Companies from Google Inc. to small startups are introducing new features, such as taking and syncing notes and files within the browser, voice-recognition, video calls and messaging. They are also reinventing the browser for newly connected devices like cars.

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Or maybe you didn’t notice it. The Quartz team told me about the change in advance, and even I have a hard time seeing much difference. The biggest change is that a black bar that used to run across the top of the site and then shrink down as you scrolled down is now just preshrunk.

You can see, sort of, by comparing some “before” shots (clicking the images should enlarge them):

And an after:

The more interesting thing to note about Quartz’s overhaul is that it is one of dozens of changes Atlantic Media’s newest property has made since it launched seven months ago. Quartz editor Kevin Delaney says the site has pushed 73 code chages since Quartz first debuted, most of which have to do with the way the site’s guts function.

The reason Quartz can do that, Delaney argues, is because of its decision to rely on an HTML5 design that essentially serves up the same page to every reader, no matter what device they’re using to access the site. If you want to change the way an HTML5 site looks or behaves, you can simply change it — no need to monkey with an app that’s already downloaded to someone’s iPhone or Android.

That runs counter to a lot of current digital distribution thinking, which holds that every Web distributor — from newspapers to Facebook to Netflix — needs to be thinking app-first.

No need to beat the debate into the ground — it’s really only relevant to a few thousand people, and it can take on a religious overtone — but it is worth noting that it seems to be working for Quartz. Delaney said his site is now attracting two million users a month.

“[In Latin America] the smartphone will be your whole connection to the Internet,” said Bloisi, in an onstage interview at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference in New York. “I think Wi-Fi is a big, big trend.”

The fast-growing Movile is trying to find better ways for consumers in its market to be able to connect to take advantage of rich media. “We believe the best of the mobile opportunity will be in the next four years,” said Bloisi, who noted that most users are on pre-paid phones in the important region.

More to the point, “We really need cheaper phones,” said Bloisi, especially since Latin American countries like Brazil are among the most expensive places to buy a device by a factor of 10 times or more.

Why is that so? “Taxes, taxes and the mystery of the Brazilian economy,” he joked, while pointing to efforts to produce phones in the region that would be less expensive.

Bloisi also thought that the focus away from HTML5 — a once-hot area of mobile development that has recently fallen out of favor — was wrong.

“It is not a religious discussion,” he said. “[But] on the long term, I am more HTML5.”

What’s different about Little Outliner is that while it looks and feels like a Web app — it’s written in JavaScript and runs in HTML5 — it stores everything locally on each user’s computer, rather than on servers controlled by the company.

Because of that, Little Outliner is really only a personal tool — there’s no way to share outlines with people who aren’t using the same machine. So it may appeal to people who don’t like storing their stuff in some company’s cloud.

However, Winer — who is releasing Little Outliner as the first project from a company called Small Picture with partner Kyle Shank — indicated that he anticipated networked and shared outlines in future releases.

Winer told CNET that the product harkens back to his outliner MORE, which debuted all the way back in 1986.

He noted that there are desktop outliners, such as OmniOutliner and Tinderbox, and browser-based outliners, like Workflowy and Trello, but that Little Outliner occupies a space in between.

The first will take place April 18 in New York, and will be followed by events in London and Seoul. The focus will be on topics such as integrating Facebook login and Open Graph into apps for Android, iOS and the mobile Web.

“Over the last year, Facebook has worked hard to improve our mobile offerings,” the company said in a blog post announcing the events.

Facebook is also working hard to make mobile a bigger part of its business plan, a key concern of Wall Street.

First off, carriers love anything that threatens to lessen the power of Apple and Android. It’s why they always express hope and optimism for any new release of Windows or BlackBerry and have for years.

“Duopolies are not beneficial for any industry,” Telefonica CEO Cesar Alierta said onstage at Mozilla’s press conference on Sunday. Telefonica is betting very big on Firefox OS, bringing it to several countries this year and to all its markets by the end of next year.

Even with BlackBerry and Windows Phone, Telecom Italia CEO Franco Bernabè says there is enough opportunity for Firefox and even Tizen, a mobile version of Linux.

“I think there is room for all of them,” Bernabè said in a brief interview at the Mozilla event. “The only thing we don’t want is to have two monopolies dominating the market.”

But Firefox offers two additional benefits beyond just offering carriers a chance to knock Google and Apple down a peg.

The first of these is cost. The operating system, like Android, is free. But even more than that, it is designed to run well on low-end hardware where Android performs poorly or can’t run at all.

Secondly, Firefox is open. Carriers can do whatever they want, from running their own apps and services to branding and anything else.

That could give Firefox and Tizen a leg up on BlackBerry and Microsoft, Bernabè said. “In our opinion, who will prevail will be the open source platforms.”

There is still a huge challenge, though. Firefox OS actually has to run well. And that’s where the carrier’s dreams could end.

The list of companies that bet too early and too heavily on HTML is a long one that includes, most notably, Facebook, which has since reversed course and focused heavily on native work for iOS and Android.

Analysts say Firefox has lined up an impressive array of partners but still has a lot of work to do in order to deliver a product that will sell.

“The real acid test for Firefox OS and its long-term prospects is the quality of the software itself and the user and developer experiences that it fosters,” said Ovum analyst Tony Cripps. “What is clear from the Firefox OS demonstration handsets that we have seen was that they are still some way from being market ready, being both slow and buggy.”

