All Things Digital

Ribbit is as much “Silicon Valley’s first telephone company” as the region’s first to boast a silly name and grandiose claims.

Still, the Silicon Valley start-up, which officially opened its Web-based telephony platform to third party developers this morning, is generating a lot of buzz for its Flash/Flex-based telephones (see video below), and rightly so. The company has essentially built a software version of an operator-class telephone switch that connects Internet-based voice communication services with mobile and landline phones and other Web-based phone applications.

Using its Ribbit API, developers can write applications that support full telephone capabilities–voice mail, call-logging, text-to-speech transcription services, etc.–and because they’re Flash/Flex-based, they can be embedded into Web sites and integrated into Web-based services.

“What we have done is made voice an object that you embed into your workflow (or software),” said Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs. “We didn’t want to change how people did things, like communicate via Skype, and wanted to integrate the platform to work with any phone.”

Smart, eh? But how’s the company going to make money? Ribbit says it plans to charge for services like calls to traditional landlines, voice-mail transcriptions and billing. A reasonable plan, but as Ovum analyst Brett Azuma notes, an unproven one. “Unless there’s a foolproof way to get the products out there and make them successful,” Azuma told Wired. “I think the consumer applications are a little unclear for now. Being able to use text-to-speech transcription services and archive voice calls are many of the features that consumers have shown interest in over the years. However, whether or not they’re willing to pay for these features is going to be the big question.”

LinkedIn, Facebook’s dour older brother, joined Google’s OpenSocial development platform today, announcing the Intelligent Application Platform–a service that will open the social-networking site to third-party software developers.

Like the Facebook Platform, “InApps” allows developers to create productivity applications for LinkedIn or to port some of the site’s features to outside Web sites. But unlike Facebook, these widgets must be approved by LinkedIn before they’re deployed.

Clearly, the company has no intention of offering users the chance to send electronic hamburgers to each other, or pop their zits. “What we are trying to do is make professionals more productive by making them able to find one another, learn more about each other and communicate efficiently with each other,” LinkedIn Chief Executive Dan Nye told Reuters. “It’s not a place where you waste two hours of your time trying to find a date.”

Launching in concert with InApps are a new look and a number of new features designed to make the site more interactive. Among them: a news feed customized by the company and the industry in which a user works and an interesting BusinessWeek application that lets you see how you’re connected through LinkedIn to people and companies mentioned in its articles. With such upgrades, LinkedIn–which claims 17 million registered users globally and about 5 million unique per month–hopes to dominate the business of business networking. Personal networking and self-expression, it seems to be saying, are best left to others.

But is it reasonable to think that people will continue to maintain two social-networking profiles–one for their personal life and another for their professional life? LinkedIn CEO Nye says it is, especially given the value proposition LinkedIn offers its users. “…People have profiles on both services,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “But on LinkedIn, you’re not going to get poked, there’s no zombies and you’re not going to share your music list. … Now when someone says, ‘Hey, let’s go down and meet at Starbucks,’ you don’t have to ask five people if they’re Tom.”

“Once every hundred years media changes,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this month of the social network’s imaginatively titled “Facebook Ads.” And that may be so. But not, it would seem, without a few legal warnings and the occasional online petition.

Liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org launched a campaign yesterday against Facebook’s “Beacon” advertisements, which transform member transactions on third-party partner sites into product/service endorsements and insert them into their friends’ “news feeds.” Facebook members, or should I say “fansumers,” are automatically opted-in to the program, and while they are offered the chance to opt out, they can do so only on a case-by-case basis.

MoveOn considers that to be a glaring violation of privacy and has launched an online petition protesting it. “Facebook users across the nation are outraged that the books, movies and gifts they buy privately on other sites are being displayed without permission to lots of people–and Facebook needs to reverse this massive privacy breach,” MoveOn.org spokesman Adam Green said in a statement. “They should respect privacy by switching to an opt-in process like most other Facebook applications, not opt-out–which was solely designed to benefit corporate advertisers.”

Facebook, of course, says it’s not violating anyone’s privacy. “Information is shared with a small selection of a user’s trusted network of friends, not publicly on the Web or with all Facebook users,” the company said in a statement. “Users also are given multiple ways to choose not to share information from a participating site, both on that site and on Facebook.”

Of course they are. But as Forrester’s Charlene Li notes, they’re easily missed and don’t give users nearly enough control over their behavioral data. “The biggest problem is the lack of transparency,” Li explains. “Facebook is right in that I would really like to have some things that I do on third-party sites to conveniently appear in news feed, e.g. events I’m attending from Evite or eBay/craigslist listings so that my friends know about them. That’s the promise of Beacon. But I need to be in control and not get blindsided.”

In a press conference following Google Analyst Day, company Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin confirmed Google’s plans to bid in the FCC’s upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction, but declined to discuss the mobile-phone strategy that might make use of it–apparently leaving that task to The Wall Street Journal.

