OpenStack has been around since 2010, but it wasn't until 2012 that the open-source cloud computing project really took off. Since Rackspace established the OpenStack Foundation in September 2012, the project has exploded to over 1,000 code authors, and is now one of the world's largest open-source communities, arguably even bigger than the Linux community. Given how central open source has become to software development, generally, it's worth analyzing why OpenStack has taken off.

It's The Foundation, Stupid

While OpenStack always offered great promise, it wasn't until Rackspace let go of the wheel that the project really exploded. This isn't to suggest that Rackspace's stewardship was somehow bad, but rather that moving to a foundation made the project more inviting.

While Rackspace used to dominate code commits, now Red Hat is OpenStack's biggest committer, with IBM quickly moving in on the second spot. 

This is pretty amazing. Just a year ago Rackspace was in control. Now it's just one of the community. A key member of the OpenStack community, to be sure, but it's a testament to the vitality of the OpenStack community that Rackspace is no longer the top code committer.

A Common Enemy

Equally impressive is how fast the number of code authors has increased, now at 1,031 at the time of publication. Part of this might be due to the foundation governance model, but a number of open-source projects - MySQL, JBoss and others come to mind - have been exceptionally succeessful with one primary developer.

Hence, while moving to a foundation certainly helped, OpenStack's success comes down to a range of different factors.

Among them is simply need. As The Register's Jack Clark somewhat humorously highlights, "OpenStack is big because Amazon has terrified everyone into contributing code." Or as Mat Keep, director of MySQL Product Management and Marketing at Oracle, puts it, vendors felt like they could only compete with Amazon as a cohesive unit. Importantly, Rackspace didn't directly compete with the IBMs and Red Hats of the world, as Inktank vice president Neil Levine suggested to me over IM, and hence "companies felt less awkward about participating." He concludes:

"It's easier to join a project where the authors have different business models to you (as a software business)."

These are important motivations, sure, but there's more to the OpenStack story. After all, if a common enemy and orthogonal business models were enough, we would have seen OpenOffice mount a serious challenge to Microsoft Office years ago, given its backing by Sun and then Oracle, among other industry titans.

Making Contributing Easy

No matter the motivation to contribute and collaborate, the best open-source projects make it easy to do so. As Andy Grimm, an operations support engineer for Red Hat's OpenShift, highlights, OpenStack chose both the most developer-friendly license (Apache v2) and a highly approachable programming language (Python), significantly lowering the legal and technical bars to participating.

Couple that with a super-simple setup ("it just works (startup in 2 lines of code)", as MongoDB community manager Francesca Krihely suggests and a modular architecture, echoing Rishidot Research principal analyst Krishnan Subramanian, and you have all the right elements for break-out success.

Market Timing And More Than A Hint Of Luck

In sum, it's hard to assign full credit to any particular element of OpenStack's make-up in its runaway community success. More likely OpenStack has boomed due because it sits at the nexus of several key components of successful open-source communities. Some of this stems from market timing and luck, but much of its success also derives from laying essential infrastructure for open-source success (license, language, modularity, etc.).

Back in 2006 I laid out the essential elements for architecting a successful open-source project. Among these were market timing, the right license, how applicable the code was to pressing business problems, code modularity and more. While other projects have attempted to pull these together, few can claim to have done so with as much precision, or success, as OpenStack.

Which is why it now has 9,685 members standing behind the project. That's real community.

One of the biggest roadblocks to implementing local community ideas is finding resources in city government or local organizations who might be able to help. More importantly, how can you involve like-minded individuals in the discussion?

MindMixer = A New Type Of Civic Engagement Platform

A new type of civic engagement platform - like MindMixer - can help. MindMixer is in essence a “virtual town hall,” a community forum where constituents can meet to discuss issues and share ideas. (Here’s an overview of how MindMixer works.)

Without time and location constraints, citizens can conveniently share ideas while managers gain community insights. According to the 2012 CivicPlus Digital Citizen Engagement survey, 40% of citizens want to provide input on municipal government.

From Los Angeles To Calgary

MindMixer COO Nathan Preheim tells me that the company has attracted more than 300 communities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, plus its first Canadian client, the city of Calgary. Among civic, education and healthcare organizations that are using the service to engage their communities, the governor of Colorado is using it to better engage his entire state.

Here are a few examples of how municipals governments are using MindMixer:

Orlando, FL: When residents were asked how much more they would be willing to pay to have half of their food sourced from local farms, 36% of respondents said they would pay 10% more, and 22% said they'd pay 5% more. While the response rate was low, it shows the potential of civic engagement as the use of these platforms increases.

Boulder, CO: InspireBoulder held a Reusable Bag Design Competition on the MindMixer site. The winning design is set to be used on 30,000 reusable grocery bags to be distributed by the city.

Park City, UT: One resident’s idea to implement a community composting program became a reality when Park City’s Environmental Sustainability Manager approved the concept, which is similar to an ordinance passed by the city of San Francisco.

MindMixer Buys VoterTide

MindMixer recently acquired VoterTide, a social media intelligence company that specializes in activating audiences who follow hot topics for political campaigns, non-profits and special-interest groups. Preheim says the company’s thinking was, “How can we use social media to help our clients better engage topics?”

All existing clients will have access to Votertide audiences. Going forward, adds Preheim, “We are in the process of building an application framework, called Community Insights.”

Given the current pressure to shrink governments, the populace will have to take more active roles in the governance of their communities. Platforms like MindMixer could make it easier for people to take on and succees in those new roles.

Chances are you've used Livefyre and not known it. After all, their clients include some of the biggest media out there. With huge partnerships with Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, and TechCrunch, Livefyre's business is largely enterprise, and geared towards giving its clients, who boast millions of readers, new outlets to express themselves. Way beyond the typical social login, those options include live chat discussions, comment threads where users can embed YouTube videos, media and pictures, and new second screen experiences geared to drive engagement.

So when Livefyre announced a $15 million funding round last month to ramp up their mobile and moderating features, people took note.

If Livefyre is the new kid on the block flexing its muscles, then the tried and true veteran is Disqus, which has raised more than $10.5 million in VC investment. The six-year-old Y Combinator startup is the other major player in this sector, powering a total of 2.5 million sites, including big names like CNN and — ahem — ReadWrite. Disqus operates on a freemium model, with pro accounts at $99 a month. While it may not be fancy as Livefyre, it's effective, just like other commenting services like IntenseDebate and Echo, other players in this space.

That's a lot of choices for publishers, because there's value in giving customers varied options as to how they interact online. 

Let Them Comment

Users crave both more options from comments and more ways to engage with other readers and writers. As a result, publishers are shelling out dollars to increase that back-and-forth interaction. At the end of the day, people commenting on a page means longer active time spent on a site, and the potential of driving up click rates on adjacent ads. It's also about community building on these comment threads, and leveraging that community for more page views and reader loyalty.

Robyn Peterson, CTO of Mashable, says Livefyre has amped up conversations in three ways. Comment streaming drives up the "organic and lively feel of the conversation, which in turn drove more commenting from other readers. Second, since Mashable is a very social brand, a lot of our reader conversation takes place on Facebook, and Livefyre is able to cull those conversations and mirror them on our article pages, which coalesces the across-the-web comments into a single comment stream."

Lastly, Peterson says, social functions -- like the aforementioned embeddable media -- help readers "add more interesting content to a given article."

Interfaces that fuel user engagement creates maximum return on these comments, says Jordan Kretchmer, Livefyre's founder and chief executive officer. He sees comments as way beyond a linear and threaded tool.

"Our approach of integrating all conversations about an article or topic into one place makes us unique, regardless of the format those comments are displayed in," he said. "The centralization of social content is key to getting users to interact more."

Steve Roy, a Disqus VP for marketing and PR, says his company is not trying to build a better comment mousetrap. Instead, he wants to make it easier for people to participate in discussions and introduce them to communities where they can explore their passions:

Our AudienceSync feature enables users to easily connect their Disqus profile to publisher sites with one or two clicks. It makes it easy to participate in discussions on even more sites while enabling publishers to manage their own registration systems.

Roy explained that these tools are getting people to stay on the site and express themselves, a boon for publishers. "Our data shows more than half of all our page visits include time spent engaged in comment, either reading, sharing or leaving comments. Audiences truly care about this discussion. And as page real estate, it's unharvested revenue territory," to the tune of 15 million organic new clicks to publisher content a month.

