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What is likely to happen is that many of FriendFeed’s killer features become features on Facebook, with FriendFeed eventually shutting its doors to focus on Facebook development. So what are those FriendFeed features Facebook doesn’t have, or that FriendFeed simply does better?

FriendFeed's search is real time, and content-centric. Something similar for Facebook could yield good results.

Any we left off? Leave them in the comments.

IM integration. I’ve knocked this feature in the past for being noisy, but for some it’s useful. FriendFeed’s IM integration can give you the heads up when someone likes one of your posts, or simply posts new content. It’s also got a deep list of commands that let you interact with content on the site, all without actually having to go there. For instance, if you see someone has commented on something you just posted, you get that notification in an IM, and can leave a retort. This is great for continuing to use the service in places where the site itself may be blocked like work or school.

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CNET)

Monday’s news that social giant Facebook is acquiring the less than two-year old FriendFeed included an important postscript: “FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.” But for FriendFeed users, the future seems unclear. Will development on the service be discontinued as the now Facebook-employed FriendFeed creators have been tapped to work on a bigger, and more popular social-networking site? Probably.

Content aggregation. Facebook’s “highlights” section of its home page does its best to show you new or otherwise interesting things from your friends if they’ve liked something. It feels like an afterthought though. FriendFeed’s solution is to create a “best of the day” which shows the most popular and fresh content that your friends like. It can also be filtered by day, week and month, which lets you get a quick digest of content without having to keep your eyeballs glued to the news feed.

Real real time. FriendFeed’s real time is a constant flow of information that comes in as soon as the service can get it to you. On Facebook, you get a little reminder to refresh the stream when there are updates. FriendFeed’s way of letting users avoid an overload is to simply put the stream on pause–something Facebook could soon adopt.

Search: One of the most important features FriendFeed has (that Facebook doesn’t) is a really solid search engine. On FriendFeed you can search for content from your friends, or the entire world. The best part is, you can save any search you’ve made and keep an eye on it for updates. Facebook’s search is currently focused more on finding people, along with navigating to various parts of its site like events, pages, and applications. Update: Scratch this one off the list. Hours after this post went live, Facebook began pushing an updated version of its search engine that indexes updates and other content. At least for the past 30 days, which is a good start.

Themes. Facebook has long been the king of vanilla. You don’t like blue on white? Tough luck, go download a browser add-on. FriendFeed on the other hand, recently embraced themes that can skin the entire experience. It was also opened up to third parties to design their own, letting anyone browse the site with a visual style of their preference. Is Facebook likely to embrace this right away? Probably not, but FriendFeed sure did a great job of adding it to its own site, and with other big products from Google like Gmail and Calendar getting themes, it’s a big trend to ignore.

Any item on FriendFeed can be tracked through IM. The IM system also lets users interact with the content without having to visit the site.

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Admittedly file sharing is probably not something Facebook would have too hard a time cooking up on its own, but after seeing all the internal data on how FriendFeeders have been using it, Facebook will have something to work with if it chooses to expand how it handles posting or sending media.

File sharing. To share files on Facebook, you have to use one of Facebook’s granular applications like photos, or videos. You can use third party tools for items that fall outside of that, but that puts the hosting and control outside of Facebook’s realm. On FriendFeed you can upload all sorts of file types just for sharing purposes. Users then download them to view, listen, or watch on their own machines.

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Discussion tracking. FriendFeed lets you keep an eye on anything you’ve commented on. This means that if you dropped in to leave a comment it makes a note of that and gives you a very simple way to get back to that conversation. Facebook does this to a degree, but it’s via e-mail, and there’s no quick return path to get back to those conversations. Not to mention, you can use the aforementioned IM integration to get a quick update on a reply, without filling up your in-box, and without having to go back to the site to add another reply.

FriendFeed's themes let users skin the experience, something Facebook does not currently offer.

Updated at 5:10 p.m. PDT with eBay comment.

“Skype has infringed Joltid’s copyrights,” a company spokesman said in a statement. “Joltid will vigorously enforce its copyrights and other intellectual property rights in all of the technologies it has innovated.”

Just the latest in an ongoing license dispute between the popular VoIP service and its developers, the lawsuit, filed in Northern California U.S. District Court, seeks an injunction and damages, which Joltid “reasonably believes are amassing at a rate of $75 million daily,” according to the suit.

