A new application aims to put users back in control of their private data stored on the increasingly public social networking site, Facebook. With “The Green Safe” app, Facebook users can now export their profile data for off-site storage on Green Safe’s servers. Data can then be purged from Facebook itself, allowing only friends to view profile information by way of a profile page tab labeled “My Info.”

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Privacy Concerns for Facebook Users

With the ever-growing concern about Facebook’s data-sharing policies – policies that are now under attack from several U.S. senators – people are becoming more concerned about how personal information shared with the world’s largest social networking site is being used.

After already having been blindsided with “recommended settings” that automatically publicized previously private data like status updates and photos, Facebook users are now dealing with even more changes that have major privacy implications. Recently announced initiatives include things like “instantly personalized” websites that tap into your Facebook data without prior authorization, revamped profile pages where every interest of yours from bands to books is made public and new terms for Facebook application developers that allow apps to store your data indefinitely.

Despite these radical changes on Facebook’s part, few users are actually deleting their Facebook accounts. Although the privacy concerns are troubling, the social network has become more than a simple pastime for many people. Instead, it has transformed into a communication tool nearly as vital as email for staying in touch with networks of friends, family, co-workers and other colleagues.

Now instead of deleting your Facebook account, The Green Safe app offers a viable alternative: keep Facebook, but remove Facebook’s ability to access your data. And with the data gone from Facebook, application developers and their partners are out of luck too…at least those whose apps you install going forward.

How “The Green Safe” Works

To use The Green Safe, you grant it access just like any other Facebook application, quiz or game, then tell it to “Import Your Data.” After the import is complete, follow the instructions provided to add the app to a tab on your Facebook profile. Here, it will appear as a tab labeled “My Info” which only your friends can see. At this point, you can return to your Facebook profile and delete the information stored there, removing it from Facebook’s control.

This is a somewhat ingenious workaround to the data privacy situation on Facebook – using Facebook’s own application platform against them. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that your personal data is now completely and entirely private, either.

The Green Safe’s homepage clearly states that the app “may use your info to serve up ads that target your interests” In other words, your personal data may be made a marketing tool. However, the privacy policy does assure that the company will not “share, trade or sell your information with anyone.”

So with “The Green Safe,” you may see a few ads in the future, it seems. Still, that’s nothing worse that what Facebook already does. (If you’ve ever wondered why Facebook’s ads are so eerily, creepily personalized, it’s because the Facebook ad platform allows advertisers the ability to very narrowly target users using the information shared on profile pages.)

At least with The Green Safe installed, you’ve turned over your data to a company whose business relies on keeping data safe instead of the opposite: sharing it with the world, as Facebook is doing now. It may not be a perfect solution, but it’s definitely a workaround that’s worth checking out.

The Green Safe’s application developer, LJ Jones, runs a blog here. The most recent post, “My Info is not a Commodity,” is a diatribe against Facebook’s changes.

Discuss

We’ve reported that if you disconnect your Facebook account from the manufactured pages that now connect to things like hometown and interests, it will blank your profile.

The default response was a shrug. What can you do? Now an indie app, Give Me My Data, promises to replace that missing information on your profile.

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Owen Mundy, a Florida State art prof and the developer, explained the app and its use.

“Give Me My Data is a Facebook application designed to give users the ability to export their data out of Facebook for any purpose they see fit. This could include making artwork, archiving and deleting your account, or circumventing the interface Facebook provides. Data can be exported in CSV, XML, and other common formats.”

The application does not export the data, then import it back into the profile section. Instead, a user can use the data to construct a new-old profile in a less restrictive part of their Facebook account.

Discuss

Once again, Facebook is our top story of the week – this time thanks to its high-pressure opt-in tactics. Oh Facebook, our readers just love reading about your privacy antics. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010: On the Internet of Things highway, cars are getting smarter; Google Wave has found new purpose as a real-time blogging platform; and don’t miss the augmented reality jigsaw puzzles. Read on for more.

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Story of the Week: Facebook’s High Pressure Tactics

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• POLL: Which Location-Based Mobile App Do You Use Now?
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Internet of Things

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• 5 Ways That Cars Are Getting Smarter

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Discuss

I’ve seen a lot of angst over the past week about Facebook’s moves to open up your data to other applications.

