My audio-tweet was from Srini Kumar, developer of TinyVox. He wanted to know what I thought of the app's "voicemail on Twitter" approach and its retro cassette tape aesthetic. I said I'd be happy to check it out on the condition that we conduct our interview asynchronously, back and forth over TinyVox. So we did, and I learned more about communication than any social app has taught me in a while.

Srini:

@jonmwords cool path article - stealing the News Feed? taped with audio app TINYVOX

The metaphors are all over the place with this app. Srini called it, at various times, "voicemail on Twitter," a "mix tape," an "audio brainstorm" that can be a "throwaway" just for getting ideas out, and "podcasting for everyone." It was hard to decide how to use it. I figured concision was a good rule of thumb, so I just shot off a brief question about the medium itself.

Jon:

Question 1: About whether or not this is a new kind of medium taped with audio app TINYVOX

Srini came back with a huge response, full of passion and color and drama... and it was really, really long. But it was clear that he intends the app to be all of those things and more. Whatever we can do with our voice, Srini wants TinyVox to help us do more.

Srini:

The Tyler Durden effect ? taped with audio app TINYVOX

I loved what he had to say about the honesty and unsettling newness of communicating this way, aloud, spontaneously, without constraints. But exchanges of 10-minute messages didn't seem sustainable to me. This began to seem like a problem with the way the app works. Tweets are constrained to 140 characters, and that's why the medium works. These "audio-tweets" break that wide open.

So I asked Srini whether he agreed:

Jon:

Question 2: On the tendency (temptation?) to go long in this medium. taped with audio app TINYVOX

Honestly, I sort of expected him to take a hint and rein it in for the next answer, but he didn't. He came back with another six minutes of rhapsody, pushing me on the cultural norms that made me want short, tight answers. It's hard to concentrate and really listen to someone, even when they're sitting right in front of you. Would we be better to each other if we worked on that?

Srini:

we're spanning time taped with audio app TINYVOX

So I did. I practiced the art of paying attention, and I listened to every word. I found myself sympathizing with his whole message much more deeply than I do on Twitter. A Twitter person is just a picture, a handle and a burst of text. But committing to listening to a six-minute tape of someone's voice makes you follow his train of thought wherever it goes. I learned much more about where his head was at than I do about people in a comment thread.

For my last question, I let myself open up the same way. I asked him about the nostalgia and sentimentality of TinyVox itself and where the app is going:

Jon:

Question 3: about how the TinyVox recipient gets to keep the sentimental metaphor of the mixtape. taped with audio app TINYVOX

Srini's answer was vast again, but it was really exciting to hear from a developer with so much love for the interaction he's designing. Rather than summarizing where TinyVox is going, I'll leave you with Srini's audio answer. TinyVox is available for iOS and Android, and I'd be interested to hear how you find ways to use it. Share them in the comments here.

Srini:

the mixtape in the cloud taped with audio app TINYVOX

Note: the timestamps are off for the recordings in this exchange because I didn't realize that TinyVox is better about privacy than I initially thought. It doesn't post clips to the Web unless you explicitly tell it to, so I had to ask Srini to re-upload them after we were done.

We've compared Showyou's previous versions to Flipboard and Instapaper, which is pretty esteemed company for an iOS app. As a set of features, those comparisons are apt. But the interface takes it a step further. The app takes full advantage of the touchscreen. It's a better interface than TV has ever had. And you don't just watch on your device; you can AirPlay it to your Apple TV and just use Showyou as the remote. Whatever it was about TV that Steve Jobs said he "finally cracked," it was probably something like this.

Showyou has this figured out in so many ways. No other app has this grid interface, for one thing. The main screen of all your videos flows under your fingers like Microsoft's Surface or something out of Minority Report, except this is something you can have right now.

When you go further in to the app, whether you're browsing a category or a friend's videos, the interface is reined in a little, going to a simpler, scrolling column. The new navigation drawer helps you get reoriented quickly and easily.

The sources of the videos in Showyou are your friends and the people you follow. It connects to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Vimeo and Vodpod, which is a video curation site by Remixation, the company that makes Showyou. There are also some publisher channels, like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, TED and more. The main grid shows videos from all the sources you're following, and you can narrow down by source, by topic or hashtag, or by the person sharing. It even has pretty fast search using all that social metadata, with an index of nearly 30 million videos so far.