Joltid terminated its license for the software after learning that Skype had allegedly acquired unauthorized versions of the source code, made unauthorized modifications, and disclosed the software to third persons, according to the lawsuit.

“Their allegations and claims are without merit and are founded on fundamental legal and factual errors,” eBay spokesman John Pluhowski said in a statement.

The two companies have been involved in a separate lawsuit in the U.K. over that license termination, but the case isn’t set to go to trial until June 2010. Referring to that suit, eBay’s SEC filing regarding the sale of Skype says “consummation of the deal was subject to ‘no settlement of the pending litigation with Joltid Limited having been effected without the consent of the Buyer (subject to certain limitations).’”

The other defendants in the suit filed Wednesday are Silver Lake Partners, Index Ventures Management, Michaelangelo Volpi, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. This lawsuit was first reported Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal.

Joltid, a peer-to-peer software company established by Skype’s founders, filed a copyright suit against Skype Wednesday alleging Joltid’s technology is being infringed on by Skype users “in the United States at least 100,000 times each day.”

Also listed as defendants are Skype’s current owner eBay, as well as investors in a consortium that earlier this month signed a deal with eBay to acquire a 65 percent stake in Skype, with eBay retaining 35 percent.

In 2006, eBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion, but co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom retained the rights to Skype’s key peer-to-peer technology–Global Index Software–via the Joltid company they formed.

The lawsuit has the potential to at least complicate the ongoing sale of Skype. In the past, however, eBay has said it’s working on its own software to replace what it gets from Joltid.

For decades HP has been a leader in environmental responsibility and has adopted practices in product development, operations, and supply chain that are transparent and help to reduce its environmental impact. HP has a comprehensive approach to environmental sustainability, with three main components: minimizing our impact; helping our customers to improve their environmental performance; and driving towards a sustainable, low-carbon economy.

It sent activists to HP’s global headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., where they climbed on top of the building and painted a gigantic message announcing “Hazardous Products,” using nontoxic children’s finger paint. The message covered more than 11,500 square feet, which is about the size of two and half basketball courts.

After rating Hewlett-Packard low on its Green Meter did little to convince the company to change its ways, the organization decided to resort to trespassing.

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Greenpeace)

Looks like it’s a war that nobody wins.

Obviously, it’s very important to eliminate e-waste and care about the environment. However, it’s also important to understand that putting graffiti on private properties is a type of vandalism. I guess Greenpeace doesn’t care about this.

The unconstructive antics at HP’s headquarters today did nothing to advance the goals that all who care about the environment share. HP will continue its efforts to develop new products and programs around the globe that help the company, its business partners, and customers conserve energy, reduce materials use, and reduce waste through responsible reuse and recycling. HP supports industry efforts to eliminate BFR and PVC because of potential e-waste issues. HP is a worldwide leader in e-waste recycling. HP has recycled 1 billion pounds of electronic products from 1987 to 2007 and has committed to recycling another billion pounds between 2008 and 2011.

According to Greenpeace, the organization took this action because HP broke its promise to eliminate hazardous chemicals in its products. Earlier this year, HP postponed its 2007 commitment to phase out dangerous substances, such as brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics, from its computing products. The delay shifts compliance up two years, from 2009 to 2011.

It’s war on hazardous chemicals that Greenpeace single-handedly provoked Tuesday.

Editors’ note: This article was updated at 2:50 p.m. PDT with HP’s statement.

Earlier this year, Greenpeace released a report that rated PC makers and other electronic vendors in regard to their compliance with e-waste elimination. Apple was ranked highest among PC makers and HP was one of the lowest, together with Dell and Lenovo.

This commitment includes reducing the use of BFR/PVC in our products until these materials are eliminated entirely. HP has introduced several new computing products this year that use less BFR/PVC than previous generations. This September, HP will release a BFR/PVC free notebook. By fall 2010 all new commercial PC products released will be BFR/PVC free. By the end of 2011, all new PC products released will be free of BFR/PVCs.

Apart from the graffiti, HP employees were also greeted today by automated phone calls from actor William Shatner, calling upon the company to phase out the toxic chemicals.

In reply to CNET News’ phone call seeking comments on Greenpeace’s action, HP released this statement via an e-mail:

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Greenpeace)

PVC and BFRs are highly toxic, and can release dioxin when burned, a chemical known to cause cancer.

