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Google's Street View launched in the US last May, but expanding the service to Europe is proving to be a bit more difficult for Google. The Google Maps blog today announced the release of Street View for the route of the Tour de France, but privacy activists in England are anything but amused by the prospect of Google starting to photograph the streets of London.

England's Privacy International doesn't trust in Google's ability to automatically blur faces. While in the US, photographing people in the street is absolutely legal without the need to ask for consent, in the UK, anyone who appears in a photo that is used commercially has to grant consent. Google is rumored to have started taking pictures in the UK this week.

However, Google's experiment with its face blurring technology in New York shows that they are quite capable of employing this technology. Google already blurs all license plate numbers in Street View as well.

This is, of course, a week where Google's privacy policies have been in the news almost every single day (and where Google finally put its privacy policy on its front page). After losing the private data of quite a few of its employees and being forced to release the records of its YouTube users to Viacom, Google was probably hoping to make the news today by having a little Uncle Sam in Street View to celebrate the 4th of July and by releasing Street View for the route of the Tour de France (after all, this is the first European appearance of Street View).

The launch of Twitter clone Identi.ca earlier this week caused a bit of a blogstorm because it appears to have a solution to Twitter’s all-too-regular downtime. (That problem has reached comical proportions, with the familiar Twitter Fail Whale now appearing on T-shirts and kitschy art).

Identi.ca’s answer to Twitter’s scaling issues is by open-sourcing its code and encouraging others to host Identi.ca on their own servers, thus distributing the load. The service also supports other open standards, such as OpenID and a new one called OpenMicroblogging. Based on OAuth, the OpenMicroblogging standard is aimed at making it easy for people on other messaging services to subscribe to Identi.ca users and vice versa.

Identi.ca is the brainchild of Canadian developer Evan Prodromou, who explains the thinking behind the project here. He has a lot of good ideas. In particular, we agree that decentralizing Twitter is the key to making it scale better, although there are other ways to do that as well. The service is also based on the idea that you can take your data with you at any time to any other microblogging service.

But for now, Identi.ca is only for super-early adopters. It lacks some basic functionality, such as the ability to search for other users to follow or to import your contacts from other services. (I guess you are supposed to e-mail all your friends the link to your Identi.ca profile so that they can subscribe to you or just hope they find your name on the public feed). These problems are easy enough to address, and Identi.ca has along list of features it is working on.

The bigger problem with Identi.ca is simply that it is not Twitter. However annoying Twitter’s erratic outages may be, it still has the advantage of having many more users than any other competing service. If everyone is on Twitter, what’s the point of going to Identi.ca? That can change over time, obviously, especially if Twitter does not get its act together. But the inconvenience of switching means that it still has time to fix itself.

That does not mean Twitter can afford to ignore the excitement generated by Identi.ca. In fact, it should adopt some of its ideas, like decentralizing its messaging system and making it easy for people to export their friends and data to other services.

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Polymeme is a new memetracker that bills itself as "a polymath's guide to news." Polymeme is the brainchild of Evgeny Morozov who started the project because of his frustration with most current memetrackers and the echo chamber effect often associated with them. Polymeme is based on Drupal and uses Reuter's OpenCalais to tag and index the 25,000 blogs it tracks.

Polymeme is trying to create what it calls a 'social infrastructure' for the non-tech and non-US politics blogospheres by creating an outlet for bloggers in fields ranging from economics to social science and education.

Polymeme is an ambitious project and it goes up against against more established meme trackers like Tailrank, Megite, Techmeme and Memeorandum, as well as the broad range of social news sites like Digg, Newsvine, and Yahoo! Buzz.

Hybrid Model

Polymeme is a hybrid system. Its front page is determined by a group of editors who pick the most interesting stories to be featured on the site from the pool of popular stories in the blogosphere as determined by Polymeme's memetracker back-end. This memetracker is never fully exposed to users, but the 'Popular Memes' section is determined algorithmically.

