When we first came across Faviki back in 2008, we were intrigued by the concept of a social bookmarking service built using semantic tagging capabilities. Instead of organizing bookmarks based on user-created tags, Faviki tags come from structured information extracted from Wikipedia. After Faviki's update earlier this year which improved the tagging process and introduced OpenID support, we again wanted to make the move to this semantic web-based service. There was just one thing standing in our way: no bookmark import feature.

Unfortunately, until now, the only way to use Faviki involved abandoning your extensive bookmark collection and starting fresh. Today, things have changed. Faviki has, at long last, added a Delicious import feature.

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While at the moment, the bookmarking import feature only supports Delicious users and not other popular bookmarking tools like Diigo, Delicious is still the largest and most heavily used of the social bookmarking services available today...at least among those who still collect and save websites for future reference.

Delicious Import and Common Tags

With the new semi-automatic Delicious import feature, Faviki users can enter in their Delicious information and the service will import their saved sites. However, before the import is initiated, Faviki displays a list of sites along with suggestions of "Common Tags."

Common Tags are a new open tagging format introduced this year which help eliminate some of the problems inherent in user-generated tagging systems. Prior to common tags, users could create a number of different tags that mean the same thing. For example, "new_york" and "nyc" could both mean the New York, the city. Also, there is the problem of one tag that refers to different things such as "jaguar" the animal and "jaguar" the car. With the new standardized format, tags are linked to concepts complete with metadata and their own URLs. That way, "new_york" and "nyc" would both be known to mean the same thing and an article about an animal tagged "jaguar" would link back to the concept for the animal. The metadata in these "concepts" provides additional information about the item being tagged, too. For example, a tag for "obama" would be linked to a concept which indicates that he's the President of the U.S. and married to Michelle Obama.

After Faviki suggests the appropriate common tags for each link being imported, you can make corrections and suggestions as you see fit. Also, if any of your own Delicious tags don't resolve to a common tag, you don't have to fix that issue before import. Instead, the next time you go to use that particular tag, Faviki will prompt you to define it then.

Automatic Posting to Delicious and Twitter

Another nice feature in today's upgrade is that you can continue to use the Delicious service to complement Faviki. Through automatic posting settings, your bookmarks tagged in Faviki will copy over to Delicious. Not only that, but you can continue to use your Delicious tags, too, once they're mapped to common tags after import. Twitter posting is also supported as of now.

While this update is a relatively minor one, it was a much-needed feature in order to get users to make the big switch from one service to the next. Now that we don't have to abandon our bookmarks - and can even still use Delicious if desired - Faviki looks a lot more appealing.

After a long weekend, you may find you're all caught up on your favorite shows. If you're looking for a new source for entertainment, Berkeley-based community Redux is finally emerging from closed beta. ReadWriteWeb first covered Redux's Facebook and Twitter integration in early October. Since then the company has increased its member base, created some new tools and most importantly, built on the strength of its video.

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Similar to Digg, Redux allows users to upload, share and vote on content across the network. Tools like its embeddable blogging widget and inlinevideo comment threads encourage ongoing dialogue and engagement. The community's best content and dialogue has been its video, and TV mode is a way to celebrate that.

Redux lets you stream videos continuously in full screen mode from your friends, networks, and favorite channels. Because the community pulls a live feed from your Twitter and Facebook networks, clips arrive as real-time suggestions from friends and community members. In the past ReadWriteWeb has looked to Redux as a great way to bypass Bit.ly's malware issues as the site offers a thumbnail preview prior to clicking on links. With TV Mode, users can bypass the act of clicking altogether and watch an unadulterated stream of real-time video. To register visit Redux.

When you think of services offering to get you more fans, followers, and friends on social media sites, a few of words come to mind: spammy, scammy, and sad. Purchasing fans is taking the easy way out. Instead of building up a community of followers who actually appreciate what you (or your company) has to say, you can give off the appearance of popularity with a store-bought set of fans. While no one in their right mind will come out and say that the social media "marketing" services that deliver followers and fans are worthwhile, the truth is that many people and businesses are using them anyway, even if they won't admit it. But can any of these services really be trusted?

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One of the most notorious companies involved in the "fans for sale" business is USocial. Earlier this year, they were cited in an L.A. Times article regarding their service for gaming Digg, the social news website that relies on user votes to promote stories to the homepage. Stories that make it to Digg's front page end up receiving massive amounts of traffic - tens of thousands of visitors within hours. Those numbers are tempting. In fact, they're too tempting for some to resist, apparently. According to USocial's founder, organizations like a Darfur foundation, the U.S. Marines, the Mormon Church, and the Korean Department of Tourism had all signed up to used the service.

