Some people didn’t want to believe me, but it appears I was right about the gPhone launching on November 5th. I was not completely right about it being their Social Networking platform. Of course the platform launch of OpenSocial was launched early. It appears the November 5th launch so anticipated by all the blogosphere was, in fact, the gPhone and their new platform, Android.

I’ve blogged about this before - for some reason (not that I would have an influence), it still hasn’t stuck. We are officially in Web 3.0. Why do I say this?

I define 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and any major computer change as a change in platforms. Back in the day we saw major platform changes from Unix, Apple II, to the IBM PC and Microsoft Windows. All these were major platform shifts, accepted by the general population. People are stuck in trying to define 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc. as marketing terms surrounding the general consumer, when in fact they aren’t. A 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 release is usually a major architecture change instantiated by the developers, and branded by a marketing or business staff.

So let’s look at Web 2.0. Web 2.0 started making a name for itself at the launch of Gmail, YouTube, Flickr and maybe even sites such as del.icio.us, and Digg. What was special about these sites? They all utilized AJAX, a relatively new platform which allowed developers to create desktop “clients” on top of the previous, 1.0 web platform. Around this same time came Adobe’s Flex, another similar platform which accomplished the same purpose. Add to that Google’s Gears and Adobe’s Air, (and maybe even the soon-to-come Mozilla products), developers now had the capability to provide media-rich, client-side platforms that have the ability to communicate with the web all through a single web browser or web communications platform. This was a major change from the previous web architecture of only being able to shift from page to page to get what you wanted your applications to do on the web.

Over the last year or two, as some of the Web 2.0 applications have released social capabilities - sites such as Classmates (not a platform), LinkedIn, Hi5, MySpace, and Facebook. Users have embraced many of these sites, and have begun to utilize these sites as their own “personal internet”, allowing them to view what their friends are doing, keep track of relationships, business contacts, and use the internet at a much more personalized level. Some of those have released APIs to the platform controlling the social capabilities within their own architectures. These APIs, such as OpenSocial and the Facebook Platform bring an entirely new level to these social websites, giving access to hundreds of millions of individual internet users. Now, through an entirely open methodology, developers, like never before have access to an entirely new internet, inaccessible before, that brings completely new customers, a much more personalized audience, and a completely new method of application development. Social API, my friends, is Web 3.0.

What will Web 4.0 be? I predict the cell phone market - perhaps through phones such as the iPhone and just announced Android architecture. There are more than a billion cell phones out there, at an even more personalized level than even the social networks can provide!

Due to some last minute complications, the Utah Facebook Developers / Social Media Developers Garage has changed its location for tomorrow. Thanks to Perfect Search Corporation, we were able to secure a last minute location to host the event. The event will now be held at Perfect Search Corporation in the Fibernet Building in Orem - it will NO LONGER be at Noah’s. Same time, same speakers. The address is:

1145 S 800 E Suite 325
Orem, UT

Our instructions are to stay out of the development areas and in the conference rooms only. To get in, if no one is at the door, please call me on my cell phone and we’ll send some one to let you in: (801) 979-7576. I apologize if this is an inconvenience. Thanks again to Tim Stay and Perfect Search Corporation for their willingness to host our event.

Here’s a Google Maps to that location: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&q=1145+S+800+E+Suite+325,+Orem,+UT&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=29.219963,76.025391&ie=UTF8&ll=40.276612,-111.676068&spn=0.006859,0.018561&z=16&iwloc=addr&om=1

I am rather late on this news, but I haven’t seen anyone take this slant on it. As most of you are aware, Facebook has removed their notifications.sendRequest API method in favor of a more standardized invite interface for all their applications. This has several ramifications:

1. You are pretty much forced to use FBML now if you want an invite interface. IMO this is a good thing, and especially good for Facebook, as it means they have more control over the content of the applications on their platform. You can say goodbye to most of the applications using iFrames in the future.
2. All invite interfaces will pretty much look the same. Facebook has provided a few FBML tags that make creation of the friends list to select from, and form to send invites to very easy. I implemented this on all my applications last night and I have to say it’s quite slick. This also means more applications will have invite forms and will henceforth grow much faster. Expect to see many more invites in the coming weeks from various applications because of this.
3. All your base belongs to Facebook. Facebook now has much more control over how invite forms look and are used. On the other hand, developers have much less flexibility on how the invites are used. I am having a huge headache trying to figure out a way to get an invite link below your friends profile pics if you have the app installed on a few of my apps. Maybe Facebook doesn’t want it. Some theorize it’s because many developers have abused this interface.

