Rex Is Excited

Apple's Address Book update in today's release of OS X 10.5.3 now adds the ability to sync your contacts with Google Contacts. To enable contact sync, make sure you've updated to 10.5.3 and then head to the General tab of your Address Book preferences. From there, turning on sync is as simple as ticking a checkbox and entering your Google account info. Address Book has supported Yahoo Address Book sync for a while, so Gmail users will be thrilled to see the added support. We didn't see many sexy features in the 10.5.3 update to Leopard, but Google Contact Sync for Address Book definitely qualifies.

Don’t they say good things come in threes? Well, regardless, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.

MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).

Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services. See my post on the Centralized Me for more of my thoughts on this.

The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).

If what we hear is correct, Google’s offering may not be as attractive as MySpace’s and Facebook’s. Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contract, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it (with strict terms of service in case they violate that trust). That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it.

We’ll have to wait until Monday for the exact details, though. But what’s clear is that Google wants to get in between social networks and the web sites that want to access their data. By controlling the flow through Open Social and the new Friend Connect product, they can effectively become a huge social network without actually having a, well, social network (unless you count Orkut).

Google’s been scrambling for partners to announce on Monday as well. So far our understanding is they have their own Orkut and Plaxo. Compare that to MySpace (Yahoo, eBay and Twitter, plus their own PhotoBucket) and Facebook, which announced Digg as an early partner.

Another limiting factor with Google’s product is that, unlike Facebook and MySpace, they do not already control user profiles for tens of millions of active users. That means they’ll quickly need to get big partners on board as well. Will MySpace help them? They may - MySpace is already part of Open Social and said on Thursday that they will adopt Open Social initiatives in this space once they are defined. We’ll see.

More details as they come in.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Language translation service Google Translate has added the ability to automatically detect the source language, streamlining translations when you don't recognize the language. When you stumble onto a foreign language web site, the most difficult part of using sites like Google Translate is that you often don't know what the source language is. Google Translate's new Detect Language feature removes this limitation altogether, so translations are quicker and easier. Apart from the new auto-detection, Google Translate has also added support for nine new languages, and can translate from any one of them to any other. Not bad.

Filed under: Hacks, iPhone

Way back, one of our readers begged for an iPhone LoJack solution. He wanted his iPhone to "call home" regularly in case of loss or, let's be more realistic, theft. Over the past week, I finally had a chance to give this request some time, and I put together findme. It's a command-line program that returns the location of the cell phone tower nearest to your iPhone. When run, it tells you the tower id, plus its latitude and longitude courtesy of Google Maps.

Still, how to get the location report to a place you can get it... but nobody else can... and without receiving a zillion SMSes? For this part of the puzzle, enter Twitter. Twitter dev Britt Selvitelle helped walk me through the setup for a private account that allows your iPhone to phone home but keeps the location data relatively secure.

To do this, create a new Twitter account just for your iPhone (it will need its own unique email address, separate from your main account, so have one handy). Open the Settings panel, and look for the "Protect My Updates" checkbox. It's towards the bottom of the page, just above the Save button. Check this and click Save. With protected updates, only the Twitter users you approve will see the updates for this iPhone-only account (just you? you + spouse? spouse, kids, and "special friends?" Up to you).

Continue reading TUAW Responds: iPhone LoJack

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Last night, we discussed the importance of a well-kept shared link blog in Google Reader. Humans can still play an important role in filtering out the best of feeds from the rest, as smart folks can trump even the best written code in terms of determining humor, originality and insight.

The ease of creating and subscribing to link blogs in Google Reader has led to some actively searching out these link blogs, and instead of subscribing feed by feed, instead preferring to rely on the selections of others.

One blogger, with the nickname of "SeekGround", says he has subscribed to more than 300 individual shared item feeds, which he displays on his blog - an amazing number. I have to assume there are a number of commonly-subscribed feeds that would result in duplication, but SeekGround says he goes through them, primarily on his mobile phone, and shares those items he finds most useful.

Shockingly, despite having more than 300 individual feeds, it looks like his interests most overlap with me, of all people. In an insightful post, "Google Reader, Shared Items and Mobility", the blogger reveals that over the last 30 days, he's also shared 35 items from me, 19 from Frederic Lardinois of the Last Podcast, and 17 from Mike Reynolds, taking first, second and third, respectively.

Kindly, he writes, "I think that Louis Gray is making waves in the community lately and he may soon find himself considered part of the A-List rather than his self-stated position as a B-Lister."

I don't know about that... but it's fun to see SeekGround taking a new approach to consuming feeds, and finding so many shared items in common. While his blog is a relative unknown, with a Technorati Authority of "Zero", before tonight, I have to expect that would change. While some entrepreneurs are setting new bars in content creation, others are changing the world of content consumption.

Maybe, over time, there will be a big shift from those who are the content creators and filters, and those who are the consumers and readers. With Feedheads, Shared Reader, ReadBurner and RSSMeme out there now, Link Blogs are becoming a very big deal.

