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.

Not every click is created equal. While publishers know exactly how many visitors per day their sites get, this aggregate data doesn’t say much about the actual value of the individual visitors and what they do on the rest of the Web. Social media analytics and monitoring firm Sysomos wants to bridge this gap with its latest product: Sysomos Audience. Using proprietary technology, Audience can automatically assign a certain value to individual visitors, based on the other sites they visit and other factors users can tweak in the service’s scoring engine.

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Going Beyond Traditional Web Analytics

As Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal told us earlier this week, traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics tools help users get a good understanding of what a visitor is doing on your own site. This, however, doesn’t tell you anything about the sites that influence your visitors and the actual value of these visitors for you business. After all, somebody who tends to visit auto blogs is far more likely to buy something from your auto parts site than somebody who doesn’t show any interest in cars.

Sysomos wouldn’t give us any details about how it tracks a user’s behavior across the Internet. Bansal told us that the company doesn’t use cookies and just places a small snippet of JavaScript code on the publisher’s site. Thanks to the data Sysomos already has in its Heartbeat and MAP social media monitoring and analytics tools, the company can easily identify the ecosystem around a certain topic. How Sysomos can tell that one of your visitors also went your competitor’s sites and read Autoblog earlier in the week remains Sysomos’ secret, however.

For publishers and e-commerce sites, this also means that they can now keep a closer tap on their social media ROI. After tweaking Audience’s scoring engine, marketers can now see exactly what the value of a given campaign on Twitter or the company’s blog was. You can also see what blogs tend to bring the most valuable visitors to your site and then specifically target this audience.

We do have some lingering questions about how Sysomos can track a user’s behavior across the Internet and the potential privacy implications of this, but there can’t be any doubt that this will be a very popular tool among marketers, community managers and sales managers. Sysomos is currently testing Audience with a small group of beta testers and plans to open the service to all of its clients by the third quarter of 2010.

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The hyperlocal news site Fwix launched a revamp to its service yesterday, allowing readers on its website to customize and socialize their news feed. Fwix users can follow local and hyperlocal topics, as well as follow other readers who share their interests. Taking advantage of Facebook’s recently released Open Graph API, Fwix now allows likes, comments and sharing of news stories. Noting that Facebook currently doesn’t “do location,” Fwix founder and CEO Darian Shirazi said that the updates to Fwix allow them to connect local data to the social graph, creating an ecosystem of real-time local and hyperlocal news.

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“Linking ’social’ and ‘news’ has been a goal since the beginning,” said Shirazi. “Now that we’ve built a robust and well-trafficked content network, we are making that goal a reality. The next step for local news is making it social, and we’re excited for this launch.”

Fwix aggregates local news articles and blog posts, and delivers content to readers based on their geographic and topical interests. The San Francisco-based company is less than two years old and in March inked a deal with the New York Times Company to deliver its content to its regional news sites. Initially covering 80 cites, Fwix now boasts a network of more than 200 markets worldwide.

While major newspapers have cut thousands of jobs, the rise of hyperlocal news services like Fwix, Outside.in, and EveryBlock demonstrate that readers are keenly interested in tracking local news, but want to be able to filter that information based on the topics and neighborhoods that matter personally to them.

As we wrote last week, the hyperlocal is already an important site for new startups. The updates to Fwix point towards more services that are not just acutely hyperlocal, but deeply socialized.

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It’s been a given for some time that businesses, including startups, should have a presence on and connection with Facebook. With over 400 million active users, chances are your potential investors and customers are already there.

Fan pages have been a simple way to generate interest and engage customers, and Facebook Connect has quickly become a standard in signing up and signing in users. In his keynote at f8 yesterday Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg actually mentioned startups in his opening remarks, stating that they “are requiring that their users use Facebook Connect. We want to make it simple to create these personalized experiences.”

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Whether or not Facebook is a “requirement” for startups, there are some things new businesses should think about based on yesterday’s announcements.

