Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Google Friend Connect Tries to Strangle the Social  —  Later tonight Google will launch a new service called Friend Connect, aiming to “bring the social” to any page around the web.  Unfortunately the service takes a bunch of open technical standards yearning to see the light …

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an effort to sway moderate and independent voters, McCain stressed his environmental bona fides and sought to distance himself from the Bush administration’s record — calling for a return to 1990 emissions levels by 2020 and for a 60% cut below 1990 levels by 2050.

Citing the success of the sulphur emissions trading program, instituted under the Clean Air Act, in reducing acid rain, McCain said a cap-and-trade system would have an “equally dramatic and permanent effect on carbon emissions” by setting clear limits on emissions levels while giving companies a financial incentive to reduce them.

Such a system would have the added benefit of fostering innovation and entrepreneurship among companies looking to make a profit from the sale of their permits, McCain said. “It is very hard to picture venture capitalists, corporate planners, small businesses and environmentalists all working to the same good purchase. But such cooperation is actually possible in the case of climate change,” he added.

Over time, the government would sell an increasing fraction of permits through an auctioning system to maximize federal revenues. Some of these proceeds would be used to fund advanced CCS and renewable energy projects and to promote the development of promising new technologies, such as hydrogen-powered vehicles; the rest would be invested in the country’s creaking infrastructure or used to bring clean energy to the states that need them.

A working cap-and-trade system would also help bring China, India and other developing nations to the table by demonstrating the U.S.’s firm commitment to emissions reduction. The U.S. will need to lead by example by fulfilling its obligations under a future successor to the Kyoto Protocol and by pushing for closer technological and political cooperation. While he stressed the importance of speaking to different nations’ interests, he called any comprehensive plan that did not include China and India a failure.

A McCain administration would use the government’s full purchasing power to encourage greater demand and adoption of the “best technologies and practices in energy conservation” and lean on the Congress to eliminate some of the energy bill’s subsidies and tax breaks — even those for clean energy. When interviewed by Grist last October, he said he was opposed to subsidies for wind and solar technologies.

The Arizona senator is a strong advocate of nuclear energy, however, and has hinged his support for the Lieberman-Warner climate bill in part on a provision granting nuclear operators more perks. In fact, McCain has made nuclear energy a central component of his climate agenda, arguing that the U.S. — which currently has 104 reactors in operation — should ramp up the construction of new reactors.

He mentioned the progress made by France and Belgium, which derive over half their electricity from nuclear energy, in reducing their emissions. Under a cap-and-trade system, he said, the costs of building new plants would be much lower; further research and technological innovation would help overcome nuclear energy’s main drawback — the storage and disposal of waste.

We won’t know for sure what a renewable energy infrastructure could look like under a McCain administration until early June, when he will deliver a speech dedicated solely to his energy policy. At that time, he will lay out some more specifics on his government’s approach to fossil fuels, nuclear energy and renewables. Given his strong backing for the nuclear sector, however, it’s likely that we’d see a lot more nuclear reactors popping up around the country under his presidency. His stated opposition to subsidies and tax breaks casts some doubt on the continuation of government tax credits, which could crimp growth prospects for the renewable sector.

Barack Obama’s climate and energy plan, which he unveiled last October, differs in several key respects: I would push for deeper emissions cuts; invest $150 billion in new infrastructure and so-called “green-collar” jobs over the next decade; place a stronger emphasis on energy efficiency; and make explicit the country’s reduced dependence on foreign oil sources.

Under his proposed cap-and-trade system, emissions would have to be cut 80% below 1990 levels by 2050; like McCain, it would start by mandating a return to 1990 level emissions by 2020.

A more accurate way of representing Obama’s plan is to call it “cap-and-auction“: Unlike his Republican rival, Obama endorses a “100% allowance auction” system in which all carbon permits would be auctioned off — rather than giving a portion away for free, as McCain’s system would — to ensure all companies are required to pay for each ton of emissions they produce.

