Twitter has taken to redesign the OAuth screen - the screen you see whenever you decide to login to an application using your Twitter account - in an attempt to better show what you are agreeing to when you hit the "Allow," err, "Authorize app" button.

Twitter developer advocate Matt Harris announced on the developer Google group this afternoon that they were working on refreshing the screen to offer "better clarity about what an application can see and do with an account."

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If you’ve ever wondered what you’re signing up for when you click that button - whatever it will be called in the end - it’s now made a bit more explicit. As you can see from the image, giving an application access to your Twitter account allows that app to read tweets from your timeline, see who you follow, follow accounts, update your profile and post tweets.

Twitter developer Orian Marx points out, however, that a few key permissions are omitted from this screen: the ability to unfollow users and, more importantly, access their private DMs.

"Obviously it’s been to everyone’s benefit who has built apps that rely on OAuth up to this point that there has been specific mentioning of access to DMs as this would likely turn off a lot of people from granting access to experimental apps," writes Marx. "The reality is that the OAuth system needs finer-grained controls."

While Facebook allows developers to select what content to request authorization for, with Twitter it’s all or none. By giving a Twitter app access to your account, that includes everything mentioned above - including those DMs that you might have thought were totally private. This isn’t the first we’ve heard of this - GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram pointed out last October that DMs aren’t exactly private, but it seems notable that this fact might not show up on the new login screen. Or maybe they will.

Harris writes on the developer list that "This is a first release of these pages to get a feel for if they are going in the right direction. We tried to select a number of phrases that explain the access that’s being granted to an application but that are also easy to understand. I think there will always be some that don’t make it, but there are others, like the ones you raise, which would help aid transparency more."

Here’s hoping that either users are made explicitly aware that their DMs are not exactly private or that developers are given the granular security permissions necessary to say "No, we don’t want access to that." Or both.

Image via @abraham’s Picassa.

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I think it was about a decade ago now when I downloaded my first camcorder movie off the Internet and a love affair was born. Why bother going out and renting something from Blockbuster or forfeiting your first born for a movie ticket and a bucket of popcorn when you could nearly replicate the entire experience, for free, on your couch with Orville Redenbacher at your side?

As time went on and peer-to-peer file sharing grew - and the movies went from shaky, "down in front!" home movies to near-DVD quality replicas - it only got worse. And then, suddenly, it all came to an end. "Cold turkey," as they say. But why?

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Today, after reading an article over on TorrentFreak about how Netflix is killing BitTorrent, I suddenly felt like a reformed smoker who never intentionally put down the cancer stick. It all made sense.

As TorrentFreak’s Ernesto writes, "It doesn’t take a genius to conclude that Netflix’ popularity has a negative effect on the movie piracy rates in the US."

In the States, Netflix nearly doubled the number of new subscribers in the first quarter of 2010, from 1.7 to 3.3 million. In total, Netflix now has 22.8 million paid subscribers in the US, which generated a total revenue of $706 million in the first quarter of this year.

But where did this influx of subscribers come from? Everyone in the know will point to one thing - streaming video. When Netflix first began offering unlimited streaming in 2008, some forecast that it would only erode the companies profits and spell gloom for the company. Quite the opposite. By November 2010, streaming surpassed DVD subscriptions. Rather than cost Netflix the bottom line, streaming - thus far, though we’ll see what happens - has saved the company enormous amounts of money from delivery costs.

When Neftlix finally came around and said it would give me as many movies as I’d like for $8 a month, the love affair with free movies was over. After all, $8 barely gets you in the door at most movie theaters and in some cities it won’t even cover a matinee. For the convenience of never having to plan, eat up my bandwidth and risk getting a letter from the MPAA, $8 is but a pittance. I was one of the 7.7 million new subscribers that jumped on board in 2010 and I haven’t looked back since. It wasn’t a conscience decision, it wasn’t a pang of guilt, it was a simple, cheap way to fulfill my desire to go on Battlestar Gallactica benders and quickly queue up whatever movie everyone else had raved about six months ago that I’d never gone to see. 

