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Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0, Web

Twitterfriends gives you the stats on your Twitter network

With all the uproar about third-party Twitter app security and authorization, I thought it would be nice to talk about a Twitter site that works without logging in. Twitterfriends generates statistics about your conversations on Twitter: what percentage of your posts are @replies? What percentage are links? Who do you talk to the most? Twitterfriends can tell you all of this.

It also provides a visual representation of the network of people you @reply with. It can even go to the next step, and show your friends of friends. That's all without putting in a password.

If you do feel like logging in, you can see who in your network is inactive, and who's online - presumably based on the time of their latest tweet. This can be handy if you're looking to prune back an overgrown network. Mostly, though, Twitterfriends is a fun way to find out about and evaluate how you're using Twitter.

Filed under: Fun, Productivity, iPhone

Weightbot: simple weight tracker for iPhone and iTouch

I love apps that make a very specific task as easy as it ought to be. That's why I love Weightbot, an iPhone/iPod Touch weight tracking app developed by Tapbots. I confess that I used to keep track of my weight in a Numbers document. It wasn't too much trouble, but I didn't look forward to it. With Weightbot, it's so easy that it's almost -- dare I say it? -- fun.

I snatched up Weightbot right away when I found out it was on sale for a buck during the holidays, and I was not disappointed. Its basic functions are pretty intuitive: move the slider to a date, click on the weight display, and set your weight. Other handy features: switch from pounds to metric, set a target weight, enter your height to get a BMI calculation, set a privacy code, and back up your data to a web account. The coolest feature by far is graph mode, though. It's a quick way to visually track your progress, and it includes your target weight and a trend line.

[via Daring Fireball]

Evri.com: Zeitgeist for news

Evri
Every year Google releases a zeitgeist, a list of everything that is popular on the web based on their search data. But what if once a year just isn't enough for you? Then you turn to Evri.

Evri is a site currently in beta that uses news sources on the web to chart the popularity of different subjects in the categories of People, Places and Things. Clicking on the individual circles in the flow chart opens up a list of news articles in which they appear. Using Evri.com is certainly one way to keep up to date on whats hot and what's not.

Filed under: Audio, Fun, Internet

Visualize your Last.fm listening habits with LastGraph



If you listen to a ton of music and the word "scrobble" is part of your vocabulary, you'll get a kick out of Lastgraph. It's a service that generates interesting visual representations of your Last.fm listening history. You can view a sweet line graph of your listening to a given artist, or you can generate some snazzy posters of your overall listening.

The posters are pretty huge and take quite a while to render, but you can actually print them out as some stylish, informative wall art. If you don't need something that huge, there's also a smaller version available through the quick timeline feature. You can also export your data as an Excel file, a CSV or JSON.

Filed under: Fun, Internet, E-mail, Productivity, Google, Freeware, web 2.0

Mail Trends: what's your email look like on a graph?

Mail Trends
Ever wonder what your email behavior looks like on a graph? Because if you have, we've good news for some of you -- well, those of you that use Gmail. Google coder Mihai Parparita just released a Python program called Mail Trends, which can show you various graphs of data extracted from your email account. You can examine your email behavior from various angles:
  • Distribution of messages by year, month, day, day of week and time of day
  • Distribution of messages by size and your top 40 largest messages
  • The top senders, recipients and mailing lists you're on.
  • Distributions of senders, recipients and mailing lists over time
  • The distribution of thread lengths and the lists and people that result in the longest threads
If you don't use Gmail, fear not. The plan is to eventually release a version that works with other email services, though it is unknown when that version will see the light of day.

[via Googlified]

Filed under: Business, Finance, Utilities, Office, Productivity, Web services

Instacalc: Quick, powerful, shareable calculator

Instacalc
Instacalc just blows my mind. It's such a simple idea, brilliantly executed: It's sort of like a Web 2.0 mini-Excel, allowing you to quickly create a calculator for anything--body mass, loan repayment, YouTube valuation--with simple or complex calculations, and then share them with your friends, colleagues, or the world. It knows lots of mathematical operations and functions, understands things like "3 billion" or "8 kbps," and even does some basic programming-like operations.

Unlike a full-fledged spreadsheet, Instacalc just has rows, and in each row you can enter a number or bit of math, and the result will be shown at the end of the row as you type. You can refer to values from other rows by their row number (e.g. 5 + R1), or you can give a row a name by putting "rowname =" before it and then refer to it by name (5 + rowname). You can click on the result at the end of a row to hide the row and show only the result, and you can put "//" before a row to make it into a comment, i.e. a text label that doesn't do anything but give information to whoever's using your Instacalc. If you've ever done any programming, all of this is probably sounding pretty familiar, but even if you haven't Instacalc is easy to use. On top of all the various operations, you can also quickly create bar, pie, and line charts, like this country population chart.

But wait, it gets better. Like any good Web 2.0 service, Instacalc lets you embed your calculator in any web page with a snippet of HTML.

Obviously, I'm very impressed by Instacalc and am shuffling it straight into my bookmarks. Head over there and check out some of the sample calculators to quickly get an idea of what it's capable of. Once you've played around a bit, post links to your Instacalcs in the comments.

Filed under: Utilities, Linux, Productivity

Graphically view your disk space usage with Filelight

Filelight

Filelight is a Linux utility that creates a concentric graph of your computer's disk usage. Each color represents a different type of file, such as documents or apps, so it's easy to tell which is the biggest bully on the block. I found a utility like this for Mac OS X over on TUAW by the name of Disk Inventory X - has anyone seen a similar app for Windows?

No specific OS flavor is required, though Qt 3.2 and KDE 3.2 are. Filelight is available from MethyBlue and is released under the GNU General Public License.

Filed under: Finance, Internet, Yahoo!

A First Look at the New Yahoo! Finance Charts Beta

Yahoo! Finance Charts Beta

Earlier this week Yahoo! announced changes that would roll out soon to upgrade aspects of the Yahoo! Finance property. One of these changes, and probably the most significant for daily users, is the completely overhauled Stock Charts.

When Google rolled out Google Finance property, most of the hubbub around their offering was the dynamic charts. These hadn't been seen before anywhere and had a lot of "kewl" factor in them. Even without the kewl charts, Yahoo! continued to be the most comprehensive and most visited financial resource on the web. And now, Y! is rolling out their version of dynamic stock charts with lots of "kewl" factor. Read on for an overview of the new features and my thoughts.

Read more →

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