ReadWriteWeb

Two years ago Danah Boyd's article "Viewing
American Class Divisions Through Facebook and MySpace" mesmerized marketers and tech journalists. Facebook was described as "hegemonic" while MySpace was the haven of "subaltern" teens. Whether Boyd intended it or not, Facebook became characterized as the privileged space of college kids and MySpace was plagued with the perception of lowbrow tackiness. At the time it made sense that a site for the privileged had less traffic. After all, isn't privilege generally exclusive? According to a recent Hitwise blog post Facebook is not only beating MySpace's traffic, it's the second ranked site overall in the US behind Google.

A new service called TweepML just launched that makes it easy to create and share groups of Twitter users. It's more than just a grouping service though, TweepML is also an open extensible format. What OPML is to RSS, TweepML is to Twitter.

Groups are of course one of the core features of social software, but up till now it's been relatively cumbersome to create groups of Twitter users - even in otherwise feature-packed Twitter clients like TweetDeck and Peoplebrowsr. TweepML makes this process real simple.

As is the trend with every Apple-related announcement, Apple stock rises during the hype of initial rumors and drops shortly after the keynote simply fails to live up to expectations. Apple could've put a man on the moon this morning and fanboys would've still expected a monkey on Venus. Although users were not blessed with the announcement of a Beatles' release, the company did offer Genius Mixes and the iTunes' LP. ReadWriteWeb covered the news earlier this morning, now we take an in-depth look at Apple's latest music-related releases.

At its annual iPod event today, Apple introduced version 3.1 of the iPhone OS for the iPhone and iPod touch. While there are a number of small tweaks and new features in this update, for the most part, the new firmware enables support for the new features that iTunes 9 introduced today, including Genius mixes and premade ringtones. One feature we were really looking for, support for augmented reality (AR) apps, will only be semi-supported in this new version, though at least some AR apps that were previously impossible to implement on the iPhone will now be feasible.

Steve Jobs returned to a standing ovation at Apple's annual iPod event today, where Apple introduced version 3.1 of the iPhone OS and the next version of iTunes. With iTunes 9, Apple introduces a Genius-like recommendation feature for apps and 30,000 premade ringtones for $1.29 in iTunes. Version 9 of iTunes has also seen a major redesign. The application and the iTunes store now look much cleaner. Apple also introduced 'iTunes LPs' that will bring liner notes and artwork to digital albums (the much rumored 'Cocktail' feature), as well as app management for the iPhone and iPod touch that is built in to iTunes.

Starting today, Google Voice users can route around yet another feature their cell phone carriers would like them to pay for: text messages. Google Voice now allows users to receive and reply to text messages by email without incurring any charges from their cell phone carriers. By default, Google Voice still forwards SMS messages to the cell phone a user has on record with Google Voice. Now, however, this new feature allows users to simply forward these text messages to any email address. Responding to these messages is as easy as replying to the email.

Yesterday, Nielsen announced that they will make their new "Internet Meter" available by year's end to measure the online television viewing audience. Until now, this ever-increasing demographic has been left out of U.S. television ratings as Nielsen currently focuses only on live and time-shifted (i.e. DVR) TV viewings. Says the company, the Internet Meter software will be deployed by the end of 2009 to their "People Meter" households - the chosen few whose TV-viewing habits function as the representative sample for measuring a show's success. This new addition to the ratings game is bound to have a major impact on TV monetization efforts as both networks and advertisers will see, officially, how many viewers have tuned in to watch this "2nd screen."

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the 5 biggest Web trends of 2009. Our first post was about Structured Data, our second about The Real-Time Web. The third part of our series is on Personalization.

Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the Web circa 2009, personalization in this era means providing effective filters and recommendations. Ultimately personalization is about web sites and services giving you what you want, when you want it. That's the long-standing dream anyway. Let's see if the products of 2009 are fulfilling it.

Ten private companies, a number of US Government Federal Agencies primarily in the Health sector and the OpenID and Information Card Foundations will announce this morning in Washington DC the launch of a pilot program to allow members of the public to log in to participating government websites with their credentials from approved independent websites.

That's right - someday soon you'll be able to log in to the websites of the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Insititute of Health and other government agencies with your accounts from Google, Yahoo and similar services. Below we discuss the privacy protection steps being taken, the usability issues and the ultimate significance of this announcement.

TweetDeck is the most popular desktop Twitter client and is racing Seesmic to see who can be the most innovative social media browser across multiple social networks. TweetDeck will release the latest version of its software Wednesday and the differences are dramatic. Deep integration with Facebook, MySpace integration, easier link and photo sharing are just a few of the new features.

I've been testing the new TweetDeck for about half a day and below are the five things I like the best about it and the three things I like the least.