Showyou is free, and it will become ad-supported as it grows. It's also considering a subscription service for certain shows or publishers. The big question is whether Showyou will get licenses for major TV shows or movies. "Not yet," its people say. "Maybe soon." But YouTube viewing is eclipsing TV, anyway. For iPad or Kindle Fire owners, or even for iPhone and iPod Touch, Showyou should be in your living room.

Lately, we've started to see a new class of app emerge just for managing these tasks across their various apps. The idea of apps for our apps sounds ridiculous, but some of them are neat, and some are downright lifesavers. Here's a round-up of apps you should use if you want to bring your many social networks into one dedicated place.

A photo app called Pixable exists just to pull the photos from your Facebook and Twitter feeds into one attractive place. It allows further sorting of the photos into all kinds of categories, but its reach across social networks is what stands out. Pixable announced today that it reached a million downloads on iOS, and it also has a mobile Web version for users of other platforms.

Hopefully the creators will roll Instagram, Google+ and a few other services into this app. Then we'd only have to launch one app to see all our photos.

Videos

For viewing all the videos in your various social networks, Showyou is amazing. It brings any video from your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Vimeo and Vodpod accounts into one sleek, sliding touchscreen theater (Vodpod is a video curation site by Remixation, the company that makes Showyou). Apple people can even AirPlay the videos over to their Apple TV from the iPhone or iPad version.

Showyou is available for iOS devices and the Kindle Fire. If this app appeals to you, stay tuned, because we heard through the grapevine that Showyou has something to announce pretty soon.

Files

If you need to find files that could be anywhere, Greplin can help. It logs into your Dropbox, Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar, Facebook, Twitter and more, and it lets you search all of them for the thing you need. Check out our guide to Greplin for more details.

It's available for the iPhone as well as on the Web at Greplin.com.

Places

If you're like most Americans, you might not get the point of location apps. The point should be to find cool stuff going on around you. But there are so many of these location apps, it's impossible to know which one to use. That's where Localscope comes in.

It's a browser for the real world. It lets you search or browse across pretty much every Web service that shares public location data, and the interface is easy. You just click side to side between Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Bing and more.

You can get Localscope for the iPhone or webOS.

Do you use any other apps for dealing with too many apps? Share them in the comments.

"Facebook is a great project, but the international art market is very closed and the requirements especially for this market are really different in comparison to other markets," says My-ArtMap CEO Stefan Sebök. "Facebook and Google are too big and not specialized enough for the art market!"

The site's news feed is known as the NewsCafe. Much like Facebook, it surfaces stories posted by fellow users. But unlike the Facebook algorithm, My-ArtMap does not differentiate between highlighted and most recent stories.

The "Galleries" section allows users to create their own virtual art galleries around specific topics. These images can either have a certain theme, or could be a collection of artwork. For some reason, even though I set the language to English, the text in this section keeps popping up in German.

Users can also create groups around a specific topics.

The site still has quite a few quirks. It's unclear how the NewsCafe algorithm sorts stories, and sometimes the text doesn't translate. Still, this is an interesting project that seems like it could become a very useful tool for the social networked Art World.

Co-founder Cody Barbierri wrote in to let me know that, in the two weeks since launch (and it was over the holidays, too!), they added over 1,400 testers and 250 start-ups. The email was getting too long, so they've revamped the process. Only newly submitted apps will be in the email, and the rest are listed on the BetaBait site.

Only apps submitted in the past 24 hours are featured in the email, so recipients can view the latest submissions. At the bottom, there's a link to click through to the online directory, which offers tabbed browsing by category. It offers developers the same opportunity to pay to put their app at the top of the page. The Web view also includes Twitter and Facebook share buttons.

The developers we talked to at launch seemed pleased with the opportunity to get in front of willing beta testers for free. Now that this large directory of apps in testing is available online, it will be great to see how that impacts testing.

Check it out at BetaBait.com.

Google Translate has been available on the iPhone since the mobile Web version launched in 2008. The native app released last year added the voice-to-text feature as well as the spoken translations from Google's voice synthesizer. As one should expect, the translations are never perfect, but they're great for getting the gist.

The iPad UI is the slightest bit strange. When you paste text into the box, it scoots up, so the language choice buttons go away. You have to pull it down from a very thin tab to get it back (or hit cancel and start over). There's also no 'Translate' button, only 'Go' on the keyboard. There's plenty of room for that under the voice-to-text button, so let this be a humble, simple feature request.