To really understand how huge these changes are I had to get away from Silicon Valley and come and hang out with the geeks in Kinneret, Israel where famous VC Yossi Vardi is throwing an exclusive camp for geeks and successful business innovators.

To be sure, there is some fear and even a bit of hatred here of Facebook. Let’s detail that fear and hate:

1. Facebook has broken an invisible privacy contract with its users. Most of the geeks here say they expected Facebook to be about sharing photos, videos, and thoughts with friends and family. But now their previously private data is showing up on Yelp, Pandora, and Spotify. That wasn’t expected by the users, so has generated quite a bit of discussion here.
2. Facebook is very quickly painting the web with little like buttons and other social widgets. One CEO I talked with, who asked me to keep his name and company name out of this article but who runs one of the top 50 websites according to Comscore and Compete.com, told me his company will add Facebook’s likes next week. He’s not the only one saying that. My prediction that 30 of the top 100 Websites would incorporate Facebook’s likes in the first few months might turn out to be very low, based on what I’m hearing in Israel. But that does worry geeks here who are seeing that Facebook is very quickly getting their fingers (and branding) into a very large chunk of the web.
3. I’m sharing a room with one of Yahoo’s search strategists here at Kinnernet and, while he wasn’t able to tell me what direction Yahoo is going in, it’s clear that Facebook has disrupted his thinking of where the world is going. If Yahoo is feeling the disruption imagine what it must be like over at Google! Facebook is studying metadata from all these likes and other behavior of ours and I believe is preparing new kinds of search and discovery services. Facebook doesn’t need to “kill” Google to have quite an effect, either. They just need to put a box around Google which would keep Google from growing. What happens when Google can’t grow the way it wants to? Flat stock prices and loss of ability to hire the best employees that comes with it. Google is the new Microsoft, the geeks here say.
4. The geeks here say that it is clear that Facebook is becoming a dramatically more important, and larger, company than they expected. So, now, new business plans are being changed to account for Facebook’s new power and stance in the world.

So, why is it too late to regulate Facebook?

Well, first of all, what can government do?

1. They can force Facebook to switch its defaults on its new Instant Personalization program, which is already being used by Yelp and Pandora (you can see which music I listen to, for instance, on Pandora, and that feature got turned on automatically. The government could force Facebook to turn that feature off by default and make me “opt in” for you to see my Pandora music.
2. They could fine Facebook for its behavior.
3. They could call Mark Zuckerberg in front of Congress and call him nasty names.

But what else could the government do? I don’t see too many options. Do you?

So, why is it too late to regulate Facebook?

1. The damage is done. Well, let’s assume they made them switch Instant Personalization to opt in. Who cares? The damage is done. My Pandora already has all your music shared with me. Most Facebook members won’t change their privacy settings from what they already are. So, old users will keep sharing their music and only new members will be asked to opt in to these new privacy-sharing features.
2. The regulation will come too slowly. Government never moves fast. Even when it’s motivated. So Zuckerberg has at least a few months to aggregate his power before Government slaps him on the hand. Government is not going to be able to prevent that top 50 website from putting Facebook’s new features into its service. Government will not keep me from using Pandora.
3. The regulation will come after we get used to new privacy landscape. Already I’m finding I’m getting used to the fact that you all can see my data and that I can see yours. So, if Government comes along and tries to regulate that it will get pushback from me. Why? Well, I actually like the new Pandora features. I’m finding a ton of cool music because Zuckerberg forced you to give up some of your privacy. So what that I can see that you like Kenny G? Users will get addicted to these new features and they won’t take kindly to some government jerk taking away these new features.
4. Giving Zuckerberg a fine will not change Facebook’s behavior. If anything it will just push him to monetize these features more aggressively in order to pay the fine. Just wait until Cocacola icons show up next to all those Facebook like buttons. Government taxation, which really is what fines are, might have a negative effect long term.

So, what can be done about Facebook? I don’t see what we can do about Facebook. Not enough people have changed their behaviors due to these changes. I’m watching and these features are VERY popular. Even here in Israel, far from the hype bubble of Silicon Valley, all the geeks I talked with are impressed with the new features and many are already implementing them. No one sees Facebook as less powerful or less interesting today than two weeks ago. Even with a few of my geeky friends saying they deleted their accounts from Facebook my feed there is actually moving faster lately and my items are getting more engagement, which shows that not many geeks changed their behavior away from Facebook.