A fraction of this revenue would be used to offset the costs of energy efficiency improvements for lower-income homeowners — by expanding the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and establishing a dedicated fund to provide continuing assistance. Such programs could prove especially beneficial for solar installers like SolarCity and Sun Run, which are aggressively promoting new lease programs for homeowners to purchase solar panels.

In general, Obama’s expansive agenda contains many more specifics about the key areas of research and development his government would pursue and the carrots it would dangle before companies to encourage clean energy technologies and efficiency gains. In its current form, the plan contains goodies for a range of industries — from nuclear and biofuels to solar and wind — so we could expect to see many more solar farms, windmills and bio-refineries sprout up under an Obama presidency. Venture capitalists and private equity investors, who have warmed to his candidacy, hope that, as a new face in Washington, he will be more open to their entreaties — and cleantech portfolios.

The Democratic candidate’s ambitious proposal to create millions of green-collar jobs would be a boon to both established players and startups that have been struggling to recruit skilled workers.

We’ll have a better idea of McCain’s approach to energy policy in a few weeks, at which point we’ll revisit these issues in more depth.

Twelve companies pitched to the crowd at the Where 2.0 conference Monday night. Each had only five minutes each to make their case. A full rundown of the companies is on the official Launchpad page, but here's the Webware takeaway on the most interesting of the dozen apps (not counting Whrrl, which we covered last week):

Orbster makes location-based games for mobile phones. The company was showing off GPS Mission. The cool thing is a Web-based mission designer lets individuals or communities create games based on their own knowledge of their locales. Game players have to collect virtual "gold" by going to the locations in the game and, I think, answering questions based on them. It's like geo-caching, but without that bothersome digging up of plastic bins. GPS-capable phone required.

Rhiza Labs is launching Community Insights, which is a Web-based platform for mapping data sets. It lets users compare data sets on a map, annotate existing maps, and also lets the users who upload data see what other maps use their data. Not quite as straightforward as a "Flickr for data," as the presenter said, but it looks like a very useful tool for any organization trying to make sense of its map-based data.

GreenMap is more a political initiative than a technology: The company makes it easy to create maps of items relevant to sustainable living. Also coming soon: A global, open map of green resources.

Pushpin is a map-making service that "looks and acts" like the maps you get from Google and Microsoft, except you get a lot more control over how the map looks and what data it displays. The news at the conference is that the company is releasing a free version of the API. Also, in the geeky-cool category, each location on the map has a human-understandable URL.

Concharto is a Wikipedia of mapping. On the base map (from Google), anyone can add their markups. But what's really interesting is that all markups on the map are time-coded, so it works better for plotting the course of history than static maps. Might even work for complex battle maps or for sports. Needs a better way to control the timeline aspect of the map display, though. Hopefully that will be added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adam Lashinsky / Fortune:
Where does Google go next?  —  Yes, it's making gobs of money.  Yes, it's full of smart people.  Yes, it's a wonderful place to work.  So why are so many people leaving?  —  (Fortune) — Sean Knapp had it made.  As a young computer scientist, he couldn't have had a better gig: working at Google, the engineer's paradise.

But something it did reveal: There's a storm afoot at Digg, and it could very well shape the site's future.

When Kevin Rose founded Digg, the site caught on as a hub for quirky geek news, and it's retained a reputation as being full of extremely opinionated tech enthusiasts. But with the 2008 presidential election on the way, Digg has caught on among another very vocal set of news junkies: the political crowd. It's helped boost the site's numbers for sure: Digg now boasts 230 million page views per month, 26 million unique visitors, and 15,000 stories submitted per day.

On one hand, Digg's geeky early adopters ought to welcome the red-and-blue hordes because they're helping to bring the site to a new level. But the questions in Monday night's webcast, which were selected by users "digging" and "burying" the questions, revealed that the politicization of Digg hasn't been altogether popular.