In addition to gaming the social news sites, USocial also offers services for gaining more followers on Twitter, more fans on Facebook, and more recently, more views on YouTube. This latest offering flat-out guarantees your viral video's success by delivering more traffic and more views to your video pages.

Does all this sound too good to be true? Well, it probably is. Only last month, Facebook sent USocial a cease-and-desist letter to the company after an investigation revealed USocial was breaking multiple laws, including illegally accessing the Facebook website and violating the Terms of Service. Among the violations, Facebook stated USocial was sending spam, using web tools to harvest pages, and getting login names and by accessing accounts that did not belong to the marketing firm. Yes, that last one sounds a lot like hacking, doesn't it? Does your business really want fans who were obtained in that way?

According to Dominic Holland, founder of Viralee, a new competitor to USocial, his business offers a better way. In an article on Facebook-watching blog AllFacebook, Holland was quoted as saying "We do not take control of any users account at any time. We create a page for the user and market it within and externally to Facebook."

One the surface, that sounds more on the up-and-up, but Holland, whose service sells Facebook fans at 10 cents each, won't say exactly how those fans are acquired...and the Viralee website doesn't explain either. What it does show is the company's past efforts which include fan pages for "Kisses," "Hugs," and "Pizza" as well as ongoing efforts which include various sports teams, Australia, and the charity Movember.

In the comments of the AllFacebook post, Holland responds to those questioning whether these "fans" are actually from the U.S. by responding that the service can provide targeted fans. Not that it does by default, just that it can. He also defends the "pay for fans" model by explaining that once you've acquired a good number of these purchased fans, you're then exposed to the friend groups of those fans as well. It sounds like he's saying store-bought fans are just a kick-start method for generating a fan base. The initial group is there to help start the organic growth that comes from natural discovery.

Still, it's hard to feel anything but skepticism for a business whose Twitter account looks like spam bot, filled with keyword-based updates like "performance based advertising," "pay per sale," and "pay per lead," instead of any actual conversation. And considering that Holland was responding on AllFacebook as Viralee's founder using Facebook Conenct, you would think he would have updated his Facebook photo to something a little more...uh...professional. While there's nothing wrong with posting "party pics" on Facebook, if you're publicly representing a company, this is not the sort of image that engenders trust...especially if you're asking for people's money.

At the end of the day, companies like Viralee and USocial keep their "marketing" techniques under wraps and undisclosed. They promise fans but not how they'll get them or whether they're legit. And that's because they're probably not.

But the argument for using these services - as scammy and spammy as they seem to be - is that they let you get a head start on building your social media profile. First come the store-bought fans, then come the real ones. Or so they say. Although few are willing to go on record admitting they're involved with services like this, there's no doubt that many people and businesses are. But the question remains: does any of this really work? And even if it does, is this how you wanted to achieve success?

Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

Would your company recruit skilled employees using a video game?

That isn't a rhetorical question. Recruiting the right people is an unavoidable and costly challenge for many organizations.

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Enter SkyTroller (iTunes link). This $1.99 iPhone app lets would-be air traffic controllers assign flight altitudes to aircraft entering their airspace. The game ends on the third "critical separation loss." And, if the stars align, high scorers might one day receive a call from an ATC recruiter.

SkyTroller could help address a pressing HR issue. The Federal Aviation Administration, on which Ronald Reagan hit the reset button early in his presidency, faces a huge loss of ATCs around 2016.

The FAA also suffers ongoing ATC shortages, at least according to the ATCs. The FAA insists that US control towers are not understaffed, but echoes of this "disagreement" can be heard in places like Australia and Europe as well.

Could SkyTroller help match ATC organizations worldwide with people who show the raw talent to keep the skies collision-free? Maybe.

SkyTroller concept originator Dale Leier, a 20-year ATC vet (retired) with Nav Canada, now with iPhone app incubator HeavyLifters Network Ltd., says that the game contains about as much of the real thing as HeavyLifters could wedge into a phone screen.

And NavCan, Leier's old employer, has shown interest. (SkyTroller hasn't yet registered on the FAA's radar.)

Using technology to find promising staff is nothing new. There's even a B-movie precedent, The Last Starfighter, in which aliens recruit the protagonist, an American teen, using a video game based on the gunships used in a far-off intergalactic war. That game notified the recruiter when the teen recorded a high score.

To help aspiring ATCs get jobs, SkyTroller would need a similar alert mechanism, on top of buy-in from the FAA and its sister organizations.

