On Monday, a new casual-gaming social network called Mytopia entered its public-beta phase. Taking a conscious cue from massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), Mytopia players create custom avatars and win points in games that they can trade in for virtual goods and real-world prizes, like iTunes and Amazon gift certificates.

Whoever predicted that social gaming was the next niche of the Web to get totally saturated was very, very right.

The kicker with Mytopia is that it promises social-network interoperability. In addition to running applications on Facebook, MySpace.com, and Bebo’s developer platform (with Orkut and Hi5 on the way), Mytopia also offers widgets on the
Windows Vista Toolbar, Apple Dashboard, Yahoo, and Google’s iGoogle. Players on any platform, in addition to those on Mytopia’s home page, can play against one another.

Mytopia’s interoperability strategy could push it away from the pack, but let’s face it: a whole lot of the people who want to be playing poker and Sudoku online already have a place to play it. This is one start-up that’s going to have to rely on getting the word out to new adopters.

Membership is free, but for a $5-per-month premium membership, players have access to an ad-supported version of the site and “grand prize” tournaments. The site already has 300,000 registered users, 150,000 of whom have paid memberships.

It sounds promising, but there are already a ton of casual-gaming start-ups out there, not to mention standalone games that have proven to be even bigger hits.

ESTABLISHMENT OF COMMISSION.–There is established in the legislative branch a commission to be known as the “Commission on Warrantless Electronic Surveillance Activities”

Democrats repeatedly accused the Republicans and the Bush administration of engaging in a smear campaign designed to undermine their bill’s passage. “The president has said our legislation will not make Americans safe,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. “The president is wrong, and I think he knows it.”

Another section that the Republicans dislike is this, which I’ll excerpt:

The Commission shall ascertain, evaluate, and report upon the facts and circumstances relating to electronic surveillance activities conducted without a warrant between September 11, 2001 and January 17, 2007 (and shall) evaluate the lawfulness of such activities

But the primary obstacle remains President Bush, who has threatened a veto. The White House circulated a statement after the vote calling it a “a significant step backward in defending our country against terrorism” that was “not a serious effort to move the legislative process forward.”

But now, with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both opposing retroactive immunity, with a new Justice Department report critical of FBI surveillance abuses, and with a stronger public perception of the Bush administration as having gone too far, the Democrats are more willing to fight back. Nineteen Democrats released a statement this week saying that they’ve seen classified documents and no immunity was necessary; an unusual closed session on Thursday was intended to make the same point.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday narrowly approved an electronic surveillance expansion without immunization for any telecommunications companies that illegally opened their networks to intelligence agencies.

Republicans also assailed the Democratic leadership for failing to permit an up-or-down vote on the Senate version. They attempted, but failed to push through, a procedural move that would have allowed the House to consider the Senate version of the bill automatically if the House version didn’t pass.

Especially because the commission would be organized under the legislative branch, and would have subpoena power with the authority to enforce its subpoenas in court, it could result in some embarrassing disclosures about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.

The debate before the vote was contentious, with more hoots and catcalls than usual. The lack of retroactive legal immunity for telephone companies also drew accusations from several Republicans that Democrats were handing out favors to lawyers who would ostensibly profit from the court proceedings moving forward. The bill is “nothing more than an earmark for the trial bar,” charged Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.)

Before the vote, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Sylvestre Reyes (D-Texas), said the measure gives telephone companies the ability to present otherwise-classified evidence, one-on-one with a judge, that could show they deserve such immunity. “If they did nothing wrong, as they have said, then they will be immune from any lawsuit,” he said before the vote.

News.com’s Anne Broache contributed to this report.

The 213-197 split, with most Democrats voting in favor of the bill (PDF) and most Republicans opposing it, hardly means that the political tussle over retroactive immunity is over. It now shifts to the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, said he was “encouraged” to see the House vote.

Some pointed out that telephone companies and other corporations who open their networks lawfully to the government already have “immunity” under law. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) read from that passage of existing law and then proclaimed, “I think the administration is more concerned about their liability than the phone companies.”

Republican leader John Boehner accused Democrats of failing to bring up the Senate bill “because it would pass.”

