There have been reports flying around Twitter and several prominent blogs that Twitter is making a move to acquire Summize, a popular Twitter search engine. In case this is the first you're hearing about Summize, here's a rundown of what it does. It can search Twitter for any string -- most importantly, an @name -- which makes it indispensable when Twitter's tracking function is down. Second, it aggregates and lists the most popular search terms, so you can get a sense of the Twitter zeitgeist.
It's too early to speculate about what effect the acquistion could have on Twitter itself, or how the resulting service would look with Summize's features integrated. We do love the idea of combining two services we use every day, though. Basically, we're keeping our fingers crossed that these rumors are true.
TweetDeck is a desktop client for Twitter build on Adobe AIR. Nothing new there. That sentence could have described Twhirl, Snitter, or Alert Thingy. But TweetDeck has a few features up its sleeve that other Twitter clients lack.
The most noticeable difference is that TweetDeck has a multi-column view. You can glance at all of the latest tweets from your contacts in one column, see replies in another, and direct messages in a third. Or you can create groups of contacts (for example, a group of all your favorite Download Squad bloggers on Twitter), and see just updates from those contacts in a column.
You can customize the display by adding up to 10 columns, or removing columns you don't need. The display is also resizable. There are no themes and no way to adjust the font yet. But the application is still in beta.
Maintaining your online presence can be such a giant pain in the ass nowadays since your followers are looking for constant updates on three hundred different web sites. It's especially annoying to try and publicize your new blog post manually after you've spent precious minutes of your morning typing and re-typing it.
Thankfully, the folks at switchAbit have been gracious enough to develop a web app for us that handles cross-site posting for us. What's not to love about an app that makes it appear as though you're doing much more work than you actually are?
When we first looked at Zenbe two months ago, the service was still in private beta. Now anyone can sign up for Zenbe. The company has also added several new features that help transform the service from a simple webmail client to a personalized start page.
For example, you can now sign into Google Talk and Twitter in the Quick View area on the right side of the page. This lets you chat with your contacts without leaving the email/calendar client. You can update your twitter status or read updates from your contacts.
Zenbe has also created a new email notification script for Firefox, redesigned the task list, and added buttons for easily deleting all items in your deleted and spam folders. Zenbe also says it's working on adding a Gmail-style conversation e-mail view, and is working to add IMAP support.
On July 11th, Zenbe will also be launching an iPhone list application. This is described as the company's first foray into bringing Zenbe to a mobile platform, so we expect we'll see a full Zenbe client for the iPhone and other mobile devices in the future.
While it's nice to think that anyone can create an awesome web page or desktop application just by typing a few lines of code into a computer, the truth is good design is good design, whether it's sketched out on a computer or on a piece of paper. Deeplinking has put together a pictorial showing some of the paper sketches that led to popular applications like Twitter, Vimeo's profile pages, Flickr's Places feature, and the AbiWord word processor port for the XO Laptop.
There are a few other paper prototypes to check out as well. In some cases the paper sketches look strikingly like the finished product. In other cases, they just look like a blur of lines and arrows.
Most of the images were found via Flickr. Odds are if you spend some time searching, you can find a few other gems. Let us know if you find anything good in the comments!
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!
Social web browsing plugin Yoono has emerged from private beta. The new version still wears a beta label, but it's available to the public. Yoono is basically a utility that hangs out in the Firefox sidebar and gives you quick access to instant messenging services, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, and Piczo.
The public beta adds support for Firefox. It also packs a few new features:
Filter your friends activity by network, group, or names
Add FriendFeed and Flickr comments
Send Twitter direct messages and replies
Upload pictures to Facebook or poke friends
Browse Digg video
Yoono will also be adding Google Talk and MySpace soon. There does appear to be a bug that prevents Yoono from working properly on Firefox 3 in some cases. The problem seems to show up if you've installed some other browser plugins. Yoono is expected to release an updated version addressing this problem within the next few days.
Do you have trouble finding like-minded people to follow on Twitter? Not sure how your favorite Twitter celebrities pick the people they follow? Now you can follow the same folks as your Twitter idol -- it's Merlin Mann, just admit it -- by using a tool appropriately called Twannabe.
Twannabe takes your username and your idol's username and tells you who they follow that you don't. We think Twannabe is a useful service that doesn't do itself any favors by framing things in terms of idols and hangers-on. If you just want to follow a bunch of people your best friend knows, it works just as well.
