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

• Facebook’s High Pressure Tactics: Opt-in or Else
• How to Avoid Making PowerPoint Your Enemy: Tips for Your Pitch Deck
• Firefox Steps Up to Challenge Facebook’s Claim to Identity
• Bringing Google, Facebook, Twitter Together: Third Party Login Grows Rapidly in 2010
• Google Earth Gets in Maps: Browser-Based & Embeddable
• Steve Jobs Speaks: Why We Don’t Allow Flash on iPhones and iPads

More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit

Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services, augmented reality, native app vs. browser-based, commerce and marketing, mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com.

Mobile Web

• POLL: Which Location-Based Mobile App Do You Use Now?
• One Third of iPhone 2Gs Sold Still In Use, Will Be Unsupported
• Apple Shuts Down Lala: Here are 5 Alternatives

More Mobile Web coverage

Augmented Reality

• Move Over Jackson Pollock, Here Come AR Jigsaw Puzzles
• Layar Launches Its Augmented Reality Content Marketplace

More Augmented Reality coverage

Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report

We’re pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb’s latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future. This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user’s view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here.

Internet of Things

• 3 Ways Internet Of Things Works On Your Phone
• 5 Ways That Cars Are Getting Smarter

More Internet of Things coverage

Real-Time Web

• Google Wave Finds Purpose as Live Blogging Platform
• Infochimps Release Twitter Data, “Trst.Me” App and API for Ranking Twitter Users

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.

Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App

We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we’ve made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

• How to Avoid Making PowerPoint Your Enemy: Tips for Your Pitch Deck
• Angel-Backed Companies More Likely to Succeed, Says Harvard Study
• What to Do When a PR Disaster Strikes Your Startup

ReadWriteCloud

Our channel ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

• Bringing Google, Facebook, Twitter Together: Third Party Login Grows Rapidly in 2010
• Google’s Eric Schmidt Gushes About HTML 5
• Oregon First To Go Statewide With Google Apps For Education

Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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Discuss

Brazil is objecting to the picture drawn of it from the data on Google’s Government Request tool, which shows requests filed with Google by each country. Brazil made the most data requests of any country, 3,663, and the requested the most removals, 291.

The Associated Press reported that Priscila Schreiner, a federal prosecutor focusing on child pornography and racist crimes claimed the requests were all devoted to those subjects. But that does not seem to be so.

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Search Engine Watch points to Google’s own documents. Child pornography removals are not counted in the requests.

Business Week quoted Google as saying Brazil had a large number of requests “in part because of the popularity of our social networking website.” Orkut is very popular in Brazil.

“The Brazilian government is not exercising any type of censorship of any legal expression,” said Schreiner. However, Brazil has a history of blocking websites and services, including blogging platform WordPress and video-hosting site YouTube.

As we wrote last week, the statistics cover July through December.

Discuss

Internet Evolution has come up with their first-ever list of the top 100 most innovative and influential people in the Web 2.0 world. In the social networking category, Mark Zuckerberg, the Founder of Facebook, beat out Kevin Rose, the Founder of Digg. In the search category, the heads of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! were named, but surprisingly Jason Calacanis of Mahalo was named, as well.

Internet Evolution has narrowed down the list into 10 different categories, which include the most innovative and influential people in each category:
Social Networking
Enterprise & Cloud Computing
News/Media
Greentech
Wireless & Gadgets
E-Commerce
Search
Security
Digital Entertainment
Most Over-Rated

I am particularly interested in the Search category, where Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Founders of Google, were named first. Stefan Weitz of Microsoft and Carol Bartz of Yahoo were also named, and Jason Calacanis was also named in the Search category.

Here is the list of the top 10 most innovative and influential people in search:

1. Larry Page, Founder, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)
2. Stefan Weitz, Director of Search, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)
3. Carol Bartz, CEO, Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO)
4. Jason Calacanis, Founder, Mahalo.com Inc.
5. Robin Li, originator of Baidu Inc. (Nasdaq: BIDU) search technology
6. Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
7. Vipul Ved Prakash, Founder, Topsy.com
8. Jack Ma, Founder, Alibaba.com Hong Kong Ltd.
9. Alan Emtage, creator of pre-Web search engine Archie
10. Suranga Chandratillake, CEO, blinkx

Being in the search industry, I’m not sure if I totally agree with this list, as there are some websites that are in the list that I don’t necessarily think are really “search engines”. I would also name a few individuals like Danny Sullivan to the search category before I named Jason Calacanis to the search category. I agree that Calacanis should be named somewhere, but not in the search category.