“Facebook Connect On Steroids”

Facebook announced a major overhaul to its API and introduced three new components yesterday: social plugins, the Open Graph protocol, and the Graph API. By using the tags specified in this protocol, any website can now become part of the Facebook ecosystem.

If a Facebook user visits your site and Likes your page, you have the ability then to publish information into that user’s stream. In addition, implementation of the code on your site will give you access to administrative tools and analytics just like any Facebook fan page owner. As we wrote yesterday, this will take analytics to the next level, providing an incredible amount of demographic data about users who like and link their profiles to your site. However, this information will reside with Facebook, not on your own website, making them a de facto owner of your visitors’ social data.

Applications & Virtual Currency: Where the Money Is?

While many businesses will likely integrate their websites into the expanding Facebook ecosystem, there is likely still room for growth within the platform itself, namely with application development. There are over 550,000 applications on the site, a number that continues to grow – and to encourage return visitors.

To coincide with the growth of the application market, particularly in the area of social gaming, Facebook also announced the expansion of its official virtual currency, Credits. Last year Paypal processed over $500 million in virtual goods last year, with social gaming company Zynga becoming Paypal’s second largest merchant (following eBay). Clearly Facebook seeks to stake a claim in the virtual currency market.

Facebook Credits are currently in beta with over 100 applications, and will roll out to the entire network soon, Zuckerberg said yesterday. Credits will allow users to purchase one currency for all transactions on Facebook, rather than have to enter their credit card information with each purchase. By facilitating online payments, Facebook hopes to increase the percentage of users willing to purchase virtual goods to between 8% and 20%

David vs. Goliath?

Despite repetition at f8 yesterday that these changes were meant designed “for developers,” it remains to be seen how the announcements will play out for developers and for users alike, the latter of whom are notorious for protesting changes to the site. In particular, continued concerns about privacy might not be well received, particulary given Facebook’s past history with opening user data.

Privacy concerns might not be the only thing that gives some businesses pause about Facebook’s direction. Facebook also announced yesterday “instant personalization” yesterday, giving three “preferred partners” – Yelp, Pandora, and CNN – instant and additional access to Facebook profile information when users visit their sites. For startups in these areas, namely restaurant recommendation, music sharing, and news delivery, the “preferred partner” program might make industry in-roads more difficult and could adversely impact user adoption. As the “preferred partner” program expands beyond the three selected for launch, it remains to be seen the effect of being sanctioned – or not – by Facebook.

The buzz yesterday was that Facebook had just “seized control of the Internet.” Comments on how you think the f8 announcements might play out for startups welcome!

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Facebook today announced that application developers will be allowed to store user data for more than 24 hours, removing a major restriction that the company had imposed on its ecosystem for years. Competitors like Twitter and MySpace had no such restrictions and now Facebook is in the same boat. Founder Mark Zukerberg used to say that the rule against storing data was essential to protect users and their privacy.

Where are those now? Privacy, Zuckerberg told me in a March 2008 interview, “is the vector around which Facebook operates.” Two years later, not so much. In a December 2009 interview, Zuckerberg said that Facebook’s new public-by-default privacy settings reflected how he would build the site if he were to do it again from scratch today. Compare below what Zuckerberg said in 2008 and what today’s new Developer Terms of Service say about holding on to user data now.

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I believe that the Facebook policy change on storing user data is a net win for the web: it will enable all kinds of new innovation. It was that kind of innovation that I was asking about two years ago when I got the following answer about privacy that just doesn’t sound right anymore today.

Zuckerberg on Data Portability, March 10th 2008 interview with ReadWriteWeb:

“If you export your friends list, does their contact information come with that? What if they change their privacy settings later? Right now if you take an action that gets published to your friends’ news feeds, but then if you change your privacy settings later to be more restrictive – then those events disappear from the news feeds. If that data is published off-site, then there’s no longer any control over the data for users.” (emphasis added)

And today, on the new Developers’ Terms of Service:

You must give users control over their data by posting a privacy policy that explains what data you collect, and how you will use, store, and/or transfer their data….You may cache data you receive from the Facebook API in order to improve your application’s user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date…You will delete all data you receive from us concerning a user if the user asks you to do so, and will provide a mechanism for users to make such a request. (emphasis added)

One thing that remains the same? “You cannot use a user’s friend list outside of your application, even if a user consents to such use.” Facebook doesn’t want you taking your data out of the Facebook ecosystem, to other competing services, but it doesn’t insist that 3rd parties under its shadow check in with you daily anymore, either. It’s hard not to feel a little cynical about that.