Zuckerberg just played chicken with our privacy and it sure looks like he won based on what I’m hearing here in Israel.

What do you think?

Comments

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.

Discuss

Every now and then we publish the favorite mobile apps or sites of the ReadWriteWeb staff. The last time we did this was November 2009, however with our Mobile Summit just around the corner we wanted to give you an updated list. We’re all early adopters of mobile technology here at ReadWriteWeb, so have a scan of our favorite apps and see what catches your eye.

We’d also love to know your current favorites, because that’s a great way to keep our finger on the pulse. Please note your favorite mobile apps or sites in the comments.

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Richard MacManus (iPhone)

• ReadWriteWeb iPhone App (of course)
• Diamedic
• Evernote
• Insight (Basecamp app)
• Google Voice
• Google Reader
• Shazam
• Facebook
• Tweetie
• Woopra
• Flicks (movies)
• Art
• Words With Friends
• WorldMate
• NYTimes
• The Onion

Marshall Kirkpatrick

• Facebook
• Portland Business Journal
• Cinch
• Gowalla
• Tweetie
• NYT
• WSJ
• Rachel Maddow
• Yelp
• Pandora
• SimpleMindX (mind mapping)
• AroundMe
• Instapaper
• Shazam
• AppsFire
• BaseBall ‘10
• Etsy Addict
• Newser
• Crop For Free
• The Guardian
• Plancast
• Mobile Safari

  Mobile web apps: Techmeme, MediaGazer, Quora, EveryBlock

Sarah Perez

iPhone:

• Google Reader (web app)
• Facebook
• WeatherBug
• Flashlight
• Tweetie
• Brizzly
• TweetDeck
• Siri
• Flickr
• Bump
• Phone Flicks
• Pandora
• Foursquare (why am I doing this?)
• WhiteNoise (baby app)
• Instapaper
• NYT
• Yelp
• Google Maps
• Amazon
• Babies R Us
• Notifications
• iScrobble

iPad:

• Google Reader (web app)
• NYT
• BBC
• NPR
• USA Today
• Netflix
• AP News
• ABC Player
• Instapaper
• Pandora
• Twitterific
• StreamToMe
• Facebook (web shortcut! no app!)
• Desktop
• iMahjong

Frederic Lardinois

• Instapaper
• Reeder
• Gowalla
• Tweetie
• WorldMate
• Boxcar
• PicPosterous
• NYTimes

Mike Melanson (iPhone)

• Facebook
• Tweetdeck
• Evernote
• Public Radio
• Gowalla
• Google Maps
• Boxcar
• MapMyRide (when I’m out riding)
• Pandora
• ReadItLater

Alex Williams

• Pandora
• Twitdroid
• Facebook
• Google Maps
• The Hangover ("for weekend mindless laughs with the teenage son.")

Chris Cameron

• Social: Foursquare, Tweetie, Facebook.
• Games: Words With Friends & Charadium.
• Photography: AutoStitch, TiltShiftGen & ColorSplash.
• Other: TripIt & Chipotle.

  And the RWW app of course!! (Actually I use it every day to share my stories on Twitter/Facebook easily).

Audrey Watters

I like mobile apps that allow me to move easily between iphone and laptop, so Evernote and RememberTheMilk.

Also Marvel and ComiXology’s comics apps. And the Kindle app for when I need words to go with my picture books.

Abraham Hyatt

Goodreads, Stanza, Thompson Reuters, ReadItLater, NYT, Echofon, CameraPlus, Words With Friends, RWW, Pandora

Sean Ammirati

Twitterific, RWW App, Encamp, Kindle, Zipcar App

Elyssa Pallai

Where’s Wally – entertainment for children of every age.

