Next, Google will show trending apps, so you can jump on the bandwagon before it's too late and you're the only one without the coolest app on the block.

Now, if Google could just get rid of that terrible phony Flickr app that nearly destroyed my first experience as a new Android user. (Don't worry, I've since recovered and am learning to love - as I predicted - my fully integrated Android experience.)

Roden: Just like anything else, I was scratching my own itch, I really needed this service.

About two years ago my wife and I had our first baby. While we were still in the hospital for that baby, I agreed to write a book for O'Reilly (Building the Realtime User Experience, came out last June). This was on top of a full-time job at the time. So anything that I needed to do on top of "take care of the baby," "do your day job," or "write your book," just was not going to happen. So if I wanted to take my wife out for a nice dinner, I'd NEVER get around to making the reservation. A two minute phone call would take me six weeks to do.

So I built a small website which could handle this and found some people to do these things for me. A few weeks later, I added a link so people could pay and signup. I was client number zero. I only really opened it up to other people because I couldn't get the assistants to hang around very long with only my few tasks per week. So I figured if there were more people using the site, I'd get better assistants.

Roden: Yep, I am the solo founder of Fancy Hands. I wrote ever line of code and pretty much if you know any thing about Fancy Hands, it came from my mouth or keyboard.

The conventional wisdom about launching a startup is that you need at least two founders. It's just plain wrong. I've been on both sides of the equation so I have some perspective on why it can be better.

RWW: There are a lot of startup philosophies out there - how does yours fit into the mix? Is it a hybrid or something of your own creation?

Roden: I don't think I created any philosophy. I never sat down and wrote down a manifesto or anything. However, one can only read so many posts about "why the whole team should eat lunch together" on Hacker News before you go crazy and scream "Lunch is not the problem!"

My philosophy is a is a hybrid between the Techstars/Y Combinator theory that you need mentors and outside expertise to help you get started, but not much money. However, there is a lot of 37 signals philosophy in that you're not trying to raise money, you're trying to build a business. (I hope to never compare myself to 37 signals ever again).

RWW: What exactly makes "going it alone" preferable to having a team?

Roden: This is a big question, I'll try to answer it in the talk.

RWW: What's the biggest downfall of "going it alone" and what's the best way (other than your own company, perhaps) for overcoming it?

Roden: The biggest downfall to going it alone is the perception that a single founder company is somehow not a real company. This becomes an issue when trying to work with other companies. When a potential partner looks at my solo/unfunded startup and a traditional funded competitor, I have to do some extra legwork to prove to them that I'm the one who is going to execute. You overcome that by doing the work and executing.

Some people do things to make themselves seem bigger. But I put tedroden@fancyhands.com on the bottom of the website because I want to be honest about where the email is going. I could add "support@fancyhands.com" and forward that along, but it feels dishonest. I'm going to have to read it, might as well address it to me.

RWW: What's the first step in taking something from a side project to a full-time job? Is it a mindset, an action, or something else altogether?

Roden: It's an action: stop talking, start doing. Start small and ship. Also, don't talk about it ahead of time. Don't mention it to people until after you've shipped something. This is important for two reasons: 1) You need to be totally focused on what you're building, this is not the time for feedback. 2) "People who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen."

RWW: When you wake up in the morning, what's the first thing (that you want to share with our readers) that you do? How does it fit into your entire philosophy?

Roden: I've got two kids under two years old, so you can imagine the first few things I do every morning.

After that, I check my email to see if anything blew up overnight. Usually, everything is fine, but if I do need to put out fires, this is how I handle it: I first figure out how to stop it from every happening again... is it a problem with an assistant? a PR problem? A simple bug in the code? Customer service issues? etc. Most of the time I can add some documentation or push a simple code fix and I'm set. Then I respond to the email explaining what I did (or what I still have to do if it wasn't a quick fix). This all falls neatly into my "ship first" philosophy.

Having said that, 90% of the time I wake up and don't have to deal with those things. I so get up, hang out with the babies and wife and try to get out the door in one piece... that's a full time job.

Want to learn more from Ted Roden? Register for the 2WAY Summit using this link and get $200 off select ticket levels.

Today was to be the day for Google to finally roll-out the expected redesign of Blogger, but it seems things haven't gone as planned.

Late last night, the Blogger Twitter account announced that "scheduled maintenance" was underway and later said that it was "sorting out a few issues," but now, hours later, the service still appears to be out of commission.

We would link to posts about the redesign, which the company announced nearly a month ago, but alas, they are all on Blogger itself. The cache of the announcement gives a preview of what The Next Web reported earlier today that Google was rolling out to its users.

The latest report from the Blogger Twitter follows:

We are very sorry that users are unable to publish to Blogger right now. We have rolled back the maintenance release from last night and as a result, posts and comments from all users made after 7:37 am PDT on May 11, 2011 have been removed. Again, we apologize that this happened and our engineers are working hard to return Blogger to normal and restore your posts and comments. We will post a report once this work is complete.

The company first debuted its redesign at this year's SXSW, at which point it had more than a half a billion blog posts.

Update: Despite tweets about the redesign and a story on The Next Web, Blogger has said that it was "not rolling out the new UI, but instead conducting a routine maintenance."

We've contacted Google for more information but haven't heard back yet.