Although most of the early attention focused on the agreement around a browser “ballot screen,” Microsoft also announced on Wednesday an agreement around product interoperability. Under that deal, a 10-year commitment by Microsoft, the software maker agrees to publish communication protocols and adopt certain standards as part of Windows, Windows Server, Office and other high market share products. Companies could also purchase for 5,000 euros a warranty that would subject Microsoft to court oversight and monetary penalties if it doesn’t live up to its commitments.

Microsoft’s top lawyer said that a tentative agreement with Brussels announced earlier Wednesday could potentially allow the software maker to move out of the regulatory crosshairs, perhaps paving the way for regulators to shift their attention elsewhere.

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Microsoft is in the process of trying to ascertain whether the deal needs approval from Brussels or from individual European antitrust authorities. It also needs approval from U.S. regulators, who have asked for more information on the deal.

Settling now with Brussels also could help Microsoft in its effort to win approval for its search deal with Yahoo, Smith said.

While not final, Microsoft’s moves would appear to resolve all of its outstanding regulatory issues with the Commission and were greeted warmly by regulators on Wednesday.

“This certainly isn’t going to hurt when it comes to the Yahoo-Microsoft agreement,” he said. “It’s not necessarily going to make a huge difference. We didn’t feel a particular step was needed to help it along.”

Microsoft initially took a much different approach to the European Commission’s assertion that the inclusion of a browser in Windows violated antitrust law. The company had initially proposed just stripping out the browser from Windows 7 entirely, leaving users the prospect of trying to get a browser on their own. The software maker eventually backed down after indications that that approach was unlikely to fly.

“It’s important for us to get closure in Europe on issues that have obviously been controversial for over a decade,” General Counsel Brad Smith said in an interview. “Today’s decision takes us an important step closer to doing that.”

Smith

“I actually think this in effect implements the model that the Commission has been advocating,” Smith said. Moreover, he said it is a model that other software companies should pay attention to, he said, noting that there are lots of companies that have high market share. He noted that Google has 78 percent of the paid search market and IBM has 100 percent of the mainframe market, while Adobe also has dominant positions in certain areas, such as Photoshop.

“It is important we believe to create a level legal and regulatory playing field,” Smith said. “Everyone that has a high market share needs to respect the same set of rules. I think a number of these rules are likely to be applicable to other companies and other products.”

Smith said that the approach Microsoft took with regard to interoperability was designed to adopt methods that Nellie Kroes, commissioner for competition, had outlined in a speech last year for how companies with high market share products should behave.

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It’s essentially guaranteed that Apple will announce upgrades across the iPod line, including the iPod Touch and Nano, and perhaps even kill off some older models.The iPod Touch is rumored to be getting a camera, digital compass, and microphone. Other clues have pointed to the Nano also getting equipped with a camera.

And finally, many are wondering if Apple CEO Steve Jobs will use the September event–if it happens–to make his first public appearance since returning from medical leave earlier this year. Apple executive Phil Schiller has filled in for Jobs at these keynote-style events since January, but since Jobs has been officially back at the company’s helm since the end of June, the September event would be the first opportunity for him to return to the spotlight.

He says he has heard from “multiple music industry sources” that there will be an Apple event held sometime during the week of September 7. Now, this isn’t a huge surprise since Apple has held an event announcing the latest upgrade to the iPod and iTunes around this same time every year. But this year there are some interesting variables in play.

It’s happened every September for the past few years, and it appears it’s on track again: Apple is planning a keynote event rumored to take place the second week of September, according to AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka.

Of more interest perhaps is whether Apple will use this event to debut the oft-discussed and long-rumored Apple tablet. Different sources have pointed to a 10-inch touch-screen device that’s essentially a giant iPod Touch being available either this fall or in early 2010. It’s rumored to have a music element to it, through a new album format supposedly called “Cocktail,” making its introduction at a music-focused event seem plausible. The timing would also make sense if Apple wanted to establish some solid pre-holiday buzz before the annual winter shopping season.

Almost time for a tuneup for the iPod Touch?

Craigslist filed a lawsuit against McMaster’s office and a judge slapped it with a restraining order that prevented the attorney general from filing the charges. McMaster’s office never made good on the criminal charges.

File this under the practice what you preach department.

Apparently, the cemetery is a hot spot for sexual encounters, both publications reported. Corning, 66, was not arrested after identifying himself to police as a prosecutor, but The Associated Press reported he was later fired by his boss, McMaster.

