WebProNews

Tag: web development

  • World’s Most Popular Screen Resolution Now At 1366×768

    There’s something to be said about having a great screen resolution. I use a 16:10 monitor at 1680×1050 with my PC. Not exactly the enthusiast golden standard of 1920×1080 but it serves me well and looks great to boot. That’s why all the more distressing that most people in the world don’t really care about resolution as much as I do.

    For the longest time, people have been content with a paltry 1024×768 resolution. For the first time in three years, 1024×768 has finally fallen behind a competing resolution. The new most popular resolution worldwide is now a better, but still really small, 1366×768. This information comes from StatCounter who has been keeping track of global screen resolution trends since 2009. Surely this isn’t that important though, right? Wrong!

    “The data reflects a continuing trend of users moving to larger screen resolution sizes,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “The screen resolution size people are using is a critical factor for developers when it comes to web design, particularly in the case of fixed width web pages.”

    How do the actual numbers work out though? 1024×768 has decreased in global use to only 18.6 percent, while 1366×768 has risen above it to 19.28 percent. It’s not a big difference, but it’s significant for the Web development ecosystem.

    Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Screen Resolution Market Share

    On a similar note, the move from 1024×768 to 1366×768 shows a change in aspect ratio as well. The new standard is a resolution at 16:9. This means that more and more people are switching over to widescreen. Hmm… I wonder, what popular social media service drew the ire of users when it switched its design to a non-widescreen friendly version full of whitespace? Companies like Google need this kind of information the most so they can take advantage of that whitespace for the increased amount of people using wide-screen monitors.

    I was curious to see if this trend was being influenced by the types of PCs being sold. I highly doubt that many desktop monitors are being sold at that size, so the main culprit must be the all powerful laptop. Tablets don’t really come into question since the iPad 2 is at a 1024×768 resolution and the new iPad has a 4:3 aspect ratio.

    Looking at Newegg, the selection of laptops with a 1024×768 resolution is all but dried out. While there are other resolutions to choose from, the most bountiful selection is, you guessed it, 1366×768 with 378 laptops to choose from. It seems that hardware manufacturers have been pushing this as the new standard in entry level cheap laptops and it’s working.

    To recap, Web developers need to start building their applications with these resolutions in mind. While most will build their Web applications to take advantage of a large variety of resolutions, it’s good to keep the standard in mind.

    Are you still a 1024×768 diehard? Have you upgraded to 1366×768? Or are you like me and have an HD resolution? Let us know in the comments.

    [Lead Image: StatCounter]

  • The Dart Platform: An Introduction To Web Development

    There are many languages and platforms when it comes to developing apps for the Web, mobile and servers. One of the languages vying for your attention is Google’s Dart Web development language.

    Seth Ladd, a developer advocate of Dart and Chrome, gave a talk on the Dart platform this week. In his talk, he introduces what Dart is and why developers should care about the platform. The main philosophy of Dart is to “help app developers write complex, high performance client apps for the modern web.”

    Ladd then goes into a review of the new language features for Dart like “static types and isolates.” He also demos the editor that developers will use when making applications for Dart.

    Dart is still relatively new and will have many updates made to it over the next few years. This video is just meant to introduce people to the platform to drive up notoriety and interest. The video is very interesting and worth checking out even if you can’t watch the entire hour.

    While Dart might not be the future of the Web, it’s still nice to have more options when it comes to developing for the Web. A wide range of options leads to more innovation in the development and creation of apps which is only a good thing for the end user.

    Check out the hour-long video below and tell us what you think:

  • Adobe Shadow Labs Release 2 Now Available

    Adobe Shadow Labs Release 2 Now Available

    Adobe Shadow, tools that make developing mobile Web sites easier and faster, has been updated today to stay in line with current Web standards. Adobe released the details of the new Shadow Labs Release 2 today. They’re incorporating many of the features that users have requested.

    The new features added range from expanded development tools to support for new hardware. There’s a little something here for everybody so let’s get cracking on these new features.

    The first addition is localhost URL support. This means that Shadow now works with URLs containing localhost and 127.0.0.1, as well as OS X containing machine.local. Shadow now integrates Adobe Edge as swell. The Preview in Browser command now works in Shadow with animations previewing in Chrome and all other Shadow devices.

    Another addition is HTTP authentication support which allows users to head to URLs that feature HTTP authentication. As part of this, you will see the login/password form on Shadow devices. You can bypass the form if the site URL contains the login and password.