Here is the list of the top 100 most innovative and influential people in the Web 2.0 World:

1) Social Networking

1. Mark Zuckerberg, Founder, Facebook
2. Kevin Rose, Founder, Digg
3. Jonathan Miller, Chief Digital Officer, News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) (MySpace )
4. Philip Rosedale, Founder, Second Life
5. Jeff Weiner, CEO, LinkedIn Corp.
6. Caterina Fake, Founder, Flickr
7. Adam Christensen, Social Media Communications Manager, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM)
8. Jonathan Abrams, Founder, Friendster
9. Mark Goldston, CEO, United Online Inc.
10. Jason Rosenthal, CEO, Ning.com

2) Enterprise & Cloud Computing

1. Padmasree Warrior, CTO, Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO)
2. Bradley Horowitz, VP, Product Management, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Apps
3. Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM Distinguished Engineer, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM)
4. Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN)
5. Amitabh Srivastava, SVP, Server & Cloud Division, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)
6. Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO, Salesforce.com Inc.
7. Simon Crosby, CTO, Citrix Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS)
8. Randi Levin, CTO, City of Los Angeles
9. Andrew Brown, Managing Director, Bank of America
10. Manesh Patel, CIO, Sanmina-SCI Corp. (Nasdaq: SANM)

3) News/Media

1. Rupert Murdoch, CEO, News Corp. (NYSE: NWS)
2. Fiona Spruill, Editor, Web Newsroom, The New York Times
3. Arianna Huffington, Founder, Huffington Post
4. Jim Walton, President, CNN Worldwide (including CNN.com)
5. Matt Drudge, Founder, Drudge Report
6. Michael Arrington, Founder, TechCrunch
7. Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief, Wired
8. Julian Assange, Co-Founder, WikiLeaks
9. Chris Tolles, CEO, Topix
10. Cory Doctorow, Editor, Boing Boing

4) Greentech

1. Steven Chu, US Secretary of Energy, DOE
2. Hal La Flash, Director of Emerging Clean Energy Technologies, PG&E
3. Guido Bartels, Managing Director, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM); Chairman, GridWise Alliance Inc.
4. Elon Musk, Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO, Tesla Motors
5. Chuck Powers, IT strategist, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
6. Paul Maritz, CEO, VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW)
7. Joel Selanikio, software developer
8. Lisa Wood, Executive Director, Institute for Electric Efficiency
9. Andres Carvallo, EVP, Chief Strategy Officer, Grid Net
10. KR Sridhar, Co-Founder & CEO, Bloom Energy Corp.

5) Wireless & Gadgets

1. Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL)
2. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO, Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK)
3. Kevin Dallas, General Manager, Windows Embedded Business Unit, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)
4. David Yach, CTO, Software, Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) (Nasdaq: RIMM; Toronto: RIM)
5. Ivan Seidenberg, Chairman & CEO, Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ)
6. Greg Brown, Sanjay Jha, Co-CEOs, Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT)
7. Min Kao, Chairman & CEO, Garmin Ltd. (Nasdaq: GRMN)
8. Jeff Hawkins, Palm Inc.
9. Don Eigler, IBM Fellow, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM)

6) E-Commerce

1. Jeff Bezos, CEO & Chairman, Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN)
2. Pierre Omidyar, Chairman, eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY)
3. Craig Newmark, Founder, craigslist
4. Barry Diller, Chairman, Expedia
5. Scott Thompson, President, PayPal
6. Michael Dell, CEO, Dell Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL)
7. Raul Vazquez, President & CEO, WalMart.com
8. Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp Inc.
9. Greg Blatt, CEO, Match.com
10. Joey Levin, CEO, MyFunCards.com (Mindspark Interactive Network)

7) Search

1. Larry Page, Founder, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)
2. Stefan Weitz, Director of Search, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)
3. Carol Bartz, CEO, Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO)
4. Jason Calacanis, Founder, Mahalo.com Inc.
5. Robin Li, originator of Baidu Inc. (Nasdaq: BIDU) search technology
6. Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
7. Vipul Ved Prakash, Founder, Topsy.com
8. Jack Ma, Founder, Alibaba.com Hong Kong Ltd.
9. Alan Emtage, creator of pre-Web search engine Archie
10. Suranga Chandratillake, CEO, blinkx

Security

1. Robert S. Mueller III, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
2. Scott Charney, Corporate VP, Trustworthy Computing, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)
3. Al Zollar, General Manager, IBM Tivoli
4. Whitfield Diffie, cryptography expert
5. Art Coviello, President, RSA Security Inc. (Nasdaq: EMC)
6. Dave Cullinane, Chairman, Cloud Security Alliance; CISO, eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY)
7. Richard Clarke, Chairman, Good Harbor Consulting
8. Jeff Moss, Founder, Black Hat Inc.
9. Jeremiah Grossman, Founder & CTO, WhiteHat Security
10. Bruce Schneier, Blogger

9) Digital Entertainment

1. Eddy Cue, VP, iTunes (Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL))
2. Mitch Bainwol, Chairman, RIAA
3. Jason Kilar, CEO, Hulu LLC
4. Chad Hurley, Founder and CEO, YouTube Inc.
5. Bram Cohen, Founder, BitTorrent Inc.
6. Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix Inc.
7. Rob Pardo, Executive VP, Blizzard Entertainment Inc.
8. Tim Westergren, Founder, Pandora Media Inc.
9. Cédric Tournay, CEO, Dailymotion
10. Leslie Moonves, CEO, CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS)/TV.com