Sure, Netflix doesn’t get first-run movies, or those not-yet-in-the-theater screeners, like peer-to-peer networks do, but my eight bucks buys me a peace of mind and enough content to keep me happy until it makes its way around. As Ernesto concludes, "Netflix shows that people are willing to pay for access to movies online, even when plenty of pirated copies are available. The next step is to offer easy access to movies in the rest of the world, and get rid of the artificial delays in release dates."

Besides, if the movie is that good, I might actually hit the theater…and once again be convinced that the only logical approach to movie theater popcorn is the large, because who can justify paying 75 cents less for half as much popcorn? That’s just silly.

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Dominic Szablewski, the creator of the JavaScript game engine Impact has released a library for creating iOS apps using Impact that don’t rely on UIWebView to run. Unlike apps created with PhoneGap or Titanium, these apps run in pure JavaScript. Apple has already accepted Szablewski’s first two apps built using this approach.

“They bypass the iPhone’s browser altogether and use Apple’s JavaScript interpreter (JavaScriptCore) directly. All graphics are rendered with OpenGL instead of in a browser window and all sound and music is played back with OpenAL instead of… well, having no sound at all,” he writes.

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You’ll need an Impact license to download it. There’s some basic documentation here

There are some drawbacks. This is still entirely experimental and make not always work. Also:

JavaScriptCore uses libicu to sort strings according to a unicode locale. Sadly, libicu is also private on iOS and bundling it is not an option because of its size. So I got rid of libicu completely. This means that only ASCII strings are now sorted correctly (e.g. the umlaut “Ä” will come after “Z”, not after “A” as it should). Other than that, the JavaScript library should behave exactly as the private one that comes with iOS.

Also, the JavaScriptCore library bundled with iOSImpact does not use the JIT compiler (Nitro). You can’t allocate executable memory on the iPhone and if Apple doesn’t lift that restriction, there’s nothing I can do about it.

All told, this is an interesting approach.

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It looks like PayPal has mobile on the mind. Last week, parent company eBay bought the location-based media company Where and today, PayPal announced that it has acquired Fig Card.

PayPal has been working on a number of ways to enable mobile payments, from bumping iPhone together to using NFC chips, but this acquisition could focus on giving merchants the ability to accept mobile payments quickly, easily and cheaply.

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What is Fig Card’s innovation that moved PayPal to snatch them up? According to the PayPal blog, the company "developed an extremely easy way for merchants to accept mobile payments in stores by using a simple and very low cost USB device that plugs into the cash register or point-of-sale terminal." Once the merchant added the USB device, the customer simply needed the app to make a mobile payment.

PayPal doesn’t make any mention of its plans for Fig Card, other than that founders Max Metral and Hasty Granbery will be joining the team, but it seems likely that this sort of technology could help ease mobile payments into the mainstream. While NFC is certainly on the way, it won’t be ubiquitous for some time. According to a report by Juniper Research, one in five smartphones will have the technology by 2014, but how many point-of-sales systems will be NFC enabled? A low cost device, such as the one offered by Fig Card, could make the transition to mobile payments for vendors much easier.

Take a look at Fig Card demo video below:

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You may have seen the new web services that make it easy for anyone to create a lightweight iPhone or Android app, just using drag and drop, text entry and feed URLs. The apps are then hosted for a monthly fee. Those are cool but how about an iPad version? If that’s of interest to you, check out a new service just launched today by a company called Bizness Apps.

Bizness has an iPhone app creation system similar to Widgetbox or Genwi’s iSites (my favorite) but now it lets you create a dynamic and native (not web) iPad app and host it for $39 per month. I tested it out and the Content Management System is easy to use, relatively powerful and rich with features. It’s particularly well suited to restaurants and other small local businesses. Bizness also positions itself well for designer resellers.

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Photo galleries, menus, RSS feeds, Twitter streams, Wufoo forms, QR codes, coupons and other features are included. The interface gets a little bit confusing at times (I’m sure I could have gotten used to it) but a live chat is enabled for help and the company will finish creating your app for you at no cost at any time. That surprised me a little - but I suppose if they are signing customers up for recurring payments they can put a touch of labor into a simple design without it being of much consequence.