Because Polymeme only has a limited pool of editors, it can take some time for a story to appear on the front page. As Evgeny pointed out to us, though, having editors look for stories that would otherwise stay off the radar is 'a feature, not a bug.' Also, Polymeme argues that while the tech blogosphere moves very fast, other blogging verticals move a lot slower. In general, the site refreshes every 2-3 hours.

In many respects, this approach does resemble a newspaper ore journal more than a memetracker - but maybe that doesn't come as a surprise, given Evgeny's background as a journalist.

Features

While the site works very well without creating an account, logging into the site allows users to personalize the news selection and create personalized RSS feeds or email alerts. What Polymeme doesn't do is create a personalized feed based on keywords or on a user's OPML file like Megite does. For now, the personalization options stop at choosing topics from a menu of different sections of the site .

Polymeme's Buzz section is another interesting feature of the site. Buzz is basically a tag-cloud interface to Polymeme based on the tags automatically created by OpenCalais, and while it broke once or twice during testing, it does present an interesting way for browsing blogs.

Verdict

Where Polymeme really shines is in the selection of blogs it tracks, which is extremely wide and global in its scope. Looking at the articles featured on Polymeme today, there is very little overlap with those of other memetrackers.

Polymeme is an interesting experiment. The hybrid model of tracking memes but also employing editors might seem a bit strange at first, but so far, the editors have done a good job at highlighting interesting stories that did mostly fly under the radar of the traditional memetrackers.

Whether Polymeme can help us break out of the echo chamber (or whether it just creates a bigger echo chamber) remains to be seen - for now, it's an experiment worth taking a look at.

GigaOM???s Structure 08 event offered a terrific opportunity to survey the changing landscape of computing infrastructure. But as with all technology shifts, innovation won???t just belong to the big established players like VMWare, Amazon, Google, Sun Microsystems, Salesforce.com and NetSuite. With that in mind, Found|READ asked a panel of conference participants to share their thoughts [...]

Google Earth is turning out to be a great resource for scientists to visualize and communicate the phenomena they study. You can see the migration patterns of endangered and other threatened animals, based on data collected by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. (The image above shows the range of both the Northern spotted owl and the Mexican spotted owl).

Anybody can take geographical data and turn it into a layer on Google Earth. Scientists are doing this in droves. You can also track storms, the paths of solar eclipses, volcano activity, arctic ice melting, bird flu mutations and biomaps of emotional stress levels in different cities (see this Popular Science article for more info).

Since these are all KML files, they could be made into layers on the regular Google Maps as well. Although they wouldn’t look as cool, more people would see them.

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Tags: Google, Earth

For users of the Windows Mobile platform, visiting Facebook while on the go meant loading up the mobile web page in their device's browser. Meanwhile, Blackberry users have had their own downloadable app since late 2007. But now, as of today, there is at long last a downloadable application just for Windows Mobile users, FriendMobilizer.

Today Macrospecs, Inc. has launched FriendMobilizer, a new software application for Windows Mobile phones which gives you full access to your Facebook accounts. Unlike other Windows Mobile Facebook apps like Snap2Face, which only provides for photo uploads, FriendMobilizer gives Windows Mobile users an app that's comporable to the Blackberry version.

With FriendMobilizer, you can view your friend's info, write on their walls, browse photo albums, approve friend requests, view group and event invites, read your new wall posts and messages, update your status, and more.

The application is currently available for both Windows Mobile devices and Pocket PCs and is a free download from the web site www.faceofmobile.com. However, according to the company, the generic software platform developed for FriendMobilizer will soon be ported to other mobile OS's as well. In addition, the company plans to build mobile apps for other social networks in the future.

AT&T, long before it merged with SBC had made a half-hearted attempt at getting into consumer VoIP by selling a service called, CallVantage. It was surprisingly good, especially its call quality. Unfortunately, the company never quite made the commitment to it. And when SBC merger happened, well it fell victim of save-your-mentality that comes with it. Today, there is word that AT&T has stopped pushing the service through its affiliate channels - a sure sign that the company is backing away even further and would shut it down soon enough. Some believe that shut down is going to come next year, though I thought it was already killed, since the former AT&T Callvantage boss is now running AT&T’s CDN business, and we have not heard a single pitch from the company in over a year. I guess this is one less thing Vonage has to worry about!