A new tool called the discovery box recirculates traffic back to the publisher through promoted articles, providing a "new revenue stream each time a reader clicks on an advertiser's content," Roy said. "It's optimizing their comments section much like they already optimize the headlines and articles for search."

That interaction between commenters and blogs is producing real revenue. "This quarter, we're making revenue share payments to our publishers who have participated in our pilot native advertising launch," Roy said.

Real Value?

Comments are seeing a serious build up of online niches and sub-communities, to the point where some sites like Gawker have even toyed with the idea of charging readers to comment.

A year later, it seems they've given up on this pay-to-play approach, but Gawker has since introduced a new level of comment curation. Users who reply to an existing comment are more likely to get their opinions seen higher on the page than an earlier user who added a reaction directly to the original post. Gawker is attempting to highlight the most-trafficked and replied-to material, doing away with the chronological commenting stream, all in an effort to keep readers on site.

It's difficult to imagine a scenario where charging a fee to comment becomes plausible or scalable. It’s not something that we believe in culturally since speech tends to be viewed as both free as in freedom and free as in beer.

But publishers are investing in comment systems in an effort to generate more indirect revenue. People are commenting more than ever, driving huge consumption and engagement that publishers would lose if they didn't recognize the value of comments. A value that's at least the equal of the material they're commenting upon.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

While everyone else was likely bored to tears at a dinner party when old Babbage droned on about his Analytical Engine, Ada was fascinated.  She liked it so much that she began corresponding with him, even writing up notes on Menabrea’s summary of Babbage’s plans.  

In those notes, Ada predicted that a machine like the one Babbage was planning would one day be used to compose music, produce graphics and would be employed for practical and scientific use. Of course, like many of the great visionaries, she left us far too young, dying of illness at age 36.

We celebrate Ada not for her visions of computers that would one day bring us joy and pain, but because she suggested a plan for the engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers, and that algorithm is now considered the first computer program.  In honor of Lady Lovelace, we have chosen to highlight three remarkable women who made the earth just a little cooler for having been a part of it, just like Ada.

Dr. James Barry

Note:  James Barry chose to live life as a man, so despite anatomy, I've chosen to refer to James as 'he' throughout this post.  

Some time in the late 1790s, the person who would come to be known as James Barry was born.  Records then not being what they are now, and the fact that James lived his life cloaked in mystery, we are not entirely sure how his childhood unfolded.  What we do know is that James was known then as Margaret Bulkley, impoverished niece of the famous Irish artist, James Barry.   

By 1809, Margaret Bulkley was no more, and James Barry had begun his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh, to later graduate with a Medical Doctorate.  He moved on to become Assistant Staff Surgeon at the Royal Military Hospital in Plymouth, and later to hold the position of Medical Inspector for the British Colony of South Africa, in Cape Town.  While there, he performed the first successful cesarean birth in Africa; successful because mom and baby both survived.  

His later postings took him to many Crown holdings, including Trinidad and Tobago, Mauritius, Malta, Corfu, Saint Helena, the Crimea, Jamaica, Canada, the West Indies and Malta.

His career, which began as a hospital assistant and ended with the rank of inspector-general of hospitals (Canada), was long and storied.  James survived yellow fever, fought for sanitation and hygiene, encouraged healthy food for patients and soldiers, was a vegetarian and teetotaler, and crusaded for better treatment for commoners and the poor.   Glowing reviews of his person not withstanding, his behavior was a little unorthodox.  He fought duels to prove his masculinity, was reported to be blunt and impatient when sharing his opinions and was punished throughout his career for breaking the rules, at least once resulting in a demotion of real significance.  He was hot-tempered, but damn good at doctoring.

James died in 1865, of dysentery, and it was upon his death that his charade was uncovered, literally.  Why Margaret became James is hotly debated.  I won’t guess, but mad props to this lady who fought for the poor, healed the sick and fought her duels as good as any man.

Dr. Ruth Westheimer

The next doctor on our list is famous for her bluntly specific sex help, but her story is so much more than that.  Ruth Westheimer was born in 1928, the adored and spoiled only child of doting Jewish parents in Germany.  Her idyllic childhood would soon end with the Nazi arrest of her father in the late 30s.  Her mom promptly sent her to safety in Switzerland with plans to meet after the mixup was worked out.  Both of her parents likely died in concentration camps, writing letters to her until 1941 when the letters abruptly ceased.

After reaching her majority in the Swiss orphanage, she went to Palestine, joining an underground Jewish military group.  Trained as a sniper, she never had to kill anyone but did suffer a serious injury, after shrapnel from a bomb pierced both of her legs.

After a long and painful recovery, she went to Paris, studying and later teaching at the Sorbonne.  She used the small amount that Germany paid her in reparations, around $1,500, to book passage to New York.  It was a stint at Planned Parenthood that convinced her to study human sexuality.

Once shocked by the frank talk about sexuality she heard in New York, she later came to embrace it.  And who among us doesn’t remember the little old lady who was always talking about penises, vaginas and orgasms as blithely as if she were discussing a grocery list.  Dr. Ruth helped many of us embrace our sexuality as normal and healthy, and in doing so made her mark on the world in a mighty way.  And she’s not done yet.  Her latest book, about caring for a parent with Alzheimers is due to be released in November.  

Babe Didrikson Zaharias

Babe, or Mildred, Didrikson, was the sixth child, of seven, born to Norwegian immigrants in 1911 in south Texas.  Though not a strong student -- she failed 8th grade and eventually dropped out -- Babe was destined for greatness.  She embraced all sports in school, playing for the all-city and all-state teams.  

Her first adult job was as a secretary for an insurance firm, hired because she was an ace at b-ball and they wanted her to join their company team, the Golden Cyclones.  In what would become a habit, her team was victorious, snagging the AAU Basketball Championships in 1931.  From there, she went on to represent Employers Casualty Insurance Co. of Dallas at the AAU 1932 Championships, competing in eight of the 10 events held, and qualifying for the Olympics to boot.  I should point out that she also marched in the opening parade as the entire team, because in essence, she was.

She won five of the eight events, and tied for the sixth.  At that competition, she broke four (FOUR!) women’s world records.  Her score of 30 points was eight points higher than the second-place winner.  

As you can imagine, Babe caused a stir and it wasn’t just because she was a somewhat arrogant and insanely competitive lady.  She was also a rock-star athlete and had the chops to back up that chip she proudly wore on her extremely fit shoulders.  She excelled at everything, from playing her harmonica (in Vaudeville) to sewing (Babe won a championship for that too).  

She went from there to the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles.  She could only do three events there, darn rule book, but took the gold in two of them, breaking world records in both events.  In the high jump, she had to accept the silver due to a rule violation.  She went over head first, which was against the rules at the time.  Her height was the same as the gold medalist, but diving over was a foul in 1932.  It was not very long at all after this that they changed that rule.  Later she would be credited with tying the world record in that jump too, and tying for the gold.

Babe’s celebrity status was assured with the strong showing.  Unfortunately, amateur athletes don’t get paid, and getting paid was what Babe needed most.  She had to turn pro to pay the bills, so she posed for an automobile advertisement and thus began the Babe Didrikson campaign for fun and profit.  She did some vaudeville, took part in MLB stunts, toured with a women’s basketball team, Babe Didrikson’s All-Americans, and then an all-bearded team (other than herself), called the House of David.  Babe married a wrestler, taking his name, and Babe Didrikson was now Babe Didrikson Zaharias.

A massively talented athlete, Babe made a name for herself in track and field, basketball, baseball, tennis, diving, billiards and later golf, only taking it up after her fame in basketball and track and field was achieved.  But she was no slouch there either.  After winning the Texas Women’s Championship in 1935, the Golf Association in a dastardly move, declared that Babe wasn’t to be considered a golf amateur because she was a pro in other sports, “for the best interest of the game.”  They changed their mind in 1945, making her an amateur again, and in 1945 she won 13 consecutive tournaments.  When she chose to turn pro in 1947, she won all of the tournaments, save one.  Bobby Jones, yes, THE Bobby Jones, called her one of the 10 best golfers of all time, male or female.  