Even low-cost smartphones have to work well, Cripps said, noting that there is increasing competition from Android as well as the latest generation of feature phones such as Nokia’s Asha touch line and Samsung’s Rex phones.

Meanwhile, the U.S. could prove an even tougher nut to crack. The home market is on Mozilla’s radar, but not the top priority, says CEO Gary Kovacs. The company announced Sprint as a partner, but didn’t give any details and Kovacs said the U.S. probably won’t see its first Firefox OS devices until 2014.

Kik Messenger was early in this category, launching in late 2010 as the first app that mined users’ address books to find friends when they sign up (before that was more closely regulated).

After explosive growth as a cross-platform alternative to the popular BlackBerry chat app BBM — it got its first million users in 15 days — Kik lost a step when it was blocked and sued by Research In Motion. (That was particularly crushing given Kik founder and CEO Ted Livingston had interned at RIM and stayed in touch with the company as he dropped out of college to found his start-up.)

Livingston said this week that his app has not been standing still. Kik still signs up 100,000 new users per day, for a total of 30 million registered users.

Even after the lawsuit, Kik managed to close $8 million in Series A funding from RRE Ventures, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures — and $4.3 million since then in bridge funding from the same investors as it has paid its legal bills and plotted its next move.

But the company has not added any new features in the past year except for speed and infrastructure improvements across its various free native apps.

Today, Kik is finally adding features, through a new design that tries to allow users to pick and choose what new stuff they want to add without cluttering up the core Kik experience of fast text messaging.

The idea, said Livingston, is to avoid the fate of applications that add feature after feature and “pivot” upon their core idea to the point that users have no idea why they’re useful.

Kik’s concept is essentially a highly controlled app platform that it calls Cards. Users can opt to add the apps — for instance, a YouTube viewing interface or a sketch pad — to their Kik account. If they don’t add the apps, they can stick with good old messaging. When minimized, the Cards are just a tiny line of pixels along the left side of the app that can be swiped out like a drawer.

The Cards are all built in HTML5 so they are easily transferrable across all of Kik’s native apps.

Livingston is particularly proud of this architecture. “We know we’ll be immediately copied,” he bragged. But he feels that his team’s work in building tools and libraries around the HTML5 code to create the Cards is a defensible advantage for the company.

Unlike other social media sites’ app platforms, Kik Cards won’t be open to outside developers. In fact, the company plans for Cards to be its monetization strategy. Livingston said Kik will charge brands and other companies to make and feature custom Cards.

One-to-one messaging is a vastly underestimated form of social sharing, Livingston contended. “We think we can build the most viral network in the world for sharing content.”

Now, as the lion’s share of the social giant’s user base accesses the site via mobile devices, Facebook has undergone a major internal organizational shift, retooling product workflows to better focus on the phone.

Engineering teams are morphing. Software cycles are being rejiggered. It’s a materialization of the company’s newest mantra: “Mobile first.“

The Old Days

Facebook has taken flak for its mobile strategy for some time. Its smartphone apps, for example, were sluggish and underperforming compared to others like Twitter.

Some of the blame for these deficiencies is placed on a technology bet Facebook made years ago, making HTML5 a key component of its mobile strategy. Put simply, HTML5 is a coding language that can handle some of today’s more taxing Web features. And Facebook’s apps were built with heavy use of HTML5.

Using a language like HTML5 has its benefits. For one, it let Facebook spread much faster. Any phone with a Web browser can access Facebook’s mobile site, which the company spent much of its effort refining early on.

Not to mention that many of today’s engineers grew up using Web-based languages back in the early dot-com days. That makes it much easier to recruit talent for Facebook’s ever-growing engineering team.

But as we’ve moved toward a “native” world of smartphone app development, the classic Web-centric engineering emphasis is harder to maintain. “Pushing” a piece of new code live to the desktop and mobile Web is a much faster process than making changes to a native iOS or Android application. For native apps, there is a mandatory review of app changes from Apple’s App Store. And with every change made to an app, that means users need to download a new update to the app.

Previously, Facebook split dealing with these problems in two. Desktop coders were part of one group, while the mobile apps teams were separate. In fact, as product manager Dirk Stoop told me, the native iOS and Android apps were so small in the early days, only a handful of people were responsible for maintaining the iOS and Android applications — two of the most-downloaded apps in the entire world.

This wasn’t enough. Facebook’s Web-centric culture didn’t translate over to native app development the same way. Something had to change.

A Different Framework

The Facebook product structure of today looks very different than it did before. Teams are separated across the company by product rather than platform.

So, for example, the Facebook Messenger group, led by Facebook veteran Peter Deng, is one team composed of desktop, mobile and native engineers who create features for every place that this product appears. This is the same for Photos, the team which Stoop leads.

Both of those teams, you may recall, produce standalone apps outside of the proper “Facebook” native application. This, Deng tells me, is part of a strategy focusing on improving these products faster, essentially making each app a “testing ground” for the main Facebook app. If the team sees increased use in a specific feature in the standalone app, for example, that feature could be integrated into the main app.

Timing is also a focus. To shift the “push-whenever” mentality of a Web-focused coder, Facebook has put all new code updates into staggered release cycles.

