Google has launched the Google Analytics App Gallery, which includes 32 apps so far.

"All Google Analytics customers have access to a worldwide network of Google Certified Partners (formerly known as Google Analytics Authorized Consultants)," says Trevor Claiborne of the Google Analytics Team. "And now the ecosystem is growing further with developers who are creating a variety of applications on the Google Analytics platform."

Among the apps in the gallery are ones that let you work with analytics data in an Excel spreadsheet, and one that automatically implements Google Analytics across a WordPress site.

Developers can find more information here about how to publish apps in the gallery.

Google also announced it will be making a new set of AdWords reports available in Google Analytics over the coming weeks.

"These reports expand significantly on the AdWords reports you currently see in your account," says Claiborne. "For example, you can break out your AdWords traffic by actual search query, match type, distribution network, and many other AdWords attributes. We’ve added reports for day parting, placements, and destination URLs."

Developers can access AdWords info with the Google Analytics APIs, which Google says makes it much easier to combine AdWords and Analytics data for analysis and automation.

In addition to these announcements, AdWords Search Funnels are now available for all AdWords accounts.

Twitter has released its first official application for Android 2.1 and Google will be open sourcing the code in the app soon. 

Twitter for Android app features a share button in your favorite applications for sharing links and images via Twitter.

The Twitter Blog provides more details. "Reading tweets is easy in a bunch of places on your phone. Quickly access your timeline with the home screen widget, view a tweet location on a map, and see your friend’s latest tweet in your phonebook, GoogleTalk list or any application that uses Android’s QuickContact bar."

"We had a great time working with the Android team and are thrilled that Google will be open sourcing the code used in this app in the near future. We look forward to the amazing experiences developers will create using Twitter APIs in their upcoming Android apps."
 

In our discussion of the closing of Devver earlier this week, we mentioned the problems the company faced by being created by two technical co-founders. Without a business-minded co-founder to bring passion to the non-techie parts of a startup, companies may struggle to keep up with both sides of the operation. WePay co-founder Rich Aberman is the quintessential non-technical co-founder, and he recently provided some advice on things to consider before founding a startup without technical prowess.

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WePay is a service to help groups collect and manage money, but dealing in cash transactions involves lots of regulations and security issues. While his partners are coding away making the experience better for users, Aberman deals with banks and interfaces with customers to find out ways to make the product better and safer. One lesson Aberman has for the non-technical co-founders out there working side-by-side with developers is to not trivialize projects that may seem obvious and easy.

“Just because something is logical and it makes sense, does not mean that the code can easily support it,” writes Aberman. “From what I can tell, nothing is more frustrating to an engineer than a non-engineer asking for something complex, and treating it as if it’s trivial.”

The lesson here is that even if parts of your team are clearly focused on separate goals, such as programming code versus developing business strategies, they should be working and collaborating as closely as possible. The only worse than being completely one-sided with developers would be to have the business side employees completely detached from the technical people.

It is crucial that the people focusing on business goals be cognizant of the limitations of the development side, and vice versa. If that kind of collaboration is occurring, the trivialization of concepts won’t happen as often. Another lesson Aberman has for the non-techies is to understand the organic qualities of software development.

“Software is like a living breathing organism. It’s never ‘complete’,” writes Aberman. “I used to think that you build the product and then you get people to use it. As it turns out, these two things happen at the same time, from the beginning, and throughout the entire life cycle of the company.”

Last month we mentioned Aberman and WePay in an article about how startups need to be concerned with credibility when dealing with venture capitalists. Credibility also plays a role for the non-technical co-founder, according to Aberman.

“Being honest about your technical skills, genuinely asking for help, and trying your best to contribute is like trying your best to speak the local language in a foreign country- it’s a sign of respect and humility,” he says.

Check out Aberman’s original post on the WePay blog to check up on the other lessons he says are imperative for non-technical co-founders. And let us know any advice you may have on the subject in the comments below.

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The team behind Mozilla’s Firefox browser announced today the availability of experimental code that website owners can add to their pages to allow site visitors to create an account, log-in or switch users with just a few simple clicks and no password to remember.

The unveiling comes a week after Facebook fired a big shot across the web, staking a claim as the dominant provider of one-click portable identity. These two technologies seem aimed right at each other and engineers at both companies have no doubt been following each others’ work closely.

