A few months ago, we reviewed Tinychat, an easy to use web app for creating on-demand chatrooms with close connections to Twitter. Today, Tinychat relaunches with a number of very cool features, including video chats with up to 12 people, recording, screen sharing, and a Facebook application for video chats on Facebook. The new version of Tinychat keeps a lot of the features that we liked in the text-only version (no need to sign up, very easy to use, vanity room names), and adds the new video features on top of that.
PeopleBrowsr, the online dashboard for tracking the social web (previous coverage) is today leaving alpha and moving into beta. Although many people use the app for tracking Twitter, it's actually capable of tracking a ton of the top web properties including Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, and even RSS feeds. You can also use the app to update multiple networks at once.
It's a little bit scary, but widget and sharing service ClearSpring said this morning that the company's media widgets and newly acquired AddThis plug-in are now seen by more than 500 million unique viewers each month, according to Comscore. That's half the people on the internet, the company says.
That's a whole lot of information. ClearSpring sees not just what you're sharing, but nearly everything you're doing on the pages its products are on. (AddThis is on ReadWriteWeb, for example.) So what on earth is it going to do with all that data? Like they said in Spiderman, "with great power, comes great responsibility." We asked ClearSpring's CEO about these super hero-like responsibilities and his thoughts are below. You can decide for yourself whether he can be trusted, but the work the company is doing is very cool.
At the 140 Twitter Conference yesterday, Alex Payne, Twitter's API lead told Robert Scoble that Twitter might soon add location-based information to every tweet. Currently, users can set a location on their profile, but individual tweets are not geo-coded in any way. If Twitter did indeed add a geo-references to every tweet, then that would open up the door to a wealth of new possibilities for developers. Suddenly, for example, it would be possible to develop an application that could pull in every tweet ever made from a certain restaurant or bar.
Skype, the popular VOIP client formerly owned by eBay, just released a new beta version of its Windows client. The new version finally brings screen sharing to the Windows client, something which already became available in the last beta version of the Mac client in January. In addition, Skype now also allows users to import their contacts from Gmail, Windows Live, Hotmail, AOL, LinkedIn, and Yahoo.
Thanks to this update, Mac users (who use the latest beta version) can now also finally share their screens with PC users, which wasn't possible until now.
According to a report released today from mobile advertising company AdMob, smartphones accounted for nearly three times more use than their relative market share last month. The report also found that relative use of both mobile-specific websites and HTML sites was highest on Apple and Android devices.
Results were based on user-generated requests for mobile ads during April 2009 as well as on a Gartner report on smartphone sales in Q4 2008.
The MIT SENSEable City Lab recently released visualizations of mobile phone call activity over the week of President Obama's inauguration on January 20, 2009. The visualizations are of course stunning, but they also aim to answer the questions: Who was in Washington, D.C. for President Obama's Inauguration Day, when did they arrive, where did they go, and how long did they stay?
MIT says that the objective of these visualizations was to determine how a city performs during a special event or a sudden emergency.
A fabulous, ambitious virtual operating system, G.ho.st launched at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco two years ago. The browser-based computers allow users to leave their desktop, files, and applications in the Amazon-hosted cloud and access them from just about any place or device with an internet connection.
G.ho.st, which already implements well-known applications such as Google Docs, Meebo, Last.fm, and Pandora, has now announced an open API for developers, allowing them to add any web-based application as an integrated part of the G.ho.st virtual desktop.
According to a recent post from Data Center Knowledge, Apple is rumored to be planning a massive server facility costing as much as $1 billion.
Both North Carolina and Virginia have or are hurrying to instate tax incentives for projects such as this one, which will cost around twice as much as what Google or Microsoft would typically invest in a data center.
As many of us know, the usefulness of Twitter lies in the user's ability to find, refine, and engage with a network. Most of the invalid complaints about the service revolve around signal-to-noise ratios; of course you, Naysayer #583, don't want to know what I ate for breakfast. Neither does anyone else. This is called "noise," and it's what smart Twitter users are trying desperately to avoid.
Everyone raves about Tweetdeck's allowing users to create groups, which nicely sorts much of the information available in a collection of streams from followers. However, there are features beyond groups that could be useful for social noise reduction. Mixero has added filtering and channel creation to the current mix of available Twitter tools with interesting results.
