Read/WriteWeb News

[STUDY] Your Facebook Friends Influence How You Feel

Alicia Eler — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:30:00 -0800

"A cute baby dolphin for your weekend-viewing pleasure" a Facebook friend of mine writes. Under the text, I see a link to an imgur-hosted image of that amazingly adorable marine mammal. Suddenly, my day is feeling a lot better. Did I just catch a mood... on Facebook?

A new study by Facebook data scientists shows that Facebook users can spread emotions to their friends through messages, posts and status updates. It suggests that emotional contagion happens quite frequently on the world's biggest social network. Facebook's Chief Data Scientist Adam Kramer presented these findings at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology on January 27, 2012.

"It's time to rethink how emotional contagion works, since vocal cues and mimicry aren't needed," said Kramer.

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To test this out, Kramer used a program that identified words implying positive and negative emotions in Facebook status updates. Kramer looked at status update from one-million English-speaking users over a three-day period in 2010. Each Facebook user he studied had on average 150 friends, which means that this study included approximately 150 million people. The status updates that Kramer looked at were undirected, meaning they were not directed at a specific person.

He discovered that if a user's status update had more positive than negative words, updates from the user's friends averaged 7 percent more positive words and 1 percent fewer negative words. The inverse results were similar for negative words posted in a status update. The results were the same regardless of when during the week they were posted.

Did friends view a users' updates from three days before? Or did they just randomly see stuff in the news feed? Kramer said that there was no way to know. But one thing is for sure.

"Facebook users' emotions leaks into the emotional worlds of their friends," Kramer said.

Here's that cute baby dolphin for your weekend viewing pleasure.

Image courtesy Shutterstock.

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This App Tells You All About Your Facebook Friends, But Will It Make You Smarter?

Dave Copeland — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0800

In the two weeks I have been using Wisdom, an iPad and iPhone app that gives you detailed demographic data about your Facebook friends, the number of users has gone from just over 4 million to just under 6 million. Part of that rapid growth is most likely attributable to an extensive advertising campaign on the iPad version of the New York Times (which is where I first heard about it).

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Wisdom's marketing slogan promises "Get Wisdom and Get Wiser," and gives us the option of not only analyzing our own social network, but the entire Wisdom network (yes, to Get Wisdom you also need to give Wisdom your information, but they have a clear-cut, succinctly-explained and explicitly-presented privacy policy. I wish every online company and social network would use that bit of wisdom from the makers of Wisdom). "Best of all, the more people who get Wisdom, the smarter the application gets - and the smarter you become!" the apps Web site promises.

Well, maybe. Depending on your definition of "smarter."

For example, does it make me smarter to know that New England Patriots fans on the Wisdom network like Narragansett Beer and New York Giants fans prefer Hennessy? Or that fans of both teams prefer Dunkin Donuts? And why is Wisdom still teasing its analysis of Super Bowl fans nearly a full-week after the game?

The U.S. Election breakdown is slightly more telling. Based on "likes" of candidates on Facebook in the last 12 months, it shows a handsome U.S. map showing which states favor which candidates, then shows the demographic makeup of each candidate's followers (in other words, the same information found in almost any decent political poll).

You can also drill down and look at your friends. You can see who has posted on Facebook the most in the past 30 days, the average number of words they used in each post and other trivia.I now know that in the past 30 days Maya Angelou and David Sedaris were the most popular authors among my friends, and U2 and Johnny Cash were the most popular musicians. Nine of my friends have made a combined 27 trips to Fenway Park, and one of my friends has been to the same hospital six times (whoever it is, I hope everything is okay).

I can also look at whom I interact with most. There are loads of other data, but not as much as you'd think: I can generally check every chart and figure on Wisdom within five or 10 minutes. And even as the network increases in size, not much changes on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis.

Among other things, Wisdom lets you check where your Facebook friends have been checking in to find places you may want to go to.

Wisdom gives you a chance to do some very limited number crunching of your own, but not much. The design is beautiful, and it seems somewhat addictive the first time you play around with it, but then you realize there's not much you can do with the data aside from look at it.

And that's the problem: Every time I finish scanning through Wisdom, I'm left with that "Now what?" feeling we get when we don't really know what else to do with an app. The data is interesting, but there's not much I can do with it: I can't download it, I can't even access it from my desktop, making it harder to crunch.

Wisdom has some recommendations on how to use the app, including finding places to go when traveling and finding out what's popular. I have loads of other apps that do all of the things Wisdom claims to be able to do, and, since they're focused (finding the best place to eat, keeping me up-to-date on news and trends), the information in those apps comes off as being far more manageable than the artfully-presented glut I get in Wisdom.

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Daniel Jacobson of Netflix on the API with an Audience

Scott M. Fulton, III — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:30:00 -0800

Alexia Tsotsis, who writes for TechCrunch, had this advice on Twitter earlier today: "Good tech blogger rule of thumb: Avoid using 'API' in headlines when/if you can." Usually, I'm all thumbs myself, but I can't find this particular rule on them anywhere. I suppose I'm not a blogger after all.

Or perhaps I just know my audience. The first rule of communication, as I have taught and been taught (both quite repeatedly, and often) is, "Know your audience." The API has become the principal communications tool of any company that does business digitally. Therefore, professes Netflix Director of Engineering Daniel Jacobson, when designing your API, you should identify, evaluate, and serve its audience just like with any other communications tool.

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So naturally, like anyone who's heard the "Audience" axiom for the very first time, I asked the principal builder of Netflix' new, corporate-wide API, the veteran developer of NPR's API used in Infinite Radio, and the co-author of APIs: A Strategy Guide, what in the world he possibly means by that. In the third and final part of our continuing interview, part 2 of which was published in RWW last week, Jacobson defines two audiences: the public who uses a company's servers, and the company itself. And in contrast to many developers on the public stage today, he believes the evolution of your API begins internally.

"The most important decision you can make about an API program is, who is or are your key audience that you need to focus on?" states Jacobson. "Because once you've focused on the problem there, you get all kinds of other decisions that fall into place."

One-Third of the Traffic Isn't Half the Picture

The more common API project nowadays is based around a Web app or Web site, for what he calls the public use case. Oftentimes this is built as a shell around the business' existing services, effectively codifying the interactions that already take place every day by way of ordinary Web forms and the Submit button. A much more powerful case for API development - the foundation of Jacobson's entire philosophy - is the internal use case. This is where the business codifies the transactions that constitute everyday business.

Here is where Jacobson makes one of the most shocking revelations of all: Even though his service has been estimated to comprise as much as one-third of all downstream traffic in North America, the volume of API calls to Netflix servers whose source is the general public - someone out there with an Xbox 360 or a Windows Media Server or a Web browser connected to Netflix streaming video - is only about 10%.

"Most companies are exposed to these concepts of open APIs, and that's what gets them excited," he says. "It's about use cases, Twitter, Facebook, and whatever else changes business focus around the public case. So a lot of companies will take that concept of a public API, create a program around that, start thinking about office APIs, and then realize the opportunity that the private APIs gives them - multiple platforms, local apps... And once that happens, there's a transition point where a lot of these companies will say, 'Wow, I can really see a lot more power out of the internal use case.' And just like at Netflix, it will change your thinking about how you want to strategize your office."