10) Most Over-Rated

1. Evan Williams
2. Biz Stone
3. Sergey Brin
4. Larry Ellison
5. Howard Schmidt
6. Ashton Kutcher
7. Barack Obama
8. Tim Berners-Lee
9. Stephen Saunders
10. Robert Scoble

Comments

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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Story of the Week: Delete Those Facebook Apps

• How to Delete Facebook Applications (and Why You Should)
• This is What a Tweet Looks Like
• XAuth: The Open Web Fires a Shot Against Facebook Connect
• Adobe Gives up on Apple, Welcomes Android
• Is the New Facebook a Deal With the Devil?
• Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 1: Design & Development

More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit

Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services, augmented reality, native app vs. browser-based, commerce and marketing, mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com.

Mobile Web

• Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 3: Emerging Markets
• Two-Thirds of iPhone Users Now Use Location-Based Services at Least Once a Week
• Top 10 YouTube Videos About Flash Mobs

More Mobile Web coverage

Augmented Reality

• Budding AR Developer? Put Your Creativity to Use and Win $5,000
• Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 2: Apps, Apps, Apps

More Augmented Reality coverage

Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report

We’re pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb’s latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future. This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user’s view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here.

Internet of Things

• Internet of Things Can Make Us Human Again
• As Cattle Rustling Increases, So Does the Need for RFID

More Internet of Things coverage

Real-Time Web

• PostRank Launches New Tools to Visualize the Real-Time Web
• YouTube Streams IPL Cricket Live In U.S.

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.

Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App

We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we’ve made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

• The Art of the Email Pitch
• Tips for Networking (Beyond Just “Social Networking”)
• Got an Exit Strategy? Lessons From Foursquare and Yahoo

ReadWriteCloud

Our channel ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

• The Largest Cloud in the World is Owned By A Criminal Network
• Google’s Eric Schmidt Gushes About HTML 5
• Google’s Vint Cerf on Private Clouds v. Public Clouds

Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Discuss

A consortium of companies including Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Meebo and more announced tonight that it will launch a new system on Monday that will let website owners discover which social networks a site visitor uses and prompt them automatically to log-in and share with friends on those network. The system is called XAuth and serves to facilitate cross-site authentication (logging in) for sharing and potentially many other uses.

Facebook and Twitter, the dominant ways people share links with friends outside of email, are not participating.

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Consortium leader Meebo emphasized that it doesn’t see this as competition with Facebook’s system for letting users share links from around the web, but it’s hard to see it any other way. Facebook desperately needs more competition. Either way, XAuth is a good move that people excited about online innovation should support.

What XAuth Delivers

The gist here is that XAuth will make it easier for sites around the web to find out what social networks you are using, let you log in to those easily, access your permitted information from those networks in order to better personalize your experience on their site and easily share their content back into your social network. It’s like Facebook Connect, but for every other social network. Any website can register as an identity provider with XAuth, too.

Google’s Joseph Smarr, recently hired because of his high-profile work on distributed identity systems across the web, says that XAuth is a provisional solution to the limitations of the cookie system. If you visit ReadWriteWeb, for example, our servers aren’t allowed to check the cookies left on your browser by the social networks you use because they are tied to URL domains other than ours.

XAuth will provide a single place that participating websites can ping to request information about you, the user. The social networks that are participating in XAuth will have reported to the central XAuth hub that you are using their service (Google, Yahoo, Meebo, Disqus, Gigya). If ReadWriteWeb is sporting XAuth, we would check in with the central hub, find out where you network and prompt you to log-in through that service and share your account information, social connections and more with us.

And yes, there are privacy implications to exposing where you network, even if your personal info beyond that isn’t exposed until you log-in. “Broadcasting where you log-in,” says online identity community leader Kaliya Hamlin, “gives away things about yourself you may not want to give away.” Hopefully specialty networks will be selective about whether they participate in XAuth or not, but any time there is an opt-out model like this it’s dangerous.

Once you’re logged-in to your favorite social network, there are many things the website you are visiting could do. Think of all the things Facebook Connect lets you do. XAuth will enable to do that type of thing with any other participating social network, on any participating site. On the Huffington Post, you can see what your friends from Facebook are reading across that sprawling site. On CNN during the Presidential Inauguration, Facebook Connect let you comment on the live video with your real identity and see what your friends were saying about it at the same time.

It’s really easy, Facebook Connect is, and the huge audience that can be shared with makes publishers salivate as they install Facebook Connect.

