So… Apple anounced yesterday the availability of Safari 3 (beta) for Windows. Why?
Step back for a moment. We are in the begining of a “browser is the platform” war. Adobe has Apollo. Microsoft is pushing Silverlight. Mozilla has not been strong on this, but XUL is a great platform to develop applications on (see Songbird and, correct me if I’m wrong, Joost).
An now Apple with Safari. You may think that Safari is “just a browser”, but I have the impression that Safari will soon be able to control the environment outside the browser. Did you see that “web2.0 addressbook-in-safari demo”? In iPhone, you can call the number you see in the browser just by clicking on it…
IF iPhone does well, then Safari 3 will be a desirable platform to develop upon. Being able to use Safari as a cross-platform (OS X, Windows, mobile) development platform 
will be a great asset and considering that iPhone will be closed to third party developers it may have a strong advantage.
I like the fact you can log in to LiveJournal.com using OpenID but most of all I love that you can leave comments using OpenID. OpenID is so far the best way to “sign” your comments, to prove that a comment is yours and does no belong to someone else using your name or nickname.
This is important for everyone, but in some cases it may be crucial -politicians for example. It makes the platform a safe place to be active (fake identities is a major non-starter for well known people that rely on their fame).
Using OpenID may be a bit geeky now, but services like Wordpress.com are starting to provide users with OpenID accounts for free -I know AOL is doing the same thing, Microsoft’s InfoCards will make OpenID even more friendlier for Windows users (it is based on OpenID as far as I know).
I was waiting for someone to buy FeeBurner for a long time, but since it looked one of the last really valuable web2.0 properties I expected this someone to be other than Google -Yahoo! to be honest.
But it happened: Google bought Feedburner. Wow!
Expect to see new features in Google Analytics, AdWords, and AdSense some time in the near future.