As the APIs book states in Chapter 4, "The value chain starts with business assets, something that a business wants to allow others to use. Business assets can range from a product catalog to geospatial maps to Twitter posts to airline status information to services that allow products in the physical world to be controlled by virtual services such as payment systems. If there is nothing of value in the business assets, the API won't succeed."

The API's job, the book goes on to explain, is to expose these business assets in a secure and manageable fashion. Once that's feasible, developers are enabled to build applications around the API that makes these assets available. In the end, the app is developed around the assets, not the API. And if the API doesn't efficiently represent these assets, the app will likely fall apart, and the business' API strategy will fail.

Can an API Be Made 'Turnkey?'

But let's face it, isn't there some type of cloud-based service or outsourcing operation or a set of templates you can just plug in and build an API in three easy steps? You know, an "API wizard?" After all, aren't most RESTful architectures basically two-thirds the same?

You could almost hear Dan Jacobson's grimace through the telephone wire. "A lot of people think about APIs as open APIs," he responded. "And we [the authors of the APIs book] really wanted to put an emphasis on thinking about this as a business opportunity, and the internal, private use cases of interacting with your partners or your internal development teams. When you think about it in that context, outsourcing it to a company and just flipping a switch and turning something on isn't going to have all that business sensitivity baked into it.

"I've said it before, you need to bake your business DNA into your APIs," he emphasized. "If you don't do that, then you have this service that's not really filled with what your company is going for."

Netflix, he admits, is actually among the companies that have had to shift their API strategy. It's redeveloping the current Netflix Public API for a greater emphasis on the use cases that the general public will never see. "In Netflix' case, the business opportunity is independent from our ability to reach tens of millions of users, and get them into streaming on their devices and consuming our content," the lead engineer tells RWW. "That's the opportunity we are trying to pursue, and the API helps facilitate that, makes it faster, easier. And to the extent we can improve our strategy on building and improving these APIs, we can better improve our ability to satisfy our business goals."

The book projects a metaphor of APIs in the form of an iceberg. "A small part of what you see - which represents the public API - is above water, highly visible, but is also such a small percentage of the total mass. This huge mass underneath the water that you can't see, the private API, is the biggest part of the whole opportunity. I think it's a great visual around the way things are evolving in this space."

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Zuck Voting for Mitt? How Facebook "Like" Makes Things Ambiguous

Alicia Eler — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:30:00 -0800

Sometimes the "Like" button is not as clear cut as it seems. Even Zuck would agree.

ZDNet reports that a Facebook design flaw has accidentally convinced some readers that Zuckerberg is endorsing Republican Party presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

The awkward "Liking" took place earlier this week. Zuck "liked" a story by Salon.com's Farhad Manjoo, who posted the following status along with a link to mittromney.com: "Try, just looking at the Romney logo without seeing the word MONEY." When that image shows up on users' news feeds, however, it appears as if Zuck "liked" the Mitt Romney link rather than Manjoo's comment, coupled with a link to the Romney website. Whatever happened to the "Like" button making things simple?

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On Manjoo's Facebook profile, however, it's pretty clear that Zuckerberg "liked" his status update joke. Check it out. Facebook prominently displays Zuckerberg's name as one of the 526 people who, as of right now, "like" this post.

Seeing this out of context in the main news feed might lead some to believe otherwise. It looks like Zuck is endorsing Romney. Here's the screengrab of the news feed view that ZDNet posted:

This sort of screw-up is just a byproduct of Facebook's annoying oversharing features that clutter up users' news feed.

Do Facebook users really need to know what their friends "like" in as prominent a spot as the main news feed? The same goes for the news ticker, which brings a micro-view to what every single one of a user's Facebook friends likes and comments on.

Just think: If Facebook tweaked both the news feed and the news ticker to show users content that has real value, rather than the mundane activities of other Facebook users, "like" ambiguities might happen a lot less.

But back to the whole Manjoo/Zuckerberg/Romney "like" thing.

On Manjoo's side, the status update could have been clearer and more poignant if he just wrote that joke as a status update, and included an image of Romney's name-as-logo. (Switch two letters around and Romney spells "money"!)

Still, the Zuckerberg "like" would have come up the same in the main news feed. It just would have looked like Zuck "liked" an image of Romney's logo, which could also be misconstrued.

So to completely avoid any Facebook false endorsement snafus like this one, Manjoo should have posted this as a Twitter-like, witty one-liner status update. Of course, that would have been too simple, even by Facebook standards.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

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iPads and iPhones Make Up More Web Traffic Than Mac Desktops

John Paul Titlow — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:15:15 -0800

The tablet revolution. The post-PC era. The smartphone explosion. Whatever label you want to apply to it, personal computing is changing. People are spending more time with smaller devices like tablets and smartphones and less time on desktops and laptops. This been evident for awhile, but the trend is still relatively young and the data points are only just beginning to trickle in.

For evidence of this shift, look no further than Apple. The company just reported an absolutely bonkers financial quarter, in which it sold 37 million iPhones and 15.4 million iPads. The two products now make up 72% of Apple's quarterly revenue and the consumer demand shows no sign of letting up.

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As iOS devices sell like crazy, it only makes sense that the amount of Web traffic coming from these gadgets would increase. But by how much? Well, that traffic is now greater than the traffic that comes from Mac OS X, according to data from advertising analytics firm Chikita.

This month, iOS edged past Mac OS X for the first time, accounting for 8.15% of all Web traffic, compared to the 7.96% coming from Mac desktops. Of course, this data does include Android, which probably constitutes a share of Web traffic that's roughly comparable to iOS. Even so, the combined mobile operating systems likely do not even begin to outnumber desktops overall, as there are still plenty of Windows machines out there.

Indeed, it will be some time before tablets and smartphones truly outnumber desktops and laptops. For now, most consumers are not replacing their computers with smaller devices, but rather supplementing them.

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A Proposal to Fix Online Identity

Jon Mitchell — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:53:00 -0800

Facebook's social graph of you isn't you. It's an approximation and an extrapolation based on little clues you've left lying around the Web. Using your Facebook or Google identity gives those services more data points about what you do, but that doesn't mean it substitutes for whom you are.

The central thing wrong with the social Web is that users don't own their identities. Users share themselves with identity services - like Facebook and Google - that then act as representatives of the people using them. Facebook and Google allow other sites to rent those identities. But when you log in to a new service using Facebook Connect, you are actually constraining your identity to the Facebook version of it, though you're expanding Facebook itself. Do you want to be the same version of yourself everywhere else as you are on Facebook? Or Google?

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Facebook & Google Act on Our Behalf

By doing things this way, Facebook, Google et al. can lend your name to things without really asking you, like ads and promotions of various kinds. You have implied your permission by "liking" things or "checking in" to places.

But you didn't create the ad. You just initiated an action that triggered it. Social applications that speak for us this way are using our identities without us.

Identity Is Prismatic

Our Facebook and Google identities are like constellations. The stars are our actions on the Web. Facebook and Google are on the ground, staring up at the sky with a bunch of marketers and advertisers. They're the know-it-alls pointing at abstract shapes and confidently labeling them with names.

But the actual user, not the vague constellation of her online actions, is a multi-faceted person. "Identity is prismatic," as Chris Poole says, and "Facebook and Google do identity wrong."