Deng’s team, for instance, updates the iOS Messenger app every six weeks, like clockwork. This gives the team a better sense of deadlines and timing, while minimizing the amount of updates users need to download. Desktop coders still push more frequently, but are now relegated to doing so twice a day.

Perhaps the most drastic change is philosophical. Product managers want teams to “own their code,” to put more intention and responsibility behind any changes they make.

“This is about understanding that there is some level of permanence in the code you ship,” product manager Michael Sharon told me. “This is educating our people about quality.”

End Game

Facebook talks a big game. But is this shift actually going to benefit users?

Deng and his fellow product managers believe so. In a recent update, two of the most popular features from Messenger and Camera were integrated into the Facebook main iOS app. The idea is, Facebook’s app will get better, faster and stronger with the modular approach.

Not every timed release will be groundbreaking. Most have included bug fixes and optimizations, while others include better feature additions. It’s less about revamping the application and more about getting into a timing groove.

Ultimately, Facebook hopes the shift will pay off in the masses being happier with their mobile experience, unlike the old days when the native apps were built heavily with HTML5. Ideally, that makes for a more engaged, more active Facebook user.

That’ll let the engineering team rest a bit easier. At least until the next product cycle begins.

Now, thanks to Google, I might be able live out my dreams, after all.

Today, the company introduced Jam with Chrome, an interactive Web app for Chrome that lets you play a variety of instruments and invite friends to play with you in real time.

The app offers 19 different instruments, including a classic steel-string guitar, a standard drum set and a brass synth keyboard.

By default, it’s set to “easy mode,” where you can use your mouse or trackpad to play the various instruments. For advanced players, there’s a “pro mode” that lets you control the instruments using your keyboard. There are also four autoplay functions that let the instruments do all the work (where’s the fun in that?).

If you feel like jamming out with some friends, you can invite up to three different people using the “Invite Friends to Jam” button at the bottom of the screen.

Jam with Chrome is a product of Chrome Experiments, and was built using various Web technologies, such as HTML5, WebSockets and CSS3.

You can check out how the app works in the video below, which features a special appearance from Keyboard Cat.

Me? I’m off to channel my inner Cindy Blackman.

Though not a flat-out acquisition, many of Particle’s employees joined Apple last month, presumably to work on HTML5-based apps and services, iAds and the like. Particle was backed by performer Justin Timberlake among others, and its client list includes Apple, Google, Disney, Motorola, Amazon, Yahoo and Sony.

Terms of the deal, which was first reported by News.com, are unknown at this point. But Particle’s days as a stand-alone entity are likely numbered. Apple declined comment.

Starting today, Cabana will be joining Twitter’s platform team, where it will be building tools “to help third-party developers create new experiences on Twitter,” according to a blog post.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but given that Cabana will be shutting down its mobile app development tools on Dec. 1, it sounds like Twitter was more interested in the team than the actual product. It’s worth noting that while HTML5 was once hyped as the way to solve fragmentation in mobile, the trend has shifted back toward native applications since they provide a better user experience — at least for now.

Cabana’s technology was used, in part, to turn Facebook fan pages into mobile apps. The San Francisco-based company’s list of investors includes First Round Capital and other high-profile angels, including Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca and Dave Morin. The Cabana co-founders are Reeve Thompson and Jeremy Gordon.

Twitter confirmed the acquisition and provided the following statement: “Reeve Thompson, Jeremy Gordon and their team have created a product that makes it easier for people to build rich mobile apps. At Twitter, they will join our platform team and build tools to help third-party developers create new experiences on Twitter.”

As it existed in the past, the portal worked on computers, but now it will also run on phones and tablets — or at least some of the games will. Of the 5,000 titles, about 100 have been developed in HTML5, making them capable of running across multiple devices.

The games are free to play and subsidized by advertising. AOL plans to add the ability to charge for virtual goods at a later date.

John Fox, the general manager for Games.com, said the average visitor to the legacy site spends an impressive 29 minutes per visit, adding that AOL saw an opportunity to capture even more time by taking the property to more platforms. As more games are played on mobile devices and less on the PC, AOL probably had no choice. In doing so, it will also be going up against some already established competitors, including Big Fish and GameStop’s Kongregate.com.

As part of the relaunch, there’s a right-hand column that looks like AOL’s instant messenger service, but instead of listing conversations, it shows a player’s favorite games, recommendations and leader boards of some of the high scorers.

Fox said more updates are planned for the platform, including the ability to help promote mobile games by referring games to players through landing pages that redirect to Apple’s App Store or Amazon’s AppStore. AOL hopes to collect referral fees as another source of revenue.

For AOL, this is the second recent move in the games space. Just two weeks ago, the company launched its first mobile game with the release of Clucks, which provides a new take on the game Draw Something by using video instead of art. For the Games.com redesign, it has partnered with several game developers to make sure it has a selection of titles at launch, including Arkadium, Big Fish Games, Masque Publishing, Mochi Media and Tylted.

Pro Tip 1: If you want to see what the fuss is about, head over to qz.com, not quartz.com.* The latter will only help you if you’re interested in tubing and rod.

Pro Tip 2: Even though Quartz makes a big deal of targeting tablet and smartphone users, don’t bother looking for it at Apple’s App Store or Google’s Android Market. Instead of producing apps for the new publication, Quartz expects you to find its stuff the old-fashioned way — on the Web, via a WordPress-produced site.