AT&T, long before it merged with SBC had made a half-hearted attempt at getting into consumer VoIP by selling a service called, CallVantage. It was surprisingly good, especially its call quality. Unfortunately, the company never quite made the commitment to it. And when SBC merger happened, well it fell victim of save-your-mentality that comes with [...]

Tomorrow we celebrate July 4th, and a week later our long National Nightmare is over. On the 11th we deposit our 2G iPhones in the FriendFeed donation bins and officially hook ourselves up to the Enterprise iPhone. The ePhone will change how we work and play, and in the process free us from the tyranny of our jobs as consumers.

When the iPhone shipped last year, IT responded with a wave of dismissal to the shiny new platform. No keyboard, no push email, no secure deployability, and certainly no way to decommission the phone on exit from a company

Continue reading on TechcrunchIT >>

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Regator, a new blog aggregator that hopes to reduce the blogosphere down to consumable chunks for the average user, has launched today in private beta. The site acts like a combination between Digg and a standard RSS reader, allowing users to vote on the most popular stories drawn from 3,000 blogs that have been hand-picked by Regator editors. TechCrunch readers looking to try the site can get one of 100 invites here by entering the code “techcrunch”.

The Ajax-heavy site seems best suited for users who aren’t interested in heavy-duty blog reading. There’s no way to add an RSS feed that isn’t already on the site, and the sharing options seem to be limited compared to more mature offerings like Google Reader. Each story has voting arrows which allow users to determine the most popular articles - a nice touch, but one that may turn Regator into a Digg-clone instead of a more general news reader.

Beyond standard text search, Regator offers an audio and video search across its indexed blogs, but the results aren’t always appropriate - a video search for “Yahoo” yielded a YouTube trailer for the movie Wanted as the second highest hit.

Regator will see competition from a number of blog aggregators, which include Blogged, which launched a similar feature yesterday, and TechMeme, which uses an algorithm rather than user input to rate top stories.

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Get in a patriotic mood by listening to our conversation with Zoe Lofgren, the world’s geekiest politician (she’s a Congresswoman from Silicon Valley). This is part of our trip to Washington DC.

“We’re boring,” she said, when I noted that Andrew Feinberg chastized me and other tech bloggers for not going to Washington DC more often (Andrew runs the Capitol Valley blog and setup these interviews for me).

After that big of joking around we got into broadband policy, network neutrality, immigration policy, R&D incentives, and she tells us what geeks should pay attention to in the political world of Washington DC.

Enjoy, and enjoy the Fourth of July with your families. For those of you who aren’t Americans, see ya on Saturday.

Some notable things she said: “it’s ridiculous,” she said, that we’re increasing our prosecution of nannies and decreasing our prosecution of organized crime.

She advocated for a chief technology officer and decried that there are still lots of pieces of the government that are still working on paper.

Regarding advertising, she admitted that the technology is moving faster than Congress can move.

2008 has seen a big change in the way the blogging community communicates with each other. In a nutshell, discussions have become very fragmented. There are two main reasons for this: firstly Twitter and its 140 character soundbites has become very popular among bloggers, and secondly FriendFeed has tipped as the lifestreaming aggregator of choice for many people. The upshot is that there are now many places where people can have online discussions. This has been a challenge to blog publishers, for whom comments are an integral part of the blogging experience.

Over the past few months, the ReadWriteWeb team has been discussing internally how to adapt to this. We've discussed whether to use services such as Disqus, YackTrack and SezWho, which enable people to track and rate blog comments. However our conclusion was that those types of apps are unsuitable for a large multi-author blog like ReadWriteWeb - there are question marks over ability to handle the load, what happens if the service goes down, SEO, and other issues. And to be frank, personally I haven't found the user experience of any of those apps to be very compelling (we've tested one of them on RWW before).