Facebook is not participating in XAuth, though the companies behind it say they hope it will soon. That seems unlikely. For Facebook, sharing and identity start and end with Facebook. The giant social network spreads its Connect system around the web with an imperial vision. It might participate in XAuth later, as might Twitter (who calls another authentication system XAuth and generally communicates poorly with other companies), but only because they want to be everywhere. They won’t be sending out invites to publishers to attend any XAuth parties though. They already own the most dominant cross-site authentication system the world has ever known.

Above: Robert Scoble interviews Meebo’s Seth Sternberg about XAuth

Google’s Smarr says that XAuth is just a work-around until the browser itself reports to websites what social networks a user uses. He says he’s working with the Google Chrome team and Mozilla has been working on making Firefox a hub of identity for some time. Everyone has something to fear from Facebook.

Will Someone Please Stop Facebook?

You do too, as a user. Facebook is a fabulous service for communicating with friends and family, for sharing links, thoughts and feelings. It’s also too big, too centralized and too susceptible to making drastic changes that have terrible consequences in the real lives of users (hello, privacy policy).

Facebook needs meaningful competition. XAuth could help breathe more life into a constellation of other social networks to provide that competition.

It’s hard to say what will work against Facebook, though, because that’s where the most precious resource in the online world is hoarded – your friendships. The prospect of a large number of people and websites coming together to use a technology that discovers social network use across everywhere but Facebook and Twitter isn’t likely to excite very many publishers focused on their short-term interests.

It’s a very frustrating situation. Facebook just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The experience there just keeps getting more and more compelling. No information gets out without flying the Facebook flag. Your friends probably don’t use much else, so switching would come at a heavy social cost. And we grow more and more under Facebook’s thumb every day. December’s radical changes to Facebook’s privacy policy are likely to be just the beginning.

Google’s Smarr points out that just a few years ago it would have seemed inconceivable to people that MySpace would come tumbling down from the top of the social networking heap, that the future is still wide open and Facebook’s total domination can’t be presumed unstoppable. He would say that. Facebook is smarter and much, much better than MySpace ever was, though.

I love using Facebook, I use it every day, but something needs to be done. There needs to be a variety of interoperable, viable social networking options. Imagine if there was one super-dominant cell phone network provider and it didn’t allow you to call people on other networks. It wouldn’t matter how good that service was, that would be a bad situation. Social networking is a huge part of the world we live in today. It’s far too important to leave in the hands of a near-monopoly, even if that monopoly seems relatively benign today.

I hope that XAuth today and browser-based identity management in the future can help other social networks gain more traction. This may be a part of the solution. It’s a nice move, but we’ll see how effective it is.

Discuss

What a better way to welcome our newest writer at ReadWriteStart than to have the fortune of showcasing her work in the ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup? Turns out that Audrey Watters was responsible for writing all of this week’s top posts – quite a way to get things started! This week we discus the future of mobile trends, advice for and by entrepreneurs, elevator pitches, data visualization and the check-in wars!

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Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends: The Future is Mobile

Internet analyst Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley presented a report on Internet trends at Events@Google yesterday. Echoing those trends identified in her 2009 presentation, the report focuses on the rapid and continued growth of the mobile internet and social networking. Claiming that the world has entered the fifth major technology cycle, Meeker predicts that this cycle will be marked by the adoption of mobile Internet technologies, as the trends of “3G + Social Networking + Video + VoIP + Impressive Mobile Devices” converge. Meeker predicts the mobile Internet will be bigger than desktop in five years, noting that by comparing iPhone and iPod touch versus AOL and Netscape users, that mobile Internet is ramping up at a rate far faster than desktop did. Furthermore, she argues that 3G coverage has reached a global inflection point, meaning it is available to at least 20% of the world’s cellphone users.

Entrepreneurs Under 30: Advice From Your Peers

Although the median age of CEOs is 54, one of the fasted growing demographics of entrepreneurs is young people. According to a survey by JA Worldwide almost three-quarters of high school students indicate an interest in becoming entrepreneurs. Although there are a few college programs dedicated to entrepreneurship, even with the preparation from a college degree program many young entrepreneurs can flounder.

To help remedy this, Under30CEO.com has collected advice from its users and offers “Young Entrepreneur Advice: 100 Things You Must Know!”

The Art of the Elevator Pitch: 10 Great Tips

The elevator door opens. And there stands your ideal investor. It’s the chance of a lifetime. But that chance only lasts as long as the elevator ride – you have less than a minute to make an impression. Hopefully, you’ve got a well-crafted elevator pitch ready to give.

The elevator pitch is not the hurried presentation of a full-blown business plan. It’s an introduction, an overview and a pitch – and a short one at that – meant to capture the attention of a potential investor. Of course, an elevator ride is a short one. Guides for elevator speeches that say you have one minute surely overestimate the amount of time it takes for an elevator to move from floor to floor. Of course, an elevator speech isn’t restricted to elevators. Rather, it comes in handy for any occasion where a concise presentation is appropriate.

