In the latter parts of the study, the company looked specifically at social network membership data for users of the AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services. Not surprisingly, the study found that Facebook was the most popular network across the board. What's more interesting is how well MySpace fared in some cases. On both the Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services, Facebook only had a small lead. Here, around 20% of all Hotmail and Yahoo webmail users were found to be on Facebook and MySpace. What does this reveal about the Hotmail and Yahoo user base? That they're a little more behind the times? Or that they've been around on the net longer and at one time had created (and possibly now abandoned) their MySpace pages? Unfortunately, the study can't provide us with these sorts of answers.

The study also showed that Twitter is far more popular among Gmail users than anyone else. In fact, on the other services, it's 4-5 times less popular than Facebook. We would like to think that's because Gmail users are just more web-savvy and cool, but it's possible that it's because they're just younger than everyone else.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is the least popular social network, but as Rapleaf points out, many LinkedIn users may have registered with their business email instead.

Participation Levels - Hotmail Users have Most Profiles, Gmail Users Better-Connected

When it comes to how the webmail users participate on social networks, Rapleaf found that the majority of the users have only one social media profile. But the service where the average number of profiles is the highest might surprise you - it's Hotmail. There the average is 2.5 profiles per user. Hotmail is followed by Yahoo, then AOL, and it's Gmail users who have the least number of social media profiles. That finding seems odd considering that Gmail users are younger and more likely to use Twitter in addition to Facebook. In fact, it almost seems like this data doesn't even fit with the rest of the study.

However, the discovery that Gmail users are better-connected than the other users makes more sense. On average, Gmail users have the most friends on social networks with 46.2 friends while Yahoo users have the least with 40.0.

Since again, Gmail users tend to be younger than the rest, it goes to reason that they would be in a demographic where their peers are more likely to have social membership profiles. Older webmail users, meanwhile, are still signing up for these sites. Although baby boomers and other middle-aged folks are joining sites like Facebook in droves these days, social networks are still dominated by the young.

Methodology

For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age, gender and social networking data by collecting information from public social media profiles. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their original blog post. However, the sample size is large enough to form some conclusions about the members of these services, even if it relied on a particular subset of users.

Wait a minute...the two social media companies with some of the most valuable, interesting data on the web made a deal and what do we get? Spammy Twitter streams clouding up our LinkedIn feeds and an occasional uptight Tweet on Twitter that was born inside LinkedIn? We're still waiting for the meaty announcements everyone says are coming someday soon - that Twitter and LinkedIn are open for business.

But is business just about broadcasting your marketing message? What about the listening part of doing business, thoughtful analysis, responding to actionable information and market conditions? Conversations with your customers and business partners?

Twitter is arguably better for listening than it is for broadcast and conversion of marketing messages. This kind of cross-posting deal falls short of the huge potential latent in the data both of these companies control and instead appeals to the craven broadcast-model of marketing. Challenging that broadcast-model is where many people believe social media derives its meaning.

What could this look like? It could look like an option to view the employer and job title of anyone you see on Twitter or through a 3rd party Twitter interface. It could look like Twitter opening up its fire hose for unfettered 3rd party analysis and development - then you'd see social graph and content analysis done that gave a big boost to the User Experience on LinkedIn. ("This LinkedIn user has been conversing with friends on Twitter who were talking about 'mobile,' 'Wisconsin' and 'gaming' over the last 2 weeks.")

Whatever the case may be, both occupational data (LinkedIn) and social messaging data (Twitter) are rich green fields for mashups and analysis - but these two companies are holding back the tide of innovation by refusing to offer a clear path to their data by outside partners.

LinkedIn partners with next to no one. Only large, established organizations like Business Week, the New York Times and now Twitter get access to LinkedIn data. Other services all around the web will tell you stories about reaching out to LinkedIn for API access and getting the cold shoulder.

