Over the past year, there's been something of a gold-rush for Twitter clients on the iPhone. From Twitterrific to Twitterfon, Tweetie to the recently-launched TweetDeck, there's a bucketload of apps to let you use Twitter on the go. Today sees the launch of another challenger for space on your homescreen: Birdfeed [iTunes Link]: "A very nice Twitter client for your iPhone".

In trying Birdfeed this evening, it's clear that a huge amount of time has been spent on the application from the exceptional icons (similar in style to those in another Download Squad favourite-app, Things) to some smart touches. Here's just some that caught my eye:

• a small dot in the 'Compose Tweet' button to show the presence of a draft
• a super-handy 'home' button that takes you back to your original list of tweets when you're drilling-down in the options
• the auto-loading of more tweets once you reach the bottom of the list
• integration with services like Favrd.

It's worth noting that Birdfeed doesn't do absolutely everything you may see in other clients. However that's of little concern to me quite frankly, as it features all the options I need on the go. Birdfeed is extremely well designed, super-snappy and well worth the $4.99 price. I know, we're fickle here at Download Squad when it comes to Twitter clients. However if you're wanting a slick new Twitter client, Birdfeed gets our thumbs up.

Sites like Rapidshare and Megaupload tend to be used heavily by music blogs and other sites that don't have the bandwidth or the storage space to handle a high volume of downloads. Even the biggest mirror services can get bogged down, though. Sometimes one mirror will be slow, your file will be taken down, or you'll reach the limited number of downloads some sites allow. Mirroring your file on several services at once is a possible solution, and DropRecord makes it easy to upload to all of them at once.

Ok, so maybe DropRecord doesn't upload to every single mirror out there, but it hits around a dozen sites, most of which you've probably heard of: the aforementioned Rapidshare and Megaupload, Zshare, Mediafire and Sendspace are all included. You can also search DropRecord for files people have uploaded with it. The only catch is the 500mb upload limit, but a lot of individual mirror sites impose similar caps.

Back in 2006, Netflix launched a contest to improve its movie recommendation algorithm. To win the Netflix Prize, a team has to improve the accuracy of the Netflix movie recommendations by 10% or more. The prize is a million dollars. Now it looks like one team may have won the contest, with a score of 10.05%. Although several teams had come close, nobody was able to hit the 10% mark until members of four top teams joined forces. It's not over yet, though. Other teams now have 30 days to best the 10,05% result, with the prize going to the best overall score.

BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, the first team to top 10%, includes researchers from Yahoo and AT&T, and many of the team members have collected Netflix's Yearly Progress Prize for their attempts in previous years. The rules of the contest require that the winning team explain how their algorithm works, and allow Netflix to use their work. This victory may have come sooner than Netflix expected: the contest was scheduled to run until 2011 if no one could come up with a suitable solution before then.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and my queue of things to listen seems to be growing constantly; I can never catch up. What's frustrating about this is that most people talk too slowly on podcasts. To be fair, they are speaking at a reasonable conversational pace, but when you are simply listening to a conversation rather than taking part in it, you can take it all in at a much faster pace.

While iPods have been able to speed up audio books for some time, the latest 3.0 iPhone / iPod Touch release has added the ability to speed up (and slow down) podcasts as well as audiobooks. That's the good news. The bad news is that whatever the algorithm is that is being used to speed up the audio ends up sounding quite rough.

For podcast listeners that are not using an iPhone or iPod Touch, there are not many options for speeding up podcasts, short of doing it yourself manually with a program like Audacity.

Luckily, there's a new site that is looking to take care of this problem for us. PodShifter is a site that will allow you to enter the RSS feed for a given podcast, and it will spit out a new feed URL that will deliver podcasts that are sped up to exactly the speed you prefer. You can choose from slowing down your feed to 0.6 times its original speed, all the way up to 3.0 times the original speed, in increments of 0.2. Based on the demo MP3s on PodShifter's homepage, the sped-up audio is quite smooth.

Unfortunately, in my testing PodShifter has generated new podcast RSS URLs, but when I put them into iTunes, the audio files that I get are exactly the same speed as the originals. I was surprised that they downloaded at all to begin with, so I'm hopeful that there is processing going on in the background and a new version of the podcast will arrive that actually is sped up.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that it is quite likely that some podcast publishers will not be thrilled about a republishing service such as this. Larger podcasts that rely on download statistics for determining advertising rates could potentially lose track of the subscribers that sit behind a republishing service like PodShifter. And unfortunately PodShifter's site is not particularly forthcoming with information, so it's hard to determine whether they offer publishers some manner of tracking statistics properly.

In any event, the service that PodShifter provides is a very useful one, and one I hope will succeed. Now excuse me while I go refresh my podcasts to see if any of my PodShifter subscriptions have delivered on its promise.

