Webware

Classifieds start-up Oodle will be powering Facebook's official "marketplace," the company said Tuesday. Members will be able to use it just like any third-party app on the Facebook platform--the only difference is that this one is official.

"Turning the development and management of Marketplace over to an innovator in online classifieds will give users more advanced ways to create and share listings on Facebook," Ethan Beard, Facebook's director of business development, said in a release. "We're excited by the potential of the Oodle-powered Marketplace application to offer an engaging classifieds experience on Facebook."

Facebook launched its own Marketplace about a year and a half ago, a potential rival to the Craigslist juggernaut. But it didn't really take off, and though it was never formally pulled, Facebook decided to revamp it with Oodle to "further expand the functionality and breadth of the application."

It'll relaunch early next year. Facebook, meanwhile, has been working on developing a PayPal-like payment system for quite some time; it has yet to launch, but presumably could be closely integrated with an official classifieds service.

Oodle also has powered MySpace's classifieds since July.

(Credit: Google)

Google has put out an official Gmail gadget for its Google Desktop product, giving users the option to run multiple instances of different Gmail accounts as standalone gadgets. The tool includes several useful Gmail features like keyboard shortcuts, mail, and contact search, along with the option to star messages. Users can also compose messages in a little pop-out window, which keeps them from having to fire up their browser.

The app is currently Windows-only and requires Google Desktop version 5 or higher, leaving Mac and Linux users of Google Desktop out in the cold. Anyone looking to use Amnesty's Generator program to convert it for other platforms like OS X's Dashboard are also out of luck, as Google has not offered it as an iGoogle, Web-ready widget.

Metasearch engine Dogpile announced Tuesday that it has raised $100,000 toward its goal of raising $1 million to help pets in need.

Dogpile donations are being funded through its Search and Rescue program, a service that's designed to help pets by donating a portion of the search engine's revenue to animal-related charities. Each time a visitor uses Dogpile's search or its Search and Rescue Facebook application, the company delivers some of the revenue generated from that query to the ASPCA.

"Whether people are using Dogpile.com for their online holiday shopping or just for general information searches, the traffic to the site has helped us raise a significant amount for the ASPCA already," Stacy Ybarra, Dogpile's senior director of corporate giving, said in a statement. "Search and Rescue allows any individual with access to a computer to support a worthy cause without significantly changing their habits or spending a penny of their own money."

Dogpile's Search and Rescue program has a goal of raising at least $1 million for pets in need through the end of 2009. As of this writing, the total amount raised has reached $108,000.

With all the buzz about Facebook Connect this week, it's worth asking the question: Whatever happened to OpenID?

The universal log-in standard was created in 2005 by Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of LiveJournal, while he was working at blog software company Six Apart. (Fitzpatrick now works at Google; Six Apart has since sold LiveJournal.) It has the support of Yahoo, MySpace (which just helped build an OpenID extension for the Flock browser), and President-elect Barack Obama's Change.gov. Even Google has dipped its proverbial toe in the pool.

But it wasn't until Facebook Connect started making headlines that the concept of data portability--a single log-in across multiple sites--made the jump from the tech press to the mainstream media. OpenID, some speculated, had been left behind in the dust.

Hardly. But Wired's Michael Calore hit the nail on the head on Monday: "Presenting a dialog that asks a user to log in to one Web site using a name and password from another Web site is jarring, but Facebook has managed to keep Facebook Connect simple enough for everyday users to understand. Such ease of use virtually guarantees it will win support quickly."

The truth is, the future of the "social Web" is in expansion. And expansion invariably involves dealing with a crowd beyond the Twittering, FriendFeeding, WordPressing geeks who actually understand the concept behind data portability.

And that's not made any easier by the fact that OpenID calls itself "an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity." Try bringing that up in the boardroom of a non-tech company looking to ride the social-networking wave. Then tell them that the most buzzed-about social network on the planet will power your site's social features. The decision will probably fall in the Facebook camp, unfortunately for the open-standards crowd and its admirable dedication to all things balanced and democratic.

"Nobody should own this. Nobody's planning on making any money from this," Fitzpatrick has said about OpenID. "The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there's no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we're all a part of the community."

But your average company is probably going to care more about profit margins than OpenID's decentralized ideal, and the possibility of having its user activity broadcast across Facebook members' news feeds is tantalizing. Especially during tough financial times, strategy will likely trump idealism.

