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In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we look into Facebook’s controversial new "principles", check out the latest OpenID trends, cover Amazon’s public data initiative, analyze Wikipedia’s possible future as a development platform, investigate the future of ‘touch’ apps, and more. Also we cover the highlights from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb’s new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

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Web Trends

Facebook Management Has Lost Its Grip on Reality

Facebook made one of the most important announcements in the young company’s history this week. It has proposed a set of foundational documents, including the first official statement of Facebook Principles. The proposal is made to Facebook’s users, who will now have 30 days to read, comment and perhaps vote on the documents. Looking just below the surface of this big news, though, there are a number of things going on that make absolutely no sense to us. Facebook’s management appears to have lost its grip on reality. The population of Facebook dwarfs that of scores of countries in the physical world; these foundational documents are of immense importance and raise big red flags.

See also: Open Thread: Thoughts on Facebook’s New Constitution

Bad News for OpenID: People Still Using Same Password Everywhere

A new survey from Gartner Research delivers some bad news regarding our online security practices: two-thirds of U.S. consumers use the same one or two passwords for all the websites they access. And they like it that way. Although people claim they’re concerned about security, they still tend to use unsafe password management techniques rather than exploring new methods – be they new hardware, software, or new authentication frameworks like OpenID.

Related: Biometrics for Identification or Authentication Still Has a Way to Go

Could Wikipedia’s Future Be as a Development Platform?

Content creation at Wikipedia is slowing down. The already small number of active regular editors is on the decline and Jimmy Wales has called for live edits to be held for approval on many pages, a step sure to slow contributions even further. The tapering of fresh content doesn’t have to mean Wikipedia’s death, though. The site contains a gargantuan amount of human created and tended but largely machine readable and structured data. That’s a potential gold mine in terms of a potential pay-off in innovation. Wikipedia can offer developers opportunities to glean analysis, supplemental content and structured data from its years-old store of collaboratively generated information. All of that is possible, but Wikipedia as a platform can’t be taken for granted.

The Future of Touch

It’s tempting to give Apple’s iPhone credit for the birth of touch-based computing, but it was not the first touchscreen user interface – nor is it the only one in existence today. Long before the iPhone, touchscreen LCDs were common, as were touch smartphones from Palm, Sony Ericsson, HTC, and others. In addition, back in 2001 – long before the iPhone launch – Microsoft began work on Microsoft Surface, a touchscreen tabletop computer. Yet it was the iPhone’s multi-touch capabilities along with its stellar design that really got the ball rolling for touch computing. The only question that remains now is what will come next?

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We’d like to thank ReadWriteWeb’s sponsors, without whom we couldn’t bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
• Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• Discover the Semantic Web, at a Dow Jones Webinar.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• TaxACT lets you file your taxes online.
• Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 allows you to create interactive social media experiences.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• DEMO09 is the launchpad for emerging technology.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

Jobwire

Changes at Google.org

Search engine giant Google is in the middle of reorganizing its philanthropic arm Google.org and this week the company announced a couple of key personnel changes. Dr. Larry Brilliant will step down as Executive Director to take the position of Chief Philanthropy Evangelist. Vice President of New Business Development Megan Smith will assume the role of General Manager. Smith will continue in her Vice President role in addition to taking on this new role.

See also additional coverage and insight from ReadWriteWeb.

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEWEB’S JOBWIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

Web Products

Amazon Exposes 1 Terabyte of Public Data to Developers

Amazon.com changed the retail world. In the process the company built up so much surplus computing power that it started a dirt cheap "computing in the cloud" business that changed the computing world. This week the company’s newest project Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services began offering more than 1 Terabyte (1000 GB) of fascinating public data for developers to access on the fly through Amazon’s cloud computing service. We’re talking about an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences, including the Human Genome, huge amounts of chemistry data, machine readable encyclopedic entries about millions of different topics and an entire dump of Wikipedia. US Census data, data from the US Department of Transportation and more. It’s all accessible by web applications in no time at all. What do you think this is going to change?

Google Announces Pricing for App Engine: Allows Developers to Scale Beyond Free Quotas

Google has finally announced its pricing plans for its App Engine service. Google’s App Engine allows developers to run their web applications on Google’s infrastructure and, until now, was only available in a free, but restricted, version. The free version currently gives developers up to 500MB of persistent storage and CPU power and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. Starting this week, however, developers will also be able to purchase additional resources, which will enable them to scale their apps beyond these free quotas.

Times Open: Developers Gather to Discuss The New York Times APIs

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we’re big fans of the Times Open strategy, the program that focuses on making the data of The New York Times more accessible to the developer community. We heralded the launch of the program, covered the first available API, and marveled at the access to content the APIs have begun to provide. Now the Times has taken another momentous step forward: bringing developers together for Times Open, the publication’s inaugural API seminar.

