Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Also Thursday, Google announced that Google Finance is now supported in the Google Data API. That means data could be retrieved to build, for example, a gadget with a live chart showing changing portfolio value.

And since the API permits two-way communications, it also means an outside service could update a user’s information at Google Finance, for example with recent stock trades.

The Google Data API (application programming interface)–GData for short–provides a conduit whereby other Web sites can slurp out data stored at Google. For personal information, such as photos at Picasa or contacts at Gmail, access to that information requires authentication. OAuth provides a standard way to perform that authentication, which means programmers at least theoretically should have an easier time writing code.

Google announced the OAuth support Thursday on its Data API blog.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

When the virtualization smoke clears, large enterprises will deploy a number of virtualization technologies best suited for different types of users. Like everything else in the IT world, desktop virtualization isn’t black and white but many shades of gray. Alas, as promising as desktop virtualization is, it is not a panacea and never will be.

No one would argue that these benefits are worth exploring, but there are a few caveats here. First off, not all desktops are good candidates for virtualization. Anyone who needs massive endpoint compute power, like engineers and designers, would not be a good candidate for desktop virtualization. Road warriors who need to work remotely are also off limits at this point. Finally, employees anchored to local or remote desktop tower computers may be better served by application virtualization (a la Citrix XenApp or Symantec AppStream) or file virtualization (a la F5 or Cisco Systems) rather than a desktop virtualization play.

With the industry doing back flips about server virtualization, it is only natural to wonder what virtualization technology can do for desktops. Plenty! With desktop virtualization, organizations can manage desktop images in the data center and employ strict security policies without touching physical devices. Enterprises should be able to cut operating costs while bolstering security to boot.

“This significant investment from Intel Capital will allow us to grow our team, our capabilities, and our reach during a time of market expansion,” Telligent CEO Rob Howard said in a statement. The investment will be directed toward geographic expansion, hiring more sales professionals, and increasing Telligent’s advertising and marketing budget.

Intel Capital, the chipmaker’s venture arm, has signed a deal to acquire a $20 million stake in Telligent Systems, which specializes in social-networking software for businesses.

Intel is an existing client of Telligent.

Telligent manufactures a product called Community Server, which provides clients with blog, forum, wiki, and other collaborative and social software; the software is used primarily for customer relations and marketing. Those clients include the Associated Press, MySpace, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Visa, Honda, Dell, and the NFL.

The open mesh is not Microsoft’s Live Mesh. The open mesh is “made up of vendors, standards, and glue code that connects a wide range of services, applications, and platforms together,” Canter said. And, it has identity at the center:

Canter recognizes that a completely unified and open mesh is more theory than practice:

“Coming out of all this is an awareness of a new kind of infrastructure – which simulates the blood veins, nervous systems, skeletons, fire hose and neural networks of the open mesh. Its about RSS, Friendfeeds, XMPP, attention, two-way APIs, OpenID, DNS-like backbones and an international approach.”

Canter has been an evangelist for a Web without walled gardens. He also has a financial stake in the open mesh. He runs a company called Broadband Mechanics that has developed a white label social network and Web site creation service that depends on open standards.

My friend Marc Canter has written a series of blog posts outlining the issues, constructs, technologies, and standards required to build out an “open mesh,” as he put it. It’s a kind of unified field theory for the Web.

“No one wants to give up control of their technology – so (by definition) the open mesh must be made up of a combination of open, free protocols and technologies with proprietary APIs and technologies.”

(Credit:
Marc Canter)

“The key foundation set of constructs, web services and APIs to support when building the mesh – is the area of profiles, personas, friendships, relationships, social graphs and groups. It all starts with humans and every construct, element and component of the open social web we’re building has to do with people.”

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

Marc Canter

At this juncture the underlying plumbing, or mesh, for the social Web is under construction. It’s a good time to bring the issues to the forefront, before the mesh blocks out more than it lets in.

Today, for kicks, I tried to draw a map of all the places I write content, all the places it is displayed, and all the intermediate services that re-post my content in places other than where I originally write it. It’s a spaghetti of interlinked services, and it’s becoming unmanageable. I think it’s just dumb luck that I haven’t created an infinite loop of republishing so far. Adding one more service could push things over the edge.

