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Report: Facebook IM service will debut soon

Facebook plans to launch an instant-messaging application for members to embed on their profiles as early as next week, TechCrunch reported Friday.

Details are sketchy, but it appears that this will be a Web-based IM service that would allow Facebook users to chat with other people on their friends lists without needing to go through a third-party program. Additionally, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington detailed, the service would likely be based on the Jabber open-source platform, which would mean that third-party "universal IM" clients like Pidgin, Trillian, and Adium would be able to implement it.

Facebook representatives were not … Read more

Forget Facebook. The Web's platform is Firefox

Correction: This post was updated to correct the time line of John Lilly's meeting with Jerry Yang.

I spent an hour Thursday with John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, and Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of Engineering, and learned a few things. For one thing, I once argued that Mozilla should hire more "capitalist pigs." John's riposte Thursday was, "We have more capitalist pigs than you think."

John didn't mean that Mozilla is just another commercial open-source company. It's not. Clarifying that comment, John went on to point out that four out of its five executives are entrepreneurs. In other words, though Mozilla is tiny compared to its proprietary competition (and big by open-source project standards), Mozilla's team and community are well-architected to compete. It's not going to fall over at Microsoft's feet anytime soon.

But while competing, Mozilla is heavily focused on its customers first and its competitors second. As John indicated to me:

Our question is always, how do we grow in a way that is leveraged? We always lead with the user experience and think about the money secondarily.

That user experience is starting to evolve beyond today's browsing experience. The most interesting topic discussed in our meeting was just how compelling Mozilla's Firefox will increasingly be as the platform for much that happens on the Web. Forget Facebook, MySpace, the iPhone, and other so-called platforms. Firefox could well prove to be the most disruptive Web platform on the market. Here's why.… Read more

Navigating out of Facebook's awkward adolescence

It's easy to get caught up in the mania but as a new O'Reilly report reminds readers, only a handful of Facebook applications ever become smash hits.

Anyone who has encountered the new oddball Facebook app du jour can attest that the novelty gets old rather fast. That's because many of the ideas are insipid time sucks. At that point, you're more likely to tune out (if you haven't already hit the delete button.) Indeed, O'Reilly notes the "tendency for individual applications to grow very quickly within the first few weeks, and then … Read more

Yahoo warming up to OpenSocial; Facebook staying cool

Google's OpenSocial APIs may be gaining a major new adherent this week. According to the New York Times, Yahoo is expected to join the group that includes MySpace, Plaxo, Bebo, Hi5, Orkut, LinkedIn, Six Apart, Oracle, salesforce.com and Ning, among others. In fact, Facebook is the only major social networking platform that has not joined the OpenSocial club.

OpenSocial allows applications to tap into the social graph, the network of friends and their feeds, of multiple social networks without code rewrites.

Speaking with CNET News.com's Caroline McCarthy at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival over the … Read more

Designed for disaster: SXSW's Zuckerberg keynote discussion

Chelsea Holden Baker, of frog design, says better planning and a different design choice could have changed the outcome during the now-infamous 2008 SXSW keynote discussion between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and reporter Sarah Lacy.

Here is Chelsea's blog on the matter from Tuesday:

If you have any interest in South by Southwest and/or the blogosphere, then you've probably seen something on the infamous train-wreck-of-an-interview, aka the SXSW keynote discussion with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and journalist Sarah Lacy. (In this metaphor Zuckerberg is the Little Engine That Could and Lacy is the conductor that derailed the … Read more

Mark Zuckerberg's 'Oscar Robertson' moment

Did Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have his "Oscar Robertson" moment this week?

Bear with me on this one for a moment.

In case you missed it, Sunday's New York Times sports section carried a wonderful first-person retrospective piece by Robertson, one of the greatest basketball guards in the history of the game. But when he played at the University of Cincinnati in the late 1950s, Robertson was anything but a household name.

That changed after he lit up Madison Square Garden for 56 points in front of the New York media. Unfortunately, the post-game news conference was … Read more

Facebook app turns movie clips into messages

Paramount Pictures and application developer FanRocket announced a service for Facebook users that will allow them to send movie clips to each other. The clips, which are sent as messages and last from a few seconds to several minutes, are intended to help recipients "relive the moment" in a familiar film, a studio executive told the Associated Press.

The service, called VooZoo, certainly takes message ornamentation a step or two beyond the emoticon, letting the "stars do the talking," as the FanRocket site says. I'm not sure, though, that some Facebook users will be familiar … Read more

At SXSWi, the new Twitter is...Twitter

AUSTIN, Texas--After last year's explosive arrival on the geek scene at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) of Twitter, a lot of people wondered what technology might take the conference by storm this year.

Well, after three-and-a-half days of SXSWi, I'd say we have an uncontested winner.

Announcing the technology that more than anything else has governed how the thousands of attendees here are organizing themselves, finding out what their friends are up to, weighing in on the merits of keynote address interviewers and so much more.

Drum roll please.

It's Twitter. Again.

I have never seen anything … Read more

Finally, a really worthwhile Facebook app

There are tons of Facebook apps, many that seem to be, well, silly and useless.

A new app that will help a nonprofit coordinate blood donation is really worthwhile and could make a significant direct impact on people's lives.

The app from New York nonprofit Takes All Types sends Facebook alerts to people who opt in and will send reminders for regular donation, according to The New York Times.

"We were reacting to our sense that most of what was on Facebook was too academic or frivolous," Ben Bergman, who created the program, told the newspaper.

However, … Read more