Facebook Wants to Power Web-Wide Apps

FRANCISCO — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a vision for his company’s social networking site: serving as the platform to enable applications to run almost anywhere their developers want.

Zuckerberg, who received a rock star welcome before speaking here at the f8 Facebook developers conference yesterday, outlined a plan for his company in which the actual Facebook site would become less important.

Instead, Facebook would become the engine for applications that cooperate and enable people to communicate anywhere on the Web, using devices ranging from PCs to mobile devices.

“The natural state of the world is for things to decentralize out a little more,” he said during his keynote. “At Facebook, we want to push this movement forward. It will be less about Facebook.com and more about the experiences we build together.”

Facebook has been making moves in this direction for some time, in May confirming plans to further open its platform so that third-party developers will be able to create applications using its source code that can run on other environments.

Those efforts, however, follow similar initiatives from rivals Google and MySpace. The two, along with Yahoo, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn and others, are participating in OpenSocial. Similar to Facebook’s platform aspirations, OpenSocial’s backers are creating a set of common APIs for building social applications on sites across the Web.

At the heart of Zuckerberg’s plan is Facebook Connect, a version of the Facebook platform announced in May and formally opened to developers yesterday.

Connect enables people to connect their Facebook identities, friends and privacy settings to other Web sites and applications. It also lets other Web publishers implement social networking features from Facebook.

Using Facebook Connect, when someone logs onto a site, for example to comment on a blog, they are immediately authenticated. More important, they can share their actions on that site with their friends on Facebook, so that the blog comment, a review or a rating would show up on their profiles.

However, Connect follows rivals’ efforts, debuting in the wake of MySpace’s own debuted its Data Availability program, which Google also followed by unveiling Friend Connect.

Simplicity may be one way Zuckerberg hopes to compete. “You can add Facebook Connect to any site with a line of code,” he told the audience. “Once they’re connected, people have access to all their identity components and connections — and the privacy controls are going with it.”

Facebook Connect became available to developers in a testing environment yesterday, and the company expects to roll it out to end users this fall.

Reining in troublesome apps

But Zuckerberg also highlighted efforts beyond widening the platform for Facebook’s social applications, acknowledging it be endangered by spam-like or misleading applications that grow through tactics like automatically propagating themselves through people’s networks.

Such applications have been a thorn in the side of Facebook’s overseers for some time, and the company has taken frequent steps to combat them.

[cob:Pull_Quote]”In the world we’re building, it becomes good for people to be good to each other,” he told the audience at his keynote. “Making the world more open and connected is more than any single organization can do, but we keep this in mind when we make important decisions.”

He added that Facebook has learned it needs to work more closely with developers to help them build apps that are useful and meaningful to users.

“We’ve learned we need to reward the applications that help people share and build meaningful relationships — and we haven’t done enough to punish the applications that have been abusive.” Now, the company wants to find a way to make sure that the apps that provide the most value are the most successful.

To that end, Facebook is launching two certification-style programs, Application Verification and Great Apps.

[cob:Special_Report]The verification program will assure users that applications are secure and “respectful.” Verified applications will get better positioning on Facebook. Developers also will be able to apply for the Great Apps selection process starting later this summer; criteria will include meeting the Facebook Platform guiding principles, a minimum of 10,000 users and a consistent track record of complying with platform policies.

Selected apps with be given greater visibility, likely leading to more usage, and will have early access to new Facebook functionality.

A redesign also eliminates the clutter of application boxes on users’ profile, highlighting only members’ most frequently used applications. Under the old layout, installed applications were displayed as a box on the user’s profile, staying there even if the person never used it again.

US wants Lebanon to talk to Israel about Shebaa

BEIRUT: A US initiative to resolve the dispute over the occupied Shebaa Farms is still on the table, and is being considered by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, An-Nahar newspaper’s correspondent in Washington on Wednesday quoted an American official as saying.

“The essence of the proposal is that Lebanon engages in indirect negotiations over the fate of Shebaa Farms, either through United Nations mediation or through an intermediary of the Tripartite Military Committee that groups Israel, Lebanon, and the UN,” An-Nahar said.

The same official and other US officials told An-Nahar that placing the territory under UN guardianship following an Israeli withdrawal, as Lebanon has demanded, would not be possible “before the final status of the zone has been determined.”

“The officials argue that Lebanon must engage in negotiations with the Jewish state before any Israeli pullout from the Farms,” the daily reported.

