closed platforms. In this post, I want to look at just the question of when it makes sense to use Facebook Connect, Twitter Oauth, OpenID, Yahoo Browser-Based Authentication, Google Friend Connect or basically any of the other authentication mechanisms. Example What do I mean? Interestingly, they are not including Google Authentication . One of the topics that came up in my post Mobile Internet Apple Facebook was around open vs. This issue comes up at the start of almost every new startup company in a variety of forms.

The topic is: Betting Your Company On An Internet Platform? A very interesting topic, especially for those of us involved in developing for start-ups. However, these platforms could be interesting for prototype and pilot solutions. The other conclusion was that you need to have a migration path from the platform. I'm blogging from the CalTech Enterprise Forum . At the CTO Group that I organize in Santa Monica, we've had lots of discussions around this.

We finally are starting to hear what Google's anticipated alternative to Facebook as a platform. I've talked about this issue in: Facebook Platform and Facebook as a Learning Platform . With Google's entry, there's a nice alternative to Facebook and the key word is "open." If you've talked to me in the past few months, you probably know that this is something I've been grappling with across a variety of projects/domains. With Facebook you are somewhat forced to make a hard choice about rewiring your application to live seamlessly within the Facebook environment

Google's new Ad Manager technology will soon enable premium ad banners to be sold directly to advertisers by publishers and when the clicks are used up on the premium ads it will revert automatically to use Google Adsense. have always felt that quality advertisers will find quality content and now there is one single platform to consummate these relationships. This is a brilliant move and will further accelerate the gap between premium content and generic publishers who don't provide any unique content value. I

Top officers of some of the leading social media websites and tools (including Facebook, MySpace and Yammer) will be on the Panel, and there will be panelists from the worlds of media sharing platforms (Pringo), online advertising (Stun Media) and law (Greenberg Glusker), the latter to highlight risks relating to such issues as corporate blogging and privacy. Speakers: * Jason Oberfest, Senior Vice President, Business Development of MySpace * Paul Ollinger, West Coast Vice President of Sales of Facebook * Sam Cimino, Sales Manager SW, YouTube * Majid Abai, CEO

Closed Platforms They raise one of the most complex issues I grapple with all the time. And I’m not sure I buy some of their predictions just because of that question: We believe Facebook has the potential to serve as a communications platform / engine of one-to-one, one-to-some and one-to-many (and visa versa) for the mobile Internet. Facebook has made some moves recently that suggest that they may head more in the direction of Google Connect and be a platform, but their heritage and the way they view what the world looks like (think Facebook applications), suggest to me

I haven’t even used Google Wave yet and I’m already bored of it. Google released 100,000 golden tickets into the wild this week, in the process enabling thousands of poor folks to generally make an ass of themselves begging for, spamming about and even selling the exclusive invites. can understand the fuss to a certain extent, after all it is Google, and real time is HOT HOT HOT. Not so much bored, I just know it’s not for me. Basically it’s a feeding frenzy of Apple-like proportions clogging up Twitter streams nationwide.

Today’s topic, and a personal favorite is Google Apps.  Here at Startup Army we’re using a combination of Google Apps and Microsoft Office to keep ourselves organized and productive.  In case you’re unaware, Google Apps is a suite of applications that enable users to collaborate through e-mail, calendars, documents and customized sites. Hey Everybody! [Pause Pause for Simpsons Fans] The team has been on my case to get on this whole blogging thing and the time has arrived. 

Last week TechCrunch was reporting that Google was in talks to buy restaurant review monster Yelp for $550 million. This could come from so many places, from rivals like Apple and Microsoft to struggling platforms like Yahoo!. Of course for Google the Yelp model is a perfect fit, mountains of data that people want with the option for Google to sell the top spots. Turns out the match wasn’t meant to be: TechCrunch is now reporting that the deal is dead. Citing that it was Yelp who walked away from the table indicates this could go a few ways.

Last week TechCrunch was reporting that Google was in talks to buy restaurant review monster Yelp for $550 million. This could come from so many places, from rivals like Apple and Microsoft to struggling platforms like Yahoo!. Of course for Google the Yelp model is a perfect fit, mountains of data that people want with the option for Google to sell the top spots. Turns out the match wasn’t meant to be: TechCrunch is now reporting that the deal is dead. Citing that it was Yelp who walked away from the table indicates this could go a few ways.