Watch Tim O'Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

Find news coverage and the latest photos and video, plus the full session schedule at the Web 2.0 Expo site.

With Facebook topping 330 million active users over the past week, the company's strongest growth region continues to be Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook added close to 17M active users in Asia alone. Since my previous post, the share of active users from Asia grew by 2% (to 13.5% of all users), and roughly 1 in 7 users now come from the region. With a market penetration under 2%, Facebook is poised to add many more users in Asia (and Africa).

Introducing the Open Web Foundation Agreement -- Applying the open source approach to better standards. The Open Web Foundation Agreement itself establishes the copyright and patent rights for a specification, ensuring that downstream consumers may freely implement and reuse the licensed specification without seeking further permission. In addition to the agreement itself, we also created an easy-to-read "Deed" that provides a high level overview of the agreement. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Healthcare in the near future will be quite different than it is today. Web enabled technology is already changing the way medicine is practiced. As the digital nation comes of age we will see new opportunities, and new challenges, bringing healthcare in America into the 21st century. Health consumers will come to expect they will have control over their own health data. Having secure, interoperable access to clinical data will allow patients to partner with their care providers in new ways incorporating Web 2.0 principles.

Every day million people make use of Google products and these products are written mainly using one well known language: JavaScript! What makes this online software stable, fast and responsive is a good use of the language and an excellent system of data compression and asynchronous loading. Today this power is available to everyone, since Google has released its magic tool under Apache 2 license.

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Watch Tim O'Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

The Web 2.0 Expo is happening right now in New York. You can watch selected sessions streamed live from Web 2.0 Expo New York plus additional off-stage interviews and demos! Highlights from today's schedule include:

• Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media
• Advertising Strategies in Social Media: Adapt or Die
• The Lean Startup: a Disciplined Approach to Imagining, Designing, and Building New Products

Find news coverage and the latest photos and video, plus the full session schedule at the Web 2.0 Expo site.

This is an excerpt from Designing Social Interfaces. From the creators of Yahoo!'s Design Pattern Library, Designing Social Interfaces provides you with more than 100 patterns, principles, and best practices, along with salient advice for many of the common challenges you'll face when starting a social website. Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. You'll learn how to balance opposing factions and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users.

Less Than Free -- Begins by talking about Google giving away turn-by-turn directions on Android, and then analyses Google's "less than free" business model: Additionally, because Google has created an open source version of Android, carriers believe they have an “out” if they part ways with Google in the future. I then asked my friend, “so why would they ever use the Google (non open source) license version.” Here was the big punch line - because Google will give you ad splits on search if you use that version! That’s right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. I like to call this the “less than free” business model. This is a remarkable card to play. Because of its dominance in search, Google has ad rates that blow away the competition. To compete at an equally “less than free” price point, Symbian or windows mobile would need to subsidize. Double ouch!! This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Green Technologies and Interactive Audio are two fields not generally considered related, but a new trend may change that: "Generated Sounds for Electric Vehicles", aka "EV Audio", aka "CarTunes". When I first heard that "electric cars are so quiet, manufacturers want them to make noise", I had a strong memory flashback to 1995, when I was contracted to produce my first ringtone (Fur Elise for Sprint PCS). At the time, I thought "mobile phone plays melody when it rings" was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard of; now, it's a multi-billion dollar industry. If you think audio personalization of your cellphone is an important statement of your individuality (as many do), imagine how much more important personalizing the sound of your car will be!

Muzak grew from constant technological innovation and originally succeeded as a broadcast medium using spare spectrum, a business model rarely examined today.

• How the iPhone sensors work in concert to determine orientation
• What's your backup system at home?
• Learn the Anatomy of Palm Web OS
• How to Share Printers and Fax Machines in Windows 7

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Stackoverflow releases a monthly XML data dump (CC-licensed) of all the data in their system. Unlike a lot of other data sets that just reflects what developers are buying, this data reflects what developers are actually using and asking questions about, which is pretty cool. I used this dataset to create a topic map that reflects the relationships among the top topics (based on how frequently the topic was used as a tag on a post) for the month of October, 2009. There was a lot of interesting stuff in here. For example, I love the fact that plain old "regex" is the main link between "php" and "c#." Also, it's interesting that only PHP has a direct link to various database topics; I would have expected databases to be more central.

William Stanek here, continuing with the in-depth look at e-readers and e-books. The recap: In my earlier blog entries, I've explored the ins and outs of e-ink, electronic paper displays (EPDs) and e-readers. Now, I'm examining individual readers as a case study in how e-readers work. As I stated in previous posts, my hope is that if you are better informed, you can decide whether e-readers are right for you. So here's another installment in the Sony Reader discussion, focusing on the features of the Sony PRS-700.

The Web 2.0 Expo is happening right now in New York. You can watch selected sessions streamed live from Web 2.0 Expo New York plus additional off-stage interviews and demos! Highlights from today's schedule include:

• Creating Tomorrow's User Experience for Mobile Phones
• Scalable CSS for Developers
• Building Across the Social Web: The Implications of Facebook Connect, Google OpenSocial
• Java in Web 2.0
• Radical Abundance: How We Get Past "Free" and Learn to Exchange Value Again
• Making Sense of Google Wave
• PubSubHubbub: Scaling Real-time RSS for the Decentralized Web
• A Conversation about the Real Time Web
• Confessions of a Public Speaker

Find news coverage and the latest photos and video, plus the full session schedule at the Web 2.0 Expo site.

Mapsicle -- Is an open source Javascript library to create mashups and application on Google Streetview, from NZ developers Project X. It has been released by Google as part of the Maps Utility library. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

The iPhone, in addition to revolutionizing how people thought about mobile phone user interfaces, also was one of the first devices to offer a suite of sensors measuring everything from the visual environment to position to acceleration, all in a package that could fit in your shirt pocket. On December 3rd, O'Reilly will be offering a one-day online edition of the Where 2.0 conference, focusing on the iPhone sensors, and what you can do with them.

The Web 2.0 Expo is happening right now in New York. You can watch selected sessions streamed live from Web 2.0 Expo New York plus additional off-stage interviews and demos! Highlights from today's schedule include:

• The Hidden Costs of Social Sites
• Real-Time Marketing: Operationalizing The Use of Social Media
• HTML 5 and the Future of Web Apps
• The Serendipity Engine
• Bootstrap Usability: Enhancing Your Product on a Shoestring Budget
• The Lean Startup: a Disciplined Approach to Imagining, Designing, and Building New Products

Find news coverage and the latest photos and video, plus the full session schedule at the Web 2.0 Expo site.

ICU64 -- an open source Commodore 64 emulator (Frodo) hacked to visually and textually display memory. Watch the video embedded below, it's hypnotic and seductive. It immediately made me want one for my programs (without having to port my code back to 6502 assembler). (via waxy whose return from pneumonia is greatly welcomed)

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• How to Load JavaScript Wisely to Speed Up Web Pages
• Android users, which apps do you use daily?

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