The Shebaa Farms is adjacent to the Syrian Golan Heights, on Lebanon’s southeast border. Both Syria and Lebanon have publicly stated that the land is Lebanese. Israel, which invaded the land in 1967 along with Syrian territories, refuses to withdraw from the farms.

According to one US official, quoted by An-Nahar, “although the US acknowledges that Lebanon cannot engage in direct negotiations with Israel, it contends that Beirut’s previous pretexts that it cannot hold indirect talks with the Jewish state are no longer valid, in view of the indirect Turkish-brokered Syrian-Israeli negotiations and the recent German-mediated prisoner swap deal between Hizbullah and Israel.”
The US officials said that those indirect negotiations had created “a new dynamic” that Lebanon could exploit if it wished to “break way from its traditional thinking with regard to indirect talks with Israel.”

Regarding the Lebanese-Syrian border demarcation, the US officials told An-Nahar that Beirut must ask Damascus “publicly and clearly” to define the border between the two countries in the Shebaa Farms area.

They stressed that statements by Syrian officials regarding Lebanon’s ownership of Shebaa Farms had “no legal weight,” since the UN accepts only official agreements between states accompanied by the submission of joint documents to the world body that confirm that.

The officials also said that Lebanon must take “brave decisions” with regard to the Shebaa Farms, which confirm its capacity to make “sovereign decisions” in its dealings with Syria and Israel.

They said that Washington was willing to offer “technical and logistical” assistance, as well as political support to the proposed indirect negotiations between Lebanon and Israel over the occupied zone. They added that the US could play the role of “a facilitator in the implementation of any agreement that might be reached.” – The Daily Star

Lebanon’s ‘Soldiers of Virtue’

By FOUAD AJAMI
July 23, 2008

There have been a dozen prisoner exchanges between Hezbollah and Israel since the early 1990s, but Samir Kuntar was always a case apart. In 1979 Kuntar and his companions killed a policeman, kidnapped a young father, Danny Haran, and killed him in front of his 4-year-old daughter. Then Kuntar turned to the child and crushed her skull against a rock with the butt of his rifle. In the mayhem, Danny Haran’s wife, Smadar, hiding in her home, accidentally smothered to death the couple’s 2-year-old daughter.

Now Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has finally got his way. Last week, Israel handed over Kuntar in return for Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, captured by Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. They returned to Israel in black coffins.

This prisoner swap will serve Hezbollah’s purposes in the interminable struggles within Lebanon. Trumpets and drums greeted Kuntar’s release. Breathless pollsters now tell us that Nasrallah, a turbaned Shiite and a child of poverty, is the most admired hero of the “Arab street.” This is so, we are told, even in Sunni Arab lands otherwise given to animus toward Shiites.

But Nasrallah had been here before. Two summers ago, he triggered a terrible war across the Lebanon-Israel frontier, with a toll of 1,200 Lebanese deaths (160 Israelis also perished in that senseless summer) and no less than $5 billion in damages to Lebanon’s economy. That war was sold to the gullible as a “divine victory” — the first Arab victory against Israel’s might.

Some expected that Hezbollah would lay down its arms and that the Lebanese, free of Syrian captivity, would return their country to a modicum of order and normalcy. Those hopes were in vain. In the last two years, Hezbollah brought the political life of Lebanon to a standstill. Its formidable militia made a mockery of the incumbent government. Nasrallah sent his followers into Beirut’s commercial center, and for seven long months he thwarted the attempts to elect a new president.

The “Cedar Revolution” of 2005, so full of promise, was no match for Nasrallah’s “soldiers of virtue.” A proxy struggle played out in Lebanon, with the United States, France and Saudi Arabia on the side of the incumbent government, and Syria, Iran and Hezbollah, on the other. There was no escaping the sectarianism: A determined Sunni-Shiite struggle had come to Lebanon.

In its heady days, the Cedar Revolution movement was “hip” and seemed like a fight between the “beautiful people” and the Shiite hicks. The Shiites had a cruel, rural past and they still had self-doubt — believing that the Sunni merchant classes of West Beirut continued to see them as squatters in the city. The clerics and laymen who dominate Hezbollah were quite skilled at exploiting this Shiite sense of unease.

There was a built-in flaw in the Cedar Revolution that Hezbollah preyed upon. Intended or not, that broad, spontaneous eruption following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri had come to rest on an alliance of the Druse, the Sunni Muslims and the bulk of the country’s Christian population. The vast Shiite community, the country’s largest, had stood uncertain amid the tumult that followed Syria’s withdrawal. The Shiites had an uneasy alliance with the Syrian occupiers, and the Shiite mainstream was enthusiastic about Lebanese liberty. Hezbollah had the guns and the money. It had as well the status of a “liberation movement,” and few in Lebanon dared question this claim.