It gets worse. Each of the sites my content ends up on (partial list: Webware, News.com, ProPRTips, Swagalicio.us, Twitter, Friendfeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Pownce, Kwippy, Flickr, Delicious, Digg) has its own communities. And I never know where a conversation will take hold. Since I’m most active on Webware, Twitter, and Friendfeed, I check those services more frequently. Sometimes something I write will spark a conversation on one, sometimes another. There’s no telling. (By the way, Plurk gets a decent share of community action; every time I go there I think I should check in more frequently.) Disqus can do a lot of discussion bridging between blogs, but one thing it doesn’t do is bridge communities between the microblog sites.

(Credit:
Rafe Needleman / CNET)

Or should I drop it all and just write e-mail newsletters instead?

It shouldn't be this complicated (click for full-size).

The challenge is keeping track of all the connections between services. It’s a tangle, as I said: I have Friendfeed republishing my Twitter posts. Ping.fm, which I often use to post to Twitter (and thus, to Friendfeed), could just as easily publish to Friendfeed directly. I just happened to set up the Friendfeed-Twitter link before I started using Ping.fm. I have Ping.fm updating several other nanoblog feeds, like Jaiku, Pownce, and Plurk. Meanwhile, my Webware article feed (just my stories) is read into Friendfeed and directly by Jaiku. I do not feed Webware into Twitter directly; I use a republisher called Twitterfeed. I am also using Twitterfeed to republish my ProPRTips blog into Twitter, which is strategic, since I get more readers for that blog’s content on Twitter than the blog gets itself.

Twhirl, a desktop client for Twitter and Friendfeed that I dearly love, updates only one site at a time, so I can use it to send Twitter posts to either my main Twitter account or other specialized accounts I occasionally write to. Friendfeed reads in only what I write in my main Twitter account, though. And since Twhirl does not update other services I use, like Jaiku and Plurk, when I use Twhirl I need to be mindful that some of my followers on these other networks aren’t going to see the posts.

I am, so far, managing to keep most of these connections in my head, but I fear that if I sleep for more than nine hours I could forget how my network is put together. I could look at my sketch. But we really shouldn’t need network maps to keep track of what we’re doing where, should we?

So this is my challenge to the Web 2.0 community: Solve the personal content and community problem. Take the multi-publishing chops of Ping.fm, the aggregation features of Friendfeed, the republishing capability of Twitterfeed (with more functions, please), and the discussion aggregation of Disqus, and put it all together into one simple, easy-to-maintain product that acts as a hub for publishing, reading, and community in all these services. And while you’re at it, make sure you don’t steal traffic or community from the services you’re front-ending; they all have personalities we want to keep alive.

Carbon capture and storage is considered an important technology to reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions, but the technology is unproven at a large scale. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year called for government funding of carbon capture projects in the United States to work out technical issues.

Separately, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce speech on Tuesday that President Bush’s budget proposal next week “will start to deal with” tariffs on imported ethanol. “I think this industry is pretty close to being able to stand on its own,” he was quoted as saying.

The U.S. Department of Energy plans to pull its support of a $1.8 billion project to build a power plant that captures pollution underground, according to published reports.

But ballooning costs and a dispute over the location prompted the Department of Energy to pull its support, according to an Associated Press article citing lawmakers who were briefed by the agency. An announcement is expected in the coming days.

The FutureGen project is meant to test cutting-edge carbon capture and storage technology, which is supposed to dramatically reduce emissions from fossil fuel-burning power plants.

In December, the FuturGen Alliance, which includes participation of oil and coal companies, announced plans to build its first facility in Matoon, Ill.

“When it finally came time to go into the auction, I think they (Google) were pretty firm about wanting to enforce the open-access conditions as much as it could be enforced, but also being firm on not really being interested in becoming a network operator,” she said. “I think they were a willing loser.”

There’s no question that the auction, which began on January 24, was a monetary success for the government–it raised a record $19.6 billion in 261 rounds of bidding. During a conference call with reporters Tuesday after the bidding closed, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said the 700MHz auction was the most successful auction the agency has ever conducted, raising more money than all previous auctions put together, excluding the Advanced Wireless Services, or AWS, auction in 2006.

