February 23rd, 2007
Netvibes to make widgets universal; Digg to support OpenID; YouTube outsources filtering; MyBlogLog bans user
The social web weekly: a quick-fire roundup of some of the news, announcements and conversations that have occurred throughout the week…
- Digg to support OpenID. Earlier in the week, speaking at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in the UK, Digg's Kevin Rose announced that the site will soon support OpenID — joining a list of big name supporters, including AOL and Microsoft. More OpenID discussion over at Read/WriteWeb's superb FOWA coverage.
- Netvibes to make widgets universal. Also at FOWA, Netvibes has announced a new Universal Widget API, which will mean that any widget created for Netvibes will also work on Google, Vista, and MacOSX. Support for Yahoo is also in the works. This should certainly make widget development a lot more efficient and is also a smart move from Netvibes, as developers will be tempted to develop for them first, knowing that their efforts will work elsewhere.
- YouTube to outsource 'filtering'. The Mercury News is reporting that YouTube is finally ready to start filtering out content that violates copyright — though not based on its own in-house technology which the company had previously claimed to be developing. Instead, YouTube will license technology from Audible Magic — the same company that supplies filtering software to MySpace.
- MyBlogLog bans user. MyBlogLog, which I've previously profiled here on The Social Web, has taken the step of banning a user who published a number of spam exploits for the popular social networking widget. The problem, says MyBlogLog, wasn't that exploits were published, but that along the way, so was other users' data. Considering MyBlogLog don't even have a published Terms of Service — banning a user for pointing out how the service can be abused, should be a last resort. A backlash in the making?
Steve O'Hear is a London-based consultant, educator, and journalist, focussing on the Internet and all aspects of digital technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