"It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'" Poole says. In other words, we're only presenting one, Facebook-facing aspect of ourselves when we share online via Facebook. The advertisers who make Facebook possible don't have a full picture; they have a Facebook caricature.

Today's Social Web Is a Performance

The more about ourselves we share with Facebook, the more stars you can see in the night sky, the clearer the constellation appears. Hence, Facebook rolls out Timeline and asks us to share our entire life story.

But what Facebook has to acknowledge is that this is still a performance. It's a make-believe Facebook self. And Facebook's (and Google's) business consists of spinning that self on our behalf, mapping it and stereotyping it and selling it.

It's not wrong of Facebook or Google to do that, per se. But I have a feeling that better products, better ads, and a better Web would be possible if users owned their identities, showing as many (or as few) facets as they want to show.

A Proposal: Online Identity as a Fingerprint

Users should have signatures that are truly theirs, instead of their Facebook and Google guardians signing on their behalf.

Identity on the Internet should be embedded by the user like a fingerprint. It should be written into the digital material we make using hardware we have authorized. We should also be able to withhold it whenever we choose and make the content anonymous.

We should also be able to sign multiple and pseudonymous identities, but we'll have to hash that out later, as a political issue, once this is even technically possible. The first step is to create a protocol that lets us sign off the bits we've written as being of us, so that they remain identifiable no matter where the content is repackaged or republished.

Why Do We Want This?

We want this because it would delineate a difference between something we made or we said and something an outside service extrapolated about us.

We want this because it would simplify problems of attribution and copyright on the Web. If we didn't sign something we created, it would default to the other ways we deal with unsigned content. But content that is signed would have an unmistakable origin.

"There would be a layer of protection between who we declare we are and who companies assume we are."

We want this because it will make identity services like Google, Facebook and the rest compete honestly for our attention instead of boxing us into their worlds.

Facebook and Google can only make enough money from their profiles of us by tracking our activity and extrapolating who we are and what we do. But that would still be possible on top of a layer of authentic identity that those services didn't own. They would be able to compete based on whose recommendations were more accurate, but there would be a layer of protection between who we declare we are and who companies assume we are. We would no longer be tied to just one of those identity constellations.

OpenID is not what I'm talking about, either. It's more than just logging in to websites. This is something we write in. It's not a handle and a password. It's like one of those wax seals on a letter, except with Information Age security measures.

The Naïve Things About My Idea

Many things about my above proposal are naïve. Here are just a few:

I am not well-versed enough in the longstanding projects of this nature that already exist, like GnuPG signing or Mozilla's BrowserID, to know what the challenges are. But I'm working on it.
I haven't specified at which layer of the user interface this identity signature should take place, whether at the device level, the browser level, or what. Again, that's because I am not well-versed enough in the technical requirements of such a project.
And yes, the inertia of moving away from siloed Web identities (Google/Facebook) towards this is unconscionably humongous.

So I know there are experts on these problems out there. Talk to me. What's right and what's wrong about this idea? Who's working on it? How is it going? Is it impossible? Is it unnecessary? Is it hopeless? In the interest of a better Web, let's talk about this.

See also: Scott M. Fulton, III's year-end post, "Issues for 2012 #3: Who Gets to Define Your Online Identity?"

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

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Brian Stevens on Red Hat's Involvement with OpenStack

Joe Brockmeier — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:30:00 -0800

Red Hat has been involved with OpenStack development for some time. Unlike the bulk of companies involved, however, Red Hat has gone about its work quietly and without "officially" joining the effort. Red Hat still isn't saying exactly what it hopes to get from OpenStack contributions, but Brian Stevens did divulge a bit about the company's involvement.

Stevens is Red Hat's CTO and vice president of worldwide engineering. Right now, he says Red Hat has no "confirmed" product plans for OpenStack but the company is "just finding additive ways where we can get involved in the community and help move OpenStack forward."

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Even though Red Hat isn't saying what its intent for OpenStack is, Stevens says that OpenStack is "highly complementary" to other projects and products in Red Hat's portfolio.

With the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0, we provide a community-backed solution (through the oVirt project) for enterprise-scale virtualization, which includes capabilities such as live migration, high availability and dynamic scheduling with support for both virtual servers and virtual desktops (VDI) in a single open platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux with integrated KVM, when combined with OpenStack, forms an interesting foundation for building enterprise or public IaaS clouds.

Our upcoming CloudForms solution will provide IT governance and lifecycle of application management across hybrid clouds including vSphere, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and providers like AWS. Architecturally CloudForms sits above the IaaS layer.

Stevens also says that Red Hat is already seeing "early stage interest" in using OpenStack with RHEV and "in some cases are providing consultative support for our customers."

Joining OpenStack?

RackSpace and the OpenStack community are currently thrashing out a plan to create a foundation around OpenStack. I asked Stevens if the company was involved in those discussions. Stevens says that the company has "publicly expressed some of our thoughts on how the governance for OpenStack could be modified to allow for, in our opinion, a meritocracy-based model that could result in an even more vibrant community."

Stevens says that Red Hat would like to see a "lightweight and open" foundation, of which "there are many successful models in existence that could be emulated." He pointed to the LibreOffice community, Apache/Hadoop, GNOME, and the Linux kernel community as examples of well-run communities.

Since Red Hat is already doing the hard part of actually contributing to OpenStack, why not actually take the step of joining officially? Stevens says that it's more efficient.

"The way OpenStack has set things up, official joining is not a prerequisite to getting involved and helping," says Stevens. "So instead of a press release, we chose to just roll up our sleeves. In some cases we find it more efficient to get involved in the actual technologies than in some of the commercial and marketing elements of open source efforts."

Stevens says that it's "early days" for OpenStack, but says that it's "another example of collaborative open source development driving cloud innovation."

The next OpenStack release is due on April 5th. It will be interesting to see which companies have put in the most to the Essex release, and how it turns out.

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[Video] Artist's Time-Lapse Map of the World's 2053 Nuclear Explosions

Dan Rowinski — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:00:00 -0800

For those of us that came of age during the 1980s and after, the threat of nuclear oblivion has never seemed to be a real threat. The dangers of AIDS, economic failure, terrorism have loomed large in the lives of Generation X, Y and the Millennials, but very few of us ever had to hide under our desks during a bomb drill or watch Dad obsess over the backyard underground bunker.

In 2003, Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto created a time-lapse video map of every nuclear bomb explosion in the world between 1945 and 1998. There were 2053 explosions in that time, including the tests that the United States made during the "Manhattan Project" and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ostensibly ended World War II. The 14-minute long video (below) is a beautiful and terrifying look at the nuclear era that defined world politics, warfare and humanity for more than half a century.

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Hashimoto is a curator at the Lalique Museum in Hakone, Japan. The video was created in 2003 as a series expressing Hashimoto's view of, "the fear and the folly of nuclear weapons." The video represents nuclear tests with a colored dot and a beep on a map. It starts slow in 1945, showing a world view of a couple flashes in the southwestern United States before zooming in on the two bombs dropped in Japan. The video then pans out and continues for the duration from a birds-eye view of the world. The climax comes between 1955 and 1970 as the Soviet Union joined the U.S. as a nuclear power and England, France, India and Pakistan eventually joined the arms race.

