As Microsoft's recent $240M investment in Facebook gives FB all the capital it needs to further its grand ambitions, some are concerned that one corporation should control so much information about the detailed personal activities and connections among individuals. Even before OpenSocial launched today, one individual had decided to outline an open source software architecture to address these concerns. He has published a technical overview of his ideas for an open source infrastructure for social networking, calling it 'Breaking Open Facebook with Open Source Software.'

What I am going to do in this regular column is feed my habit by highlighting some of the books I am reading, and (mostly) enjoying. (I will only rarely write negative reviews; it's a rare book that I 'do not put down gently but throw across the room with great force' after all.) Geeks like to read - and not only programming books. Most of us read incessantly. Whether it's popular science, sci-fi or fantasy, a good thriller or an occasional popular history book or biography, it's a rare geek who isn't in love with books. And I am no exception, although I have to confess I am rather an extreme case since my love of books and eclectic tastes borders on the 'gentle madness' aka bibliomania.

Keynote Systems has introduced an Internet testing environment for recording and measuring the performance of Web 2.0 applications at all stages of the life cycle. Keynote's Internet Testing Environment (KITE) is a desktop-based console that enables developers and testing professionals, from their own desktop, to test and measure the end-user experience of next-generation Web applications including AJAX-based applications and asynchronously downloaded content.

Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don't work. In this case it's Google trying to undermine Facebook. And I don't think it's going to work. What would be exciting and uplifting, a real game-changer -- Internet companies giving users full control of their data.

In a move to bolster its attempt to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, Google yesterday joined other leading social networking players in introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write cross-network programs. According to The New York Times the sites in the OpenSocial alliance 'have a combined 100 million users, more than double the size of Facebook.'

Keynote Systems has announced major upgrades to the company's two flagship Web site performance test and measurement product offerings: Transaction Perspective 8.0 and Application Perspective 5.0. The enhanced versions include the Keynote Internet Testing Environment (KITE), a new desktop-based test and measurement environment that enables developers and testing professionals, from their own desktop, to test and measure the end-user experience of next-generation Web applications that include AJAX and asynchronously downloaded content with point and click ease.

At its analysts' day the other day, Google remained reluctant to forecast how its Google apps will fare and evaded off the question of whether it could get 5%-7% of the SMB segments saying predictions were 'dangerous.' It claimed it's a function of the penetration of Internet and that a lot of companies are still Internet naif. It reckons, however, that its presence in the market has affected pricing.

Often in software I find myself preaching restraint to those who wish to move platforms for no apparent reason than to keep up with the IT fashion industry; however, even harder than the silver-bullet chasers is dealing with organizations where change is required, not only in a company's software stack, but throughout their entire IT department.

'There's definitely a lot of betting going on, and it's not rational.' - Book publisher and conference thrower Tim O'Reilly, who coined the phrase Web 2.0, on the Bubble-style amounts of money going into Internet start-ups as quoted in the New York Times where he worries that the Valley is 'minting too many copycat companies, half-baked business plans and overpriced buy-outs.' The trend in valuing social sites, the latest investment fad, is to count users and ignore any P&Ls.

FatWire Software has acquired Infostoria, a provider of Web 2.0 collaboration and content sharing tools for the enterprise. Infostoria's technology enables single-click wiki creation and blogging, and offers an advanced content integration platform to help organizations manage, find and share content stored in disparate repositories.

Launched in February 2004, Facebook is now worth $15BN - judging from the fact that Microsoft has reportedly just bought itself a modest 1.6% chunk of the company for a staggering $240M. Mark Zuckerberg, a former member of the Harvard Class of 2006, will not be short of change any time soon: as of October 2007, the website had 42 million active members worldwide and expects to pass 60 million users by the end of the year.

In this session we will examine how the SOA and Web 2.0 technology-based platform developed in Openreach Portal by wiring up the existing rigid flows and deploying them for execution, through Web and Web service interfaces in real-time and zero down time, gave the power to end users to define their own services and flows.

WebEffective 6.0 facilitates fast, accurate testing of end users interacting with sites featuring Web 2.0 technologies, including AJAX, Flash and DHTML. DHTML is a combination of technologies gaining in popularity used to create highly dynamic and interactive Web sites in which the user does not actually click on the page to view new content, but simply hovers over it. This is an important and much needed technical and industry advance as until now there have been no user experience tools capable of accurately capturing and measuring the experience of users traversing Web pages that include DHTML content, without actually manually tagging events in order to monitor them. Consequently, WebEffective 6.0 will work with any site, including competitors. The new technology will be extremely useful to marketers interested in understanding the user experience and overall effectiveness of advanced Web 2.0 Web sites.

