Ok, so this is so cool I just had to blog about it. Using some departure data fetched from the TfL API along with a bit of maths and magic, Matthew Somerville (with helpful hinderances from Frances Berriman and James Aylett) made a live train map for the London Underground. Yes, that’s right, this map shows all trains on the London Underground network.

The yellow pins are stations, the red pins trains. The trains move in approximately real time.

Apart from that you can also stalk all trains currently on approach to a particular station via this live train map.

Note that this was done in only a few hours at Science Hackday.

As expected, Google I/O keynote was thrilling. Google made some major announcements regarding the future of the web. The event began at 9 a.m. PDT, that is around 7 p.m. here in Greece. The keynote started with VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra taking the stage followed by VP of Product Management Sundar Pichai. It was all about HTML5 and open standards.

First and foremost, the VP8 codec. Last summer Google acquired On2 for its video compression technology. Today, Google announced VP8 codec as part of a new project named WebM. By the way, VP8 is now open-source.

The WebM project is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone.

One of the most important things about this is that the WebM launch is supported by Mozilla, Opera, Google and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors! Read more here.

…including Microsoft!

In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.

What’s Great About WebM

• Very high quality video
• Great video playback performance, even on older computers
• 100% free and open to everyone
• Supported on popular video sites like YouTube

Later on, Adobe shared some HTML5 love on the stage.

The keynote continued with the Chrome Web Store. The Chrome Web Store opens later this year.

Users will be able to discover a broad range of amazing web apps while developers will be able to reach millions of new users.

Next was Wave. Google Wave has been opened up to everyone as of today (also part of Google Apps as of today).

The keynote ended with an extensive reference to App Engine, GWT and some great things coming from Google + VMWare.

VMWare has been working with Google to bring an open-source layer for the cloud

You can watch the Google I/O 2010 Keynote online here.

I am guessing Day 2 will be all about Android. Woo hoo!

P.S. By the time I am writing this Google Buzz APIs come into play. Take a look here.

Outdated plugins are a major source of security and stability risk for web users, and some studies have put the proportion of users with older versions as high as 80%.

Just visit mozilla.com/plugincheck/ to run a plugin check for your browser.

You should also check out SecBrowsing, another powerful tool that helps you keep your browser and plugins up-to-date. If you are using Google Chrome, there is a SecBrowsing extension that alerts you if plugins are out-of-date.

diaspora (origin: Greek, διασπορά – “a scattering [of seeds]“) is a project which is mainly about privacy and social networks. As it states itself, diaspora is the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.

Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy. We call these computers ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your facebook profile, tweets, anything. We are designing an easily extendable plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content gets invented, it will be automagically integrated into every seed.

diaspora is the birth child of four NYU computer science students: Daniel Grippi, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Raphael Sofaer and Maxwell Salzberg. It is currently hosted on Kickstarter and the software will be released at the end of the summer under aGPL (Affero General Public License).

Here are some key features coming to diaspora this summer:

• Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances)
• Complete PGP encryption
• External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data)
• Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation
• Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code

Privacy

Since the start of this year, a lot of stuff has been going on around privacy on the web. I think that privacy is an integral part of the web as we know it and this is why I believe diaspora is so important right now. Especially now that social networks are even more centralized. I really liked it when I read this regarding diaspora.

We believe that privacy and connectedness do not have to be mutually exclusive.

ReadWriteWeb refers to diaspora as an ambitious undertaking to build an “anti-Facebook”. Though I am not sure if diaspora will ever manage to be a successful “anti-Facebook”, I am curious to see what will happen to this initiative by the end of this year.

Read more about diaspora here.

Just a few minutes ago, Twitter released this new cool tool, named as Blackbird Pie. What this does is generate a static HTML tweet which you can use as you want.

So, we decided to take the janky script we’ve been using to generate static HTML tweets for posts (like the one you see here), polish it up a bit, and make it public. And if tweets really are the new quotes, this should come in handy: Blackbird Pie.

Just go to media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/ and enter the tweet url that you want to use to generate your static HTML tweet. Moreover, the code generated there seems to be sufficiently customizable and when you paste it into your site, the tweet will pick up some of your styling. Shorter code and better timestamp are coming soon, too.

We’ll likely tweak the appearance of these tweets over time as we get feedback and bug reports – so do drop us a line at @twittermedia.

Here’s how the tweet is supposed to look.

And here is how it looks when pasted into elephantsquared.

What do you think?

Keep in mind though that this release requires Android 2.0 or above. It has been tested only on Motorola Droid and the Nexus One. And there is high probability to cause your phone to crash or make it temporarily unresponsive. You can still test Fennec on you desktop if you want to.

Weave Sync

There is an experimental version of Weave that is compatible with this build.

If you want to test Weave on your android phone, head over to mozillalabs.com/weave and click on “Experimental Version”. Read more on this on Vladimir’s blog post.

We’ve created a temporary Google Group for feedback about this pre-alpha build.

Just visit secbrowsing.appspot.com to run a browser plugin check. Afterwards SecBrowsing will automatically provide you with quick links/fixes for your browser plugins that are vulnerable. If you are using Google Chrome, there is an extension that periodically checks if your browser is running any out-of-date, vulnerable plugins (e.g., Java, Flash) and notifies you if you do.

SecBrowsing’s source code is available on Google Code. Also check out SecBrowsing’s blog for regular news on browser-related security issues.

You can follow SecBrowsing on Twitter here.

It has been almost two years since the formation of the Open Web foundation. Back then Google, Facebook, MySpace and others joined this initiative for the provision of web technologies.

Open Web Foundation The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.

Two years later, Facebook launches OpenGraphProtocol.org under the Open Web Foundation Agreement. Now that’s what I call interesting!

xAuth is an open platform for extending authenticated user services across the web.

Meaning that toolbar vendors, like Meebo, can now take advantage of this new open platform in order to provide a better user experience to the users. Specifically, users will be able to see social elements only from the social networks that they are actually on. This could lead to fewer HTTP requests that are usually necessary to recognize every potential online service. In addition, xAuth gives the users the option to decide which services pass data to sites through xAuth using the HTML5 methods window.postMessage and localStorage. In other words, the user has complete control of this exchange of data that takes place between the service and the site. This one strongly reminds me of a talk by Aza Raskin titled “You-Centric: The Future of Browsing” which I strongly suggest you see it. The whole idea of complete control of your data hovers around most of Mozilla’s projects like the latest Contacts.

As for the social toolbars, I personally am not very fond of, probably because I do not like the current implementation of these toolbars. Though I have used them one or two times -and they seemed quite handy- I never liked them. I don’t like the way they show up and I don’t like the way the look like.

However, xAuth seems that it grabbed my attention. I am wondering, now that developers can actually grab that information about your social networks how this could help make experiencing the web even better. I mean, why do I have to be bombarded with all these sharing/like buttons if I haven’t even joined each particular social network? And the same goes for all these commenting systems like Disqus.

Moreover, this would be very-very-very interesting for all the mobile platforms out there. Providing a faster and a better mobile experience happens to be one big fcuking reason to support xAuth.

More information on xAuth here and here.

Update: Don’t forget to watch Meebo’s CEO talk with Robert Scoble about xAuth here.

With ‘TweetNotebook’ you can create a unique notebook in seconds. At the bottom of each page, you’ll find 1 tweet you’ve posted on twitter.

Just enter your Twitter username and TweetNotebook will select the best of your tweets and create your notebook in seconds.