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After a busy couple of days, oneforty app store founder Laura Fitton is in the unique position as the unofficial spokesperson for a developer community turned upside down in the wake of the Tweetie acquisition and Promoted Tweets launch. As the company hosts its first Chirp developer conference, thousands of coders are questioning their role and ability to monetize on the microblogging platform. Always an optimist, Fitton and oneforty are intent on collecting and answering the many questions plaguing developers.

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The Tweetie acquisition in particular has sparked wild speculation from the blogosphere. For the first time since Twitter chose Bit.ly as its official link shortener, developers are reminded of the sobering fact that building on a single ecosystem can prove shortsighted.

When asked how third party application developers can mitigate the risk of being cannibalized, Fitton agrees that integrating applications into the broader real-time web (not just Twitter) is always a good idea. While she acknowledges her own product is marketed as a Twitter app store, a number of the featured services integrate with other platforms.

We asked Fitton how her community’s developers are responding. She answered, “Tensions always exist between platforms and the companies that build on them. Entrepreneurs have to realize that and be ready to pivot in the face of competitive forces they cannot master. But really, in what industry do startups NOT face competitive forces they cannot master?”

She makes the point that Twitter web clients have been competing with the Twitter.com browser client interface for almost as long as the community has existed.

Says Fitton, “It hasn’t been within Twitter’s core competency to utterly master the user experience, so the competition there might not be as one-sided as everyone thinks. The company has to realize that a diverse ecosystem is going to remain critically important to their growth. If a client monoculture forms and diverse use cases/engagement styles are not well served, user uptake and retention will eventually slow.”

That being said, if Twitter does choose to acquire more application services, Fitton’s recently launched Twitter Toolkits suddenly become even more useful than their initial consumer benefit statement. Fitton’s toolkits feature curated Twitter application lists from high profile tastemakers like Guy Kawasaki, Brian Solis and Steven Rubel. With web celebrities openly endorsing their favorite apps, Twitter and other potential investors get a glimpse of what lies beyond download and usage numbers. Investors see which applications have elite web celebrity advocates – these applications then more attractive for acquisition.

Acquisition candidate or not, ReadWriteWeb’s own Audrey Watters’ wrote a fantastic articleto help you assuage any fears you might have as a developer. As for Fitton, she’s already met with a group of 27 top third party application developers and carried the group’s concerns to Twitter platform lead Ryan Sarver. In the future she plans on expanding this group and formalizing the process in which oneforty carries developer needs to platform executives. If you’re a developer and you’ve got Twitter-related questions or comments, you can reach Laura Fitton by tweeting @pistachio with a brief note and link to any relevant blog posts or material.

Photo Credit: (cc) Kenneth Yeung – TheLetterTwo.com

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Before tonight there were probably 30 to 50 teams making a serious play to build the best mobile client for Twitter. Tonight one of those teams was annointed the official selection of Twitter itself and its leader at least is now a millionaire.

People are saying that the acquisition of Tweetie by Twitter is bad news for the ecosystem of 3rd party developers that made Twitter so much more useful for millions of people. In truth though, those odds were pretty good for all of them. Tonight’s news demonstrates again that independent developers can code their way into cash, equity and a job at one of the hottest startups on the web. That bodes well for those of us who love to use the software built by all of them, too.

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Tweetie developer Loren Brichter is just 4 years out of college. He graduated from Tufts in 2006 and got a job doing embedded graphics and iPhone development for Apple through July, 2007. That month, the iPhone 3G was released and that year Time Magazine named it the invention of the year. After more than a year of development Tweetie was launched in November, 2008. Less than 18 months later Brichter and Twitter announced tonight that Tweetie has been acquired and will become “Twitter for iPhone.”