According to a report in the publication today, Google will officially disclose its long-anticipated plans for Google-powered phones within the next two weeks. The devices will reportedly feature Google’s standard mobile applications (Maps, etc.) and more interestingly, a customized open-source operating system, which would allow third-party developers to build applications beyond those offered by Google. From the Journal:

The Google-powered phones are expected to wrap together several Google applications–among them, its search engine, Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail email–that have already made their way onto some mobile devices. The most radical element of the plan, though, is Google’s push to make the phones’ software ‘open’ right down to the operating system, the layer that controls applications and interacts with the hardware. That means independent software developers would get access to the tools they need to build additional phone features.

“Developers could, for instance, more easily create services that take advantage of users’ Global Positioning System location, contact lists and Web-browsing habits. They also would be able to interact with Google Maps and other Google applications. The idea is that a range of new social networking, mapping and other services would emerge, just as they have on the open, mostly unfettered Web. Google, meanwhile, could gather user data to show targeted ads to cellphone users.”

And don’t forget the mobile commerce element. Google-powered phones might even offer customers a way to pay for goods from vending machines and retailers via text message.

Anyway … The company has approached a number of handset makers and wireless operators about partnering in the effort, which it hopes to bring to market by the middle of 2008.

Previously:

• First Gphone Line Forms in New York Times Newsroom
• We Believe in One Godphone, the Handset Almighty …
• ‘We’re Not Doing a Mobile Phone’ Added to Norton Anthology of False Denials
• The Gphone: Exclusively From Sprint Nextel and Google?

Discussion is led by entrepreneur and start-up adviser Dave McClure, with Seth Goldstein (CEO, SocialMedia.com), Ali Partovi (CEO, iLike), Keith Rabois (VP, Slide) and Lance Tokuda (CEO, RockYou) as panelists.

McClure: How many of you in the audience think the Facebook platform announcement was the most important tech event of 2007? Smattering of hands. Clearly, the audience hasn’t yet realized the vast implications of Vampires, Zombies, iLike and Pop Ur Zit.

McClure then says the announcement of the Facebook platform was the most important tech event of 2007 and perhaps even the most important event since Google’s IPO.

(For Mark Zuckerberg, maybe.)

Sweet! Lance “If you told me you were going to write me a check for $10 million for my Facebook widget, I’d say, ‘Forget it’ “ Tokuda is a panelist! (Wonder if he’ll take $10-million-and-1 for his Super Wall widget during the Q&A.)

Oh my. Lots of irrational Zuckeruberance onstage right now. Apparently Kara Swisher’s “Facebook Apps Are for Toddlers” post did not go over well with the current panel, which is giving her a big ol’ Facebook developer pig pile for colorfully describing their work as “silly, useless and time-wasting.” To these folks, “silly, useless and time-wasting” is apparently a business model. “Kara’s argument is ridiculous,” says Rabois. “Why do people watch movies and TV? Because they’re bored or looking for something to do to relieve stress in their lives. Apps are providing entertainment to users.”

High point: Takuda volunteers to build a Facebook widget just for Kara. Wonder if it will be anything like Super Wall–based on a pre-existing Facebook application and easily obsoleted.

Feels like a good time to duck out and boost my Facebook Vampire stats …

We are excited about creating a vibrant third-party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users.”

Though the firmware update that disabled third-party iPhone applications and bricked iPhones uncoupled from AT&T’s network might have led you to think otherwise, Apple is actually excited about the prospect of a third-party developer community for the iPhone. So much so that it’s planning to release an official SDK (software development kit) for the device.

In a letter posted on Apple’s Web site this morning, CEO Steve Jobs said the company will release an iPhone SDK early next year. “Let me just say it: We want native third-party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February,” Jobs wrote. “We are excited about creating a vibrant third-party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users.”

Jobs offered few other concrete details beyond that, but an Apple-sanctioned kit, even a limited one, will likely be embraced by a developer community that’s created scores of applications for the device despite Apple’s best efforts to stop them.

The sputtering outrage over the firmware update that disabled third-party iPhone applications and bricked iPhones uncoupled from AT&T’s network became a cry of victory yesterday when the iPhone dev community said it had found a way to again implement third-party applications on the device.

According to Engadget, the iPhone Dev Team, an unofficial group of programmers who developed the jailbreaking tools that opened up iPhone 1.0.1, have crafted a second set of tools that exploits a vulnerability in Mobile Safari to open iPhone 1.1.1. They’ve not yet released a general-use version of the tool, but one is surely on the way.

That said, there’s no telling how long it will work once it’s released. As Engadget notes, these newer jailbreaks aren’t nearly as robust as their predecessors. “… Unfortunately, it sounds like most (if not all) of these new hacks rely solely on that single TIFF exploit in Mobile Safari, meaning that everyone’s back to square one the moment Apple beams v1.1.2 to the public at large.”