We wrote about this concern three weeks ago ("LinkedIn Hits 50 Million Users; Still a Roach Motel") and the company told us then and today that big changes are coming to its API soon. That's great. That's something to look forward to, if cautiously. We're years into the LinkedIn Platform today and there's only a select few partners doing anything there so far.

Likewise, Twitter is fabulously open with its data in some ways (on a per-item basis) - but it's leaving a substantial number of outside developers frustrated because they can't get their hands on the full feed of Twitter data (the fire hose) to analyze. Startup companies that do appear to have relationships with Twitter tell us things like "We won't describe our relationship with Twitter to you and neither will anyone else who has one." That's charming. It's unclear whether anyone but Google and Bing have access to all the Twitter data.

Twitter investor and real-time web guru John Borthwick told us in another conversation today that he believes Twitter is just in its early days as a company, that there's nothing mysterious going on. "I'm hoping there will be a click-thru EULA [End User Licensing Agreement] to the firehose [someday]," he wrote. (Emphasis added.)

That sounds good.

So everybody's working on the wide-open web that so many of us want to see? Standards and APIs and open platforms to facilitate a new era of innovation are right around the corner?

Sounds great. For now though what we get is a little cross-network message broadcasting. Hopefully it's just the beginning.

The Timeline

According to details on the newly revamped Silentale web site, the startup has three main features: the "Timeline," the "People Book," and "Connectors." In the timeline, you're presented with a view of all your messages from around the web and even from your mobile phone. Silentale is able to connect to Facebook, Google Contacts, most POP3/IMAP email accounts (such as those you might access in Outlook), Gmail, AOL Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Twitter, and it can pull in your SMS messages from your mobile phone. All these are presented in the scrollable timeline view with icons indicating their source along with the date, subject, sender, recipient, and of course, the message itself.

Connectors

The "Connectors" page is where you set up the various connections to the platforms whose messages you want archived. The list of connectors (see above) is short right now, but they promise more will be added in the future. These connectors crawl through your messages and contacts and archive them on the service once you've authorized Silentale to access those accounts. Not only will the service pull in the messages from that point forward, it will also work backwards in time to retrieve older messages too. Attached documents, including Office documents, photos, videos, and links will also be archived. Although at first you won't be able to search within these documents, that functionality will be "introduced shortly," reads the Silentale FAQ.

As for the SMS messages, they'll be archived using special mobile applications. At the moment, the company has developed an iPhone app and an Android app which both use your data connection to archive each text received to the Silentale service. Our only concern with this feature is in regards to those of us who choose to receive either Facebook or Twitter messages via SMS. Since that would be a large number of updates, it would be nice to exclude certain SMS short codes from the archiving process in order to save our precious battery life, which no doubt, the SMS archiving apps would eat up. Besides, since both Facebook and Twitter are available "connectors" on the Silentale service, those particular SMS texts would be redundant.

The People Book

Finally, there is the "People Book" view which is essentially an aggregated address book. Silentale finds the duplicate contacts from across your networks and combines their information together, merging their email, phone numbers, addresses, profiles, etc. into one single contact. This list, like the other views, is searchable, but it can be filtered by network as well to help you find your contacts with ease.

When you click on one of these contacts, all your conversations from across the various supported platforms are displayed. A message timeline at the top of the page lets you hop around from month to month and year to year, too.

Get Your Invite Now!

Of course, since Silentale hasn't launched yet, it's too soon to praise the service. We have no idea how well it will work. For all we know, it could be buggy and slow. But on paper, the service looks useful, promising, and - dare we say it? - exciting. How incredible would it be to have a master copy of all your communication from everywhere in one searchable resource in the cloud? We think it would be great. It's especially exciting since there aren't good ways to archive and search through your communications yet on some of these supported platforms - like Facebook and Twitter, for example.

Still, there may be some concerns about security when it comes to this service. How will Silentale access these networks? Hopefully they'll tap into Twitter via OAuth and into Facebook using Facebook Connect, but will they ask for our email passwords? That always makes people a little uneasy.