Despite the obvious financial success of the auction, it will be a long time before it’s clear whether the FCC was successful in achieving some of its broader policy goals, such as creating a more open wireless marketplace and a nationwide interoperable public safety wireless network.

The identities of the auction bidders are still a secret. To prevent anti-competitive behavior, the FCC kept the bidding anonymous. Martin said the names of the auction winners would not be revealed until the commission voted on separating the D block from the rest of the auction. Since the FCC won’t be able to get this item on its agenda for at least three weeks, the names of the winners won’t likely be revealed until April.

Stifel Nicolaus’s Arbogast said she thought a combination of factors caused the lackluster bidding on the D block, including lack of certainty over what was expected of the public-safety network that had to be built, and general tightening of capital markets.

Still, Chairman Martin said on the conference call with reporters Tuesday evening that he was pleased the auction had prompted the open-access rules to take effect.

“The $19.6 billion generated by the auction nearly doubled congressional estimates of $10.2 billion,” Martin said. “All other 68 auctions conducted by the FCC in the past 15 years collectively generated a total of only $19.1 billion in receipts. Even with open-platform and aggressive build-out obligations, each of these blocks sold for more than AWS-1 blocks with comparable bandwidth and license areas.”

News.com’s Anne Broache co-wrote this report.

The Federal Communications Commission generated $19.6 billion in the 700MHz spectrum that ended Tuesday, but the true success of the auction will take months or even years to assess.

Google, which had pushed for open-access rules for some of the spectrum, was bidding on the open-access C-block licenses. But Rebecca Arbogast, a principal telecommunications analyst with Stifel Nicolaus, said she wouldn’t be surprised if Verizon Wireless, and not open-access proponent Google, takes home that slice of spectrum. (Google had committed to bidding up to $4.6 billion, but the final price for that block was $4.75 billion, according to FCC figures released Wednesday.)

“I believe that any new auction for the ‘D block’ should be consistent with an overarching policy goal of advancing public safety objectives and ultimately achieving a state-of-the-art, broadband infrastructure for first responders,” he said in a statement. “In developing a plan for a re-auction of the ‘D block,’ the FCC should also take into account the auction results to gauge the level of new competition achieved. Policymakers should also analyze whether a need for a high reserve price continues to exist.”

The 700MHz spectrum has long been considered the last bit of beachfront wireless real estate left in the air. The spectrum, which is being vacated by the switch to digital TV in 2009, is considered valuable because of inherent properties that allow it to propagate over long distances and penetrate walls. Some experts believe the spectrum is ideal for offering robust, affordable wireless broadband services.

“With the open-platform requirements on one-third of the spectrum, consumers will be able to use the wireless device of their choice on those networks and download whatever software or applications they want on it,” he said. “The open platform will help foster innovation on the edge of the network, while creating more choices and greater freedom for consumers to use the wireless devices and applications of their choice.”

Now it looks like the FCC will re-auction the D-block spectrum separately later this year. FCC Chairman Martin would not say specifically when the new D-block auction would take place, but he said the commission hoped to expedite the process so the spectrum was available in plenty of time before the February 2009 digital TV conversion deadline. He also reiterated his hope that the spectrum could be used toward building a nationwide public safety network.

Why open access matters
The open-access requirement is significant because today, U.S. wireless operators have tight control over which devices can be used on their networks and which applications can be used on those handsets. Google and other companies, such as Skype, have complained that this is too restrictive.

Frontline Wireless, an entity that hoped to build a national network for emergency responders, was expected to be the big winner of the D-block spectrum licenses. But the company, which was headed by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, folded at the beginning of January just before the bidding got under way.

If Verizon Wireless is the winner of the C-block licenses, it will likely include this spectrum in its open-access plans. But until details about the actual service plan are revealed, it’s difficult to say just how serious Verizon is about open access. If the service is priced too high or customers find that buying their own handsets is too expensive, the whole notion of an open-access network could be moot.

Verizon, which has traditionally been the most strict operator in the U.S. about what it lets on its network, recently said it would allow non-certified devices on its network. On Wednesday, the company is hosting a developer conference in New York where it’s expected to reveal details of the first version of specifications for these new open-access devices for its network.

Another slice of the spectrum called the D block was set aside to build a nationwide network for public-safety operators. But that segment didn’t attract the FCC’s $1.3 billion reserve price. In fact, it didn’t attract any bids beyond the $472 million opening bid.