The Enterprise Service Bus provides event-driven and standards-based message services that are fundamental to large and complex enterprise infrastructures. Traditionally the ESB has focused on message delivery between different disparate server-side systems. With the use of modern Web 2.0 techniques we can now extend the ESB all the way to the browser.

'We want to provide the best, most engaging discovery experience possible -- whether through the power of our simple 'Stumble' button or by enabling discovery across the Web, with the search engines our users are already familiar with,' said Michael Buhr, general manager of StumbleUpon, as he today released SearchReviews, to enhance the way Internet users discover interesting content. eBay acquired StumbleUpon in May 2007.

What kind of infrastructure should enterprises adopt for mashups? How can an enterprise mashup solution best consume data sources like WSDLs, databases, portals, REST, RSS/ATOM feeds, and legacy systems? How do we orchestrate and coordinate such disparate services inside a mashup? This session will 'talk the talk' about Enterprise Mashups, outlining a working model for mashups in the real-world context of the heterogeneous enterprise.

BEA has released its annual state of the enterprise portal market report, which is available for download. The report reveals that portals remain a top priority for CIOs at large enterprises for the sixth consecutive year. It also compiles survey results from over 540 customers, which indicates that portals will help introduce Web 2.0 capabilities and social computing technologies in the enterprise.

Nexaweb Technologies has announced that InfoWorld Magazine's Test Center has given the Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite a 'very good' rating based on scores of 8.0 and above for each of the five criteria considered critical to the enterprise IT buying decision: capability, developer tools, documentation, performance and value.

Another topic Scoble and I talked about today was Facebook. I said I don't like Facebook, never have, and I finally figured out why. It's another one of those user generated content things, only this time I'm building up an address book that I can look at, but can only do things with it that Facebook lets me do. Why exactly do I need Facebook to get in between me and my address book?

Compuware Corporation has released Compuware Optimal Trace 5.0, the latest version of Compuware Optimal's business requirements management solution. This new version provides an entry into adopting a business requirements management solution and enables organizations to grow into a sophisticated use of 'structured requirements.' It also further strengthens Compuware Optimal's application delivery management solution by offering increased capability to propagate business intent through the life cycle.

The IBM Mashup Starter Kit can combine information from databases, departmental information, personal information or the Web. It rapidly blends information and Web services, such as real-time weather reports or maps, with enterprise content and services, and easily 'mashes' them together to generate fast, flexible and affordable applications for specific business needs.

A new breed of web manager is emerging to link content management more closely to website visitor satisfaction. The new web manager may operate under several professional guises: 'customer advocate,' 'information guru,' or 'metator,' to name just a few. They need to employ a very different set of soft skills than traditional webmastering, and many enterprises are struggling with the personnel challenges of this transition.

And finally Steve gets around to the iPhone. Basically he says that through Web 2.0 and AJAX, you can create applications for the iPhone because the iPhone is running the full, uncut, unaltered version of the same Safari engine that is now running on Mac OS X Leopard, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. This is a huge thing and I can't wait to start exploring some of the possibilities of this. I wonder - you think the iPhone version of Safari will allow the Silverlight plug-in to install? :)

Social networking - not a new idea for the twenty-something generation - but an idea that has finally crossed over into the corporate boardroom thanks to customer demand and open standards technologies built on service-oriented architectures (SOA).

Secure Computing Corporation unveiled the company's new 'SWAT' Initiative for protecting organizations from Web 2.0-related threats carried in Web and messaging protocols. The 'Secure Web 2.0 Anti-Threat' initiative is an intensive effort to provide corporations with informative research, tools, solutions and best practices vital for companies evaluating - or re-evaluating - their approach to Web and messaging security.

Postini's e-mail security and compliance services have been added to Google Apps Premier Edition. Google acquired Postini last month to help companies realize the benefits of hosted applications while also addressing complex information security and compliance requirements.

Everyone in IT understands that there are disasters and then there are disasters. Regardless of the scale of any interruption in operations, disaster recovery plans generally comprise details describing how IT will accomplish the two most important tasks they will face in the event of a disaster: business continuity contingencies and the recovery of lost data.