During the beta period, Silentale will be free, but when they publicly launch, it will be offered as a "freemium" type service. The basic (free) plan will allow 5 connections, unlimited contacts, but only 8 weeks of message history and a total storage space of 2 GB. The unlimited plan, which looks to be $50/year, will offer unlimited everything.

As we mentioned earlier, Silentale isn't open for business yet, but you can go ahead and sign up for your beta invite right here on the Silentale homepage. Just click the link on the upper-right.

Twitter has offered two explanations for the change. First, that very few users were choosing to receive these kinds of messages anyway and that it was confusing. Then, this morning, the company put up a blog post saying simply that "there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt--it wouldn't have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever." So what's the story? Here's our best guess.

First, it is clear that most users have not chosen to receive public replies sent by their friends to people they themselves aren't following. Non-early-adopters in particular are quite likely to consider these kinds of messages noise. Many of us early adopters believed such messages were a part of the magic of Twitter; it's a great way to discover people your friends find interesting. Information overload can be dealt with by forming groups in a third party twitter client like Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop. Getting over our antiquated sense of guilt and obligation concerning reading every message we receive would help too. (We've argued that online noise is good for you.)

The fact is though that most Twitter users now probably only receive replies sent to people they know. That's been the default setting for several months and we assume the system has thus been architected for this use case.

Scalability

What does that mean? Probably this: when you publish a Tweet that begins with @username, the computer that all your user files lives on in Twitter HQ probably already knows not only who your friends are, but also who their friends are. Everyone who is your friend but is not friends with the person you are replying to won't even have the message sent to them. Making that determination locally and limiting the tweets broadcast to your friends is probably much more efficient for Twitter than sending that message to all your friends.

Even updating the "friends of friends" files for all your friends every time you make a new friend - is more efficient than sending out replies to all your friends who aren't following the recipient.

Sending Tweets from one user to another is traffic-expensive and if most people don't want replies directed at people they don't know, then none of us are going to get that kind of message.

Most people don't want a noisy public conversation? Most people don't want serendipitous introduction to new people? That sounds like most people don't want a key part of what makes Twitter most magical. That magic is expensive and if millions of Oprah followers don't even want it, then a few thousand @marshallk followers don't get to have it either.

Who can blame them? Everyone wants Twitter to scale. Maybe it has to be neutered in order to do so. Architecting the social graph can't be easy. We can be sad about the decisions that the company makes in order to try to do it, but that probably isn't going to change things.

Instead of strolling through the social graph to discover new users, Twitter users will likely be given a new set of recommendation features pointing them to new people to follow. It may be a "people you follow also follow these people" type of feature, hopefully it won't just be more recommendations based on who Twitter's established leaders like. Or perhaps those of us who want all messages published by our friends can pay for a premium account. I'm ready to do that right now.

Thanks to the super-smart Alex Iskold, who we trust a lot and who helped talk us through this technical speculation.

Update: Hours after we put up this post, Twitter has reversed this policy. The story just keeps getting more interesting!

Some people won't respond to email (or take a while to respond) but reply immediately when you contact them with Twitter direct messages. Other people do the same in Facebook or FriendFeed. And yet other people send messages that pile up in your LinkedIn inbox.

Oh, and then I get the Skype pings.

And Gmail chat requests.

Oops, almost forgot FriendFeed.

This is getting out of hand. Do what you gotta do. If one of these is the only way to reach somebody I need to reach, then I'll use it. But these are too many messaging systems, and they are becoming a productivity drain.

Open Standards Always Win

Lots of people say that email sucks, that it's broken. This "e-fail" mantra is really about the inadequacy of email systems, something that many entrepreneurs recognize and are aiming to fix. The reason why email will always be with us is that it is an open standard, and this mantra is always worth repeating:

• Open standards always win
• Open standards always win
• Open standards always win

Winners and Losers from a Standards Shakeout

Twitter has possibly gotten this right once again. Because it is open, anybody can build an interface for its direct messages.