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The Mozilla technology is called Account Manager and is intended to become an open specification that any other browser can build on top of as well. Supporting browsers will automatically generate and remember diverse, high-strength passwords for users and allow multiple users to switch easily between accounts when visiting common websites on one computer. The interface mock-ups looks really nice, too.

Account Manager is currently available as an experimental plug-in, primarily for developers to test with, but project leaders say they “are looking to ship this feature as soon as possible in Firefox.”

Mozilla’s Dan Mills says “the final feature will almost certainly not look like this – it’s just to give you an idea.” But it certainly does look exciting. A feature like this would make new account creation super fast, it would eliminate the need to remember your passwords and it would make it safer to use web apps. That could be just the beginning, too: identity is more than just a username and password. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to carry all kinds of payload with you (tastes, contact info, etc.) when you navigate the web with your browser.

Hopefully Chrome will institute support for this same code quickly. The browser is a very logical place to transport log-in info. “The browser also has deep knowledge about the user,” says Mozilla. “For example, the browser could implement fast user switching with just a click. Or think about picking a username: the browser can look at usernames for other accounts and make some pretty good guesses about what usernames are preferred.”

The ability to easily manage multiple identities is big, too. That’s something that Facebook doesn’t offer, but it’s important when it comes to choice, freedom and privacy.

Challenging Facebook

One year ago we wrote that the most viable challenger to Facebook’s fast growing domination of the web could be Firefox, not another social network. Firefox had more users at the time (270 million vs Facebook’s then 200 million), but Facebook has doubled its user numbers in the last year alone.

Facebook launched a jaw dropping number and scope of new portable identity technologies last week.

Here’s what we wrote a year ago about these two companies going head to head.

Why compare user numbers between a browser and a social network? Because there’s every reason to believe that the two technologies are converging in the near term future. …

Though we may not be sure about his prediction that Google will act before Firefox, we think Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang offers a very compelling vision of the future of browsers and social networks in his excellent report The Future of the Social Web.

‘… in a bid to extend the reach of its new browser, Chrome, we expect Google to build OpenID and its associated friend connections into the browser; look for Firefox and eventually Internet Explorer to copy this feature. Facebook and MySpace will also likely build a way for users to surf the Web within the Facebook experience, retaining the social functionality. These connections won’t be perfect, but they’ll allow social networks to colonize communities and other parts of the Web, extending their experience out to other sites through the shared ID. As a result, in two years, portable identities will become a ubiquitous part of the online experience as they reach maturity.’

It’s only logical to extrapolate from that analysis that the line between browsers and social networks will become much less clear and the two types of software will very likely compete with each other.”

Click here to read the rest of our analysis of things changing about Firefox that point towards its importance in the world of online identity.

Who do you want to carry your identity around the web for you? How about a nice open source browser, built on open standards, supporting multiple identities and strong security? That sounds better to me than putting Facebook in charge. Despite all Facebook does for hundreds of millions of people, putting our entire portable identity into one company’s hands is just too dangerous. Of course if it’s quick and easy browser-level identity you want, don’t forget about the “Facebook browser” called RockMelt that Netscape founder Marc Andreessen is backing and that we broke the news about last Summer. Last we heard, that super stealthy company was still hiring.

Let’s see some more competition on the browser level! This time with portable data and a world of web applications at the heart of the battle.

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Google has acquired widget developer Labpixies, which developed some of the first gadgets for Google’s personalized homepage iGoogle. It also develops apps for Android and iPhone.

"Over the years, we worked closely together on a variety of projects, including the launch of a number of global OpenSocial based gadgets. Recently, we decided that we could do more if we were part of the same team…" says Don Loeb of Google’s iGoogle team.

"We are looking forward to working with Labpixies to develop great web apps and leverage their knowledge and expertise to help developers and improve the ecosystem overall," he adds.

"We both felt the time was right to come together," says Labpixies in its announcement. "We started LabPixies to create a truly personalized online experience and develop fun widgets that people find useful every day. Working at Google will help us scale to more users as well as giving our team greater opportunities. Google and LabPixies teams have worked on many projects together including the launch of global OpenSocial based gadgets. The acquisition is an opportunity to learn from each other to bring more apps to users, help developers and improve the overall developer ecosystem."

