Philipp Heintze

Shared by Jesse Stay
Someone should write an AIR client around this - allow you to post status updates @replies, etc. similar to Twitter, but allow you at any time to IM the user real time and start up a full conversation with the user.

Since the launch of Facebook Chat, we've received a lot of positive feedback from users about being able to connect instantly with their friends on Facebook. With Chat fully launched and growing steadily, we've started working on more new features to enhance the Chat experience.

Right now we're building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. In the near future, users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat to:

• Communicate with their friends
• See which of their friends are online and view their profile pictures
• Set their statuses

Users can securely authenticate and authorize applications to connect to Chat on their behalf and send messages to their friends just like they can on Facebook.

We will share more details as we get closer to launch, but we wanted to give you a heads up so you can start thinking about (or even start building) Chat into your applications.

Please send us your comments and feedback to developer-feedback@facebook.com. Put [Chat via Jabber] in the subject line.

Shared by Phil
don't believe the hype. 3G? not until 2009... my guess

Shared by Robert Scoble
Zoho is one of the companies I'm watching very closely. Especially since next month we'll start a new show on the future of work for fastcompany.tv.

Now you can login to Zoho with your Google or Yahoo! accounts. Below the Zoho Sign-in section, you now have the option to login with your Google or Yahoo! accounts.

If you already have a Zoho account with your Google or Yahoo! email address, you will be logged in to the Zoho account automatically. If you do not have a Zoho account with your Google or Yahoo email address, then you have the option to either associate the Google or Yahoo email address with your existing Zoho account (under Accounts) or you can create a new one.

Apart from logging into Zoho with your existing accounts, you also have an option to import contacts from your Google and Yahoo! accounts to the Contacts section under Zoho Accounts.

This functionality is also useful for sharing documents. Now you can easily share your documents with your friends who have Google or Yahoo! accounts. They can login to Zoho with their Google or Yahoo! credentials and view shared documents without having to create new Zoho Account.

Here is a useful tip. Under http://accounts.zoho.com, if you add your Gmail and Yahoo email addresses (under ‘My Email IDs’ section) and confirm them, you’ll be able to login to your Zoho Account with either your Zoho Account, Google Account or your Yahoo! Account.

Why this move?

We obviously want many users to try out and use our applications. Apart from that, we noticed that when users try Zoho, they prefer our apps to competition. This Lifehacker poll conducted few months back for example gives you a snapshot.

There are two takeaways from the poll like the one above (and other polls we conducted).

1. Many users don’t prefer creating yet another account for yet another online app
2. Users prefer Zoho to Competition when they try both (In case of the above poll, around 75% prefer Zoho)

We hope this little feature is useful. More than these polls, we want to hear from you if this is useful. Please do let us know your feedback.

Shared by Phil
Suggest a better translation is THE feature to watch...

Today Plazes CEO Felix Petersen gave us a peek at iPlazer, the upcoming iPhone client for the geo-tagging social networking site. The app will be available when Apple’s official App Store launches in mid June. Plazes has been around for a while - it was one of the first companies to be covered on TechCrunch. Since then it has switched gears a couple of times, but it’s best described as Twitter with geotagging, points of interest, and social networking features.

Right now iPlazer seems like a combination of Twitter and Dopplr. The phone detects the user’s location through the iPhone API, then presents the user with a number of suggested descriptions (for example, opening Plazes from our office presented us with choices of “TechCrunch HQ” and “The Mansion”, both of which were assigned to the coordinates by previous visitors).

After choosing a location label, the user is prompted to send “activity” messages to their friends (it’s basically a tweet tagged with location information). These activity messages are compared by the server, and Plazes notifies you if you’re in the same neighborhood as one of your friends. You can get a feel for the app in the screencast below.

Plazes is also launching a new version of their main site, which will enter private beta next week. Most notable about the launch is the introduction of Twitter integration, which is strange because Plazes seems to mimic Twitter in some ways. For the time being Plazes stands to gain by allowing Twitter users to send geo-tagged tweets, but things may work out differently in the long term. The new version of the site also introduces a Dopplr-esque nearby friend notification system and support for iCal integration. You can request an invite here.

Readers may remember Felix Petersen as the guy who got busted by his own product. Petersen backed out of a speaking gig at a conference, telling them that one of his kids was sick, then proceeded to party at a different event (while Plazes told the world). The whole thing was overblown, but it was amusing nonetheless.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

More details on Facebook’s banning of Google Friend Connect from the Facebook API earlier today. I spoke with Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly and Google’s Director of Engineering David Glazer about the banning to get a fuller picture of the conflict.

Here’s an example of how Friend Connect (more details) works in practice. A third party site may want to add social elements to their service. They can integrate with Friend connect and allow users to sign in. Those users choose a social network where they keep their profile (Orkut, Hi5, GTalk and, until today, Facebook) and log in via the social network’s API. They then become “members” of the site, using Google’s terminology. If any of their friends from their social network also become members of that site, those friends are shown on the site and you can interact with them. To see it for yourself, click “log in” at the top of this sample site, IngridMichaelson.

Kelly says the issue comes down to the fact that Google Friend Connect users don’t have control over data pulled from Facebook. In particular, Facebook is concerned that they have no relationship to the end site where the data is presented (in the example above, IngridMichaelson). Instead, Google has inserted itself as a middleman in the process.

Also, Kelly says, once permission is granted to share data, the user has no way to revoke that permission from their Facebook account. Facebook has a privacy control panel that lets users set and change privacy setting over time, including the removal of applications. With Google in the middle, Facebook has no way to stop the flow of data to these third parties.

Google’s Glazer counters that they have a very effective method for unlinking to a site that a user has given permission to, so users will be just fine. In the screen shot below, Google gives an option to “Unlink” the specific social network from the site (on right) or change the data that’s shared from the social network (on left). Kelly is correct that you can’t trigger the unsubscribe from Facebook.com, but Glazer says that’s because Facebook’s API has no way of telling Facebook about the third party site the data has been passed off to.

Glazer says that they have been in “constant contact” with Facebook over the Friend Connect product, and are still trying to work with Facebook to get access to the API again. But Facebook has their own competing product to Friend Connect, called Facebook Connect. The longer the ban, made under the banner of protecting user privacy, remains in place, the stronger Facebook’s position will be competitively. My guess is they’re in no hurry to get through this conflict any time soon.

The fact is that Google is taking perfectly adequate steps to protect user privacy with their Friend Connect product, and it is a useful product for users. After talking with both sides, it seems to me that Facebook is relying on a very convenient catch-22 to stay out of Google’s network. They are the ones in control of their own API functionality, and they could add features that fix this problem. Until they do, there’s nothing Google can do to remedy the “problem,” and the walls around the Facebook garden get ever higher.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.