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Voice over WiFi is already available on other smartphones, so is RIM late with this development? Not so, Maribel Lopez, principal analyst and founder of Lopez Research, told TechNewsWorld. BlackBerry Pearl 3G

"Voice over WiFi needs to be engineered for good battery life," she pointed out. "The difference between RIM and other platforms is that RIM is always concerned with efficiency and battery life; most other platforms are not."

Other Bold 9650 features that could be attractive to enterprise IT are authentication (which ensures that only authorized BlackBerry smartphones have access to the corporate phone system) and incoming call filtering.

Market Blues

Despite the new releases, RIM shares began falling Monday after CoCEO Jim Balsillie announced the new products. Shares started the day at over US$70 but at one point fell to $68.51.

Investors were perhaps disappointed that Balsillie had not announced a new browser or user interface.

RIM has received a lot of knocks for having a "somewhat outdated operating system that can't compete with Android and the iPhone's operating system," IDC's Llamas said.

RIM's share price largely recovered later in the day when RIM's other coCEO, Mike Lazaridis, spoke up about BlackBerry OS 6.

The sooner the company can implement its new software, the better, according to Lopez. "RIM will be challenged to maintain growth until it changes the browser and UI experience," she said. "However, they have said that this will happen this year

For website masters, visibility in Facebook pages about the declared subject is one inherent advantage of Open Graph, as is the ability to communicate with users, via Facebook, who have declared they like the site's subject matter. It sounds like a sensible solution to the problem Yahoo faced two decades ago: cataloging commercially oriented Web sites by subject

At its f8 developers' conference in San Francisco last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented his vision of a cross-site social platform whose developmental state may already be quite far along. Essentially, he sees a kind of online social sphere wherein anything one communicates that he likes gets channeled to Facebook, where that like becomes a public fact.

Association Name Game

The model Zuckerberg is discussing is essentially a published API for users of any service to associate themselves with something -- not just something they like, as he said at first, but also something they're working on, including documents. Those associations then become facts of the Facebook database.

On Monday, Betanews reported on 'Connections,' the types of associations that a Facebook user may establish between himself and something or someone he wishes to be associated with. As demonstrated at the time, Facebook now enables individuals to create Facebook pages that represent things or perhaps celebrities that they and others may like -- not a page by those celebrities as much as about them, similar to what Wikipedia provides now.

As independent Facebook developers were introduced to, for the first time, existing Web pages outside Facebook can also be enabled to become the center of those associations, by adopting the company's new Open Graph Protocol. The protocol involves the use of special properties in the elements of Web pages, whose collective purpose is to classify those pages for Facebook. In an extremely hypothetical example, a fan site for the movie "Manos: The Hands of Fate" might include the tags

Surprisingly, a check of the accepted object types for things users may like shows that Open Graph will enable sites to declare themselves the centers of attention for video games, movies, TV shows, and albums (collections of songs gathered together onto a disc, originally reproduced using an analog needle apparatus), software or "apps" is not listed, and neither is "device" such as "iPad" (although it could conceivably be classified as product). If Betanews wanted to be a Facebook "like" site for beta software (I know, it's a stretch, but bear with me), it might be a difficult concept to explain using the current set of Open Graph tags.

Exposure and Communication

"The Open Graph protocol ... is currently designed for Web pages representing profiles of real-world things -- things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants," reads Facebook's official explanation. "Once your pages become objects in the graph, users can establish connections to your pages as they do with Facebook Pages. Based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed."

Visibility in Facebook pages about the declared subject is one benefit to the website master. Another is the ability to communicate with users, via Facebook, who have declared they like the site's subject matter; and to receive analytics and statistics about how Facebook users are interacting with your pages.

If you think about it, it sounds like a sensible solution to the problem Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) faced two decades ago: cataloging commercially oriented Web sites by subject. This system

invites the masters of those pages to do the cataloging, with the payoff being a direct connection to the Internet's center of social activity.

Piping In YouTube

Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) YouTube is already part of the process, with its latest round of changes to its front-end controls. Where the "Favorites" button used to be is now something called "Like" (shown above), which does more than just submit a video you like to your YouTube favorites list. As the settings screen now shows (as depicted below), your likes may be communicated with Facebook (if you have an account there).