The Labpixies team will be based out of Google’s Tel Aviv office, and will anchor the company’s iGoogle efforts across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

This is only the latest in a string of acquisitions from Google. Other recent acquisitions include Agnilux, Plink, Aardvark, and Episodic.

Today Google announced new preferred AdWords API pricing.  Qualified AdWords Certified Partners who manage client AdWords accounts get free use of the API based on managed client spend.

"The Google AdWords API allows developers to build applications that interact directly with the AdWords platform," explains Penry Price, Vice President, Global Agency Development at Google. "Agencies and developers of search engine marketing tools use these applications to manage large AdWords campaigns more efficiently and creatively."

Agencies must have an active agency profile page to apply for preferred API pricing. To qualify, they must meet the following criteria:

• Your company is a Google AdWords Certified Partner.
• You use the AdWords API to manage your customers’ AdWords campaigns (e.g. you are an agency or develop search engine marketing tools).
• Your AdWords API-based tools remain in compliance with the AdWords API terms and conditions, including the required minimum functionality.

"We hope preferred AdWords API pricing will encourage agencies and developers to experiment with new strategies, expand the functionality of their tools, and build more comprehensive client campaigns without worrying about increased costs," says Price.

Google will begin accepting applications on May 26.

Google also dropped its Google Advertising Professionals (GAP) program, and replaced it with the new Google AdWords Certification program, while launching a directory for agencies and advertisers to connect. This is called Google Partner Search.

Now that Facebook allows developers to store data for more than 24 hours, social media analytics firms like Sysomos are finally able to include public updates from Facebook users in their databases. Sysomos began surfacing this data on some of its customers’ accounts yesterday and plans to roll these new features out to the rest of its users soon.

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Given the size of Facebook’s user base, being able to analyze this data will be a major boon for anybody who is interested in tracking these kinds of updates.

Sysomos already allowed its users to search and analyze Facebook fan pages and groups for the last few months through its MAP analytics tool. The company now also includes these updates in Heartbeat, Sysomos’ social media monitoring tool. Sysomos’ integration of the Open Graph API will surface all the activity that has been made public by a user, including status updates and public wall posts.

Thanks to Sysomos’ new ability to analyze and search public Facebook updates, we were, for example, able to track the backlash against Facebook’s “instant personalization.” According to Sysomos, only about 15% of the public updates about this topic were positive.

Are Facebook Users Aware that their Updates Will Live a Second Life in Social Media Analytics Tools?

Sysomos, of course, only pulls in public updates, but we have to wonder if most Facebook users are aware that their updates will end up in the vast data repositories of firms like Sysomos and Radian6. Given the current backlash against what some users perceive as an invasion of their privacy by Facebook, it will be interesting to see how Facebook users will react to this.

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At Facebook’s f8 conference, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company was removing restrictions on user data retention within Facebook applications. Previously, the company had a policy where developers couldn’t “store and cache any data for more than 24 hours,” Zuckerberg said while speaking to the audience of Facebook developers crowded into the San Francisco Design Center on Wednesday. “We’re going to go ahead and…get rid of that policy,” he said. The audience cheered.

But should Facebook end users cheer this news, too?

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The Change is for Developers, “No Effect” on End Users?

For developers, the removal of this technical limitation is great news. Apps had to constantly connect to Facebook’s servers in order to refresh their data. Application load speeds were also affected as the apps would have to do this server pinging process upon first launch. Now the data the apps need will already be there – a change that may even result in noticeable performance gains for the end users of the applications.

Yes, Facebook Apps Have Your Data

The new policy, however, brings to light something that your average Facebook user may not have ever known at all: Facebook applications access your personal data.

We’ve looked at this issue before (see: “What Facebook Quizzes Know About You“) after the ACLU put together an awareness campaign surrounding the privacy issues of Facebook applications. Using a sample app, the ACLU’s Facebook Quiz, many everyday Facebook users were shocked to find that applications (like quizzes) could access almost everything on a user profile, including hometown, groups you belong to, events attended, favorite books, and more. What’s worse is that your profile information becomes available to developers when your friends take the same quiz.

Why the Policy Change is Riskier Than It Appears

On its own, the new data retention policy doesn’t change how developers can use the data they store. In fact, for some developers, it won’t change much of anything at all – many simply ignored Facebook’s rules about data retention in the past. Even with the change, it’s just business as usual for those developers and their apps.

