The countdown is officially on for the big Facebook location backlash. How long will it be? One week? Two weeks? We all know it’s coming, it’s just a matter of when. And that’s too bad because I think Places is actually pretty great — potentially. The ACLU wasted little time yesterday trying to start such a backlash (their post on the matter came what, a whole 30 seconds after the press conference ended?). Evelyn already did a nice job deconstructing many of their arguments and showing why a few were ridiculous. All I can add is to say that thank god the ACLU doesn’t design consumer apps — it would be like Facebook’s current nightmare of settings multiplied by a billion. We’d have settings for individual minutes in individual days for when individual users could see individual profiles. It would be the the least social social network ever. Today, the EFF followed up the ACLU’s post by citing things like pleaserobme.com as an illustration of how sensitive location information can be. Not cited is the fact that most people have jobs which they are at from 9 to 5 everyday, so they’re not likely to be home then, leaving their houses susceptible to robbery. My point is that plenty of people right now are out there on the hunt for a way to show that Facebook Places is the devil. It’s an easy angle. You take something that already a very sensitive topic: Facebook privacy — and combine it with another sensitive topic: location privacy. Boom. Match made in hell. I thought Facebook’s presentation ( and video ) about Places yesterday was great because it focused on the positive. The talk was about serendipitous meetups and friends nearby, not people being stalked or worse. It seems like Facebook fully understands that location has the potential to be the bridge between social networking and actually being social . I’m just surprised it has taken them this long to launch a product. But clearly they wanted to be careful. And they’re still being careful. Places is about as bare-bones as a location service can be. It is just check-ins. And that’s undoubtedly why they’re paying homage to Foursquare in the Places logo. Without Foursquare, Places would not exist. But after only one day of using Places I’m seeing the potential here. I’m seeing friends checking-in who I’ve never seen use Foursquare. I’ve seen some friends check-in who I’m fairly positive have no idea what Foursquare is. Earlier, I was in a park near my apartment and I checked-in and saw that 30-some other people that I wasn’t friends with were checked-in there as well. To some people, that’s creepy (it has been a feature on Foursquare for a while and that’s basically what Loopt was for a while). But to me, I think that’s potentially really interesting for when it comes to meeting people. And the fact that so many had checked-in on day one of the service is impressive. That’s the power of Facebook’s social graph. It’s a graph that none of the current location players can touch even if you added all of their users together and multiplied them by twenty. Facebook is going to bring location to the mainstream by virtue of their size alone. But the flip side is that because Facebook has such a large social graph that’s already established, a lot of current users are going to feel this new layer as something being forced upon them. And again, creepy. Of course there’s the option not to use it, but I can certainly see how the friend tagging thing is troubling to a lot of people (particularly because of the somewhat confusing three states ). But it’s also potentially a great tool. Imagine if you’re with a group of friends and only one of you has to check everyone in. That’s the cure for check-in fatigue right there. And when you think about it, this functionality isn’t much different than the tweets we’ve all sent that state something like “at the park with @____ @_____ @_____ and @_______”. But the real key of Facebook Places is as a platform. Though it is still in the process of being turned on, it’s going to be great to be able to load up one app and see where people from Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, etc have all checked-in. And even better will be when you can check-in on Facebook Places and push it out to these services (so far, only Gowalla has committed to working on this as far as I know). These services are all going to have to focus on building great utilities on top of this platform because the check-in will finally be completely commoditized. And that’s a good thing. I hope the Places API becomes the Facebook Connect for check-ins so the real innovation can begin. We need to remove the “ ugh, another service I have to check-in to ” factor. That’s undoubtedly what Facebook is hoping for too. It’s a potential new branch of the Platform. While location obviously has risks associated with it, it’s the upside that has all of these startups and now bigger players interested in the space. It’s easy to forget about this upside and instead worry about how everyone is going to be stalking one another. You know, the same things people used to say about the Internet itself back in the day. CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase

