Thanks to the popularity of microblogging and status sites like Twitter, Identi.ca, Pownce, and Plurk, we're being given to more information faster than ever before. The Pope's recent visit to New York prompted an incredible number of updates - as many as 800 tweets a minute. So how do you find important, relevant content amongst the constant flow of updates?

You find a great tool to do it for you, that's how.

NowPublic's Scan offers an incredible new way to look at what's happening right now by tapping in to data from the aforementioned sites, geocoding it, and analyzing it - all within mere moments of an event taking place.

Useful? Without a doubt. Cool? Absolutely. Revolutionary? The potential is certainly there for Scan to change the way people find and follow up-to-the-minute stories.

Len Brody, NowPublic's CEO, led me through a couple of topics to illustrate how Scan works. Take Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, for example. Scan provides the "engine velocity," which averages the number of pertinent posts per hour (Palin rates 109/hr). The five most posted links are displayed and - not too surprisingly - Exploration's listing of Palin rumors tops the rankings.

Brad first reviewed Ping.FM back in march, and the service has come a long way since then. Today, they announced that they're ready to do away with invites and open up the service to the public.

Before getting my beta code, I really wasn't all that interested in any of the microblog/status sites that exist. There are just too damn many of them, and I don't have time to update a dozen sites every time I read or post something interesting. Ping has made that chore so unbelievably easy that I'm now getting some use out of my Twitter, Pownce, Plurk, Friendfeed, Rejaw, Facebook, and myriad other accounts.

Apart from using the dashboard on the Ping.FM website, you can also update via email or IM. All you have to do is add Ping as a buddy in your favorite app, enter a verification code, and any messages you send will be sent to your default list. If you're an iGoogle user, Ping's got a gadget for that, too. I've talked about their mobile version as well, which I love since it'll run on any old handheld with wifi access.

Ping is a great service, and I can't imagine trying to do manually what their service does for me. It's a winner.

Microblogging options abound, most with drippy sounding names and many with half-baked functionality, having only been thrown together because Twitter was down again due to some kind of malfunction with the staffroom espresso machine. Rejaw, on the other hand, offers users a solid alternative with a number of excellent features. Without whales.

The basic idea's pretty much the same: shout and post something on your main profile page, whisper to send a private message to someone. nothing really special here yet, but bear with me.

Shouts, whispers, and replies are posted to the Rejaw servers almost instantly, so what you actually get is a more like an IRC/microblogging mashup than just another Twitter wannabe. The interface is nicely Ajaxed, and extremely responsive. Keep an eye on the status overlay at the bottom of your browser window, it'll let you know when new shouts and whispers are posted.

Adobe AIR-based microblogging client Twhirl already supported Twitter, Friendfeed and Seesmic, and now its coverage of the world of mini-updates gets even broader with the addition of Identi.ca. Identi.ca is something like a less-popular open-source version of Twitter. This is a big deal for the Identi.ca folks, because Twhirl may actually be better-known than their service.

Along with potentially pumping up the userbase of a fledgling microblogging site, Twhirl has also position itself to be to these micropost what Trillian and Adium are to IM. Keeping several services readily accessible from the same app is a proven winner when it's done right, and Twhirl delivers on the usability and appearance side of things. It was already one of the most popular clients back when it could only handle Twitter, and its main competition is going to come from some of the better Twitter-specific clients that attract people who don't use the other sites Twhirl handles.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Twitter is a vast network of individuals posting about all sorts of different things. Take for instance this very second, members are posting about cupcakes, the military, Ferrari, mobileme, the Olympics and much more. But these topics change so quickly you would be mad if you tried to keep up with them yourself. Thankfully, Twitscoop has automated this process so that you can continue to sit in front of your computer staring endlessly at other people conversation.

Twitscoop works by monitoring all the publicly available tweets out there and measures the frequency of the words used. The more mentions of a subject the more popular it must be.

Twitscoop then places them in alphabetical order in a Tag Cloud, the more popular the word the larger it is compared to the rest in the cloud. Mouse over the tag to find out who is talking about what, click on the tag and it will take you to a graph that will display the frequency of the topic along with the users. With all of this information available, you'll be one well informed Twitter!