The impasse between a sovereign Beirut government and an armed militia doing the bidding of the Iranian theocrats could not last. A small war broke out last May when the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora wanted to dismantle an illegal fiber-optic network that Hezbollah had installed, a vast communication system that stretched for more than 200 miles and reached to the Syrian border. In retaliation, Hezbollah struck into the Sunni neighborhoods of West Beirut and the Druse stronghold in the Shouf Mountains.

The Sunnis were easily overwhelmed. The Druse had put up a measure of resistance, but they, too, could not stand up to Hezbollah. It’s no small irony that Kuntar, a man of the Druse Mountains, is now returned home courtesy of Hezbollah. But the deep antagonism between the Druse and Hezbollah can’t be wished away by Kuntar’s release.

More than ever, Hezbollah is a Shiite party, shorn of its exalted status as a national resistance movement. Behind Hezbollah’s deeds is the fine hand of Iran. Nasrallah had tried to obscure the difference between Lebanon’s needs and those of his paymasters in Iran. In a widely scrutinized speech the cleric gave in late May, on the eighth anniversary of Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Nasrallah claimed that he was at once a devoted believer in Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution and a son of Lebanon who believed in its “specificity” and pluralism.

There would be distinct roles for the Lebanese state and for his “resistance movement.” The first would assume the burden of order and governing, while his movement would carry the banner of the armed struggle against Israel. This kind of contradiction can’t be papered over. Nasrallah and his lieutenants must fully grasp their precarious position: They feed off mayhem and strife, while the country yearns for a break from its feuds.

It is doubtful that the Shiites will always follow Nasrallah to the barricades, and those who do so will expect material sustenance from Hezbollah. There are estimates that Hezbollah provides employment for 40,000 of its wards and schooling for 100,000 children. This is no small burden, even for a movement sustained by Iranian subsidies. Nor is it the case that the majority of the Shiites want the strictures and the rigor of Qom and Tehran dominating their world. True, the underclass and the newly urbanized in the Shiite suburbs may have taken to the dress codes and style and religious ritual of the Iranian theocracy. But the majority must wish a break from all that.

Hezbollah will not be able to run away with Lebanon. Already the Sunnis have been stirred up by Hezbollah’s power. Sunni jihadists have made their presence felt in the northern town of Tripoli, and in the dozen or so Palestinian refugee camps on the outskirts of the principal cities.

It would be reasonable to assume that the weight of Sunni sentiment would shift toward the jihadists, were they to conclude that the mild-mannered Sunni politicians can’t win a test of wills, and arms, against Hezbollah. Nor do the Christians want Hezbollah’s utopia. The Christians have been weakened by emigration, but they, too, will fight for their place in the country if forced to do so. Furthermore, should there be any accommodation between America and Iran, the Persian power is sure to cast Hezbollah adrift.

“We lived in a world where we believed that our enemy was exactly like us,” Ofer Regev said in a eulogy for his fallen brother. “We thought we could speak to people who also wanted to raise a child, grow a flower, love a girl, exactly like us. But the enemy proved that it is not exactly like us. And still, we will not stop trying.”

Across the Lebanon border, Israelis may have once found a culture not so distant from their own, with mercy, decorum and “rules of engagement” even in times of conflict. The Lebanese will have to retrieve that older world if they are to find their way out of the grip of bigotry and terror. A decent country would be under no moral or political obligation to celebrate a murderer as a heroic son returning from a long captivity.

Mr. Ajami, a Bradley Prize recipient, teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of “The Foreigner’s Gift” (Free Press, 2006).

See all of today’s editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.

Obama warns US president can’t solve Mideast crisis alone

By Agence France Presse (AFP)