That said, the indefinite storage now permitted is concerning for a few reasons. As security engineer Joey Tyson points out on his blog, a site where he has detailed numerous hacks and security holes for Facebook, Google and more, the change makes Facebook apps “far more valuable targets for attackers.”

A popular application’s database could be filled with literally millions of users’ personal details (Facebook now touts 400 million users and Facebook’s most popular app, Farmville, for instance, boasts over 81 million users). If such a database was targeted for attack, the payload for hackers could be incredible.

In addition, Tyson explains, opportunities for behavioral targeting and visitor tracking are increased since developers can now maintain complete archives of profile information.

It’s also worth noting, as tech blog VentureBeat points out, it’s impossible for Facebook to know about how application developers are using the data they collect. If a developer chooses to use that data in ways that are misleading, malicious or that break the company’s terms of agreement, Facebook may not be aware. With 500,000 supported applications, Facebook just doesn’t have the resources to police the apps they house.

How to Remove Facebook Applications

To the end user, these changes may sound overwhelming and even scary. But there is something very easy everyone can do to minimize their risk and that’s delete the Facebook applications you no longer use.

The process of doing so is incredibly simple.

After signing into Facebook, do the following:

1. Click on “Account” at the top-right of the screen.
2. Click “Application Settings”
3. Change the “Show” drop-down box to “Authorized.” This will show all the applications you’ve ever given permission to.
4. In the resulting list, click the “X” button on the far right next to each app you want to remove to delete it.
5. On the pop-up box that appears, click “Remove” then click “Okay” on the next box confirming the app was deleted.

Repeat this process to remove all the apps you no longer use on a regular basis.

Doing this won’t eliminate risk entirely – nothing can do that – but it’s a good first step in reducing risk. However, as long as you have a Facebook account, your data won’t be private. If true privacy is really a concern for you, it may be time to find that account delete button instead. (Hint: it’s under “Account Settings.”)

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Building on Facebook’s OpenGraph API, Posterous has added Facebook Like buttons to all of its standard themes today. Click a Posterous Like button and the blog it’s on is “shared” to Facebook

For designers, inserting a “like” tag in a theme and adjusting the href attribute to whichever page they want a user to Like will create a Facebook-facing button for that theme.

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Facebook’s recent changes include proliferating the number of pages in its system by transforming profile fields and interest areas into discrete pages and allowing app developers to retain user data for a longer period of time and, of course, the out-of-the-box Like function.

Facebook’s size, and the likely increase in its web gravity, is no doubt inspiring developers from horizon to horizon to include Like buttons and like features in their products.

Expect a significant upturn in Jack Horner references.

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If you’ve been following our posts about augmented reality (AR) in the last few months, you’ve noticed that we speak often about practicality and its importance for the proliferation of the technology. Sure, gimmicky applications can be fun and new, but it’s my opinion that the more practical and useful an AR application is, the better suited it is to help push AR toward mainstream acceptance. With that being said, AR developers should be aware of a contest being hosted by metaio, the makers of the junaio iPhone app and mobile AR platform, which will reward creativity and practicality in AR.

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The company says over 200 developers have flocked to the platform since opening up junaio’s API to the public, and to reward them, they are giving $5,000 to the developer who makes the best use of it. Developers can sign up on junaio’s website where they can follow instructions on how to get started creating a “channel” for their AR content. The company is encouraging as much creativity and practicality as possible in order to stand out against the crowd of simple POI locators.

“The creative potential of junaio is vast: AR Mashups, multiplayer games or scavenger hunts, interactive, indoor and outdoor exhibitions, tours with animated 3D characters, eduainment right on the spot and location independent gaming,” the company expressed in press release. “It is up to the developer to challenge his imagination and become as much creative as he wants to.”

On June 16, the top five channels with the most subscribers will become finalists in the contest, and the winner will ultimately be chosen by a panel of AR and IT aficionados, including Robert Scoble, Thomas Carpenter of Games Alfresco, and Dr. Christian Geiger, professor and mixed reality researcher at Düsseldorf University. I will also be participating on the judges panel, and am very excited to see the innovative AR channels that could come from this contest.