Between cash and equity, Brichter must be a millionaire on paper at least. Brichter’s one employee is Ash Ponders, who is in Spain and isn’t saying anything on Twitter tonight. These guys built a service that won the big contest. If there were (and this is generous) 50 viable mobile Twitter clients – do you really think any of them launched this kind of business expecting better odds than that?

There are a number of other companies that could have become the official mobile app for Twitter but at this stage of the game Tweetie was an obvious choice. It loads fast, is relatively feature rich, is attractively designed and has proven popular with users.

Tweetie offers an attractive and simple desktop Twitter client, but was most valued for its iPhone version. Its strongest competitors were Twitterific, Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Twitterific is beautiful and perhaps a viable ad-supported small business but is too complicated to be appreciated by all but power users. (It’s great on the iPad though.) Seesmic is strong on the smaller Android platform and is extending beyond Twitter alone.

Tweetdeck is the most powerful 3rd party Twitter app but it has higher aspirations, is exploring development of sophisticated Artificial Intelligence, is more complex than mainstream users need and is most likely to be bought by an enterprise, media or financial services company – not Twitter itself.

Tweetie is the everyperson’s Twitter app. Twitter is chronically confusing for mainstream users, something the company has been trying desperately to change. If you are looking for a simple, attractive Twitter app for casual use then Tweetie on the desktop works great. When you’re on a mobile phone, that’s really all you ever need. In his blog post tonight Loren Brichter mentioned “simplifying the Twitter experience.” That’s something Twitter needs and something he’s very qualified to help do.

There is still a place for other, more complex, Twitter apps. Media companies around the world (including this one) are finding Tweetdeck invaluable in carefully parsing the stream of Tweets for high-value nuggets. Seesmic is believed to be working closely with Microsoft in order to bring social media stream reading to all kinds of different platforms.

But tonight one of the many Twitter apps hit it big. That’s good news for app developers in general and for the users who would use their software. Go ahead and build a client for a major social network. Odds are it won’t prove a viable business, but if you were risk averse then building a Twitter client startup is probably the last thing on earth you’d do anyway. The fairy tale came true for one of these companies. That’s reason enough for many more developers to build many more innovative apps in the future.

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The long-closed nature of Apple’s iPhone OS ecosystem is coming to a head with the addition of major new restrictions on developers. If there ever was a time when the Android world had a chance to out-innovate Apple, this could be it.

Each day this week, developers have pointed out another indignity Apple’s legal framework subjects them to. Could this be the pressure that gets resolved by the rise of a compelling Android offering? It seems like a long shot.

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People creating applications on the iPhone and iPad platform are apparently no longer allowed to build in development environments abstracted from the preferred form of code, 3rd party analytics services are believed to be no longer allowed to track use of apps, Apple has baked in its own advertising platform and the essential requirement of winning Apple’s permission to deploy apps on its platform is feeling more onerous every day.  

At the same time, no one else has come close to building a User Experience that can rival the iPhone and iPad.  If someone could, a grand battle could emerge.  Instead, right now it’s looking ugly. On the positive side, the number of Android applications is growing faster and faster.

The Anguish

Prominant iPhone developer Dan Grigsby articulated today what could become an increasingly common sentiment in a goodbye post announcing the closure of his popular iPhone development blog Mobile Orchard:

Ask permission environments crush creativity and innovation. In healthy environments, when would-be innovators/creators identify opportunities the only thing that stands between the idea and its realization is work. In the iPhone OS environment when you see an opportunity, you put in work first, ask Apple’s permission and then, only after gaining their approval, your idea can be realized.

I’ve always worked at the edge; it’s where the interesting opportunities live. None of the startup I’ve created would have been possible in an ask permission environment…. I won’t work in this ask-permission environment any longer.

As Google’s Chris Messina put it well in some poignant speculation this afternoon, “It occurs to me that Apple is crossing a chasm. To where, I don’t know. But its early proponents seem to be being left behind.”

