What I like about LogMeIn is how they are upstanding guys. If you put down your money in the past for Ignition, you will be grandfathered in and have the premium features forever. They are planning on an Android app next year, naturally. The Pro version is $40 a year.

Timeline view is still available in Google News, but it only searches certain archived publications instead of all Web results. Google community managers have suggested the normal date range filter as an alternative, but this isn't a browsable feature like Timeline was. Just as it has done with Google Reader in recent weeks, Google has killed off a feature used by a small but dedicated set of its users.

In response to user complaints about the disappearance of Timeline, Google search community manager Kelly Fee suggests using google.com/trends or google.com/insights/search for graphs of search results over time, but those tools only go back to 2004, and they aren't a part of Web search. She also suggests the Google Books ngram viewer, but that's only for book searches.

Google's Going Real-Time

The end of Timeline coincides with its implementation of new real-time search algorithms that privilege recent results over old ones by assuming when users want current information. It's also experimenting with real-time search on Google+, and it's surfacing recent posts from the social network in Web search. The removal of Timeline pushes users of Google search away from historical content and toward real-time results.

Google can do whatever it wants with its free services, and it doesn't have to explain itself to anyone. And pushing around smaller products like Google Reader in the interest of Google+ is a sensible business move. But taking away useful features of Google search raises a more core issue.

As Vic Gundotra has made clear, the + part of Google is integral to Google itself. Is it starting to change the company's priorities? Google's mission has always been to organize the Web's information. Is its new social experiment in real-time trends compromising that?

Timeline search screenshot credit: Digital Marketing Rucksack

Of course, by October things were a bit different in the Twitterverse, as on the streets of New York and elsewhere. The above screen shot shows centers of influence from Huffington Post and Keith Olbermann, with smaller nodes from the New York Post, CNN and the Associated Press. Where is the coverage by the Grey Lady? Too small to see with my eyes. That in itself shows you how the message was spread and who was relevant and who wasn't. Fascinating.

Push delivery technology company Superfeedr today released a new Chrome browser plug-in called Msgboy. (The first 200 people to use this link can get it.) The plug-in accesses your browser's history and uses it to make a big list of web pages you like and feeds you're subscribed to. Then it uses Superfeeder's XMPP and Websockets technology to push new updates from those sources to your browser, in the form of a Chrome Notification. Click the plus and minus buttons in the pop-up and you can quickly train it to know what kind of notifications you want or don't want to see. I've been using it this morning and like it a lot. There are a lot of feeds I've subscribed to that I don't remember to check very often anymore; now they are in the corner of my screen all day.

"The msgboy addresses just that : it sends you the web you care about and stores it in your browser. It's a Chrome application that will silently build a small firehose of all the web services that you use online. It will show you some of these messages as HTML5 notifications."

If you don't like to be interrupted while online, if you need a perfectly polished UI or if you can't handle a little bit of noise until the system is trained, then Msgboy probably isn't for you.

For me, though, this looks great so far. I've now got Growl messages popping up in the top left corner of my screen, Tweetdeck messages in the bottom right and Msgboy in the top right. I am in news firehose heaven.

A number of synchronization services are available that handle file transfer, including Evernote, SugarSynch and FileMagnet (see the TidBITS story comparing five of them). Ignition avoids the effort in using a second app for these transfer tasks.

You can download the latest version from the iTunes Store here. You'll need to set up a free LogMeIn account and install the desktop software on the computers that you wish to remotely control first.

Also in other news, Ignition will come pre-installed on new Toshiba Android Thrive tablets and be available for a free 45-day period, and $25 thereafter. Like other Android versions, though, it doesn't include the file transfer feature yet.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the closure, but called it a temporary one. According to Google, Realtime Search has been shuttered as a 2009 agreement between Twitter and Google had expired, making what was one of the key element of that real-time content - Tweets - no longer available.

