By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Identi.ca/FriendFeed)


In working with Google FriendConnect recently, I realized that Google has a unique opportunity that perhaps they did not have previously. In only the last few months, Facebook has opened up the opportunity for any 3rd party site to integrate with Facebook, all via a special login button and form Facebook provides. Such technology is enabled through a product Facebook calls Facebook Connect. In playing with Google's product, it enables one to authenticate through other services and allow porting of friend data and more through its FriendConnect interface. I believe Google now may just have the unique opportunity to finally integrate Facebook as they wanted to before.

Several months back, Google attempted to launch FriendConnect with Facebook as one of the launch partners. Facebook quickly pulled Google's app from the Facebook App Store because they claimed it breached the Facebook Terms of Service. Google denied they were doing such, but Facebook insisted, keeping Google from being able to integrate with Facebook. It's unclear what exactly Facebook was claiming Google had done wrong, but it appeared to be some sort of backdoor technique to obtain user information.

Enter Facebook Connect

Several months later, Facebook launched their somewhat competing product, Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect does not integrate with other sites, but does integrate with OpenID similar to the way Google FriendConnect does, and enables you to through simple javascript, allow others to login and integrate their Facebook friends right on their own website.

Because FriendConnect is specific to Facebook, Google could now have just the opportunity to integrate Facebook the way they wanted to. Now, Google simply, and legally, should be able to implement a simple Facebook Connect login button into their user settings interface, let the user log into Facebook, and automatically Google would now have full access to the Facebook API from a third party site as they were trying to do before. Google can now enter in through the front door.

Not only that, but Facebook now allows site owners to identify existing accounts with existing Facebook accounts that have the same e-mail address. If Google were to collect the user's Facebook e-mail, or use their existing assuming it's the same as their Gmail address, they could then identify existing Friends on Google that also have Facebook accounts, allow you to link into them, invite them to begin using your FriendConnect-enabled site, and more.

Why Google has not yet implemented this is beyond me. Perhaps they already have and we are just waiting for Facebook to fully lift the Sandbox they have in place for developers right now. Regardless, I am willing to bet that Facebook integration into Google FriendConnect is coming very soon because of these features. Expect it to come in the form of Facebook Connect.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

In July, TweetDeck debuted as a new Adobe AIR app aiming to simplify your Twitter experience - offering live Twitter streams, grouping, and integrated search, all in one window. In the ensuing three months, TweetDeck has grown to incorporate services like 12seconds.tv, and has become a must-use application for many of the digerati, including Guy Kawasaki, who swore by it during his keynote at the recent BlogWorld Expo.

Today, Iain Dodsworth rolled out an update to the service with some much-requested features, including the ability to alter the application's look and feel, an improved user interface, support for new URL shorteniing services, part of the never-ending battle to be verbose within 140 characters or less, and additional security, as calls to Twitter are now made using HTTPS.


TweetDeck Shows Tweets, Groups, Replies, Search and DMs in One Window
The new update allows you pretty much all the functionality you get from Twitter's Web site from within TweetDeck, including marking and unmarking individual tweets as favorites, and adding the ability to follow or unfollow other users. Combined with TweetDeck's integrated search capability, the pair would set you up to follow a group of users who are focused on topics you're interested in.


You can see Tweets and Replies flow by in their own columns
And should you want to avoid being overloaded by seeing all the tweets from your friends scrolling by, you can even "turn off twitter updates", letting you use the tool as a desktop Twitter search application or a TwitScoop client. (See the full release notes here)

So far, I've trended toward using Posty, as it puts my updates on both Twitter and Identica, but when it comes to strictly Twitter, TweetDeck's UI and feature set puts the others to shame. You can get TweetDeck yourself at http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/.

Three weeks ago, we showed you images from an early access build of i.TV, a new application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that lets you get the latest TV and movie schedules from your area, rate shows, and leave reviews. The application, which is free, was added to the Apple iTunes application store late last night, and is available to the public immediately.

At launch, i.TV bills itself as the "ultimate" movies and TV guide for Apple's portable devices, offering more than 144,000 TV and movie listings, data from 5,000 local theaters, and nearly 6,000 TV previews or movie trailers. It currently works in the United States and Canada, so those outside North America will need to wait.


i.TV Pulled Down My Channel Data in Seconds to the iPhone
As has been said by many, no application is complete without some social element these days, and i.TV, as you recall, is no different. You can engage with other viewers of shows you like by sharing reviews, and you can recommend shows to friends by e-mail. In fact, some of the elements of this app shadow the recommendations I gave TiVo in June. (See: TiVo Is a Zero On the Social Web. It's Time They Fast Forward.)


You Can Get Show Data and Theater Info on i.TV
I downloaded the new application from the iTunes Store tonight, and the speed is remarkably faster than the first alpha I tried last month. It automatically recognized my location, and based on that zip code, I was pulling down channel listings in seconds. Given its price (free), there's really no reason not to have this app if you already have an iPhone or an iPod Touch. You can find it here: Apple iTunes Store: i.TV.

A year ago, Spokeo entered my view as a service that would let you follow all your friends' updates across multiple social networks. At the time, the idea that you could see all their updates, from MySpace to Friendster, as well as follow all your RSS feeds in one place, was quite compelling. But even then, I said, "there's always the question of "How will they make money?" Not surprisingly, their approach of building a large user base, and slapping ads all over the place, gathering the pennies where they fell, simply didn't scale.

Their timing was also impeccably poor, as just two weeks after my initial post, FriendFeed debuted, ushering in a new level of expectations for social following and engagement.

Tonight, in a blog post by Harrison Tang, the company's founder, he writes that "as most of you would agree, the Web 2.0 era is long over", recounting that the company "ran ads for 3 months in the beginning of 2008, and we quickly realized that even if we grow the traffic by 100 times, we still couldn’t cover our basic costs."

In what's a complete 180 from their initial free model open to all who grabbed beta invites, Spokeo has revamped, making itself a premium play, and has flipped the data on its head, being less about tracking friends, and instead, tailoring it toward HR professionals who want to do some detective work on potential hires. (See: www.spokeo.com/hr)

This new model actually falls further into what people often called "Spook-eo", as the service can dredge up items you might have thought had been long since tucked away in the Web's archives. But Spokeo, after having launched with big expectations, has clearly scaled back, and is facing a new reality head on, trying to salvage something. As Harrison wrote, "Advertisers aren’t dumb, and they won’t pay for ads that don’t work forever." I've been outspoken in my distaste for display ads on Web sites, and think they're not the solution to all that ails the Web. Even services and blog networks more mature than that of Spokeo are going to struggle as ad budgets dry up, and differentiation decreases.


An example of an update within Spokeo's new interface

If anything, Spokeo has never been one to shy away from questionable publicity. You might recall in the wake of Google's auto-friending debacle last December, Spokeo made no changes and held their ground. But I don't know that I was waiting for them to declare Web 2.0 "over". Maybe the "ads + free" model is on thin ice, but Web 2.0 is and was about more than that. Should be interesting to see if Spokeo can turn the corner with their new approach, and if HR professionals will come their way instead of relying solely on LinkedIn. I think they'll find this new road a struggle as well.