I am also thrilled that metaio and junaio are pushing the creative side of the contest. It is much easier for gimmicky AR applications to become popular, but these kinds of applications don’t benefit AR as much as actual useful implementations. The subscriber threshold will merely be used to shorten the list of applications that will be considered for the prize, but that doesn’t mean the most popular one will win.

For more information on the contest and on the junaio platform, check out their website, or if you happen to be in Germany, stop by at AR DevCamp in Berlin this Friday. There will be free sessions available for developers to learn the capabilities of the API and will provide a jumping-off point for those new to the platform.

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Google may be stepping up its efforts to have developers pay attention to Android.  The search giant – or rather, a division of it known as the "Android Advocacy Group" – has supposedly gone on the offensive, emailing a developer and offering him (or her) a free device.

Of course, we’ve seen Google hand out Android phones before; hundreds of them have found new homes thanks to giveaways at different conferences.  The difference is that conference attendees opted to be present at those gatherings, and the conferences were usually related to Android in the first place.

Now, Google might just be contacting folks out of the blue.

Someone – presumably either Lauren Leto or Ben Bator – told David Pogue, "I’m the developer of the Texts From Last Night app for the iPhone.  Anyway, I received an e-mail yesterday from someone at Google claiming to be in their Android Advocacy Group.  He basically said that he wanted to open a line of communication with me in case I chose to port the app to Android, and he offered to ship me a free Nexus One to play around with."

The nameless developer later added, "Contrast with Apple’s approach: it took us about three months of resubmitting our app to Apple before they stopped rejecting it for inappropriate content.  And even now (after we peaked at the No. 7 paid app), we still have no relationship with anyone there."

It would seem, then, that reaching out to developers is potentially a very effective tactic for Google to adopt.

Google’s developer version of the Chrome browser has made a significant change. In the URL the traditional first step, “http://” has been done away with.

Thom Holwerda, of OSNews, had an idea why.

“(T)he URL scheme bears little meaning to most people using a browser – they know it’s there and how to type it, but it doesn’t indicate anything to them. Since computing has been about abstracting away complexity for a while now, it was only a matter of time before browser makers started removing this piece of web history.”

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There are problems with this change, as far as developers are concerned.

• The change itself was unclear. When developers started noticing it, they interpreted and reported it as a bug. It seems that Google perhaps did not converse with their developers prior to implementing this
• Although the http is hidden, it is not gone. So the change is a visual one, perhaps not a functional one.
• Some developers are worried about what will happen when working with the https or ftp protocols.
• This is not an agreed-upon move, industry-wide.

A moderator on Google’s Chrome code forum said, “we include “http:// when copying the URL to the clipboard, so it will still appear when pasted elsewhere.” This is a function that is apparently not in working order for a number of developers.

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Just 13 days after it launched to the public, the iPad is the subject of the latest Silicon Valley developers’ unconference event. At 5 PM this evening iPadDevCamp kicked off at the PayPal/eBay offices in San Jose. The photo above of developers waiting in line to enter was posted to Twitter by Portland, Oregon based iPhone (and now iPad) push notification service Urban Airship.

Build some cool apps in there, folks!

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How do you connect to Twitter and understand its value and performance? That’s part of the challenge for any enterprise considering how to adopt social technologies to connect with customers.

This week at Sugarcon we heard a lot about how to manage a social CRM envrionment. Increasingly, companies are turning to API’s for integrating third-party applications like Twitter to better connect and interact with customers.

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Sonoa Systems calls it an API economy with Twitter serving as the most applied API on the planet.

To manage API’s, Sonoa offers Apigee, a free self-service for developers working with API’s. This week at the Chirp conference, Sonoa broadened Apigee by providing analytics, monitoring, debugging and testing tools.

For example, with API Analytics a customer may monitor usage levels, review usage patterns, see the geo-location and look at performance metrics like response time.

The service now also allows users to share messages with other developers to help with troubleshooting and community learning.

API management will become a major requirement for the enterprise, especially as more applications integrate into CRM environments. As Paul Greenberg stated in his keynote at Sugarcon, the focus is no longer about controlling the customer contact but interacting with the customer in the fashion they wish to communicate.

[Disclosure: SugarCRM paid for a plane ticket for Alex Williams to attend SugarCon in San Francisco.]

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