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What a week! In October, I wrote about Facebook’s openness after they announced their API. In the post I posted three ideas for them to explore:

1. Allow other sites to use the Facebook login, like an OpenID
2. Give the user the ability for Photos, Movies, and Notes to be indexed and searched, or even exported to another website
3. Export user data into Address Book, which automatically updates

Now in 2008, Robert Scoble was caught running a script to export his Friends data for a Plaxo product. Facebook initially kicked him out, but let him quickly back in. That single event probably did not have any effect upon Facebook’s next move (but it was very coincidental!). Facebook and Google joined the DataPortability Workgroup.

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Contributed by Anand Chhatpar
CEO of BrainReactions LLC

The Internet has become a powerful resource for any innovator, and there are a variety of online tools available to help you with various stages of the innovation process.

Let’s go down each step of the process and see examples of tools on the web that can be used along the way:

1. Opportunity Identification
For discovering opportunities to innovate and for finding areas of need and untapped demand, use the following websites:
ePinions.com: Reading consumers’ reviews and complaints about certain products tells you which problems could be valuable to solve.
Inventory.Overture.com: Searching for keyword terms and phrases on this website tells you how many people searched for that phrase and similar phrases last month on the Yahoo network. When you get the number of searches, you can triple it to get the approximate number of total searches worldwide. If you find an interesting phrase that has high searches but not too many websites serving the need, you’ve found a good niche to innovate within.
Trendwatching.com: This website tells you about trends happening in the business world today that you could align yourself with to take advantage of their popularity. Every trend highlights the opportunities for business that lie within.
SpringWise.com: Another great website from the people who run trendwatching.com, which features interesting new businesses starting up around the globe. If you see a successful business in another country that could apply to your country, it is a clear-cut opportunity and you have lower risk because the business model is proven in another market.
Emily Chang’s Ehub: Emily does a great job of cataloging the latest Web 2.0 applications in her Ehub database. Many of these applications have become instant hits with the online audience and one can detect amazing opportunities by looking at the adoption rates of applications like Twitter. Read the rest of this post >

At the Seoul Digital Forum recently, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt was asked to define the term Web 3.0. While he got a few laughs for the initial response he gave (quoted below), he actually provided some interesting elements to think about.

“Well, the Web 2.0 is a marketing term, and I think you’ve just invented Web 3.0″
- Eric Schmidt

The short video can be found here. The key elements of his answer:

• Focus on a different way to build applications
• Applications that are pieced together
• Applications that are relatively small
• Applications can run on any device (multi-platform)
• Applications are distributed virally (social networks, email)

The exact term (web 3.0) is of less importance. What is important is that we keep track of what is happening in the broader online world, because these evolutions are fundamental drivers of what is and will be possible with respect to open innovation and crowdsourcing. Multi-platform Mass Collaboration and Mashups will be key elements.