Through running Gizbuzz, I probably sign up to at least one new Web 2.0 service every day. Some I never use again, but a few are genuinely useful, and I think would genuinely be useful to someone else. However, unlike me, that other person isn’t at all interested in the technology (the service itself), but whether it is of any benefit to them (ie. whether it is fun, useful, interesting etc). What’s going on in their mind is a ‘cost-benefit analysis’ if you like, and the irritation of signing up to a new service which they might well not like is a significant barrier to entry.

It is why, when collaborating with friends, I suggest Google Docs and Spreadsheets rather than Zoho – however easy signing up is, it is still a barrier and an irritation when friends already have Gmail (and therefore Google) accounts.

That’s where OpenID comes in; simply put, OpenID removes the need to sign up to a service. I sign up to an OpenID server once, and am given a web addresso. When I want to use an OpenID enabled service, such as Zooomr, I simply give that service my OpenID address, and am redirected to the OpenID server, where I then confirm that I authorise the service to use my ID. I am then redirected back to the service, and am able to use it instantly.

There are obviously many advantages to OpenID, such as privacy, security and interoperability, but the headline grabber for me is ease of us, and it is why I think OpenID could be a major force in preventing the Web 2.0 boom from becoming a bubble. If people are able to signup to a new service in probably less than 20 seconds, without any privacy concerns, confirmation emails or other annoyances, they are far more likely to adopt a less conservative attitude to trying out new services, and as such, are probably likely to find themselves using more. The more people that use a web service, the more money it makes and the less likely it is to go under. Thus the bubble is less likely to pop.

I’m sure the dream of most of the founders of Web 2.0 companies today is being bought by Google; famously Google acquired YouTube late last year for $1.65bn. From the other perspective, the acquisition of startups can allow Google to move into new areas and develop current activities. I thought it would be interesting to write a post with a couple of my acquisition targets, if I were entrusted with the Goog’s billions.

FeedBurner
If I were Google, FeedBurner would be pretty high on my list of priorities. FeedBurner is a free feed analytics tool, which GizBuzz and most other ‘serious’ blogs use to see how many people are subscribing to their RSS feed and reading their content. FeedBurner works by reprocessing your feed, and if it has enough subscribers, it gives you the option to sell adverts in your feed, through the FeedBurner Advertising Network (FAN). So, whilst initially FeedBurner appears that it is a tool for publishers, in reality it is an advertising company. What does that remind you of? Google.

Google looks like a search company, but is actually an advertising company. As such, it is always looking for more places to stick its adverts, and more ways to help advertisers measure how those ads are performing. FeedBurner is a perfect fit, as it has access to far more inventory in RSS feeds than Google has. Google could simply incorporate FAN into their Adsense programme, and keep FeedBurner as a tool for blog publishers to manage and measure their feeds. I recently wrote why I think negotiations may be happening already between FB and Google.

Pluggd
Pluggd is a podcast directory. However, that’s not what the exciting part of their technology is. They recently released a search technology for podcasts called HearHere (demo and information), which allows you to select a podcast episode and enter a search term. It will then produce a heatmap showing where that term is being spoken about on the podcast, which enables you to go straight to the relevant part of a podcast, finding the relevant information quickly.

An increasing trend around at the moment is that of podcasting, and a vast amount of information is being published in audio files to the internet. Google prides itself on indexing and searching information on the internet. At the moment, however, Google can’t see inside those audio files. This will become more important going forward, and it is a problem that must be solved. Pluggd’s technology goes a long way towards solving it, and does it in an innovative and useful way. It would be a great fit as Google currently has no (published) technology in this area. I also guess that Pluggd would be fairly cheap, as it hasn’t got much of a network effect going and isn’t even funded yet.

Leo Laporte, podcasting celebrity and chief of the TWiT podcast network, has announced on his blog that he is leaving Twitter and moving to rival service Jaiku.

We’ve talked about Twitter previously on GizBuzz, but it’s basically a ‘nano-blogging’ service where you answer the question “what are you doing?”. It’s very addictive and there are many tech personalites, and normal people alike, using the service.

Laporte cites one main reason for leaving Twitter, the fact that the name is too similar to his podcast network TWiT. Laporte was an early adopter of Twitter, and mentioning it in his podcast was one of the reasons it was able to gain so much popularity.

But I’m leaving it [Twitter].