    Arguably, the most important improvements come with hardware support. Shadow now supports the iPad 3 with “high resolution application assets” and “fixes to improve iPad (3rd Generation) compatibility.” There will also be a version of Shadow soon releasing on the Kindle Fire.

    You can also now use a Refresh gesture on Shadow devices to reload the page with the newest assets. Alongside that is URL monitoring with pages/apps that “change URL parameters or navigate to new states using # anchors now work correctly.”

    Unfortunately, the team at Adobe were not able to implement virtual host file workflows into this newest version of Shadow. They understand the importance of such a feature and are working hard to deliver it.

    Beyond one disappointment, the rest of the new release seems pretty great. Check out the new version and give Adobe your feedback for better versions of Shadow in the future.

    It’s important to note that iOS devices running Shadow will require a new version that will be up on the iTunes store soon. If you want to get into Shadow right now for Mac or Windows, you can download it right now. Check it out and see how it works for your development needs.

  • New Echo Nest Partnerships Should Cater To More Awesome Music Apps

    The Echo Nest is partnering with JamBase and SongMeanings to give developers more data for their music apps. The former will provide concert and tour schedule data, while the latter will provide song lyrics and lyric interpretation.

    “Partnerships like these are driving the digital music industry forward,” the company tells WebProNews. “They increase accessibility and variety of content available to developers, better connect fans to the music they love, and bring artists revenue.”

    The JamBase and SongMeanings integrations will become part of The Echo Nest’s Rosetta Stone project. Rosetta Stone already had tour and lyric data for developers, but they bring an expanded catalog in these areas to the offering.

    “Before these partnerships, some, but not a lot of tour and lyric data was available in the Rosetta Stone,” CEO Jim Lucchese tells WebProNews. “Adding data from JamBase and SongMeanings brings more tour/lyric content and variety for developers to chose from; for example, JamBase has tour info. And our existing partnership with Seatwave enables concert ticket sales, combined, this makes for a more complete, experience; or SongMeanings offers lyric interpretation submitted by fans, where as our existing partner LyricFind offers exact lyrics, again, a richer, diverse experience.”

    There seem to be a lot of partnership announcements coming out from Echo Nest. A major one with Spotify was announced a couple weeks ago, which integrated the APIs from the two organizations to make Spotify’s apps more developer friendly.

    “Integrating Spotify’s artist and song IDs creates an efficiency where the developer now only has to use one ID structure to have access to The Echo Nest’s rich music data platform along with the streaming music of Spotify as well as our other partners in Rosetta Stone,” Shane Tobin, Director of Strategic Partnerships at The Echo Nest told us at the time.

    Spotify, of course, revealed its third-party app platform last last year. “Spotify has called its app platform the company’s biggest announcement since it launched, and rightfully so,” The Echo Nest said. “In the first three months that Spotify apps were available, music fans listened to over 1,500 years of music within them.”

    Even more recently, as in last week, The Echo Nest announced a partnership with Raditaz, a Pandora competitor, to add metadata to 14 million songs.

    “This is how we have always operated,” Lucchese tells us with regards to this spate of partnerships. “Now, we’re talking about it.”

    “As part of that initiative, The Echo Nest is distributing a ‘powered by’ logo to help our clients stand out in an increasingly competitive digital media landscape,” he adds. “When music fans encounter our logo, they will know that it accompanies a first-rate music experience grounded in a human- and machine-driven understanding of music. If it’s powered by The Echo Nest, it’s smarter, and our partners realize that.”

    Some of The Echo Nest’s key partners include: EMI, Spotify, Clear Channel Radio, MOG, Twitter, Universal Music Group, Nokia, MTV, Seatwave, eMusic, BBC, 7Digital, Rdio, Discovr, Raditaz, SpotOn Radio, Jog.fm, Cadence, Upbeat Workouts, AudioVroom, Bandito, Muzine, MusicMine, LyricFind, GrooveBug, Music Hunter, Music Tandem, Record Beater, Music+, and now JamBase and SongMeanings.

    When asked about potential partnerships, Lucchese says, “We can’t speak to what exactly is in the queue, but yes, The Echo Nest hopes to continue supplying developers with music data (currently at more than 5B data points on more than 30M songs) and engaging music fans at a higher-than-ever level (close to 300 music apps and services have been using our music intelligence, with a customer base that reaches more than 150M music fans worldwide).”