LinkedIn totally fails on this count. LinkedIn is a great and very useful research tool. When I don't know how to contact somebody, finding out which of my contacts knows them is invaluable. I use it frequently. But then, I want to be able to contact that person by email (or telephone, or Twitter if that is their preference). LinkedIn's messaging system is simply an irrelevant chore.

Methinks Facebook messaging may go the same way. Not being a big Facebook user, I may miss the point. But I have noticed that the sort of person who in the past preferred to be contacted via Facebook now prefers communication via Twitter.

The Integration Opportunity

This pain point is, of course, an opportunity. This integration has been referred to in the past as "unified messaging," but many of those solutions were too complex. You needed to buy into everything to use it at all.

Some great solutions are probably already out there. I am not talking about something like TweetDeck, which is perfect for somebody who lives in Twitter. Rather, the interesting thing is integrating Twitter direct messages into existing messaging and email systems.

Adium's Zac West posted screenshots to the official blog and the implementation looks great. The plan was announced this weekend but just now noticed by The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Many people will want to track certain search terms of tags on Twitter in Adium and West says he's hoping that will be possible soon. He has also said that drag and drop upload of images to Twitpic is another goal.

We hope that the controls on new message receipts will be granular enough that Twitter by Adium won't be annoying for heavy Twitter users. We presume that having all your Twitter friends as contacts will make it easy to create groups in Adium as well. Groups in Twitter is one of the keys to effective use of the service.

We hate to keep writing about Twitter here, but we do use the service all day long and there's a reason that so many developers are focused on it. You can follow me on Twitter at Marshallk and the whole ReadWriteWeb crew at ReadWriteWeb. Thanks to Chris Messina for catching this news and bringing it to our attention on Twitter.

That description above doesn't really do the service justice - it's the user experience that makes ClikBall stand out. There's something magical about the grace of the app, and there's clearly a premium put on sharing links that lots of other people will want to click on and share.

There's lots of nice little touches here - like the most popular items among your circle of friends, apart from the most universally popular links. The application also installs a custom search engine into your browser, which augments the regular google results with items that you've shared on Clikball.

I'm going to try using this to share my links on Twitter for a little while, instead of doing it through Tweetdeck. There are a few things I'd like to see changed, of course. I'd like to be able to set sharing to Twitter as automatic and I'd like to have a choice in URL shorteners used, at least when posting to Twitter, as I have a strong preference for using the semantic and API friendly Bit.ly. I'd also really like some data export options and there doesn't appear to be any right now. This app could use some more visual elements to it, too. Enjoysthin.gs (our review) could be a good inspiration, and ClikBall for it, too.

One might ask, what's the difference between this and Pierre Omidyar's Ginx, which I gave a scathing review last week. I think there's something about the way that ClikBall seems to integrate with my existing workflow, and uses AJAX in some nice ways, that makes it much more pleasing to use. And, to be frank, ClikBall was built by the guy who made Userscripts.org - one of the best sites on the internet. That's exciting. Credit is also due to Anthony Young, the co-founder of Flock and Ex-flock crew Geoffrey Arone & Raj Paul.

What's even better is that you can click on the notification in the Activity Stream to see all the relevant details. If the item was an image, for example, you can preview it or download the original. For blog posts and wiki pages, you can click to read the item that was updated. Plus, you can download any files that have been added straight from the Activity Stream to your desktop.

However, the cyn.in desktop client isn't just about automated notifications - it allows for those personal updates, too. But this is the enterprise, mind you, so we're not calling them "tweets" here - they are "status updates" instead. Guided by the prompt "What are you doing?" anyone can quickly set their status update which is then sent into the Activity Stream to update everyone else.

