MySpace will announce support for the OpenID single sign-on framework sometime this week. This will be the second largest implementation ever and will bring the total number of OpenID-enabled accounts to over half a billion. MySpace’s 200 million user IDs join Yahoo’s 250 million or so accounts, plus accounts from a number of other large providers.

Like most large company integrations, MySpace is at first becoming an OpenID issuer only, and may integrate as a relying party down the road. We’ve argued that becoming an issuer is essentially a land grab for user identities. The integration work on accepting OpenIDs from others is harder, and the payoff is less.

MySpace may also be writing code to extend the OpenID spec and allow easy integration of their Data Availability product to sites that accept MySpace OpenIDs.

Source:Techcrunch.com

From the developer’s blog: “I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.”

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.

Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.

Bulk management of plugins.

A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.

Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.

Plugin update notification bubble.

Customizable default avatars.

You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.

Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.

Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.

You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.

Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.

Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”

You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.

A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.

Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

Apple’s iPhone App Store is now live. To access it, download iTunes 7.7 here. Once iTunes has upgraded, you can access the App Store here. You can “get apps” on iTunes now, but you’ll need the iPhone 2.0 software to actually use them on the iPhone, which isn’t yet available.   Source: Techcrunch.com

SpeedDate, an application from the company of the same name, has disappeared from the application list, and the link to the application leads back to the Facebook homepage. SpeedDate is a web-based speed dating service that also offers a Meebo application, and until recently, a Facebook application.

Recent victims include Slide’s Top Friends (was gone for 7 days, restored this weekend), Socialhi’s SocialMe (suspended since July 1, not available yet), RockYou’s Super Wall (moratorium on viral channels), and now SpeedDate.

A recent Google search came up with a Yahoo! Answers post that asked the question “has anyone had the speed date application appear on their profile without adding the application?” There was another response that had someone saying that the same thing had happened to them. This might have something to do with the suspension, but we won’t know until tomorrow (seems to be a trend, the Top Friends application disappeared in the middle of the night as well).

Other speed dating applications (from Desidate.tv and Randomate) on Facebook have remained untouched.

Today, Hasbro and EA announced that the Facebook app EA has been working on for more than six months will be launched later this month, although a version on Pogo (EA’s online casual gaming site) is available today.

There is a Facebook Scrabble app in private beta, but the company is still testing it. It is not clear what is taking EA so long. After all, this is just a Facebook app, not a fully-featured video game like Spore.

It is also not clear what will happen to Scrabulous, the unofficial version of Scrabble that has become one of the most popular apps on Facebook.

Scrabulous, which was developed by two brothers in India, was almost shut down earlier this year because Hasbro claims that it infringes on its trademarks. Scrabulous was in acquisition talks with many different companies, including Electronic Arts (which has the domestic license to digital versions of the game) and Real Networks (which has the international digital rights), but everyone balked on price.

Rather than force Facebook to shut down Scrabulous immediately, however, Hasbro and Electronic Arts realized that they would suffer an extreme backlash if they took away everyone’s favorite Facebook game without offering up an alternative. Now that the alternative is almost here, it remains to be seen whether they will try to eliminate the competition.

It looks like green lights all the way for the launch of the iPhone App Store this week. Most developers have been told they must submit their applications by 12 PM PDT today (Monday) to be considered for inclusion in the launch:

“Have your application be among the first available when the App Store goes live. To ensure your application can be considered for the exciting launch of the App Store, submit your application by 12 PM PDT, on July 7, 2008. We will continue to accept applications after this time, however your application may not be available until after the launch of the App Store. Conduct final testing of your application with iPhone OS beta eight and submit your app today.”

The store will almost certainly launch by Friday when the 3G iPhone is released, but some app developers say the App Store will likely launch a few days before that. Most developers will only get a few hours notice prior to the go live time, and Apple is keeping a tight reign on PR, as usual. The store could be launched as early as Tuesday.

Yes, you can destroy your blog. It’s not difficult just follow all the above hints and soon you will see your site traffic drop and visitors vanished. Of course this article is to show you what NOT to do.