Craigslist has been victorious in every court case on the issue of whether the site can be held responsible for the actions of its users.

The situation with Corning, who told police he always carried Viagra and sex toys “just in case,” will be fodder for those who argue that prostitution or sexual misconduct are not the fault of Craigslist.

Roland Corning, a nine-year employee of the state’s attorney general’s office, was stopped by police after being found in a Columbia, S.C., cemetery while in the company of an 18-year-old female stripper and in possession of assorted sex toys, according to a report about the incident in the blog Fitsnews.com. The online unit of The State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper, verified the report.

McMaster threatened to launch a criminal investigation against the operators of Craigslist while the site was trying to negotiate with several state attorneys general about limiting the ads posted by prostitutes. Critics accused McMaster of using Craigslist’s situation to grab headlines.

Remember Henry McMaster, South Carolina’s state attorney general, the man who was shocked, shocked, shocked to find illicit sex on Craigslist and earlier this year threatened to file charges against the Web’s No. 1 classifieds site? Perhaps McMaster would do well to police his own office before going after anyone else.

And they did. So did several faculty and university employees who chose to audit the class, or sit in without getting a grade, illustrating much of what we already know: the App Store is popular. Apple’s online marketplace for iPhone and iPod Touch programs has been bombarded with submissions from developers in the year and a half it’s been open for business. There are more than 100,000 applications currently for sale and 8,500 new and updated programs submitted every day. And its competitors want a piece too: Research In Motion, Google’s Android, Palm, Nokia, and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile have followed suit, opening up application marketplaces, though none has university professors teaching courses about them. Or at least not yet.

The class was deemed a success, but it’s unclear if it’ll be back on the schedule come next fall. “We hope to offer it next year, but with the budget problems of the University of California system, no one quite knows what’s going to happen.”

But besides teaching the programming language to build iPhone apps, Joy’s class also included business how-tos for those who may want to create their own iPhone app developer companies.

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Sunny Dhillon and Fei Li)

Granted, squeezing the entire learning and development process into a 10-week academic quarter was a challenge. The first five weeks were spent learning the SDK, some Objective C programming language, and making simple apps like an RSS reader, while the last five weeks they split into two-person teams building their apps.

“I saw the e-mail (about the class) and I thought, ‘Oh gosh.’ I jumped right on my computer and signed up for the class as soon as I saw it,” said Kip Nicol, 22, a computer science and engineering major. “It was a pretty hot class.”

“We had no choice; students had to find resources themselves,” said Joy.

Either way, Joy says teaching to the SDK is one of the most hands-on real-world classes he’s ever taught to undergrads.

Professor Joy teaches ECS 198H, Introduction To iPhone Application Development, to undergraduates at the University of California at Davis. On the first day of class in late September UC Davis became one of a growing number of schools that are tailoring classes and focusing academic resources on the making and selling of applications for Apple’s popular mobile platform.

“We got to develop some apps for the real world. Students got to see a really good SDK…This is something we normally don’t get in a university,” Joy said. Most classes “tend to solve limited problems and don’t really deal with real world that much. These that do, trying to develop bigger applications, get the students closer to the experience of industry. Which is very good.”

A professor for almost 30 years, Joy has mainly researched computer graphics and visualizations, until he and a former grad student came up with the idea to offer a class that teaches to the iPhone SDK (software development kit). Joy didn’t have much experience in mobile platforms, but he was game for teaching something “relevant” that would keep his students motivated.

He’s not the first to teach this class to undergrads. Stanford University has offered the class for a year, as have Florida’s Stetson University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Jules Houts, 21, also studying computer science and engineering, jumped at what looked like a “fun” class, he said. “It seemed better than operating systems or something like that.”

ECS 198H wasn’t approved as a university course until 10 days before the fall quarter started in September–in other words, students already had their class schedules set. But less than four hours after Joy placed it in the registration guide, the class was filled to its 35-student capacity, with another 40 people staking out wait-list spots.

But while those schools have taken advantage of Apple’s iPhone Developer University Program–which provides free access to the SDK, Apple hardware, and Apple employees as teachers–Joy’s course is a bit more of a grassroots effort.

Some students, like Houts, are already thinking that way. As a member of UC Davis’ lacrosse team, he plans on making an iPhone game based on his sport, a market he believes has some good potential.

Besides room on their schedules, students also had to provide their own iPhone, iPod Touch, or Mac that can run the SDK, thanks to the UC system’s well-publicized budget problems.