    We asked him what the most interesting implementations of The Echo Nest have been so far. “Too many to count!” he says. “One of our personal favorites is Drinkify which came out of Music Hack Day Boston 2011–you enter an artist, it gives you a drink!”

    Drinkify

    I agree. That’s pretty awesome.

    Here’s another interview we did with Lucchese last week:

  • How to Develop a Next-Generation Mobile Strategy

    According to an IDC forecast, by 2015 more U.S. Internet users will access the Internet through mobile devices than through PCs or other desktop devices. As smartphones begin to outsell simpler feature phones, and as tablet sales continue to explode, the number of mobile Internet users will grow by a compound annual growth rate of 16.6% by 2015.

    Supporting customers and staff on mobile is now a basic requirement for all organizations that currently have an online presence. Perfecting that strategy starts with getting the basics right and setting a strong mobile foundation to build upon.

    Be Comprehensive: Support on Mobile What you Support on the PC

    Since many Internet users are replacing their use of the PC with mobile, it is key for businesses to ensure that whatever users can do on their keyboard, they can do from the palm of their hand. Brands must make sure that every important feature of their website is also implemented on their mobile site and/or apps.

    However, the content and functionalities need to be optimized to properly fit the specific mobile device, rather than just offering a smaller version of the website. The user’s location, screen size, network speed and other key aspects unique to mobile need to be taken into account in the design and delivery of your mobile site or app. Productivity, speed, and simplicity are all essential to achieve maximum usability and customer satisfaction.

    The mobile site needs to support the site’s natural traffic coming from various sources, including SEO, email marketing and advertising. All of this inbound traffic should be redirected to a mobile comparable optimized experience. By getting this aspect right, brands will increase traffic, mobile ROI, and provide the groundwork to expand your mobile strategy.

    Staples mobileStaples.com has successfully achieved a consistent mobile experience on all sources of traffic by automatically directing customers to the mobile optimized view of its site regardless of entry point. If a user is searching for paper products via Google, for example, they will be led to an optimized mobile experience of that product page, despite coming from an outside source.

    Brands should also integrate mobile equivalent third party solutions that consumers trust, such as mobile payment provider PayPal and analytics platform Adobe. Integrating PayPal into your brand’s mobile strategy will make the checkout process that much easier, as users won’t be faced with the hassle of typing in their billing and shipping information for every purchase, or trying to remember their account log-in information for each site they access. Making the checkout process as simple as possible will result in more purchases and repeat visits.

    HTML5 Enhances the Mobile User Experience

    Leveraging HTML5 technology is a great way to improve the consumer’s experience with your brand in the mobile browser environment. By developing with next-generation HTML5 technologies, brands can deliver users a rich, app-like experience without having to develop downloadable apps for each specific mobile platform (iOS vs. Android and others). HTML5 enables brands to offer a consistent experience across all major mobile operating systems.

    Additionally, HTML5-based mobile sites enable users to take their mobile shopping experience to the next level with innovative features such as location-aware capabilities, high-resolution image galleries that enable you to zoom in to view products in detail, expandable navigation, collapsible menus, and advanced shopping carts that streamline and simplify the amount of steps users need to follow to complete a transaction.

    Travel giant Expedia.com is a brand dedicated to its innovative mobile strategy. The company’s HTML5-enabled mobile site, for example, takes “location-aware” to the next level by leveraging the device’s internal GPS to offer travelers the ability to search for nearby hotels with same day vacancies, as well as push notifications based on their location.

    Expedia mobile

    Scaling your Mobile Site to Reach an International Audience

    Rapid smartphone adoption is a global phenomenon, with more and more users around the world replacing their feature phones with smartphones. In fact, global smartphone sales grew 53.3% in 2011 and made up 34% of all mobile handsets sold in the year, according to Informa Telecoms research agency.

    Further, it is estimated that over a billion people would own a smartphone by 2013, reiterating the massive market potential. According to a recent PhoCusWright report, smartphone use now exceeds 50% in the U.S. and Europe. While Asia’s smartphone adoption has been a bit slower, the smartphone market there is expected to double its size by 2016, according to research firm Ovum.

    Because of this international smartphone surge, it is becoming more and more important for organizations to extend their mobile channel to match regional web channels in order to leverage worldwide smartphone adoption. It is vital to ensure that your company’s mobile site can adapt to regional differences in mobile user context and other key features.

    Engaging consumers on a worldwide scale has many benefits to both the company and the consumer. These include increased mobile channel revenues and maximized usage and repeat visits. Offering consumers access to online features and functionalities in their preferred language and currency will create a positive experience and encourage repeat visits.