But that's all very nitpicky. I have no right to complain about an app that will translate text into 64 different languages, many of which it will read aloud to you, for free. The future rocks.

Download Google Translate for iOS from the App Store.

Do you know of any other good translator apps?

Handpick is a social Web app that doesn't interfere with the Web itself. It lives in your bookmarks bar or Chrome extensions. When you find a link you want to share, you click it, and it pops up a simple form for a title, link, description and a checklist of recipient groups you've created. When you click 'share,' it doesn't buzz all your friends' phones right away. It collects links for you all day and sends an email digest to each group in the evening.

Now, that's still better than an inbox full of email, but that's not Handpick's solution. Recipients of your Handpick links only get one message, and it arrives late in the day, when there's more time for thinking. You create groups of contacts using whatever criteria you choose, and each group gets one message around 5 p.m. Pacific Time.

It has support for desktop and iPhone browser bookmarklets, a Chrome extension, and it can link with Instapaper. It's a great way to share selectively with minimal interruption, reaching your contacts in a place they'd check anyway. Want to try it out? Here's an invite link. Room is limited. First come, first served.

So when I opened Yobongo on Friday, my first thought was, There must be a Web app in here somewhere. My second thought was, Oh, wow! Global Yobongo chat and private rooms are open to everyone! So that's the news. You can now use Yobongo no matter where you are, although the location-specific rooms are still only in select cities. But there's more. As Caleb told me coyly, "iPhone is just the start" for Yobongo. "We want to help people communicate more efficiently," Elston says, and that means everybody.

The Transition From Texting

I'm home in Atlanta for the holidays, and, fortunately, so are tons of my friends. Now that I finally could, I decided to beta test Yobongo with them. When Elston contacted me, I was on my way to see those friends at the time, and a great many of them have iPhones. So I created a private chat room for us, invited them all via a Web link in an SMS message, and told them what Yobongo does.

"It's a live, persistent chat room," I told them. "There are public rooms and private rooms." I was improvising based on the new version. "There's a global room now, and soon, there will be local, neighborhood-based rooms, so you can meet people around you. We can use this private room I made, and it also has direct messages." They got the idea.

We already used Apple's native iMessage for this, but group texting is annoying. It's hard to tell who sent the message, some people don't have group messaging turned on, et cetera. The new Yobongo features made the transition easy. It just used the contacts on my phone. I could send them invitations via SMS or email, and when they clicked on the link and downloaded the free app, they were in.

A Sense of Place

My friends are geeks in that they are the kind of people who have smartphones. But they aren't geek geeks. They consider my obsession with the details and minute improvements of applications to be somewhat embarrassing. For my part, I think that makes them perfect beta testers.

I brought in a Web designer, a pro photographer, a third-year medical student, a senior congressional staffer and an Interscope-signed rock drummer. That's a pretty good range of the geek spectrum, and only one is as OCD about apps as I am.

To my delight, the adoption was instantaneous. Everyone remarked on how the faces and simple bios, as well as the graceful, in-line photos, created a feeling of being together. When I explained that the goal Yobongo declared at launch was to bring new people together based on location, they understood. You could meet people here and then keep in touch with them, as well as bring your outside friends into the conversation.

Some Compromises

I won't overlook the negatives. Some of the less native-feeling functionality had downsides that put a few bumps in the road. All my guinea pigs friends were frustrated by the app's tendency to refresh when launching instead of bringing you back to your last screen. This morning, I noticed that the performance was a bit faster, and I could leave the app briefly and get right back to where I was. It doesn't feel all the way native yet - though Elston assures me it is - but it's getting there.

Another feature we want is access to the address book on the front screen, so we can invite our friends straight into private messages. As it is, you have to invite them through a private room first, and then you can message them. Presumably, when the beta period is over, the prominent 'Feedback' button can be replaced with this. In the meantime, Yobongo feels like exactly what it is: a work in progress by creative people who are open to suggestions.

Beta, But Beautiful

The global Yobongo room is clearly labeled as a beta, and the local rooms for your location are still in the menu, even if they aren't open yet. So Yobongo currently feels like a sandbox. That is to say, it's childlike, a little messy, playful and fun. Meet people, mess around, take pictures of your burritos, who cares? Talking to strangers in IM is good practice for real life.