The U.S. had the most nuclear tests, by a large margin, with most occurring in the southwest. The Soviet Union performed most of its tests in and around what is now Kazakhstan and the Lake Balkhash region with many also coming in northern Siberia and Nordic border with Finland. When the British entered the nuclear race, their first tests were in the desolate regions of west Australia. The French were several years behind but made up for coming late by being very active with nuclear tests in the South Pacific, the most vast and uninhabited region on Earth. India and Pakistan tested nuclear bombs mostly in the northern section of the Indian subcontinent. China tested many of its nuclear weapons at Lop Nur in the northwestern part of the country.

Hashimoto's data is based on research from the Swedish Defense Research Establishment and Stockholm International Peace Institute. It does not include two supposed nuclear tests by North Korea in 1998 that may or may not have actually happened. Pakistan was the last to test nuclear bombs in 1998.

"This piece of work is a bird's eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second. No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier. The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted. I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world," said Hashimoto according to the website CTBTO, a commission formed to ban the testing of nuclear weapons.

The gruesome tally: the U.S. tested 1032 nuclear weapons, U.S.S.R 715, France 210, Britain 45, China 45, India 4 and Pakistan 2.

See Hashimoto's video "1945--1998" below.

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When Facebook Defriending Ends in Murder

Alicia Eler — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:00:00 -0800

Reuters reports that a Tennessee couple who "defriended" Jenelle Potter on Facebook were murdered by her father and another man.

"This is just senseless," said Johnson County Sheriff Mike Reece told Reuters. "We've had murders, but nothing like this."

Jenelle Potter, 30, is one of those types who you just don't mess with. She is a Facebook fanatic who stays home with her parents and is constantly on Facebook.

"Once you've crossed her, you've crossed her father too," Reece said.

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Marvin Enoch "Buddy" Potter Jr., 60, and Jamie Lynn Curd, 38, were each charged with two counts of first-degree murder on Wednesday in Mountain City, which is located in northeastern Tennessee. They were arrested on Tuesday.

Billy Clay Payne Jr. and Billie Jean Hayworth were the victims of this Facebook-induced crime, which occurred last month. The murderers spared Hayworth's eight-month-old baby, whom Hayworth was holding when she was killed. According to the Associated Press, Billy Payne Sr., who also lived with the couple, left the house at 5:30am for work, hours before the murderers occurred.

No charges have been filed against Jenelle Potter, the sheriff said.

Facebook "Caused" Domestic Violence in Texas

In October of last year, CNET reported that domestic violence erupted after a woman allegedly failed to "Like" her husband's Facebook update.

Benito Apolinar of Pecos, Texas, stopped by his wife Dolores Apolinar's house to drop off his two children. After 15 years of marriage, the two had recently decided to separate. Dolores would not let Benito into her home because she was on house arrest and did not want to get in trouble. Plus, Benito was drunk. They exchanged a few words, and then Benito came into the house anyway, pulled Dolores' hair and punched her in the cheek.

Benito's version of this story is quite different, and has everything to do with a Facebook status update.

According to Benito, the two had been staying together at the house for a week, and he was upset that Dolores did not click "Like" on a Facebook status update about the anniversary of his mother's death. In his version, Dolores hit herself in the face, and then smacked him in the eyebrow area with her phone.

Benito Apolinar was arrested on battery charges.

Image courtesy Shutterstock.

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[Data Visualization] How Yahoo's Homepage Delivers Personalized News to 700 Million People

John Paul Titlow — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:30:56 -0800

With all the attention focused on Facebook and Google, it's sometimes easy to forget how many people visit Yahoo on a typical day. The site has over 700 million users and gets a massive amount of page views each day. As the company struggles to figure out what its future focus should be, one thing they've prioritized highly is content.

Every day, Yahoo displays about 13 million different news story combination on its homepage. Those stories are personalized based on demographic data and reading behavior, and the company keeps track of what kind of stories do well with which groups of people.

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To do that, Yahoo utilizes a complex set of algorithms it calls the Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (CORE). The system crunches 1.2 terabytes of data per hour to determine which stories to deliver to which users. The result is a line-up of stories on the homepage that's customized for each user, based on calculations that take milliseconds to crunch as the page loads. It also lead to a substantial increase in engagement on Yahoo's site, where click-throughs to news stories have increased by 300% since this technology was first implemented.

To illustrate how this works, Yahoo has created an interactive data visualization that shows visitor traffic data in nearly real time. Using it, one can drill down into specific age groups, genders and story types to see what people's aggregate reading habits look like.

You can view and play with the data visualization here. They even designed the UI in HTML5 rather than Flash so you can check it out on your iPad.

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Microsoft Sides with Apple in FRAND Licensing Fracas

Scott M. Fulton, III — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:00:00 -0800

The term "reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing" or "RAND" (which may or may not include the "F" for "fair," depending on one's whim) was evidently coined long before any group of people came to a mutual decision upon what constituted "reasonable." At any rate, the debate over what's reasonable and what's "F" has now gone full-throttle, with Google's revelation Wednesday that it perceives prospective partner Motorola Mobility's (MMI) definition as reasonable enough, and that it's 2.25% of retail sale price minus subsidies.

That might not sound like much, but if you compound all the essential patents for which a manufacturer may need to obtain a license just to produce an ordinary smartphone, the sum total may become quite a chunk. That's the argument Apple made to European telecom regulators last November, in a letter revealed only last Tuesday. With Apple and Google now on the record, Microsoft could not afford to be left out of the discussion.

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So late Wednesday, it published a brief statement in support of FRAND terms, with the "fair" included, for the licensing of patents that are essential to adopting an industry standard. The general complaint is that companies should not have to be levied unreasonably just so their products can support the standards that consumers dictate they must support.

To Fair or Not To Fair

Microsoft's statement reads in part, "The international standards system works well because firms that contribute to standards promise to make their essential patents available to others on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms. Consumers and the entire industry will suffer if, in disregard of this promise, firms seek to block others from shipping products on the basis of such standard essential patents."

This language has the advantage of appearing to place Microsoft in the same camp with Apple, which raised the issue in the first place, while at the same time adopting terms that could be comprised as not necessarily in opposition to Google.

Apple's letter to ETSI Director-General Luis Jorge Romero Saro, dated last November 11, does not single out Google or Motorola by name. Nevertheless, it was clear to most, and it was probably clear to Romero Saro, to whom Apple was referring.

"It is apparent that our industry suffers from a lack of consistent adherence to FRAND principles in the cellular standards arena," wrote Apple Vice President and Chief Legal Counsel Bruce H. Watrous, Jr. He went on to stipulate the three pillars of what Apple considers fair licensing (again, with the "F"): 1) a royalties rate that takes into account the total amount that manufacturers would end up paying all their licensors in royalties; 2) a common base price, or fair market average, against which this rate would be applied, as opposed to the actual sale price of each item; 3) a commitment never to seek injunctions against anyone entering into a FRAND agreement.

Google's response to that letter, made to various MMI licensees and then made public, literally promised to make a "binding and unconditional commitment" to continue issuing licenses on RAND terms (without the "F") on one condition: that the licensee refrain from seeking an injunction against MMI.

The Hidden Hook in the Grant Back

That might have been the end of it, had Microsoft VP and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner not written a lengthy blog post explaining the otherwise brief Microsoft official statement.