The problem is the name. I wish to heck he’d named it Tweeter, or Tooter, or anything but Twitter. Twitter is so close to TWiT that I’m afraid it’s really confusing. And it hasn’t helped the confusion that I’ve been such a fan of Twitter. I’m sure half the people there think we have some sort of relationship. But we don’t. And the proliferation of programs like Twitbox and sites like Twit This are not helping things much. So let me repeat…

Twitter has nothing to do with TWiT.

And, I’m afraid, I can’t have anything to do with Twitter, either. It’s just fueling the confusion. Fortunately, there are several similar services including Groovr, Dodgeball, and Jaiku. After a cursory glance at all three Jaiku seems to have the best mix of features for me (I’m too old to be groovy, or hooking up) so I’m moving to Jaiku. My handle is ChiefTWiT. Hope to see some of you there.

Fellow GizBuzz and YouMakeMedia blogger Chris Van Patten speculates that there could be a potential legal battle between Leo and the TWiTs and Odeo (the parent company of Twitter). It’s certainly a possibility, but I do hope that Leo and friends are seeking a non-legal resolution to the problem.

Twitter is certainly making a buzz in the tech community and this move does raise its profile yet further, just unfortunately does so in a bad context.

While I’m on the subject of Twitter, I just want to let everyone know that I’m busy hacking away at a solution so that you can get the latest Oratos posts (from here, FOSSwire and YouMakeMedia) delivered directly to your Twitter account.

It’s not done yet, and it’s currently a bit unstable and temperamental (and we’ve been having some issues with it posting old stories over and over again), but if you want to brave the beta, you can follow us at http://twitter.com/oratos.

The Official Google Blog has announced a new feature in Google Maps called My Maps.

It is described as:

…a new feature that makes it quick and easy to create your own custom Google Maps just by pointing and clicking. You can add placemarks, draw lines and shapes, and embed text, photos and videos — all using a simple drag and drop interface.

Developers have been able to do this kind of thing using the Google Maps API for some time, but this is the first step Google are taking to make this kind of customisation available to the average user within the web interface.

After going into Google Maps, you simply click on the My Maps tab on the left and you have the option to create a new map. After signing in with a Google Account, you can then quite easily go about marking places on the map with pushpins, draw lines and add shapes.

It’s quite a nice feature, but I can’t help thinking that all it is just bringing one of the features of Google’s desktop Google Earth client to the web interface. With Google Earth, you can already create your own custom maps and add your own placemarks. Your places are then saved on your computer in the KML format.

The real difference between the Google Earth mapping tools and the new My Map feature of Google Maps is that Maps saves your data on Google’s servers and binds it to your Google Account, whereas Earth stores data on your computer.

One thing that does irritate me slightly is that you can only export Public maps to KML format so that you can then import them into Google Earth. Unlisted maps don’t have any export features as far as I can see.

Still, it is quite nice to be able to make maps on the fly from anywhere, not just computers where Google Earth is installed and to be able to share them with others more easily.

Widgets are fast becoming a prerequisite for most startups to achieve viral growth. Yourminins.com is a platform to distribute your widget creations while being able to easily monitor statistics like number of views, which domains they are coming from and where in the world your viewers are. Essentially a bit like Google Analytics for widgets.

In addition to this, becoming a featured widget and getting on the front page of yourminis.com can in itself generate significant uptake of your embeddable offering. Yourminis.com has tried to create a community around widgets, offering the ability to rate and review each widget and providing dynamic rankings based on popularity. In order to distribute your widgets on the site you have to prepare your widget using their developers’ kit. Essentially the SDK is a Flash container in which the widget is embedded which then makes it easy for yourminis.com to distribute to their users.

It’s a great idea which will certainly make the distribution of widgets a lot easier for startups. The community aspect will also mean that users only need bother with the coolest offerings.

Yourminis.com has been created by the Goowy.com team and is funded by billionaire Mark Cuban famed for selling broadcast.com to Yahoo for over $5bn (in Yahoo stock).

Back in November 2006, Huw and Peter actually interviewed Alex Bard, CEO of Goowy for the Gizbuzz Podcast. The podcast talks a little bit about the Yourminis service (which at that time had just been launched), so if you’re curious for more information, you might want to check that out.

Secret Notes is reporting that big record label EMI is planning to release tracks to the iTunes Store without DRM protection on them.

