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.

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.

I guess it is not too soon for Christmas presents. About two weeks ago, AppJet and the Google PR Team announced the acquisition of AppJet (the company and technology behind EtherPad) by Google and a few hours after that they made a second announcement about EtherPad going back online until open sourced. Two days ago, EtherPad announced the release of its source code to the public which can be found here. As they said:

Our goal with this release is to let the world run their own etherpad servers so that the functionality can live on even after we shut down etherpad.com.

So, if you are up for a challenge you can read these instructions for compiling and running the EtherPad open source release and try out your own etherpad server.

[ photo via etherpad ]

Maemo is an advanced Linux-based operating system designed to run on high-end Nokia mobile computers. As this is an open-source platform, it enables the Maemo community to freely modify and continually develop software as part of a shared goal: to bring added value to all Maemo users.

The Maemo Platform is supported by the Maemo Community which consists of more than 18.000 members actively contributing to more than 800 development projects. Apart from the Linux Kernel, Maemo is based on a lot of open source projects including Debian and GNOME.

Here is a Nokia N900 unboxing video from SlashGear.com

The first one was HTC’s kernel of the Hero device, which can be downloaded from HTC’s Developer Center. But the second one I find more interesting, it is Symbian’s kernel that was released, nine months ahaid of scedule, under the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

It looks like that no one wants to stay away from time’s trend, which hopefully will be de facto in the near feature, open source! Who’s coming next?

• Enabled pf by default in the rc.conf.
• Removed pf scrub rules, and only do one kind of packet reassembly. Rulesets with scrub rules need to be modified because of this.
• Regular rules can now have per-rule scrub options.
• Added new “match” keyword which only applies rule options but does not change the current pass/block state.
• Make all pf operations transactional to improve atomicity of reloads.
• Stricter pf checking for ICMP and ICMPv6 packets.
• Various improvements to pfsync to lower sync traffic bandwidth and optionally allow active-active firewall setups.
• Fix pf scrub max-mss for IPv6 traffic.

You can find more details about all the new features shipping with this release here.

Last but not least, as Jeremy S. Anderson said:

There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence.

Interesting news for all the Open-Source guys and gals. The Linux Foundation now provides new Individual Membership. About 3 months ago the Linux Foundation launched a branded credit card featuring tux. Now its time for new, exclusive perks for Individual Members.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced new, exclusive benefits for individual members, including employee purchase pricing from Dell, HP and Lenovo, and the opportunity to secure a Linux.com email address for life.

With an annual fee of $99 you can now get a @linux.com email address and secure it for lifetime with $150 more. There are three types of membership including Individual, Student and an Individual with a lifetime @linux.com email address. You can see here more details about each type of membership.

A few days after Google’s actions against the CyanogenMod project a group of Android developers formed the Open Android Alliance. Their goal is to replace all closed source and proprietary applications found in the bas Android install with open source applications that can be freely distributed. As they state:

We don’t have anything against the existing closed applications, however, we believe in open platforms and want all users to be able to modify their systems as they see fit.

Above all, remember, we are NOT “Anti-Google”. We are “Pro-Android”. Please act accordingly when posting on this project.

Code license is currently under GPL v3 due to familiarity and because GPL ensures that code based on project’s code will remain open source  for ever. Although this is not a final decition yet.

If developers would like a different license, I’m open to suggestions.

Tickets for replacing Android Market, IM Client, Mail client and other application are already open.