Taking a page from Jaiku's book, the client also includes a threaded discussions feature. Any item in the stream can be commented on whether it's an automated update or a personal status update. The replies can be viewed in a pop-up sidebar to the right of the original Activity Stream, just as with photos, wikis, and blog updates. Like FriendFeed, when someone comments on an item, that item bubbles up to the top so everyone is immediately alerted.

As any Twitter user could tell you, no microblogging product would be complete without search, and cyn.in is no exception. When you need to find something that had been posted before and has since fallen off the page, you can enter in a query straight into the desktop client itself. The results returned are ranked for you according to the percentage match and you can scroll through them just as you can with the Activity Stream.

The cyn.in client is beautiful implementation of how microblogging could (and perhaps should) work for businesses, but it's the client's integration with the cyn.in team collaboration suite that makes it so worthwhile. Of course, the decision to move away from your company's current collaboration suite is not one to be made lightly, so you should review the suite's features before deciding if it's right for you.

Other enterprise microblogging clients include Yammer, Present.ly, and Status, but none offer an integrated collaboration suite, too. Cyn.in is open source, but it can also be purchased as a hosted service or as an enterprise appliance.

There are lots of location based social networks available, but this one is refreshingly simple. Is that enough to effectively differentiate Shizzow? It's going to have to be, because there's not much else about the service that's unique. Most features are easily reproduced, however, and usability may be the key point of competition in this market.

Shizzow let's you "shout" about where you are, based on the name of the place instead of its address (that's figured out in the back end), and listen to the shouts of friends' locations. You can see who hangs out at particular locations and what locations your friends hang out at most often. Ultimately, the service should help your lonely self connect with people in public more often, if that's something you're looking for.

Posting can be done through a mobile interface, a Google Gadget or the Shizzow web page. There's some IM and SMS integration as well.

Is there an API? Not yet. When will it open for general availability? Just before the SXSW conference - that's pretty cliche, but it could work.

Why would you use this instead of Brightkite, Loopt, something built on top of Yahoo Fire Eagle? If you're comfortable using any of those services already, you probably have no need to use Shizzow. The company's attempts to explain how different their service is haven't been particularly convincing.

The Upside

If you're looking for a less geeky, attractive, easy to use location based network to use with a wider circle of people than just early adopters - Shizzow will likely play well with that crowd (the rest of the world). If we told you three years ago that a simple service that let you broadcast 140 characters or less about "what you're doing" was going to take the world by storm, you'd probably have called us crazy. Similarly, comparing location based social networks on features may not be the best criterion.

Usability is key to adoption beyond the relatively small number of people who obsess over every feature and Shizzow is simple, clean looking and usable. Location based social networking sometimes feels so bleeding edge pretentious that you wonder whether these communities even want more users. That's not the feeling you'll likely get looking around Shizzow.

Does the the world at large want to find friends and be found via short messages? We're not sure, but it's possible. Can Shizzow take its simple, useful tool out into the world successfully? We'll see, location based social networking is a new paradigm and given privacy concerns (even if they're not rationally "valid") it could be a hard sell to mainstream users.

Shizzow is now available for users in California. Drop by, give it a try and let us know what you think. See also WebMonkey's interview with the Shizzow CEO this morning, it's an interesting discussion about side projects, simplicity and mobile communication.

With the release of Utterli Free Group Texting, Utterli - formerly known as Utterz - is hoping to tap into that market, offering the ability to send SMS messages to friends - and groups of friends - for free from within Facebook or Bebo. And, free is a very good price.

For our Facebook- and MySpace-centric US readers, the question, "Why Bebo?" is likely to jump to mind, given that Bebo doesn't often come up in conversation. However, in the UK, Ireland, and New Zealand - places where SMS rates can be restrictive - Bebo has a large market share. This makes Bebo a perfect candidate for this type of service. It's safe to assume that Utterli's ability to reduce the cost of SMS for these users will be met with broad acceptance.