EMI is scheduled to make the announcement in London at a news conference that will feature Apple CEO Steve Jobs, The Wall Street Journal reports. Jobs created a stir earlier this year when he published an open letter to the music industry calling on it to abandon DRM.

We know that EMI have been eyeing up this move for quite some time and with Steve Jobs support for ditching DRM in his open letter, it appears that EMI want to try the non-DRM route.

EMI, the world’s third largest music label, has seen only mediocre success with its digital strategy, a result that some analysts believe compelled the label to take the bold move of dropping DRM. The firm had reportedly attempted to sell DRM-free music in the past but met resistance from online music stores who demanded “insurance” payments to guard against potential lost sales from the possible increase in digital piracy that DRM-free music might yield.

This is a pretty big story and a very bold move by EMI. They are the first major label to even get this far and if this does come to fruition, it has the potential to cause a chain reaction.

At very least, consumers will become aware of the fact that they will be able to buy tracks from the iTunes Store and play them on non-Apple approved devices. Once they realise this, consumers might start to demand more and more tracks without DRM, recognising the benefits of interoperability.

I’m a opposer of DRM in any shape or form, so I’m quite pleased by this development. Whether or not it will have repurcussions beyond EMI or if it will just be a small ripple we have yet to see.

UPDATE: you can listen to the audio of the announcement here.

In case you haven’t already realised, it is the 1st of April again – and of course, that means it’s time for some silly news stories to appear in my RSS reader. I’ve selected three of my favourites that I’ve seen around the web.

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Today, the Gizbuzz team had the opportunity to interview Dave Hoff, the co-founder of IMified – a new service that’s taking the internet world by storm. The premise is simple; take popular web applications (Remember The Milk, Basecamp, Salesforce, etc.) and break them down so they can be used through popular instant message networks.

We spoke with Dave about all sorts of things: what IMified is, the challenges faced, the instant messaging interface, APIs, and more. It’s a great service with a lot of potential and we got an interesting look into the early stages of what may well become a very influential startup.

• Download the podcast
• Subscribe via a feed reader
• Subscribe via iTunes

You may notice that a while back, I did a post on adding Gizbuzz to your Firefox/IE7 search box. You might have wondered how I actually got that to work.

Well, I’m actually going to write a quick tutorial on how you make OpenSearch plugins (which is what that Gizbuzz one was). Normally, my tutorials are the realm of Gizbuzz’s sister site FOSSwire, but since this one has quite a lot of relevance to the web in general (not just free/open source software), I thought I’d put it on Gizbuzz.

OpenSearch is a standard being pushed by Amazon’s research arm, A9.com. To create a search plugin, you simply need to write a really short XML file containing instructions to the web browser on how to perform the search. The search plugins currently are supported in both Firefox 2.0.x and Internet Explorer 7. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s implementation is sadly incomplete, so to retain full cross-browser support you can’t use all features of OpenSearch.

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Google have just posted on their official blog about ‘improving their privacy practices’.

One of these things involves so-called ‘anonymising’ their logs, which apparently involves:

We will change some of the bits in the IP address in the logs as well as change the cookie
information. We’re still developing the precise technical methods and approach to this, but we
believe these changes will be a significant addition to protecting user privacy.

Up until now, Google have just kept their logs for as long as they wanted – and in fact that isn’t going to change here. What will change is that 18-24 months afterwards, they will remove bits of the IP address and cookie information such that data won’t necessarily be tracable to one user any more.

Our engineers are already busy working out the technical details, and we hope to implement this new data policy over the coming months (and within a year’s time). We’ll communicate more as we work out these details, but for now, we wanted you to know that we’re working on this additional step to strengthen your privacy.

You can read a bit more in-depth about exactly what this anonymsing step is and involves in this PDF document.

So what is this? A PR stunt by Google to try and shake off some of the ‘evilness’ they’ve acquired in people’s minds (Google.cn, anyone?) or is a genuine attempt to try and protect Google’s users.

I think it’s mostly the latter. Google have been stubborn in the face of subpoenas before and this move would mean that it would be more difficult for legal processes to get their hands on data, but the time restriction also means that Google can do what they want with the data (and it’s also a compromise).

In fact, in a sense it kind of doubles as a PR stunt as well. If Google are subject to some kind of legal process that compells them to reveal data, they can turn around and say “well, we do this”.

Whatever it is, I’m all for Google being more transparent about how they operate. To me, this seems like a ‘good thing’.