Stephen Collinson Agence France Presse AMMAN: White House hopeful Barack Obama stepped into the maelstrom of the Middle East Tuesday, warning the next US president could not just snap his fingers and make peace, as fresh violence rocked the region. The Democratic senator’s high-risk tour to prove his commander in chief mettle touched down in Jordan for talks with King Abdullah II, and an onward journey to Israel and a packed presidential-style schedule. But the region’s tensions immediately intruded, as a Palestinian man was shot dead after going on a bulldozer rampage which wounded at least 16 people near Jerusalem’s King David Hotel where Obama was to stay. Obama condemned the attack, saying it was a reminder of what Israelis have to “courageously live with on a daily basis for far too long,” and promised to vigorously join the search for Middle East peace if he is elected in November. The Illinois senator, who is being advised by ex-President Bill Clinton’s former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, backed the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But a day before meeting Israeli and Palestinian leaders, he warned that entrenched positions, divisions among Palestinians and turbulent Israeli politics meant progress could be slow. “It is a very difficult process. There is a lot of history that exists between those two people. That history is not going to vanish overnight. “So I think it’s unrealistic to expect that a US president alone can suddenly snap his fingers and bring about peace in this region,” he added. Obama flew in from Iraq aboard a US military aircraft, and disembarked carrying a helmet and a flak jacket and wearing a wrinkled shirt and heavy-duty hiking boots following his stealth visit to Iraq. While Obama is likely to be greeted as a hero in Europe, there remain questions in the Middle East about his potential policies toward the region. His view that Occupied Jerusalem must remain the undivided capital of Israel sparked fury among Palestinians, who saw it as pre-judging final status talks, while his offer to talk to Iran is likely to face scrutiny in Israel. Abdullah, fresh from a trip to the United States, hosted Obama for a half-hour of closed talks, before a formal dinner. “Jordan is a very important state in the region, it’s played an important role in the peace process,” a senior Obama adviser said on condition of anonymity. But mindful of claims by backers of Obama’s Republican rival John McCain that the trip is a mere political stunt, the aide stressed the senator was in Jordan to listen and talk. “We have one president at a time, Senator Obama is not here to make policy or negotiate but to have a very useful exchange.” In Colorado on Monday, King Abdullah said he would keep any advice to Obama private, but urged a vigorous future US role in peace moves. “I see us at a crossroads – a time of danger and challenge, but also, unique opportunities,” he said. Jordanian officials said the king would raise concerns about the Palestinian cause and his country’s efforts to help forge an independent Palestinian state. Obama’s Israel schedule has more in common with a presidential trip than that of a mere presidential candidate. He will meet Premier Ehud Olmert, President Shimon Peres, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, opposition Likud party chief Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Obama will also pay homage to Holocaust victims at the Yad Vashem Memorial and hold talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. The Obama camp again sought to clarify his position on Occupied Jerusalem after his comments to the US Jewish lobby in June, which aides later admitted were poorly worded. “He has repeatedly said Jerusalem is a final-status issue to be negotiated by the parties, that Jerusalem will remain Israel’s capital, but it should not again be divided by barbed wire and checkpoints,” said one adviser. After spending two days in Israel, the Illinois senator will head to Germany for the symbolic centerpiece of his campaign swing, a major open-air speech in Berlin on US transatlantic relations. – AFP

What Could Jesus Learn from Barack Obama?

While Barack Obama is in the Middle East, he brings to mind another great leader who made waves there not too long ago. That’s right: Jesus Christ.

While many people think Obama draws inspiration from Jesus, I view it the other way around. I mean, what could Christ learn from Obama?

There were times when Jesus was plagued with doubt and wondered if he was up to the task. But this doesn’t happen with Obama. Some call it arrogance, but I call it spiritual confidence.
Seriously, would Obama have told God, “Sorry Dad, I can’t die for everyone’s sins. I’d rather build canoes.”

No way. Obama just says, “Bring it on, God.”

Jesus also took grief for hanging with paupers, thieves, even a scorned woman. But just marvel at the way Obama stuck by a controversial life partner, as well as his pal in the Weather Underground. That’s loyalty, Jesus.

And yet, Obama also knew when it was time to cut the strings, as he did with Reverend Wright. If only Jesus had done the same with Judas.

Jesus was only 33 when he died for our sins. And, aside from carpentry, what experience did he have in saving the world? Did he ever run a corporation, hold public office for many years or fight in a war? No, no and no. A Holy Trinity of no — like Obama.

But Obama is older than Jesus, he went to better schools, he can speak more languages and he did narcotics. So you could say he’s been there and done that. And that’s good.

Some say Jesus flip flops: On one hand he preaches forgiveness, on the other he mentions hell. But by seeing how Obama shifts beliefs to gain political advantage, you can see that all great leaders are willing to change. I mean, if you keep falling down, maybe it’s time to buy a better cross.

And sure, Jesus Christ had a funny name. But, here are some other funny names: Gandhi, Confucius, Obama, Pitt. Meanwhile, here are some more common names: Koresh, Manson, Bush.

You get the picture.

And if you disagree with me, then you sir are worse than Hitler.

Greg Gutfeld hosts “Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld” weekdays at 3 a.m. ET. Send your comments to: redeye@foxnews.com