Once the app is done, Bizness Apps can upload it to iTunes or the Android Marketplace for you under its account, or you can pay the $99 developer account fee to Apple and do it yourself.

Technologies like this represent a fascinating democratization of a new means of communication. The mobile world is a big, beautiful place and I suspect that many small businesses have spent enough time and money on a designed web page that a revamped mobile webpage is less appealing than a lightweight new app.

Presuming that the service is a good deal long run (good customer service, stable etc.) then this represents something the world really needs. It’s an easy way for anyone to get into the iPad app world. Tools like this are to mobile apps what blogging was to publishing. Most blogs may not read like the New York Times, but thank goodness for them (us!) anyway, right? Likewise, lightweight mobile app creation tools may not produce the next award winning design miracle but they could deliver a whole lot of functionality and value to a large number of people.

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Project management seems like an obvious use case for iPads, so we were surprised to see a relatively small number of professional project management applications. But we found a few. For this article we decided to focus only on native iPad applications - we’ll look at tablet-optimized Web apps another time.

Which of these is your favorite? Are there any you think we should have included?

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Project Planner HD

If you’re a users of the open source Gantt Project, or just need a simple Gantt chart app for the iPad, Project Planner HD is worth a look. It can import and export Gannt Project files, export PDFs, and manage tasks and multiple projects.

Projector

Projector is a popular and slick looking project management app for both OSX and iOS. Macintosh users starting fresh might want to give it a try.

SG Project

SG Project 2 and SG Project Pro are some of the most fully featured project management apps available for the iPad. SG Project can import and export Microsoft Project files.

Trackerbot

Trackerbot is an iOS client for the popular Pivotal Tracker agile project management SaaS. Trackerbot is a project of Vulpine Labs and is not related to Pivotal Labs, the makers of Pivotal Tracker.

Trackerbot lets uses create, edit, reject, delete and comment on Pivotal Tracker stories. Attachments are supported. Vulpine Labs claims the app will support large projects.

Which Is the Best?

Thanks to the readers who suggested iPad project management apps via Twitter!

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Startup Weekend always sounds like mission impossible: you have 54 hours - from Friday night until Sunday night - to pitch, then build, then demo a product. But the intensity and creativity of the teams that come together for these events are impressive. Great ideas, great products, great teams, and yes despite the short duration, great startups are hatched there.

That’s why it’s pretty exciting to see the next San Francisco Startup Weekend turn its sights on the education technology industry.

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Startup Weekend EDU will be held June 3 -5 at the Grockit offices in San Francisco, and will bring together “makers, founders, creators, developers, teachers, students, designers, and the business-inclined to launch real startups to address the real problems in the multi-trillion dollar education, training and learning markets.”

The weekend will follow the same pattern as other Startup Weekend events: ideas will be pitched on Friday night, and the teams will come together to work on their chosen ones, hacking all weekend in preparation for a demo on Sunday evening.

Speakers at Startup Weekend EDU will include Eric Ries, creator of the Lean Startup methodology, and the judges panel will include Prashant Fuloria, Director of Product Management at Facebook. More judges, speakers, and mentors will be announced soon.

The judges panel will offer feedback to the presenting teams and will hand out over $5000 in cash for the startups.

“SFEDU Startup Weekend is about people passionate about improving education giving up their weekend to create real solutions,” says Grockit CEO Farbood Nivi. Education technology can definitely use more hackers, and you can register here to attend the event.

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Android phone owners will soon be able to video chat with each other using Google Talk over WiFi, 3G or 4G networks, Google announced in a blog post this afternoon. The feature will roll out first to Nexus S phone owners over the coming weeks and to Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and newer devices “in the future.” It’s a start!

The offering, when it ships, sounds like it will be more compelling than Apple’s Facetime but less useful than independent mobile video chat apps like Tango that offer iPhone to Android video chat. A number of mobile video chat apps have been launched in just the past few weeks from Skype, Qik, Fring (now with group video calling on iPhone!) and others. But how long will we have to wait until Android users can video call iPhone owners without any more thought than voice calls require today?