Another Perspective: Despite Its Problems, Apple’s Ecosystem Remains the Best

Raven Zachary, President of leading iPhone development shop Small Society, offers another perspective.

Android needs a better OS before we’d even begin to see iPhone developers leave. I didn’t fall in love with iPhone OS due to the elegance of Apple’s legal terms. It’s the platform that I fell in love with. It’s the best mobile platform out there, and while I appreciate the analysis by the community and the hard questions being asked, I remain committed to the iPhone platform.

Of course the most probable outcome of all this is that most developers will stay where the users, the money and the best user experience are. Some will be unhappy and some will leave – but probably not enough for consumers to notice.

If only someone could build an Android device that rivaled Apple’s hardware, and if the issues with different versions of Android across devices could be fixed, if the Android OS was just betteer – then there would be an incredible opportunity to lure away developers and finally get more users drawn to their applications. The iPad is really incredible though and there are a whole lot of very big “ifs” in play.

An effective challenge by Android sure feels like a long-shot right now, doesn’t it?

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The Center for Digital Democracy, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), and the World Privacy Forum may have just created some problems for Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other companies that deal in online ads.  Together, they submitted a complaint about the companies to the Federal Trade Commission today.

The first part of a 32-page letter stated, "Recent developments in online profiling and behavioral targeting . . . have all contributed to what is now standard practice online.  A vast ecosystem of online advertising and data auctions and exchanges, demand- and supply-side platforms, and the increasing use of third-party data providers that bring offline information to Internet profiling and targeting, operates without the awareness or consent of users."

The complaint then continued, "This massive and stealth data collection apparatus threatens user privacy.  It also robs individual users of the ability to reap the financial benefits of their own data – while publishers, ad exchangers and information brokers (so-called ‘ad optimizers’) profitably cash in on this information."

So the three organizations behind the letter would like to see certain procedures only allowed on an opt-in basis.  There’s a mention of financial compensation for consumers, too, and a few other requests that relate to openness and transparency.

This may not get too far; the manner in which online ads work is indeed standard practice, and regulators don’t seem likely to flip the system on its head after all this time.  Still, all of the companies named in the complaint – and perhaps Google in particular – aren’t liable to enjoy the extra attention from the FTC.

Last summer IBM began asking their 120 venture capital partners what it would take to launch the world’s most successful initiative for helping startups capture new business. They concluded that the initiative had to be offered to startups for free, with no upsell and regardless of VC status. Add to this IBM’s preferred software, as well as access to IBM’s social network of 8 million IT professionals and you have IBM’s version of BizSpark.

So today is launch day and Drew Clark, Director of Strategy for IBM’s Venture Capital Group defined Big Blue’s new initiative for startups as a “small crisp set of capabilities that are what startups most want.”

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Of course what IBM offers is anything but small. With over 400,000 employees world-wide their strategy to collaborate with startups in areas of health care, energy efficiency, retail and manufacturing under the SmarterPlanet vision is significant. At the start of the year we covered CEO Sam Palmisano’s London speech about IBM’s heavy investment into this sector, which is often refered to as smart systems or internet of things.

Yet there have been few commercial success stories for startups in this sector so it stands to reason that IBM needs to focus on supporting startups in this emerging market. Drew Clark recognizes that this initiative may not be for everyone, but if your startup is in alignment with IBM Smarter Planet ambitions they want to work with you. So today in Bangalore, India they are announcing their Global Entrepreneur Initiative.

Claudia Fan Munce of IBM Venture Capital Group says, “Our vision of a smarter planet is really a collaborative vision. It’s about collaborating with all aspects of the ecosystem: with academia, with government, and more importantly, with the real innovators.”

The initiative’s aim is to help your startup find and develop your niche with markets and developers who most suit you, which they refer to as “impedance matching.”

Here’s a breakdown of what IBM offers once you sign up, and are accepted:

Access to IBM’s Software

IBM provides software access either on-premise or in a cloud computing environment to help you build your software applications. Expertise will also be made available to help you better understand how to navigate and fully utilize the full range of the software options IBM is making available.