[via Lifehacker]

There's a lot of great financial tracking software out there now. Sites like Mint and Rudder that link up to your bank account and track your spending automatically are great, but what if you don't want to give your account information to a finance site? Texthog is a lot like old-school DIY checkbook balancing, except replacing pen and paper with SMS, email and Twitter.

You can send a transaction to Texthog through one of the aforementioned mobile methods, or just log into the site and add one later. Logging in is also good for changing dates and such if you text a transaction to Texthog after the fact. You can also tag and organize your expenses, and generate spending reports. It might be more work than letting some automated service track your account, but it's also more accurate, because you're recording expenses as you charge them, rather than when they eventually clear your account.

If your job has you tasked with monitoring your company's online presence, you're probably dealing with Twitter in some way. Running occasional manual searches for your company's name is one way to go, but a better way would be to sign up with a service like TweetBeep.

TweetBeep is a free service that will email you as frequently as once per hour with any Twitter mentions of the search terms of your choice. The service is ad-supported, but if you find that you need it, TweetBeep also offers a premium option for $20US/month that allows you to receive updates as frequently as every 15 minutes, up to 200 different alert searches, and no advertising.

While TweetBeep allows you to set a number of criteria for your alerts, one of the most interesting is the ability to set an "Attitude" criteria. You can choose from three:

• Positive attitude
• Negative attitude
• Asking a question

This appears to be a fantastic way to stay on top of how people are perceiving your company or brand, and gives you the ability to very quickly react to your customers or users. It can also be useful for heavy Twitter users to ensure they don't miss any mentions. I should note that as of the time of this writing I had some difficulty with the email confirmation process - it took multiple requests and over an hour before my email confirmation arrived in my inbox.

[via Stay N' Alive]

Google's blogging about making the web faster, and they're backing it up with Page Speed, a Firefox add-on that makes sure your webpages use best practices to load as quickly as possible. Page Speed was quietly launched earlier this month on the Google Code blog, but now it's mentioned on The Official Google Blog, in a post that lays out some factors that slow down the web, and how Google thinks they can be fixed.

The Google plan for a faster web includes stuff like HTML5 support, more performance diagnostic tools like Page Speed and Yahoo's YSlow, and greater adoption of broadband. So, what are some of the best practices that Page Speed might suggest? Mostly, minor code tweaks like cleaning up your CSS so you only use each declaration once, or removing unnecessary tags from your HTML. There's some more advanced stuff that gets into PHP and JavaScript as well.

One note: Page Speed also requires the Firebug add-on for Firefox, which is very useful in its own right.

Is Twitter a popularity contest? If you think so, then you might be interested in Twitter-Train, but for the sane people reading this you'll probably want to move on.

Twitter-Train is essentially a pyramid scheme whereby if you follow a prescribed list of Twitter accounts, you will be added to that same list for the next 40 Twitter-Train users. Basically, by willfully polluting your Twitter stream with updates from Twitter accounts that you care nothing about, you get the benefit of being followed by 40 people that care nothing about you. That's a win-win if I ever saw one.

I mean seriously, what is the point of this? I can think of only one, and that would be if you somehow got paid to inflate an account's Twitter followers by any means possible. But in terms of real value, there is none to be had here. You now have to filter through tweets that mean nothing to you, and the "followers" that you acquire are essentially doing the same thing.

I suspect this is one of the reasons that Twitter has not yet added host-side filtering to the service (the other being that Twitter seems busy just keeping the service up). Twitter clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop offer client-side filtering, which allows you to "follow" huge amounts of people while actually ignoring them. While I suppose to each their own, it's still frustrating to see how users willfully abuse a system just to inflate their follower numbers to appear more important. Twitter seems to agree, given that they are disabling the auto-follow feature that had been enabled for certain select Twitter users.

I think Twitter should hide follower counts so that there is very little ego-boost from having a huge number of followers. This isn't going to stop people that want to use Twitter as a spamming service, but it will kill the ego game that is plaguing most social networks.

It looks like real-time search - mainly built around Twitter - is the hot new bandwagon to jump on. Twitscoop, Scoopler, Twingly, Searchmerge, Collecta ... we've written about all of these this year, and the grab for real-time search traffic hasn't stopped yet. CrowdEye is the latest entry to catch our attention in this already-crowded field.

CrowdEye is limited compared to some of the above-mentioned competitors, in that it only searches Twitter. Collecta, for example, searches photos, news stories, and other microblogging services, and offers the option to filter any of those out if they're too much for you. CrowdEye does offer some Twitter data that its competitors don't, though: the popular links results are nice, and the graph of popularity over time for your search term could also be useful. For getting a comprehensive picture of what's going on in real time, though, I think search sites are going to have to go beyond Twitter. Even popular Twitpics and Yfrog pictures would add a lot to CrowdEye, and that seems within the site's capabilities to do.

