Facebook is doing SSO really well for stuff that's just not that important. Sign in to random websites/games/apps/forums with a single click.

I wouldn't want SSO for my bank/finances/medical though because of the single point of failure issue.

However, for PC's Windows 8 now allows you to log in with your Windows Live credentials (not sure if you could do this before)... I personally liked that feature since you can log onto different PC's/tablets around the house without reconfiguring things.

I've run into this lately as an Android developer. A lot of the things we need to do like notifications require things like reading phone state, booting at start, etc just to work. If I want my app to be able to send you a notification I have to add 5 new permissions to my app (that didn't require them before).

So while some apps do "spy" on you, there are a lot more with scary looking permissions just because they're trying to implement some small feature that requires them to declare all of these upfront even though they probably won't be using them directly.

For example, the Urban Airship library which allows for push notifications, it requires the following:

android.permission.INTERNET
android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE
android.permission.RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED
android.permission.VIBRATE
android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE
android.permission.BROADCAST_STICKY
      com.google.android.c2dm.permission.RECEIVE

Besides "INTERNET" my app doesn't need any of the other permissions.

Reference: https://docs.urbanairship.com/display/DOCS/Getting+Started:+Android:+C2DM+Push

This article has the least comments I've ever seen for an article on the homepage. Only 16 comments after 7+ hours. What's happening with Slashdot??

I actually built a site/app called "CanIStream.It" ( http://www.canistream.it/ ) just because I wanted to get rid of cable, but I didn't want to search across all of the services. Plus I knew movies would eventually get to the service I had (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon) so I built a reminder system into it. Now when I hear about a movie somewhere, I just pull out my (free!) app and tell it to remind me when that movie is out on Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/etc. I don't get to watch everything right away, but at least I know I'll watch it eventually. /plug

Pseudonyms and Anonymous users provide absolute no value to Google. Google isn't a charity, it provides services because of the data it gathers about users for targeted advertising.

Facebook / Twitter / etc also rely on advertising and user information but they don't care about fake information because these fake accounts make their site look good to investors. Google on the other hand actually cares about REAL data, they don't want their algorithms to be soiled with fake data.

CSS3. Lots of cool stuff in there. Background gradients, rounded corners, animation, etc.

Jeez, so true, please mod up!

And sadly will never be released... iPad 2 comes out in 9 days. That's really one of the biggest issues other manufacturers have... they announce something, everyone is excited, then people wait 6+ months to buy it... but by that time... 3 more competitors have announced new things, and they're shipping it in 3-4 months afterwards... so everyone sits there and waits... eventually no one buys anything.

As opposed to Apple announcements that usually go something like this: hype -> announcement -> excitement -> pre-order or purchase -> deliver within a week to a month.

This is a great explanation of what's actually going on in this case.

This is true for all analog -> digital advertising. Digital advertising is so enticing to brands because they can MEASURE how their ads are actually doing. Are people looking at my ad? Are they interacting with it? How long? Are then then going to my site? Are they buying something? Are they coming back later? Did they invite someone else? Did those people come to our site? Did they buy something? On and on and on...

Those are all questions we can answer now with digital advertising. You couldn't do that with "analog" ads in print, on TV or Radio.

So at first companies stopped spending as much, then they realized that their normal ads didn't work, but soon, they started spending much more money on digital because they could maximize their returns now.

So in this case, advertisers might start buying less ads if they see that people are ignoring them and leaving the room. However, advertisers will soon figure out what works and we'll have ads that are better tailored for the experience and will make people actually watch / interact with them. This happened with TV ads too... once DVR's became popular, advertisers created ads just for DVR's.

I don't know about you, but my experience is MUCH worse. Flash ads on a desktop might be a bit annoying but on a Droid, they completely make the site unusable. Also, I am a Flash and Android dev and the performance if you want to do any normal "Flash" stuff is horrendous. Try doing anything that involved drawing to the screen. Unless all you have is a static app you can't make a performant Flash app on Android yet. It's just not possible.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dwireless-phones&field-keywords=android&x=0&y=0

A bunch of phones are on that list and under $50.

When I got my phone, my wife got hers (Droid Eris) for free. There were a bunch of other promotions like buy a Droid X and get any other phone for free etc... It's stuff like this that inflates the numbers. My wife probably wouldn't have gotten an Android based phone and she doesn't download apps in the marketplace or anything like that. So I don't think developers are benefiting from these low-end android phones.

Great troll. I believe the numbers posted on TechCrunch yesterday say it all... both platforms are accelerating neck and neck ... iOS devices had 300k/day activations in the past month. Which is similar to Android.

Also, these numbers are getting inflated because lower end phones are being sold with Android now. So it's not like people are picking between Droid and iPhone so it's apples to apples... it's more like iPhone 4 vs Crappy $50 Android Phone. Those aren't technically direct competitors.

On the other hand, iOS activations could iPod Touches and iPad's which isn't quite fair either.

Lastly, suck a dick.