I met Elston for coffee in San Francisco last October, and we discussed awkwardness. That's the problem he was talking about solving with Yobongo. Awkwardness is in the mind, we agreed, and communication is the cure. Text messaging is awkward. It's hard to type with thumbs, auto-correct can be hilarious and embarrassing, and, with groups, it's hard to tell who said what. The little touches of Yobongo warm up the medium.

My friends and I planned our whole New Year's Eve in our Yobongo room. And now that we're starting to fly back to our respective new homes, we're still using it, sharing little updates and hanging out live with one another for a few minutes at a time. It's almost like we never left.

iPhone Is Just The Start

Thanks to Yobongo, Twitter, Instagram and a little bit of real life, I've gotten to know some of this team. The Yobongo people care about quality. They meditate in the office. They wouldn't make compromises without a reason. So I know there's something behind this functionality, the reconnecting on launch, the email and SMS invitations, things that the iPhone can do more natively, but Yobongo doesn't.

"I'm just going to ask this straight up," I said to Elston. "Is all this Web and email and SMS stuff setting the stage for a cross-platform adventure?"

"iPhone is just the start," he replied. He followed with the Yobongo mantra, "We want to help people communicate more efficiently," and then he changed the subject. "Standing in line for a burrito," he said, and he sent me a picture.

If you have an iPhone, visit the App Store and try out Yobongo with your iPhone-wielding friends. See if it's as natural for you as it was for me and mine. And non-iPhone folks should stay tuned, because that burrito pic was some serious sleight of hand.

How do you communicate with groups of friends at once?

Other additions are catching up with WordPress for iOS, but they're welcome. The post editor now has a formatting toolbar above the keyboard, and the app now has a tablet view. The app also adds post uploading in the background and gets a few other fixes. This is an open-source app, and it's the best mobile blogging interface I've seen yet. What's up with everybody else?

WordPress for iOS is fine. Our Marshall Kirkpatrick finds it to be a knock-out, but that may be Stockholm syndrome. I use it, too, and it works, but it's awfully hard to use compared to this new Android version. The Action Bar and Dashboard should become the standard. I love that it's the result of open-source collaboration.

So, what's up, blogging platforms? The world is mobile now, and helping us blog while we're out is a surefire way to keep users engaged. WordPress for Android has pivoted back toward the light, but most of the pivots in this area have been toward social networking and away from writing posts.

Do you blog from mobile devices? What service do you use?

ReadWriteWeb gets tips about new consumer-facing location apps every day. We like the futuristic whiz-bang idea of augmented reality, so we tend to write these up every once in a while. But geolocation apps have not yet caught on in consumers' minds. That's because most offerings focus on monetizing location, leaving the user interface as an afterthought. Today, I think that changed. I found Localscope, the first location app I've ever used that I think I'll use every day.

A Browser For the World Around You

Localscope is currently available for iPhone and webOS only. This is actually the launch of version 2.0; the app has been around for almost a year. Version 1 helped users find things nearby using publicly available geo data. It was a nice interface, but not a unique offering. Version 2.0 is much more than that. It's a browser for the world around you.

The app has three views: gallery, map and augmented reality. None of these interfaces is new to the market, although Localscope's UI design is striking.

But here's the difference: while a photo discovery app like Trover or a business finding app like Yelp can show you its own content through these same kinds of views, that's all it has. Localscope lets you toggle between whichever location-enabled service you want to find something nearby.

Localscope has both a search mode and a discover mode. When you choose a mode, it goes straight into the view you last used, and a scrolling list of services appears across the bottom. They include Panoramio, Google's map-based photo network, Instagram, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Google and Bing, as well as the open-source service Wikimapia. Siloed services like Yelp are conspicuously absent.

Find What You're Looking For

The app will grab full location info, usually from Google, when you choose a place. But you don't have to search for a restaurant; you can just go find neat spots people have photographed on Instagram or tweeted about. That's the kind of exploration that drew me to Trover, but Trover is its own network, while Localscope searches across a bunch of different, more popular ones.

The best touch is the compass, though. You don't have to hold your phone up in the goofy augmented reality position. The app uses the phone's compass, and it displays the direction of the object you're looking for everywhere, even in the list view, using a floating compass icon. You can start walking right away. It never takes more than two or three taps to find something that interests you and start looking for it.