Trying a new approach
As part of its rule making for this auction, the FCC tried something new. It set specific rules for two of the five blocks of wireless spectrum. For the C block, it established rules that require license winners to build a network allowing any device to operate on it. The C block reached its threshold of $4.6 billion in only 17 rounds of bidding, triggering this open-access rule. But the D block, set aside to build a nationwide public-safety network, did not meet its reserve price.

Representative Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, will hold a hearing to decide what to do with the D-block spectrum.

So, what was the final verdict?

On the plus side, all three reviewers thought Apple dramatically improved the audio quality of the iPhone 3G, both in terms of the built-in
iPod and the phone. All were enthused about the new applications that would be coming to the phone; Pogue wrote, “Above all, the iPhone is about to become a dazzling hand-held game machine.” And, of course, downloading Web pages over a 3G network is much faster than over an EDGE network, which you probably already knew.

Mossberg: “If you’ve been waiting to buy an iPhone until it dropped in price, or ran on faster cell networks, you might want to take the plunge, if you can live with the higher service costs and the weaker battery life. The same goes for those with existing iPhones who love the device but crave faster cellular data speeds. But if you already own an iPhone, and can usually use Wi-Fi for data, you probably should hold off and get the free software upgrade before deciding whether it’s worth getting the new hardware.”

Walt Mossberg of All Things Digital, David Pogue of The New York Times, and Edward Baig of USA Today were the chosen few selected to review the
iPhone 3G ahead of its launch on Friday. There wasn’t nearly as much suspense about the reviews this year, since we already knew the iPhone 3G was–with the exception of the faster networks, GPS, and third-party applications–essentially the same phone.

As far as nits go, that was about it. The outstanding issues remain: the touchscreen keyboard doesn’t work for everybody, the cost of operating an iPhone has risen despite the drop in the starting price, and it doesn’t have things like voice-dialing or MMS.

Still, some interesting details were revealed. Mossberg didn’t seem very happy about the battery life. “In my tests, the iPhone 3G’s battery was drained much more quickly in a typical day of use than the battery on the original iPhone, due to the higher power demands of 3G networks,” he wrote. “In daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20% by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day.”

The first iPhone 3G reviews have been released, and if you’ve been paying attention to the news for the past month, you won’t be surprised.

Pogue didn’t address battery life, but Baig thought the iPhone 3G consumed roughly the same amount of juice as its predecessor. “I started receiving low battery warnings toward the end of a busy work day; I found myself charging the device overnight, the same as with the older iPhone.”

One big addition to the iPhone 3G was GPS, but according to Pogue, Apple has said the antenna is too small to permit useful things like turn-by-turn navigation. Baig, however, didn’t think it was that bad: “I was pretty impressed by the accuracy on the new device as I drove along in my
car, searched for nearby pizza places, and requested directions,” he wrote.

Pogue: “So the iPhone 3G is a nice upgrade. It more than keeps pace with advancing technology, and new buyers will generally be delighted. But it’s not so much better that it turns all those original iPhones into has-beens. Indeed, the really big deal is the iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store, neither of which requires buying a new iPhone. That twist may come as a refreshing surprise to planned-obsolescence conspiracy theorists — and everyone who stood in line last year.”

CNET’s Kent German will have his own review up this Friday, when the iPhone 3G is formally released.

Baig: “While not everything on my wish list made it onto the new device, Apple has raised the bar with iPhone 3G. To which I offer an enthusiastic thumbs up.”

The iPhone 3G, which goes on sale to the public Friday, gets generally positive marks from three prominent gadget reviewers.

During the question-and-answer session, an audience member made some interesting points. First, there don’t seem to be the economic incentives to do surveillance in the offline world as there are in the online world. Second, many people seem to be more worried about privacy breaches that expose embarrassing things about them than they are about things like location-based data that enable geographically related ads.

Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, acknowledged that she finds the location-based technology in her
iPhone very convenient when she’s trying to avoid traffic congestion. But she doesn’t want the government to be able to use that technology to track her down.

STANFORD, Calif.–Life was so simple before the Internet came along.

Government regulation is necessary to ensure that consumers’ privacy is adequately protected online, Granick and Rosen said. Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington University Law School, said the Fourth Amendment can be applied to the online world in a way that balances individual rights with law enforcement needs.

