Verizon Communications Inc, Google Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Ericsson, are believed to have a joined a group calling itself the Allied Security Trust. The companies will pay roughly $250,000 to join the group and will each put about $5 million into escrow with the organization to go toward future patent purchases...

Great, now the patent trolls have a target audience.

The market of CMSes has become hotter since the web 2.0 movement. Drupal and Joomla the top 2 open source CMSes are consolidating in the market. This consolidation could be beneficial to software giants Microsoft and Google; therefore Microsoft and Google could secretly finance Drupal and Joomla.

Drupal and Joomla are the top 2 open source CMSes, are consolidating in the market (whatever that means). This consolidation could be beneficial to the CIA since the CIA would love to be pulling all the strings so they could install backdoors into the software and have complete access to all the content in the CMSes; therefore the CIA could secretly finance Drupal and Joomla.

No, really. First, what does "the top 2 open source CMSes are consolidating in the market" mean? I think the author meant to say something along the lines of many people shopping for an open source CMS tend to pick Drupal or Joomla, giving them both a large chunk of the market share.

I fail to see why these two open source CMS packages is beneficial to either Microsoft or Google. Microsoft's bread and butter is Windows and Office and they won't lose this any time soon since the corporate world is quite entrenched (or as some might say, a victim of vendor lock-in). Google's primary source of income is from advertisers placing targeted ads on search results (which Google will only keep showing lots of as long as they continue to be the number one place to go when you're looking for something on the web and as long as advertisers still consider it worthwhile to advertise via Google). Drupal and Joomla could disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow and neither company would have any issue whatsoever. In fact, I bet most employees at both companies and almost all the stockholders wouldn't even notice.

Even if the success of these two open source CMSes were beneficial to Google or Microsoft, that doesn't mean that is the reason why Google and Microsoft could secretly finance them. No, because both Google and Microsoft are the 800 pound gorillas in the room with billions of dollars to throw around, that is how they could do the funding. Why would they do the funding? I don't know. I don't think it would help them directly.

(Though it is worth noting that Google runs their Summer of Code program so Google is not-so-secretly funding many open source projects, including Drupal and Microsoft.)

You can use your Google Account to log into any site that supports OpenID!

But can you log into Google with another site's OpenID?

Looking through the "gallery" of demo apps built with Google App Engine, the only one that seems more than half-baked is HuddleChat, written by Google employees Darren Delaye, Braden Kowitz, and Kyle Consalus. But HuddleChat is just a feature-for-feature clone of 37signals's Campfire. The layout is the same, the tabs at the top of the screen are the same, the right-side sidebar listing participants and file uploads is the same. It even copies Campfire's trick of formatting a message as "code" if it contains literal newline characters.

Borrowing ideas is fair game, but copying an entire app is wrong. And it's creepy, in a Microsoft-of-the-'90s way, when it's a $150 billion company cloning an app from a 10-person company.

A couple from Pittsburgh has sued Google because a photo of their house appeared on Google Street View. They are demanding in excess of $25,000 to make up for the 'mental suffering' and the diminished value of their home. Their street is apparently marked with a 'Private Road' sign, and they claim that putting a photo of their property online is an 'intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion' of their privacy. Google, on the other hand, claims that this lawsuit is pointless since anyone can ask them to have pictures removed without legal action.

Well, since it was a private road, I don't think that legally Google was in the clear. If the photos were taken from a public road, they would be fine.

This morning the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board. The OpenID Foundation was formed in early 2006 by seven community members with the goal of helping promote, protect and enabling the OpenID technologies and community. Today’s announcement marks a milestone in the maturity and impact that the OpenID community has had. While the OpenID Foundation serves a stewardship role around the community’s intellectual property, the Foundation’s board itself does not make any decisions about the specifications the community is collaboratively building.

The Borg-Yahoo merger won't work. Here's why. It's like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they'll run faster.

Yahoo has been on the ropes for a long time.

Once the top dog of the internet, the company has been haemorrhaging users and money. With advertising income not anywhere near where it should be, Yahoo's share price is stuck in the doldrums.

Last June Yahoo's board chucked out chief executive Terry Semel and brought back co-founder Jerry Yang to recapture the firm's dominance - to little avail.

One word explains all of Yahoo's troubles: Google. While Yahoo invested in content to lure its audience, the search engine rival simply focused on delivering what users really wanted: good search results.

...

For Microsoft, however, this is the deal that could break it.

Making the offer is an admission that Microsoft's management has been scared by the success of Google.

The bid is also an acknowledgement that its numerous attempts to become a dominant internet content provider have failed.

While I like the direction of Google OpenSocial, not only may Google be too late, as Mark argues, I don't think they go far enough. A framework and a set of Google Gadgets for building "social applications" misses the point. We don't want to build more applications that look like Facebook applications. It isn't about a social UI. It's about deeper re-use of social data to enliven any application. Some of those applications may have a minimal UI, like Google's breakthrough search app. OpenSocial doesn't give us any of that. Ajax widgets are a halfway house, an attempt to sandbox the kinds of applications that can be created. And that will be the downfall of OpenSocial. If all you can build are Facebook-like applications, Facebook wins.

We all want what Mark describes: a definitive place under our own control where we can describe who we are and what we care about so that applications can use that data to provide us with smarter services. We don't really care whether that repository is at Facebook or Google or any other site, or perhaps even if it's an aggregation of data from many places, but we do want it to become more useful to us. Not just more useful to the holder of our profile, but to every site we touch on the internet. Whichever company gets there first, to a truly open, user-empowering, internet-turbocharging social network platform, is going to be the net's next big winner.

I couldn't agree more.

I want to sign up for a social networking account someplace and just have it suck in all my information. (And I'm pretty hellbent on me hosting all my stuff, I don't place much faith in a third-party service for photos, email, blogging, etc.)

So, we now have Google's answer to Facebook's closed development platform: OpenSocial (link goes live Thursday).

Google has a good selection of launch partners for this -- Ning, LinkedIn (an API?! finally!), and Plaxo being the most interesting ones. RockYou and Slide are Facebook development companies that are also signed on, so we'll definitely see some launch apps, not just bare APIs.

This is, of course, very encouraging and similar to the short discussion I lead at the Facebook Developer Garage: integrate with systems other than Facebook, use open standards, and put your stuff out on the open web. Marc Canter has a gleeful post about all of this, including linking back to standards and experiments that have already been underway. Be interesting to see how OpenID Attribute Exchange, which I have long been a fan of, fits into all this.

Previously, Microformats Applied To Various Social Networking Hubs.