This is what I've been waiting for, a location app that isn't about gathering data from me, but about showing it to me. And having access to so many services means that the exact thing I'm looking for is bound to be in here somewhere, never more than a few slides and taps - and then a short walk - away.

Localscope is available in the iTunes Store for $1.99.

It's a free, email-driven service. When you join, you're on the daily email list, which breaks down the apps by category. BetaBait charges $50 for a sponsor slot at the top of the email, so readers see sponsor apps first. That's it. If you've got an app, there's no reason not to use it.

BetaBait just wants to be helpful and make a little dough from sponsors. The website has places to sign up, info for sponsors and a short but helpful primer on marketing an app to early users.

Does it work? It's only been out two days - and BetaBait itself is still in beta - but apps are already seeing results. I emailed all the founders on today's list to ask, and I got a bunch of responses right away.

Quoc Nguyen, founder of local hotspot finder RedSpark, says, "We were extremely surprised in the influx of interest in our product the day after we published on BetaBait."

"I was able to track that 3 people signed up from it," says Sean Barkulis, co-founder and CEO of personalized "smart-calendar" UPlanMe, which has only been on the list one day. "Not bad, considering we were 3/4 of the way down on the e-mail."

Check the Mail makes a full-featured email client for iOS devices that, once its out of beta, will be able to work with all the major free email services. Its team says it's seen traffic and sign-ups both days. "What we really like about BetaBait is that the sign-up process was simple and quick and emphasizes getting the point of our project across in a very succinct manner," the team says.

I got one really thorough response from Erik Lagerway, founder of stealth social iPad app Hookflash. He says "they really need to improve upon" the BetaBait dashboard, offering analytics and stats to testers. Right now, it's just a panel to manage the email listing, as seen here:

That does sound nice, but maybe it's a lot to ask for a totally free service. Lagerway is also frustrated by the inability to track signups specific to BetaBait using its own tools, but UPlanMe handled this by putting a special tag in the link it submitted.

It's a simple, free service, and I'm sure the team will appreciate Lagerway's feedback. If you want to put your app in front of people who want to test apps, BetaBait is a no-brainer.

It's hard enough being a normal user, but some have millions of people tweeting at them! How are they supposed to process all those messages? In the Information Age, you'd think more data would be a good thing, but on the social Web, the opposite is true. But the aforementioned Nova Spivack - along with co-founder Dominiek ter Heide - has just unveiled Bottlenose, and it could be the tool that helps us avert The Sharepocalypse in the nick of time.

Stream Intelligence

Bottlenose is a new social media dashboard for influencers of all stripes. But it's not just for posting and reading; it helps you filter and manage your networks with semantics and machine learning. It's all Web-based, written in HTML 5 and Javascript. It does the data crunching on the browser side (for the non-pro users), so you get native performance behind these major operations reading and parsing your stream.

You log in to your social networks - Twitter and Facebook only at first - and Bottlenose begins crawling your stream. You can also add RSS/Atom feeds to bring in entries from websites. Other social networks are coming soon, and you'll even be able to pull in email eventually.

You can view your full real-time feed and post to it as normal. Bottlenose knows how to filter the stream by media type, letting you pull out news, videos and pictures. You can add rules, just like Gmail filters or iTunes smart playlists, and save those searches. You can go even further with intelligent "assistants," which provide suggestions based on your interests and social graph, which Bottlenose learns by itself.

Does "intelligent assistant" sound familiar? That's no coincidence; Bottlenose co-founder Nova Spivack helped start the incubator that gave birth to Siri. This is an oversimplification, but think of the way Siri uses semantic processing to understand what you're looking for and apply it to your entire social media stream. Bottlenose assistants can do that for you.

And that's just the beginning.

Navigate By Sonar

With all these semantically loaded messages pouring in all the time, our social streams can reveal connections much more subtle and interesting than manual filters can provide. On Bottlenose, that's where the Sonar feature comes in.

Every stream view on Bottlenose can be displayed as a Sonar view, which shows the relationships between the topics (or hashtags, or mentions) at which you're looking. More relevant topics are displayed larger, and the web of connections can be zoomed into and explored.

Finding What's Relevant

All these features are various ways of sorting your overloaded stream to pull out only the posts that are interesting. For example, if you get too many Twitter mentions to read every day, you can create a rule to show only mentions from people with more than 5,000 followers, or only with Klout scores above 40, and just read that stream.