Eben Moglen, executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center, spoke up from the audience and urged people to protect their privacy themselves using technology. Laser pointers can thwart video cameras, and strong public key encryption technology can protect communications, he said.

Where does it stop? Should it stop? Do we even care?

However, encryption use isn’t widespread and won’t be anytime soon, Granick pointed out. “It has to be easy enough, distributed enough that people will use it, whether or not they care about the issue.”

For example, imagine how convenient it would be to have RFID chips embedded in sunglasses so you could find them easily, Jonas said.

We could live our lives in relative obscurity, renting porn at the video store, checking out books on VD at the library, and consorting with all sorts of miscreants at dive bars, or worse, Celine Dion concerts.

Now, our moves, thoughts, transactions, and romantic tendencies are out on the Internet for everyone to see. You’re in a silly costume at a party in a Facebook photo when you called in sick from work. Now you are captured on Google Maps Street View climbing over a neighbor’s fence. And then there was that Web search you did with the keywords “torture” and “kittens.”

“Facebook should be a bunch of free Web apps on everybody’s personal server,” Moglen said. “You have to stop thinking that the law is the stronger form of social control than the technology.”

Examples are Facebook revealing more about its members than they care to have revealed and tracking their purchases without consent, as well as AOL inadvertently exposing search terms of 650,000 people in 2006. “That was one of the most invasive offenses against privacy I can imagine,” Rosen said.

The fact that all sorts of data about each of us is being gathered and is archived, searchable, and can be compiled to create profiles about each of us is what makes digital privacy intrusions so much scarier than pre-Internet life, she said.

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic, warned of “privacy chernobyls,” which he described as “new threats to privacy that have the potential to transform society in troubling ways.”

The perspective is different in other countries, Rosen said. Americans are, in general, concerned with preventing terrorism, while Europeans are concerned with protecting their individual privacy, he said. For example, the French will bare their breasts but not their salaries and mortgages, and the reverse is true in the U.S. “My fear is that the cultural differences will make thoughtful regulation difficult,” Rosen said.

There are a handful of other useful updates and additions, but these were just some of our picks. Are you a WordPress user running 2.5? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Updating plug-ins is now a one-button affair. If you're a control freak, there's also a download link you can put onto your server via FTP.

Editing protection: The lack of concurrent editing is one thing that created massive headaches and potential data loss for multiauthored blogs. Say you were writing or editing a post and your co-blogger went into edit it. Both of you could overwrite each other’s work endlessly without knowing the other person was in there. The new system locks down a post when a user is still in edit mode, and gives you the person’s name so you can message them in real-life to see what they’re doing. We’ve got a similar system here at CNET, and it’s a life saver.

One-click plug-in upgrades: Like software on PCs, third-party WordPress plugins are updated constantly. The one thing you had to manage on your own was when they got updated. The new system cross checks your plug-ins with the database at Wordpress.org, and if there’s an update it will both let you know, as well as give you a one click option to update it to the latest version.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Tags management: The new system lets you add and delete tags as you would on Flickr, or anywhere else using the same system of comma separated tags. The old system simply had you list the tags, but there was no way to edit or see a list of all the tags you had used, which is now maintained in the “manage” tab.

Adding multiple files at the same time works a lot like Flickr's uploader, except you can pick whatever files you want. Videos, photos, and music files are automatically stuck into your media library.

Tags can now be deleted and managed on the fly.

Media handling: The new media uploader is a huge step up from the old system. It now lets you upload multiple files at once. Each file uploads with its own progress bar and goes into your media collection to be inserted into posts according to your liking. What I really like, however, is the new gallery feature. You can take all those pictures and put them into an easy to view gallery that can be inserted into a post with one click. It’s not as flashy as some of the gallery tools you can get as plug-ins, but it’s great to have as a standard solution.

I spent some time this weekend updating my personal blog to WordPress 2.5 which was released Saturday. I’ve been a WordPress user for a while now, and it’s worth noting that version 2.5 is one of the biggest updates since the release of version 2.0 back in late 2005. There’s a huge list of upgrades on the official WordPress blog, but I thought I’d go over a few of my personal favorites so far:

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)