“Nothing is more relevant than the iPhone or iPod Touch right now,” Joy said in an interview this week.

If all goes well, Houts said he could see himself starting an iPhone app-making business. “I think I’ll submit the first couple apps under my name, and if they’re successful then I might start something.”

“It was one of the funnest classes I’ve taken because it was project-oriented, and it created a community of developers,” said Houts, who created the piano-tuning application.

Joy said he is impressed with what his newbie iPhone developers came up with: an app for properly tuning a piano, one for tracking location of the GPS-equipped UC Davis student-run bus system, and one application for all UC Davis students, including information about student groups, maps of the campus, class locations, to name a few. That one will be in the App Store next quarter, Joy is already predicting.

“There’s nothing except for a lacrosse stats (app) on the App Store. I want to make a little lacrosse game, and be the first to get on that market. There’s a new lacrosse Xbox game that just came out, so it’s still a new market right now.”

One of the apps developed in Professor Joy's first iPhone app making class.

Most college professors will tell students to put away their iPhone or iPod once class starts. But not Ken Joy. His class requires them.

The real value to PublicEarth is that it can find places that aren’t, as they say, on the map. It’s very easy for users to create a point of interest, draw a boundary line around a park, or trace a route to walk or hike. If enough people get into this system it could be a great resource for travelers. Which is the business model.

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Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

PublicEarth is also being marketed to activity groups like RV and sports clubs, parents groups, birdwatchers, and so on. It can be used by social networks to collect and collate locations aimed at specific interests, which can help people with those interests when they visit a new region.

The MapZen iPhone app will help you map on the go.

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CloudMade will monetize the system by offering search features and routing (with awareness of the junction turn restrictions), and possibly by working on location-based advertising.

OpenStreetMap currently matters more to people in less-mapped regions than to dwellers of hyper-mapped U.S. cities. But ultimately the system may enable new location-based apps and services thanks to its wide-open system.

Google has already added a form of crowdsourcing to its mapping services: Its traffic system gets location and speed data from its mobile users. (Users can get their own raw data through Latitude, if they wish.) But Google relies on its own private mapping data, and its own servers to deliver maps to users. It’s an expensive model and it doesn’t serve all users in all locations equally. The crowdsourced mapping model is a serious competitor to the proprietary map business. I wouldn’t have thought it could work, but Wikipedia shows that it’s a mistake to dismiss the power of millions of individuals, each willing to chip in a little bit, to create great reference works.

The PublicEarth team wants to make this service the go-to database of unusual places, and to partner with standard booking sites like Hotels.com, OpenTable, and travel solutions like TripIt. Getting traffic from those sites will get people into the system, and then sending booking and ticket traffic out to venues will generate revenue.

Of course, success hinges on contributions, and it’s not easy to create a user-maintained location database that sticks. There’s also competition: Wikimapia and Yelp come to mind. But if PublicEarth can affiliate with other travel resources it could work out. It is a very strong product. It has the potential to compete with the guidebook market.

The MapZen/OpenStreetMap combo also lets you do very specific and modern cartography. There’s a junction editor, for example, that lets contributors specify turn restrictions by time of day.

As with other crowdsourced place databases, anyone can insert a location. And as with most of the other products, PublicEarth uses Google base maps. The difference in PublicEarth is in the execution: It’s slick, in a good way. For map users, PublicEarth lets you quickly find categories of locations — romantic, kid-friendly, historic, for campers, etc. — for places you are going. When you’re looking at a map of places, you can get a lot of data by just rolling your mouse over hot spots, without clicking. “We learned how expensive a click is,” Rubin says.

OpenStreetMap

The full MapZen app lets you re-route roads. Please be careful.

PublicEarth

PublicEarth is an open database of places. Michael Rubin, who was an architect of Netflix, wanted to bring the same “element of delight” of connecting people to things they enjoy. Netflix did it for movies, and Public Earth is doing it for locations.

Later this month a new map editor, MapZen, is coming to the system from CloudMade, a company that commercializes the OpenStreetMap project. MapZen will make it easier for mappers to create and correct roads and points of interest. An iPhone app, currently in approval limbo, will also make it easier for anyone to walk and map. And new social tools should be good for to help groups of “map buddies” coordinate their work.