"Firms benefit from having their ideas included in new standards, and in exchange for this, firms usually make a promise: that if they have any patents they have that are 'essential' to implementing a standard, they will make these patents available to all," Heiner wrote. "This system works really well, almost all of the time." Taking the first big pick-axe swing at the dam, Heiner added that most of the time, Microsoft does not actually find itself licensing its own patents to others, when those patents apply to standards.

He then alluded to one of the big underlying issues in this whole debate. Again without singling out Google or MMI by name, he stated his company's position that "patent holders should not seek to block shipments of competing products just because they implement an industry standard - a license on reasonable terms is always available. That also means that such patent holders should not require other firms to license back their patents, except for patents that are essential to the same standard."

The practice here is something called a grant back, and it's rooted in the notion that a licensor will always be granting licenses to its own competitors. Those competitors will always seek to improve the technology it's being allowed to use, because that's all part of obtaining a competitive advantage. The right to improve is something the open source community has already worked out in great detail. A grant-back clause, however, would effectively license any improvements back to the licensor, and bar the licensee from seeking an injunction on the use of those improvements.

It's what some legal sources have called "open source, except closed."

Google's letter to MMI licensees explicitly allows for grant back clauses, saying that Google's final offer of RAND terms "may include a reciprocal grant back license for Google's products to the licensee's Essential Patent Claims for the same standards, also on RAND terms."

The typical weapon of retaliation against someone who improves upon a standard, in either direction, is a motion for injunctive relief. That's something which Apple stands firmly against, and Heiner's blog post puts Microsoft in Apple's camp for this reason. "Seeking an injunction," Apple's Watrous wrote, "would be a violation of the party's commitment to FRAND licensing."

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How We Used 15 Minutes To Save $600 On Airfare

Dave Copeland — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 08:30:00 -0800

My girlfriend and I are renting an apartment in Paris for a week this summer, which is the first real vacation I have taken since 2006, when I went to Dublin to run a marathon then spend a week recovering in Irish pubs and on Irish seashores. (Word of advice: no matter how enchanting it seems, don't rent a bicycle on the rocky Aran Islands off the coast of Galway two days after running your first marathon).

The only thing that is further in the past than my last, "real" week-long vacation was the first time I turned to Orbitz as my first and last shopping destination when booking air travel for business and the weekend getaways. According to Orbitz, the first trip I ever booked through the site was in November, 2001 when I flew from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia.

That says a lot about how good Orbitz has been at maintaining my loyalty, but not so much about my savvy shopping skills. With a pair of $1,200+ flights to purchase (based on originall search of Orbitz), I decided it was time to figure out a better way to buy airfare online.

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The strategy outlined below takes a few extra steps, and there are certainly similar Web sites you can turn to instead of the ones I recommend. But what amounted to less than 15 minutes of extra Web sleuthing ended up saving us more than $500 on the two flights we purchased.

Figure Out When You Want To Travel

One of the reasons for my Orbitz rut is that my travel has been largely for work and holidays. Searching multiple sites when I had specific travel dates meant there wasn't going to be much more than a couple of bucks in price variations from one site to the next.

Planning a vacation, however, meant I have some flexibility in dates. So I turned to the Matrix Airfare Search offered by ITA Software, a unit of Google. By plugging in a single date, I can see the lowest airfares for that date and the following 30 days. Within a few minutes we were able to figure out the cheapest time for our trip involved a mid-June departure.

Buy Now Or Wait?

Another reason why I liked Orbitz is that if someone booked the same flight on the site for less than I had paid, they would send me a check. It's a nice little price guarantee but it doesn't protect me from price fluctuations on other sites, and it doesn't help me figure out whether or not prices are going to go down between now and my trip.

Enter Bing's travel search engine, which tried to predict whether or not flight prices will go up or down. Once we had settled on our travel dates for Paris, we searched for the same flights in Bing and tried to figure out if we should book now or later.

While the price for our Paris search held relatively steady when compared to our initial search on Matrix, note the difference in the sample itinerary I'm using for this article:

Another nice feature about Bing is that it opened the same search in Hotwire, Travelocity, Expeida and Priceline so we could instantly comparison shop.

Track Prices

In both case, the time to buy was when we searched. But had Bing told us to wait, we could have used Yapta to track the price of our flight and even gotten text message alerts sent to our mobile phone when prices dropped.

If we wanted to bid on Priceline to see if we could shave some money off the price of the flight, the Bidding For Travel forum, as well as the Priceline and Hotwire forums on Better Bidding, are good resources for picking up pointers.

Click "Purchase Now"

As it stands, we were ready to purchase. The best possible price on a flight we could get was on Aer Lingus with a stopover in Dublin. We did one last search of the air carrier's Web site (which is often the cheapest place to look). Out of loyalty, and because I am such a big fan of getting checks in the mail, I did one last search on Orbitz.

Ultimately, Expedia had the best price. With just a little extra time we were got the price down to $904 meaning we saved close to $600 on what we would have paid for two flights on our initial search.

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

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[Poll] Are the iPad 3 Rumors Underwhelming?

Dan Rowinski — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:35:00 -0800

One more thing ... what will it be this time around? Apple's so-called iPad 3 is said to be announced in the first week of March and the rumor mill thinks it has pretty much nailed what the device will entail. A higher resolution screen, faster processor, better battery and a quality camera all packed in the same 9.7-inch form factor running iOS 5. Is it a technological marvel of the mobile revolution or just another ho-hum iteration from Apple?

If you are a device specification geek, the lusty deets from the iPad 3 are likely to excite you more Megan Fox announcing she is coming back for Transformers 9: The Rise and Fall of Prime set in the year 0001 A.D. during the height of the Roman Empire. If not, well, you might be out of luck with the iPad 3. It is hard to get pumped up for a device that, in reality, will be a nominal upgrade over the already great iPad 2. That is why I am waiting for the "one more thing" from the iPad 3. Are the iPad 3 rumors underwhelming? That is the topic of this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

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As we discussed when the iPhone 4S was released, public expectations of new Apple products are unreasonably high. Five to 10 years ago, when PCs were making great technological leaps from one version to the next, we all cared about how much RAM was packed in a new unit, what kind of processor it was running and where the components of the motherboard came from. The smartphone revolution similarly glommed on to the spec-driven madness. Single core, dual ... quad core?! How many megahertz is that baby packing?

We are not all that concerned with hardware specs at ReadWriteWeb. When we write about hardware, it is within the discussion of functionality. How many different tasks can a quad-core tablet perform and how does that make you a better Internet user, employee, developer, publisher? What kind of benefits or detriments are there to the deployment of LTE 4G for mobile app developers?

Every year with Apple we are looking for the company to wow us with something new, something "magical." Pundits do not accept iterative releases that are a small step above the last round. Part of that is because Apple only releases one new iPhone and iPad a year unlike a company like Samsung that releases a new smartphone or tablet seemingly every other week. When you release two new mobile products a year, they better blow our freaking socks off.

What is the one more thing, damn it?!

There better be a special one more thing at next month's iPad announcement. Because I do not really care if the "iPad 3" has a 2048x1536 resolution screen. I am interested in a better battery but it is not a game changer that I must have. A camera that actually takes quality pictures would be nice too but the iPad is rarely a camera for me. Apple needs to convince me that the iPad 3 is so far and above the iPad 2 that I need... it... now.