The fact that Utterli is available on multiple platforms provides a fringe benefit, as well: cross-platform messaging. With Utterli, users on Facebook can send short messages to their friends on Bebo without having to establish a Bebo profile. And vice versa. Users already on the Utterli platform have the ability to send and receive messages with Facebook and Bebo users, too.

Another benefit of the new service? The ability to send SMS text across oceans. Which, to date, hasn't been as easy as it sounds without a client application.

"This is filling a need for Web-to-phone and phone-to-Web group messaging - without a client," said Burcell. "No one else is really doing this right now."

Our take? Texting is a way of life for many. If Utterli can find a way to make sending and receiving SMS messages easy, cheap, and accessible, it is safe to assume that they will gain a following.

To test drive the app, visit Utterli's Social Apps and install it on your preferred platform.

While having random ads inserted into their messages might not work for some developers, having access to a free SMS gateway is a very seductive proposition, especially for small developers who don't have the resources to either establish relationships with the big mobile carriers, or who simply don't have the money to pay a commercial provider for access to their SMS gateway.

We asked Zeep Mobile if it had any plans to share revenue from these SMS ads with developers or if it was going to give developers any influence over which ads it would display. However, as of now, Zeep Mobile is not planning anything in this direction, though it would seem reasonable to assume that they might start sharing revenue with developers at some point in the future.

API

Besides the standard web API, Zeep Mobile has also developed Python and Ruby libraries, which developers can use free of charge. As far as we can see, this API is pretty straightforward and well documented.

Still in Beta

It is important to note, though, that the service is still in beta right now and that developers are limited to sending out messages to no more than 10 recipients at a time. Also, while Zeep Mobile has plans to expand beyond the U.S. in the future, the service can only send messages within the U.S. for now and is also limited to a select number of carriers.

Overall, though, this seems like a service worth looking into for developers who wants to start adding some SMS functionality to their applications without having to pay some of Zeep Mobile's competitors like SMS Everywhere, Clickatell, or Celltrust.

Until now, only users with paid Yahoo Plus accounts had POP access to their email. Now, all Yahoo users will get offline access to their accounts through the Zimbra Desktop via the arguably superior IMAP protocol.

Yahoo bought the email and messaging company Zimbra for $350 million in September 2007, soon after Zimbra had launched its offline capabilities. The Zimbra Desktop runs on top of Prism, a Mozilla Labs product, which, just like Gears, is meant to allow users offline access to their web applications.

Besides working with Yahoo mail, Zimbra also supports all other IMAP and POP capable accounts, as well as, of course, accounts hosted on a Zimbra server. Zimbra has predefined settings for Gmail, AOL, and Yahoo accounts.

Still Beta

After one alpha and two beta releases under Yahoo, Zimbra is still calling this new version a beta, but given that fact that they are releasing it to all Yahoo users, the company must feel pretty good about the stability of the application. In our tests, we did not experience any crashes or other problems with the Windows and Linux client, though we did not test the Mac version.

The Zimbra Blog also lists a large number of other updates and new features to the application, including built-in notifications, minimize to tray on Windows, showing the number of new mails in the tray, and a few other minor updates.

Only Mail

One thing that is still sorely missing though (or at least we couldn't find it), is syncing calendars, tasks, files, contacts, etc. Yahoo is surely planning to do this in a future release, but right now, this does reduce the usefulness of the Zimbra Desktop quite a bit.

Why Zimbra Only?

The big news, however, is definitely that all Yahoo users now have offline access to their email accounts. Of course, cynics might point out that all Yahoo would have to do is flip one switch and all its users could just use any email client they wanted for offline access. Those same cynics might point out that Yahoo is mostly doing this to justify the $300 million investment in Zimbra. However, at least Yahoo's users now have one option to get offline access to their messages.

Google has been rolling up no end of very young mobile services; while the comparison with the Dodgeball acquisition, which ended up going nowhere, is inevitable - I think there's a lot more going on this time around. For one thing, Jaiku will now have access to scaling that Twitter could desperately use.