Visualize Big Data with Flowing Media

As a recent article in The Economist observed, we are at the point of an “industrial revolution of data,” with vast amounts of digital information being created, stored and analyzed. The rise of “big data” has led in turn to an increased demand for tools to both analyze and visualize the information. This bodes well for startups tackling the field.

One new service is Flowing Media, the new company of Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, a consultancy focused on data visualization services.

Startups and Early Adopters: “Checking In” on Conventional Wisdom

The popular location-based services Foursquare and Gowalla were launched at the 2009 SXSW, and one year later, many proclaimed the 2010 SXSW to be the year of “location, location, location”. With almost 350,000 Foursquare check-ins during one day of the event, and with numerous location-based services launching before, during, and after SXSW, the buzz among early adopters surrounding location-based social networking seems to show no signs of abating.

Discuss

Our number one post this week was that Twitter’s archives will soon be housed in the hallowed halls of the Library of Congress. There’s got to be joke about librarians shushing tweets in there somewhere. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010. We wrote about Internet of Things threads you’ll be wearing soon, a real-time trip into Twitter’s past, and that augmented reality is going to the fishes on the Discovery Channel. Read on for more.

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Story of the Week: Twitter in the Library of Congress

• Twitter’s Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress
• Apple Announces iPhone OS 4 with Support for Multitasking
• 10 Smart Clothes You’ll Be Wearing Soon
• Goodbye, Gears – Google Docs Boots Plugin for HTML5 on May 3rd
• Top 10 YouTube Videos About Facebook
• New Google Docs Features: Added Co-Editing Capabilities, Similar To Google Wave

More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit

Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services, augmented reality, native app vs. browser-based, commerce and marketing, mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com.

Mobile Web

• Where Does Android Register on Google’s “Evil” Meter?
• Opera Takes a Back Seat to Safari on the iPhone
• Microsoft’s New Phone Gets the Social/App Balance Wrong

More Mobile Web coverage

Augmented Reality

• Discovery Channel Puts AR In Front of Millions of Eyeballs

More Augmented Reality coverage

Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report

We’re pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb’s latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future. This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user’s view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here.

Internet of Things

• 10 Smart Clothes You’ll Be Wearing Soon
• DASH7: Bringing Sensor Networking to Smartphones

More Internet of Things coverage

Real-Time Web

• Google’s Twitter Timeline Lets You Explore the Past
• Microblogging vs. Blogging: 5 Ways to Create an Open Twitter Alternative

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.

Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App

We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we’ve made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

• Entrepreneurs Under 30: Advice From Your Peers
• Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends: The Future is Mobile
• Apple’s Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games Developers

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations.

• New Google Docs Features: Added Co-Editing Capabilities, Similar To Google Wave
• Social Media Analysis: SAS Makes Its Play

ReadWriteCloud

Our channel ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

• Weekly Poll: What does Virtualization as a Service Really Mean?
• Drupal Founder Takes on Jive Software
• Another Cloud Computing Acronym To Drive You Bonkers

Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Discuss

Rally Up, a new location-based social network with a strong focus on privacy, just became the first fully featured location-based social network with an iPad app. The app, which is available for free (iTunes link), includes all of the features of Rally Up’s iPhone app. Thanks to making good use of the iPad’s expanded screen estate, however, using the iPad app is far easier and a lot more fun.

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Location-Based Services on the iPad: On Hold Until the WiFi + 3G Models Arrive

The current version of the iPad has to rely on WiFi triangulation to pinpoint a user’s location. As long as you are in a city, this works reasonably well. We expect to see more location-based iPad apps, including from Foursquare and Gowalla, once Apple launches the WiFi + 3G version of the iPad, which will include a GPS chip. For now, Loopt’s Pulse is the only other location-based social network that has arrived on the iPad, but Loopt’s app doesn’t allow users to check in from the app and focuses on letting users browser photos, places, events and their friends streams instead.

Rally Up on the iPad

When we first reviewed Rally Up’s iPhone service a few weeks ago, we noted that the application puts a very strong emphasis on privacy and allows you to tweak these privacy settings individually for every single on of your followers and the people you follow. As Rally Up’s co-founder Sol Lipman told us, Rally Up is really more about connecting you to your “real” friends. It is important to note that Rally Up’s sophisticated privacy controls also gives you the flexibility to follow whoever you want to and just broadcast very little to none of your location data to people you don’t fully trust or know.

Using the iPhone version of Rally Up is a lot of fun – in part thanks to the application’s minimalist design – but as with so many iPad apps, the larger screen makes browsing your friends streams and looking at their locations on a large map a lot easier. Rally Up’s iPad app also emphasizes the microblogging aspects of the service, where the extra screen estate comes in handy for posts with photos, for example.

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Today is the last day to save $200 on your tickets to ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010! Tomorrow the price goes up to $595. Register now!

The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit will take place May 7, 2010, in Mountain View, California and will be an exploration of the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications.