Access to IBM developerWorks

Last April we told you about IBM’s big geek network, reportedly the largest online technical resource for software developers in the world. Today, half of the world’s developers use it; that’s around 8 million members.

Dedicated Project Managers to Help You Build, Market and Sell

Jim Corgel, IBM ISV and Developer Relations, says that “…real project managers are going to be assigned to work with our entrepreneurs.” So whomever your target client is, from consumers, to small businesses, to large corporations, to governments both small and large, IBM has a project manager familiar with that territory.

Work Side-By-Side With Scientists and Technology Experts

With more than $6 billion per year invested into Research, IBM has more than 3,000 workers in eight major labs around the world. In 2009 year they produced nearly 5,000 patents. With this many patents being produced imagine how eager they are to work with startups who can help get their new patented technologies into the market place?

Attend Global SmartCamp Mentoring and Networking Workshops

Smart Camps will be occurring every other month around the world. Locations over the course of this coming year are: Boston, Paris, Stockholm, Dublin, Israel, England, and the Silicon Valley. At Smart Camp you’ll not only get feedback on how to present and refine your startups, but you’ll also be able to network with the people most prepared to guide you in gaining the notoriety your startup deserves. The Smart Camp Community is also a collaborative online group where your projects can be reviewed and refined in connection with upcoming Smart Camp events.

The criteria for start-ups to participate in the IBM Global Entrepreneur Initiative are; 1) the company must be privately-held; 2) in business less than three years; and 3) actively developing software aligned to IBM’s Smarter Planet focus areas. To apply go here.

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The IBM Cloud is a prototype of the ecosystem we expect to see emerge in the world of cloud services. It has the flavor of other platform environments, with the primary goal of integrating IBM with third-party applications to serve developers and end customers.

It is the partners that tie into the larger ecosystems, often existing on multiple platforms. The healthy platforms will resemble coral reefs in which the partners are important to the cloud ecosystem as the platform itself.

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But what is the importance of these third-party applications and what do they say about the future of IBM Cloud?

RightScale

RightScale http://rightscale.com is becoming a power in its own right. The San Diego-based company provides a sought after need. The capability to port applications to the cloud. RightScale is playing across the market. It has served as an important partner for Amazon Web Services in helping companies deploy cloud-based applications in the cloud. As part of an IBM ecosystem, the company will be one of those go to services that helps manage the cloud’s inherent complexities.

Kaavo

Kaavo is another cloud management application that leverages its position as a service that according to the web site, provides “middleware on demand.”That’s a fascinating example of how entire infrastructures are moving off premise and into cloud environments. For instance, Kaavo makes the claim that it can bring online one or multiple server systems, configure middleware and deploy applications The result being that people may use the IBM platform to set up and tear down test and and development environments within minutes. Again, we see how IBM is seeking to provide services that serve the needs of the developer or IT manager looking for more efficient and powerful ways t leverage its assets in a private cloud environment or in a public cloud.

Silanis

Silanis fits in the e-signature market. In January, the company announced services that integrate with IBM’s LotusLive. The service allows companies to work with customers in an extranet environment where contracts may be reviewed, modified and electronically signed. The service would seem to fit with IBM’s efforts to create a transaction environment within IBM Cloud.

Aviarc

IBM is partnering with several application developers, including Aviarc, a custom software application developer for on-premise, private cloud, appliances or the multi-tenant environment of IBM Cloud.

These are just samplings of the ecosystem that IBM is developing. You can tell that IBM is following its strategy to serve hybrid environments and establish its platform as a place where developers may build, test, sell and distribute applications.

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A new report from mobile analytics firm Flurry reveals some interesting numbers about Google’s first attempt to sell its own custom branded Android device, an HTC-built phone called the Nexus One. It’s a flop. After 74 days, the same amount of time it took the original iPhone to sell its first million units, the Nexus One sold only 135,000.

