Pascal Van Hecke – Daily Links

Service built on Google Appspot meant for developers wanting to build quick signups or tying user credentials to an avatar:
"A lot of people use the same username across multiple services. Instead of offering your user a blank avatar when they sign up, why not take a guess and pull the portrait for the same username on other services as a default? That's what Overtar is here to help with."

P2P file storage. Your files are encrypted and stored on drives of other users of the service. Your password doesn't leave your computer.
The service was taken over by Lacie and relaunched recently.
Java based client.

"Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook."
Great article summarizing the developments in pubsub, webhooks and decentralized microblogging. Interesting that xmpp seems passé according to this article.

"widget uses BackType Connect to find all the links your posts receive on Twitter. It shows the number of tweets you have, and lets users retweet your posts quickly and easily"
Quite similar to the Digg badge…

"portfolio-sharing service that offers individual (self-directed) investors the opportunity to compete with, and be rewarded like, professionals. Covestor enables investors to build a verified track record and to collect a following of other investors based upon it. Covestor aims to de-institutionalize fund management."
To investigate: most of the top trader are aledged to trade in pennystocks: http://timothysykes.com/2008/10/07/pennystocking-joke-of-an-industry-domination-the-top-5-ranked-traders-out-of-10000-on-covestor-are-pennystockers/
Which makes it more of a gambling game actually.

"Licuro depositors put up their cash for auction and receive time deposit bids from a number of competing financial institutions within 2 hours"
(Pooling cash offerings so you get a better offer/higher interest rate from the bank for your savings.)

"6 Ideas For Those Needing Defensive Technology to Protect Free Speech from Authoritarian Regimes and 4 Ways the Rest of Us Can Help": a concise description of what's available nowadays to communicate securely and privately

"Lots of European initiatives, data sets and examples are hard to find outside their own language area. So this site will build an overview of European initiatives and activities around Open Government Data."
By Ton Zijlstra and James Burke.

Browser plugin that encrypts text with a key that will become unavailable after a set period of time:
"Vanish creates a secret key to encrypt a user's data item (such as an email), breaks the key into many pieces and then sprinkles the pieces across the P2P network. As machines constantly join and leave the P2P network, the pieces of the key gradually disappear. By the time the hacker or someone with a subpoena actually tries to obtain access to the message, the pieces of the key will have permanently disappeared. "

Wall Street Journal on WP29 opinion: default settings, disclosure to third parties, no behavioural advertising on sensitive information and erasure of info in deleted accounts.
Reactions:
"When a Facebook user installs an application, the user is warned that some personal information may be sent to the application provider, said a Facebook spokeswoman.
Facebook and MySpace added they are studying the EU opinion to assess how to respond to the guidelines."

Mashable stresses default security questions, minimal data disclosure to third parties, erasure of info after users delete accounts. Post positive on the document as a whole.
Quotes Jan Dhont (data privacy lawyer at Lorenz in Brussels) as "these regulations [of the directive] are not always very clear".

Techcrunch report stresses the data controller versus data processor distinction, and that both network operators and developers of 3d party applications are data controllers.

How Twitter "hacker" got access:
# accessed Gmail for a Twitter employee by using the password recovery feature that sends a reset link to a secondary email. The secondary email was an expired Hotmail account, he simply registered it and reset the password
# read emails to guess what the original Gmail password was and reset the password so the Twitter employee would not notice
# used the same password to access the employee’s Twitter email on Google Apps for your domain, getting access to sensitive company information from emails and attachments
# used this information along with additional password guesses and resets to take control of other personal and work emails
# used the same username/password combinations and password reset features to access AT&T, MobileMe, Amazon, iTunes, domain names and other services. A security hole in iTunes gave access to full credit card information in clear text
# Even at this point, Twitter had no idea they had been compromised

overview of the upcoming features of HTML5 along with a good set of references at the end

"Adding Facebook Connect to your website is not that hard, as a lot of information can be found at http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php. But there are some missing pieces to make it really easy if you have a website running PHP. So let me try to fill in the gaps."

Series of blogpostings by Marc Canter on what he sees as necessary components for the "Live Mesh". Distributed Identity systems obviously one of them (but also infrastructure, standards like XMPP, a lingua franca of UI components.

Great article on decentralised/distributed identity, and the semweb building stones needed.
Privacy is a complicating factor, yet the decentralised nature will be one of the safeguards for privacy on a linked-identity web.

Fascinating: Vendor Relationship Management seems to be further ahead in China…
(via Tom De Bruyne @Twitter)
"Individuals band together via online BBS (bulletin board systems), chat rooms and other web forums around products they are interested in purchasing, from fast food to cars or furniture. Once a team amasses enough members, their appointed captain approaches retailers to organize in-store haggling sessions.

A number of companies, like the electronics chain Gome, have started to deal directly with the groups while dozens of professional tuangou web sites have also emerged. Retailers say they often feel they have no choice but join the bartering or lose business.

Social networking has also been vital to the phenomenon's success.
…
The Chinese internet is more developed from a social perspective than in the West. There are more people who are participating in these kinds of conversations, and they are more active."

History and discussion of social features in Google Reader: has been and still is a troublesome story!
(I think it is difficult to bolt on social features afterwards on an activity that people have gotten to see as solitary and private…)

Every post or page can be wikified (made editable by all registered users).
Looks a bit unpolished at first sight, but this is a plugin I've been waiting for for a long time…

The "Static FBML application" is nothing but a scrap of editable html/fbml.
I guess you can use it for lots of purposes?

Step-by-step instructions

Nicely done.
Mashes the Twitter trending topics up with Bing search results.
(googtweets and googletweets.com are already taken )

Freemium, affiliates, subscription, virtual goods, advertising.
The value of the article are the micro-interviews with practitioners of each businessmodel.

Google's reaction to publishers' statement that "Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost".
Google will stick to the Robots' exclusion protocol, only extended with the unavailable_after specification.

Standard put forward by the publishing industry "to express access and use policies in a language that search engines' robot "spiders" can be taught to understand."
The standard is backwards compatible with robots.txt (it adds directives to robots.txt). It allows/disallows to crawl/follow/index/preserve or present (a resource in a specific context).
Presentation can be in the form of links/snippets/thumbnail images… and can be allowed/disallowed for specific usage such as image/news/blogsearch…
Presentation can also be limited to html with a specific class, or to snippets with specific length…, change of format can be allowed/disallowed…
(Note: so far only Exalead implements ACAP…)

Drupal distribution bundling typical intranet functionality:
- blogging
- wikis
- calendars
- group dashboards
- documents
- shoutbox
- ticketing system
Says it has an open architecture so more features can be developed as plugins

A segmentation of Facebook connections ("friendships"):
- all friends (that show up in your newsfeed)
- Maintained relationships (profile visited more than once)
- One-way communication (posting comment, writing message)
- Reciprocal communication (the core network)
For an average user, the size of those latter three is plotted in function of the size of the entire friend group, and an example of the network structure is plotted for those type of relationships.
Takeaway: news spreads fast via social networks because we're able to maintain lots of passive relationships

open source (GPL license) web analytics software. reports on website visitors, popular pages, the search engines keywords they used, the language they speak… Features are built inside plugins, you can build your own plugins You own your data!