The 140-character limit on each post is one of the most appealing things about Twitter, but it can also be one of the most annoying. That's why uri.is was created. You can write as much as you want and click to post to Twitter, and uri.is will link to your full text via a shortened URL instead of cutting you off. Sometimes you have something that's too long to tweet, but not long enough or permanent enough to post on your blog, so uri.is offers something in between.

Uri.is was built in a weekend, but it's already got some good features, like auto-shortening URLs within your posts, to make sure as much of your long post as possible actually goes out to Twitter. The developer reports that he's interested in having uri.is integrated with a major Twitter app like Seesmic or Tweetdeck, which is really the only way to achieve the goal of making it as easy to post long messages to Twitter as short ones. A bookmarklet or a Greasemonkey script would perhaps be more realistic ways to improve the service, so it's nice to see that those are in the works, too.

Bozeman, Montana -- a city just 5 miles to the east of freakin' nowhere -- as part of a more thorough set of background checks, is asking job applicants to, "list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc."

Federal law states that you can't ask about religion or marital status when interviewing you for a job, but both of those things are conveniently available in most Facebook profiles. Added to which, giving a prospective employer all your logins and passwords gives them access to direct and private messages, and in the case of most social networks, indirect access to the information of other people who never granted the city access. The whole thing violates just about every social network's Terms of Service, and just generally feels slimy.

In an interview with local news, the city's attorney says it isn't "trying to find out all kinds of information about the person that we're not able to use or shouldn't use in the hiring process."

Current job listings for Bozeman include a Water/Sewer technician so, presumably, with a high school diploma and a clean Facebook record, you could get hired to dig around in something that smells almost as bad as this hiring policy.

[via BoingBoing]

Aviary has added a new tool to its suite of online image editing applications. The company is calling Falcon an "image markup editor" as a way to differentiate it from Phoenix, which is Aviary's online "image editor."

Basically, Falcon was designed to power the new Talon Firefox add-on I mentioned last week. It offers basic image editing tools without all the bells and whistles found in Phoenix. The utility is less than 90k in size, which means it loads much faster than Talon, letting you edit images found on the web or uploaded from your desktop almost immediately. Today Aviary released it as a standalone tool that will work in almost any web browser.

Falcon doesn't support layers like Phoenix. And the tools are all much simpler to use, which could make Falcon attractive to anyone intimidated by fuller featured image editors like Phoenix, or Photoshop.

Spezify is a kind of freeform search tool that incorporates websites, videos, images, microblog posts and more into a grid of results. It's not going to beat Google at finding some specific thing you're looking for, but it's impressive if you're looking to get an overview of a topic, especially if you're a visual person. Instead of showing text results, like Google, Spezify is more like a multimedia wall that you can scroll across vertically or horizontally to take in information at a glance.

Spezify also provides a list of related words at the top of the results screen, which can help you explore a topic further. Videos in the results are all embedded, and can be played without leaving the site, and a lot of the text results feature slightly longer previews than Google results do. All in all, I don't think Spezify is meant to replace any of the major search engines, but you might consider using it when you want a visual summary of a given topic.

It was only a matter of time before the P2P community came up with some workable options for anonymizing our activities. Sure, Tor has been able to do it for quite some time, but torrenting is very taxing on the network and transfers can be painfully slow. Recently, however, three new services have appeared that could provide the privacy protection we've been waiting for.

iPredator VPN - We've known this one was coming for a while. The beta launch date got pushed back quite a bit, but that little courtroom skirmish may have slowed things down a little. In a blog post yesterday, the iPredator team announced that the first 3,000 beta invites have been sent out. If you're in the queue, don't start drooling just yet. There are 179,999 others names lined up.

Furk (pictured) - Find a torrent, paste it into Furk, and you're provided a direct download link. Even with the free account, I still averaged about 275k/s, which isn't much slower than what I typically manage on a straight torrent download (thanks to my ISP). Download links are also passed to you with SSL encryption. Just don't use it to download stuff like what's in the capture - it's there for illustration purposes only, of course...

Paid accounts are just under 10 Euros a month or 24/three months.

BitBlinder - Jay posted about this service the other day. The open source project aims to anonymize not only torrent downloads but also your web browsing. How does it work? Think of your Internet traffic as the fruit in a smoothie. Now take all your friends' fruit, chuck it all into a blender, and press 'liquify'. Pour it into a glass, and all you see is smoothie - you can't tell what's your fruit and what belongs to your friends.

As with iPredator you may be waiting a while to get your invite and download link.