A few of her achievements:

• 2 Olympic world records

• 2 Olympic gold medals

• 1 tied Olympic world record

• 1 tied Olympic gold medal/1 Olympic silver medal

• First American to win the British Women’s Amateur

• First American to win both the British Women’s Amateur and the American Women’s Amateur

• Won U.S. Women’s Open, World Championship and the All-American Open in 1948

• First Woman to win the Western Open three times (as an amateur and pro)

• Member of the Ladies Golf Hall of Fame

• Co-counded LPGA 1949

• Named Female Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press (1945-1947, 1950, 1954)  

In 1953 she was diagnosed with colon cancer.  Despite removing the tumor, the cancer had spread and she was told she would die.  In 1954 she won the U.S. Women’s Open for the third time, by 12 strokes, but the pain was too great to continue, so she retired from golf.  She died a year later at age 45.

Now you know the story of three awesome women.  Go and enjoy your Ada Lovelace day in a grand style!

A variety of cities applied for local-name gTLDs. New York City applied for .NYC through its Department of Information Technology and Communications. The City of Paris applied for .Paris. Sydney, Australia applied for .Sydney through the State of New South Wales Department of Premier and Cabinet. These are all very logical things for municipalities to undertake. 

Boston is different. The City of Boston didn't apply for its own gTLD. Instead, it will work in conjunction with The Boston Globe to operate its domain registry. The Globe will own and operate the registry through a technology partner, OpenRegistry, that will take care of all the technical aspects of the .Boston domain. 

“It is something we started looking at last year,” said Jeff Moriarty, VP of digital products at The Boston Globe and Boston.com. “We saw that there would be an opportunity to do .Boston, and this made a lot of sense to us.”

Owning .Boston would give The Globe an opportunity to enhance its media properties by creating subdomains like news.boston and sports.boston. But the opportunity is much bigger. The Globe is positioning itself to be the center of Boston life on the Web. "The .Boston TLD aims to become a new online identity for the city of Boston, its inhabitants, companies, organizations and institutions, managed and supervised by The Boston Globe," the application stated. 

The Globe will function as a website registry through its partnership with OpenRegistry. But it's not looking to become a Domain Name System (DNS) registrar like Go Daddy, according to Moriarty. It will provide the City of Boston with URLs such as mayor.boston, city.boston or visit.boston. The goal is to give Bostonians a digital presence that outstrips anything they could produce on their own. The newspaper has always thought of itself as central to the lives of those who reside in and associate with the city, and by owning .Boston, it views itself as the gateway to all things Boston online.

Applications submitted by other cities express similar aims. The difference is that other cities do not have a news organization applying for their gTLD. This is what makes The Globe’s approach unique.

“It’s not about the name," said Alexa Raad, CEO of Architelos, a TLD consulting firm. "It’s about offering those who would buy a domain name under it a value proposition. That proposition must also be valued by the end user of the website with the domain name under the TLD."

In Raad's view, ownership of .Boston could give The Globe powerful leverage over the local business community. “What if Dee-Dee’s Steakhouse was Dee-Dee’sSteakhouse.boston?" she asked. "People who Googled 'good steakhouse in Boston' would find Dee-Dee with all the apps embedded in their website that .boston developed, including which MBTA line to take, which stop to get off, how much it would cost, how long it would take, the ability to buy the MBTA ticket online and how to walk to the station. Dee-Dee didn’t develop the apps; .Boston did and thereby added value.”

Only three other cities in the United States applied for geographic gTLDs. In addition to New York City, Miami (.Miami) and Las Vegas (.Vegas) applied for names. 

“Most cities didn’t seek out experts who could help them visualize how they could have leveraged the TLD,” Raad said. “Many CMOs of even the savviest brands were in the dark about all this. I suspect that, of the city names that applied for a TLD, some or at least one will succeed. That success will drive TLD geographic applications in the next round.”

The Globe is the only applicant for .Boston, and it has the city's support, so there appears to be little reason why ICANN would deny the application. The decision should be made within seven months, and the new domains should start coming online in early 2013. Eventually, ICANN will open up a new round of applications for gTLDs. Meanwhile, cities, companies and media organizations will be watching The Globe as a guide of the opportunities and pitfalls that owning a top-level domain can bring.

Top image: Boston skyline at dusk courtesy of Shutterstock.

Netizens who joined the groundswell against the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate’s Protect IP Act were part of the first successful Internet campaign to kill legislation. The Internet-delivered knockout punch left many lawmakers scrambling to understand this sudden disruption of the political process, according to Internet leaders on a panel at the two-day Tech Policy Summit in Napa, Calif, this week.

“This is kind of the day that Silicon Valley realizes that Washington exists, and this is also the day that Washington realizes that Silicon Valley is important,” said Jonathan Nelson, founder of Hacker & Founders, an Internet community of early Silicon Valley startups.

Online protests have “really disrupted the whole process of tech policy, advocacy in Washington,” said panelist Larry Downes, author of the “The Laws of Disruption.” “Congress is very confused. They don’t know what to make of it. They know it’s scary, and it’s fast, and it had an effect.”

Web Mobs

One reason for the politicians' confusion is the unruly nature of many Web protests. Outrage over Internet controversies, such as the censorship and privacy issues many saw in SOPA and PIPA, can often spark mob-like behavior. Many netizens join movements through word of mouth on Facebook, Twitter and other online forums without a full understanding of the issues, panelists noted.

“I’ve noticed this in online communities for years,” Nelson said. “There are lynch mobs that happen when this rumor passes, and all of a sudden this person is being lambasted online.”

Unfortunately, people using the Web for activism will have to accept mobs as a fact of Internet life, Nelson warned. “We’re going to actually start seeing a lot more of that emergence sort of mob behavior around these political issues.”

The Politicians Come

Trying to make sense of the protests, politicians have been flying into Silicon Valley more often to meet with tech startups and get a reading on where the industry stands on political issues, noted Nnena Ukuku, co-founder and chief executive of Black Founders Startup Ventures. Black Founders provides startup financing with a focus on black entrepreneurs.

To take advantage of this attention, though, younger generations in the tech industry will have to get over their bad attitudes about working with government. Tech leaders often complain that government moves too slowly and has no bearing on their lives anyway. “Because of that, they’re not engaging with government, which I think continues to create a problem,” Ukuku said.

“There’s a machine, and there’s rules, and I think that it’s just a matter of time before enough people say, ‘Hey, may be I can tweak this machine a little bit,’” Nelson added. “I actually think that those geeks and those companies that do [engage with government] are probably going to have an immense amount of leverage.”

Now What?

So what’s the next flashpoint? Unresolved issues that could bring the tech industry into conflict with lawmakers include consumer privacy, immigration reform and copyright protection.

Those conflicts are likely to continue, as many tech leaders still don’t trust government to solve problems effectively. Downes echoed the familiar refrain that government should let the industry regulate itself. “Let us work out issues like privacy, like security, like anti-trust,” he said. “Let us work out these competitive things ourselves. We won’t do a perfect job, but we’re going to do a better job.”

It’s far from clear if government agrees with that assessment. But in the wake of the successful SOPA/PIPA protests, it’s no longer safe for the government to ignore the wishes of the tech community.

Photo by Antone Gonsalves: Pictured, left to right:

Michelle Quinn, tech reporter, Politico PRO (Moderator)

Larry Downes, author of “The Laws of Disruption”

Nnena Ukuku, co-founder and CEO of Black Founders Startup Ventures

Jonathan Nelson, founder of Hackers & Founders

If you could give someone one piece of advice about social media, what would it be?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and now we're presenting them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

The meetup will be held at the offices of Mercury Labs in the trendy midtown section of St. Louis from 6-8 p.m. Mercury is a cool cinema and communications company with a number of tech clients; our thanks to them for sponsoring the event. As with our previous meetups, you will get a chance to hob-nob with midwestern editors and connect with other uber-geeks from around the city.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

Facebook's Real Mobile Question, Post-Instagram: Can It Challenge Apple and Google?

Clearly the Instagram purchase was huge news this week, dominating our Top Ten. We dissected the story in detail, looking at how the purchase affected current Instagram users, what it meant for potential Facebook investors and even what we could learn about Facebook's mobile monetization strategy. The sizable purchase makes a great deal of sense, and inspired us to ruminate on both the value of Path and the strategy of Pinterest, and what other companies might be on a Facebook shopping list. I don't think anyone would argue though that it's the normal exit for a mobile app like this, despite Instagram's amazing growth story. Instagram won the lottery this week.