Also see:
Last Podcast: Shared Feeds, RSSmeme and Ecosystems
louisgray.com: How Soon Until People Demand Link Blog Portability?
louisgray.com: What I'm Reading and Sharing on Google Reader

My shared items link blog is here: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/05763917848110205585

Filed under: Internet Tools, iPhone

Continue reading iPhone gets iGoogle

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Ever look up an address on Google Maps and find that the pushpin for that address is more than a bit off? Now you can edit where Google pinpoints addresses (provided you're logged into your Google account) by clicking the Edit link and dragging the pin to a more appropriate location. Moves over 200 meters will need to be moderated before they're applied, and you can see the original location or recently moved markers at any time. My parents' house in Iowa has always been about a mile off the mark so I've been dying for something like this, but unfortunately it looks like not all locations are currently supported.

O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Summit kicks off this Wednesday at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. A who’s who list of Web 2.0 digerati will converge for three days of deal making, partying and more deal making.

If you didn’t have the budget to nab one of the $3,595 tickets for the event, fret not - VentureBeat reporters will be on hand to bring you frontline dispatches.

In preparation for the event, here’s a quick preview of what’s expected during the week, which includes some product launches by MadeIt, Userplane, Radar and Nokia.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Marissa Mayer and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer will all be speaking — and ears will be perked for the latest on reported acquisition talks between Microsoft and Facebook, and Google’s response to this.

EBay’s Meg Whitman will be speaking Thursday, right before her company’s Q3 earnings announcement the same day. Friday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about eBay’s struggle to juice its slowing growth rates. We also hope the moderator asks her questions about the departure of Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom, and about eBay’s associated $900 million write down. Speaking of Mr. Zennstrom, the Skype founder curiously disappeared from Web 2.0 Summit’s list of speakers sometime over the last few days. As recently as last Wednesday according to the Google cache, Zennstrom was listed as a speaker at the conference, where he was to participate in a session entitled, “Show Me.” Oops. Today, all references to Zennstrom are removed from O’Reilly’s conference agenda.

Wednesday evening, MySpace will host a dinner with News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdock and MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe. We hope he speaks about his pending acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, and how he sees his new media properties meshing with his old media properties.

Several companies are expected to show off their latest Web 2.0 wares.

Thursday night, at a party promoted here, MadeIt.com, a new Web 2.0 online invitations site, will make its public beta debut. MadeIt.com plans to take on market leader Evite.com by adding social networking features to “keep the party going” after the party’s over, such as online photo sharing, video sharing, slideshows, story sharing, message boards and widgets. The company was founded by CEO Stephen Weir and his advisor, Jonny Hendriksen. Weir tells VentureBeat the company has been self-funded to date with about $80,000 in capital. The company is looking to do a seed round of up to $300,000 in the next three months to get to proof of concept stage, at which point it may seek a Series A. However, it enters a very crowded sector, filled with the likes of Socializr, Renkoo, Skobee, MingleNow and the related events sites such as Going.com.

On Wednesday morning at an invitation-only breakfast, cell phone maker Nokia says it will introduce a new N series handheld computer that promises to marry the mobility of a multimedia device with the Internet (yes, this is frustratingly vague, but we don’t know anything else). Other handheld computers in N Series family combine many of the features of an Apple iPhone - such as Internet browsing, photos, videos, games and maps, without the phone part.

Userplane, which provides hosted communications applications such as chat, messaging and voice recording for online communities, plans to announce Userplane Feeds, a collection of free APIs so that developers can build the applications into their own sites.

On Friday, Radar Networks’ CEO Nova Spivack, who in a previous life founded EarthWeb, will unveil and name the company’s first Semantic Web application, most likely an online personal data organizer, according to a July feature in the recently shuttered Business 2.0 magazine. The San Francisco company, which is backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Leapfrog Ventures and angel investors, has been in stealth for a few years, yet has been been aggressively promoting its business, technology and ideas for the Semantic Web for quite a while (this is one of those “pseudo stealth” companies, promoting itself in public relations pitches to media outlets, even as it feigns secrecy). Friday’s anticipated announcement will also mark the start of the private beta for the not-so-secret service. In addition to naming its first product, the company says it will announce a strategic partnership. Stay tuned for later this week when VentureBeat’s Chris Morrison reports on Radar Networks’ product launch and tells us if the company’s first Semantic Web application is ready for prime time.

We’ve noticed a couple passes listed for sale on Craigslist here and here, or you can always crash the conference and join the unofficial Web 2.0 Summit LobbyCon unconference in the lobby of the Palace hotel.

Mark Coker is a contributing writer for VentureBeat. He’s founder of Dovetail Public Relations, a Silicon Valley technology marketing firm. He has no clients among the companies mentioned in the story, nor among their competitors. More on Mark at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markcoker