'The e-mail system is in a complete heap.' Those are the words of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created a little something called the World Wide Web, in reference to e-mail's shortcomings as a communications tool. His message is that although e-mail is effective for one-on-one dialogue, it has flaws that impede the kind of knowledge gained from true team collaboration. To promote collaboration for your teams and projects in ways that e-mail cannot, the answer lies in the corporate potential of 'Web 2.0' tools.

Experts in mobile applications development, AJAX, and Web standards come together to build a more complete picture of the future of interactive mobile Web applications. W3C and the OpenAjax Alliance have convened a workshop on September 28, at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View, CA.

Nexaweb Technologies, provider of the leading standards-based platform for building and deploying Enterprise Web 2.0 (EW2.0) applications, today announced the latest release of its Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite. Nexaweb?s Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite enhanced design and management features, as well as its interoperability with leading governance solutions from Layer 7 and HP Systinet, make it the ideal RIA, composite application and enterprise mash-up development and deployment platform for IT organizations and the heterogeneous and distributed business groups they serve.

The 'upgrade' from Web 1.0 to the new Web 2.0 world has been an evolutionary process, continually driving the Web to be more interactive, useful, and interesting for consumers and the business community. The evolution from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 has been about improvements in the Web 'experience' - from that of simply browsing static content and graphic images that display upon request, to an all-new highly interactive, programmable, and much more useful Web.

Alfred Chuang started out by talking about his core believe that we are on the cusp of fundamental change, with the advent of iPods, Web 2.0, and social networks. He started with a discussion of Mashups, and talked about how most of them are consumer facing. He then said 'The era of innovation in packaged applications is over.' He then called out the key needs he has seen recently from customers.

As more and more Websites incorporate Web 2.0 technologies including Web services, service-oriented architecture, and AJAX to perform more critical online transactions one thing is certain - Web 2.0 technologies increase an organization's security risks.

Accelerators are business specific packages that easily integrate existing portal and address a specific business need. With the delivery of three new accelerators, IBM now offers customers all five of the initial accelerators identified as part of a new strategy announced April 2007 for the portal market. The Dashboard accelerator was announced late April while Workforce Management for HR self-service was made available in July.

David Gootzit talked about the 'Portal of the Future' and mashups are a key actor in the tale he told. David described portals as an 'important' entry point for enterprise mashups. More interestingly, he outlined key areas that must be addressed for mashups to become to a first-class portal citizen (like user profiles, security, metadata and portlets) and guidelines to deploying mashups. And there was more mashup talking to be done. Unfortunately, I had to come home to get ready for AjaxWorld. Which means I am missing Anthony Bradley's session on mashups tomorrow, among others. If anyone has comments on that, I'd love to hear them.

I will be attending the Ajax World Conference next week in Santa Clara. I will also be at the opening reception on Monday and the conference party on Tuesday. Over the weekend Jesse Liberty blogged about this as well 'If you are going to be at AJAXWorld, look for me on Twitter, and let's see if we can set up a meeting or a lunch.' Other faculty members, according to the Ajax World website, who will be at these parties include...

Enterprise Web 2.0 and SOBA development have gained significant momentum among enterprise and public sector IT organizations as delivery platforms for next-generation 'services-based' composite, RIA, 'mashup,' and Net-centric applications. A major consideration in the development of these applications, however, must be governance including the identity of the application user and their location, the provider of these services, how they are secured, and their level of testing.

EasyAsk R10 software includs an easy-to-use, intuitive, AJAX Web-based user interface that provides merchandisers with complete control over the presentation of their products sold on their e-commerce sites. With this new EasyAsk software, merchandisers can optimize product searches based on a wide variety of parameters such as sales popularity and relevance, while automatically adjusting site navigation in real-time based upon search results and exploit up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.

Yahoo has launched Mash as a beta version (by invitation only) this weekend. It's (yet another) social networkig site that appears to be aimed at unseating Facebook, and their biggest differentiator is a wiki-like approach where people can edit each other's profiles. More importantly, you can create a new profile for somebody else and then inite them to 'claim' that profile and make it theirs. Hmmmm, I'm not sure that I really like that idea. Friends writing on my wall in Facebook is one thing, but having them edit my profile?!

Web audience interests are both more diverse and practical than the 'big stories' orientation of the major media outlets. That is the main conclusion of a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ),a research organization that specializes in using empirical methods to evaluate and study the performance of the press.