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:

“two out of three new reg­is­tra­tions at par­tic­i­pat­ing sites were gen­er­ated through Face­book Con­nect dur­ing the test­ing phase.”

“users who logged in using Face­book Con­nect were 50 per­cent more likely to par­tic­i­pate socially on a web­site than non-Facebook Con­nect users once logged in.”

Of course, a grand don’t come for free: he who bestows upon his web­site the pow­ers of FB, grants them sole access to all the social data gath­ered. So the stan­dard blog-commenting sys­tem with­out reg­is­tra­tion is here to stay for another while.

More Face­book news: embed­d­a­ble videos

Embed­ding videos is not a big deal any­more — every major site offers this func­tion. But Face­book takes the game to the next level by intro­duc­ing friends-only embed­d­a­ble videos, and the qual­ity has improved as well:

The qual­ity will be bumped up to 720p, which is tech­ni­cally the low end of HD. Coin­ci­den­tally (or not), YouTube turned on an HD-quality option on Fri­day. […] The key change, though, is that the videos will now be embed­d­a­ble on other sites. […] Just as on Face­book, you can deter­mine exactly who can see any video you upload. Those pri­vacy set­tings will be main­tained across the Web.

Win tick­ets for Elite Retreat

There’s no doubt that Elite Retreat is a high-profile con­fer­ence, and it’s always sold out quite quickly. And the tick­ets are not too cheap either, but here comes the good news: The friendly guys from Pep­per­jam are giv­ing away not only free tick­ets, but also gives away hotel room and a free flight. To be eli­gi­ble for the free­bies, you’ll have to work hard though, as the rules are all about affil­i­ate per­for­mance. [via Shoe­money]

Video of the week: A Chain Animation

1993 45 media artists did a chain-animation — most of them were using an Amiga. Max has uploaded this 21-minutes clip — looks pretty amazing:

Also rec­om­mended: Akira remod­eled. Have you ever won­dered, what the manga clas­sic Akira would look life, if it had been pro­duced for an Amer­i­can audi­ence? Laugh­ing Squid knows!

And that’s it for the week — have a great Sun­day, enjoy your trips to the blo­gos­phere. See you next week! And btw: don’t for­get to clean your screen

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