But before you read too much into these numbers, thinking that it has any meaning with regard to the Android ecosystem as a whole, think again. Android market share is growing fast – it more than doubled from September to December of last year, for example. Oh, and the Droid, Android’s fastest-selling phone to date? It actually beat the iPhone by day 74, Flurry says. All this new data shows is that Google is no Apple when it comes to marketing their own device.

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iPhone Killer? Hardly

In January of this year, Google hosted a press event to showcase their new Nexus One phone, a HTC device sold exclusively by Google on its own website in both a carrier-specific and unlocked version. When asked if the new phone was meant to be an iPhone killer, Google’s Director of Mobile Platforms Andy Rubin simply replied that “choice is a good thing.”

Prior to its launch, many technology insiders suspected (or rather, hoped) that the new “Google phone” would be exactly that – a killer, the first real rival to challenge Apple’s dominance in the smartphone market. With features like support for multitasking, Google’s own GPS navigation application, Google Voice (the VoIP app Apple banned from iTunes), a 3D photo gallery and, of course, heavy integration of Google services, the Nexus One had a feature lineup that Apple’s iPhone couldn’t beat.

Why Did the N1 Flop?

So what happened? Why don’t the sales numbers match up with the excitement surrounding the device? The problem likely has to do with the fact that the phone is sold online only. You can’t march into a store and purchase a Nexus One and, apparently, that’s how most customers want to shop. Another problem is that the U.S. carrier for the N1 is T-Mobile, a much smaller network than either AT&T (iPhone) or Verizon (the Droid). Also, the N1 isn’t available worldwide like the iPhone is.

However, don’t count the N1 out just yet. According to Google’s website, it will arrive on Vodafone in Europe by Spring 2010 and, in the U.S., Verizon will get a version of the device at the same time. Given how well the Droid has done for Verizon, the Nexus One may have a shot at boosting its sales soon.

Meanwhile, Android, as a platform, is doing quite well even if the Nexus One isn’t. The Droid recently became the fastest-selling Android phone to date, beating the sales of the myTouch 3G by more than four times, the Android market share has been growing by leaps and bounds, Android’s application store is now the second largest, second only to Apple’s iTunes and finally, some companies found their Android website visitors increasing by as much as 350% over the past year.

In the end, the Nexus One may not have succeeded the way Google had hoped, but clearly, Android itself has.

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We were walking the streets of San Francisco and happened to witness a street band in the process of setting up shop. On the cue, almost all the observers around the band fished out their cellphones and started snapping pictures and video. Which lead us to ask this question: Which is the greatest camera?

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A renowned photographer pointed out to us during Macworld Expo that the greatest camera is not the one that gives you the best quality picture or the best resolution. The greatest camera is the camera in your hand. Going by that, I guess it makes the mobile camera the greatest camera of our time.

Mobile photography has really blossomed in the past few years with almost every cellphone worth its merit having a camera built into it. We now have cellphone camera capturing with up to 12.0 megapixels. We have citizen journalists providing breaking news of the Indian Ocean earthquake through phone footage.

Let’s step back a little. There are 110 or more million cellphones with camera on them. Add the dimension of them connecting to social networking sites, and that really makes things interesting.

But there is a raging debate as to whether the cell phone camera can really be called a “camera”. Maybe it depends on individual choices. However, from personal experience we have observed that people are passionate about photography from whichever source it comes from.

The sheer volume of photos taken using cellphone cameras makes mobile photography a serious affair. (For instance, our iPhone app Camera Plus has been downloaded 5 million times.) Consequently,the ecosystem around mobile photography is also blossoming.

The range of photography applications in the iPhone App Store is the testimony to how serious mobile photography is. The apps have covered all aspects of photography from the actual capture of the picture to editing, managing and sharing them all within the phone itself.

No Limits for Mobile

Surprisingly, the limitation of the phone hardware here is not stopping the application developers to dream any less than the digital camera manufacturers. If anything, they’re dreaming bigger. You can use multi-shot to snap photos, adjust anything from brightness, sharpness of a photo, and add funny effects to them. With most of the cameras having GPS, users can also geotag their photos with just a click. It does not stop here. You can also instantly share your photos on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and other social media platforms all from the phone itself!