For background on Jaiku, I recommend this video interview by the new European outfit Intruders.tv with company founder Jyri Engestrom, trained as a sociologist and formerly from Nokia.

RedMonk analyst James Governor, who has blogged extensively about the business value of Jaiku competitor Twitter and whose Twitter feed I learned about the acquisition from, has some interesting thoughts on the news. Governor says he'd like to see RIM buy Twitter but thinks Yahoo! is much more likely. He says the Jaiku mobile download could be a key addition to the Google Phone kernel but fears that all the leading microblogging services will be quickly overrun with commercial messages. I think that's a valid concern and worry that ads could drown out the links I Twitter promoting my blog posts. (Joking.) All of Twitter is lit up with conversation on the acquisition, according the the tracking service Twitterverse, the hottest word across Twitter in the last hour is Jaiku. There's more good discussion there than I can post here.

With easy group creation, RSS import and threaded conversation, amongst other features, Jaiku is probably a superior service to Twitter. Twitter's API and large US community offers its own advantages for some users. Unfortunately, new accounts have been throttled at Jaiku with news of the announcement. That seems like a move that's a bit hostile to the early adopter types who are following this news now and a real lost opportunity.

Update: Here's the official Google statement about this exciting news.]]> Sponsor

Fresh Logic Studios has built an addictive Flash mapping interface, aggregating worldwide "Tweets" (Twitter messages). The screen refreshes every six seconds or so with a different Twitterer's status report; and profile details are displayed on top of their location on a map. A toolbox allows you to toggle between views - and the Microsoft Virtual Earth graphics are stunning. Each of the Twitterers has their own lollipop on the map to note where they are, plus there's (limited) language support. But the Atlas isn't just a visualisation device for status junkies. There's also a practical side: users can get directions, search for local shops and services, find out what events are coming up in places around the world, and even see where the most expensive petrol stations are around.

What's it missing? The ability to get only your Twitter group's tweets shown on the map.

2. Squawk

Those enjoying a Second Life have a few options for social network integration. One of the most impressive is Squawk, which links up your gaming application with services including Twitter and Jaiku. There's an introductory how-to video for installing the service (note: you'll have to find it as an object in the SL 'metaverse' and then configure it). There's also a good social network devoted to tracking Squawk's progress, letting those not in Second Life peep in on the locations of top squawkers.

3. Twitticious

This little app from Alex Girard is about as stripped-down as you get - it doesn't even have a GUI. But it's a time-saver for those who'd like to link up their Del.icio.us bookmarks and their Twitter posts for later tagging and grouping. All the app does is take your tweets and route them to your Delicious account. With lots of Twitter networks set up specifically for this kind of link-sharing activity, this could be a golden life-hack. A word of warning though: there's no turning off the service. Full marks go to Alex for making some amendments to the service, to allow your followers' comments to also be added as links to your delicious account - as well as the Public Timeline's, should you want that many links in your Delicious account!

4. Remember the Milk + Twitter

Alert and to-do service Remember the Milk has just combined its range of services with that of Twitter, meaning that if you include 'rtm' as a friend in your Twitter network, your new task-oriented friend informs all of the web services that you've got synced up to Remember The Milk - and that can include iGoogle, Google Calendar and others. The smart bit is a series of commands that you can send to RTM via Twitter, using a few easy short codes. For instance, to get a list of these commands just type in 'd rtm !tips' and you'll get back a full command list. Once you get the hang of the commands, you'll see how much time this can save, instead of flipping between devices or websites to update your lists.

5. Social Comic Book

It's never going to win any prettiness awards, but the creative juices were flowing the day that Tim Wintle decided to mash up Flickr tags with Tweets. The idea is simple: enter your Twitter name, and the app creates a comic book of six panels - with your Tweets serving as the description in the panel and Flickr photos being pulled in that relate to your Tweets. Kind of like a visual Mad-Libs. Great idea - just a bit of a shame that some Tweets can't find relevant Flickr photos to attach to them. Dust up the old design and it could be quite viral.