Google Plus and Realtime Search

Google may move to incorporate the new Google Plus posts into a revised real-time search, but that hardly addresses the problem of searching for Tweets. As Danny Sullivan points out, Twitter has "largely outsourced the service of Twitter search longer than a few days to Google." Although Google will still have access to Twitter data by crawling the Web, it won't be the same, and the recurring complaints about the difficulties surrounding Twitter search and archives are likely to resurface.

Social Signals in Search

It's easy to read the falling out between Twitter and Google as being connected to the newly launched Google Plus, but it's far too early to make any sweeping pronouncements about Google no longer needing Twitter to beef up its social search now that it has what appears to be a successful social component on its hands. Google has managed just fine without having Facebook integration, of course. But the value of Twitter in real-time searches seems to go beyond just "the social." Add to that, Google+ still a nascent network, one that may be, at least according to journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, somewhat less useful of a tool for breaking news coverage and by extension, less useful for real-time search.

Last week at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit, our COO Sean Ammirati spoke to Betaworks CEO John Borthwick. Betaworks has funded and incubated a number of companies in the real-time Web market, such as TweetDeck, Bit.ly and Chartbeat.

Partly the answer to that is the health of the startup ecosystem. Betaworks spotted the trend of the real-time Web early and helped developed some key startups in this area, particularly third party Twitter services. So Sean asked Borthwick what he thinks of the market currently. Borthwick replied that he doesn't think the market is in a bubble. He noted that companies with very large valuations have big revenue: Facebook, GroupOn, Zynga and even Twitter. So he thinks those valuations are justified.

Another key is when startups should pivot, to capitalize on market opportunities or changes. According to Borthwick, user adoption and engagement are two key metrics for companies when deciding whether to pivot or not. He also talked about "right-sizing your business" if necessary, in other words don't over-reach and raise a lot of capital if it's not feasible to reach the mainstream.

iPad magazine apps is an example of an emerging market that Betaworks is at the early stage of exploring. News.me is a personalized magazine from the Betaworks stable, competing head on with Flipboard. Borthwick explained that News.me is both an iPad app and an email subscription service. With the iPad app, they charge 99c per week and pay that revenue to publishers (they have done deals with 650 publishers, including ReadWriteWeb).

News.me isn't just another Flipboard copycat. Whereas Flipboard is a social magazine, News.me is a curated reading experience. It works by showing different views of what people are reading. It isn't based on what a person has read, but what they are likely to read according to who they follow and interact with on Twitter.

It remains to be seen if News.me can successfully compete against Flipboard and other online reading services, but it's a great example of how Betaworks pushes the boundaries when releasing new Web products.

You can see the entire conversation here, courtesy of Livestream:

Google is doing this through a program called WebRTC, a project that was spawned from the company's acquisition of Global IP Positions (GIPS) in May 2010. Google is now ready to begin implementing WebRTC into its Chrome browser. It will augment its current video chat capabilities within Gmail and put a dent into real-time, unified communications aspirations of companies like Microsoft (Skype), Apple and Cisco.

Secondly, and on a more practical basis, Google's three biggest initiatives are in developing Web applications outside of the desktop (see Chrome OS), mobile functionality and the cloud. Those three are tightly intertwined in Google's vision. WebRTC fits within all three of those by creating system where people can connect through video or audio anywhere on the Web, on any device, through the browser, in the cloud.

WebRTC makes this possible through Javascript APIs that are free and open source. Hence, not limited to Google. Mozilla and Opera have been invited to the initiative as well. The immediate goal is to collaborate with the open source community to create a universal set of Javascript APIs that enable real-time communication through the browser across the Web.

Google announced last week that WebRTC is about to land in Chromium, the code source for the Chrome browser.

"We are working hard to complete the remaining steps for a full integration in Chromium and Chrome including JavaScript APIs in WebKit and handling of the native audio and video capture and rendering," Jan Linded wrote in a blog post at WebRTC.org. "When we are done, any web developer shall be able to create RTC applications, like the Google Talk client in Gmail, without using any plugins but only WebRTC components that runs in the sandbox."