Bottlenose can also provide rich information about a single user at a glance. In one screen, you can see a bio, follower stats, Klout score, and a Sonar view of all the various topics and people that person mentions.

Not enough features for you? Plug in a new one. A few plug-ins are available already, such as Bit.ly link shortening, but this platform is going to be totally extensible. The API isn't open yet, but it will be.

Who Needs Bottlenose?

Bottlenose is freemium! Hooray! That means regular folks can use it for free. The pricing is based on storage, like Dropbox's model, so the free account will be enough for most people. The consumer version does all its data processing at the edge - meaning, in your browser - so you get pretty good performance without putting too much strain on Bottlenose servers. The free version runs only when you're logged in.

For the pro folks, a low monthly subscription model is coming in Q3 of 2012. That version will run in the cloud, crunching your streams 24/7, and it will offer as much storage as needed. Further down the road, there will be an enterprise version, offering centralized management, integration with other applications, and detailed analytics and reporting.

This kind of tool will only be more important in enterprise settings in the future. Gartner reports that, by 2014, social networking will replace email in 20% of enterprises as the main way to communicate. That shift is already taking place.

Stop The Streampocalypse

The Streampocalypse is inevitable without more intelligent ways to manage it. Bottlenose has built what it calls a "StreamOS," an operating system of sorts for the way we manage the downpour of real-time messages. It's positioned in the middle, more intelligent than basic consumer dashboards like TweetDeck and HootSuite, but more manageable, extensible and affordable than hardcore enterprise software.

So, do you want in? I thought so. Bottlenose is launching in private beta, but if your Klout score is high enough, you can walk right in. If not, we've got a few invites to give out. Visit Bottlenose.com and sign up with the code readwriteweb while supplies last.

Favo.rs looks a lot like LinkedIn and Facebook. There's a central news feed, a home navigation button in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, a centrally located search bar and notifications. Users gain a reputation through earning points. Favo.rs brings in a gamification element with four status levels (rookies, participant, advocate and benefactor) that users can achieve if they help one another enough.

Don't people already use Facebook or Twitter for these types of questions? Yes, they do, but because of the huge quantity of information on both of those sites, it's easy for stuff to get lost. Plus, while Facebook is focused mostly on friends, family members and work friends (you don't necessarily want to be Facebook friends with your boss, for example) and Twitter is more about interests, Favo.rs bills itself as a space entirely dedicated to asking favors from other professionals. It aims to both build and facilitate professional relationships right on the site. That's not to say Facebook friends and Twitter followers can't help. Favo.rs gives users the option to broadcast their favors to Facebook and Twitter in order to cast a wider net. In fact, Favo.rs also works as a Facebook app.

Transparency will encourage users to share more. Each user has a profile that includes who helped, who the user helped, who is following the user and who the user follows. Theoretically, the relationship starts off on the right foot, with a favor, and is easy to build from there.

Will Favo.rs fulfill that tiny ease-of-introductions niche need that LinkedIn lacks?
Favo.rs, however, is a network for professionals, thus making it seem more like LinkedIn. While it is easier to "meet" people on Favo.rs, it's hard to say right now because the community is still relatively small. The "introduction" mechanisms that Favo.rs provides does make the approaching new contacts feel much simpler than on LinkedIn, where it's difficult to connect with someone you don't know.

The site currently has about 1,200 users who have asked about 450 questions over the site's six-month-long private beta.

Favo.rs is an interesting idea, but will it actually take off? If it does, it will need to make clear why professionals would want to use it in addition to LinkedIn and Twitter.

The tech "world," or "scene," or whatever it is, is in love with this app. It tingled with excitement when Path went "stealthish" in 2010. It launched later that year weirdly lacking in features, and the blogerati still fawned over it. What is it about Path? How does "love" arise from Objective-C and 3.5 inches of glass? By evoking the people in your life, of course. And Path does that, just as Facebook does. It's a life stream. An ego trip. "Share life with the ones you love," especially yourself.

Path, in the exact manner as the conspicuously not-shipped Facebook Timeline, makes your life into a story, and your friends and family are the characters. You, of course, are the protagonist, the narrator, the star. Choose a profile picture. Choose a cover image. Share what you're doing. Are we talking about Facebook or Path? Exactly.

But Path's attention to detail puts Facebook to shame. Granted, that's easy to do when you don't have to bleed money out of your users' eyeballs yet.