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As with our first event, the Real-Time Web Summit last October, the Mobile Summit will be in the “unconference” format. We discovered in October that the unconference is a perfect complement to our brand, because it encourages a high quality two-way dialog. Not only that, but the knowledge and ideas that came out of our Real-Time Web Summit were practical and useful – we got a lot of great feedback about that.

As with our previous event, the Mobile Summit will be facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin, who in our opinion is the best in the business at this style of event. We’re using the same venue too, the beautiful Computer History Museum.

Mobile was one of our top five trends last year and continues to undergo explosive growth, so our aim with this event is to help you navigate the opportunities. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of mobile! Because it will be you – the attendees – who ultimately set the agenda. You can begin adding your suggestions now.

We will have two main tracks at this Summit, Development and Business. Here’s a sample of some of the topics we’ll explore in both of these tracks:

• Geo-location services – what can you do using location as a platform?
• Commerce & Marketing – as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel?
• Content, Publishing & Recommendations – the technologies and best practices.
• Mobile Social Networking – how to tap into communities on mobile devices.
• Internet of Things – the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data.
• Augmented Reality – the technology and business applications of AR.
• Native App vs. Browser Based – Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

If you’re a company in the Mobile Internet market, you may be interested in helping sponsor this event. Current sponsors include:

Platinum Sponsor: CallFire

CallFire allows SMBs and developers to easily & cost-effectively build rich interactive phone systems. In minutes, users can create useful toll free hot-lines, send notification & emergency response phone calls, and even setup cloud call centers with agents located anywhere in the world. CallFire’s text-to-speech engine lets you create database-driven appointment reminders, toll-free information hotlines & outbound power-dialing campaigns for pennies a call. Call 877.897.FIRE to learn more, or check out a video: IVR, Cloud Call Center, Toll Free Numbers.

CallFire will be introducing our very own Richard MacManus for the keynote and has a surprise giveaway for all attendees of the morning keynote – so make sure you arrive early!

Travel Sponsor: World Mate

WorldMate, the world’s leading mobile travel assistant with over 5 million members worldwide, is the official travel sponsor of the upcoming 2010 ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit. Add WorldMate to your Blackberry or iPhone today and use its powerful features to deliver an unparalleled travel experience as you make your way to the Summit on May 7th in Mountain View. WorldMate can recommend flights, hotels and ground transportation to suit your individual needs – you can even book your travel through the mobile application. Visit www.worldmate.com for more information.

Lunch Sponsor: Alcatel-Lucent

Finally, Alcatel-Lucent will be sponsoring the lunch at the Mobile Summit. By the way, this isn’t a boxed lunch, we know that shaping the future of mobile takes energy and therefore you need good food – so we’re pleased to announce the lunch will be fresh grilled made to order tacos, burritos & quesadillas. Also, while ordering your lunch make sure to drop your business card in for a chance to win one of the six iPads Alcatel-Lucent’s team will be giving away!

Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information on the sponsor options.

The ReadWriteWeb team is excited about our second event and we can’t wait to discuss the opportunities in Mobile with you on May 7. You can find banners and logos to link to our event here, if you’re so inclined.

We hope to see you on May 7!

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Internet analyst Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley presented a report on Internet trends at Events@Google yesterday. Echoing those trends identified in her 2009 presentation, the report focuses on the rapid and continued growth of the mobile internet and social networking. Claiming that the world has entered the fifth major technology cycle, Meeker predicts that this cycle will be marked by the adoption of mobile Internet technologies, as the trends of “3G + Social Networking + Video + VoIP + Impressive Mobile Devices” converge. Meeker predicts the mobile Internet will be bigger than desktop in five years, noting that by comparing iPhone and iPod touch versus AOL and Netscape users, that mobile Internet is ramping up at a rate far faster than desktop did. Furthermore, she argues that 3G coverage has reached a global inflection point, meaning it is available to at least 20% of the world’s cellphone users.

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While the trends Meeker identifies in her report will be familiar to ReadWriteWeb readers, it is worth considering how some of what she observes might impact startups, providing opportunities for new business ventures.

Mobile E-Commerce: Not only is mobile increasingly the method by which users are accessing the Internet, Meeker contends that mobile will revolutionize e-commerce, forcing both innovations for both online and brick-and-mortar companies. She identifies location-based services, push notifications, transparent pricing, and instant mobile delivery as four potential areas this will occur.

Virtual Goods: The success of Tencent, with over $2 billion in sales of virtual goods in China, demonstrates the potential for this area, Meeker argues

Applications: Noting the success of both Facebook and Apple in the app market, what Meeker labels as “vibrant developer / application platform ecosystems, ” she suggests that companies will continue to leverage social networks for fans and for revenue.

Video: Meeker’s research points to video as outpacing VoIP and other resources people seek to access with their mobile devices.

Look to Japan: Meeker points to the Japanese social networking site Mixi, who has seen its mobile page views increase from 17% of total views three years ago to 72% today.