In the mid-1990s, it took two minutes or more for a modem to make a connection and boot the World Wide Web for your "surfing" pleasure. Two minutes is an eternity in today's Internet and communications landscape. The ability to send messages and find information in real-time has certainly changed the way we work and live.

Communicating In the Speed of Now

One of the most disruptive innovations of the past two decades has been that of the instant message. It started with chat rooms in the early to mid-1990s and progressed to personal chat between parties. AOL's instant messaging was an addictive practice when it was released and was the first step in real-time messaging that has evolved into the unified communications industry.

Today, real-time communications can come from anywhere at anytime and include things that seemed like science fiction only five years ago. Whether it is online presence and chat provided by Google, Microsoft or Cisco or mobile video chat with Apple's FaceTime, the ability to communicate in real-time has created the ability for instant collaboration that increases worker efficiency.

Instant Information of What Is Happening Now

Search is a constantly evolving science. Yet, it was not until the last several years that search started to deliver result in near real-time. The effect is a gradual change in the way people create and consume information.

Twitter is the poster child of the real-time information revolution (actually, it is hard to find Twitter results that are older than real-time). People now know of events minutes after they happened, as opposed to hours later or the next day. In business, that can have a profound impact as decisions can be informed by what is happening now.

The present "now" can also be correlated into a previous "now" that happened in the past (think of the ability to see exactly what kind of data you had 10 minutes ago, an hour ago, at noon on a Tuesday last month or last year). Real-time data affects individual productivity as well as group mindsets, such as stock market data.

Real-Time Location Just Starting to Be Utilized

The Web is just starting to tap the potential of the confluence between real-time and location. You can now track objects and people from a mobile device or a desktop to monitor progress (such as tracking a package or a courier and your managers in the field).

There is extraordinary power in knowing where a person or an object is right now, as opposed to where it is coming from or where it is supposed to be going. Mobile devices and sensors have made this possible and it is one of the most rapidly evolving aspects of Internet innovation.

Photo by aurelio

Facial detection software is not just limited to the Web though. A new startup in Chicago called SceneTap uses facial detection and people-counting cameras to scope out your local bar to tell you "what is going on." What is the male-to-female ratio at your favorite club? Who is buying drinks? SceneTap cameras see it all and provide the data to users and bar owners. Seem a little creepy? Maybe not as much as you might think.

According to founder and CEO Cole Harper, the footage collected by SceneTap is not meant to be looked at by anyone. There is a demarcation between "facial detection" and "facial recognition" that SceneTap says it does not cross. The way it works is that there is a camera facing the door of the bar. A person comes in and the camera creates a box around the face, analyzing the eyes, nose and facial structure. It takes that data and scans it through a database to find the most similar type of match. Are you a 25-year-old female? That is what the SceneTap camera is trying to find out.

The cameras are not monitored by people and information is not stored. Bar owners do not have access to the feeds as the stream is encrypted from the backend. SceneTap does technically have access to the visual feed but Harper says that it would only be used for maintenance.

Big Data for Bar Owners for the First Time

The value proposition for bar goers and bar owners is significant. Fundamentally, SceneTap is trying to bring big data on a granular level to the restaurant industry. It analyzes what type of people are coming in, what they are buying and when they come and go. That information can be cross-referenced with promotions, advertisements and on-site staff (does Bartender A bring in more male patrons than Bartender B, for instance).

This is not the type of information that restaurants and bars have ever had access to. Even with the most sophisticated point-of-sale systems, the ability to have specific gender-related data on a timeline that can be studied over a period of time is not available. Yet, add SceneTap data with the POS system and all of a sudden restaurant owners know everything about their clientele.

For bar goers, it provides real-time information to help you decide where you are going. Is Bartender A working? How many girls are there and how old are they?