When Twitter warned developers last March against building Twitter clients, it used one word repeatedly in its announcement: "consistent".

"We need to ensure that tweets, and tweet actions, are rendered in a consistent way so that people have the same experience with tweets no matter where they are," wrote Twitter platform lead Ryan Sarver.

Today, Twitter announced a "better app for your mobile browser" that it says will offer exactly that: "a high-quality and consistent Twitter experience on high-end touchscreen devices".

The new version of the mobile Twitter websites was built "from the ground up" for smartphones and tablets. Accordingly, Twitter says that it is optimized for these devices, which "have more advanced browsers that support the latest web technologies, including HTML5."

It's rich - it takes advantage of capabilities that high-end device browsers offer, such as touch gestures and a large screen. And it's simple - it's easy-to-use and has the features you'd expect from a Twitter application, including your timeline, @mentions, messages that you can read in conversation view, search, trending topics, lists, and more.

The app is making its way initially only to a small number of iPhone, iPod Touch and Android smartphones, with other devices being added in the coming weeks. In many ways, the new Twitter mobile app looks much like the #newtwitter that the company released last September, with embedded images and the like. Take a look:

I guess I have just a couple questions about "consistency." Is it synonymous with "boring" and is it appropriate for the mobile Web? Am I looking for the same thing from my mobile Twitter use as when I use the website? I'm not so sure.

In February, Apple announced a new subscription service for all publishers of content-based apps. This system took a 30% cut of subscription fees for Apple. The announcement had bloggers, publishers and mainstream media alike calling Apple everything from greedy to anti-competitive and wondering what effect it would have on subscription reliant apps.

For iFlow Reader, that effect has been to remove any profit margin the company had. The company has announced that it will be shutting down by the end of the month and that, in no uncertain terms, it is all because of Apple.

"BeamItDown Software and the iFlow Reader will cease operations as of May 31, 2011," explains the company in an open letter to Apple. "We absolutely do not want to do this, but Apple has made it completely impossible for anyone but Apple to make a profit selling contemporary ebooks on any iOS device. We cannot survive selling books at a loss and so we are forced to go out of business. We bet everything on Apple and iOS and then Apple killed us by changing the rules in the middle of the game."

It goes on to explain that their gross margin on ebooks is less than the 30% that Apple now charges because of the "agency model" adopted by the largest publishers, which sets a fixed price for all ebooks across all sellers and cuts commissions down to 30%.

"The key point here is that all sellers now get a 30% commission and Apple now wants a 30% fee, which is all of our gross margin and then some," they write.

The company doesn't mix words in who is to blame in this situation, writing that "We put our faith in Apple and they screwed us."

While some reactions were ambivalent on whether or not Apple's policy was prudent, the iFlow Reader team paints a bleak picture for small retailers involved in ebook sales.

"Our philosophy is simple," explained Apple CEO Steve Jobs upon announcing the rule changes, "when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing. All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app."

The iFlow Reader team sees it quite differently, writing "We were rapidly adding books to our catalog and we had plans to add many, many more by adding PDF support to the iFlowReader along with many other exciting features. We were also in the middle of discussions with OEM customers in many countries who wanted to license our technology in countries around the world. We had investors ready to invest money in our future. It was the American dream that we all strive for. Sadly, the America that we thought we were working in turned out to be a totalitarian regime and the dictator decided that he wanted all of what we had. Our dream is now over."

Today at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, Google announced the opening up and general availability of the Google Places API.

The API, which has been in a closed beta testing and only available for a select number of companies for the past year, gives developers access to Google's database of restaurants, bars, hotels and various other points of interest.

Google announced the opening up of the API to the general public this morning at a session on connecting people with places, led by VP of location and local services Marisa Meyer. We got a chance to talk with Thor Mitchell, product manager of the Google Maps API and he explained that the Places API will give developers access to more than 50 million places and several new features. By comparison, when location data service SimpleGeo launched last December, it started with 13 million places and just recently announced that it was open sourcing more than 20 million.

The Places API was first introduced at Google I/O last year and has been in use by a number of companies, including location-based app SCVNGR. Over the past year, the company has tested the service and added a number of new features:

• A globally consistent type scheme for Places, spanning more than 100 types such as bar, restaurant, and lodging
• Name and type based query support
• A significantly simpler key based authentication scheme
• Global coverage across every country covered by Google Maps
• Google APIs Console integration, which provides group ownership of projects, key management, and usage monitoring
• Instant reflection of new Places submitted by an app in subsequent searches made by that app, with new Places shared with all apps after moderation
• Real time reranking of search results based on current check-in activity, so that Places that are currently popular are automatically ranked higher in searches by your app

Also included in the newly released API is an autocomplete service, much as users have become used to seeing when searching on Google. The service predicts place results as a user types, meaning that if they are looking for a familiar bar and know the name, they may only need to type a few letters before seeing the result, which can be ultimately helpful on a mobile device.

We asked Mitchell if the API would quickly connect developers to other Google data, such as open hours or Street View imagery and he said that it isn't quite there yet, but it is certainly going in that direction.

For developers and interested parties attending Google I/O, there is a session - "Building Location Based apps using Google APIs" - at 3pm on Wednesday, in which Marcelo Camelo will provide more detail.