The iPad 2 did this to the original iPad. While it may seem blasphemous to the Apple Fanboys, the iPad 2 made the original seem like a prototype. I do not see this happening with the iPad 3.

It may have Siri! Shrug. LTE! Doubt it. Interesting but not essential. Bluetooth! I was never much of a Bluetooth user anyway (and I am not alone in that). Thunderbolt! With Wi-Fi syncing in iOS 5, that is not a game-changer and Thunderbolt's rollout is limited enough to make it of nominal impact. Really, my prediction is that the iPad 3 will have a lot of the same functionality of the iPhone 4S, a device that is a solid release but nothing groundbreaking from previous versions.

Steve Jobs was known for his "one more thing." With the iPhone 4S there was not really a one more thing. What can Apple do to really surprise us anymore?

This is why I find the iPad 3 rumors to be underwhelming. None of the spec-driven madness excites me. We used to expect game-changers from Apple every year. Now we just get iterative updates. Does that make Apple a victim of unreasonable expectations? Certainly.

What do you think of the iPad 3 rumors? Are specs enough for you? Do you get all tingly with Retina display quality? Take the poll below and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Iran Blocks HTTPS, Cutting Off Gmail, Yahoo and Other Major Sites

John Paul Titlow — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 06:42:42 -0800

The Iranian government isn't exactly known as a champion of free speech and access to information. Thus, it's never shocking to hear about Internet censorship in the country, the state of which appears to be getting worse all the time.

Today, news surfaced that the country is blocking access to websites that use HTTPS. That means that a number of popular, secure websites like Google, Gmail, Yahoo and even online banking sites are inaccessible. Anything based outside the country that uses a secure connection via HTTPS is blocked, according to news reports and a thread on Hacker News. Secure sites based within Iran are reportedly still accessible.

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The shutdown is said to be timed to coincide with the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and is believed to be temporary. Exactly how long it will be in place is unclear. The revolution culminated with the fall of the Shah on February 11, 1979, but the country did not officially become an Islamic Republic until April 1. So, the restrictions could be lifted this weekend, or perhaps several weeks from now.

Meanwhile, developers and members of the Hacker News community are brainstorming ways to help Iranians get around the limitations. Some have suggested setting up Tor bridges for Web users in Iran, although that presents its own logistical issues.

These measures come just as the Iranian government begins to roll out longer-term plans to effectively strangle the Internet to death and create a new, state-sponsored Web for citizens of that country to use. The government is even requiring Internet cafe owners to videotape all patrons so that Web surfers can be more easily identified by authorities.

If news reports are accurate, Iranians could be facing a level of Web censorship that approaches that which exists in North Korea, where public access to the Internet we all know and love is barely existent. Whether or not Iranians, who have already had a taste of what the Web can do, will tolerate such restrictions without a struggle, remains to be seen.

That the Iranian government is clamping down on Internet access is hardly a surprise. In 2009, they saw firsthand the kind of unrest that emerge amidst a well-connected and dissatisfied citizenry. Since then, governments in nearby countries have been overthrown or otherwise challenged in the so-called Arab Spring.

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Microsoft Dynamics Tries to Ease Enterprise Customers Onto the Cloud

Dave Copeland — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 06:30:00 -0800

The Next Web is having "a chuckle" at the expense of customers Microsoft is catering to with its enterprise resource planning products.

And after spending an hour talking with Fred Studer, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics, and Microsoft Business Solutions Technical Fellow Mike Ehrenberg Thursday, we can say it's probably an unfair chuckle at both Microsoft and its customer base. "I bet they still use IE6," Alex Wilhelm writes in his post.

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Which may indeed be true. Because something tech journalists - myself included - forget far too often is that the business owners who make everything from our lunch to automobiles don't geek out on this stuff the way we do. Small- and medium-sized businesses look at every tech purchase as an expense that eats away at the bottom line, and even the largest business, given the current state of the economy, wants an immediate return on investment.

So tech journalists and Microsoft can make declarations about the cloud being great, the place only a fool would avoid, but it's up to tech journalists and the companies that make those cloud-enabled products to show them why they're losing time and productivity by doing things the way they have always done things. And remember, Microsoft made a lot of those on-premise technologies a lot of companies purchased a decade or more ago, so they have to be extra tactful in convincing companies about what can be a radical shft.

Breaking Down The Microsoft Dynamics Strategy

At the risk of oversimplifying, Studer and Ehrenberg are tasked with anticipating problems for a wide range of businesses, then figuring out which tools from Microsoft's ample shed they can apply to solving those problems. For example, they were the ones who leaked news to ReadWriteWeb that a workplace version of Kinect would be available next month.

The two are clearly focused on Cloud-based products that are more affordable and easier to implement, but that is not all the division is working on. But they also want to introduce those products to customers with on-premise products with gentle nudges as opposed to simply demanding that they change. The strategy, as outlined by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, includes moving all four of the Dynamics ERP products to the Azure, offering exclusive tie-ins to other products with the cloud versions of its ERP products and eventually releasing new products on the cloud before the on-premise versions are released.

"We think our history of building on-site solutions give us an advantage. The shift isn't going to be immediate," Studer said. "People are going to exist on-premise and on the cloud for a long time to come, and that is building into the things we do well."

Studer and Ehrenberg outlined some of the problems they are addressing, some of the possible solutions and gave a sneak peak of some of the topics they'll be discussing at next month's Convergence 2012 conference in Houston.

ERP Needs To Be Better At Predicting Business Trends

Ehrenberg said ERP has been good at analyzing past business trends, but it needs to get better at predicting what will happen tomorrow. We talked about restaurants and grocery stores that still may be using a spiral-bound notebook to record daily sales and weather figures on any given day to help them make food orders for the same day the following year.

One small chain of convenience stores Microsoft Dynamics has been working with had a women who was doing just that for about 20 stores in the chain and used about two dozen data points, ranging from weather forecasts to local sports team schedules.

Dynamics was able to build a machine-learning model of the women's system and analyze 200 days of historical data. The Microsoft model was better able to adapt, finding new information to pull into the model (like a sports team's schedule that was affecting sales but not being accounted for), while eliminating other data points that didn't matter.

Other models can be tailored for other businesses. Retailers rely on foot traffic, something that may be affected by city sidewalk construction projects. A convention schedule from the local Chamber of Commerce could also be rolled into the model.

"We've done the science," Ehrenberg said. "Now we're working on ways to turn it into a product."

Giving Little Guys A Fighting Chance Against Wal-Mart And Amazon

The cloud, Studer said, will let small retailers share inventory: with other small retailers.

There's a good chance you've done something like this in the past year. You've vowed to support small, local businesses. Maybe you're buying a newly-released book or an oil filter for your car, or a set of socket wrenches. You head to the local book shop, auto parts dealer or hardware store, only to find the item is out of stock. The shop owner can order it for you, but...

You soon find yourself walking across the parking lot of a big-box retail store, or you find yourself driving home to order the item online. Chances are it's cheaper than you would have paid at the smaller store, not to mention it's in stock, and that's enough to temper the guilt you're feeling about not buying local. And maybe the next time you need a similar product, you don't even bother with the well-intentioned trip to the small store first.

