Rollover zoom allows shoppers to get a better look at the arrangements, large Facebook and Pinterest buttons promote prolific sharing. Integrated Facebook Connect allows high school students to login with their FB accounts, while account and guest checkout options allow parents a Facebook-free shopping experience. Expanded and custom shipping options allow Promflow to enter selected schools and their corresponding prom events with dates as a shipping selection, arrangements are delivered based on the event to ensure fresh and beautiful bouquets.

The free community version of the open source Magento framework allows for easy integrated taxes, shipping rates, scalability, marketing, search engine optimization, and catalog-management.

These niche social networks focus on specific aspects of human interaction, especially people with similar interests, and giving specific, existing groups ownership of their own data or a percentage of the social network. “These are not clones of Facebook [and] our clients are all motivated entrepreneurs with clear, innovative ideas of what they want to create.” Tullysmith said “The people we work with recognize the gold rush into social networking and they have come to stake their claim.”

And a very large claim it may be. Last June, Google, the Mountain View, Calif. company whose name has become synonymous with on-line search, launched Google+, their own social network which has skyrocketed to a 100 million user community. But with large players in the social networking space, is there enough room left for small startups? Tullysmith notes “In 2003, Facebook was not even a startup, it was a few sharp college students with an idea and programming experience. Then it killed MySpace. My typical clients are well funded, well motivated entrepreneurs who know what they want to build and then come to us to build it. Social networks even at the niche level are very big business.”

Breakwater Syndicate, LLC is a boutique web development firm based in Santa Rosa California. The new world company is of a group of top level web developers and designers. Focused on a near zero carbon footprint, the company has no offices and no employees, and all workers are contractors who get to pick and choose the projects they’re passionate about and want to work on. This allows the company to be profitable while delivering the highest quality of work and staying competitive in a global economy.

The latest major iteration of WordPress adds drag-and-drop uploader, hover menus for the navigation, new toolbar, improved co-editing support, and a Tumblr importer for users. We’ll be seeing the improvements on the developer side with the new editor API, new jQuery version, better ways to hook into the help screens, and more performant post-slug-only permalinks. We’re particularly excited about iPad support, as previous versions were clunky and hard to use on the iPad, even to update blog posts.

We expect to use 3.3 for new WordPress projects in 2012.

When it’s a retail site, shopping cart bugs would be a problem. When it’s a Top 10 NYC Startups to Watch as identified by Time, Today Show featured, ecommerce community listing site that’s been featured in InStyle magazine, it’s a really big problem.

For some users going through the multi step shopping cart process, they bounced back to step one from step three and couldn’t get to the fee and per item checkout through paypal to complete their purchase of discounted designer clothes and accessories. They’d had contractors work on the same problem in the past, but they weren’t able to solve the issue. Within a few days worth of work troubleshooting and making code changes, purchases were completing without a snag.

Google Plus for business to launch later in 2011? Google is indicating the the forthcoming Google Plus pages for business will be able to integrate Google Analytics and Google Adwords. They’ve accepted some beta testers for entities, but have apparently closed submissions. At the Web 2.0 Summit Google SVP of Social Vic Gundotra revealed that Google will eventually support other forms of identity, it is assumed that means pseudonyms and entities.

We’ve been adding +1 buttons to our client sites since they emerged a few months ago. There is mention of the +1 button being of value as far as Google SEO is concerned. “Naturally, everyone speculated that the more +1 clicks that a site received, the higher that Google would esteem it for that particular search term. Google denied this at +1’s implementation but did not dismiss the possibility of +1 affecting search rankings in the future – which means it will be a reality soon enough,” submitted Naveen Hariprasad of Forbes.com.

When clients ask us about Google +, we suggest that they start with personal pages to get used to the interface, and we’ll keep them updated when business profiles are ready to launch. The rumored Google Plus for business comes with a host of business specific features like a business-specific Hangout feature and ways to engage customers that should be worth waiting for.

Social Media Dialogue.com: Google Plus for Business Pages to launch later this year

Forbes.com: Things Small Businesses Should Know About Google Plus

Mashable: Google+ To Support Pseudonyms

The topography/topology idea got me thinking. One possible way to do this would be for there to be a peice of software that operates on client machines, Windows, Linux, and Mac. This would be running on HTTPS port 443 for example and would handle and process authentication requests. Authentication requests. So web sites would simply include a POST form that would be posted back to the client machine, the client machine would handle authentication information and would then post back information post authentication to the server side.

When you go to login you would click a “login” button and be taken to your local HTTPS server via post, you would then fill in the login information on your own local machine (this could be verified by displaying an image to you that you captured when you installed the system, if you don’t see this image you have been fished and you are on someone else’s server), when you have successfully logged in then you see a page that has a button to “click here to return to requesting site” that will accomplish a post request back to the site and will send whatever information you have configured for it to receive (which can be as little as “Authenticated”). Given that this post request is originated from your machine more checks can occur including ensuring that the receiving site is encrypted using HTTPS, if it is not then you would receive a warning. This would make it so that you are always informed what of your personal identity information is being sent to the server. Since you must login in order to authenticate multiple identities can be stored on the machine.

When you go to sign up for an account on a website, you would trade API keys with the server one time with the server displaying an API key (perhaps the md5 hash of the date in GMT, the current page URI, the server domain name and the requested site username) and a return entry point URL, you would copy paste that key and entry point URL into the client, the client would then generate a new key (perhaps the md5hash of the server hash, the server domain and the client account database id) which you would paste into the server box, completing the connection.

The client would store all the personal data the server can ever access about you, email, name, etc. The server would make queries and you can control which servers can access which data fields.

I would love comments on this idea and to start a discussion around it. If you are interested I am thinking about starting this project under the MIT license using a cut down nginx or other small web server and PHP and sqlite3. Perhaps standardization on a different port 1443 would work. The installer package would use ssl to generate the HTTPS certificates and possibly even add those to the various browsers trusted certificates thus eliminating HTTPS errors. Assuming the use of off the shelf technologies the system woudl be cross platform as soon as it was packaged in an NSIS or MSI installer for Windows, a dmg Package for Mac OSX and a tar ball for linux (ubuntu packages would be a nice touch). Deployment may even be possible via browser extensions. Using sqlite3 makes it easy to copy the identity information from machine to machine if you have several machines.

In any case advantages of this methodology would be, transparency, portability, personal data management, compatibility (no flash or java required, heck this woudl work in lynx or curl as it is just HTTP POST)

This is likely not a complete long term solution, however it is a begining, and from there it may be possible to develop a more complete solution over time.