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Why all this video chat going live now? Tech blog VentureBeat ran a guest post earlier this month from Rebtel CEO Andreas Bernstrom about why now is the time for mobile video chat to take off. Bernstrom argues it’s because of four factors: social networking, improved call quality, increasingly common cross-device compatibility thanks to software and the network effect of exploding sales of mobile devices with front-facing cameras.

From dreams of remote medicine to already deployed high-end hotel concierge consultations, video chat has a lot of potential in a lot of different circumstances.

That potential, though, is hobbled by the contemporary equivalent of an inability for customers of two different telephone companies to call each other by voice or different trains to make it across the whole country over different rail line company tracks.

Where’s the Open Technology Standard?

When Apple launched Facetime a year ago June, Steve Jobs said it was going to become an open, universal technical standard. We haven’t seen that happen though, or at least we haven’t seen much development on top of it. Might Google try to accomplish that big picture goal to go post-silo in mobile video chat?

Will the Google Talk implementation be as well executed as Apple’s is? Will it be available anytime soon for iPhone and thus be at least that close to cross-platform? Will we someday be able to video chat from one phone to another regardless of its maker or OS, as easily as we can do voice calls today? Presuming that’s something people really want beyond the initial wow factor (and to be honest, I’m not sure it is) then those will be big questions to watch for answers to.

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Something strange has been happening to several popular Facebook pages in recent weeks: they’ve disappeared. According to the affected page owners, they’re victims of bogus DMCA claims. The DMCA, or Digital Millennium Copyright Act, is a piece of (arguably broken) legislation which allows copyright owners to protect their copyrighted works from infringement. Over the years, it’s been used to remove content from Google’s search index, from YouTube and Yahoo Video, and by entities like Major League Baseball, record labels, doctors who don’t like bad reviews, software companies, and many, many others, in opposition to what most would claim is “fair use” of such content.

But while the DMCA has a long history of misuse, or perhaps, heavy-handed use, the law itself is not the main concern here with these Facebook pages’ takedowns - it’s Facebook’s process for handling such complaints. Because the social network does not validate the identity of anyone submitting a DMCA takedown notice, nor does it check to see if the report was sent from a legitimate email address, anyone with an ax to grind can fill out a form with bogus information to see a Facebook Page disappear, sometimes for good.

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Tech Blogs are Latest Victims

This has happened recently to several websites, including some which may be familiar to ReadWriteWeb readers: RedmondPie, Neowin and Ars Technica. We’ve come across others, too, like the Pakistan-based Rewriting Technology, for example, which proves that this is not just a U.S.-based problem. In many cases, the pages have been taken down multiple times.

Typically, the process for handling copyright infringement claims involves the copyright owner submitting a claim to the entity (in this case, Facebook) about the infringing content. The entity, removes the content immediately and informs the entity who had posted the content it had been removed and why. If this was a mistake, the person or organization who had posted the infringing content then has to contact the complaining party directly to resolve the issue. The hosting provider is not involved in resolving the dispute, and is protected by the safe harbor portion of the DMCA from being liable for having allowed the content to be uploaded in the first place.

This is Facebook’s general process as well. On the form it provides here (https://www.facebook.com/legal/copyright.php?noncopyright_notice=1), the copyright holder has to provide their name, mailing address, telephone, email and details of the infringement.

Facebook Does Not Verify Identity of Submitter, Not Even the Email

However, what Facebook does not do is verify whether or not any of that contact information is accurate. While doing so may be an administrative burden the network could not afford, it does not even take the simple step of verifying the reporter’s email address is valid.

Scam artists, as you may have guessed, have discovered this loophole. In one case, with Hamard Dar’s Rewriting Technology site, the page went down for over a month. Dar says he was targeted for money. “He wanted me to pay him…to get the page back,” he told us. Dar didn’t go for that option, however, because there was no guarantee the scammer would return the page once paid. Instead, Dar ran his own personal investigation until he discovered the person involved and threatened him to withdraw the complaint, saying he would report him to U.S. cyber crime enforcement (the scam artist lives in Chicago). The page was then returned.