Excessive Ads - Hey, there’s nothing wrong with making some money from your blog (that’s why your reading this blog right?). But, when your advertisements begin to take up more space on your blog than your content, you’ve got a problem. People visit blog to learn and discuss topics that interest them. They want to share their ideas or ask questions. They DON’T want to have to sort through a million ads, to find your content. Think of it this way, you don’t tune in to your favorite TV show to watch the commercials do you? Well neither do your readers.

Lack of Interaction - Many people view blogging as the digital version of giving a sermon. The blogger sits behind his pulpit (keyboard) and preaches to his or her loyal followers. However, if you look at the most successful blogs online, you’ll notice that the interaction is a HUGE part of the blogs success. The ability to leave comments, read other comments, and interact with the content that you’re consuming is what has made blogging what it is. If you don’t make yourself available to your readers, don’t answer any questions and don’t accept any feedback on your content, you’re dooming yourself to the digital equivalent of talking to yourself.

Over Posting - Believe it or not, posting too often can drive away readers as well. If you’re slamming your readers with a high number of posts each and every day, there will be no way for them to keep up. Also, it’s going to be tough to keep up the quality of the posts if you’re cranking them out at such a frantic pace. If you slip into the mistake of posting too often, your “signal to noise” ratio will drop considerably, meaning readers will have to sort through more information to find something worthwhile or valuable to them. That’s a quick recipe for a failed blog.

Fights - Now don’t think for one second that you’re going to agree with everyone all the time. And yes, I still stand by my statement that controversy is good. However, I’ve seen many bloggers allow themselves to get completely side-tracked by their fight with another blogger to the point that it consumes the blog. A good general rule of thumb is that when you get into name calling and personal attacks, it’s time to shut it down. If you allow a fight to go on long enough, you’ll lose readers who simply don’t want to hear the pissing and moaning anymore. Remember, your subscribers read your blog to get your thoughts and opinions on the subject matter. Unless that subject is fighting with other bloggers, chances are your fight will be interesting for a while, but in the end it will lack substance for your readers to survive on.

Playing Follow the Leader - I borrowed that phrase from Max but the premise behind it is 100% true. If you don’t bring anything unique to your blog, whether it’s a distinct style, a special way of covering the information, etc. chances are your blog will die. There are simply too many other options out there for people to read. If you’re not interesting and exceptional in some way, readers will have no reason to return to your site. Find the one thing that makes your blog exceptional, and make that your brand.

Many facebook application developers have been asking whether they should develop for international markets now or wait for Facebook to release its crowd-sourced translation tools for applications. New data is available on applications developed in other languages.

In total, there are 527 apps currently listing a language other than English as their primary language. That’s about 1.7% of the 30,000 Facebook apps currently in the directory. The most popular apps in languages other than English are Sexo Quizz (French), with 25,000 daily active users, Horoscope (French), with 18,000 daily active users, and Tarot Gratis (Spanish), with 13,000 daily active users.

Spanish is by far the language with the most apps developed at 330. Next comes French at 134. Trailing far behind are German (11), Italian (9), Japanese (7), Danish (6), and Finnish (6). Less than 5 apps have been developed in Chinese, Catalan, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, and Korean. Developers keeping track of Facebook’s user counts in international markets will note that there remain tremendous opportunities for local developers in languages with huge user populations on Facebook.

And as a final note, in addition to adding a language filter to the application directory, Facebook also removed application counts from the directory. Now, you’ll need a third party service to count.

A new study suggests that attitude rather than availability may be the key reason why more Americans don’t have high-speed Internet access. The findings from the Pew Internet and American Life Project challenge the argument that broadband providers need to more aggressively roll out supply to meet demand.

Only 14 percent of dial-up users say they’re stuck with the older, slower connection technology because they can’t get broadband in their neighborhoods, Pew reported Wednesday.

Thirty-five percent say they’re still on dial-up because broadband prices are too high, while another 19 percent say nothing would persuade them to upgrade. The remainder have other reasons or do not know.

“That suggests that solving the supply problem where there are availability gaps is only going to go so far,” said John Horrigan, the study’s author. “It’s going to have to be a process of getting people more engaged with information technology and demonstrating to people it’s worth it for them to make the investment of time and money.”

