• Google announced last week that they will become an OpenID 2.0 compliant identity provider, letting other sites authenticate their users by a Google account. In a later post Google hinted that they are committed to working on becoming a relying party, thus allowing sign-in to Google using other OpenID providers. Possibly these moves by Google can help fight other proprietary authentication systems like Facebook Connect.
  Tags: authentication, OpenID
• Google Alerts, a useful service for brand tracking among other things, can now be delivered by RSS feeds. Though there is still the limitation that only the top 20 results of a Web search is tracked (and the top 10 results for news and blog search).
  Tags: feeds
• Platforms are everywhere, but those without a monetization model, like the Facebook platform, are doomed, argues Alex Iskold: 
  

  The platforms of the future need to think about not just short-term marketing and buzz, but long-term sustainability and monetization. [...]
  Having been burnt by Facebook, small and large companies alike will now think twice before investing in a presence on platforms.

  On the other hand, who really needs platform vendor lock-in when the Web is the ultimate open platform?
  Tags: platforms

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  Unsuspicious users got their login credentials harvested, seems to be a perfect fit for OAuth to solve.
  Tags: authentication, OAuth
• The future of social networks: Social networks will be like air – Charlene Li
  In the future, social networks will be everywhere, characterized by 1) Universal identities (OpenID, email), 2) A single social graph, 3) Distributed social activities (social shopping), 4) Influential people having a high marketing value (personal CPM, PageRank of people). BigCos (MSFT, GOOG), will dominate 1) and 2).
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• Microsoft hits multiple Internet home runs – Robert Scoble
  Robert is excited about Microsoft's internet strategy presented at Mix08: Standards compliant IE8, passing the Acid2 browser test. Though not yet Acid3. A cloud storage service (SSDS) based on SQL server was also presented at Mix.
  Tags: Microsoft, IE8
• WordPress: The Social Network – Erick Schonfeld
  BuddyPress, a suite of Wordpress plugins that make a social network platform of a multi-user Wordpress installation, becomes an official Wordpress project.
  Tags: Wordpress, platforms
• 6 Ways to Filter Your RSS Feeds – Josh Catone
  A list of some useful services, more in the comments.
  Tags: rss
• Innovation comes cheap, says Google engineer Kevin Marks – Caroline McCarthy
  In an interview Kevin Marks talks about OpenSocial, why open source and open standards are a good thing, how MySpace allows applications on both home (private) and profile (public) user pages, and how privacy concerns make interoperability between social networks a hard problem.
  Tags: OpenSocial
• Yahoo’s MyBlogLog Adds An Activity Stream Feature – Michael Arrington
  And Mike says that the best activity stream aggregator is FriendFeed.
  Tags: activity streams