Damage to Brand Reputation

In RedmondPie’s case, after its original Facebook page was disabled, leaving over 70,000 Facebook fans in the lurch, a new, fake RedmondPie Facebook page came online, promising its Facebook fans free iPads. Not only was this a loss on Redmond Pie’s part, the resulting action greatly damaged the site’s brand reputation.

Facebook’s Statement

We asked Facebook about these situations and a spokesperson told us the company takes all IP claims seriously. It provided us with the following statement:

We want Facebook to be a place where people can share and discuss openly while respecting the rights of others. We take seriously both the interests of people who post content and those of rights holders. We work to ensure that we don’t take content down as a result of fraudulent notices. However, when a rights holder properly completes our notice form alleging intellectual property (IP) infringement, we will take appropriate action including removing or disabling access to the relevant content. When we do this, we notify the person who shared the content so he or she can take appropriate action, which may include contacting the reporting party or following up with Facebook.

Submitting an IP notice is no trivial matter. The forms in our Help Center require statements under penalty of perjury, and fraudulent claims are subject to legal process.

Facebook Could Do More

But Facebook isn’t doing enough to protect these victims, says Graham Cluley, a security research at Sophos, who has previous experience documenting Facebook scams. Facebook could set a higher bar for complainants to jump over, he said. For instance, they could confirm that the email address being used is “legitimate and contactable,” he suggested. Facebook could do this easily simply by replying to the email, and requesting the complainant to click on a link to prove they really did sent the email, for example.

Facebook could also choose to insist that throwaway email addresses (e.g. Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) cannot be used for these sorts of complaints - that a domain name associated with the brand which claims to being breached is used instead, says Cluley. Or it could even request these claims were sent in on headed letter paper via snail mail or fax.

Dirk Knop, a Technical Editor at security firm Avira, agreed with Cluley, saying, “reacting blindly without verifying whether the sender of the complaint even really exists and uses an existing email address is not how it should be done.” He said Facebook needs to “react fast and correct this error.”

That said, neither Cluley, Knop, nor two other researchers at security firms we contacted were aware of this sort of fake takedown notice being used in scams or for spamming purposes, nor was it known to be a common cybercrime trend.

No Recourse for Page Owners Without Lawyers

But Ars Technica, which is now the most recent victim, notes this problem has been around for some time. Last year, for example, sex blogger Violet Blue’s Facebook page was taken down through similar fake claims.

To make matters worse, when the targeted individuals are public figures or small-time bloggers, without access to the legal counsel Facebook recommends they use to resolve the matter, they have almost no recourse in resolving the problem.

Here’s what a typical Facebook response to an innocent victim suggests:

While we appreciate your concerns, as we hope you can understand, we are not in a position to adjudicate disputes between third parties. When we receive an allegation of infringement, or a suitable report of a violation of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, our procedures require that we take action appropriate to the report. If you believe these reports are not being made in good faith or are inaccurate, we suggest you or your legal counsel contact the complaining party to discuss this further. If the reporting party withdraws their complaint or you prevail in court, we would be happy to follow up about restoring the removed material.

But when the complaining party is a ghost, page restoration is difficult, if not impossible.

We’ve seen several of these form emails from Facebook, and they seem to be automated responses, or, at best, form letters, despite being signed with a “real” Facebook employee’s name. In some cases, the form letter writer appears to have no knowledge of actions being taken by another Facebook employee, such as is the case when the victim “knows someone at Facebook” who is helping. This leads to even more confusion in what’s already a complex situation.

How to Protect Yourself

For what it’s worth, Dar says he found a workaround that allows legitimate page owners to protect themselves until Facebook’s policy changes: submit a claim against yourself. Once it’s taken down, ask Facebook for support in migrating your fans to a new page. When the migration is complete, you can use the new page safely. If anyone ever reports the page again, you can use your first complaint as proof that the page is yours. “I know it’s crazy,” he says. But it worked for him.

