Snackr is a new Adobe AIR app that lets you display items in your RSS feeds in a beautiful scrolling ticker on any edge of your screen. I am absolutely giddy about it after only a few minutes of use. Snackr is something you'd supplement your existing reader with, not a replacement. It is not for the faint of heart or information averse, either.
If you've ever fantasized about having the river of news flow straight into your brain, this is the closest I've seen yet. I've uploaded a small OPML file of my top priority feeds, limited Snackr to displaying items from within the last 5 days and am in heaven. Read on for screenshots and some critique.
Six weeks ago, ReadWriteWeb published their definitive list of the top Twitter clients. The methodology for that list was watching the Twitter public feed and logging tweet sources. However, how does the list of clients people are using match up the list of the ones people are talking about? Using data from blog search engine Twingly, we decided to see which Twitter clients are getting the most buzz on blogs. The result is a list of the most popular 3rd-party Twitter-apps according to the blogosphere.
Allen Stern points out that RSS filtering service AideRSS has added Twitter to its PostRank algorithm. AideRSS works by measuring social media interaction with blog posts, and then comparing them to what's normal for that blog. The service then algorithmically applies a ranking to each post allowing users to filter out only the best posts based on the theory that people will only bother interacting with the most interesting or worthwhile content.
The music search engine and Internet jukebox, Songza, lets you seek out any song on the web and stream it immediately. In January of this year, we announced the site's partnerships with Seeqpod and Skreemr, which allowed them to grown their online library to 28 million songs. Now, Songza grows again with a launch of a new Facebook app and the arrival of a Songza API.
Last August we called Spongecell "the most intuitive of the online calendar apps," and picked it as one of our 10 Must Have Online Office Apps. Since then, though, a lot has changed. Spongecell is no longer just a personal calendar, but rather a full-scale event management platform aimed at businesses with complicated event calendars. Last week I caught up with Spongecell CEO Ben Kartzman and Chief Strategy Office Marc Guldimann to learn a little bit more about what the company is up to.
The way we create, interact with, and share information on the web is continuously changing, and at a very rapid pace. The end goal, most would argue, is the create a medium that completely democratizes the entire process. This evolution has taken us through editorially driven community sites (Slashdot), socially driven bookmarking sites (del.icio.us), and socially driven news sites (Digg), but none of them have really managed to figure out how to make the newspaper of the future. Just launched Knewsroom, one of the first apps from Kluster (ReadWriteWeb's coverage), believes that it has gotten it right, but has it really?
Since we reported yesterday that cable and Internet provider Comcast had acquired social address book Plaxo for an estimated $150 million, we've been fielding a lot of comments and emails -- most of them not very supportive of the acquisition. Most people seem wary of Comcast -- which has a poor reputation on the web due to "bandwidth throttling" practices -- and some have told us that they'll be deleting their Plaxo accounts. How about you?
Gen Y is taking over. The generation of young adults that's composed of the children of Boomers, Generation Jones, and even some Gen X'ers, is the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers and three times the size of Gen X. As the Boomers fade into retirement and Gen Y takes root in the workplace, we're going to see some big changes ahead, not just at work, but on the web as a whole.
Paul Miller reports that Yahoo! is today opening up its open developer platform for search SearchMonkey. SearchMonkey, which we reported on at the Web 2.0 Expo, is a component of a major overhaul at Yahoo! across all of its properties to "rewire" for the social graph and data portability. SearchMonkey allows developers to build applications for Yahoo! search "that enhance the usefulness and relevance of search results," according to Amit Kumar, Product Manager for Yahoo! Search.
Google announced this morning that YouTube's new Insight video viewer analytics now includes free demographic stats on any video's viewers. YouTube users who have included gender in their user profiles can be anonymously reported and providing your age is a requirement to open an account with YouTube.
It's interesting to know that my latest video about late night escapades was viewed primarily by men ages 30 to 50. In a few minutes I will embed in this post a video of myself eating a live baby chicken and will report back on viewer demographics when they become available. You can view the demographics on your videos by clicking the "insight" button next to each video on your account view.