Jared Smith ("The Lone Blackberrier")

• Twitter for BlackBerry official app–direct message push via the BlackBerry system is an awful nice touch
• Seesmic for BlackBerry–fills a big gap in the official Twitter client by letting me support multiple accounts; probably the program that’s easiest on my resources aside from the official client
• MyKite–still my go-to to check in on Brightkite on BlackBerry
• Rowmote (I use it on an iPod touch)–extremely inexpensive and powerful alternative to the Apple Remote for controlling a Mac.
• RadarScope (on iPod touch)–still the best mobile radar viewer on any platform.

See also: POLL: Which Location-Based Mobile App Do You Use Now?

Discuss

Google has launched a new feature in its search results, which displays results that are deemed "similar" to the query. If you search for eBay, for example, you may get results for Craigslist, uBid, Buy.com, and ebayanuncios.es.

Basically, if someone searches for a brand, there is a good chance Google will inject links to the competition on that results page by default (though at the bottom).

It’s actually not a new feature entirely. "We’ve offered a ‘Similar’ feature on results for a while now as a way to discover new, useful sites, but it hasn’t been too visible," says Google software engineer Doantam Phan. "Since we’ve been continuously improving this feature and we think it’s really useful, we’re now going to start showing these alternative sites more prominently."

I thought it would be interesting to see what pages Google thinks are similar to Google itself and some of its competitors. When I searched "google" I didn’t get any similar pages. When I searched "bing", I got the following:

For "facebook" I got the following:

For Yahoo, I got the following:

I find it interesting that Google deems Bing to be more like Dogpile than Google or even Yahoo. It’s also worth noting that Gmail is in the mix for Facebook, with Buzz presumably being the connecting factor, which is interesting in itself since Buzz is more like FriendFeed than Facebook, and Facebook actually owns FriendFeed, but that’s not listed (while Microsoft.com is listed as similar to Bing).

HP bought Palm today, as you no doubt have heard, for more than $1 billion. What does it mean when a company among the most venerable in Silicon Valley but outside the consumer tech limelight of the day, acquires another company that created the handheld computing market and continues to innovate radically, but has fallen far out of public favor? HP is a company with extensive social software experience, so I’m excited to see what it can do with Palm’s widely admired WebOS mobile platform.

Below we’ve posted some of most interesting short ruminations on the news, from the first few moments after the announcement, from smart industry thought leaders. There are a lot of different reactions out there, what are your thoughts about these ones?

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Tim Bray, who recently left Sun after the Oracle acquisition, joined Google and blasted Apple in a blog post calling the iPhone a “a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers.”

Dion Almaer, well known innovative web developer at Palm, is excited.

Joe Hewitt, the man who built the Facebook iPhone app, gives Palm’s mobile OS a thumbs up.

Hearst Digital Media’s Seamus Condron is not so sure.

That’s a great question, so we asked it of HP. Senior VP of Strategy Brian Humphries told us today that “the issue over the years has been Palm’s ability to prove financial viability and with HP in the picture those concerns go away. We’ll invest substantially in building a developer community. Further, you take this OS onto other platforms and you give people an opportunity to participate in an ecosystem play.”

Mobile developer Tim Sears sees a potential iPad competitor.

Blogger Mark Hopkins points out that HP is on an acquisition roll. Deals we’ve spotted over the last 12 months include: cluster file storage software vendor IBRIX, global consulting company EYP Mission Critical Facilities and network infrastructure manufacturer 3Com $2.7b.

Lon Seidman, startup founder, points to a missed opportunity by Microsoft. Many people agree. Business Insider says this is all about HP trying to “end its reliance on Microsoft Windows as the basis for its hardware gadgets.”

Was it a bad deal for the investors? Leading financial blogger Dan Primack does some quick evaluation of the impact for Elevation Partners, the VC firm that singer Bono is a part of that put hundreds of millions into Palm. Primack says the sky has not fallen.

Former Autodesk and Edelman PR exec Caroline Kawashima is unmoved. Tech media guru Sam Whitmore retweets.

Online comedy guy Justin Kownacki is appropriately meta.

Huffington Post’s Adam Clark Estes makes a good joke.

Discuss

Google has launched a new feature in its search results, which displays results that are deemed "similar" to the query. If you search for eBay, for example, you may get results for Craigslist, uBid, Buy.com, and ebayanuncios.es.

Basically, if someone searches for a brand, there is a good chance Google will inject links to the competition on that results page by default (though at the bottom).