It is clear that social networks and mobile Internet will continue to play a huge role in shaping the future of technology and business development.

The full version of Meeker’s presentation is available on Scribd, thanks to Mathew Ingram from GigaOm.

Don’t miss the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7th in Mountain View, California! We’re at a key point in the history of mobile computing right now – we hope you’ll join us, and a group of the most innovative leaders in the mobile industry, to discuss it. Register now »

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Yesterday we looked at DASH7, a wireless sensor networking standard that may play an important part in next generation mobile services – including location-based services, Internet of Things and social networking.

In this post we analyze some use cases for DASH7, which also point to where the Mobile Web is heading. We’ll look at how location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla could evolve. Then we’ll explore the potential of long distance mobile advertising and mobile coupons.

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Extending Location-Based App Functionality

Given the growth of location-based apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla in 2010, it’s intriguing to think about what’s next for these services.

According to an as yet unreleased white paper by the DASH7 Alliance, enhanced loyalty programs could be the next big thing. With a DASH7-enabled phone, the white paper states, "a user could set his or her preferences in the Foursquare or Gowalla application that would allow the user to be automatically “discovered” or “checked in” at the coffee shop/restaurant/gun store/etc. and thereby accrue loyalty points passively, i.e. by just being “in” the establishment, rather than requiring active/conscious user behavior to participate in the program."

Even more advanced services could offer customized promotions created “on the fly”, targeting a certain user’s preferences.

Mobile Advertising From Long Distance and On-The-Go

A long-held goal of the Mobile Web – at least for retailers – is using mobile phones for mobile advertising, loyalty programs, couponing, and other ‘personalized shopping’ experiences. Of course there are privacy issues with these things, but nevertheless these scenarios are (finally) coming soon.

NFC-enabled phones have shown glimpses of this functionality, via smart posters, kiosks and billboards. As discussed in a previous post, NFC technology is limited to a 4 centimeter range – so the phone needs to be held close to the media asset in order to initiate the data transfer. Also it requires a tag reader application to be installed on your mobile phone.

According to its white paper, the DASH7 Alliance thinks that "a far larger set of customers would be willing to execute the same applications provided that they were executable a) from a longer distance, b) while moving, and c) in some cases, passively/without any conscious initiation of their own."

DASH7 has a range of hundreds of meters and can be used while on the move. While point 3 might scare some privacy advocates, it’s very likely that customers would need to opt in before they "passively" received such advertising messages.

If this is still too abstract for you, here’s a potential scenario: I’m driving down a street and I pass a smart poster pasted onto a building wall. This elicits a beep from my phone, because my phone has ‘passively’ scanned the poster and discovered something that I want to be notified about (I’ve opted into receiving notifications only about certain things). Because it’s against the law where I live to check my mobile phone while driving, I wait till I’m parked and then I check what the beep was for. Turns out that one of my favorite bands is playing in the city tomorrow night! The smart poster I’d driven past was an advertisement for that band. So I then proceed to book a ticket, using my phone of course.

Mobile Coupons

Mobile coupons are a hot area of activity already, with Google and others offering them. However, currently mobile coupons are limited to short-range and active receiving. Soon we might have long-range couponing, real-time interaction and ‘passively’ receiving coupons.

The DASH7 Alliance white paper offers a scenario of Paramount promoting its upcoming movie Iron Man 2, using a smart poster. In the NFC scenario, someone could walk past the Iron Man 2 poster and download a 2-for-1 coupon to see the movie. However, according to the DASH7 Alliance:

"…a combination DASH7/NFC-enabled smartphone could still support the default NFC scenario, but could also provide for a) longer distance distribution of the coupon b) “passive” acquisition of coupons according to a user’s pre-defined “coupon acquisition criteria” (e.g. “auto-accept coupons for any movies starring Al Pacino” , and c) real-time interaction with the media asset (e.g. “answer the following three questions correctly and win a 2-for-1 coupon to see “Iron Man 2″.)"

Those are just some of the next generation mobile services we can expect to see soon, thanks to wireless technologies like NFC and DASH7. Let us know in the comments if you have other potential use case ideas!

Photo credits: David Berkowitz; kengo

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The popular location-based services Foursquare and Gowalla were launched at the 2009 SXSW, and one year later, many proclaimed the 2010 SXSW to be the year of “location, location, location”. With almost 350,000 Foursquare check-ins during one day of the event, and with numerous location-based services launching before, during, and after SXSW, the buzz among early adopters surrounding location-based social networking seems to show no signs of abating.

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In a provocative (and NSFW) blog post this weekend, entrepreneur and developer Dave McClure takes both location-based social networks and their early adopters to task, arguing that “the current method of check-ins is a classic case of early-adopter lust for shiny objects, & has not a damn thing to do with long-term sustainable mainstream consumer behavior.” Dismissing the lure of the game-mechanics that many of these platforms utilize – the idea of collecting badges, points, and/or mayorships – McClure contends that until LBS start offering some sort of simple monetary incentive, mainstream users will not be compelled to check-in. Whether or not you agree with McClure’s pronouncements and predictions about location-based social networks, his comments about “early-adopter lust for shiny objects” are worth considering.