In 1997 Wired Magazine declared the browser dead. “Sure, we’ll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don’t we?” said Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf. They were wrong, of course. The browser is still the killer app of killer apps. It’s the single most important way that we interact with the Internet. From Wikipedia to webmail to YouTube, it’s the universal virtual machine that has made pc operating systems irrelevant. If all you have is a browser, you’ll be just fine. Fast forward to today and Wired is once again saying the browser is dead . “Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display,” says Chris Anderson. And about that 1997 article: They weren’t wrong, they were prescient . “The point was altogether prescient,” Anderson says now of that article. Overheard on the TechCrunch Yammer stream: “Possibly the greatest explanation for being dead fucking wrong that I’ve ever seen.” Wired is still wrong. Way wrong. The new article is based on a foundation of data supplied by Cisco that shows web traffic, as taking a smaller piece of total Internet traffic. The chart itself is misleading, as BoingBoing pointed out. But even taken at face value, it’s still wrong. Wired’s argument, based on the data, is that the browser is dead and apps, like iPhone apps, are taking over. “This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.” Um, ok. But the data doesn’t show this at all. Sure, video traffic is expanding. Which makes sense because it’s a heavy load. But most of it is also being transported via Flash and HTML right through a web browser. And most app data is counted under “web” in Wired’s graph, meaning its all lumped together with normal browser data. In other words, Wired took a misleading graph and then drew all kinds of conclusions based on it that don’t even make sense in their make believe world. It’s like they showed a picture of a banana and said it explains the rising cost of gasoline. In fact, the only thing Wired’s chart really shows is that video files are really big, and people like to watch them in browsers. The browser isn’t dead. Web pages aren’t dead. HTML works really, really well. Check out Facebook’s iPad “app,” for example. You don’t download it from an app store, you just point your browser to touch.facebook.com . Not only does it work really well, Steve Jobs doesn’t get to have a veto right over people using it. It’s no wonder that we’re seeing a surge of traffic from the iPad to our site, via a browser. Apps are great on mobile phones with small screens. But they are a pain to install and keep synchronized. Eventually having less local software will make sense on phones, too. All you really need is that browser virtual machine and you can pull everything else from the cloud. This is obvious. Only a bunch of hipster tech journalists checking email on their iPads all day* would think otherwise, and then make up a bunch of data to support their argument. *Wired, not us.

Ericsson , which provides technology and services to telecom operators around the globe, estimates we’ve hit another milestone in the Internet becoming increasingly mobile. The company claims, based on estimates based on industry information, that the 5 billionth mobile subscription was accounted for on Thursday, July 8. The 5 billion mark was hit largely thanks to a surge in mobile subscriptions in emerging markets like China and India, the company says. In the year 2000, about 720 million people had mobile subscriptions, less than the amount of users China alone has today, still according to Ericsson. Mobile broadband subscriptions are growing at similar pace and are expected to amount to more than 3.4 billion by 2015 (from 360 million in 2009). Furthermore, Ericsson estimates, 2 million mobile subscriptions are added on a daily basis, and the number of 3G subscriptions has now exceeded 500 million worldwide. The company also posits we’ll be at no less than 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020. (Photo via Ericsson ) CrunchBase Information Ericsson Information provided by CrunchBase

As soon as everyone got to actually see the unreleased Google Desktop application in action, they wanted to have it. The only problem is this isn’t just about waiting until Google finishes it off and ships it. There’s a real possibility that Google will never release a Skype-like soft phone for the desktop – they clearly want to build these types of applications in the browser. But the experts we’ve spoken with, including Skype execs, say browser technology just isn’t ready to run high quality VoIP calls at scale. Even with advancements in HTML5, it’s still at least a year away, say people who know: And sometime after that, we will see web applications leveraging Skype as a service, too. A couple of things have to happen first, though. There are two reasons Skype has to run on a client today. The first is audio/video encoding at the client level that ensure high quality calls with low latency and minimal configuration. There’s a reason