In our time with using the site we only had one gripe with it, the lack to sort the cloud via the size of the tag. This is only a minor complaint really but something that should be added for those of us out there that like a little order in our lives.

There are already more desktop apps for Twitter than we could ever possibly cover without losing our minds. But what about that OTHER microblogging service, Plurk? A couple of people have hacked the mobile version into Adobe Air to create two similar apps: PlurkAir and PlurkIt. This is ok for now, but it's nowhere near the level that Twitter clients have achieved.

That's where Plurker comes in. It's scheduled to be the first dedicated Windows desktop version of Plurk, and the feature list looks pretty impressive. Sort Plurks using custom searches, set alerts for private Plurks you receive, enjoy autocompleting @message functionality, and way too much more for us to list here. If Plurker is as good as promised, it could give Plurk a big user boost by taking away one major excuse not to use the service.

With Twitter, you generally follow people you know or at least have heard about from others, but that limits your social circle. Twellow attempts to change how you find people to follow by indexing all the publicly available messages floating around the twitter network into searchable categories.

Twellow's website is laid out so you can click on a category and it will display all the members that have expressed some interest in that particular subject. In addition, Twellow also provides a search box for more free form searching.

But if the idea that your messages are being indexed so that others can find you is a bit unnerving, just make sure you send your twits in private.

TwitterCounter has one simple purpose in life, to give you a counter to display the number of people that follow you, from Twitter, on your website.

Just enter your user name and TwitterCounter will display the number of people following you over a seven day period. To display the updating counter on your website simply copy the available code and paste it to your site for all to see.

If you're really into your Twitter stats, enter your email address to receive daily updates. Because we all know you're only a few followers short of that elusive number one spot!

Plurk is a new micro-blogging service that looks a lot like a Twitter clone. At face value Plurk allows you to post updates letting people know what you're up to. You know, telling everyone you're brushing your cat, or feeding your hair, or trying to break the world beer drinking record whilst standing on your head.

The normal stuff.

There might be more that meets the eye to this little service though.

Right off the bat, here are some features that make Plurk stand out:

• No character restrictions
• More elegant display of your "timeline", with Ajax drag and drop capability
• Pre-set emoticons and prefixes such as "was, is, will"

Pretty basic stuff, right?

Well here are the two potential game changers:

• Karma Points
• Cliques

What are Karma points? Basically it's a measure of how active you and your Plurk friends are on the site. The more Plurk services you use (such as instant messaging or uploading a profile picture) the more points you'll rack up.

And what are cliques? Well you know the answer to that. It's the ability to group your friends together into categories that you choose. Pownce lets you do this already, and so does Facebook...but the possibilities are endless with this one. Think of being able to send updates to very unique groups of people. Family, friends, possible investors or colleagues. You could spend an infinite amount of time shuffling your cliques based on what's happening around you. Has someone fallen off the map or lost favor with you? Then they're out of the clique. It's sticky AND useful.

Twitter's downtime and focus on marketing over substance has maddened a lot of people. Who will be there to clean up the mess? Don't shirk, it might be Plurk. On the other hand, Plurk may have to deal with the same scaling and reliability issues as Twitter. The service was down for a brief period this morning. What do you think? Are you ready to leave Twitter for a service that offers more features? Or would you rather stick to a network that already has a loyal userbase?

UPDATE: There is indeed a 140 character limit.

If you think Twitter's 140-character limit doesn't go far enough to restrict users when it comes to nanoblogging, you'll be glad to know there's Adocu. Adocu is a nanoblogging platform with a one-word limit for each post, which "keeps it short and simple," but also makes it tricky to say anything meaningful without typingyourmessageoutlikethis, forming one long word.

With Twitter experiencing stability issues, we guess the proliferation of new nanoblogging platforms are waiting hungrily for everyone who's threatened to quit Twitter to put their money where their mouths are and do it. We're not ruling out the possibility of a Twitter killer, but Adocu is probably not it. They're working on buying up an SMS shortcode, but for now they lack the all-important text-message updating feature that helped Twitter become so prevalent. It's not that Adocu doesn't do what it's supposed to do, it's just that even if it had all of Twitter's features, plus stability, it would be hard to sell users on a one-word blogging system.