SceneTap will launch in Chicago in the middle of July and have partners in select cities across the country shortly thereafter including New York, Boston, Miami, Austin, Columbus, Phoenix, St. Louis, San Diego and Las Vegas.

Skype, the company states, will be coming to Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone, Lync and Outlook, plus other Windows devices and communities.

"Skype will support Microsoft devices like Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone and a wide array of Windows devices," the blog post states, referring cryptically to "Windows devices," instead of saying "computers running the Windows operating system," for example, which is a bit curious, we think. The post then continues, "Microsoft will connect Skype users with Lync, Outlook, Xbox Live and other communities."

Prior to this statement, Skype referred to Microsoft's "long-standing focus and investment in real-time communications," and mentioned many of the same products, but also included Hotmail and Messenger in the list. Although not named directly in the line of products and services Skype says it will support going forward, it would make sense to integrate Skype with Hotmail or Microsoft's consumer-facing instant messaging service, Messenger, both on the desktop and on mobile. That would make the product a compelling alternative to Google's popular Gmail program, which includes Google Talk, an integrated video chat service, albeit a far more basic one than Skype.

Further integrating the Skype + IM + Hotmail offering onto the mobile handset, specifically those powered by Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's mobile OS which also connects users to their Xbox identities and games, would then complete the circle.

As ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus speculated prior to this morning's news, Skype needs to make a jump to "non-PC devices," and will be able to do so thanks to the Xbox and Kinect. Skype from your living room TV to your phone and back? Skype from your work PC to your kids playing Xbox at home? Maybe even Skype from Mac to your SYNC-enabled vehicle? This is the future of Skype, under Microsoft's direction. And it's not a bad one at that, if Microsoft can execute.

Since it added Facebook support in March 2009, TweetDeck has aimed to be a central app from which people can interact with all of their social networks. That's a potentially massive commercial opportunity for a startup. Imagine being able to control your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social services using the one interface. That's precisely what TweetDeck does right now, only it's not quite fully functional yet and people haven't gotten used to the concept. Unfortunately, the acquisition by Twitter will put an end to TweetDeck's ambition and we'll have to wait for another startup to chase that Holy Grail. Here's how this all played out and our guess at what will happen next...

TweetDesk was developed by Iain Dodsworth from England, at first as a desktop app for Twitter powered by Adobe AIR. TweetDeck was released as a public beta in July, 2008. "I originally built TweetDeck to solve my problem of being overwhelmed with Twitter," Dodsworth later told tech blogger Louis Gray.

ReadWriteWeb reviewed TweetDeck when it launched. Frederic Lardinois noted at the time:

The major difference between TweetDeck and other Twitter clients like Twhirl, Snitter, Twitteriffic, and AlertThingy, is that it displays more than one column of information at a time. In TweetDeck, you can define columns for your replies, numerous searches in Summize, as well as groups. You can define up to 10 different columns.

One of TweetDeck's defining features on launch was its ability to create groups of Twitter users, to better allow you to filter your Twitter experience. Dodsworth explained to Louis Gray that "segmenting my friends out to a separate area was the catalyst for the creation of groups (a first for twitter applications afaik) and required a new approach to the UI." This UI was inspired by financial dashboards, which Dodsworth had "been involved in building and evolving before TweetDeck."

2009: TweetDeck Expands Beyond Twitter; to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn & More

Although TweetDeck was originally conceived as an application to manage your Twitter reading and writing, Dodsworth soon saw the potential to expand it to other social media services. Dodsworth wrote in mid-09 that he had "a bigger vision [for TweetDeck], to become a new browser for the real-time Web."

To fuel that ambition, Dodsworth took seed funding from Betaworks in January 2009. We profiled Betaworks in September last year - it's a seed-stage investor in a range of real-time web companies, such as Tumblr, Twitterfeed, Superfeedr and Songkick.