Paradoxically, that puts Quartz on the leading edge of digital publishing, or at least in the middle of digital publishing chatter. There’s a lot of talk about “Web apps” instead of “native apps” and “responsive design” right now, and Quartz highlights both concepts.

In English: Instead of asking readers to download an app to get its stuff on tablets or phones, Quartz will work on the mobile Web browsers those machines already have. And it will publish a single Web site, which will configure itself depending on the kind of device and screen size each reader uses.

Duh. Right?

Except that just two years ago, the entire publishing world was consumed with the iPad, and tablets in general, and the notion that device-specific apps would allow them to break free of the tyranny of the free Web’s economics. Instead of giving away their stuff online, publishers argued/hoped, they could sell discrete bundles of programming and content via Apple, and hopefully Google and other platforms.

But, both publicly  and privately, many publishers now concede that they’ve been underwhelmed with apps. The road for brand-new titles launched as apps has been even rockier. So the Quartz staff say they decided early on that they would give away their content, and they would do it on the Web.

“It seems very clear that the Web is far more suited for sharing of news and articles, and we want everybody to access our stuff,” says senior editor Zachary Seward.** “It sounds sort of silly to say this, but anyone can navigate directly to any of our stories. You can’t do that in the app store world.”

Seward showed me a preview of the approach over the weekend, but I was looking at it via MacBook, not iPad, so I can’t vouch for the way the site will display on mobile screens. I can note that on a laptop screen the site has a very simple approach that makes it look quite a bit like other publishers’ mobile sites. No flashy graphics or extra “rails” of headlines and other “entry points.”

That’s intentional, Seward says, because Quartz wants to look more or less the same no matter what screen you’re using. And mobile sites have to be utilitarian.

There’s some precedent for reaching high-end business news readers on mobile devices without a bona fide app. Last year, after a dispute with Apple over subscription terms, Pearson’s Financial Times launched its own Web app, which it says has performed quite well.

But the FT already had an established brand, and customers. Quartz will now have to find its own without the help that someone like Apple could have provided via its App Store.

At least as important: By bailing on native apps and the income they can provide, Quartz will have to fight for ad dollars in a brutal climate. Mobile ads may be the future, but right now they’re dirt cheap. People who buy and sell display ads tell me that mobile eyeballs frequently sell at an 80 percent discount to Web prices, which are already under pressure.

Team Quartz says they can solve that problem with a plan that involves selling “sponsorships” instead of conventional Web advertising, along with other tactics, like events. That one we won’t be able to assess for some time.

*And you may have to be patient. The Quartz staff thought the site would be live early this morning, but is apparently still working out some last-minute kinks.

**Both Seward and editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney used to work at The Wall Street Journal, which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.

Merrill is the founder of a start-up called TapCanvas, which focuses on helping people easily create apps that can live on a smartphone for just a short time, like for a conference or other time-limited event.

“With TapCanvas, we’re creating a category of apps that hasn’t existed before,” Merrill said in an interview.

Merrill said TapCanvas offers several advantages. Its HTML5-based creations work on almost any mobile device, can be created without any coding knowledge, and are far cheaper than alternatives.

“It will be like $20 instead of hundreds or thousands,” Merrill said, adding that there will be a variety of pricing options.

Its apps aren’t actually native code, but rather HTML5 Web sites that closely mimic the behavior of an app.

Merrill, whose previously worked at mobile ticketing company MogoTix, said he started to realize there was a need for apps that didn’t require the time and expense associated with being submitted to various app stores for approval.

“I realized that a ticket on a cellphone could be a throwaway app — only useful for a finite period of time,” Merrill said.

While its initial efforts have centered around creating event apps, Merrill sees lots of niches that are well-suited to the TapCanvas approach. Merrill, who is in the process of selling the house where he and his boyfriend live, noted that his listing was delayed by four days because they were waiting for physical brochures to be printed.

“I would love to replace that,” Merrill said.

TapCanvas, currently a two-person outfit based in AOL’s Palo Alto offices, has raised $200,000 so far from K9 Ventures, 500 Startups, and a few angel investors.

Plus, they didn’t want to waste time building and maintaining native apps when the Web was the way the mobile world was going (hopefully).

That plan didn’t really work. The mobile Web apps often were slower and didn’t fully make use of the capabilities of each phone. It was almost like a voluntary handicap.

So today, both the Web giants and the most promising Web start-ups are going native. Every press briefing I go to, I hear people brag about how “we didn’t just port” the latest mobile app from one platform to another.

You see this with Facebook, which recently (finally!) rewrote its iOS app to be a native app, seeing significant gains in speed. Or with Pinterest, which just launched its first Android and iPad apps, which the company’s founders emphasized were lovingly crafted for each platform. Tumblr also recently overhauled its apps, and the mobile-first companies like Instagram and Foursquare figured this out from the start, of course.

Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever

The latest is the Q&A service Quora, which today launched its first Android version, for both phones and tablets including the Kindle Fire.

Quora is not a huge site — it reportedly gets single-digit millions of visitors per month, and it’s only available in English — but it’s well-respected for its content, product and team, led by early Facebook programmers Charlie Cheever and Adam D’Angelo.

Between its iPhone app and mobile Web site, Quora says it already gets 25 percent of its traffic from mobile. So Cheever, with whom I met yesterday, has shifted his internal focus entirely to mobile, he said.