Top Posts:

15 Clever Responses to Facebook Buying Instagram

By now you've heard the news. Earlier today Facebook announced it had acquired Instagram for a meaty sum of $1 billion. We've written about who the sale is really about (it's the investors) and how to get some more followers. But what does the Twitterverse say about this? Here are a few insightful tweets about this whole shabang. Read on. More

8 Things Instagram Did Right

With its billion-dollar sale to Facebook, Instagram instantly became the latest poster child for startup success. In just 551 days, the photo-sharing mobile app zoomed from zero to 30 million-odd users, and 10 million U.S. visits by March 2012, up 1000% since December 2011. Its valuation outstrips that of the 116-year-old New York Times.. More

[Infographic] How the App Stores "Really" Stack Up

If you liken app stores to race horses, Apple is the biggest, baddest thoroughbred in town. Google Play is a fine specimen with some distinct qualities but has a lot of work to do in the practice yard before catching up. Everything else is an also-ran. Windows Phone has been growing rapidly, increasing from 40,000 apps in Nov. 2011 to 70,000 at the most recent count. Then there is BlackBerry App World. For all of Research In Motion's troubles, its app repository is tied with Windows Phone at 70,000, which includes 15,000 specifically designed for the BlackBerry PlayBook. There are no tablet apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace, mostly because there is no Windows tablet (well, one worth anything). More

Jack Tramiel Remembered: The Legacy of the Commodore Founder and PC Pioneer

Quite a few people have been retroactively credited with the invention of the personal computer. One man who never claimed credit himself, but who would certainly be listed among Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Clive Sinclair, Adam Osborne, and John Roach as original creators of the personal computer industry is Jack Tramiel - who passed away today at the age of 83. More

SAP Plans to Dominate Enterprise Mobile Apps with HTML5 and New Partnerships

One of the largest software companies in the world just made a series of moves that could make it one of the most powerful enterprise mobile developers in the world. Hidden within SAP's Hana database platform announcement yesterday was the fact that the company signed three strategic partnerships with leading U.S. mobile development firms, signaling what could be a huge shift in the balance of power in the race for enterprise mobile dollars. More

To Pivot Or Not To Pivot: Instagram vs. Pinterest

One of the more intriguing aspects of Instagram's $1 billion payday from Facebook is that photo sharing was Plan B. Compare that to the other social startup darling of 2012, Pinterest, which has stayed true to its original mission from Day 1. More

How to Create Your Own Social Media Playbook

If you are trying to plan out your enterprise's social media activities, it helps to have a playbook. Several companies have produced such a document, ranging from a few pages to more extensive tomes, and I wanted to give you some tips to preparing your own, as well as talk about best practices. More

New Analytics Dashboard for Infochimps.com

This morning the Big Data online marketplace vendor Infochimps announces a new analytics dashboard for their services called Dashpot.

Dashpot lets users configure their dashboard with exactly the information they need. For example, users can visualize their data in the form of line graphs, heat maps, geographic maps, counters, pie charts, or lists. You can also customize with selects, filters and sorts, to let users setup drilldowns for zooming in and out on their data, too.This lets users of different types and skill levels create multiple views depending on who is interacting with a given dashboard, and also specify what information each view should show. More

5 Things the Experts Say You Need to Know About the Facebook-Instagram Merger

Depending on which hastily pasted-together analysis you believe, Facebook's $1 billion acquisition Monday is reason enough to close your Instagram account, and Facebook is going to ruin Instagram. We're not buying it, so instead we spent Monday interviewing a dozen experts for their thoughts and opinions on the deal. More

Life After Death of the Check-In

The first generation of location-based apps has fallen short. Most consumers don't even know location apps exist, and only a tiny minority actually use them. Today's apps focus on benefits for businesses, like being discovered by nearby shoppers, but they've failed to stir customers. Can next-generation companies like Geoloqi show us why location is valuable? More

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After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

Websites Have to Get Better

When you take content written by someone else, strip it of its chosen monetization methods, and present it back to readers without the publisher's permission, that publisher is not going to be happy. Unfortunately for publishers, that's exactly what many of the read-later apps are doing. But is this because readers want to be able to read offline, or is it because they simply don't like using our sites? Read Jon Mitchell's take on this issue in Websites Have to Get Better.

From our readers:

Jaap Willem Online Marketeer and Photographer -- That's true.
The reading experience is very important indeed, but so is the time shifted reading and the different device when you read the content.

The big break through for Instapaper was with the iPhone and I think it´s still their main scanning (in your words scraping/parsing) device while the iPad is the main reading device.

I don´t have the exact numbers for this but when I hear Marco Arment speaking, I have this idea.

Furthermore I do hope indeed that the websites will continue to improve and that in general the reading experience will be improving every time

Keep up the good work here at RWW :)

More Top Posts:

The Nokia Lumia 900 Could Be Today's Best Smartphone, But...

When it hits AT&T stores next week, the Nokia Lumia 900 could be the best smartphone on the market. If Apple released a piece of hardware as sleek and beautiful as the Lumia 900, the world would bow at its feet and marvel at Cupertino's latest masterpiece. But that is not going to happen with the Lumia 900. More

5 Ways to Keep Your Google Browsing Private

Google's one unified privacy policy went into effect on March 1. We spoke with two security experts, Security Evangelist Stephen Cobb of security solutions provider ESET, and Alisdair Faulkner, chief products officer of cybercrime defender platform ThreatMatrix, to get a better idea of what you can do to keep your browsing history as private as possible. More

New iPhone, iPad and Android Apps for March 2012

It has been a great month for apps. Both iOS and Android had big markers in March, as Apple released the new iPad and Google rebranded the Android Market as Google Play. Developers have been hard at work creating apps for each platform and some great games, social apps and utilities have been recently released. Whether you are looking to draw on your iPad, make VoIP calls with your Android or just learn a new language, the ReadWriteWeb Apps of the Month for March has a little something for everybody. More

Eye Movement Study Reveals Six Must-Know Things About Facebook Brand Pages

The Facebook Timeline that brand pages were forced to switch over to last week is "flawed," according to an eye movement study of six brand pages by SimpleUsability, with many of the new features going unnoticed or being misunderstood. More

Windows 8: The OS/2 of Today

After watching Microsoft lurch toward completion of Windows 8 and trying out a few of its early versions, I am struck by a tremendous sense of déjà vu. It took me some time to figure out why I was feeling this way, and then it hit me: Win 8 is on track to become the OS/2 of today, and suffer a similar and ignominious fate. More

The Future of Photo-Sharing Apps

The tiny Instagram app grew to a gigantic 27 million users during its first year in the App Store. It has inspired real-life Instameet-ups, Instagram art shows and a community based on love for the image, where users can post and receive feedback from other visual thinkers. Instagrams are not only the new Polaroids when it comes to party pics, they've become a way for users to communicate visually, sharing inspiration and ideas (well, iPhone users anyway - the Android app is due out soon). More

The Future of Newspapers May End Up Looking a Lot Like... Newspapers

It's a bit of a role reversal at the college newspaper where I am the faculty adviser: I, playing the role of old ink-stained curmudgeon, keep insisting the students need to think about improving their website and developing multimedia reporting skills, while they insist they love putting out a dead-tree product each week. More

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After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

For Google, to Play Is to Fight the Commoditization of Android

When you think of Android, do you think of Google? No, probably not. Android as a brand conjures up associations with the little green robot, the sound of your phone's Droid tone, Motorola, Samsung and even Verizon, but rarely Google. For that reason, Google has rebranded the Android Marketplace as Google Play. Is it too little too late or is it a smart move to lessen brand dilution? Dan Rowinski takes a look at the reasons for the rebrand and its hope for success in this week's top story, For Google, to Play Is to Fight the Commoditization of Android.

From our readers:

Jay Godse - Android is not a strong enough brand to do what it needs to do for Google. It is valuable to developers as a technology brand. It is valuable to handset makers and carriers as a customer attraction brand. It is valuable to consumers as a place to buy apps for Android phones,i.e. a commerce brand. In the long run, Android cannot be all three things. The weakest brand facet of Android is the commerce brand, so it is a good decision to separate it from the technology and customer attraction brands in the form of Google Play.