While this recruiting scenario remains incomplete, it still seems promising:

• One low-cost app that could be used to test budding ATCs.
• Millions of iPhones and iPod Touches sold that run the app.
• Perpetual worldwide demand for ATCs.
• Extra time for newly unemployed owners of these Apple products to figure out if they can help meet that demand.

Do you know of other "recruiting apps" made for handhelds? Would you develop such an app for your company? Let us know what you think.

Unified communications was a notable absent In Gartner's top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. For years, the idea of a common platform for seemingly all communications seemed bewildering. Cisco CEO John Chambers said that even CIO's were unsure what unified communications really meant.

But now here it is raising its flag once again with predictions from ABI Research that the unified communications market will jump from $302 million in 2008 to $4.3 billion by 2014. Seems like a big jump? Not really if you compare it to what at least one other analyst group is predicting.

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Interestingly, the reason for the growth may be in part due to cloud computing, which not surprising is the number one technology on Gartner's list for 2010.

For years, unified communications has held promise as a product or suite of products that had a unifying user interface that, according to Wikipedia, would integrate real-time communication services "such as as instant messaging (chat); presence information; IP telephony; video conferencing; call control and speech recognition with non real-time communication services such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax)."

Over the years, camps divided as people grappled with the idea of how all these technologies come together. Cisco recently dumped the term "unified communications," in favor of "Cisco Collaboration." They are smart over at Cisco. Collaboration is definitely the new black. There's not a lot new behind the curtain but collaboration has an edge to it that is getting the attention of the enterprise.

But now comes along cloud computing and the vendors seem to be learning that perhaps unified communications should be treated as a service.

Vendors like Cisco are teaming up with SaaS services like Salesforce.com and VOIP providers such as Skype. The potential proves to In-Stat that the market for unified communications will jump to $39 billion by 2013.

It may be easy to poke fun a the hype around cloud computing these days. But there is actual proof that whatever you want to call it, cloud computing is playing a significant part in the growth of unified communications. Services that interconnect across devices and provide the capability for collaboration are emerging in a variety of flavors.

More proof of what is to come? Aire-Spring represents a new breed of telecommunications companies. They are also one of the fastest growing operators. The comany has built an IP network from scratch. The company is processing 4 billion calls annually.

Those are big numbers fitting for a market that is just about to burst.

Our startup-minded readers may remember Mike Trotzke, our good friend who, with a little help from his good friends Marc Guyer and Brad Wisler, founded a startup incubator called SproutBox earlier this year.

One of the latest sprouts to emerge from the box is Squad, Trotzke's gift to developers everywhere - and we mean everywhere! This web-based environment allows distributed teams to collaborate in real time, opening, editing and sharing code from anywhere with an Internet connection.

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It's also beautifully portable - meaning you can work on projects from any location, whether it's your home computer, your laptop, your mom's vaccum tube-era model - any device with a browser can be your portal.

And because it's collaborative, it's great for conducting code reviews or paired programming. And it's a perfect platform for noobs and the poor suckers who have to train them. It's even got a built in chat module so you can discuss changes as they're made.

Parts of this app dimly reminded us of Lowdown, a plain-text collaboration tool for developers to communicate to designers and managers, and even more so of How's My Code, a resource for distributed teams to conduct code reviews and keep all the coders for a project on the same page. But those apps were relatively lightweight contraptions slapped together for the Rails Rumble a couple months ago. Trotzke offers a product of a different caliber altogether.

He wrote to us, "It has a unique approach to realtime interaction that even non-developer types would find interest in.

"Users follow each others actions (tab switching, scrolling, etc.) and then see each character they type. You kind of need to try it out to get the feel, but it's pretty sexy for instructional or code review use cases."

Sounds sexy indeed! Like a developers-only, less crowded, actually useful version of Google Wave.

Check out the screenshots:

Pricing is competitive and ranges from free to $40 per month for teams of up to 5 users, with additional user support available for $7 per user per month. And the first month is free for everyone on a trial basis.

Squad supports a variety of languages, including HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Python, SPARQL, Lua and XML. Squad works great as an HTML editor, a PHP editor or a plain text editor.

The startup also plans to add a Ruby syntax mode, enhanced search and replace functions, an offline sharing mode, a show/hide feature on the collaboration panel and project handling functions.

It looks like a great, exciting product, and we look forward to reading users' reviews and seeing what else Trotzke and the Squad team come up with.

It's official: Google is ditching its homegrown Gears offline web app API in favor of backing HTML5 for the win.

Now that the Chrome browser is becoming available for Mac, and the Snow Leopard OS doesn't play nicely with Gears, a Google rep confirmed the company has decided to trash the whole works and wait for HTML5, even though the spec isn't yet ready and isn't supported by commercially available browsers. Oh, the humanity... or rather, the machinery.