For the Android app, Cheever said, “We really decided to make this really first-class, and do everything the way people who use Android phones would expect to work.” That means integrated voice search, homepage widgets, landscape mode, the works.

The Quora app does use some HTML5, Cheever said, in instances where Web views have better performance.

So this is actually a bit more subtle than native versus Web; what’s important is the new Quora app is handcrafted for the Android environment.

“Some people tried to be almost religious about HTML5, and the reality is the technology and performance isn’t here yet,” Cheever said. “The idea we wouldn’t invest in making great experiences seems kind of silly.”

Okay, but what about the problem of Android fragmentation across all the different devices and versions? Cheever replied that in some cases mobile support for Web features seems to be more fragmented than support for native stuff.

What about the commitment required to move to new platforms beyond Android and iOS (Quora actually doesn’t have an iPad version yet either)? Cheever also downplayed that issue, saying Quora is considering Windows Phone, but he doesn’t really see any other significant platforms beyond that.

Making the commitment to these dedicated apps is already paying off for Quora, Cheever said. That’s because so many people use their phones as computer replacements or equivalents. Offering a mobile app that does everything a Web site on a PC can do has encouraged a higher level of participation. Quora users don’t just consume content on their phones, they also create it.

So far Quora users seem to ask questions, write answers and read other people’s contributions from their phones just the way they do from their computers. There isn’t demonstrably more location-based content or quick on-the-go questions, as you might expect from mobile users, according to Cheever. “We expected to have more divergence,” he said. “It’s almost surprising there isn’t a big difference.”

By doing so, it will be even harder for the start-up to convince developers that HTML5 is indeed ready for large-scale projects.

In an apology on its site, the company explained: “As we moved out of beta and into the live world, we learned that we had problems with our backend and weren’t able to scale fast enough to support the load. As a result, we experienced numerous problems and created a really bad experience for the fans trying to access our games or even get on our website.”

As part of last week’s launch, Goko attempted to demonstrate how well its HTML5 platform worked by releasing the Dominion card game across Facebook, Google+, Goko.com, Android and iOS simultaneously. All of those games are now back in beta for further testing, which won’t help to change popular opinion about the technology.

Goko did not provide a timeline for repairs.

“We will go live again when it’s ready,” the statement said. “We’d love to say that will happen tomorrow or next week, but that’s not the right way to proceed.”

The Redwood City, Calif.-based company is backed by $8 million from Redpoint Ventures and Alsop Louie Partners.

A quarter-century later, Barack Obama is president, and people are still playing Punch-Out!!, or something close to it. When I play it, however, it’s on my iPhone. And instead of losing badly to Tyson, I’m losing badly to, um, Barack Obama.

The doppelgänger game in question is camPAIN 2012, officially out in the wild today by way of mobile games company Tylted. And while the game mechanics are more than a little familiar, everything else about camPAIN’s arrival is a lot more interesting.

Superficially, of course, the replacement of Little Mac & Co. with caricatures of Obama and Mitt Romney is a fun gimmick that will doubtless do wonders for the quality of political discourse online. And, naturally, Tylted is counting on social media users to flock to the game as an act of political one-upsmanship over their friends.

But beyond all that, CEO Lon Otremba is pushing the idea that camPAIN 2012 represents a big step forward for HTML5. And he’s (mostly) right.

CamPAIN 2012 on a Nexus 7

Why? They’re familiar. There is a Slime Volleyball clone game for iOS, but the physics are different (read: worse), and the “feel” just isn’t the same.

HTML5 promises, among other things, a chance to bridge that gap. CamPAIN 2012 is essentially the same game on all browsers, both desktop and mobile, although some devices get bonus features like haptic feedback (as in, your phone may vibrate when you get hit).

And this, Otremba says, is also good for game developers and publishers like Tylted:

“HTML5 is going to be the dominant force in mobile over the next 12 to 24 months. The enormous incentive that developers have to generate one code base for any device is too great to ignore.”

So, rather than scrambling to port a game over from iOS to Android to Windows Phone to God-knows-what-else, a game dev could theoretically make one game in HTML5 and proceed to make fixes and updates in only one place.

But Otremba’s theory falters a bit when you consider the economics of those competing operating systems. The transition to and mass adoption of HTML5, replacing (shock!) HTML4, is still ongoing, 15 years after its predecessor debuted. As the new standard for the whole Web, it has to move slowly and cautiously.

Google and Apple don’t. One could easily drive higher OS adoption rates by giving developers resources or cool capabilities the other guy doesn’t have, and if that happens, the smart devs will rush to jump on the novelty.

Nevertheless, Otremba is optimistic that gaming on the mobile Web “will be superior” to gaming on mobile apps.

“I’m not saying apps are going away,” he says. “But as a real approach to how people play on multiple devices, the mobile Web is a huge thing, and will just be getting bigger and bigger.”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go back to getting my butt kicked by the president.

But, contrary to popular opinion, Goko argues that it is possible — and has games to prove it.

The reason why the subject is worth debating at all is because HTML5 offers one major advantage over other technologies, like Flash: It allows developers to create one version of a game that can run across multiple platforms, including Facebook, the Web and mobile.

Not only does that save developers money, it also lets consumers play the same version of the game on whatever device they choose.

As a demonstration of its platform’s capabilities, Goko is releasing Dominion — a real-world card game with a huge following — across multiple digital platforms.