I have mixed feelings about this interface. On one hand, this makes it extremely easy to create an invite interface. On the other hand, this puts everyone at a level playing field, keeping some of the more creative developers out of the game. I’ve seen similar things with the limits Facebook puts on various API calls. I would love to have Facebook notify you of every new SteepAndCheap.com product on my SAC App, for instance. The Spammers have ruined it for some really good ideas to come forth.

In all, this is good for Facebook. More people will use their applications, a trend they seem to be moving towards lately. You see they’re putting a huge focus on this after opening their Apps Directory this last week. More exposure == more money for both Facebook and those developing their apps. In the end I think this is a good thing.

I was discussing with a client today about this, and realized I still had not blogged about this yet. Facebook has launched Developer Accounts. Now, no longer do developers have an excuse for errors on their pages, or sites going down because they are working on their production Facebook app, which is their only development environment to work in. Also, no longer do developers have to risk all their work deleted because they opened up a mock Facebook account and Facebook decided to kill it because it wasn’t a real person. I strongly suggest you start using this if you are a Facebook developer.

A few months ago, Facebook announced they were releasing their platform to all developers via an open API. At the same time, they release an Application Directory indexing and categorizing all of the applications for their platform. I was wondering today if Twitter, who had an open API even before Facebook, had the same thing. It turns out they do, and it’s on the Fan wiki:

http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps

Not quite 5000+ like Facebook, but there are quite a number of apps I didn’t know about. What Twitter apps are your favorites?

Apple - are you listening? I’ve got a tip for you that I’m pretty sure could very well be a solution to all your woes. Ars Technica today released new information about Apple’s new SDK and how they will continue to be web based. The article mentions the updates will be “released soon”. I actually like this idea - I see the future of operating systems as web-based, and Apple IMO is on the right track, making the AJAX SDK much more similar to what you could do with a normal SDK.

Apple - you’re on to something here with this update to be released soon after the last update - stay agile! Steve Jobs mentioned fighting the iPhone hackers was a “cat and mouse game.” He then followed it with, “I don’t know if we’re the cat or the mouse”. Apple - the object is to stay the mouse, constantly having to be chased by the cat. So long as you’re the mouse, the hackers will never keep up.

How do you become the mouse? Constantly release updates, faster than the hackers can keep up! Release new feature after new feature. Keep giving your customers more - they’re hungry for it! I guarantee you Apple, if you can keep your customers satisfied with lots and lots of new, cool stuff, they’ll ignore that their phones can’t be hacked until that stupid relationship you have with AT&T expires and you can truly allow your phone on multiple networks.

Are you in Utah? Do you like getting the latest news, as it happens? Do you like giving back to society?

Well I may have something for you. I’d like to announce the new Twitter Bot, “SLCNews”. The way it works is if you see news happening in your area, you generally can report the news much faster than a News reporter who has to get to the scene. Citizens are usually the first reporters on the scene of a major event, yet the reporters always get the credit. With this Twitter bot, if you see news happening in your area, report it by direct messaging the Twitter user slc news, followed by a short amount of text describing the event happening. All people following the user slcnews will then get Twitter updates (usually on their cell phones) that share with them the news happening. The idea is if enough people pitch in, your news will be much more on time, much more accurate, and very on the scene. I can see this meshing with Twittergrams, links to Flickr photos, etc. all from your cell phone (on your cell phone, all you have to do to send a message to slcnews is to send a text message to 40404 that says “d slcnews accident on I-80″ or whatever the news that is happening).

So if you’re on Twitter and live in Utah, please do your part to the community and follow SLCNews! If you’re not on Twitter yet, please click on the link above and join! If there were ever a reason to join Twitter, this is that reason! If you like this and don’t live in Utah, let me know and maybe I’ll add your city next.

With yesterday’s announcement of the statusUpdate API call in Facebook, my thoughts have been going wild on what this means. This was clearly done for Twitter and other status update sites out there. I can also see some cool uses for it in other applications too.

One thing this does hint at, whether Facebook is thinking about it or not, is the possibility of a common logon system similar to Microsoft’s Passport or OpenID. The next step Facebook should take is open their authentication system up in the API. Currently, you can get a user logged into Facebook via the API. Facebook now needs to package this and market it as a complete solution to sites like Twitter to get them to base their user profiles off of Facebook profiles. I would prefer this method personally, as I only need to update my profile in one place (Facebook), and then I can use Twitter for all my other status needs.

Finally! The moment has come! Soon you’ll be able to just update Twitter and magically your Facebook profile will update to what your current Twitter status is. This is big news, and great for Twitter, as now users can focus their updates in Twitter, what it was made for, and not worry about updating in a million places.

I have yet to see the feature on the Twitter app, but it was only released yesterday, so I expect to see it soon. The only main disadvantage I see to the feature is now when you send @so-and-so your Facebook friends won’t really know what you’re talking about. Do I see an acquisition down the road by Facebook?