“The activity with which Malhotra is charged was in direct violation of clear HP policies, including HP Standards of Business Conduct,” the company said in a statement. “HP detected this activity, conducted an internal investigation, terminated Malhotra’s employment from HP, and reported the activity to appropriate enforcement agencies and to IBM. HP has cooperated fully with the government’s investigation.”

In the indictment, prosecutors say Malhotra e-mailed the IBM information, marked “confidential,” to an unnamed HP senior vice president on July 25, 2006, and again to another HP senior vice president two days later.

A former vice president of Hewlett-Packard’s printing division has been indicted by federal prosecutors for allegedly sharing with HP confidential information from his previous employer.

He was fired shortly thereafter, in September 2006, according to HP.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

• DeltaBlue: One-way constraint solver, originally written in Smalltalk by John Maloney and Mario Wolczko (880 lines).

Google introduced Chrome in part because it wants faster browsing and the richer Web applications that speed will unlock. So how does Chrome actually stack up?

• Crypto: Encryption and decryption benchmark based on code by Tom Wu (1,689 lines).

• EarleyBoyer: Classic Scheme benchmarks, translated to JavaScript by Florian Loitsch’s Scheme2Js compiler (4,682 lines).

But when pressed for specifics, he told me to try them out. So I did.

Google offers a site with five JavaScript benchmarks. On each one of these tests, Chrome clearly trounced the competition. I hope benchmarking experts and developers will weigh in with comments about how well these tests represent true JavaScript performance on the Web–either for ordinary sites or for rich Web apps.

A few notes: First, your mileage may vary; I ran these tests on my dual-core Windows XP machine.

Google's overall score is head and shoulders above the competition for executing JavaScript.

Lars Bak, the Google engineer who was the technical leader for Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, said at the launch event Tuesday he’s confident Chrome is “many times faster” than the rivals at running JavaScript, the programming language that powers Google Docs, Gmail, and many other Web applications.

Here’s the site description of the speed tests:

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

Second, my apologies here to Opera, whose browser I don’t have installed.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Third, I tried to run the SunSpider benchmark tests as well, but perhaps because a lot of other curious people had the same idea on the day Chrome launched, I couldn’t get to the site.

Google's Chrome overpowers the other browsers on the five subtests by which Google measures its browser's JavaScript performance.

• Richards: OS kernel simulation benchmark, originally written in BCPL by Martin Richards (539 lines).

Good luck to you, Bruce. You deserve the best.

He will be missed in the open-source world. At least his good work will continue at the Skolling Foundation, where he’ll help to advance a range of positive social projects. This gets him back to a focus global issues, development, social change, and other things he worked on in his earlier incarnation in the US Foreign Service.

commentary

Bruce Lowry, Novell’s head of global public relations, will say ‘Goodbye’ to Novell this week to start with the Skoll Foundation as its communications director. I think the world of Bruce - he is an honorable, wonderful person who was a credit to Novell and will be an exceptional addition to the Skoll Foundation.

The new DiggBar is slightly smaller than the old one.

Registered Digg users who want to remove, or add back in, the DiggBar can now do so from the settings menu.

Along with the change, the company has also adjusted the DiggBar’s behavior once you leave the site to go read a story. For one it’s smaller, in an attempt to take up less space on sites you’re visiting. Digg has also “temporarily” removed the view count, which showed users how many times the story had been read by Digg users.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

As announced last week, Digg relaunched its DiggBar feature late Tuesday, making it something that only appears for registered users, who are now able to turn it off completely. That new option shows up in Digg’s user settings panel which means users can choose whether they feel like using it.

John Quinn, Digg’s vice president of engineering, says the removal of the view count was done simply because the actual tracking for that was being done on the DiggBar itself, and without counting clicks from unregistered Digg users (who will no longer be seeing the DiggBar) the number was no longer accurate. The company has undoubtedly been tracking the number of outgoing clicks a story gets for years (albeit internally), but did not design the view count to feed from that metric. I, for one found it one of the most useful features, since you could see how many views a story had received, regardless of the number of Diggs it had.

Mr. Dean feels very strongly about this:
“With no disrespect to her, or indeed to my ex-wife, success in business or on the playing field, at least in my opinion, are based on the abilities of the ‘player’. To my mind it wouldn’t have mattered how much support Mrs Parlour had provided to Ray - if he’d been crap on the pitch they wouldn’t have been getting the cash they both enjoyed.”