However, other sources say Facebook has stopped assisting in the migration of fans. There is no way for a page owner to manually migrate fans, either. In other words, this workaround may be iffy and ill-advised.

We asked Facebook why it didn’t validate email addresses, but the spokesperson never responded to that question directly.

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Tomorrow, Friday, April 29, the penultimate space shuttle mission launches and a 30 year shuttle program draws to a close. Mark Kelley, NASA Commander of Space Shuttle Endeavor’s final flight, aka mission STS-134, will take questions live on May 2.

Kelley and his crew will take questions via YouTube and Twitter and their responses will be broadcast live over the PBS News Hour’s YouTube channel. Miles O’Brien, a space reporter with decades of experience in broadcasting, will moderate.

UPDATE: Commenters indicated there is one more shuttle mission after this, STS-135. A lesser man would complain about how well-hidden the information on that mission was.

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To submit questions, either upload a video or text question via the News Hour channel or tag a tweet with #utalk2nasa.

“Don’t be shy,” says Public Sector Program Manager Ginny Hunt on the YouTube Blog. “if you’re most curious about how to prepare for a spacewalk or wondering if the astronauts have a speech prepared for an extra-terrestrial encounter, this is your chance to find out.”

According to NASA:

“During the 14-day mission, Endeavour will deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) and spare parts including two S-band communications antennas, a high-pressure gas tank and additional spare parts for Dextre. This will be the 36th shuttle mission to the International Space Station.”

Because we value facts more than context, data more than information, this is quite probably the last time we will send human beings into space for an indefinite period, maybe forever. For those of us who saw the first moon walk live on a grainy cart-mounted TV in elementary school, this is a tragedy. For others perhaps it’s just sound fiscal decision-making. (And isn’t that what space exploration is really all about?)

To Captain Kelly, pilot Greg Johnson and mission specialists Michael Finke, Roberto Vittori, Andrew Feustel and Greg Chamitoff: Kick ass, take names, get home.

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A Google-commissioned study on smartphone usage has confirmed just how addicted we are to our devices and revealed how we use them to help make purchasing decisions.

The data, which were laid out by Google in detail during a webinar yesterday, revealed a ton of information about how we use the devices in general. A couple of takeaways were particularly interesting for businesses large and small.

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Yeah, So We’re Addicted. So What?

For starters, 89% of smartphone owners use them on a daily basis, and many of them interact with their devices several times per day. People even said they’d rather give up such pleasures as chocolate, beer and cable TV than do without their treasured electronic companions. This is hardly shocking news, but it confirms just how connected smartphone owners are to their devices, a fact that has a slew of implications for marketers and businesses in general.

The research showed where (at home and on the go, mostly) and how people use their smartphones. Interestingly, more people (81%) said they browse the Web on their device than said they use native applications (68%). For ecommerce sites and other businesses, these numbers suggest that investing in one’s mobile-optimized Website could be more important than building native apps.

How Smartphones Help Us Buy Things

One thing for which people seem to use their iPhones, Blackberrys and Android devices quite a bit is shopping. Nearly 80% said they use their phones for shopping and shopping-related activities and 70% use their phones in stores.

Most people (67%) said they use their smartphone to do product research and then purchase an item in a store, followed by the 23% who research on their phones, check the product out in the store but then ultimately purchase it online.

The researchers also looked at what types of actions people take after conducting a mobile search. More than half (53%) ended up making a purchase and 68% visited a business online or in person.

Google Says Mobile Ads Work

People are far more likely to notice ads when using their smartphones than they are in many other circumstances. Eighty-two percent of respondents said they noticed mobile ads, and about half of them said they were likely to take some kind of action as a result, whether it be conducting more research or actually making a purchase.

The study was conducted by interviewing 5,013 U.S. adults (aged 18-64) about their phone usage. Although these results pertain to American users, a representative from Google said they’ve seen similar data in other countries.

For more details on the study’s findings, see this post on the Google Mobile Ads blog.

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Developer James Coglan has created Fargo, a small experimental programming language for a asynchronous systems in JavaScript. It works in both Node.js and in browsers. Fargo is a modified version of Scheme, a dialect of LISP.