In March 2009 TweetDeck added its first integration with Facebook. It featured a new column showing status updates from your friends, along with the ability to update your Facebook status from within TweetDeck.

In June 2009, TweetDeck went mobile with the announcement of an iPhone app. It belatedly launched an Android version in August 2010. Version 2 of the iPhone app followed in April 2011.

In September 2009, TweetDeck added "full powered Facebook" support. That featured the ability to view Facebook photos, videos, links, wall posts, comments and more in TweetDeck. At the same time, TweetDeck added MySpace to the app. LinkedIn was added in November that year, in-app YouTube and Flickr support in February 2010, and Google Buzz and Foursquare in May 2010.

As well as expanding its support of services other than Twitter, TweetDeck continued to adapt to whatever changes Twitter made. For example, TweetDeck added support for Twitter lists in October 2009.

At the end of the year, ReadWriteWeb named TweetDeck one of its Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009.

2010-2011: More Apps (iPad, Android, ChromeDeck) & Pushing Twitter's Boundaries

2010 was mostly focused on expanding the list of devices and platforms that TweetDeck covered.

TweetDeck for iPad arrived in April 2010, making "full use of the iPad's large screen size and gesture-based Multi-Touch navigation."

Another milestone was the first browser-based version of TweetDeck, with the launch of ChromeDeck in December 2010. As the name suggests, it brought TweetDeck to Google's Chrome browser. The beta of TweetDeck Web was released in April 2011, bringing TweetDeck to other web browsers.

Also in 2011, TweetDeck turned its attention to pushing the boundaries of what Twitter offers. TweetDeck launched a feature called Deck.ly in January this year, which allows users to post tweets that are longer than the traditional 140 character limit. It's been arguably the most controversial thing TweetDeck has done, but it may well be something that Twitter eventually adopts - whether or not it acquires TweetDeck.

It should be noted that TweetDeck has had technical road bumps along the way, particularly dealing with Twitter's API limits. There have also been issues with the app itself, particularly problems with large spikes in CPU and memory usage. But overall, the product has been one of the best examples of innovation in the social media era of the Web.

TweetDeck's Search for The Holy Grail

By its 2nd anniversary in July 2010, TweetDeck had firmly established itself as the leading consumer app for Twitter. At that stage the desktop TweetDeck app had been downloaded over 15 million times and the iPhone version over 2.5 million times.

To this day Facebook and the other non-Twitter services are still a peripheral feature of TweetDeck. Most people use TweetDeck primarily to manage their Twitter account. The Facebook integration is merely a handy, probably not well used, feature.

Nevertheless, as early as March 2009 TweetDeck was clearly building a product with a lot of promise. I'd argue that TweetDeck was building the Holy Grail of web apps in the social networking era: a single place to interact with all of your different social networks and social media services.

In July 2010, TweetDeck stated that its goal was to become a "true multi-stream" service. It claimed that "the intersection of social networks, can be infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. [...] TweetDeck should be more about what your friends are saying rather than the networks they are using to say it."

Twitter: Oh No You Don't...

It's a nice dream, but Twitter won't want that reality to happen. That's because to Twitter, the networks that people are using does matter. Specifically, Twitter doesn't want Facebook to usurp it for real-time updates.

It's possible that Twitter will require TweetDeck to drop support of other services entirely. More likely, Twitter will allow TweetDeck to keep developing its central social networking hub - but it will find ways to ensure that Twitter remains front and center in the app. That isn't a big change from what TweetDeck is now, because as noted above most TweetDeck users still use the app primarily for Twitter. However, it will certainly restrict the future TweetDeck.

If TweetDeck had continued to be independent, or even if UberMedia had succeeded in its earlier bid for the product, we (the users) would eventually have gotten a much more expansive TweetDeck. Probably a more exciting product too. Definitely it would've been one with the potential to change the Web ecosystem.

There's no way that will happen if Twitter buys TweetDeck, as seems likely to be confirmed any day now. That's sad for Web innovation.