It goes live today on Facebook, Google+, Goko.com, Android and iOS.

Goko is also launching a few games exclusively on its own Web site, including Catan World, based on the popular board game, Settlers of Catan; Forbidden City, a tile-placing digital game; War Factory, a puzzle and war strategy mashup; and All the King’s Men, a tower defense game.

The problems with HTML5 have been well documented. For example, in June, Wooga, a social game developer in Germany, said it was no longer developing games in HTML5, after encountering a number of problems, including long load times, lack of sound and reliance on Internet connection.

Ted Griggs, Goko’s CEO, acknowledges that there are some limitations to the technology, but for most card and board games, it’s good enough today.

To prove that its platform is up to the task, Goko secured licensing deals with 150 well-known board and card games.

Starting today, the company’s platform will also be available to developers looking for help creating, distributing and monetizing games across multiple platforms.

As part of the launch, the company is announcing that it has raised $8 million in a first round of founding from Redpoint Ventures and Alsop Louie Partners.

Previously, Griggs and Goko’s other founder, Kevin Binkley, started Electric Gravity, which was acquired by Microsoft and renamed MSN Gaming Zone. Other members of the team are from OpenFeint (now Gree), Digital Chocolate, Playdom and Zynga.

Pulse for the Web has a tiled, full-screen, image-heavy layout. When a user resizes the window, the story tiles automatically resize and snap into place — with a JavaScript technique that Pulse is so proud of creating, it plans to open source it so other people can use it, too.

The Web app also got some help under the hood from Microsoft; when used on a Windows Tablet, it speedily responds to multitouch gestures to expand stories and swipe through them.

In the test version I used and the screenshots I’ve seen, the Pulse site now displays an Internet Explorer icon up in the top-right corner, even when used in other browsers.

As part of its move to the Web, Pulse will be encouraging users to start accounts, so that they can sync their state between their browsers and iOS and Android devices. “A good portion of the Pulse audience” has never created an account, except maybe to connect their Twitter and Facebook for sharing articles, said Pulse CEO Akshay Kothari.

Prior to this launch, Pulse’s Web presence was woefully thin — it just asked potential users to submit their cellphone numbers so they could more easily download one of the Pulse mobile apps.

Pulse has more than 15 million users — counted as people who’ve used the app more than once — and they read more than 250 million stories each month. Pulse either takes public publisher feeds or works through partnerships to get fuller content. Publishers join the platform because its users like to share — more than 60,000 stories are shared per day, and each share leads to six to seven reads, Kothari said.

(For what it’s worth, as a fanatic and frequent news consumer, I personally prefer a text-based RSS reader to a more visual approach like Pulse. For those of you who are like-minded, I find the Pulse approach is helpful for giving a more-scannable display than some of the aggregators I frequent, like Hacker News and Techmeme.)

The shift from native mobile apps to Web apps “is not going to happen later this year or next year, but it’s going to happen soon,” Kothari contended. He said he used to be even more skeptical, but the partnership with Microsoft showed him the potential of HTML5.

Plus, it would be nice to unite his 25-person company around one product, rather than the three platforms — iOS, Android and Web — that it is currently divided into.

(By the way, that team just up and moved itself from a garage-style office in downtown Palo Alto to a top-floor office in downtown San Francisco, which is where 70 percent of Pulse’s employees already lived.)

Now that Pulse is on all the platforms it wants to be, the company will focus on extending its product around topics like discussion and curation, Kothari said.

So, thank God for Wells Fargo analyst Jason Maynard, who asked CEO Mark Zuckerberg point blank whether the company was building its own phone.

At first Zuckerberg’s answer seemed to be a fairly strong “no.”

“There are lots of things that you can build in other operating systems, as well,” Zuckerberg said, “that aren’t really taking — that aren’t really like building out a whole phone which I think wouldn’t really make much sense for us to do.” (Emphasis obviously mine.)

But back up for a second. Nobody, including AllThingsD, ever said Facebook was building its own phone. As my colleagues reported last year, Facebook tapped Taiwanese cellphone manufacturer HTC as a partner in working on a Facebook phone, one that has the social network’s platform fully integrated deep into the core of the hardware.

And Zuckerberg was careful in how he worded his answer. “We thought a lot about this question,” Zuckerberg said. “We want to not just have apps that people use, but also be kind of as deeply integrated into these systems as possible.”

His comments still leave tons of room for the company to be doing most of the work on a phone, while working alongside one or many partner manufacturers to do the actual hardware. Even Apple could arguably say it doesn’t manufacture phones — Foxconn builds the phones — and Apple is the most profitable phone maker in the world.

Speaking of Apple, a potential Zuckerbergian shuck and jive like this recalls a move by another famed tech CEO: Steve Jobs. He’s one of Zuck’s former mentors, with the young CEO taking in Jobs’s decades of experience on long walks together through Palo Alto. And up until the very moment Apple was ready to announce a product, Jobs had no qualms about publicly pooh-poohing rumored products — just as he did onstage with Walt Mossberg at the D: All Things Digital conference, nearly a decade ago.

Keeping that in mind, Bloomberg’s story from Wednesday resurfaces exactly what we reported a year ago: The phone is set to debut sometime in the next year or so. As Nick Bilton noted in a New York Times column in June, Facebook has even hired ex-Apple mobile engineers, with the express intent of getting the phone out the door by next year.