That's been the plight of small retailers for more than a decade: bigger stores have bigger inventories, and online stores have unlimited inventories. Price isn't even a factor if you don't have the product to sell, but Studer thinks the cloud may offer smaller stores a novel to at least compete with bigger rivals on inventory control.

"You come in looking for a certain auto part and, using the cloud, I can look it up and say that I don't have it, but the guy down the street has what you're looking for," Studer said. "Yes, I'm sending you down the street to a competitor, but at least I'm not putting you in the habit of going to Amazon or Wal-Mart first."

The point is translating the benefits of cloud-based, ERP products into something that is easy to understand, easy to use and easy to implement for businesses outside of the tech sector. Microsoft Dynamics believes that allowing companies to choose on-premise products, if that is what they are most comfortable with, and then transitioning them at their own pace is crucial.

"There's a value in having that choice," Studer said. "We really want to provide customers with a lot of flexibility."

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

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Study Suggests Content Matters On Twitter

Dave Copeland — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:30:00 -0800

Will this article get re-tweeted? According to a new HP Labs white paper, we can now predict whether or not it will become popular on Twitter.

The findings are crucial because most previous analysis of how tweets travel have focused on who has been tweeting as opposed to what they have been tweeted. If someone influential on Twitter tweets something, the conventional thinking goes, it will spread. That thinking still plays a big factor, but the new research highlights that content matters.

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Researchers analyzed 40,000 articles posted to Twitter over the course of a week in August and collected information on the agency that wrote each article, the outlet that first tweeted the article, the article's information category and the emotion of the article's language. What they found is some articles are more tweetable than others.

Among the key findings predicting the likelihood of an article getting tweeted and retweeted:

Source was the biggest indicator. The more reliable the source, the better chances of a tweet.
Stories in popular categories will spread more rapidly. (As Megan Garber at The Atlantic notes, "Health! technology! cats!").
Mention a known person, place or organization and you're also more likely to get your story tweeted (which explains why celebrities' names often litter the trending topics column whenever I log into Twitter).

What does not, however, seem to influence an articles tweetability is emotion. Emotional articles were no more likely to be spread than objective articles, the researchers said. "Brand matters; information matters; tone, however, doesn't seem to make much of a difference when it comes to sharing," Garber wrote in her thorough analysis of the study.

The researchers classified articles "low-tweet," "medium-tweet," or "high-tweet." They said their model is 84% accurate.

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

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[Interview] How Zynga Is Transforming Games With HTML5

Dan Rowinski — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:00:00 -0800

Social gaming platform Zynga takes a lot of flak for its overbearing management practices and obsession with metrics over user experience. While those rumors may or may not be true, there is more to Zynga than calculating sessions lengths and daily average users. In fact, Zynga's Germany branch is one of the global leaders in HTML5 development and creating dynamic mobile Web games. We chatted with Zynga Germany CTO Paul Bakaus about how Zynga approaches HTML5, what are the limitations of the spec and if we will ever see a Facebook app store.

Zynga has a variety of open source HTML5 projects in GitHub along with several new HTML5 game releases, including Words With Friends and Zynga Poker Mobile Web. As many Web-based game developers will tell you, those are not easy to create. See below for our interview with Bakaus and what Zynga is doing to move the HTML5 spec and ecosystem forward.

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One of the things that I don't recommend doing right now because it is just a matter of market share is going for WebGL. So, actual 3-D games have proved complicated at this point and it is also because the WebGL spec isn't completely reading for consumption at this point, I think. Other than that I think today, even though there are some rough edges with the HTML5 spec because it wasn't really created with games in mind, I think it is the right time now to start doing games. I don't think anyone should stop building games right now or being kept up by people who say HTML5 is not ready.

Zynga's HTML5 Products

There are now four HTML5-based Zynga games on the market: Words With Friends, FarmVille Express, Zynga Poker Mobile Web and CityVille Express. These games deliver load times comparable to native apps and, "utilize HTML5 tools such as WebSockets and CSS3 to deliver a seamless gaming experience and create fluid animations without slowing down game-play," according to the company.

But there is more to Zynga's contributions to HTML5 than just games. Its open source repository includes the Zynga Jukebox that helps game developers deal with the multi-layer audio limitations of HTML5 along with the Zynga Viewporter that has an essence of responsive design to it, fitting apps to the browsers they are in. One of the biggest problems, as Bakaus describes below, in HTML5 is seamless scrolling. The Zynga Scroller aims to eliminate that problem. Everybody talks about the great native scrolling in apps like Path. Bakaus hopes to give HTML5 the same capability.

Check out our interview with Bakaus below.

On background

A little bit about my background. I'm actually a developer myself. I started as a UI developer and back then we specialized in JavaScriot and UI and many years ago I joined the jQuery team, one of my first gigs, and became the creator of jQuery UI. So back then John Resig asked me if I could build the UI for jQuery. Started jQuery UI got a lot of notice from jQuery UI and started learning how JavaScript works and how people use elements on the Web and how to drive it with a reasonable performance. I then moved on to consumer projects in Japan to transform Flash applications to JavaScript and finally I started Dextrose in 2010 with a friend of mine for the purpose of creating HTML5 games.

Back then we were looking for the creation of a full blown HTML5 game community and realized that the tech was there but it wasn't any shared tech build so we started building an HTML5 engine prototype that was called Aves Engine that would really show the world what we could do with HTML5. We put up YouTube videos and I was talking at conferences about it and really made a lot of impact back then as really the first (tie)-based HTML5 engine that would show what they Web could still offer in the future.

Later that year Zynga acquired us to work on the full blown product. So, we threw away our prototype and started from scratch for the real solution for game systems to use. So, now when we are in a place where we have built up our development studio here in Germany that focuses on delivering HTML5 tech for the whole company and we are producing tech of the future here. It is a lot of research and a lot of fun as well.

A lot of challenges of course but right now we are really at a point where we have a full blown engine. We started it in house and what we can do is super exciting and let's hope that we can get out a lot of what we are doing here soon.

Zynga's philosophy on HTML5

Every decision we make on tech is really to connect people through our games. So, we are really want to bring our games to anywhere our players are. I think there is not a conscious decision for one tech or another, it is really what can deliver the job best. At this point we really are looking at HTML5 to drive a lot of this because HTML5 gives us a lot of advantages that native and Flash programs just cannot give us. The cross-platform aspect of it, bringing the game to many people on different platforms is really what is killing it for us.

Also, usually you would have to port an existing game that runs on Web and native to smartphones and tablets and maybe something else as well. We don't have to do with that HTML5 and that is super exciting.

Limitations of HTML5 for games

There are a couple of limitations, to be honest. There are certainly sound issues. Sound is still a trouble for many game devs. One of the things that I don't recommend doing right now because it is just a matter of market share is going for WebGL. So, actual 3-D games have proved complicated at this point and it is also because the WebGL spec isn't completely reading for consumption at this point, I think. Other than that I think today, even though there are some rough edges with the HTML5 spec because it wasn't really created with games in mind, I think it is the right time now to start doing games. I don't think anyone should stop building games right now or being kept up by people who say HTML5 is not ready. I think, you know, if you look back to the [1980s] when people were first creating games for the Atari and Commodore 64, we got so much less possibilities back then and people were really creative in creating games. There is so much more we can do already in HTML5 and I think the only thing left is developers jumping on it and trying not to be scared away. I think now is the time to build games.