Nonetheless, the Pew study does support concerns that rural Americans have more trouble getting faster Internet connections, which bring greater opportunities to work from home or log into classes at distant universities.

Twenty-four percent of rural dial-up users say they would get broadband if it becomes available, compared with 11 percent for suburbanites and 3 percent for city dwellers.

Vint Cerf, one of the Internet’s key inventors and an advocate for the idea that the government should be more active in expanding broadband, suspects that many more dial-up users would be interested in going high-speed if they had a better idea of what they’re missing. He pointed out that broadband access is available from only one provider in many areas, keeping prices high and speeds low.

“Some residential users may not see a need for higher speeds because they don’t know about or don’t have ability to use high speeds,” Cerf said. “My enthusiasm for video conferencing improved dramatically when all family members had MacBook Pros with built-in video cameras, for example.”

Overall, Pew found that 55 percent of American adults now have broadband access at home, up from 47 percent a year earlier and 42 percent in March 2007. By contrast, only 10 percent of Americans now have dial-up access.

Despite the increase in overall broadband adoption, though, growth has been flat among blacks and poorer Americans.

Of the Americans with no Internet access at all, about a third say they have no interest in logging on, even at dial-up speeds. Nearly 20 percent of nonusers had access in the past but dropped it. Older and lower-income Americans are most likely to be offline.

Pew’s telephone study of 2,251 U.S. adults, including 1,553 Internet users, was conducted April 8 to May 11 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. The error margins for subgroups are higher — plus or minus 7 percentage points for the dial-up sample.

Source: CNN

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Swedes may cherish openness and transparency, but not enough to accept a new law giving the government the right to snoop on all e-mails and phone calls crossing the country’s borders. Outrage over the statute has led to 2 million protests — filed by e-mail.

The online petition drive comes as other European Union countries consider granting authorities unprecedented spying powers over their own citizens amid fears of a mounting terror threat.

“This would have been totally unthinkable before Sept. 11,” said Anne Ramberg, secretary-general of the Swedish Bar Association, calling for challenges to the law in Swedish and European courts.

Under current law, e-mail and phone surveillance in Sweden require a court order in a suspected criminal case. Critics say the new law will encroach on privacy, jeopardize civil liberties and violate the European Convention on Human Rights.

Sweden’s Defense Minister Sten Tolgfors defended the law in an online forum on the Expressen Web site Tuesday, saying data regarding individuals will be destroyed unless it is directly relevant to intelligence activities.

He also stressed the need to defend Sweden from terror attacks like those in New York, Madrid and London.

“The information is needed to evaluate, and meet, outside threats against Sweden,” he said.

Even before the law was passed, TeliaSonera in April moved its e-mail servers to Finland because of the expected passage of the legislation.

Timo Lehtinen, of the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority, said he expected other telecommunications groups to rethink how they handle cross-border traffic, and expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the Swedish measures.

“The amount of traffic is so vast that it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he said. “If someone was planning some kind of terrorist activity they could make it extremely hard, or even impossible, to trace.”

Other EU countries have enacted or are mulling stronger government snooping rules.

Britain has some of the most extensive surveillance powers in the world, allowing law enforcement, intelligence agencies and others to monitor telephone calls, e-mails or mail, with special permission from the Home Secretary.

The evidence is not admissible in court; Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants to change that with new laws allowing use of some wiretap evidence.

In Germany, Parliament is expected to pass a new bill later this year giving officials the right to monitor some criminal suspects’ e-mails, but only with a court order, as is the case now for telephone wiretaps in serious crimes.

In Italy, which experts call one of the world’s most wiretapped democracies, the debate is going the other way — now focusing on how to do more to protect privacy.

A Swedish opinion poll published last week indicated that 47 percent of Swedes opposed the new law, while 36 percent are for it; the rest were undecided. The margin of error was not available.

The protest could further erode already declining support for Sweden’s center-right government, but is unlikely to cause a government crisis, since the coalition controls a solid parliamentary majority.

Niklas Wykman, chairman of the Conservative Party youth wing, told the Associated Press that he can’t support his party on the law.

“We are against the general eavesdropping of all Swedish citizens, which paves the way for a surveillance society,” he said.