Back before the days of FriendFeed, it was pretty common to see people post things like, "Just wrote a new blog post. What do you think?" to Twitter. That's a good way of getting your link out there, but if anybody actually wanted to answer your question, they'd probably do it in the comments, not in Twitter. Chirrup is a way of tweeting back at someone and commenting at the same time. A neat trick!
Installing Chirrup is as simple as uploading a bit of PHP or installing it as a Wordpress plugin. Most webhosts support this, and the HowTo on the Chirrup site has straightforward instructions for getting it working. Once it's set up, Chirrup will grab any replies to you that contain a URL from your site, and associate the right comments with the right pages. It also knows how to unpack TinyURLs, which eases character-count concerns considerably.
This is probably the awesomest thing we've seen in a while. LOL Feeds takes the lolcat phenomenon and melds it with Twitter, Jaiku, Wordpress, or anything with an RSS feed!
Basically, you plug in your user name for Twitter (or an RSS feed of your choosing) and it will make what you've written into a lolcat complete with images and LOLFontz!
It's no secret that Twitter goes down on occasion. But what are you gonna do if you just neeeeedto tweet?
The great minds at betaworks pondered that question as well and developed twitabit. A simple website that stores your messages and forwards them once Twitter is back up and running. Simply enter your username, password and message and you're off.
If you love Twitter so much that you haven't jumpedship, twitabit may be that life preserver you were waiting for.
As the 2008 US presidential election campaign finally approaches full steam, presumtive nominees Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama are facing off in the media to win hearts and minds. But which candidate is making the most of the of online social media services?
A visit to www.barackobama.com shows that the Obama campaign has established itself firmly in the social media world with an offical presence on major services such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn and more specialist sites such as Glee, Eons, MyBatanga, AsianAve and Faithbase.
On the Republican side, John McCain's presidential campaign has developed its basic Web presence with a mult-faceted Web site but McCain lags far behind Obama in terms of presence and supporters in the key online social media battlegrounds.
It's been a while since we've seen a compelling new browser start page. There was a real flurry of start pages a year or two ago when the likes of Google Personalized Start Page (now iGoogle), NetVibes, Pageflakes, and a myriad of other copycat sites launched. Strangely, even with such an amazing variety of start pages to choose from, we've never found any of them to be particularly compelling.
Then we were introduced to Feedly. Feedly is a start page that only works in Firefox, because it requires a Firefox browser extension to run. It's actually a locally hosted page that goes out and grabs information feed reader sites and social networks that you use, and presents it to you in a friendly magazine style layout.
Feedly can go through your Firefox bookmarks, as well as your My Yahoo! page, NetVibes, Bloglines, Twitter, FriendFeed, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail accounts to find relevant information to present to you. If we can offer one tip, it would be to choose carefully. When setting up our page, we checked every possible option, and ended up with far too many feeds, and too many feeds that we had lost interest in that were still in some account somewhere that Feedly found.
Feedly also has a very tight integration with Google Reader, and anything that you read in Feedly will be marked as read in Google Reader, and vice versa. This is cool, but it's also dangerous, since and feeds that you add to Feedly (or that it finds) are automatically added to your Google Reader account. So again, choose carefully what feeds you want to be seeing in Feedly, as they will affect your Google Reader account.
But once it's all set up, Feedly is a very useful and elegantly done start page - so much so, that we haven't been compelled to remove it. And since no other start page has captured our interest, that's certainly something.
HelloTxt is a web service that lets you send out status updates to your contacts on a wide array of social networking and micro-blogging services. The site makes it easy to send identical updates to Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Plaxo, Plurk, Tumblr, and other popular and not so popular services. But up until recently there was one major problem with HelloTxt: The communication was one way. You could send, but not receive status updates.
Now HelloTxt has added a new feature called Status Snap which lets you read updates from your contacts on supported networks. Right now, only Twitter and Facebook are supported, but HelloTxt plans to add more networks to Status Snap over time.
In order to enable Status Snap you need to login to your HelloTxt account and click the Status Snap boxes next to each network you want to enable the service for. HelloTxt has also added a lifestreaming feature that shows all of your recent activity on your main page.
There have been reports flying around Twitter and several prominent blogs that Twitter is making a move to acquire Summize, a popular Twitter search engine. In case this is the first you're hearing about Summize, here's a rundown of what it does. It can search Twitter for any string -- most importantly, an @name -- which makes it indispensable when Twitter's tracking function is down. Second, it aggregates and lists the most popular search terms, so you can get a sense of the Twitter zeitgeist. 
TwitterCounter
As the 2008 US presidential election campaign finally approaches full steam, presumtive nominees Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama are facing off in the media to win hearts and minds. But which candidate is making the most of the of online social media services?
