Weekly Blogistan Round-Up no. 49/2008
It's been a week full of surprises: Pownce closed pretty unexpectedly, while Twitter is still growing at an amazing rate. And a new trend finally has been turned into an API, or rather two APIs: Google as well as Facebook try to decentralize social networking and at the same time establish their own platforms as the central social hub. I am really looking forward to buddypress – in my opinion, “hosted” services are fine as additional traffic streams, but no online professional should put his main assets into third-party hands.
Google friend connect is opening
Last week, Google started the public beta phase for its new service friend connect: Basically, we're talking about a social API here: there's a unified login via Big G and Open ID. The implementation is simple, there's a couple of ready-made widgets, but actually it's all about the community now, who is expected to build their own apps. Is this going to be a threat for Facebook? The future will show.
…and Facebook launches Connect
The new service is FB's version of a portable single-sign on. While OpenID is great in theory, I totally agree with Dan:
Truth be told, I
Microblogging-platform Pownce announced its shutdown on 15th of December yesterday. The company was bought by Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type and TypePad. The team will continue to work for Six Apart on new projects – seems the company saw no light at the end of the infamous twitter-tunnel: while Pownce hat a couple of unique features to offer, the community never reached the critical size that turns microblogging-fun into a profitable business.