Another comic strip attempt is Tweetweet. Not quite as inventive as Social Comic Book, but still worth a look if you've got ten minutes to kill between meetings.

6. Twapper

Twapper hooks into your 30Boxes online calendar account and allows you to post tweets directly into your calendar from your mobile phone or online. It also allows you to see the Twitter activity of your network from within the 30Boxes environment. Another great feature is the ability to 'roll your own groups' of Twitterers. Whilst it helps to have a 30Boxes account to get the most from the integration, there are some features available to anyone.

7. Twit Bin

Why go to Twitter when Twitter can come to you? Twitbin's a Firefox extension that nestles all your friends' tweets into a sidebar. It's configurable too, and the tiny ad at the bottom of the sidebar is something I can live with. BTW, it works just as well in Flock.

8. TwittyTunes

If you want to share what you're listening to with the ease of Twitter, this is the browser plugin for you. It's a sibling of the popular FoxyTunes extension, and supports dozens of players. So if you're signed in to your Last.fm player, Twitty Tunes will let your Twitter friends know what you're listening to. There's even a social network devoted to the most recent TwittyTunes shout-outs, called Foxy Tunes Twitter DJ.

9. Twitterment

This one appeals to the statisticians and the buzz crawlers. This charts the 'zeitgeist' of what's being Tweeted about across the globe. You can even see comparisons of one key phrase versus another, and what day of the week key terms pop up most frequently. For instance, here's one that compares beer and sex. Not surprisingly, beer starts getting popular around Friday.

10. Flotzam

Flotzam started life as Flitterbook, a showcase mash-up of Flickr, Facebook and Twitter data - developed by Karsten Januszewski and Tim Aidlin for MIX07. It's available only to PC users as a downloadable .exe or as a screensaver, but it's well worth having a nose around. For Mac OS X users, check out some of the dashboard widgets collected in the Twitter Fan Wiki.

- Support for AIM Bots
- Location-based services
- PC-to-PC voice calling
- Support for developers working on the Mac OS X, Linux, and Pocket PC platforms - or with the Java language.

Together with the AIM Pages platform, which IMO is ahead of the curve in integrating external services into its social networking offering, this shows that AOL is adapting big time to the new rules of the Web.

Open AIM was launched in March and (according to the press release blurb) "empowers companies, communities and independent developers to build customized plugins, communications clients and mash-ups that access AOL's global instant messaging network." So basically AOL lets developers leverage its market-leading IM platform - which has 43 Million users according to AOL. And now they apparently have more than 45,000 developers working with the AIM Software Development Kit (SDK).

Seeing as IM is such a huge hit with the MySpace generation, it'll be interesting to see what people develop using Open AIM - and what mashups will evolve. The only way to find out is to open up, so AOL has to be given kudos for doing so. Of course, the fact that MySpace has IM too and the likes of Skype and Yahoo are big threats - doesn't hurt innovation in the IM space :-)

AIM Bots

I need to investigate these AIM Bots some more, because they sound fascinating:

"AIM Bots are dedicated, opt-in Screen Names that help developers, marketers and individuals create new connections and establish strong bonds with contacts in the AIM community. In addition, AIM Bots can support audio calls, file transfers and picture sharing. For example, an AIM Bot could be created to let users send pictures or podcasts to their blogs.

AIM Bots respond automatically to instant messages (IMs) they receive and can maintain IM conversations with multiple users - reaching up to 10,000 people per day - before encountering limits.** To prevent IM spam, AIM Bots cannot initiate IMs without permission."

They also sound kind of dodgy, in terms of being bearers of spam and advertising. As a recent Slashdot article put it: AIM Bots: Useful or Spam? But still, I'm sure AIM Bots have their good uses!

disclaimer: I've done a tiny bit of work for AOL in the recent past, via Marc Canter's BBM. Just so you know.