Not in the area between Preston and Blackpool

It would also suggest that these rumors came from a wet, windy wilderness as desolate as the location of “No Country For Old Men,” but with far better beer.

Please forgive me, but how does anyone cherish number plates (or, as they’re known in certain parts, license plates)?

He was so upset that people were calling him unpleasant names like “greedy” when he divorced his wife of nineteen years that he set up a website (at cost, I’m thinking) and published their divorce settlement.

Mr. Dean helps us to understand that divorce in England and Wales is dropping (yes, I’d heard beer sales were declining) and he compares his situation to a recent case in which a relatively famous English soccer player, Ray Parlour, once of Arsenal, suffered a mighty financial tackle from behind.

Now, divorce settlements are being slapped on websites.

I find myself wondering just how skin-tighteningly heinous the gossip must have been for Mr. Dean to feel the necessity to express his views with such bowel-assaulting sincerity.

Mr. Dean declares that the rumors had resonated “mainly in the area between Preston and Blackpool,” which would at the very least suggest precise market research is one of his strengths.

No, no. Now it’s “only in the area between Preston and Blackpool.”

Gary Dean, a British businessman, who seems to have made quite a lot of money out of advertising, is deeply sensitive to public relations.

“I have been painted in some quarters as a greedy, tight, ruthless bastard who abandoned my wife and children, walking off with millions and leaving my family almost destitute,” he writes. “It’s simply not true at all and I’ve decided that instead of allowing the rumour-mill to continue churning out nonsense - I’d just set out the actual facts to stop it.”

And to publicly declare that his wife received around $7.5million, plus
cars, child maintenance and jewelry.

It used to be that your plans to marry had to be read out in churches. (This allowed parishioners to raise an objection. “He’s stumpy and stupid.” “She’s far too beautiful for you.” That sort of thing.)

And why would anyone feel the need to publicize the sheer power of this number-plate cherishing in a divorce settlement?

They used to say “only in America”, right?

His ex-wife declared in court that without her, Mr. Parlour would have been a mere journeyman hacker. Which many observers had thought he always had been.

But I find myself struggling with both my mental and physical equilibrium to read that he also gave her “cherished number plates 7HD and 10HD.”

The Office 2.0 experiment is about moving a business–the conference itself–and a community wholly into the Web 2.0 world, and it’s about studying which devices can help the most. The Apple devices in previous years were successes, he says. This year’s Linux subnotebook giveaway will likely be less used at the conference than the pocketable devices of previous years, but Ghalimi believes that giving people devices that are essentially just Web browsing machines will reinforce that you can in fact get real work done without having much, if any, local software on your laptop. For Ghalimi, that’s apparently worth the expense.

Now, to be clear, both his business and his wife benefit from the conference. Ghalimi’s day job is is running Intalio, which provides open-source business process management software, both free versions as well as paid subscriptions for large companies; Intalio has about 400 customers, the newest of which is the Bank of Venezuela. Ismael’s wife, May Chang Ghalimi, is CEO of the Monolab Workspace, an office suite rental business designed to be compatible with the needs of Web 2.0 start-ups. Subscriptions even come with their own carbon offsets. Exposure to the Web 2.0 productivity wonks who come to the Office 2.0 conference no doubt help the Ghalimis sell their services.

Ismael Ghalimi is doing this conference for the love of it. “I love the workmanship of work, the business of these tools,” he told me. “I like interacting with the people who are passionate about this stuff. Somehow it all fits together. We don’t have very sophisticated motives. It’s just plain fun.”

The Office 2.0 conference opens September 3 in San Francisco. You can get a small ($100) registration discount by going through this link.

But I believe Ismael when he says the Office 2.0 conference is, “our collective experiment.” If he wanted to turn a profit he could start by not giving away $500+ notebooks (or he could get the giveaway sponsored, which it is not–the conference has to buy them). “We’re not in the conference business,” he says.

Recently I’ve been writing a greater proportion of curmudgeonly posts than I normally do. That’s because I’ve been talking to entrepreneurs about their one-trick and derivative products. Ghalimi is helping to restore my faith in Web 2.0 by illustrating how complex and interesting inter-related Web-based businesses can be. He is involved in three fundamentally different enterprises that nonetheless reinforce each other. It makes his businesses both more interesting and more robust than they would be on their own.

