Google will be launching Friend Connect tonight to turn the open Web a place for open social apps to run wild as a motivator adoption mechanism for the new Google Gadget 2.0 format with OpenSocial across the Web. With Google powering email and search and collecting user data, I wondered about this new social component and about user controls. I did not get a chance to ask this question on the call due to what may have been technical issues but regardless I wanted to throw it out there to the blogosphere to give their SOMEWHAT FRANK perspectives on the following: How Does Google Friend Connect Put Users In Control? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below if you have a SOMEWHAT FRANK opinion.

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SOMEWHAT FRANK Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending May 11, 2008.

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Now you can make free calls to your friends from your Facebook profile. IfbyPhone, a Chicago-based telephone application platform company, has just make this possible by creating Phone-Me-Now. Phone-Me-Now gives Facebook friends free click to call functionality without disclosing their caller ID. I am not really sure if that is a good thing or not but I guess it depends on your objective. I would think it would play to the advantage of a telemarketer but I guess it could be nice to call your friends without disclosing your phone number in case you are trying to keep it private. The Phone-Me-Now application takes advantage of Ifbyphone technology to enable all types of phones (i.e. mobile, VoIP or rotary) to connect via the Web and enables inbound, outbound and click-to-call telephone applications with integrated interactive voice response dialogs.

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SOMEWHAT FRANK Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending April 27, 2008.

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SOMEWHAT FRANK Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending March 30, 2008.

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CBS Television stations today announced the launch of the CBS Local Ad Network as it looks to get into the advertising distribution game by connecting with local bloggers and social media Web sites. At first glance, I thought CBS was looking to incorporate blogs and other social media content into the local CBS news sites but after reading on that is not the case at all, it turns out CBS is just leveraging bloggers looking to generate some revenue on their blog or social media content. Network participants can place what CBS is calling a widget (with a huge skyscraper ad unit) on their sites and in return receive a rev-share. Nothing new here. It might be the right program for bloggers or social media content producers looking for a way to monetize and not sell ads though I have no idea what the rev-share looks like and it would be worth a look before jumping in and giving CBS ad impressions.

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MyBlogLog, the blog community creating site operated by Yahoo which I previously reviewed, has rolled out a slick new community widget. The widget offers a glossy finish and flyouts upon hovering to see the details on the recent visitors of the community. It seems MyBlogLog has simplified the widget by removing a number of features and customizations. According to a recent post by Ian Kennedy on the MyBlogLog blog, the new widget was graphically inspired by Arlo Rose who created Yahoo Widgets (formerly Konfabulator). I like the new look and updated the one on Somewhat Frank.

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AOL has just announced the acquisition of Goowy Media, a San Diego-based Flash startpage, widget and desktop application startup. One of Goowy's bi-products is yourminis a slick startpage that I previously reviewed and named one of the best beta products of 2006. It is pretty rad. Goowy's widgets can be distributed to just about any page or social network on the Web (as shown below) which is comparable to offerings by ClearSpring, Widgetbox and Gigya, which have also been getting buzz in the widget advertising space. These distribution capabilities will come in handy on myAOL as well as helping to syndicate AOL network content. Goowy also offers widget metrics in a dashboard that closely resembles the feed metrics dashboard of FeedBurner which was acquired by Google for $150 million.

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I spent many summer days as a child attempting to sell lemonade to anyone that passed by. I cannot say it was that lucrative a business and recall spending a lot of time waiting and waiting for lemonade customers. Aside from a solid suntan from my hours spent waiting I also learned that lemonade stands are all about location, location, location. Lemonade has taken the idea of the "lemonade stand" to the Web making it easy to recommend items you like on sites where you already have visitors.

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Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending December 16, 2007.

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Userplane, the web chat and community tools provider, has announced today that they are working with network and cable TV media companies to rollout social networking and messaging services within their existing online communities to kick off online conversations. Userplane's deal includes Channel 4 (UK), The CW, FUEL TV, and the Independent Film Channel as they will be adding the Webchat, Minichat, and Webmessenger applications to their online communities.

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Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending November 25, 2007.

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This week the Web development community has been buzzing as details were released about an new widget API called Google OpenSocial. Google officially launched OpenSocial and provided this video to further explain its actions. I have been trying to get my head around what it really means and would like to open it up to my readers for input via a Somewhat Frank poll to get your take on OpenSocial.