    FedEx has implemented multiple language support to help reach its global user base. The shipping company’s site currently supports 242 regions and 25 languages worldwide, a number that signifies the importance FedEx places on scaling its mobile site for an international audience.

    Looking Forward

    In our new smartphone driven world, it is no longer enough for organizations to offer a simple optimized mobile site. Instead, brands must develop a strategy that leverages next-generation features and functionalities to make the customer experience just as comprehensive and easy to use as offered on the traditional website. By strategically implementing a well-executed mobile strategy, companies will see an increase in conversion, repeat visits, and overall positive brand awareness from users engaging with their brand via mobile devices.

  • Optimizing A Site For Mobile: Google Provides 70 Minutes Worth Of Tips

    Google has posted a pair of webinars from its “GoMo” campaign, which is an initiative to get people to create mobile-friendly sites. One of the webinars is for advertisers and one is for publishers. They both include tips and case studies on sites that have gone mobile.

    Frankly, you shouldn’t need Google to tell you that you need to be optimized for mobile these days, but there is still plenty to be learned.

    In the first one (the one for advertisers), Google discusses mobilizing your site, maximizing mobile ads, and tracking/measuring them. The second one discusses why you should go mobile, provides tips for building a mobile site, talks about best practices and explains how to get started.

    As a bonus, Google has also made the slides from the webinars available to download here (pdf).

  • Infographic Looks At Direct And Indirect Costs Of Testing Your Site

    Monetate has put out an interesting infographic looking at the total cost of website testing. The top challenges, according to Monetate are: deciding what to test, prioritizing testing initiatives, conducting the actual tests, obtaining enough traffic for statistical significance and acting on the test results.

    “To accomplish these and other challenges, marketers are turning to website testing tools that promise to deliver higher conversions and a positive return on investment,” the company says. “But how much do they really cost? The cost of paid website testing tools can be higher than just the ‘sticker price.’ And are ‘free’ tools really free?”

    “The near century-old financial estimate known as Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) can help determine direct and indirect costs of a purchase,” the infographic says. “Adopted by Gartner to help measure the true cost of software or hardware investments over time, companies should consider TCO when deciding which website testing tool to use.”

    Check out the image for a breakdown of direct and indirect costs.

    Total Cost of Website Testing

  • How To Make A Mobile-Friendly Site, According To Google

    How To Make A Mobile-Friendly Site, According To Google

    Google has uploaded a video of a 30-minute talk from Google Engage For Agencies, about making mobile-friendly websites.

    Google’s Shane Cassells discusses four benefits of the mobile web over apps: easier to find (through search, blogs, Twitter and links in emails), increased market size (impressions and clicks higher on mobile web than apps. anyone has access to your site), lower development costs (creating a mobile site vs. developing a mobile app), and it’s easier to maintain (if changes are made, you don’t need to upgrade because all users see is the newest version).

    Make no mistake. Google wants you to build good mobile sites. You might say it makes it easier for Google to index mobile content. Late last year, Google introduced the GoMo resource site to help sites get mobile.

    The site has a “GoMoMeter” to test your site. It shows you how your site looks on a smartphone, and provides a free report with personalized recommendations. All you have to do is enter your URL.

    It also has a list of services you can use to get your site started, which you can view by service type, annual cost and timeframe. There are also various guides for agencies, advertisers and publishers.

  • Chrome Developer? Here’s A Google+ Hangout For You

    Google has been utilizing Google+ better than anyone. Go figure. Google’s use of its own social network, regardless of how much people are using it day to day, is proving to be beneficial to webmasters, web developers, marketers, etc. simply because Googlers constantly use it as a communication medium and a place for people to learn some good tips for getting more out of Google products.

    Last week, for example, there was a developer hangout for the recently launched Chrome for Android.

    Now, Google has posted a new Chrome Developer Hangout to YouTube. This one runs through Chrome Developer tools with Googlers Paul Irish, Pavel Feldman, Sam Dutton, Peter Beverloo, Alex Sexton and Paul Lewis.

  • Autocomplete Type Attribute Can Increase Conversions, Says Google

    Google announced that Chrome is now supporting an experimental “autocomplete type” attribute for form fields that enable developers to unambiguously label text and select fields with common data types, like “full-name” or “street-address”.

    “With this attribute, web developers can drive conversions on their sites by marking their forms for auto-completion without changing the user interface or the backend,” says Google software engineer Ilya Sherman.