Related: NYT Times Newswire API: All the News That Will Fit

Don’t be Silly – The Kindle 2 is No Threat to Audiobooks

A few weeks ago, just after the introduction of the new Kindle 2, the Authors Guild complained that Amazon’s eBook reader had a text-to-speech function. According to Paul Aitken, the Guild’s executive director, this meant that Amazon would have to pay for audio rights for every book downloaded onto the device. This week, Roy Blount Jr., the Guild’s president, echoed this sentiment in an op-ed piece in the New York Times.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Enterprise

The Other Decoupling Theory

A lifetime ago, before the market meltdown, when it was just an ordinary recession, there was a theory that the big emerging markets (BRIC: Brazil, Russia, India, China) were "decoupled" from the US economy. According to this theory, when America had problems due to subprime mortgages, these countries would only be affected marginally. Well, that theory has been totally discredited. It turns out that the other web, the web of financial transactions, makes the global economy tightly coupled. But it is possible, faintly possible, that there is another form of decoupling happening between the traditional economy and the innovation economy.

Email us if you’re interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb’s Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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ReadWriteWeb

Appcelerator is an open source platform for building rich web applications. Appcelerator’s flagship product is called the Appcelerator Platform. The Appcelerator Platform consists of an SDK for building rich web applications and is completely open source. Recently, they have released Appcelerator Titanium, an open source platform for building desktop and mobile applications using a common set of Web technologies.

Appcelerator Titanium allows developers to use standard Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript to quickly and easily develop applications that can be deployed to multiple platforms, including the desktop, the browser or the mobile device.

Unlike traditional Web applications, which are limited to operating within the browser, Titanium desktop applications are able to read and write local data on the desktop and interact with the operating system. In particular, Titanium enables developers to build desktop Web applications that can operate both online and offline. You can also run your apps on Windows, Mac and Linux. Titanium is licensed under the Apache Public License.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://appcelerator.org/
License: Apache Public License

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“Gather ’round children, it’s time for story time with RoboGrandma – just make sure my batteries are charged!” This kind of blatant intellectual property violation will no longer be committed by the Amazon Kindle. The company today announced that it has given in to demands by the Author’s Guild and will let publishers choose whether or not to enable the Kindle’s speech to text audio functions for individual texts. Remember, folks, when reading by robots is outlawed, only outlaw robots will read aloud.

The Author’s Guild argued that Kindle had only licensed display rights for content on the kindle, not audio or performance rights. The feature will now be neutered and put under the control of publishers on a title by title basis.

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The New York Times has published Amazon’s full statement on the deal but it can be summarized as “blah, blah, blah…we cry Uncle.”

Last week our own Frederic Lardinois wrote a post titled “Don’t Be Silly; the Kindle 2 is no Threat to Audiobooks.” He argued that the speech to text was more likely to persuade customers to purchase professionally (human) read audio books than it was to whisk them into a pirate world of cuddling up with annoying robot voices for extended listening sessions.

It is pretty interesting that the book publishing world remains able to flex its muscles and make the mighty Amazon budge though – is it not? I bet they are pretty pleased with themselves about that.

Image from CNet UK.

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We heard about a new to-do list service today: Tasck. Tasck is a web-based application that stands out because of the pure simplicity of the service. Another to-do list service, KonoLive, just released a major update to its service and now features integration with Google Docs. KonoLive is an Adobe Air-based application that focuses on sharing to-do lists with groups. There are, of course, already plenty of to-do list managers available on the net, but both Tasck and KonoLive put their own spin on this established genre.

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KonoLive

KonoLive’s focus is on sharing to-do lists with a small group of friends or colleagues. Adding tasks and sharing your lists with other users is very easy and KonoLive offers everything from basic functions like establishing due dates to a live chat feature to discuss a certain item. KonoLive also integrates nicely with Google Docs and Box.net. Your lists are cached on your own machine, but also stored on KonoLive’s servers. Sadly, though, you can’t access your lists directly from KonoLive’s web site.

One thing we don’t like about KonoLive is that it automatically creates a new Box.net account for you. While we are big fans of Box.net, KonoLive does not inform you about this until you suddenly get a welcome message from Box.net. Also, the KonoLive window can not be resized, and the application seems a bit sluggish at times and does take up an inordinate amount of memory.

Tasck

In many ways, Tasck is the complete opposite of KonoLive. It has a minimalist AJAX user interface that allows you to perform a total of three actions: add tasks, delete tasks, and mark them as done. To mark a task as important, you simply capitalize the first letter.

Besides that, there really isn’t much else to do – which might be a good thing, because the service lets you focus on your to-do list without getting in your way. However, it would be nice if you could re-order your tasks or edit them afterwards.

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ReadWriteWeb