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I spoke a few weeks ago at the Widget Summit in San Francisco on a panel dedicated to discussing the personal homepage space. The session was an hour long discussion with a cast of industry experts. I had a chance to get ahold of a video clip of my introduction. Additional footage will be coming out soon but I wanted to preview this video introducing myAOL to the Widget Summit crowd.

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AdaptiveBlue, a startup that focuses on a smarter browsing experience, had just made its SmartLinks easier to use by making automated. SmartLinks offer site owners the ability to link to a widget that when clicked displays related items (i.e. books, music, people, etc). SmartLinks offer site owners to add utility and the social dimension to links within the site.

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I spent the day at the 2007 Widget Summit today as I spoke on a session about Personalized Homepages. The day was filled with some excellent session about, as you might guess widgets of all ways, shapes and forms. Widget Summit closed day one with a launching pad.

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This has truly been an action packed 2007 web/tech conference season thus far. I previously listed a number of conferences to attend in 2007 but as of late a number of new ones have popped up. I wanted to highlight few additional conferences as they are approaching fast and you might want to get your tickets booked now. You will find me speaking at these three conference...hope to see you there.

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YourTrumanShow, the personal video diaries startup, has just launched, VideoMap, video discovery widget at the DEMO Conference in San Diego, California. Catering to artists and online personalities, YourTrumanShow, looks to cultivate discovery within its network by exposing its interesting video linking feature to other social network and the Web via VideoMap.

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Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, sat down with TechCrunch c0-editor Mike Arrington at the TechCrunch40 conference for a fireside chat. Mark takes about opening up the Facebook platform and announced the FBFUND is a $10 million grant fund from Facebook aimed at helping application developers. The grants range from $25K to $250K and Facebook takes no equity or debt.

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MeeVee, a Silicon Valley-based personalized TV startup, has recently announced a partnership with Amazon to offer TV content via their Unboxed Video Previewer widget. The MeeVee product offers a personalized TV listings and video content. With its sites set on being the a personalized Joost-like product without having to install any software MeeVee will now be leveraging Amazon's widget distribution channel. Amazon widgets can be found at: http://widgets.amazon.com.

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Metaplace, a company founded by San Diego-based Areae, has just launched a virtual world that can be embedded on the Web via a flash-based client widget. Every world is indexed, tagged and rated by users on the Metaplace portal, so virtual worlds in the Metaplace network can be easily linked together.

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Are you a celebrity news junkie? If so, you might want to check out Fafarazzi and put your celebrity tracking habits to use. Fafarazzi, a Massachusetts-based startup created by Eastland Media, offers place for celebrity news lovers to go head-to-head via celebrity fantasy sports leagues.

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Text2Store, a Chicago-based startup, leverages text messaging to send deals and coupons directly to your cellphone. Text2Store recently launched local deals widget that shares the revenue of each click-through. Similar to other advertising and affiliate programs, anytime you help someone save money with a coupon text message accessed from your site, Text2Store will pay you 25% of the negotiated income with the advertiser.

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Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending August 26, 2007.

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AdaptiveBlue, a startup that focuses on a smarter browsering experience, has created feed output for its SmartLink functionality. This is feature called appropriately, SmartLink Feeds will make it easy for anyone to take pull in the feed from a SmartLinks widget and display it on their blog, website or personalized homepage. SmartLinks are collected via AdaptiveBlue's BlueOrganizer.

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What's buzzing on the web? Wouldn't it be nice to know? Using a a combination of techniques which include sophisticated algorithms, click tracking and human editors BuzzFeed, a NY-based startup, is place to find out what is buzzing on the Web.

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iTunes has been offering personalized recommendations within the iTunes application for quite sometime and I have found them to be very accurate and helpful. I have often discovered new songs that I like within the recommendations and downloading them quickly for instant gratification. iTunes has started to role out syndication of personalized music data as My iTunes Widgets, making it easy to share your music interests.

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Photo of the Week: Barry Bonds hit home run 755 last night in a game vs. San Diego tying Hank Aaron for most career home runs in Major League history. John Feeley was in attendance and captured history with his zoom lens in this shot (shown above). Somewhat Frank Weekly...

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Looking to plot your photos in a memorable timeline? circaVie could be just what you are looking for. With circaVie you can easily create a flashy photo timeline. Simply sign-up, start uploading or pointing to your photo links, associating a photo date and circaVie plots them on a scrollable timeline....