If you're familiar with Twitter (or even Facebook these days), then you might recognize the new feature just released by real-time comment system Disqus: @mentions.

Originally started on Twitter, the @ symbol has quickly become the character of choice for directing comments toward a certain recipient. Now, the symbol has made its way to the popular commenting service, allowing users to mention others in the conversation and even pull other people into the conversation.

The @ feature released today by Disqus allows users to not only mention other users who are participating in the conversation, but also Twitter users.

"Before @mentions, commenting threads were an island. There wasn't a way to reach out to people who weren't already participating. Now with @mentions, you can call out your friends or friendly social media gurus, and get them involved in the conversation," the company explains on its blog. An @mention of a Disqus user sends an email notification, while an @mention of a Twitter user sends a Twitter @mention from @DISQUS_Mentions, Disqus' "Spiffy Twitter bot."

With Facebook Comments, the engagement driver is simple and obvious. Facebook. When you post a comment, you can chose to share it on your timeline and even include a full link to the story on your newsfeed.

Disqus has been insistent that Facebook hasn't been an issue. "Facebook's latest update to their widget hasn't chipped away at our growth, from the metrics we pay attention to," Ha told us earlier this week. Still, we think it needs to continue making moves like this to keep publishers from making the switch.

That, and the feature is just neat. @mention me in the comments below.

Real-time commenting system Disqus came out this morning with a bunch of numbers, including "10 million" (how many dollars it just secured). The battle for commenting solutions on the Web has clearly not died just because Facebook jumped in the ring.

As a matter of fact, Disqus co-founder and CEO Daniel Ha says the company has grown immensely over recent years and he has the numbers to back it up...Facebook comments, be damned.

Disqus says that it reaches nearly 500 million unique visitors per month across the 750,000 websites using its commenting system. Over the last year, that's an increase of 500%, with much of that growth in recent months. As a matter of fact, the company says it was at only 200 million uniques per month last November, meaning it has more than doubled unique visitors in six months. The post also mentions a recent study by Lijit, which it says that Disqus is used by 75% of websites that use a third-party commenting system.

We asked Ha about how things have gone since Facebook really jumped in the arena and he pointed out (as did we earlier this year) that Facebook comments have actually been around for a while now, yet Disqus is still growing.

"Facebook Comments have been around for almost 2 years and we've grown around 600% in the last year. Facebook's latest update to their widget hasn't chipped away at our growth, from the metrics we pay attention to. Our daily publisher install rate has grown about 20% since late February when Facebook had their latest announcement. The biggest impact is that Facebook is asked about by tech press and industry peers, but honestly we've had great success with media properties and publishers who are switching to Disqus after trying alternatives," said Ha.

There's the character limitation, of course. There're the restrictions on DMing those who don't follow you. And if you have email notifications set up, there's the annoying influx in your inbox when you try to hold a conversation via direct message.

A new service launching today aims to leverage your Twitter network in order to build a better instant messaging platform. Joint lets you chat with those in your Twitter network - but it doesn't use Twitter to do so.

To IM someone via Joint, you can send them a message - either through an @-message or through a DM - asking that person to join you on Joint. That message includes a link that, once the Joint client is downloaded, will open to a one-to-one chat.

Similarly, Joint allows you to create chat rooms so that you can have instant-messaging capabilities with groups of people as well. These rooms can be either public or private. The chat rooms do not persist - in other words, once the last person logs out of Joint, the room will disappear. However, each user does have a permanent web address linked to their account, so that others can find which room(s) they're currently in.

Joint believes that this new tool could be utilized by brands and community managers in order to have real-time conversations with users outside the Twitter stream. This could be either on a one-to-one level for problem resolution or a large-scale chat room. But there may be any number of reasons why people might want to take their Twitter network and leveraging those social connections, have conversations elsewhere.

You can download the Joint client here and give it a whirl.