What is keeping developers from embracing HTML5 right now?

I think there are a couple of reasons. One of them is for classical game engineers to jump on the open web stack might prove a little bit difficult because it is a completely different environment. Before, if you have been working on an XBox game for instance, there wouldn't be any resolution difference or platform differences. There would be any cross platform code you would have to write. Writing a completely different code, not writing event-driven code like you would do with JavaScript. It is simply a very different mindset to start with.

Another big reason is that HTML5 wasn't created with games in mind. HTML itself is really a presentational language originally meant to do documents. That is one of the things we are doing now as well, to actively work with the vendors in the W3C to work with game engineers and push for the spec in terms of game development. I think a lot of people are still scared by the fact that it is not a language that was created for game. I think that is mostly the reason.

Next page: Bakaus talks about the HTML5 ecosystem, is questioned on Zynga and/or Facebook app stores and when HTML5 games will hit an inflection point of popularity.

I don't think there will be a time where you point to a certain time in history where you can say "this is the first time HTML5 was done." I think the time is now to create those things. The Web is not something that comes in release cycles. The Web is growing always and we have seen that with the current browsers and the new iterations at the browser level, the vendor level.

On app stores and ecosystem - Does Zynga have plans for an app store?

I can't disclose any plans that we have at this point for the future. But, I definitely think it is the right time build really cool solutions to serve apps on the Web. Like the Chrome Web store. Mozilla has its own Web store now. I am excited about those services. At the same time there are ways to bundle apps for the native app source. You can have solutions like PhoneGap or appMobi to really put your HTML5 game, the same code that runs on the browser, and put it into native platform and serve it in the App Store and such.

I think that there is ways that you can serve both at the same time so that is super helpful. As you're aware probably, Facebook itself is kind of like an app platform and has been a really awesome ecosystem for us. I don't see it as critical as many HTML5 engineers out there.

Facebook said at f8 last that it has no plans on an "app repository."

It depends on what you call an app repository, I guess. Right now, Facebook has launched an HTML5 version of mobile and you can actually launch apps on their HTML5 versions nowadays which is pretty cool. While there may not be an overview page that gives you access to apps it [Facebook] is still kind of an app store.

How does Zynga view the opportunities around HTML5 vis-a-vis its reliance on the Facebook platform? Is it a way to distance itself or diversify itself?

I don't think it is a matter of that actually. That really is not a reason we jumped on HTML5. Whether you are doing Flash or HTML5 or native code you could still use Facebook or not use Facebook. Other than that I cannot really describe our plans with Facebook. You know, we have a very healthy relationship with them and I am sure it will continue to be like that in the future.

What is the next step for Zynga in terms of HTML5 games and what does the roadmap for 2012 look like?

Well, we have a lot of tricks up our sleeves, that is for sure. And a lot of prototyping to do and a lot of great stuff. Unfortunately, I cannot disclose any future products that we are releasing. But one of the things that you should definitely take a look at is our open source repositories. So, from a technology perspective, we started open sourcing tech that is in our games at github.com/zynga that will drive our current or future games. We will be allowing to continue more future code there that can help game devs but can also show you a vision of what we can do. So, there will be a lot of interesting stuff in 2012 and beyond from out games perspective.

One of the prototypes that we have released is the Zynga Jukebox that is one piece of a shared tech that we built on HTML5. That has been a pretty good success story since the Jukebox is being used on Words With Friends already. If you check out Words With Friends on Facebook, which is built on HTML5, this one is actually using that open source product. I know of other situations where some of our plugins are used. This is the essence of what we are doing here, essentially, built into small components.

There are two others there. One is called Zynga Jukebox which is meant to bring HTML5 audio to game developers across devices. The next one is the Zynga Viewporter which makes resolution and view port handling on smartphones much easier which is another pain point for many engineers. Finally we released the Zynga Scroller which is an implementation of a scrolling element like the fact many people highlighted the fact that smooth scrolling in Path is awesome. And I agree. But, I am positive we can have the same smooth scrolling affect in HTML5 with the Zynga Scroller. It really brings us the capabilities that people would only know from native apps before.

What are the best tools that Zynga uses or you could point developers to when developing HTML5 games?

Tooling is still actually a pain point. I agree. So, I don't have a perfect answer right now. We are not running IDEs but are working with text editors. We are also writing our own tools. I think we are at a point right now where every HTML5 game developer still codes in there. The tool vendors out there simply don't know what people need. So, eventually, game developers have to write their own tools before putting them in indigenous libraries. I think that is really what is needed. At this point I have seen a lot of great experiments like Mobi Edge or Sencha's tools. I am reading them all on a monthly basis to see where the direction is going. There is a lot of passion and engineers working on this right now trying to solve these issues. We are not there yet. I don't know the definite solution for game engineers for tooling. Let's see what happens.

How long down the road before HTML5 Web apps for the browser and for mobile really hit an inflection point for popularity like the native ecosystem has?

You know what? Officially the spec says something like a couple of years. That is the usual way to do things because final spec is taking a very long time at the W3C level to major but that doesn't keep anyone from doing stuff and I don't think it should. So, HTML5 and what people think about HTML5, they don't really think about HTML but also CSS3 and JavaScript extensions. So, it is a whole mindset, a whole buzzword that people will raise. I don't think there will be a time where you point to a certain time in history where you can say "this is the first time HTML5 was done." I think the time is now to create those things. The Web is not something that comes in release cycles. The Web is growing always and we have seen that with the current browsers and the new iterations at the browser level, the vendor level. So, if you look at Google Chrome or Firefox, you see those weekly release cycles nowadays where you see those crazy revisions of versions. I think we are now at Firefox 10 and Chrome is at 16 or 17 and that is great because when you talk to engineers that work on new game specs or features on Google Chrome, for instance, they tell you they can have something prototyped in weeks and out there for everyone to use in a matter of months which wouldn't be possible a few years ago.

So, that shows me that there isn't any reason to wait. If you want to start using something now, you should because you have an overlap of 75% of HTML5 capable browsers that update almost monthly. So, there is no point in waiting for a certain spec to finish. You can just start using it right now.

Discuss

Daily Wrap: Google Drive Will Be Different and more

Robyn Tippins — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:03:23 -0800

Jon Mitchell explains why Google Drive doesn't have to be a Dropbox clone. This and more in today's Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

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Fabled Google Drive Won't Be Another Dropbox

Google's long rumored cloud file storage, Drive, doesn't have to be a direct competitor to Dropbox or iCloud. Jon Mitchell discusses how Google Docs is already a file sharing service for some, how Google Search Plus Your World affects the ecosystem and how Drive can set itself apart from iCloud and Dropbox to become it's own different beast.

From the community:

Mitchell Bundy - "Great post. What about the possibility of Google working with their other services? Google Music recently had an update, and you can now download the music you uploaded. Since there is already an application installed on the user's computer, what stops them from expanding to a Dropbox style sync? It's not that far off."

Leena - "There's free Google drive app, Syncdocs, that syncs music to Google Docs. I use it because Google Music is for the US only. Syncdocs lets me stream music from Google from anywhere in the world, except maybe China."

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