Wikipedia killed the encyclopedia business, in print and online, as it’s hard to make a revenue model work that involves paying people to create content when there are hordes of enthusiastic experts around the world willing to do the job for free. The business of mapping may be similarly doomed, as indicated by PublicEarth, a new wiki-style database of places launching Monday, and by the continued improvement in authoring tools at the crowdsourced mapping service OpenStreetMap.

PublicEarth is a good system for a crowdsourced database of places.

The system will have a recommendation engine that learns what you like. So if you’ve been using the system and then head to a new town you can just see the “recommended for you” locations.

The crowded map

PublicEarth is an open database of items on top of a map. OpenStreetMap is a crowdsourced map itself. The project was started before Google Maps came on to the scene, and while the search juggernaut’s global road map is certainly more popular, there’s a lot to be said for the OpenStreetMap approach. The fact that anyone with an interest in an area can create, correct, or update a map means you can get a lot of very specific data onto the map, created by people with very specific, nearly microscopic, knowledge of their regions.

And since the OpenStreetMap data itself is open, developers can do anything they wish with it. With a commercial map like Google’s you have to push everything through one API, but with a truly open system you can create your own maps from the data, perform calculations on map points, and so. OpenStreetMap would be a great mapping database for the calculation engine Wolfram Alpha.

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Users can edit photos in portrait, or landscape view.

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CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

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CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

More pics after the break.

What makes the app notable (besides from being from Adobe) is that the entire editing control set works off gestures. Instead of using dials or sliders, users just need to swipe their finger across the screen to change things such as brightness or color values. The same goes for its filters, which can be whisked from one end of the screen to the other instead of taking up more screen real estate or using a drop-down menu. It’s one of the more intuitive control methods I’ve seen on a mobile photo-editing app, and can be quite precise once you get the hang of it.

Adobe Systems on Friday introduced a new Photoshop app for iPhone users that lets them edit photos from both their phone and their online library on Photoshop.com.

The app is available now and is free of charge, although Adobe’s free Photoshop.com service has a 2GB limit, which can be expanded with an annual paid storage plan.

Photoshop's famous filter effects come to the iPhone version as well.

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Photoshop for iPhone lets you do all sorts of things to your photos, including beaming them back to Photoshop.com when you're done.

As soon as users are done editing any photo, they can either save it back to their phone or upload it to their Photoshop.com account. The app also doubles as a photo-taking tool since you can simply take a photo, then have it upload right away.

The app is free of charge and offers tools such as cropping, image rotation, color controls, and simple one-touch filter effects that can change the look and feel of shots all at once. It also features undo and redo controls so that if users make a mistake, or want to revert back to the original, it takes just a few taps.

It would be going too far to suggest that open source is the critical component of any successful technology business today, especially as just about every company now includes it in their offerings in some way. Plus, CIOs have discovered other ways to stretch IT budgets and keep their workers on the payroll, as Gartner advises.

FedEx. Yes. Nucor. Yes. But no Microsoft. No Oracle. No Salesforce.com. What gives?

President Obama is gathering 100 leaders from across the U.S. for his jobs summit in Washington on Thursday to brainstorm how to create new jobs.

When I asked Whitehurst on Wednesday what he thought the two companies had in common, he was quick to respond: “open source.”

Yes, Schmidt is a key advisor to Obama. But his invitation, along with Whitehurst’s, could have a lot to do with the fact that Google and Red Hat, unlike many of their peers, are actively hiring.

As I’ve written,Rolex Watches, both Google and Red Hat (along with Facebook and other new-school “software” companies) depend upon and help to create abundance–of code,replica watches, of Web sites, of information–and then make money by filtering that abundance.

Intriguingly, Google’s hiring may be crimped more by a desire not to aggregate all of the best and brightest than an inability to do so, as evinced by Google Vice President Bradley Horowitz’s comments at Supernova this week.

It’s a model that works, and it’s a model that heavily depends upon and contributes to open-source software.

Red Hat and Google have thrived through the recession, perhaps suggesting that they have a clue as to what it will take to create new jobs in a tough economy, one that has seen 23 straight months of job losses.

But the mentality of open source–more with less, sharing code and expertise–does seem to be a hallmark of successful technology companies,omega watches, and particularly at Google and Red Hat.

While the list of invitees is heavy on academics, labor unions, and business, it appears only two people from technology made an early invitation list: Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, and Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat.

It’s an interesting observation. While the two companies use open source in different ways, their business models are actually more similar than different, and both depend on open source.