That said, Facebook could be shifting gears, especially considering the recent departures from the company. As we reported, former CTO Bret Taylor was spearheading the Buffy project — that is, before he announced he would soon leave to work on his own start-up.

Whatever the case, we’d be remiss to take Zuck’s answer at face value.

Its basic pitch is to make the ubiquitous Web videos we encounter every day a lot more navigable. The basic problem it solves is the one where users stop watching a video because in their mind it’s going on too long, or because they wanted to get to a particular highlight point in the video and don’t have the patience to wait for it.

FlixMaster’s offering is a software-as-service video technology that makes Web video a lot more interactive than it generally is today. Customers are more likely to get engaged with a video you’re using to hook them, if you can increase viewing time by making the video more readily navigable. The resulting clips are HTML5 compatible, meaning they can play on the iPad and all the other tablets and smartphones that support it.

When I last saw the demo at a venture capital conference in Beaver Creek, it wasn’t a fully available service. Today at Fortune Magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, FlixMaster demonstrated an updated version of the service that includes a full-service Web-based video editor, an API to its video player, and other features. It’s available today in a freemium service that anyone can try, with unlimited access to its features. Upgrades from there include scaled pricing and an enterprise version that includes access to the player API. One customer is NBC/Universal, which has used FlixMaster to create Web videos to promote extra online episodes of its show “Covert Affairs,” in which the viewer can affect the outcome by making choices along the way.

The new product, Ning VIP, is a subscription-based service starting at $1,000 monthly, offering a suite of tools for larger-scale social networks. It’s appropriate for a site with a larger customer base like an MTV or a Food Network, rather than a smaller niche community. Some of the new tools combine attributes found on other social networks, like activity feeds, badging and other game-like features.

“Call it Facebook in a box,” said Samir Arora, Glam Media CEO and Chairman. Only Ning’s networks give more granular control over community management features, Arora argues.

The fruits of the Glam acquisition seem to be found in the other half of Wednesday’s announcement, dubbed Glam Social. It’s essentially an entire ad tech platform wrapped up in a bow for the network owner, complete with a social analytics dashboard that tracks engagement inside Ning as well as social metrics on other integrated networks, like Facebook and Twitter. Glam can build ads for users inside of their own network, making it simpler on the network owner.

The other claim Arora trumpets: A full mobile Web autocreation package set up for network owners. So, for new Ning customers, an HTML5-optimized version of their network is set up for them, as well.

Since the acquisition, Arora says, Ning has been growing well, with more than 50 million monthly active users across Ning networks, adding more than 2,000 new networks per month to the nearly 80,000 that already exist.

Will the new, glammed-up version of Ning bolster those ranks? Perhaps, especially for those who don’t want to look to an outside ad tech platform to monitor community engagement.

Of all the many tech maxims that exist, this is the one heard ad nauseum: “The future is in mobile.” In essence, it means that if your company doesn’t have a mobile device strategy, you aren’t doing it right.

Yet it was five months ago, on February 1, that the term rang truer than it ever had before. The wake-up call came from a line in Facebook’s freshly filed S-1, under the company’s risk factors section.

It stated that nearly half of Facebook’s 900-million-plus monthly active users visit the site via mobile devices, “although such usage,” the document reads, “does not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue.”

Facebook knows the writing is on the wall. And in order to prepare, Facebook is in the midst of a sweeping companywide shift to a “mobile first” strategy, with the marching orders trickling down from the very top tiers of management.

Chris Cox, VP of Product.

“We’re nearing a point where absolutely no one can present a new product concept without a mobile mock-up,” VP of Product Chris Cox told me during a recent interview — the first since the company’s IPO — at Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters. The mandate, Cox told me, comes straight from CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself.

It is a dramatic sea change for the social giant, a company that from its launch in 2004 rose to prominence on the backs of millions of PCs. Until relatively recently, emphasis was focused on the desktop interface, classically the primary portal for members to access the site. This made sense for years for virtually every successful Web site, given the limited browsing capabilities of early Internet-connected mobile phones like the BlackBerry or Palm devices.

In a way, it seemed Facebook had somewhat deprioritized mobile with its commitment to HTML5, a set of Web protocols championed by many tech giants — including Google and other big names — as the next evolution of the Web.

But as the years passed, smarter mobile devices proliferated, while the price floor sank on low-cost “feature phones” that spread across the globe. Asia, Africa and other developing countries could access Facebook via the cheaper devices. Simultaneously, the advent and subsequent rise of the iPhone and Android, coupled with cheap high-speed data connections, gave most of the developed world instantaneous access to any Web site at any time. And, no longer chained to our desktops, access we did.

So, as Facebook VP of Partnerships Dan Rose put it at a recent investor conference, Facebook’s “first pivot” is indeed going “mobile first.”

Staffer Shake-up

The shift comes with what seems a disconcerting omen: Not more than a month after Facebook went public, CTO Bret Taylor announced his planned departure from the company to go work on his own start-up. Admired among his peers in the valley, the loss of the high-profile executive who was charged with leading both Facebook’s mobile and platform efforts looks to be a blow for a company that aims to dive headlong into mobile.

Facebook’s exiting CTO Bret Taylor.

However, with a fresh shuffling of certain key high-level staff and a new management strategy, Taylor’s exit may not be as damaging to Facebook’s mobile prospects as one might think.