It’s actually not a new feature entirely. "We’ve offered a ‘Similar’ feature on results for a while now as a way to discover new, useful sites, but it hasn’t been too visible," says Google software engineer Doantam Phan. "Since we’ve been continuously improving this feature and we think it’s really useful, we’re now going to start showing these alternative sites more prominently."

I thought it would be interesting to see what pages Google thinks are similar to Google itself and some of its competitors. When I searched "google" I didn’t get any similar pages. When I searched "bing", I got the following:

For "facebook" I got the following:

For Yahoo, I got the following:

I find it interesting that Google deems Bing to be more like Dogpile than Google or even Yahoo. It’s also worth noting that Gmail is in the mix for Facebook, with Buzz presumably being the connecting factor, which is interesting in itself since Buzz is more like FriendFeed than Facebook, and Facebook actually owns FriendFeed, but that’s not listed (while Microsoft.com is listed as similar to Bing).

There were tweets a plenty today about Mark Benioff and his latest term: “Cloud 2,” referring to the apps that will come from VMforce, the new Java-platform as a service that Saleforce.com and VMware are launching.

Dennis Howlett added to the discussion by picking up on the meme that Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff shared as part of the launch:

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Benioff understands the value of a meme. And as a result, he has more command over the enterprise cloud market than any other executive in the space.

Cloud 2 is a that term shifts perspectives, connecting the concept of the cloud and the social Web to the Java-dominated environment of the enterprise. People may run away cynically but the language seems to work in the public discourse.

In the message is a clear realization that the social Web is the overall dynamic theme that is affecting the Internet as we know it.

That’s something people can understand.

Facebook is playing on that theme to challenge Google on the premise that hyperlinks are the future of the Web. Facebook is connecting presence with location to serve relevant updates, which act as gestures. In this regard, the social Web is woven into Facebook’s fabric.

Salesforce.com and VMWare understand the dynamic that Facebook brings to the Web and into the overall enterprise. The apps developed out of VMforce will connect to an open graph that the enterprise controls. That’s a theme that can be communicated through the discussions about the VMForce platform. It will resonate far more than dull conversations about technology infrastructure.

The alliance also shows that VMware is now positioned to compete as a platform providers against Google, Amazon and Windows Azure.

All of this leave Oracle and SAP in a tight spot. These are not exactly companies that are commanding in their influence about the social Web and its connection to the enterprise.

They are deeply entrenched, for instance, in this long discussion about private cloud computing, not communities of interest. It’s like Oracle has rejected this aspect of the Sun merger.

Sun would seem like the logical successor to Java in the cloud. Java has historically served to represent Sun as the force behind one of the technology world’s most important developer communities.

But that power is changing hands with Salesforce.com and VMware as possible successors.

VMware now is a direct benefactor of the Salesforce drive to the enterprise. And Salesforce.com has all the advantages that VMware offers from its own enterprise imprint and its $420 million acquisition of SpringSource last summer.

Java is a cornerstone coding language of the enterprise The question we now have to face: What will the competitors do as the Java platform moves into the cloud? How can they counter the micro application approach that seems to be gaining importance in the enterprise with each passing day.

Discuss

Facebook’s Open Graph API is getting some negative attention in Washington today. Four democratic U.S. senators, Charles Schumer, Michael Bennet, Mark Begich and Al Franken, sent a letter to Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this morning, asking for clarification about the privacy implications of Facebook’s latest initiatives. Specifically, these senators complain about the company’s new policy to allow third-party developers to store data for more than 24 hours, Facebook’s Instant Personalization feature and the social network’s new initiatives that make more of its users’ personal information public by default.

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Washington and Facebook Privacy

The discussion in Washington mostly centers around the fact that Facebook’s new Instant Personalization service is opt-out. Facebook’s current partners – Microsoft’s Docs.com, Pandora and Yelp – automatically get access to a subset of your personal data whenever you visit their sites while you are logged in to Facebook. According to the senators, Facebook now shares “significant and personal data points that should be kept private unless the user chooses to share them.”

In his response to the senators’ concerns, Facebook’s VP of global communications Elliot Schrage argues that these new products are “designed to enhance personalization and promote social activity across the Internet while continuing to give users unprecedented control over what information they share, when they want to share it, and with whom.”