calls on Skype tend to sound good. The second is the p2p architecture of Skype, which also affects latency and cost. It’s relatively straightforward for Skype to allow third parties to build both functions into their apps via a SDK, which is why we’ll see desktop applications integrate Skype as a service first. But the real win is when you can initiate skype voice and video calls via web applications. It’s not clear that we’re anywhere near that being possible with today’s browsers, say experts we’ve spoken with. There will likely always need to be some desktop software to assist with at least audio/video encoding. But it’s possible this could be done via browser plugins, or even in Flash. So when we see Google Voice exec Vincent Paquet say that their product effort is focused on a browser version feels like decisions are being made based more on internal Google politics than reality: We designed Google Voice to be endpoint-agnostic and we certainly want it to be accessible from any type of endpoint, not just phones,” Paquet told eWEEK June 21. “The direction in which we are going to keep working is to use the Web, which is probably the best UI there is in the world, to give you more control and personalization over your communications. Google could of course just build Google Voice directly into Chrome. In January we wrote about a Google Voice Chrome extension that lets users do just about everything except make or receive a call through their computer. It wouldn’t be hard for them to add in the soft phone code as well, particularly since we’ve seen it demo’d so well already. In the meantime, though, and for everyone that may not want to switch to Chrome, we think a Google Voice Desktop application makes a lot of sense. For Google. And for Google’s users. So we wholeheartedly endorse this petition which popped up two days ago to show support for a Google Voice Desktop application. I’ve signed it, and I command you to sign it too. Right now. And then get all your friends to sign it. Because as much fun as it is for me to have an illicit copy running happily on my computer, I want to share the love. And sadly my lawyers seem quite insistent that I don’t distribute it broadly on the Internet. Sign here: GiveUsGVDesktop.com CrunchBase Information Google Voice Information provided by CrunchBase

Mobile applications discovery and sharing service provider Appsfire has just launched a new product called AppTrends , which essentially delivers near real-time rankings of iPhone apps based on the chatter on Twitter . Rankings – currently limited to the top 20 apps on the website – are based on what Appsfire determines are noteworthy items in the App Store virtually in real-time. Appsfire crawls Twitter for links to iPhone apps, regardless of whether the iTunes URLs are shortened or not, and determines which apps are hot and which are not based on their popularity on the micro-sharing service. To do so, Appsfire looks at the number of mentions of applications, all while filtering out bots, repeat tweets from the same users, updates from seemingly fake accounts and activity tweets such as leaderboard or points sharing. In addition, the startup looks at the influence of users talking about certain iPhone apps (based on Klout ) to keep its rankings as relevant, clean and trustworthy as possible. The company tells us it’s capable of also determining sentiment through automated analysis, but intentionally does not use that data for the rankings because it claims the large majority of tweets about apps are positive of tone, according to one month’s worth of research. AppTrends gets updated on an hourly basis, and you can view evolution for the apps in the top list for the past hour, 12 hours or full day. All in all, for power users this could be very useful, given how the rankings coming from Apple are relatively similar from day to day – with AppTrends users can spot up and coming apps more rapidly and this stay ahead of the curve when it comes to downloading and testing new apps. For non-power users, the added value is less clear. If you’re an app developer or publisher, you can also use the service to track what’s being said on Twitter about your app – provided you made the top 20 list – in real-time via a sidebar. Appsfire intends to go from a top 20 to a top 100 list in the near future, and also offer localized rankings per country/store. Also in the works: lists per vertical, access to rankings from the past and notification services for developers. Coinciding with the launch of the new service, Appsfire has announced that a new investor joined the group of angels backing the company and brought an extension to its seed funding round. The new investor’s name is Lerer Ventures , the New York-based investment firm that has backed startups like (Twitter shareholder) Betaworks, GDGT and just recently, Seeing Interactive . The icing on the cake: Appsfire has persuaded Jyri Engeström (formerly at Google after selling his startup Jaiku to the Internet giant) to join its board of advisors. CrunchBase Information AppsFire Information provided by CrunchBase