Two team members will step in to fill Taylor’s shoes immediately: Mike Vernal, a Facebook vet of four years responsible for work on Facebook Connect and Open Graph, will become head of platform; Cory Ondrejka, formerly of Linden Lab and an SVP at EMI, will lead mobile as director of engineering.

Rather than have one specific department that builds all mobile components, Facebook is taking a more decentralized approach, with each product division working on projects that have mobile components to them.

“Our Photos team actually built the Camera app,” Cox told me, referring to the standalone Facebook application that lets users browse through their friends’ photo streams. “Our Messages team actually built the Messenger app,” he said.

Facebook is also placing certain valuable members of its staff on high-priority projects. Last week, for instance, longtime Facebook product engineering manager Andrew Bosworth told me he was taking on a whole new set of responsibilities going forward, becoming acting head of Facebook’s mobile monetization efforts.

Andrew “Boz” Bosworth.

Bosworth — best known as “Boz” — has been with the company since 2006, and is responsible for creating News Feed, a number of early anti-abuse systems, and Facebook’s “Bootcamp” training program, a six-week crash course in company culture and logistics that all new engineers are required to take. He’s an important figure in the company; putting him in charge of making money from mobile is a definite statement that Facebook is focusing its top people on its biggest problem areas.

Even for those who aren’t top brass, there is significant room for internal movement among departments. Dirk Stoop, for instance, first started working for Facebook in the design and user-experience department, after his company Sofa was acquired in 2011. After working for a while under design director Kate Aronowitz, Stoop moved over to the Photos team full-time, eventually rising to become the lead product manager on the photo app, Camera.

The Future

It’s unclear what the first fruits of the newly realigned Facebook will be, though it’s a safe bet we’ll first see them in mobile improvements.

One long-overdue improvement still looms: An updated version of Facebook’s native smartphone apps. Despite being the most-installed application on smartphones the world around, Facebook’s current mobile iPhone and Android apps are embarrassingly sluggish and unresponsive, in dire need of a revamp.

Fortunately, I’ve heard that we’re not far from a refresh of Facebook’s iOS app, according to three people familiar with the project, which will bring an app that looks exactly the same, but responds exponentially faster than the current version.

Nick Bilton of the New York Times has played with the new app, and attests to this. Bilton says the soon-to-be-scrapped app was mostly built with HTML5 components — an approach strongly supported by Taylor — while the new app was written primarily in Objective-C, i.e. iOS’s native language. It’s indicative, again, of Facebook’s prioritization of mobile performance, optimizing the apps that people use all the time.

There’s also the looming integration of Instagram, the billion-dollar mobile app that Facebook is in the process of acquiring (after it clears the FTC, of course). Though the future of a post-acquisition Instagram is unclear, the 50-million-plus mobile photo users Facebook will add to its masses will be a big win for the company.

And, of course, there is “Buffy,” Facebook’s secret in-house project aimed at creating a proper Facebook phone. It’s unclear, now that Taylor is on his way out, who will spearhead that project.

Will all of Facebook’s new mobile shifting pay off? Lucky for us, we won’t have to speculate for long: The company’s first quarterly earnings call is slated for the end of the month.

(Lead photo courtesy of Da Pu Qiao/Flickr)

The decision is yet another blow to the social network, which is struggling to find a way to monetize its mobile application as more people access Facebook from their phones.

As the fourth-largest game developer on the social network, Wooga was chosen to be one of the first partners to develop a game using HTML5, which would enable users to play games on Facebook through either a browser or a mobile device. However, the company has told AllThingsD that it is planning to announce today that the experiment has been largely unsuccessful, and that it will no longer make games in HTML5.

Clarification: To be clear, Wooga still remains a close partner of Facebook’s and will continue to distribute other mobile games through the social network — just not ones using HTML5.

Instead, the game developer will be focusing its resources on building native games for Apple’s iOS, which demonstrates the strength of that platform for discoverability.

“Given the excitement around the technology, the buzz in the media, the buzz among engineers you’d bump into at conferences, it would have been absurd not to at least test the technology,” said Philipp Moeser, Wooga’s co-founder and CTO, in a blog post.

Over the past few months, Wooga assigned as many as 10 employees to the game, but there were still too many issues remaining. “The mobile app market is a billion-dollar business that HTML5 could significantly disrupt. It has the potential to be a complete game changer, but the technology is not there yet,” Moeser added.

Despite several efforts to promote its game, Wooga said very few players ever discovered it.

After Wooga launched Magic Land Island in October, it was played a total of 1.3 million times and experienced a retention rate of only 5 percent. For comparison, Wooga said that Diamond Dash, on Apple’s iOS, was downloaded more than 18 million times, and had a 50 percent retention rate during the same time period.

As one of the biggest game developers on Facebook, Wooga will also continue to develop Facebook games for the PC, which are typically developed using Adobe’s Flash technology. It will also use Facebook Connect in its mobile games on iOS. As part of the announcement, Wooga said it will rename the game Pocket Island, and will make the code available to the open-source community to continue development work on HTML5, which is still in its early stages.

Wooga said it had encountered a number of problems with the technology, including long initial load times, lack of sound and reliance on Internet connection. Additionally, when the game first launched, there was no icon for it, so once players left Facebook they were often confused as to how to get back in and play.

Wooga also made the decision recently to remove at least three of its games from the Google+ platform, after not gaining enough users to justify it.