This discussion comes down to Facebook’s decision to make many of its latest features opt-out instead of opt-in. Currently, Facebook is only testing Instant Personalization with a small number of hand-selected partners. Facebook’s ambition, however, is to turn itself into the hub for personalization on virtually every site on the Internet, so this small group of partners could soon grow exponentially. This – combined with the end of the company’s 24-hour limit on storing data by third-party developers – could potentially pose a serious threat to its users’ privacy.

Opt-In vs. Opt-Out

There is a reason why Facebook is currently using opt-out as its default. After all, this guarantees Facebook the largest possible user base for these features and the best possible user experience for those who want to use them. Making new features opt-in exposes Facebook to the (very real) possibility that not enough users sign up and that the reach of its current and future initiatives will be very limited.

On the other hand, if its users really wanted to these features, wouldn’t they just opt-in if asked? And if these features turn out to be really useful, wouldn’t word about them spread across Facebook like a wildfire?

Should Facebook Make Opt-Out Its Default?

Given the Beacon fiasco from 2007 – and the recent discussion around how Google handled the launch of Buzz – however, we have to wonder if Facebook simply didn’t learn its own lessons.

Facebook already hosts more private information about its users than any other site on the Internet. Given the company’s current trajectory of exposing more and more personal data, it’s probably time for the company to establish a consistent policy for how it plans to handle personal data in the future and make it very easy for users to opt out of any new initiatives that will expose more of a user’s data to third parties in the future.

If you want to make sure that Facebook developers can’t access your personal data, here are Sarah Perez’s excellent instructions for how to opt-out.

Discuss

Spotify, our favorite streaming music browser to talk about that we can’t even (legally) use in the U.S., has just announced that it is releasing version 0.4.3 “which includes the largest feature upgrade since our launch in 2008″. Are we finally going to (legally) get Spotify here in the U.S.? Not a chance.

Spotify is going social, adding a connection with Facebook, usernames, the ability to publish activity to your blog, and more. It’s also going local, adding library features and giving users the ability to import their local library into the Spotify network.

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From Spotify’s announcement:

To kick it off we’ve added a number of social features, centered on a fully editable Spotify music profile, with the ability to publish playlists, top artists and top tracks for public view. Discovering these profiles is simple as we’ve connected with Facebook so that you can instantly add your friends’ profiles.

As well as introducing a variety of new social features, Spotify is evolving into a total music management platform. We’ve added a ‘Library’ folder in the left side bar, enabling you to combine your own music library with ours.

While Music Ally is saying that the connection with Facebook has “huge” implications, it almost feels like catching up with the competition to us. Haven’t most other web-based music delivery services gone social in many ways?

A quick run-down of the features coming to the new Spotify includes a Facebook integration, usernames, publishing to your Facebook stream from within Spotify, in-platform messaging, and tracking of collaborative playlists. As for the library, which many people in the blog posts’ comments seemed even more excited about, users can “import a link to all the music files stored on [their] computer”, wirelessly sync their mobile device, and “star” tracks to tag them as favorites.

Our own Frederic Lardinois predicted a Q3 U.S. release for Spotify, but we have already seen some solid competition. MOG, for example, released a mobile, $5 a month version this year at SXSW and a representative from Napster told us it was looking to do the same in the near future. Both of those services offer similiar sized catalogs and comparably priced services.

While today’s feature announcements by Spotify look enticing, we’re still left asking – when will it be available in the U.S.?

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This March has been a busy time for the leading architects of the social web. Twitter announced its @Anywhere at Chirp. Meanwhile, Facebookbrought the Open Graph protocol to light the path of social sharing and separately announced support for OAuth 2.0 at F8.

Personal information sharing across the web is transforming in front of our eyes. To get our bearings on the innovation taking place, we took the time to talk to JanRain a leading third-party login services to find out what the changes in the recent landscape mean for open standards and user facing services.

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2010 is the Year of Third Party Growth: Websites and Users

Lisa Hannah, head of marketing of JanRain mentioned that in the first quarter of 2010, the total number of web site customers using their RPX third party login service grew by 50%.

At the same time frame, the total number of logins through RPX accounts grew by 100%. Both the base of applications supporting third party login is growing, increase in use overall for sites using third party login services.