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In the mists of time, back when Gears first launched, we wrote, "We've written many times before about the need for offline web app access... And guess who is most at risk with this announcement? Yes, Microsoft. Google after all has many of the top 'best of breed' web apps now."

This was before Google's Chrome browser had hit the scene, and the Gears project was a collaborative effort between Goog, Opera, and Mozilla.

But in our coverage of last year's Google I/O conference, we wrote of Gears, "We question whether offline access is even necessary. After all... in today's world, you're never too far from an internet connection. We concluded that offline access is important now, but less important with each passing day."

Not only could Gears be used to take online data offline; Google had more in store for Gears users.

A few short months later, Google announced a geolocation API for mobile devices running Gears. We wrote, "We think that location-aware software is going to be one of the most interesting markets to watch in the near future and as as location-aware devices become more ubiquitous, we will hopefully see a lot of new and innovative services make use of them."

But the party ended with Snow Leopard's release. Changes in the newest Mac OS and Safari 4 prevent Gears from running on some newer Mac computers. Whether or not the relationship is one of causation or mere correlation, Google is now abandoning Gears.

As one Google rep told the L.A. Times, "We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites."

Believe us Google, no one is looking forward to the cross-browser, cross-OS implementation of HTML5 as much as we are.

UPDATE: According to blogger Mark Milian's unnamed sources at Google, Gears will continue to be supported for sites that already use it. However, the rep continued, "We expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it's a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers."

Still, this statement marks Gears' graceful and gradual retreat to obsolescence as HTML5 is coached for its center stage place.

Recently I was the keynote speaker at the Unlimited Potential W2W (Wellington to the World) event in Wellington, New Zealand. The topic of my presentation was running a virtual company.

In the presentation, written by our Marketing Manager Elyssa Pallai, I spoke about the unique nature of ReadWriteWeb's virtual business model and culture. Watch the video of my entire presentation below, for details of how our company is run and the Internet tools we use.

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As I explain in the video, ReadWriteWeb is a totally virtual organization. We have no head office, or any office for that matter. Our team work from home or on the road, around the globe, in multiple time-zones, 24/7. Being totally virtual is about a cultural change - a mind shift.

Presentation, video-taped by Spring TV and available on Viddler:

Slides, via Slideshare:

Twitter's default URL shortening service Bit.ly announced steps today to stop phishing and malware attacks from being passed around online through its service. If effective, the effort should help a whole lot of people save face and prevent those moments of panic when you're afraid you may have lost access to your Twitter account forever.

Really, though, people who take tech seriously don't fall for those kinds of things, right? Wrong! Below we offer the job titles of some of the most surprising people we've received phishing direct messages from over the last several months. It's a pretty surprising list.

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May this serve as a memorial and a reminder that when new communication media emerge - even the most savvy people can get on board and fall for the oldest tricks in the book.

Remember also, this could happen to any of us (apparently, perhaps) and thus the old saying "there, but for the grace of the Fail Whale, go I."

"I made $300 today with http://ifortune4u.com" - and assorted variations...

Bio: Market analyst following datacenters, energy efficiency, and blade servers.

That's complicated stuff but probably pretty mechanical. No wonder a little human-engineering was able to overcome this person's defenses.

Bio: Enterprise Comms Analyst

That's Comms as in communications?

Bio: Industry analyst: enterprise communications [Different person, same analyst firm as the above]

Oops. Why are these analysts, some of whom charge up to $1000 per hour for their work, falling for a scam that promises relatively small sums of money?

Bio: Consultant in large scale data warehousing.

Looks like just a little bit of your data just got warehoused!

Bio: Strategy planning at [Giant European Firm] Enterprise Communications

How's this for an enterprise strategy? Know a phishing scam when you see one.

Bio: Customer Interaction Analyst at [Giant Marketing Research and Analyst Firm] / Speech Reco and UI Geek / Trendspotter

Oh my...

Bio: an investor and co-founder of [common web 2.0 term].com; a founding partner and Vice-President in [big Web 1.0 company]...8 million page-views and 1 million unique visitors per month...with zero marketing budget.

Surely there were people pulling scams like this back when you were...building a website with 8m monthly pageviews...with zero marketing budget...

Want to brush up on your social networking skills, so you can stay off of lists like this? Check out Sarah Perez's post from October How to Avoid Malware on Facebook and Twitter: 8 Best Practicies.

You can find the whole ReadWriteWeb team on Twitter here. You can follow us with the knowledge that we aren't going to spam you with scammy Direct Messages - or at least if we do you can write a blog post teasing us about it.

