A month after Om trashed LinkedIn for failing to launch a promised application platform, and more than a year after the initiative was first announced, the professional network is finally giving out developer keys. Today LinkedIn launches a business-focused apps platform.
Continue »

Matt Cutts, a software engineer and an eloquent corporate spokesman for Google, spoke at PubCon earlier this month and later gave a video interview to Web Pro News, in which he said that the speed at which web pages are available might become a factor in SEO moving into 2010. He said that because many within Google consider fastness to be vital to the web, the company is considering making web site speed a factor in calculating page rankings. Those comments have confused and scared many folks as to how speed might impact their businesses. Continue »

AOL will launch a new look and logo along with its official spinout from Time Warner on Dec. 10, as it tries to become a content-centric company. Wolff Olins, a global brand and innovation consultancy, worked on this new look and logo which seeks to replace the older, more iconic AOL branding. The minute I saw the logo (and its various interpretations), my first reaction was simple: lame. It is ambiguous at best, and as sexy as the obese, shapeless humans living on Axiom, the flagship of the BnL fleet in Pixar movie “WALL-E.” Continue »

The Internet is abuzz over Google’s release of the open-source version of its Chrome OS, and for good reason. It’s free, which will save hardware manufacturers licensing fees, and it appears ideally suited for the netbooks that have become such a hot item for the mobile crowd (GigaOM Pro, sub. required). But Chrome is not without its detractors, and it’s worth remembering that Google isn’t King Midas — in fact, there’s a substantial list of Google products and services that have flopped, floundered or simply disappeared into the ether. Here are a few of the most memorable: Continue »

Twitter COO Dick Costolo, speaking today on a panel at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp event in San Francisco, shed some light into the micromessaging service’s revenue plans, promising that it will begin taking a cut of its partners’ advertising revenues “early next year.” Meanwhile, it will “foster mechanisms that allow partners to do more sophisticated things” with its APIs. Twitter also plans to offer commercial accounts that contain premium features like analytics dashboards and multiple authors, according to Costolo. Continue »

As AOL lays off a third of its work force as it prepares to go independent, it’s looking to drop its ICQ and MapQuest units, according to reports by Kara Swisher. But with the deluge of information hitting web users these days, location and presence are two of the most promising ways to parse the online world (GigaOM Pro sub. required). They’re also two of the most innovation-rich veins of the last year, with projectile growth of mobile location apps and the ongoing real-time status arms race. While AOL is busy revising itself to be about content and advertising, both of those areas of focus benefit greatly from context and relevance.

Continue »

Chrome OS is a natural evolution of the work that’s been done on the Chrome browser, Sundar Pichai, VP of product management, and Chrome OS engineering director Matthew Papakipos said when they unveiled it at Google’s Mountain View campus on Thursday. The operating system is designed to imbue web applications with the “full functionality of desktop applications.” As for the reasons behind the development of the new platform, they pointed to rapid growth in the netbook market — where Chrome OS is aimed — and cloud computing. Continue »