Internet

When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Geneva's celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, the enterprise had hired him to upgrade the control systems for several of the lab's particle accelerators. But almost immediately, the inventor of the modern webpage noticed a problem: thousands of people were floating in and out of the famous research institute, many of them temporary hires. 

"The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground," Berners-Lee later wrote. "Much of the crucial information existed only in people's heads."

So in his spare time, he wrote up some software to address this shortfall: a little program he named Enquire. It allowed users to create "nodes"—information-packed index card-style pages that linked to other pages. Unfortunately, the PASCAL application ran on CERN's proprietary operating system. "The few people who saw it thought it was a nice idea, but no one used it. Eventually, the disk was lost, and with it, the original Enquire."

Google has filled a major hole in its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering with the introduction of Google Cloud SQL, a  relational database service for developers building applications in Java and Python on Google's App Engine platform. Cloud SQL, based on the open-source MySQL database, was announced on Google's App Engine Blog yesterday, and is being rolled out to selected developers in a limited trial—for free.

A pending Missouri law that would have blocked teachers from having private conversations with students on social networks was overturned late Friday. The law (PDF), which had previously received the approval of the Missouri Senate and was signed by Governor Jay Nixon in July, was reversed by a judge on Friday with the Missouri House passing a new bill that requires schools to lay out teacher-student communications policies by March 1, 2012.

The law is aimed at protecting kids from sexual misconduct, among a plethora of other threats, by focusing on the reporting of sexual abuse, keeping weapons out of schools, and the like. Despite its well-meaning nature, however, the Missouri State Teachers Association (MSTA) complained immediately about one provision in the bill that restricted teachers from using a "nonwork-related Internet site" that might allow a one-on-one exchange between a teacher and student. This would likely include Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or any number of other social media sites that include the ability to send private messages, and included no provisions to allow for teacher-child communications if the teacher is the parent of the child in question.

The MSTA filed suit to stop the ban in August, saying the law was "so vague and overbroad that the Plaintiffs cannot know with confidence what conduct is permitted." Days later, a judge said the law had major implications on free speech and issued a temporary block of the law.

Now, a preliminary injunction has been issued to block the law in question from going into effect until February 20, 2012, with the judge saying it would have a "chilling effect on free speech." The Missouri House subsequently passed a similar, but separate, bill with a 139 to 2 vote that gives school districts the freedom to determine their own communications policies. The new bill, which would permanently block the previously one, now awaits Governor Nixon's approval.

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WordPress dominates the world of web content management, powering over 59 million websites and hosting about half that many. Nimble, a Santa Monica-based software-as-a-service startup, is taking some pages out of WordPress' playbook by opening the API for its social CRM platform, and offering an in-platform app store for developers to give away or sell applications based on it.

Founded by Jon Ferrara, the cofounder of the Windows contact management giant GoldMine Software (now owned by FrontRange Solutions), Nimble is trying to fill the gaps left by SalesForce.com and create a community of plug-in developers and SaaS partners by opening up its interface and server-side APIs, and create an in-platform application store that developers can sell their software through.

The Google+ social network launched with much fanfare at the end of June. As the 100-day mark approaches, Google is looking to further expand the audience. The search giant is now dropping the invitation barrier and making the service accessible to all users.

In a statement on the official company blog, Google engineering senior vice president Vic Gundotra explained that the site is ready to move from "field trial" to full beta. Google+ has adequately scaled with the growth of the audience so far—it's not clear how many users connect to the site every day, but Gundotra says that over a billion posts have been shared since the launch.

In addition to allowing anyone to sign up for the service, Gundotra also announced other new features that are going to roll out on Google+ over the next few days. The Hangout feature, which enables multiuser video chat, is going to be supported on mobile devices via the native iOS and Android applications. Google is also expanding Hangouts in the browser, offering integration with Google Docs and screensharing.

Alongside these changes, Google is also starting to open up APIs to third-party developers. They have started by enabling programmatic read-only access to public user posts. Not enough functionality is exposed through the APIs yet to support a full-blown third-party desktop client, but it's not a bad start. Google is also working on APIs for Hangouts, which will make it possible for third-party developers to integrate their own services with the video chat system.

In our own experiences with Google+, we found that the granular sharing model helps differentiate the service and will likely give it staying power. It's already off to a better start than Buzz, which was plagued with privacy problems and didn't offer much innovation out of the box.

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Apple appears to be working on a process to allow iTunes users with more than one Apple ID to somehow "merge" them into a single account. The ability to do so will be critical to the early success of the company's new iCloud service, since it relies on Apple IDs for syncing iTunes purchases and other data.

The problem with managing multiple Apple IDs with iCloud first became apparent when Apple launched an early beta of one of its features called "iTunes in the Cloud." It allows users to automatically sync iTunes purchases between iOS devices and computers running iTunes. When you link an Apple ID to your iPhone, for instance, any apps, songs, and iBooks you buy from your computer are automatically downloaded to your iPhone (and vice versa).

Our browser stats post is late this month. The source we normally use, Net Market Share, has changed the way it reports its data. This is good and bad. Mostly good, but it took extra time to retrieve the data and then decide what to do with it.

The good part is that we now have separate statistics for mobile browsers and desktop browsers. This answers long-standing demands to break this information out to take a closer look at that small but increasingly important market. The bad part is that the new figures are much harder to compare to historic ones; Net Market Share has completely separated mobile usage from desktop usage.

A number of privacy groups have spoken out against the adoption of a proposed opt-out plan for behavioral advertising in the US and Europe. The groups are referring to the Advertising Option Icon introduced by the Interactive Advertising Bureau almost one year ago, which purports to make it easy for users to opt out of ad tracking on participating websites with the help of an easily recognizable icon. The system was proposed by the advertising industry as a way to avoid stricter legislation on how they can use information obtained from behavioral tracking, but the privacy groups call it a "flimsy self-regulatory system" that will end up "insufficient and ineffective" at protecting consumer privacy on the Internet.

The Advertising Option Icon is based on an industry report from July 2009 that focuses on education, transparency, and consumer control when it comes to targeted ads. The participating trade groups represent some 5,000 other companies when it comes to advertising on the Web, giving the proposal a higher profile than most when it comes to voluntary opt-out measures. The icon itself is meant to let users know which sites are participating in behavioral tracking and to "enhance the efforts of the growing number of companies that are already using similar mechanisms to deliver enhanced notice to millions of consumers."