FriendFeed Comments

So we got to discussing how to utilize FriendFeed and/or Twitter in ReadWriteWeb. To make a long story short, ReadWriteWeb recently implemented a new Movable Type plug-in called FriendFeed Comments. The plug-in was developed by Mark Carey and it enables FriendFeed comments (and by extenstion Twitter comments) to show up on ReadWriteWeb posts as comments - and vice versa! Note that there is a similar Wordpress plug-in, developed by Glenn Slaven.

Full disclosure, Mark Carey is a Technical Consultant for ReadWriteWeb. But he also runs his own business, which includes developing Movable Type plug-ins. So ReadWriteWeb was the first blog to test FriendFeed Comments out. As Mark explains, it "enables you to import and display comments made using FriendFeed on your entries. You can also use the plugin to enable your blog commenter to "Cc." their comments to FriendFeed (if they have a FriendFeed account)."

Here is an illustration of how it works:

People commenting in FriendFeed about our post profiling Identi.ca

The FriendFeed comments show up on the RWW post

To send comments from RWW into FriendFeed, simply click the 'cc' link

What I love about the MT and Wordpress FriendFeed plug-ins is that they recognize the fact that conversations are occurring elsewhere, but they bring the discussion back to the source of the content where relevant. It's win-win as far as I can see.

And Now Please Fix Trackbacks...

Six Apart's David Recorden implied in a post that the FriendFeed plug-in operates in a similar way to Trackback. On that point, RWW has had a lot of issues with trackback. During our discussions internally about the plug-in, we also considered if it could somehow be adapted to replace or augment trackbacks. Because frankly trackbacks don't work for us. We are one of the most linked-to blogs in the world, yet we get just a trickle of trackbacks. So if there is a way to integrate link-backs to ReadWriteWeb as easily as the FriendFeed plug-in integrates outside discussion, then I'd be one very happy publisher! Consider that a challenge to the plug-in developers out there ;-)

What are your thoughts on the state of distrubuted discussions in the blogosphere? And how can we give trackback the same makeover that blog comments has gotten in 2008?

Google has just released a lengthy blog post to announce that it has finally put its privacy policy on its homepage. The search giant has been repeatedly questioned over the last few months over its lack of a readily available privacy policy, which until now has been buried in the “About Google” section of the site. The explanation has always been vague (and ridiculous), with Google repeatedly appealing to its desire to keep the home page as pristine as possible.

Google hasn’t said why it finally gave in, but it’s likely that it has been facing pressure from the government to make the privacy policy more available - a post by Saul Hansell points out that the lack of a visible policy may have actually been illegal under California law.

The announcement was accompanied by a lighthearted description of Google’s “homepage weight” - the number of words visible on the page at one time. Apparently the magic number is 28 words, and the company was forced to drop a word from its copyright disclaimer in order to make room for the new link.

It’s an interesting little story, but the tone of it is sort of strange. Privacy is a big deal at Google, so why the levity? We’ve had some recent concerns over where Google is getting its website usage data from. It would be nice if they were a little more forthcoming, even if it’s at the cost of a whimsical story.

Despite these concerns, we should give Google some credit for a hosting a pretty comprehensive privacy portal (even if it was difficult to find before). Here’s their captivating introduction to cookies:

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Here are some of the jobs listed on CrunchBoard over the last week:

• Fulltime Senior AJAX/PHP Web Developer
  DriverSide - San Francisco, CA
• QA Engineer
  Gx5 - Anywhere
• Software Support Specialist
  K&L Wine Merchants - Redwood City, CA
• GoodBarry .NET Web Development Ninja
  GoodBarry - San Francisco, CA
• Head of Web Design & Front-End Development
  Global Campus - London, UK
• Quality Assurance Cowboy
  Janus Health - San Diego, CA
• Web Developer
  Wall Street On Demand - Boulder, CO
• Operations Support Engineer
  LiveOffice - Torrance, CA
• Technical Architect
  Frog Design - Milan, IT
• Ruby Developer
  TechCrunch - Atherton, CA

International readers can check out our British and French job boards as well.