Considering that Douglas Crockford once called JavaScript “LISP in C’s Clothing,” why exactly do we need another Scheme-like language for working with it? According to the ReadMe, Fargo is “designed to ease asynchronous functional programming by providing features missing in JavaScript, namely tail recursion and some form of continuations.”

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“The main experiment here is that Fargo supports Ruby-style fibers for pausing and resuming async work,” Coglan writes on the Fargo site.

According to the ReadMe, Fargo features the following syntax elements from Scheme:

• define for binding variables and creating functions
• begin for bundling blocks of code as single expressions
• if for conditional branching
• lambda for creating first-class anonymous functions
• quote for defining immutable lists
• and and or for boolean logic

It also adds more predicates, operators, list primitives and library functions.

Fargo is available under an MIT license.

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If you work with Hadoop, or want to, check out Antonio Piccolboni’s overview of eight MapReduce languages. Piccolboni explores each language in search of a language that provides both concise syntax and the power to run both the “‘inside’ of map reduce, that is the code for the mapper and the reducer, as well as the ‘outside’, the logic that decides which map reduce jobs to run.” He also looked to whether he could write MapReduce programs that require multiple MapReduce jobs ” including the case of a data dependent number and type of jobs.”

He decided Rhipe, which integrates R with Hadoop, was the closest to what he was looking for. However, one notable absence from his overview is Wukong, which brings Ruby to Hadoop. (Though I’m not sure whether this would meet his requirements).

Which language do you prefer for creating MapReduce jobs, and why?

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In the still nascent tablet market, research is ongoing about how consumers interact with this new computing medium. Whether it is how users interact with tablet magazines or how much time they spend using various apps, there is still a lot to learn.

Advertising network Chitika released a study today showing that when perusing Google search results, users are more likely to scroll past the first couple of results than they are from a PC. The study showed that 20% of iPad users click the top search result in Google, a decline from the 34% who do so from a personal computer.

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The study was done using data from the Chitika ad network that serves three billion monthly ad impressions on the Web across 100,000 sites. The company compared it against a similar study they did last year for Google position results from desktop computers.

“It appears from the data that iPad users are more willing to scroll to find the answers to their queries, and even go to multiple pages,” Chitika wrote in the study. “Perhaps this can be attributed to the touchscreen interface, or the fact that search behavior isn’t yet ingrained in tablet users like it is in desktop and laptop users.”

Chitika said that it is not certain if this is true across all tablet or touch screen devices or whether it is just an “iPad phenomenon” and has promised to study mobile gadgets

Chitika is active in studying analytics of web trends. In August, 2010 it was one of the first to report that Bing had overtaken Yahoo in search market share and did a study shortly after the first iPad was released on where the early adopters call home. The company spends a lot of time studying on search trends, which would make sense for an ad network that wants to know where the eyeballs are going to be.

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The Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan organization that uses the Internet to promote government transparency and openness, is celebrating its fifth anniversary this week. The foundation uses data analysis to report on government activity and trains journalists in the use of data to tell the story about what the federal government is actually up to.

We often cover the Sunlight Foundation and what they are doing. For the anniversary they sent a note to all their kindred spirits in the cause of open government. “We’ve grown from a small organization with big ideas to a connected community whose call for greater government openness and transparency is heard throughout the country,” wrote Nicko Margolies, communications coordinator at the Sunlight Foundation.

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Among the various activities that the Sunlight Foundation takes part in are funding database initiatives, creating mobile applications to put Congress in the hands of the people, fostering a community of “civic hackers” and helping craft policy on the Internet age. All of that and more.

“The Sunlight Foundation will continue to work with you explore how to enhance our democracy and citizen engagement with our public officials using online tools,” wrote executive director and co-founder Ellen Miller. “Sure, there’s a lot more to be done. As a wise person once said, if this was easy, it would have been done already. And we promise you - the best is yet to come!”

The Sunglight Foundation put together a YouTube video to celebrate its fifth year. Check it out below.

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