Frictionless Sharing allows apps and websites that you authorize, to publish information to a new, realtime feed window you may have noticed in the upper righthand corner of your newsfeed. Things like what song you’re listening to in Spotify at the very moment you’re listening to it, or when you are tagged in a photo, or what video you may be watching on Hulu. It all happens without you ever confirming a “yes post this on my wall”.

While privacy is an obvious concern, the possibilities this opens up for app developers is really tremendous. What used to be a log of what you “did”, is now a real time stream of what you are “doing”, opening up new opportunities for viral marketing, gaming, and the way we socially consume media.

How it pans out remains to be seen, but think twice before you click “Allow this App”, because you may reveal your embarrassing music listening habits to the world without even knowing you did so.

Give people what they want…right here, right now.  Pretty smart.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/25/billboards-facebook-places/

The topic can be controversial and confusing- Flash is really two technologies, and it’s important to distinguish the difference.

There is the SWF, which is the traditional way something authored by the Flash development environment is published on the web. There is also the Flash development environment, which now has the capability to export not only SWFs, but desktop applications via AIR, as well as iPhone applications.

Yesterday, Apple reverted it’s decision on banning applications authored within Flash (but still does not support web pages that contain Flash content, or SWF files).

So what is the significance of all this?

Flash is a mature platform, it’s been around as long as banner ads have existed, and it has grown from a simple animation tool into a full fledged integrated development environment, and with the release of Actionscript 3.0 (the programming language that powers Flash), developers can create powerful, robust applications with it.

Flash tends to get a bad rap as of late because a site that is entirely done with Flash simply cannot run on most mobile devices. It does have it’s place on the web in 2010 however. While HTML5 is certainly exciting, there simply aren’t the tools available yet to create the powerful applications that have been created with Flash. It is still supported on 99.9% of desktop browsers, and is the de facto way to deliver rich interactive media experiences on the web.

With the introduction of Adobe AIR a few years ago, developers who are familiar with Actionscript 3.0 can now author cross platform desktop applications using the language they are already familiar with.

Apples announcement yesterday extends this capability to iOS devices. Previously, if a developer were to create an engaging Flash experience on the web, it would have to be re-written in Objective C (the preferred language for authoring iOS apps), which requires a different skill set, different tools, and different obstacles to overcome.

Authoring iOS apps from within the Flash environment changes the game completely. Developers who have years of experience with Actionscript can leverage their expertise with the tools they already know, and focus on the important differences between the desktop and mobile/touch devices which include  gesture based actions, portability, and a new form factor, instead of rethinking the entire process from scratch.

Imagine you already are an expert chef who specializes in preparing gourmet Italian meals and have been successful at a single restaurant for years. Now imagine that you have moved to a new restaurant, with new customers, but are still preparing the same meals. Things that need to be adapted include the tastes of the new customers, but the experience you already have is still a great foundation for the delicious meals you will prepare. You don’t need to learn a new language, and you can still bring with you your favorite tools from the previous establishment.

We are about to see the second explosion of mobile apps, and the future smells delicious.

Googles Chrome browser is now out of beta for Windows, Linux and Mac, and uses the same render engine as Safari (webkit), which makes building cross browser compatible websites a lot easier. In general, websites look identical in Safari and Chrome, so the end users choice is more about what else the browser offers. Chrome has a larger extension library, a more integrated search, etc. Safari has more integration with the Apple ecosystem, bookmark syncing to iPhone, etc.

Firefox isn’t left in the dust either, 4.0 is around the corner, and 3.6 is the best build to date, and while it uses a different render engine (Gecko), websites generally look the same as they do with webkit based browsers, with a lot of support for the new CSS3 specs and HTML5.

Of course the giant elephant in the room is Internet Explorer, which has a publicly available preview of IE9, and is now catching up and supporting CSS3 specs such as drop shadow and rounded corners, and will likely bring with it some of the nice features introduced in IE8 such as web slices, which are something kind of in between a widget and extension.

This is not only great news for developers, but for end users as well. Users will now have multiple choices on how to experience the web, and on the desktop, all of them seem to be good ones.

One such service, MadMimi, has a nice WYSIWYG editor for creating beautiful rich HTML emails, and a killer API to go along with it. At the SuperGroup, one of the platforms we built dynamic websites on is Drupal, which is a powerful open source framework for managing content, and so it seemed a natural fit to combine the power and flexibility of Drupal with what MadMimi offers in the email space.

The MadMimi module for Drupal is a near turn key solution for integrating Drupal and MadMimi, and works with the great PHP API Client written by Nicholas Young.

The first feature complete version of the module was released today, and allows a Drupal site administrator with a paid MadMimi account, to enter their MadMimi username, API key, and promotion name, and Drupal will start routing all of its emails to the service.

A live demo is available here, and a screencast demonstrating how to configure it will be available soon.

In this month’s Macworld, Dan Moren enlightens us with the truth. Disc refers to any optical media such as a CDs and DVDs that are read by a laser. Disk refers to magnetic media, such as your computer’s hard drive.

Now go out and impress at least three of your nerd friends!

Check out what these guys from Jamaica did with basically a Wii remote, a computer, and a dry erase board. They were able to exploit the two infra red cameras in the front end of a Wii remote which can detect the Infrared light from an infrared pen shined onto a white board. Pretty clever.

A hijacked Wii remote can add an unexpectedly cool kinetic interactive dimension to any digital experiential execution. You just need someone who isn’t afraid to “open up the hood” and tinker around a bit!

The suggestions for maintaining a successful presence are simple, concise:

1. Listen to conversations
2. Participate in conversations
3. Update frequently with valuable information
4. Reply to people who talk about issues that are important to your company
5. Retweet relevant conversations

The basic plan for resurrecting a dormant account or starting from scratch:

• CREATE a company-wide engagement strategy; a set of guidelines with best practices
• DEMONSTRATE a consistent and comprehensive brand presence
• BUILD a dialogue that paves the way to new relationships with customers and advocates
• GENERATE loyalty among new and existing communities

That’s easier said that done of course, and it certainly involves an organized effort that includes more than a few interns or a one-off viral campaign. The approval process for more traditional companies may not allow room for the spontaneity that Twitter requires, but for those who have a product or service to sell, ignoring new ways of communication will make it harder to adapt when consumers are making all of their purchases telepathically.

Here is a PDF of the study results: Do Fortune 100 Companies Need a Twittervention?

It is Linux based at its core, with a completely new user interface, making web developers feel especially at home. But why should the average consumer care?

It is lean, mean, and free. Of course, that’s what Google is claiming, we have yet to see. The idea though is that modern operating systems like Windows Vista and Mac OSX are very large, complicated operating systems, and while that is great for power users, the vast majority of people who use their computer want to do three things: surf the web, e-mail, and occasionally use a word processor.

This is where Google’s Chrome OS steps in. Builds of Linux can be so small they can actually live on a chip inside a computer, allowing for an instant-on boot up process, and with such a light operating system, in theory, it should perform excellent with less hardware, specifically net-books, which is what the big G is targeting.

These always-online machines are already extremely cheap, somewhere in the $200-300 range, and without having to pay for Windows, or MS Office, that price is likely to be significantly less.

It’s likely going to take a long time before Chrome makes a significant dent in the overall PC market, but as consumers get more and more comfortable with their web-based operating systems they have on their phones, iPods, and other devices, it should feel natural to extend that experience to their laptop.