Personally, I don't think that the name "Google Play" captures the right value proposition to customers of the Android marketplace. "Google Market" might have been a better choice. However, at least the brand is separate from the technology and customer-attraction brand facets of Android.

More Top Posts:

Google's Go Programming Language Grows Up: Now What?

Does the world really need another C-ish programming language? Apparently Google thought so in 2009, when it channeled the Ramones and introduced Go. Now the Go team has reached a stable point they're calling Go 1 and sending it out into the world for "creating reliable products, projects and publications." Now, what's the world going to do with it? More

I Quit Path

There are too many apps. "There's an app for that" has passed the point of cliché and become some strange kind of axiom. Path is the perfect example. We have an app for staying in touch with friends: Facebook. We have an app for sharing pretty photos: Instagram. We have an app for checking into places: Foursquare. We have approximately 9,182 apps for auto-tweeting what song we're listening to right now. And yet, Path. More

5 Apps for Working From the iPad

Let's be real about this. You can't do everything on an iPad. As Shawn Blanc pointed out the other day, you can't make iOS apps on it, for example. But you might be surprised by how much real work you can do on it with the right tools. If your work requires generally office-like capabilities, there are definitely iPad solutions. More

10 AirPlay-Ready iPad Apps That Make Apple TV Worth It

When I first unboxed the new 1080p Apple TV and plugged it in, I wasn't blown away. Having used a Boxee Box for the last 16 months, I've come to expect flexibility and a broad selection of content sources from my streaming set-top boxes. In fact, after several minutes of playing around with it, I was tempted to box it back up and send it back. More

The Unspoken Etiquette of Facebook Photo Tagging

That afternoon, the Facebook notifications just kept rolling in, one after the other. You've been tagged in a photo, the social giant eagerly announced via email, again and again. The subject of many of those photographs - we'll call her Stacey, as she has requested anonymity - was not expecting these images to be published online, to say the least. More

The End of RIM As We Know It

BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion shares are down tonight after reporting a terrible quarter: Sales are shrinking at a time when its main competitor, Apple, saw iPhone sales more than double. RIM is no longer profitable. And now it is looking for a new plan. More

Google Is Now a Graphing Calculator

Google has decided to make its simple search box into yet another thing. It's now a WebGL-powered 3D graphing calculator. If you type in a two-variable function, Google's search box on the desktop will graph an animated, interactive, 3D plot right in your browser. More

New Ways to Do Disaster Recovery Using Virtualization

Remember your father's disaster recovery (DR) process? Chances are it involved using a bunch of data tapes and rotating them between home and work, or different offices. Tapes were cheap, but notoriously unreliable. And getting them restored on a server took a lot of work. There are better solutions for today's DR, including using one of a number of newer virtualization technologies that makes it easier and a lot faster to bring up a server from a backup. Let's look at some of the alternatives. More

How to Jailbreak According to chpwn

When you jailbreak an iOS device for the first time, you have a lot to learn. That's just the first of many ways jailbreaking is unlike the out-of-the-box Apple experience. To get a better sense of the purpose and potential of jailbreaking, I talked to one of the best. More

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• Take My Facebook Password? Over My Dead Body
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• Squashing Bugs: The Many Layered Approach to Mobile App Testing

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• Red Hat Sets a Date for OpenShift Source Release
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After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

What Should You Do If Your Employer Asks For Your Facebook Password? HOT TOPIC

Sure, you sacrifice some of your rights to privacy when you enter the workforce, but asking for social passwords seems to be an extreme request. Employees are advised to be proactive and ask about social media policies and, of course, assert their rights to privacy in non-work activities.

What would you say if your boss asked for your Facebook password?

From our readers:

Christiaan Conover -- An employer asking for your Facebook credentials is tantamount to asking for permission to read your personal (delivered to your house) mail, read your personal email or listen to your personal voicemail messages. They have no business gaining access to something that has no connection to the employer and violates another company's terms in the process.

More Top Posts:

New York City Subpoenas Twitter For Occupy Wall Street Protester Data

U.S. activists who thought Twitter was a secure way to communicate during demonstrations may have another thing coming. The New York District Attorney's Office has begun sending subpoenas to Twitter seeking data on protesters arrested during the Occupy Wall Street protests last year. More

Best Wiki Ever? Hackpad Just Might Be

After catching a note about the wiki for SXSW being edited with Hackpad, I thought it might be worth a look. Then I caught the tagline, "best wiki ever." Well, that's a bold statement. Then I noticed that Tomboy creator Alex Graveley was part of the team behind it and thought maybe it really is. After a short test drive, I'm even more impressed. Hackpad combines the simplicity of Tomboy with real-time collaboration features that make it a great lightweight tool for teams. More

Google Semantic Search: Bad for SEO, Good for You

The Wall Street Journal reported today on some changes coming to Google search, but the article seems a bit confused about what they are. The lead item is that "[o]ver the next few months," Google "will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links," providing direct answers to questions instead. That's not new at all. More

How Windows 8 Succeeds From Here: A Prognosis

We live in a post-something era. This much, Microsoft is willing to concede; the iPad's thundering success changed the landscape. It has shown that the buyer is willing to imagine a different form factor than the PC commanding her principal information delivery platform. Apple has yet to conquer that platform, but it has fired its third round of volleys and the castle walls have been breached. More

[Poll] What Company Provides the Best HTML5 Framework and Toolset?

HTML5 and the mobile Web is starting to catch up with native apps, at least in terms of developer attention. Many developers are rushing to create HTML5-ready mobile websites or hybrid apps and need the proper tools to create dynamic apps that will function across platforms. As such, there is an arms race in the HTML5 ecosystem to create tools that developers will need to produce quality apps and content for the mobile Web, Android and iOS. More

Death By Wikipedia: Encyclopedia Britannica Stops Printing

So many things about printed encyclopedias seem insane now. The space that dozens of volumes takes up. How much an entire set weighs (well over 100 pounds). The fact that many middle class families used to have to pay for them in regular installments. How slowly they are updated with new information.

Today, we have a reservoir of infinite knowledge, most of which is virtually free to access. It takes up no more physical space than the tiny devices we use to view it. More

Stephen Wolfram Thinks Instagram is "Completely Nuts" For Writing Its Own Photo Filters

The easy news at South by Southwest yesterday was that Instagram has reached 27 million users and has indeed built the expected Android version. The hard news is that it may have wasted lots of time and effort along the way.

In a talk today entitled "Computation and Its Impact on the Future", Stephen Wolfram took a rapt audience on a tour of Wolfram Alpha and the Mathematica kernel that underlies it. To demonstrate Mathematica's capabilities, he wrote some software right in front of us to upload and filter photos. It took 10 seconds and two lines of code. More

5 Things I Learned About the Future from Stephen Wolfram

Lots of the knowledge dropped at South By Southwest Interactive is vertical. In the sense that tech people use that word, "vertical" means focused on a particular market or problem and all its implications from top to bottom. Talks tend to be about the business of this or that, or the makers of one app will talk about how they did it. More

[STUDY] Why Do People Use Instagram?

Instagram is the iPhone photographer's app of choice, and it's not just because of those slice and dice filters. Are Instagram users hasty and lazy, or do they actually take time to craft the photos before uploading them? A study done back when Instagram was fairly new suggests that the hardcore users of the Instagram app are anything but lazy. In fact, they might be using this tiny app to create art and build beautiful new communites. Before Zachary McCune joined @piictu as a community manager, he found himself in the UK on a fellowship studying the software users of Instagram. More

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• AppMobi Releases First Public Version of jqMobi HTML5 Framework

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• Next, Salesforce Aims to Obsolete the CMS with Site.com Launch
• Four (Competing) Approaches to Security in the Mobile + Cloud Era
• Hadoop Users Could Get Their First Taste of Real Encryption

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Internet culture was on full display in person this week at South by Southwest, and I got a chance to sit down with Owen Thomas, founding editor of The Daily Dot, to talk about how they cover the Web not as a tool, like we do at RWW, but as a place.

ReadWriteWeb: How are you different?

The Daily Dot: We cover the Web as a place where people live their lives. I think most publications treat the Web as a set of technologies or a business opportunity. We think those are great, and those are valid things to do, it's just not what we do. The Web is a place for us.