That said, there are some good signs for OpenID. It has a ton of support in the tech world, and if Facebook Connect's impending expansion goes awry for any reason--think Beacon--it could open up a whole new set of doors for OpenID. What it (and other open Web standards) needs either way is some image repair.

"Facebook is trying to replace all log-ins with their own, and control the creation, distribution, and application of the social graph using their proprietary platform," Chris Saad, whose DataPortability Workgroup has put its support behind OpenID and other open Web standards, wrote in a blog post. "The most scary part of this, is that while Facebook is quietly and methodically building out this vision with massive partners, the standards community is busy squabbling about naming the open alternative."

OpenID and its brethren could use a good, simplified marketing pitch, not to mention some announcements and partnerships that are more prominent than an extension for a niche Web browser. They need to use the resources that the likes of MySpace and Yahoo can provide to get more deals going and start making headlines outside of ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch.

And most importantly, in a recession, "it's good for the Web, so it's good for everyone" just isn't concrete enough. One last tip for OpenID: Start talking business benefits.

Nombray is a new site that lets you buy vanity domains for your name. The service is aimed at people with very little experience setting up a Web site, letting them "squat" the page while funneling any traffic to third-party services they're already using.

On Nombray's home page, you simply type in your first and last name, and the site will search to see which coordinating domains have been taken and which are still available. From there, you're able to claim available domains for $20 a pop, which gets you a free year of hosting and a page designer with which you can link to various social-networking profiles, such as those for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. These sites, along with any other URLs you plug in, will show up like tabs on the top of the page, and visitors can simply click on them to flip between profiles while the Nombray navigation frame remains.

If you've already purchased a domain through another service (like GoDaddy or Domain.com) you can simply link up to it and have Nombray host the page for $10 a year. This offers a little less than a service like WordPress Premium, which charges $15 a year for custom domain registration and hosting (along with a pretty swell blogging platform). I do, however, like that Nombray keeps a frame on the top of the page so your visitors can quickly toggle between activities--it's a nice touch.

Nombray hosts a page for users with top links to their various social-networking profiles, blogs, or Web sites. It also searches the Web to show if domains using their name are available.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Metasearch engine Scour has new features that provide more personalization to users. It has added a Friends Feed, which keeps track of friends and tells users what others are commenting on. Along with that, the site finally allows users to add an image to their profile, redeem points through the user administration pane, and edit the number of results returned from each engine to match searching preferences.

"There's clearly a trend toward personalization on the Web and we wholeheartedly support it," Daniel Yomtobian, CEO of Scour, said in a statement. "The ability to connect with friends more closely--whether following their comments or inviting them to Scour--is something we believe will resonate well with our growing community of users."

Scour, which launched this past summer, gathers search results from Google, Yahoo, and Live. Users are rewarded with Visa gift cards for searching, voting for good results, and commenting on results. One point is awarded for each search, vote, or comment, and 6,500 points yields a $25 reward.

Aside from the suspect use of rewards to lure users to the site, Scour's new features don't add much to an already bland search engine. It's nice to be able to search the top three search engines at the same time, but competitors like Dogpile and Clusty offer a more robust service, and the fact that Scour now allows me to add an image to my profile and keep track of friends is rather lame, considering many other services provide those features in beta.

Regardless, all of Scour's new features are available now to registered users.

There's no more room for smut and naughty bits on build-your-own social network service Ning, according to a post on the company blog. Ning has announced that it will shut down its "Red Light District" of adult content, and on January 1 will formally ban it.

"We are exploring ways for adult networks that will no longer be available on Ning to export their content in addition to their members," the post by CEO Gina Bianchini read. The reasoning, she explained, is that it's costly and problematic--something you just can't deal with in a recession.

Advertisers don't like it, Bianchini said. "Our ad partners aren't big fans of the adult networks and therefore require us to identify adult networks or risk our healthy advertising revenue," she explained. "We don't want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that's where this is heading."

And if legal adult-content networks are allowed, the illegal ones invariably weasel their way in, Bianchini said, and that means more work for a small team. The number of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices is also higher for adult networks: "Compared to our other social networks on the Ning Platform, the additional work created by adult networks alleged to have violated the copyrights of others is enough for us to discontinue adult networks in favor of investing time and energy in growing the Ning Platform from here," Bianchini wrote.

Ning isn't the only site to be cracking the whip on porn. YouTube, owned by Google, said on Tuesday that it's "tightening the standard for what is considered 'sexually suggestive.'"

Bianchini co-founded Ning with Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, and famously raised a $60 million round of funding in anticipation of a "nuclear winter." Guess that was a good move.