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Photo of the week: These green frog cupcakes were spotted and then were quickly devoured at the most recent TECH cocktail in Chicago. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.15.07 AOL Top Web Site Under New Ranking Nielsen/NetRatings will begin reporting total sessions and total time spent on a site in order...

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If you have an iPhone you may be trying to figure out a way to optimize your widget experience. Mojits offers a potential solution as it provides a place to find web widgets optimized for the iPhone. Currently, Mojits offers a couple dozen web widget options which include AIM iPhone...

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The iPhone frenzy has been brewing all week across the country. I just was curious to see how many Somewhat Frank readers were going to get an iPhone immediately. Take this poll and let me know. Free Polls - Take Our Poll

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Vyew, a Berkeley, California browser-based collaboration and conferencing platform start-up, offers a feature-rich virtual workspace for collaboration. Originally launched as SimMeeting, in September 2004, Vyew was renamed in October 2005 to and has continued to improve its web conferencing tools and first-of-its-kind asynchronous collaboration capabilities. Vyew recently launched out of...

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Photo of the Week: Space Shuttle Atlantis Launch from Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom by Josh Hallett was taken this week with the successful launch of the space shuttle. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 06.10.07 Major Relaunch For Ask: Ask3D It looks very sharp. I like the way they allow users...

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Poly9, a group of devolopers based in Quebec City, recenty launched a web-based 3D Earth product called FreeEarth that requires no download. Free is pretty slick and I would love to see FreeEarth as an embeddable widget! A Flash-based application, FreeEarth, offers an open API that can be leveraged to...

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Widgets are hot. Widgets are sexy. Widgets, widgets, widgets. I previously have covered the widget craze but widgets now have a few new promoters. With the Facebook open platform announcement last week there have been lots of new widgets and applications added to Facebook each day. Personally, I have already...

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Looking for free music available online from any computer? You might want to give JiwaMusic a try. JiwaMusic enables users to search for an artist or a track, load a track originally composed by them on the JiwaMusic servers, create and share playlists. JiwaMusic is a Paris, France based music...

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Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by Brian Solis of a video camera recording Sarah Meyers interviewing someone at the May 2007 Girls in Tech in SF. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 05.20.07 Watch TV Stations From Your Web Browser More and more services are popping enabling users to...

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Photo of the Week: While in Santa Monica, California this week for Twiistup I decided to get up early on Wednesday to go down to the beach and snap this shot. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits 05.13.07 Facebook to Launch Classifieds Service Social network Facebook is set to launch a classified...

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Photo of the Week: This was the view from Sweet View on Derby Day at Wrigley Field in Chicago, Illinois. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 05.06.07 Microsoft to Buy Yahoo? Nope. Stung by the loss of Internet advertising firm DoubleClick to Google last month, Microsoft has intensified its pursuit of a...

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Photo of the week: This San Francisco Trolley photo taken by, friend and co-founder of TECH cocktail Eric Olson, was the first photo I found on Flickr related to the Web 2.0 Expo this week in SF. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 04.15.07 The Web 2.0 Expo Is Upon Us I...

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Photo of the week: robobunny by Courtney Brooke. Happy Easter. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 04.08.07 DRM-Free Music EMI announced DRM-free music earlier in the week and now Microsoft is hinting at doing the same. Is this the death of DRM? 500 million+!!! AOL'Sphere Goes Live AOL and Sphere quietly turned...

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Sphere, the blog search engine that launched in May 2006, has been steadily disseminating and connecting the web via the "Sphere It" contextual widget. The widget has grown in popularity as it helps readers offer content recommendations from the blogosphere, as well as related content from current sites. It ultimately...

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Photo of the Week: This photo of a robot titled bleeplaps by Eric Skiff was taken at SXSW which is going on this weekend in Austin, Texas. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.11.07 My Yahoo! Gets Web 2.0 Makeover Just as Yahoo CEO, Terry Semel hinted at last week, the new...

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Photo of the Week: It was a rather crazy peculiar week so I went searching for answers in photographs and found this photo titled very strange moon tonight by Ordinary Guy. It captures the lunar eclipse that occurred on March 3, 2007. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.04.07 The Attention Economy:...

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Photo of the week: With the 79th Academy Awards tonight I felt this photo title Over Hollywood Sign by Jorge Mir offered a good point of perspective. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 02.25.07 Hollywood Disrupted By Social Media? An opinion piece in the LA Times, titled “The Movie Magic is Gone”,...

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