Wrapping up a six month-long challenge to mobile developers, Google has announced a string of winners of their second Android Developers Challenge (ADC).

From games and social networking apps to productivity and privacy tools, the cream of the ADC 2 crop includes an app for just about every kind of mobile user - and just in time, as the Droid has recently become "the fastest-selling Android phone to date." Take a peek at the innovative apps waiting in the wings for the lucky owners of Android-powered devices.

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As Android adoption swells and trends suggest the OS might be the second most widely used mobile OS by 2010, it's important that the app universe keeps pace with users. Google announced this challenge in May at their Google I/O developer conference and offered well over $1.5 million in cash prizes to the winning developers in 10 categories.

The applications - some of which might remind you of already popular iPhone apps - should be available shortly to Android users.

The overall ADC 2 winners are:

1. SweetDreams, a revolutionary tool that will finally allow you to go to sleep without worrying about changing your phone settings in order to avoid unwelcome late night calls. You can even use those inactivity periods to save battery power as well.
2. What the Doodle!?, a real-time online multiplayer game where one player tries to draw out a given phrase and others try to guess it. Features FFA and Team games, Global Highscores, Personal Face Doodles, integrated Voice Recognition and more.
3. WaveSecure, a complete mobile security solution that protects your device, data and privacy. Track your phone's location and who is using it , lock down your phone remotely, back up all your data, wipe out your data remotely, and finally, restore your data.

Winners in the education and reference category are:

1. Plink Art, an app for identifying, discovering and sharing art.
2. The Word Puzzle, a fun way to learn basic English words for preschool children.
3. Celeste, an educational augmented reality app that displays the Sun, Moon, planets and their paths through the sky onto your camera view.

The entertainment category winners are:

1. A World of Photo,a casual, globally multiplayer game inspired by Spin the Bottle.
2. SongDNA, a widget that allows you to quickly look up detailed information about a song.
3. Solo, an easy-to-play and feature-rich pocket guitar for your phone.

Winners for the arcade/action game subcategory include:

1. Speed Forge, in which heavy duty hover vehicles normally used for mining are now seen in illegal races organized in abondoned factories and dark Marsian alleys.
2. Graviturn, a game that makes you tilt your phone to move the red circles out of the screen while keeping the green circles.
3. Moto X Mayhem, an app that includes seven levels of motorbike action in a side scrolling bike game.

Winners for the casual gaming category are:

1. What the Doodle!?
2. Totemo, a unique puzzle game with over 60 mind-soothing logic tasks.
3. Mazeness, a rather simple game involving moving balls to their goals with help of barriers, teleports and holders.

These are Google's lifestyle category winners:

1. SweetDreams
2. SpecTrek, an augmented reality ghost hunting game that doubles as a fitness app.
3. FoxyRing, an app that analyzes the ambient noise and adjusts the ringer volume on your phone.

Media category winners are:

1. Buzz Deck, an app that gets all the web content you care about most, along with Twitter & Facebook updates.
2. SPB TV, a highly usable IP-TV application optimized to run on mobile devices.
3. FxCamera, which lets you take pictures with various effects.

Here are the winning productivity tools:

1. WaveSecure
2. Hoccer, an application for gesture-based ad-hoc data exchange.
3. Tasker, an app that lets users link any Task (action set) to the Contexts (application, time, day, location, event, widget press) where it should run.

In social networking, the winners are:

1. Ce:real, an app that displays geographically based, real-world trends, including photo stories paired with Twitter keywords.
2. SocialMuse, which lets users find people with similar musical taste or just explore the world through music.
3. SpotMessage, a communication tool using GPS. Send a message designating a spot with Google Maps then the message will be notified when the recipient arrives at the spot.

For the travel category, Google name these top apps:

1. Trip Journal, a trip tracking and sharing solution sending real-time updates from the places you are visiting.
2. iNap: Arrival Alert, an application that allows traveling users to sleep (or work, or just zone out) then relies on GPS to alert them with an alarm when the destination is nearby.
3. Car Locator, which navigates you back to your car should you ever have trouble finding it.

Finally, here are three miscellaneous winners:

1. Rhythm Guitar, which plays like a real 6-string, 5-fret guitar.
2. Andrometer, and app that measures the approximate distance from you to an object that you can see using GPS, accelerometer and geomagnetic sensors.
3. Calton Hill GPSCaddy, an app that allows golfers to quickly and easily map any golf course either out on the course using GPS or in the comfort of home using satellite imagery.

Bonus Round: See our picks from last year's ADC!)

Let us know in the comments what you think of this year's winners (too many iPhone app clones? too little augmented reality?) in the comments - and definitely tell us what you'd like to see Android developers tackle next!