Although conventional wisdom posits that early adopters provide a solid target market for startups, there are some drawbacks in responding focusing solely on those who “lust for shiny objects.”

Early adopters’ enthusiasm may not always be a good indication of future growth and sustainability. Although early adopters are often willing to provide feedback on a product’s development, that feedback might not be the information necessary to woo a larger market. Early adopters’ feedback on existing features and push for new features might not necessarily be the feedback necessary for features that mainstream users would want or need. The push for special stamps and badges from Gowalla and Foursquare might excite early adopters, for example, but mainstream users may not find this a compelling reason to adopt a service. The lure of other social networks, such as Facebook, is in part that “everyone is there.” The question remains how to make the move from just the early adopters to “everyone” being there.

Nevertheless, early adopters can be terrific champions of a product, actively promoting it to their friends. Early adopters are a small, but vocal group. Ignore them at your peril. And focus exclusively on them at your peril.

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Microsoft announced a new phone this morning called the Kin. It’s all about being social: putting the stream of updates from your friends on Facebook and Twitter at the center of the experience, dragging photos to share them on the web, etc. It’s a Zune phone, it will be on Verizon exclusively and no pricing information is available yet.

At first glance this looks like a lightweight device aimed at people who don’t want to pay for an iPhone and for whom apps are less important than a strong focus on social networking. That might have made sense a year ago when Microsoft bought Danger, the makers of the Sidekick and the system the Kin seems to be built on, but does it still make sense today? I don’t think so.

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Social networking is no longer the destination, it’s now the context. It’s the identity that people use to log-in to apps and share the results back to their friends. Mobile phones are about powerful, intriguing apps, these days. Analyst firm Piper Jaffray reported this morning, for example, that teen intent to purhase the iPhone has doubled over the last year to 31% – and that despite the cost. It’s because of the apps. The user experience plus huge store full of apps plus marketing make the Apple world very hard to beat on mobile.

Where are the apps for the Kin? There doesn’t appear to be any, other than the built-in features like automatic online backup of photos and the creation of a photo timeline.

It’s important to give people access to Facebook, Twitter and MySpace – but is that really enough anymore? I’d argue that it’s not. The Apple app store has so caught the imagination of so many people, that’s where the action and excitement are on mobile. Perhaps that’s just among the slightly more geeky though, perhaps a low-cost Facebook phone will win the hearts of millions.

Six months ago the Palm Pixi was mentioned as a low-cost app-savvy mobile phone that could increase youth use of smartphones, but it doesn’t appear that that’s happened. Many young people buy feature phones and supplement them with iPod Touches – for the apps. That still sounds like the smartest move for the young people being targeted by the Kin. That way you get the apps you want without a monthly data plan.

Maybe the Kin will have a strong mobile browser and support the growth of a non-native, web based app ecosystem. That’s not the way it’s being framed, though.

What do you think, do you think a social phone is sufficiently compelling for users?

Discuss

You only have a few days left to save $200 on your tickets to ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010! The ticket price goes up to $595 on April 15. Register now!

The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit will take place May 7, 2010, in Mountain View, California and will be an exploration of the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications.

Sponsor

As with our first event, the Real-Time Web Summit last October, the Mobile Summit will be in the “unconference” format. We discovered in October that the unconference is a perfect complement to our brand, because it encourages a high quality two-way dialog. Not only that, but the knowledge and ideas that came out of our Real-Time Web Summit were practical and useful – we got a lot of great feedback about that.

As with our previous event, the Mobile Summit will be facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin, who in our opinion is the best in the business at this style of event. We’re using the same venue too, the beautiful Computer History Museum.

Mobile was one of our top five trends last year and continues to undergo explosive growth, so our aim with this event is to help you navigate the opportunities. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of mobile! Because it will be you – the attendees – who ultimately set the agenda. You can begin adding your suggestions now.

We will have two main tracks at this Summit, Development and Business. Here’s a sample of some of the topics we’ll explore in both of these tracks:

• Geo-location services – what can you do using location as a platform?
• Commerce & Marketing – as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel?
• Content, Publishing & Recommendations – the technologies and best practices.
• Mobile Social Networking – how to tap into communities on mobile devices.
• Internet of Things – the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data.
• Augmented Reality – the technology and business applications of AR.
• Native App vs. Browser Based – Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

If you’re a company in the Mobile Internet market, you may be interested in helping sponsor this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information on the sponsor options.

The ReadWriteWeb team is excited about our second event and we can’t wait to discuss the opportunities in Mobile with you on May 7. You can find banners and logos to link to our event here, if you’re so inclined.

We hope to see you on May 7!

Discuss