Forgive us, great Ceiling Cat. We discovered the only way you can even attempt to introduce a service called Poodz is to use LOLspeak. And even then... we're totally fearing for our mortal souls.

Poodz (oh come on, stop giggling) is a microblogging service. Clear on that? Yeah, we weren't entirely sure what microblogging was either, but since a few of us here are pretty short, we decided to check it out..

Turns out there are no height restrictions with a microblog. Truth be told, we still don't really know what a microblog is as opposed to a plain ol' videoblog. That's what Poodz is, when it's all boiled down.

It's kind of a Twitter-esque, YouTubey, Facebook-infused service. It's kind of like Seesmic in a way. Well, actually, in a lot of ways. From country of origin to general functionality and concept it is, there's no denying, a lot like Seesmic.

Earlier in the month, we told you about TwitterStats, a downloadable script that would graph your Twitter statistics. The author of TwitterStats, Damon Cortesi, thought it would be great to take TwitterStats to the next level. He did so by making TwitterStats into a Ruby application that you could run without having to download and run a script, a task perhaps only advanced users are capable of.

When you visit TweetStats for the first time, the website prompts you for your Twitter username. Another interesting piece to the front page is the graph that shows you the most popular Twitter apps. FYI, currently the web interface is the most popular at 46% followed by Twitterrific with 21%. After you enter in your username, TweetStats gives you a basic graph of your Twitter activity. As you can see by the screenshot above, my most active Twitter day is Wednesday.

We like TweetStat's simplicity and functionality. Being able to link back to the graph url is a nice feature for those who want to show their graph on their blog or website.

Thanks Damon for this addicting new Twitter tool! Now we stand to get even less done today as we play with TweetStats.

Curious about your twitter activity? Have a Mac? Then download his script and get busy creating your own graphs. We look forward to seeing the comments with your discoveries!

Tools for Twitter are cropping up all over the place to help you get your Twitter addiction game on. Twitbin is one of those enablers tools. As an extension in your Firefox browser, it allows you to post Twitter messages (or tweets as they are called) within the browser and receive tweets as well.

Once you download the extension, the Twitbin icon shows up in your browser. When you click on it, Twitbin opens as a sidebar and displays a toolbar. The gear icon allows you to set your preferences, either public or friend streams, and auto refresh settings.

The home icon lets you log into Twitter and once you do that, Twitbin streams your tweets. Sweet. When you close Twitbin, it stops gathering your tweets, and when you reopen, it will restart the tweet stream.

Twitbin works on Windows and Mac OS X, and possibly Linux as well (anyone test it out yet?). Stay tuned for a comprehensive "All things Twitter" post coming soon.

If Twitter and all its buzz in the web community can be considered its own growing world of sorts, then Leo Laporte - one of the service's foremost users according to Twitterholic - just sent ripples through its oceans by announcing his decision to move to Jaiku, a similar service that seems to have longer legs and quite a few more features. Since this was the first we've heard about Jaiku, we couldn't resist swinging by to sign up for an account to see what this micro-blogging, über-status message service has to offer.

In a nutshell: a lot. For starters, Jaiku acts as more of an 'online presence,' allowing you to do things like import RSS feeds from any of your other web properties (including photo feeds from the likes of Flickr) in addition to its fundamental feature of allowing you to post 140-character, SMS-friendly updates of what you're thinking or doing. Jaiku also has refreshing bits of genius sprinkled everywhere, such as the ability to group update notifications via email instead of sending single notices every time any contact posts something. On the downside, however, Jaiku doesn't seem to have nearly as much of a 3rd party following. It has no API (yet), so we're having a hard time finding Jaiku equivalents for TriQQr and the Iconfactory's spectacular Twitterrific client, let alone all the widgets, plugins and mashups which Twitter has quickly grown a reputation for.

Still, Jaiku offers plent of micro-blogging goodness, so give it a spin if Twitter simply isn't offering enough meat to sink your free time into.