The number of websites using JanRain’s RPX worldwide have passed the 200,000 mark. Here is an example of what it looks like that you may have seen on the web.

A Quick Summary of the Provider Landscape

Google and Facebook are leading providers of identity services that enable third party login.

Google: Early innovator in identity, manages email, domains, and consumer facing services such as news, google health, and Google Docs as a core service for identity. Uses email as a central token for hanging authentication services within Google.

JanRain mentioned that Google is still the largest authentication provider in their pool of user population, shown here are recent stats.

Twitter: Early innovator in the OAuth implementation ecosystem, the company offers one of the cleanest and fastest growing examples of sharing identity across the web. “Tweet This” and similar features bring more and more users to Twitter. Twitter uses its unique id for each account @Twitter. It also has made an increasing prominence its goal to know the users email, mobile number, and location.

Facebook. Facebook Connect has been the companies special sauce for embedding Facebook services into websites and connecting users on the web. This strategy has been evolving, and at F8 the company announced its open standard support and an increase in presence of social sharing services for users to target the sharing of content they consume from the web.

Shown here, we see Facebook as a clear leader among media providers in the population. This may be partly due to media provider tense relationships with Google on search.

Who Sets the Terms

A decade or so ago, Google transformed the perceptive of the web by offering the “I’m feeling lucky”. This amazing product (at the time) offered a knowing of the “best hit” for a term being searched. In a subtle, but important way, a taxonomy for the web has been introduced for the web. This default view is now monetized – and controlled – by Google in how it links to top level documents on the web.

We’re starting to think of Facebook’s platform to be like Google. In a way, it is indexing the world of information, not by most linked, but by most liked. Like Google, when this filter is applied to the good old fashioned web, it shows that the world’s content is valuable, and it can be monetized.

Here is a summary of how Facebook’s Open Graph protocol works, from the companies site.

In this way, both Google and Facebook could be seen as sponges that continually absorb more and more around them. As third party login grows and it becomes easy to drop content from the web into their sites a long-time bond may be forming around social connections like it did search.

The web is evolving in a way that puts more and more responsiblity in a few key players that provision our identities.

Will the join of Twitter, Facebook, and Google be good enough competitors to do the right things with personalized services to win our trust?

Open Questions for Us and Them

There are questions are still being formed as the rules of engagement evolve in social networking. Many of these questions look at the balance of what the social hub desire and what we are willing to give them.

Below, are a few things we think will be important as third party login grows and central services continue to grow into the fabric of the Internet.

• Will Facebook, Google, and Twitter continue to let companies and web site owners use mutliple services? Today, this can be done by hooking up a service like JanRain. Will this open/closed ecosystem continue?
• Will OAuth 2.0 be implemented by each of the leading providers in a way that makes their services interoperable? Will Twitter’s XAuth, and Google’s GAuth variants merge nicely with Facebook in the end.
• Who will be the holder of the super-set of contacts a person engages with. Today, for many, the social graphs of Gmail, Twitter, and Facebook are still distinct islands. Will they merge?
• Will consumers rise up as a power to dictate the terms of social networking, data sharing, and mining of personal traits. How will balance be reached, or will it?
• Does it matter to people as consumers whether it is Google, Twitter, or Facebook as the identity service? Will another option spring up in the marketplace to meet the consumer in more friendly terms?

There is a lot of change in this landscape of social sharing on the web. Although it is growing quickly, we still feel that we’re in a chapter in the middle of book, rather than the closing pages.

Right now, it feels like anything can happen in the landscape, and we’re getting to know each of the main characters – and their intentions – well enough to get a feeling on how it may end.

What do you think, will third-party login services be a happy ending for the world wide web?

Photo credit: sidelong

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It took Sarah Perez’s post How to Delete Facebook Applications (and Why You Should) a little more than 24 hours to become to the top-viewed post of this week. In a week filled with Facebook news, it certainly hit a nerve. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010. We wrote about how the Internet of Things can be an Internet of Cows, new tools to visualize the real-time Web, and how augmented reality developers can win $5,000. Read on for more.

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More Real-Time Web coverage. Don’t miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb’s report, The Real-Time Web and its Future.

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Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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