It's really a world. It's a world of little nation states. I mean, Facebook is, by population, the third largest sovereignty, you know? The kingdom of Zuckerberg. Twitter is, if you look at active users, it's probably the size of Indonesia.

This is a place. The Daily Dot is that place's newspaper of record.

DD: It might be something where the action is on a specific community like Reddit. It might be about a person who is just influential online like Ben Huh. Something going viral as a Facebook share I think is just so dead-center to what we do. We've made animated GIFs a regular feature. That's not something that exists anywhere except the Internet. That particular form of short-form animation that can be spread in a Twitter message is native to the Web.

So we look for those stories about people, phenomena, ideas that are Web-native, and we cover them.

RWW: Daily Dot reporter Kevin Morris said on Twitter that he was "so, so happy" about The Daily Dot not covering the iPad launch last week. What is a gadget in this world you cover?

DD: Gadgets are kind of like cars. You use them to get from place to place. But you don't really think about them unless there's a miles-long traffic jam, and suddenly that becomes news.

DD: One design decision we made early on, which we're now in the process of correcting, is we kind of hard-coded into our site these various communities. What we discovered was that there are new communities that rise and fall.

Web communities, by their nature, are very, very fluid. While it's hard to be a citizen of multiple countries in the real world, online you can be an active citizen of multiple communities, and you can teleport from place to place instantly.

Our original concept that we would have beat reporters dedicated to specific communities has worked in some regards. But what if a YouTube video goes viral because it's on the front page of Reddit? Is that a Reddit story or a YouTube story? Which reporter covers it? We've had to say it's sort of up for grabs.

So our beat system has become much more fluid in recognition of the realities of the communities we cover.

RWW: When you cover a major issue within one of these communities, like Fruzsina Eördögh's recent series on YouTube reply girls, is it ever hard to translate the importance of that issue to the outside world?

DD: That's our job. It is what we do. We are explaining the Internet to the world.

You can read The Daily Dot at dailydot.com.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

Why the New iPad is So Huge for Apple HOT TOPIC

Most will agree that the new iPad, launched this week, isn't a huge step forward. That being the case, Dan Frommer still believes it will be of enormous significance for Apple this year. 2012 may well be the year of the iPad.

From our readers:

Netflix: No, We Don't Advertise with Rush Limbaugh HOT TOPIC

Did Netflix advertise on the Rush Limbaugh show? Yes. Did they mean to do this? It's complicated.

The answer is really more of a primer in the way radio advertising works. Joe Brockmeier shares how buying general airtime is different than specifying a particular show in your ad buy. He also explains why those general ad buys may not be a good idea if you are advertising on a network that airs controversial content.

From our readers:

Jason -- I see Netflix has continued to run ads on Rush today - and not just any station, on flagship Rush station WABC.

I understand network buys. I also understand a company has the right to demand "no controversial programming" with those buys.

Obviously, all but Netflix have made this demand. There are no major buyers airing during Rush except Netflix now.

So, do you think you've been used? I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.

Google Gets Into the Airline Ticket Business

Just in case it wasn't clear Google is going into the business of selling airline tickets. It's starting small with Cape Air, an independent New England-based regional airline.

The websites for Cape Air and Nantucket Airlines now have new booking software under the hood powered by Google-owned ITA Software, one of the "Ten Most Innovative Companies in Transportation," according to Fast Company.

More Top Posts:

Sencha Touch 2 Allows Developers to Code iOS Apps With Windows PCs

Mobile HTML5 developer framework Sencha wants to be more than just a tool to develop hybrid mobile applications. The company's roadmap for 2012 is to become an end-to-end solution for designing, developing and deploying HTML5 applications and is taking its first steps toward that goal today by releasing Sencha Touch 2 out of beta. Sencha Touch 2 gives developers a better user interface for developing HTML5 that will give consumers a more robust user experience. More

Google Slashes Storage Prices: Still no GDrive

Google announced today that it's dropping its pricing on Google Cloud Storage and its integration with several enterprise storage offerings. Google's updated pricing scheme puts it roughly in line with Amazon's S3, but what else does Google have to offer except a new pricing scheme?

I spoke to Google's product manager for Cloud Storage, Navneet Joneja on Monday about the pricing change and how Google stands out in storage. More

The New iPad: The Perfect Tablet at the Perfect Time HOT TOPIC

So, Apple just threw a bunch of numbers and specifications at you. Yeah, it is a new iPad. So what? Nothing about the rumor cycle heading into the third generation iPad had me excited. Honestly, I am probably not going to buy the new iPad. Well, not anytime soon. But, as we noted earlier today, you probably will. My colleague Dan Frommer will explain later today why the third generation iPad will be the most important product Apple releases this year and will sell two to three times better than the previous two iPads ... combined. If you have never bought a tablet before, this is likely going to be the one that you do buy. More

[Infographic] How to Write the Best Call to Action Emails

The folks at Litmus.com have prepared this interesting infographic about to boost the results from your email campaigns. Who knew that your readers would be more likely to click on your messages if a button included an arrow icon? And that because of image-blocking features on most email programs, make sure that you use what they call a "bulletproof" button by combine HTML and background codes so that the button will be visible when images are enabled. More

How Social Networks are Killing the Internet HOT TOPIC

Share this on Facebook! Tweet this to your followers! Pin it to Pinterest! Submit the link to StumbleUpon and drive tons of traffic to your site! Digg it and hopefully more eyeballs will see it (and then it will end up on Facebook through the Digg Social Reader). Isn't it great? You can cross your fingers and hope that the entire social Web sees something you like if you share it to all of your social networks. After all, we are what we share. More

Amazon Leads Price War: Drops AWS Pricing Again, Leans Heavy on Reserved Instances

According to Amazon's blog today, the company is now on their 19th price cut since AWS debuted, but who's counting? Well, they are, apparently. The company is lowering pricing on EC2 instances, ElastiCache, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Elastic Map Reduce are all dropping significantly. Significantly, Amazon is heavily emphasizing its price cuts on Reserved Instances. More

Apple, That iPad Will Never Get the Network Speed You Claim HOT TOPIC

When Apple executives rolled out the new iPad yesterday, there was a lot of hyperbole and cheerleading on stage. Hey, these things happen, it is a launch event for one of the year's biggest products, after all. Yet, those with a critical eye noted something peculiar with Apple's announcement of its 3G and 4G LTE announcement: the speed numbers that executives touted are nowhere near what consumers will find in the real world. More

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• How Many Vendors Can Bill Your Credit Card?
• Netflix: No, We Don't Advertise with Rush Limbaugh
• [Infographic] How to Write the Best Call to Action Emails

Mobile

• Cartoon: The Value of Flash on the iPad
• Sencha Touch 2 Allows Developers to Code iOS Apps With Windows PCs
• The Potential of Turning Mobile Money Into Mobile Apps

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• Can Data Tell the Story of a Location? Discovering Haight Street
• Font Awesome Icon Font Released for Twitter Bootstrap
• What We Lose in a Post-PC World

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UPDATE: Congratulations to Matthew Leifer who won the contest with this comment!

The possibilities are exciting. Many people, including RWW's Mobile guru, Dan Rowinski, believe it may be the innovation that changes human history the most in our lifetimes, assuming of course that we're around when it moves beyond current research. Will we live long enough to see it's promise realized?

Quantum computing will replace binary in processing transaction in a device. So, instead of 1 and 0, any value can be computed turning computing power from a limited set into exponential and powerful engine that can do things that would take days now in a matter of seconds.

Quantum Possibilities

The computer you use now is limited to binary processing, a transistor is either on or off. Quantum computing is not constrained in this way. Data can be represented in multiple states, bringing the possibilities of fantastical computing power, though for now, the hardware is still a limitation.

To win our Pi Day Contest, we want to know your vision for Quantum Computing. Will it replace existing computers? Will it be used side by side with binary computers, perhaps used only for specialized tasks? Will it be used for quantum teleportation, without the risk a Jeff Goldblum nightmare scenario?

What's Your Vision for Quantum Computing?

Answer better than everyone else and you may find yourself decked out in a fancy Pi T-shirt, holding a $25 gift certificate from ThinkGeek (our partners in quantum crime).

Let us know your vision for Quantum Computing in the comments on this post. We look forward to being schooled by your answers!