Jay Adelson, CEO of social news company Digg, has used a BusinessWeek interview to attempt to quash those long-standing acquisition rumors. From what he said, Digg is not for sale.

"Now I am pressured to keep costs reasonable and focus more on the top-line revenue, which we really haven't done ever," Adelson said to BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante, saying that he now hopes to make the company profitable in one year instead of two.

Not for sale? Riiiiiight.

It's an old (ha) Silicon Valley maxim that any company is for sale, assuming the right buyer comes along and offers the right deal. What's likely is that Digg has come to realize that in this economic climate, it's not going to get the price that Adelson and founder Kevin Rose want.

Digg raised a whopping $28.7 million in Series C funding in September, which Adelson and Rose said would go toward fueling a major site expansion. The company didn't disclose a post-round valuation, but VentureBeat heard that it was only $164 million--significantly less than the $250 to $300 million prices that were oft-whispered about in Valley social circles.

Here's my theory: The longer Digg waits for the perfect bid, the longer it's in danger of having its valuation chipped away. The truth is, it's not very difficult for a site to institute a "social news" feature or other form of Digg-like interaction. Current Media, after Digg spurned an acquisition offer, built Current News and now aggregates user-picked stories into an hourly TV show. Yahoo built Yahoo Buzz, which can propel stories to the front page of its portal. Some Google users occasionally report seeing experimental features in which they can vote on search results. There are smaller ones, too: Reddit, which sold early to Conde Nast, is still alive and kicking. A start-up called Kirtsy puts a girlier spin on the Digg model.

Adelson even remarked to BusinessWeek that buying some of these smaller social news sites could help make Digg stronger, especially now since the recession may make some of them dirt-cheap. "There are Digg clones around the world in every country," he said to Ante. "I could go into those markets and clean up those sites. If I needed more capital to do a deal, I could probably do it."

That, honestly, wouldn't be such a bad idea. Digg's biggest problem isn't user activity--it has one of the most loyal and addicted audiences on the Web--but the fact that its core user base is very niche. It experienced a surge in political traffic as election season rolled on, but its core is geek news; hot topics right now are screenshots from the movie Wolverine and airborne laser weapons.

Google on Monday formally announced full support for the CalDAV protocol along with the release of a small piece of software for Mac computers that lets users easily link up their Google Calendars with the iCal application.

Google had previously launched CalDAV support back in late July, however, consumers had to manually add their calendars directly to CalDAV-supporting applications like Mozilla Sunbird and Apple's iCal. The new Mac utility, named "Calaboration" simply lets users plug in their Google Calendar username and password to send Google calendars over to iCal. The benefit of doing this is the two-way sync. This means whatever changes you make on either end will be synced up to both every few minutes.

I gave Calaboration a spin this morning, and after restarting iCal, it worked without problems. With the current implementation you're able to see other people's schedules, as well as reply yes, no, or maybe to calendar invitations. The only problems I ran into early on were syncing errors where iCal would not let me write data to Google's servers, which was remedied with a closing and reopening of the program after the initial CalDAV setup.

You can grab Calaboration here. If you're a Sunbird user, there's a simple provider extension that does the same thing.

Calaboration lets you pick which Google Calendars you want to sync up with iCal. The same thing can be done in Mozilla's Sunbird or any other calendaring tool with CalDAV support.

(Credit: Google)

Animoto, a company that creates videos from a user's photos and music on-the-fly, announced Tuesday that it has added new features to its software that will turn its videos into online holiday greetings.

According to the company, the new holiday feature will use a snowscape to set the scene for the greeting and with the help of its new text feature, users can add captioning to detail events.

In order to create the holiday videos, users can upload photos using Animoto's service and click the "Santa" button, which turns the video into a holiday greeting. A new holiday genre will be added to Animoto's music library so users can pick the holiday song they wish to have played during the video.

Animoto's service is stellar. I've used the site to create videos on a number of occasions and each time, the videos are unique and attractive. The site allows you to upload images and choose music, but its Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology, which acts as the director and editor, will do the rest. That said, creating videos on the service can be a little pricey and unfortunately, Animoto didn't share holiday generosity with its new offering.

Full-length videos cost $3 and annual subscriptions to create an unlimited number of full-length videos will cost $30. Any video that is 30 seconds or less will be free. Animoto claims all of the videos will be DVD-quality and can be viewed on HDTVs or projectors.

(Credit: Animoto)