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Hitwise Intelligence took an interesting look at the breakdown of Yahoo's properties today. They come to the conclusion that, even if Yahoo sells off its search division, Yahoo's other properties probably wouldn't be too affected by this, as they get most of their traffic from Google's search anyway. Only Yahoo Image Search, Games, Maps, and News get most of their traffic from Yahoo Search.

Looking at these statistics, it becomes clear that most of Yahoo's properties would continue doing just fine without getting traffic from Yahoo Search. Also, according to Hitwise, Yahoo Search only gets about 12% of Yahoo's traffic anyway, while Yahoo's homepage and Yahoo Mail get a combined 68%.

It's important to note that Hitwise bases its data is solely on US traffic. Yahoo is also extremely popular in Asia. There, these numbers might look slightly different.

As rumors about the future of Yahoo continue swirling around the net, these numbers from Hitwise give us at least some idea that selling only its search business to Microsoft (or anybody else) would still allow the core of Yahoo to continue doing just fine. At the same time, though, the rest of Yahoo would become even more dependent on Google for its traffic.

RSS is magic and the things we do online are often beautiful - so why are all the interfaces for displaying the feeds of our activities so ugly? Enter Swurl, a visually stunning system for displaying a timeline of your activities on various sites around the web.

Developer Ryan Sit specializes in leveraging the visual to create new interfaces for data, his ListPic application lets users browse Craigslist by images. Just like Listpic creates a whole new experience for Craigslist, Sit hopes that Swurl will make interacting with lifestream data a much more visually enjoyable experience.

How it Works

The most important part of Swurl is the timeline view, where all the messages, bookmarks, album covers and photos you've saved in various services are organized in a calendar view. It's a great way to look back at days gone by - we've found already that it can't help but put your experiences into a different perspective.

In addition to the timeline view, Swurl also publishes your activities in a blog-type format. Each person's blog is highly customizable. If you've hesitated to send the URL to your crazy-chaotic FriendFeed page to your grandma, maybe you should send her to a Swurl page instead.

Inside of each item you'll find all kinds of visual treats, like a nice slideshow viewer, song lyrics displayed below the Flash audio player for each song in your time line and elegant captions on your photos. There are lots of nice little touches here and we hope it will only continue to improve.

One of the areas the app could really use improvement is in viewing your friends' activities. You probably don't want to use it for that, unless it's very casual. Swurl discovers your friends on various services but displays their activities in a boring list that's spotty and hours behind.

The big picture here for us is that RSS feeds and lifestream data in particular can really look great when displayed nicely and mashedup with various sources of data. By grouping your activities into a calendar view, Swurl really facilitates a change in perspective. We think you'll enjoy this app and we are excited to see where it goes in the future.

The recent court order directing Google to hand over data to Viacom about every YouTube video ever watched strikes many people as an absurd overreach of the law into the privacy of anyone who has ever used YouTube (i.e., almost everyone on the Internet). Google should definitely keep fighting the ruling if it can.

But if it can’t, perhaps it should comply with it in a creative way. The data in question are data logs containing the records of every video watched on YouTube, by whom, and at what times. The court is also ordering that Google hand over all videos that have ever been taken down for any reason. The logs alone take up 12 terabytes. Google should print them out and deliver them on paper.

It would literally fill up the Library of Congress. That is roughly the equivalent of all the printed books in the Library of Congress (by one estimate, others put it at 20 terabytes—either way, it’s a lot of paper). The court order never states what form, the data must be delivered in.

(Photo via, appropriately enough, the Library of Congress And hat tip to reader Paul Christiansen for the original suggestion).

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You just had to squeeze a little more work in on this Fourth of July holiday, didn’t you? Well, we’re glad you stopped by. But before your fire up the BBQ, take a minute to catch up on what you might have missed over at NewTeeVee. A federal judge ordered YouTube to hand over its [...]