Sometimes it's difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

Reports Raise Questions About Who Has Access To Your Facebook Profile

Rush Limbaugh's controversial statements about college student, Sandra Fluke, are have created a significant PR firestorm for companies that run ads on his show. Netflix users have clamored for a response from Netflix PR, but they have chosen not to address these concerns in their own channels, as of this writing. They did tell ReadWriteWeb's Joe Brockmeier that they have not knowingly purchased advertising on Limbaugh's show, but that they do advertise on radio and two of their spots accidentally ran on the show.

The community response on the story made it clear that without a public response, they will lose some users.

From the ReadWriteWeb community:

Peg Keller -- People started emailing and tweeting Netflix on Friday and Saturday and there was NO denial or any acknowledgment. John Deere it took about 15 minutes, E-Harmony the same. Netflix had their head up their a** for 4 days while the rest of the advertisers targeted at least attempted to look into what was going on.

Dan Lake -- I've already cancelled my Netflix account as of this morning. They have until my paid time runs out in a week to change my mind. Their commercials are playing during Rush's show and that is not in question. They can come out on Twitter or their Facebook page or however they choose to denounce this scumbag.

More Must Read Stories:

Sencha Touch 2 Allows Developers to Code iOS Apps With Windows PCs

Mobile HTML5 developer framework Sencha wants to be more than just a tool to develop hybrid mobile applications. The company's roadmap for 2012 is to become an end-to-end solution for designing, developing and deploying HTML5 applications and is taking its first steps toward that goal today by releasing Sencha Touch 2 out of beta. Sencha Touch 2 gives developers a better user interface for developing HTML5 that will give consumers a more robust user experience. (more)

How Social Networks are Killing the Internet

Share this on Facebook! Tweet this to your followers! Pin it to Pinterest! Submit the link to StumbleUpon and drive tons of traffic to your site! Digg it and hopefully more eyeballs will see it (and then it will end up on Facebook through the Digg Social Reader). Isn't it great? You can cross your fingers and hope that the entire social Web sees something you like if you share it to all of your social networks. After all, we are what we share. (more)

Despite Ban, Facebook Finds A Way To Grow In China

People in China may be barred from accessing Facebook, but that hasn't stopped them from making software for the 845-million member social network.

The partnerships with Chinese software developers allow Facebook to find ways to show investors in its upcoming initial public offering growth and expansion in China, even though the Chinese government has banned access to the site since 2009. The Chinese game developers could also be a strong source of revenue growth for the recent addition of advertisements to Facebook's mobile site. (more)

Google Play: Movies, Books, Music & Apps from Google

Google just took the wrapper off a new service called Google Play. It's a single cloud-based media store for apps, songs, books and movies that streams between Android devices and the desktop. The Android Market and Google Music have been rolled into it. There's lots of free streaming content available, and you can pay for the rest with Google Wallet. It's rolling out globally starting today, but not all content is available everywhere. (more)

Sabu the Betrayer: Hacker Tweets Outrage While Conspiring With FBI

There is a code upheld by members of Sicilian mobsters called omerta. It is considered a code of honor, of value, of principal. It is the "code of silence" that means that members do not give evidence to authorities or rivals about the activities of the organization. When an organization is brought down by police there is a good chance that there was a snitch involved. Omerta was broken. (more)

Google Slashes Storage Prices: Still no GDrive

Google announced today that it's dropping its pricing on Google Cloud Storage and its integration with several enterprise storage offerings. Google's updated pricing scheme puts it roughly in line with Amazon's S3, but what else does Google have to offer except a new pricing scheme?

I spoke to Google's product manager for Cloud Storage, Navneet Joneja on Monday about the pricing change and how Google stands out in storage. (more)

AppMobi Accelerates Android HTML5 Performance With new directCanvas SDK

A lot has been made over the last couple of days of how Android renders HTML5 a lot slower than iOS. This comes as a revelation to absolutely no one. HTML5 development studio appMobi thinks it has a fix. At the Game Developers Conference today appMobi announced the availability of its directCanvas SDK for Android that promises refresh rates up to 10 times faster. (more)

How P.R. Pros Keep Their High-Profile Clients Out Of Trouble On Twitter

Seconds after one of Jai Manselle's NBA clients accidentally tweeted out classified information about negotiations to end last fall's lockout it was already too late to delete the 140-character message.

"It was immediately reblogged, screenshot, retweeted and disseminated heavily," said Manselle, a public relations specialist whose firm represents clients ranging from the American Red Cross to Sean Combs. (more)

Verizon: External Security Threats Skyrocketed in 2011

The conventional wisdom has been that industrialized hacking organizations have become particularly successful with social engineering - coaxing employees into doing something stupid that unlocks their networks' security. Analysts at the RSA Conference in San Francisco last week spoke of increasing incidents of telephone calls - actual human beings from call centers, pretending to be "Windows Security" or some other service, offering to help employees eradicate a non-existent virus from their systems and asking for their passwords outright. (more)

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Sometimes it's difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

Reports Raise Questions About Who Has Access To Your Facebook Profile

Some Facebook moderation is performed by an external vendors. The employees of these vendors may have more information on Facebook users than some people expect. Beyond the flagged content, the moderators can see, in some cases, the user's name and other identifying information.

From the ReadWriteWeb community:

jdavid_net -- the problem is if facebook truly is a social utility, then, it becomes part of the infrastructure of human inter relationships.

Nick Stamoulis -- It's doubtful that the average Facebook user thoroughly understands Facebook's privacy policies. Most probably haven't even bothered to read it. Facebook is a "free" service, and it's obvious that you are giving up something to use it. Really, it's pretty simple. If in doubt, don't share something on Facebook.

More Must Read Stories:

How Technology Changes Our Relationships

Ah, the Internet. The once magnificent and glorious tool has transformed from being a fast-paced information highway to that place where we all admit, rather begrudgingly, that we spend too much time on. Alone. We love the immediate answers, the idea of relying on Google as one aspect of our "external brain". We crave instant gratification. We make important decisions (such as impulse buys) without a second thought. We are turning into Internet speed fiends, and we are doing it alone. (more)

Google Gets Into the Airline Ticket Business

Just in case it wasn't clear Google is going into the business of selling airline tickets. It's starting small with Cape Air, an independent New England-based regional airline. (more)

The Best SLA Ever

You no doubt are somewhat cynical about service level agreements (SLAs), those little-reviewed documents that promise the level of service from your hosting provider. Little-read that is, until something goes awry. Enter SingleHop, a Chicago-based provider that is trying to make a name for itself by actually delivering a solid "Bill of Rights" for customers and promising to pay when they don't meet their SLA. It is an interesting idea. (more)

Now You Can Pin Quotes to Pinterest

Pinterest is the new home to images from around the Web. Artists, interior designers, fashionistas and excited brides-to-be are using Pinterest to organize and curate their aesthetic. Among the photos of vintage duffle bags and cheese plates, word-only images have begun to pop up. Toronto-based developer Adam Rotman saw the opportunity and jumped on it. His new site, PinAQuote.com, offers users a way to grab text they see somewhere on the Web and turn it into a sharable image for Pinterest. Drag the PinAQuote bookmarklet into your bookmarks bar, which works well in Firefox or Chrome. (more)

How Spam and the Cloud Can Save the Future of Email

Email is dead, according to some high profile figures.

Meanwhile, email use continues to grow steadily, and by some estimates nearly 80% of all business data can be found in email. Yet, even many of email's greatest fans believe that after nearly 40 years of evolution, email has pretty much settled into its final form. I think they're wrong - we have only seen the beginning of what email can do. (more)

Experts Weigh In On What Facebook Premium Means For Users, Advertisers

The premium advertising platform Facebook launched last week, which includes an increased emphasis on mobile, is getting mixed reviews from industry professionals.

"Bottom-line- this is gonna fail because People don't want to recommend an ad," said Natalie L. Petouhoff, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. "They want to recommend a product, service or company that they have had an amazing experience with. (Or they want to share great content.) That expression of joy, surprise, wonderment... is a natural thing that people share with each other." (more)

Betting on the Future, Washington Post Hires Slashdot Founder

To say that journalism has changed in the last few years is putting it mildly. Those that watch the news industry and have a concern for its future are all too the familiar with the statistics. Dramatic drops in print advertising revenue are followed by layoffs, pay cuts and even the occasional closure of an institution that have informed the public for generations. Meanwhile, an entirely new digital news ecosystem is slowly emerging on the Web and mobile platforms, even if not everybody has figured out the best way to monetize it yet. (more)

Can Big Data Replace Domain Expertise?