And things have also started moving on the video side. Did you know you can not only capture video using a mobile but also add effects like black and white, sepia from within the phone itself? And of course, you can share your videos on YouTube.

Now just step back and wonder whether you can do all the above from within a digital camera, and you realize that mobile photography might not be that primitive at all. To put things in another perspective, you can liken the use of a cellphone camera to the use of a Swiss army knife. This was the theme around which we built our photography application Camera Plus Pro. Both Mobile Geeks and Kodak have some tips on learning how to use all the tools in the knife.

With all the mobiles around, we can now reduce the disappointment of the sentence – “I wish I had a camera right now.”

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Facebook plans to announce the availability of a firehose of user data at its F8 developers conference in April, we believe based on research. Such an offering could be similar to the firehose that Twitter has shared with large partners and select small developers building the famous Twitter ecosystem of 3rd party applications around the web. A Facebook representative did not offer a denial, saying only that the company would not comment on speculation.

The huge social network was once private by default, then made controversial changes in December that pushed hundreds of millions of users toward publishing their information in public and now appears aimed to complete the about-face at its F8 developer conference by offering up public user data in a huge river that outside parties can consume, analyze and build on top of.

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The first F8 conference saw the unveiling of the Facebook Platform, a way for app developers to build games and utilities inside of Facebook. This announcement would represent Facebook as a platform and enable far more to be built outside and on top of the social network. Privacy concerns? For sure. Genuinely world-changing potential? There’s a lot of that too.

It’s not clear exactly what would be included in this firehose, it could be a stream of low-value Fan Page promotional content, for example. The most likely thing content to be included though is user activity data published under public privacy settings. There’s far, far more of that today than there was just a few months ago.

If you’ve participated in a supermarket loyalty program, you’re familiar with the concept of opting-in to sharing data about your activities with outside parties in exchange for benefits. In that common practice, though, consumers gain shopping discounts but get nothing from the analysis of the data they emit.

In the case of the Twitter Firehose, the much sought-after full feed of public user data from across the site, users gain access to all kinds of interesting applications and insights based on analysis of their use of Twitter.

A Facebook firehose would be much bigger.

A firehose of public Facebook user activity data could function like a living, breathing global census. Cross reference that data with any other data set and we may find an ocean of insights into the human condition, around the world, for slices of people, second by second or over time.

This is something we’ve been calling on Facebook to do for some time. I’ve sat with founder Mark Zuckerberg and discussed the importance and potential of releasing aggregate user data at length.

That, though, was before last December when the privacy policy changed.

Privacy Concerns

Just because something is posted publicly on the web, Microsoft researcher danah boyd said in her opening keynote at SXSW yesterday, doesn’t mean people want it to be broadcast more generally. Making something public is not permission to publicize it.

Is the inclusion of public activity into a firehose programatically available to outside developers a case of broadcast that violates user control and thus privacy?

I don’t think it’s clear either way. In a discussion about aggregate Twitter data analysis late last year, a representative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told me that Twitter users had no reasonable expectation that their data wouldn’t be redistributed and analyzed in bulk because Twitter was a public forum.

Facebook used to be different. It was private by default, our actions were shared only with friends and family that we gave permission to see our status messages and photos.

Then in December the company made a dramatic shift, prompting users to re-evaluate their privacy settings and making “share with everyone all over the internet” the new default for most options. Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was only changing to reflect the way the world was changing, but we argued that was a disingenous rationalization of Facebook’s culture-changing actions driven in part by its own profit motive. We also argued that by pushing users toward being more public the company was reducing user control over data and spreading distrust about making data available online at all. That put at risk the idea of sharing your data in a way that could be analyzed.

Is there a reasonable expectation that online social networking activity set to “public” will not be redistributed in bulk to outside parties? How can a company like Facebook respect user privacy as much as possible while still achieving the incredible things that can be achieved by making aggregate user data available for analysis?

Let’s begin to discuss it.

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