Identified Hits is a new Facebook ad network that is taking a page from the Beacon play book. Beacon, you'll remember, is Facebook's endorsement-based ad service that uses user actions on outside sites to endorse products and services in the News Feed. Identified Hits is utilizing the same concept to push Facebook applications with a concept it calls App Endorsements.
We had a great response to last night's competition offering 2 full passes to the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo. Over 100 people left a comment telling us their favorite web app(s). Sadly, there can only be 2 winners. They were selected at random, using a cool web app called Random.org. The winners are: comment #79, James Levy, and #93, Jamie Stephens. Congrats to them and thanks everyone for commenting!
MP3 "mix tape" site Muxtape has been my preferred source of new music for the last few weeks now, in large part because the simple interface is such a joy to use. Now, internet and organic root-beer lover Colin Sproule has come up with a great way for Mac users to get an iTunes-style Coverflow preview of playlists on the site.
The improvement in user experience for this already fantastic app is remarkable. Check out the how-to video embedded below. It's also a great example of several brand new apps all put to use together.
OpenID, a technology that allows users to sign in to new supporting websites through a single trusted ID provider of their choice, is notoriously hard for non-developers to implement and in many cases use. One of the biggest challenges may have been eliminated, however, by the recent release of a new service called MyOpenID for Domains.
The service makes it remarkably easy for anyone to create OpenID accounts through their own domain, using the MyOpenID authentication service.
Today, the battle between the two most popular AIR apps as of late has begun. Yesterday, the FriendFeed AIR app, Alert Thingy, having only just launched on April 13th, was already getting an update - this one to include Twitter support via a built-in "Tweet" button. Not to be outdone, Twhirl wasted no time in providing an update of their own, seemingly crafting their updated version overnight. Now Twhirl includes FriendFeed support and Alert Thingy does Twitter, but are either of them really giving users what they want?
Just two days after Microsoft released a Google News competitor, Google has upped the ante by adding a useful new feature to their popular news site: Quotations. Google announced today that it is now augmenting searches for newsworthy names with recent quotes by those people. The quotes are pulled from news stories as quickly as Google News indexes them, which makes the new service a sort of near-real time version of Bartlett's Quotations. Quotes are organized by person and then made searchable.
NewsGator is a company that develops RSS aggregators for individuals and businesses. It is the maker of the popular FeedDemon RSS Reader for Windows and NetNewsWire for Mac. Today, NewsGator has announced a new version of their RSS Reader, designed specifically for users of Microsoft Outlook.
The new program, Inbox 3.0, offers several new features including enhanced relevancy, attention reporting, easy subscription adding, flag synchronization and a redesigned UI.
Amazon today announced premium for-pay support packages for some of its core infrastructure services. The Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and Simple Queue Service (SQS) each received the gold and silver level support treatment. The new support packages provide one-on-one support for AWS customers (24/7 via phone for gold level) as well as a guaranteed 1 hour response time and new client-side diagnostic tools.
ReadWriteWeb has 2 tickets to next week's Web 2.0 Expo to give away, courtesy of Technorati. These are full conference passes, worth $1,895 each, so they will get you into every workshop and conference session. To be in with a chance to win one of these passes, all you have to do is enter a comment below telling us what web 2.0 apps most excite you currently.
Amazon-owned Alexa has announced a major update to its 10 year old web ranking system. Previously, Alexa's rankings were based solely on data collected from the downloadable Alexa Toolbar, but now the company is aggregating data from multiple sources. That's good news, but it may be too little, too late for a company whose rankings have faded in relevance in recent years.