One of the recurring themes last week at the O'Reilly Strata Conference in Santa Clara was the idea that skill with machine learning and analytics could trump domain expertise in getting results.

The argument goes something like this: Given the right data set, a data scientist with no domain expertise can out-perform experts that have been working in the field for decades. For example, providing weather insurance or marketing strategy. (more)

The Benefits and Pitfalls of ESPN's new Developer Center

What do you do when you have a treasure trove of valuable data that developers would love to get their hands on? Release an API and let them create applications for you. That is precisely what sports network ESPN did today by announcing its Developer Center replete with multiple APIs for programmers. Developers can tap into ESPN's reservoir of data on athletes, teams, media, stats and research to create sports apps with rich data for fans across the world. (more)

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Sometimes it's difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

What Siri Would Look Like If It Were a Person

A contest to imagine what Siri's physical form might look like yielded some interesting results. The winner, Omniscent Siri, by SaGa Design, looks half alien, half human. To learn more about the contest and the winner, check out What Siri Would Look Like If It Were a Person.

More Must Read Stories:

Camera Awesome: An iPhone App That Instagram and Apple Could Learn From

The fact that smartphones have made a huge mark on photography is no breaking news. The company that was once most synonymous with taking photographs is now in bankruptcy, while the most frequently-used camera on Flickr isn't one of Nikon or Canon's DSLRs, but the iPhone 4. (more)

What Kind of Software Company Should You Work For?

I met Peter Griess last night and heard him talk about his career. Even though he still has plenty of years ahead of him, he has already worked for NetApp, Yahoo, and now Facebook. He was part of a nine-person startup that worked on some interesting social email apps that eventually got acquired by Yahoo. Along his career he has seen very different kinds of cultures in these various software engineering departments, and as I was listening to his talk, I thought about the many software companies that I have covered over the years.

I would break them down into three different kinds of cultures (the names are my own construct)... (more)

Exposé Details Facebook's Growing Pains

Fortune magazine released an exposé of Facebook that portrays Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg as a leader who promoted friends over qualified Facebook employees and may have been too focused on "extracurricular" activities as the public face of the soon-to-be public social network. (more)

AT&T Clarifies Data Throttling Policy but Still Faces User Backlash

When it comes to data throttling, there is no way that U.S. mobile carriers can win the war of public opinion. That goes double for AT&T and its PR fiasco over the last couple of weeks over its throttling of unlimited data plans. A California man won an $850 settlement in the Simi Valley small claims court, opening the door for thousands of similar court cases to be brought about the country. Several petitions on Change.org have been started to challenge the throttling policy, including one from Yonker's New York yoga instructor Jane Foody that has about 11,400 signatures since it was launched. (more)

8 Things to Think About Before You Make Your Next Product Pitch

St. Louis became the 22nd city to have a branch of the Founders Institute today. The operation helps entrepreneurs in a very structured four-month paid mentoring program. It involves intensive coaching and has resulted in more than 700 startups, with over 40% of them receiving funding. We have written about FI before here. (more)

News.me for iPhone Makes Friends the Editors of Twitter & Facebook

News.me launched its free iPhone app this morning, which introduces Facebook integration, a saved offline reading list that syncs with the iPad app and Instapaper, and new, simple social dynamics of its own. It digests the links shared by Twitter and Facebook contacts, checks Bit.ly for their popularity, and presents a list of the top news stories in a clean, readable environment. (more)

Pew: 53% of U.S. Cellphone Owners now Have Smartphones

Over half of U.S. cellphone owners now own smartphones, according to new data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. 53% of U.S. cellphone owners are now of the smart variety and 46% of American's overall own a smartphone. This is a significant inflection point in the mobile revolution, marking a significant trend in how the average interacts with information. (more)

Chinese Internet Users to Obama: "Hello Mr. President"

China's Internet censorship regime, known as the Great Firewall, can appear monolithic. A few days ago, however, that wall was breached. Chinese citizens rode a glitch and jumped onto the momentarily unencumbered information super highway, according to reports from CNET. Where did Chinese Internet users head? Straight to President Obama's Google+ page. (more)

Strata: Mixing the Social Data Cocktail

Everyone knows you can learn a lot by trawling data coming from social media services like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. But sometimes the data will surprise you. For instance, you'd expect to be able to glean product feedback from Facebook's public feed, but did you know that shoplifters tend to brag about it in social media? (more)

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Sometimes it's difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

The Only 5 Things That Matter at Mobile World Congress

Beyond the distractions of tons of people, hundreds of booths and great panels, Dan Frommer reminds us that there are five things that we can't miss at this year's Mobile World Congress. One of those is that the show itself is amazing, but beyond that, there are some significant lessons to learn about Google, Apple, Samsung and telecoms. Read "The Only 5 Things That Matter at Mobile World Congress" to stay up to date on this year's upcoming mobile trends.

From our readers:

rawryree - That's the sad part. Until WebOS and Tizen get their act together, even the open source realm is pretty much monopolized by Android, allowing mediocrity to reign. The only reason Android is flourishing right now is that it's the only alternative to Apple.

(Yeah, there's Windows Phone 7, but it's not going Open Source any time soon so they're relegated to the third-party status like BlackBerry OS.)

More Must Read Stories:

Company Reactions to Facebook Timeline for Brands

This morning Facebook launched Timeline For Brands, which will give brand pages the same look, feel and functionality as the personal page Timelines the social network has been rolling out since September. (more)

FBI Searches Social Media for Insider Trading

The FBI launched Perfect Hedge Investigations, an effort to root out insider trading that includes monitoring of social networks.

The emphasis on social media and online communications platforms like Skype accents how complex law enforcement is becoming in the connected era: a simple phone tap or document subpoena is no longer enough to catch Gordon Gecko-like figures in an age where people have dozens of options for sending information to associates. (more)

WordPress For Musicians: CASH Music Wants to Open Source the Industry

We hear a lot about how dramatically the music industry is changing. And indeed, there are plenty of positive trends amidst the disruption. Music creation is easier than ever. So is music discovery. Streaming services offer a new model for the consumption of music on any device, in any location. Whether from within a startup or at Music Hack Day, developers are building new things everyday that will help shape the future of music. (more)

Marketing Your App: Find Market Weaknesses and Exploit Them

There are more smartphones in the hands of consumers than ever. The natural consequence of smartphone penetration is that more users are downloading more apps. It comes down to simple economic theory: as volume increases the cost of acquiring loyal users goes down. (more)

Art of Entrepreneurship: Who to Listen to and Why

The art of entrepreneurship and the science of customer development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. It's understanding who to listen to and why. (more)

How to Enhance Your Community Using Twitter, a New O'Reilly Book

Are you seemingly stuck with trying to suss out what to do with Twitter? Don't know how to get started? Does 140 characters seem daunting? Then you might want to take a look at a new O'Reilly book called Tweetsmart. (more)

Strata 2012: 3 Essential Skills of a Data Driven CEO

At the Strata Jumpstart session on Tuesday, Diego Saenz of Data Driven CEO made the case for three skills that are must haves for CEOs to become "data driven."

Much of Saenz's talk focused on one specific data-driven CEO: Robert McDonald of Procter and Gamble (P&G). (more)

RSA 2012: Former McAfee CTO Demonstrates Remote Access Exploits on WebKit

The company is called CrowdStrike (not "CloudStrike"), and most folks attending the NSA session featuring the company Wednesday morning had never heard of it. That wasn't why they were there. The man behind CrowdStrike is George Kurtz, the former chief technology officer of McAfee, and the man widely credited with bringing that company into the realm of seriousness. (more)

Why Video Games Are Good for Your Kids

In addition to understanding the many real concerns that today's parents have with video games, it's also worth considering the benefits and positive aspects that contemporary interactive entertainment choices provide. (more)

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As yet, Apple has stayed out of the fray. As we look towards the upcoming Apple event, we wonder if that will change? Do you expect Apple to become a player in the streaming music market?

Will Apple Enter the Streaming Music Game?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and presented them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.