    In a proposal for the attribute, it says:

    Autofill agents save users’ time, and help site authors convert users in purchase and registration flows. Autofill works best when site authors are able to directly provide hints to autofill agents as to what data belongs in each field.
    …

    We believe that website authors have strong incentive to facilitate autofill on their forms to help convert users in purchase and registration flows. Additionally, this assists users by streamlining their experience.

    Autocomplete type

    As an example, Google shows this:

    <input type=”text” name=”field1” x-autocompletetype=”email” />

    “We’ve been working on this design in collaboration with several other autofill vendors,” says Sherman. “Like any early stage proposal we expect this will change and evolve as the web standards community provides feedback, but we believe this will serve as a good starting point for the discussion on how to best support autofillable forms in the HTML5 spec. For now, this new attribute is implemented in Chrome as x-autocompletetype to indicate that this is still experimental and not yet a standard, similar to the webkitspeech attribute we released last summer.”

    The proposal for the attribute can be read in its entirety here.

  • Yahoo Adds Blog Search to Search BOSS

    Yahoo Adds Blog Search to Search BOSS

    Yahoo announced today that it has added Blog Search (in beta) to Yahoo Search BOSS, the company’s “Build Your Own Search Service” open search and data platform.

    “Developers looking for a blog search API often find the APIs that do exist are providing a variation of a web index,” says Rahul Hampole with the Yahoo Search BOSS team. “We decided to take a different approach. Yahoo! developed a custom blog index where the relevancy is specifically tuned for blogs. This allows us to provide you a wealth of data such as the provider, the author, date of post and in certain cases, contextually relevant terms associated with the article.”

    “By their very nature, web indices used for blog search cannot provide the complex functionality that developers demand,” explains Hampole. “For example, try finding a commercial API that will give you all the blog articles written on ‘Yahoo’ in the last week sorted by date. Yes, I know, I couldn’t find one either. Developers can now make that exact query on BOSS and build a rich powerful application. As always, BOSS developers get maximum flexibility on the display of this data.”

    Yahoo has set the pricing at ten cents per 1,000 queries. Users can apply to show advertising when they sign up, and those who have already signed up for BOSS can use Blog Search immediately.

    Yahoo says it has hundreds of developer sites using BOSS for millions of queries each day. ” We have seen fascinating applications in social, mobile and on the web that are using the service,” says Hampole. “Our goal is to nurture and grow this ecosystem by continuing to add new services and helping you monetize your offering.”

    He says the team’s next goal is to “shake things up in mobile,” adding that they’re not planning on a BOSS OS.

    Earlier this year, Yahoo launched BOSS v2, which brought a number of new things to the table (including Yahoo Search advertising).

  • Microsoft Launches WebMatrix Web Dev Tool with Built-in SEO

    Microsoft has released a new web development tool called WebMatrix, which the company says is designed to let developers of "all skill levels" create, customize, and publish websites to the Internet. 

    WebMatrix brings together a Web server, a database, and programming frameworks, letting users code, test, and deploy both deploy both ASP.NET and PHP applications side by side. It also includes built-in SEO features. 

    Users can run an SEO report and find how to make their sites more visible to search engines. Microsoft says the product "provides clear guidance on how to make your site better, and even offers to take you right to the file in your site you need to fix."

    The tool lets users create sites using code provided through templates or using existing free open source Web apps like WordPress, Joomla, DotNetNuke or Umbraco. Microsoft says nearly 40 open source application partners are supporting WebMatrix.

    WebMatrix from Microsoft for simplifying web development

    "Our Web platform offers a complete ecosystem of products, partners and technologies all aimed at helping developers succeed on the Web," says S. Somasegar, SVP of the Developer Division at Microsoft. "Every day, more people are looking to build, publish and manage a website, and now, with WebMatrix, we provide developers of all skill levels with a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use solution to get their sites online."

    According to the 2010 numbers from Royal Pingdom, there were 255 million websites as of December, with 21.4 million added in 2010. As of June, there were 1.97 billion Internet users worldwide.

    WebMatrix is available in nine languages so far.

  • Salesforce Acquiring Heroku – Major Platform for Social Apps

    Salesforce Acquiring Heroku – Major Platform for Social Apps

    It’s only Wednesday, but it’s already been a huge week for Salesforce. The company is hosting its Dreamforce conference, and has already introduced a free version of its "Facebook for the Enterprise" Chatter product, and launched Database.com to go head to head in the Database space with Oracle. 