The first question asked complained about the dilution of Digg's trademark tech news by partisan politics, with the submitter declaring, "I've had enough Huffington Post stories for a lifetime" in reference to the popular liberal news aggregation site. Another question wondered whether Adelson, Rose, & company might make it so that users could customize it so that they only see the extremely popular stories in categories they don't prefer. A Digger who's not a fan of political news, for example, could limit politics stories to stuff on the caliber of a winner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

That wasn't all. Still another question asked whether the management could institute a feature to block stories that contain certain words, another complained about "special interest groups" and "rude, agenda-driven people," and yet another said that "useful information is pushed aside for whatever the mob wants."

What it shows is that, politics or no politics, Digg is getting big, and its tight-knit, active community isn't sure that it's a good thing. Adelson and Rose kept hinting at more customization features on the way. Soon you'll be able to get suggested stories, they said, and Rose said that the suggestion about letting members block stories in an unwanted category unless they rake in a minimum number of Diggs was "an awesome idea." Fixes are in the works, they kept reiterating.

But that's what Adelson and Rose were saying in the last town hall event, too, and that presidential election isn't going away any time soon.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jacqui Cheng / Ars Technica:
Bold new BlackBerry 9000 to take on expected 3G iPhone  —  RIM said “hello” to the iPhone this morning when it introduced the long-anticipated BlackBerry 9000, also known as the BlackBerry Bold.  Aside from its dashing good looks, the Bold has tweaks under the hood that not only improve upon …

I'm at the Where 2.0 conference, looking forward to the Launchpad session tonight where I hope to see several cool new geo companies. Ahead of that I had a chance to meet with some other firms building new geo services: Plazes and Praized.

Plazes: Location reporting

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Plazes has been around for a while. It's a service that helps you report your location so your friends and followers can see it. The latest updates revolve around new input and output methods for the service, according to Plazes' co-founder, Felix Petersen. On the input side, an iPhone app is coming (when the new iPhone app store goes public in a few weeks). It will let you update your location just by pressing a "locate me" button on your phone. This method will join the PC, Mac, and Linux software app that locates you based on the unique fingerprint of the Wi-Fi access point you're connected to (if you're not connected to an access point, you have to locate yourself manually, by entering a place name or address).

Plazes is for recording your location intentionally and episodically. It's not like Whrrl (story), which is designed to track you passively. The idea is that when you land at a location you want people to know about, or get set up at a location where you want people to find you, you click the big "locate me" button on whatever device you have handy, and then your location goes out to the people you want to see it.

Who sees it? That's part 2 of the changes in Plazes. Right now, your location is updated on Plazes.com and in your widget, if you've embedded one on your site. In a few weeks, Plazes will also update Twitter when you want, as well as sending your data to Fire Eagle, and to Plazes' own API, which other apps can use to grab your location from.

See also: Brightkite (review).

Praized: Local reviews

Praized's Digg-like ratings and reviews are local to the site they run on.

After talking with Plazes' Petersen, I caught up with Sylvain Carle, co-founder of a brand-new geo company, Praized. This firm is building a database of locations and a rating system for them. It's designed so that Wordpress and Movable Type site managers can plug the system into their blog, giving their reader communities a Digg-like rating system for the locations mentioned on the site.

While the Praized database content is hosted, Praized itself is not a destination site. Web managers put some code in their blogs, and the Praized content will then appear locally on the site and adopt the site's native styles. Furthermore, the ratings that people leave for locations and businesses will be specific to the site where Praized is installed. So if the users on a ballet blog leave reviews for a restaurant near a concert hall mentioned in a post, those reviews and ratings won't get mixed in with reviews for the same restaurant left by readers of a site for wrestling fans. Good thing.

See also: Yelp (location ratings, but not private).

Both Plazes and Praized are based on leveraging their own proprietary databases. Plazes is collecting the data of Wi-Fi access point locations (based on coordinating MAC addresses with user reports of location) as well as matching location coordinates with the places that users hang out at (for example, the Starbucks at SFO). Praized's database is one of physical location and associated reviews. Both look like useful infrastructure plays for emerging online geo businesses, but it's unlikely either will (or should) remain an independent company for very long.