Here’s the secret: he isn’t.

Most current conference networks, he says, “create a lot of cognitive friction.” There are always people he use them, but they’re usually the same people: “those social media freaks.” Ghalimi believes that, “we need to wait a couple of years until the large players take over the market…until everyone decides that our social graph is going to be on LinkedIn or Facebook,” or a similar service that is already working as a de facto business social network.

Office 2.0 also experiments with “back channel” concepts: community and social services that reinforce what’s happening at the show. A group Twitter feed will be projected on the side walls of the conference during sessions, oriented so both audience and people on stage can see it. Ghalimi is using Jive’s Clearspace enterprise collaboration service as the foundation for a communication during and after the show. But, he says, he still needs better tools to help attendees “get better value out of their time.”

Ghalimi tries to run the conference without paper and without traditional software apps. This year he’s having better luck than last. There’s finally a good Web-delivered accounting system, he says (Intacct), solving one of the last issues he had in going fully 2.0. And like last year, the only paper he has to deal with is the sponsor fees. Many are still submitted by check.

Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was born 100 years ago Wednesday in London.

We also can thank Fleming for the popular phrase, a “James Bond gadget.” For a look back, take a look at the list compiled on Wikipedia.

While that historical footnote passed with hardly any mention in Silicon Valley, Fleming’s spy novels deserve a place on the shelf in the section titled “history of technology.” Fleming, who rose to the rank of commander in the British Admiralty during the World War II, introduced Bond in 1953 with the publication of Casino Royale. The subsequent Bond books and films brought to public notice everything from luminous watches to
car phones and pagers–long before they became commonplace commodities in contemporary society.

(Credit:
IanFlemingCentre.com)

“This move will permanently signal the end of the music business as it was once known,” McQuivey wrote. “From that point on, more music will be sold digitally than on CD, reducing CD sales to just $3.8 billion in 2012.”

In a final note, McQuivey suggests that music artists, who have historically looked down their noses at advertising, had better change. He says the industry should rip a page out of NASCAR’s playbook.

McQuivey, a former professor at Boston University, tells record executives to cheer up because there are ways to rise from the ashes. He says first, the industry should quit fooling around with music subscriptions and ad-supported models. People want to own their music and downloads have won. Only 7 percent of adults on the Web say they have ever tried a subscription service, according to the report.

Sharing is vital, according to McQuivey, because it makes new music discovery easier, which the Web was supposed to help with but so far has tanked. In this effort, he sends a special shout out to Slacker, a personal online-radio service.

That’s a fitting title because the report reads like an obituary. Tower Records, a music mecca for decades, has already closed but McQuivey argues the real deathblow to the industry will come when Wal-Mart Stores, Best Buy, and other large retailers begin scaling back shelf space for CDs.

When it comes to artists, the labels should focus more broadly on a musician’s career, including merchandise and concerts, as well as recordings. He said it’s the artists, not the CDs that are the music industry’s true product.

These are the conclusions of James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst, according to a report titled “The End Of The Music Industry As We Know It,” issued on Tuesday.

“The gold medal for 2007 (in music discovery) should have gone to Slacker,” McQuivey wrote. “(The) portable device provides instant access to radio-formatted music that can easily convert to a digital download with the click of a button. This model combines the simplicity of the radio experience with the power of music ownership.”

The analyst also sent a message to ad-supported music services, such as SpiralFrog and Qtrax. The ad-supported model should stay “on the radio where it belongs,” he said in his report. Social networks are better places for selling ads against music, and they also allow users to share songs virally.

McQuivey’s finding here was particularly timely. Over the weekend, PaidContent reported that MySpace is in talks with the four top labels about launching a jointly operated, ad-supported music service.

“Artists who used to pretend that their platinum album success was really about their “art” will no longer have that luxurious pretense because labels won’t sign them unless they agree to a barrage of sponsorship opportunities,” McQuivey wrote. “There will eventually come a day when Chips Ahoy will contend with the Keebler Elves over who can be the official cookie of the Taylor Swift world tour.”