    Now, Salesforce has announced that it is acquiring Heroku for about $212 million. Heroku is a cloud application platform powered by Ruby. In fact, according to Salesforce, it’s the fastest growing platform of its type. 

    The acquisition would make perfect sense for the company given its increased focus on social cloud-based enterprise apps. The platform powers over 106,000 social and mobile cloud apps. In fact, the company claims that developers added 2,600 new apps to the platform last week alone. 

    The company points out that there are over a million developers developing on Ruby, and that the language was used to write things like Groupon, Hulu, and Twitter. 

    Heroku - Ruby Dev Platform Bought by Salesforce

    "The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2," said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. "Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fueling this growing community. We think this acquisition will uniquely position salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers."

    "We have a service that developers really love, and salesforce.com has the trust and credibility the most demanding customers expect," added Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian. "Together, we will provide the best place to run and deploy Cloud 2 apps. We believe this is the winning combination to bring cloud application platforms into the mainstream of the enterprise."

    The acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of January, and is subject to customary closing conditions.

  • Google Acquires Developer Tools Provider Instantiations

    Google has apparently acquired yet another company – Instantiations. This is a provider of Java and Ajax development tools.

    As MG Siegler (who first reported the news) points out, the company is known for its Google Web Toolkit designer, which is likely the reason for the acquisition.

    Instantiations greets its site visitors with the following message:
    Google acquiring Instantiations

    No word yet from Google on this. Perhaps they’re waiting until tomorrow to announce it along with the reported Slide acquisition. You have to wonder if any other acquisition announcements are in store from the company.

    The price tag on Instantiations is as of yet unknown.

  • Developer Shares Story of Being Threatened by Facebook for Crawling

    Pete Warden, a former software engineer at Apple, who is now working on his own start-up, posted an interesting story about how Facebook threatened to sue him for crawling the social network. I reached out to both Warden and Facebook for more details, but so far have only received response from Facebook, who calls  the incident as "violation of our terms."

    But first, Warden’s story. Read the whole thing in his words here for more context about what he wanted to do with the data, but to make a long story short, he was building a tool to bring data from email and various social networks into one place to make it easier for users to manage their contacts, and he crawled Facebook. He says he checked Facebook’s robot.txt, and that "they welcome the web crawlers that search engines use to gather their data," so he wrote his own. He was able to obtain data like which pages people were fans of and links to a few of their friends. He created a map showing how different countries, states and cities were connected to each other and released it so that others could use the information. Once Facebook caught wind of this, they threatened legal action. Warden writes:

    Their contention was robots.txt had no legal force and they could sue anyone for accessing their site even if they scrupulously obeyed the instructions it contained. The only legal way to access any web site with a crawler was to obtain prior written permission.

    Obviously this isn’t the way the web has worked for the last 16 years since robots.txt was introduced, but my lawyer advised me that it had never been tested in court, and the legal costs alone of being a test case would bankrupt me. With that in mind, I spent the next few weeks negotiating a final agreement with their attorney. They were quite accommodating on the details, such as allowing my blog post to remain up, and initially I was hopeful that they were interested in a supervised release of the data set with privacy safeguards. Unfortunately it became clear towards the end that they wanted the whole set destroyed.

    Andrew Noyes, Facebook Public Policy Communications Manager talks Pete Warden crawling Facebook dataFacebook Public Policy Communications Manager Andrew Noyes tells WebProNews, "Pete Warden aggregated a large amount of data from over 200 million users without our permission, in violation of our terms. He also publicly stated he intended to make that raw data freely available to others. Warden was extremely cooperative with Facebook from the moment we contacted him and he abandoned his plans."

    "We have, and will continue to, act to enforce our terms of service where appropriate," adds Noyes.

    Noyes pointed to Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which states that "You will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission." That’s under the safety section, by the way.

    "I’m bummed that Facebook are taking a legal position that would cripple the web if it was adopted (how many people would Google need to hire to write letters to every single website they crawled?), concludes Warden. "And a bit frustrated that people don’t understand that the data I was planning to release is already in the hands of lots of commercial marketing firms, but mostly I’m just looking forward to leaving the massive distraction of a legal threat behind and getting on with building my startup."

    Hearing some of what both parties have to say on the issue, what are your thoughts? Discuss here.

    If we hear back from Warden or if Facebook offers us more insight into the situation, which I’m told may still happen, I’ll update this article.