Path is a closed network. You can syndicate to Facebook or Twitter if you choose, but within Path, it's for a limited number of close friends. It's full of cute signals of feeling and emotion, including emoticons and Instagrams - I mean, photo filters. The user interface is damn awesome, eye-poppingly original, soft and intimate. You can go to sleep and wake up in it, and the icon changes with the phases of the moon.

Doesn't that sound nice? Sure, it has that whole single-player-mode, where-are-my-friends problem, but it's so sexy and flattering, even when I'm alone! Just invite them all. They'll all join in. Right?

Stickiness & The Social Web

I didn't do a poll or anything, but crawling the blogosphere every day, I get the sense that people aren't satisfied with the Web. Why should we be? Bandwidth is expanding, interfaces are improving, the hardware is more responsive than ever. The Web is a communication medium that spans the globe, and by the measure of any engineer, we should be communicating better than ever. We probably are. But we aren't satisfied.

We've wound up with a social Web in which tools have to be "sticky" to catch on. Facebook is the stickiest, because that's where "everyone" is. But, - no offense, Windows people - Facebook is like the Windows of Web 2.0. It's the most broadly compatible system, but we all resent using it a little. Do you know anyone who loves Facebook? It keeps getting noisier, more confusing, and less secure.

But 800 million people use it anyway. It's "sticky." "Everyone" is on there. "I don't use Facebook" is the new "I don't have a cell phone," it is said.

So, here's Path. What Facebook should be, some say. It's for real friends, supposedly. not "friends" like the 2,000 people on Facebook. You can use Facebook like that, but then there's all the politics: can I unfriend this person, maybe I'll just mute them, what if I want to see their photos, &c, &c, &c. Sometimes it's nice to get a fresh start.

But then you have the Google+ problem. You have to convince your real friends to join in. And you, as the kind of person who would try an app like Path, say to them, "You guys. It's so cool. We can share everything with each other. Look at the moon!"

Then your friends go to the App Store or the Android Market and they peer into this uncanny valley of ego-streaming, and what do they do? Well, when Facebook introduced Timeline, what happened? A million or so (roughly 0.125%) users turn it on, Facebook looks at the data and panics. Launch date after launch date blows by. Facebook turns its attention to privacy concerns and doesn't mention Timeline.

Path is just like Timeline, only more elegantly constructed. Unlike Timeline, Path is readily available now. Go ahead. Try it out. Gaze at yourself. Does it make you want to share?

Do we need another app for recommending cafes and sushi bars to each other? No. But perhaps we should get rid of the older ones and keep Stamped. Its distinguishing feature is the lack of 5-star ratings. If you like something, you just stamp it with approval. Stamped is satisfying to use; there's no guesswork involved. With Google's voracious need for consumer data about local businesses, no wonder Google Ventures backed it.

Instead of just hoarding reviews, Stamped controls for the quality of its users to make its recommendations better. You only get 100 stamps to start off, and you get more depending on how popular your reviews are. "Review sites are cluttered with recommendations from people you don't know and don't care about," co-founder/CEO Robby Stein says. "We're focused on quality - only the people you trust recommending only what they truly like best."

The app is integrated with Google Places to pull up place data. It also has built-in OpenTable, Amazon, iTunes and Fandango support, so users can act immediately on their friends' recommendations. In other words, it's easy to act on the recommendations you find on Stamped.

There's attention to little details that goes a long way - for instance, you get to customize the color and gradient of your personal stamp. That seems silly, but it makes the list of stamps much easier to scan, and it gives you an emotional signal about the stamper in question. That's a neat little device, much more useful than trying to interpret what ✭✭✭½ means to a stranger.

Why Is Google Interested?

It makes sense that Google wants a stake in Stamped. Google has skin in the local recommendations game, and its current Google Places reviews use the same old 5-star rating system as its main competitor, Yelp. With its acquisition of Zagat, Google has secured the jackpot of professional-quality local business reviews, but it needs something distinctive to make user-generated recommendations more interesting.

Stamped's simplicity and focus on quality sets it starkly apart from the easily gamed recommendations on Yelp. It also couldn't be more different from the new Kevin Rose project, Oink, which is really complicated and makes scary pig noises. If you're unsatisfied with the state of recommendation apps, you might find that Stamped is the one that lets you delete the rest of them.

Which social recommendation apps do you use?