When Eriksen referred to having seen a sneak preview of the application, Rose was visibly surprised. "I cannot show that off yet. You're not even supposed to know about that... Nobody knows about that." A video of the interview is embedded below.

The duo's full interview with Rose will be available shortly via their weekly tech video podcast.

How did the interviewers end up catching a glimpse of the application? Eriksen wrote us today in an email, "We were sitting next to each other, and he had his iPhone in hand. I was turning to him to ask him a question when I saw him playing around with the app."

It goes without saying that a Digg application would take a lot of pain out of social bookmarking for a large number of smartphone users. Currently, startups such as Smub have offered work-arounds for simpler saving and sharing of links on mobile devices.

The Digg iPhone app represents the company's first major mobile offering since a revamping of the Digg mobile site in July 2008. We can reasonably assume that Digg apps for other types of mobile devices will be released in the months to come, as well.

We at ReadWriteWeb are definitely looking forward to playing around with Digg's new toy when it's released. What do our readers think, and what kinds of features do you hope to see when the Digg app hits the App Store?

With Profile Organizer, bookmarking is simple. Users save contacts with one click and are given the option to create category files for their contacts. If you want to separate the product managers from the designers or the engineers from the HR staff, you can. Users are given the chance to name their contact folders by occupation, location or other relevant labels. From here you can also choose to add contact information and notes. The information is only visible to you so you can be as descriptive as you like. If you don't already have a tool like Salesforce, the notes section is a great place to jot down a contact's interests and hobbies. If you're the type of person who needs more to jog your memory, it's also a great place to record the details of your last conversation.

The Profile Organizer is available to regular LinkedIn users for a 30-day trial. Business members can access the service but are given a limit of 5 contact folders. Meanwhile, Business Pro and Pro members can create as many as 25 contact folders. To test the new product visit Linkedin.com/organizer.

From their interactive graphs to their iPhone-optimized mobile site to their tracking of who shares what items when, Delicious is showing a deep understanding of where the real-time web is heading and how traffic in this environment works. They're giving users and content creators the tools they need to optimize for this environment. Read on for a complete list of Delicious' new flavors.

They've also added interactive graphs for periods more than 24 hours before the current time. Users can highlight an area on the graph and search for results that appeared within that time frame.

Who, What, Where?
A feature we love is the addition of recipient tags to a user's bookmarks. The tags show what bookmarks were sent to a Twitter account or emailed to a friend.

iPhone-Optimized Mobile Site
iPhone users will now get a richer and simpler bookmarking and link-saving experience. Delicious' post reads, "Use your to:read tag and read all those articles you've been meaning to read. Alternatively, see what's popular on the 'Explore' page or search for whatever happens to peak your interest."

Graphs
The graphs seen on search results pages are now also available on URL details pages and in the revamped Tagometer badges, which will now show the number of saved links over time on a graph.

URL Details
Data on links is now available in a much more digestible format, complete with graphs, of course!

Especially for mobile users and those with social media obsessions, this new suite of features seems to be as useful as well as fun to play with.

1. Mutual reinforcement of user expertise and document quality: A user's expertise in a particular topic depends on the quality of the documents she or he has found, and the quality of documents in turn depends on the expertise of the users who have found them.
2. Discoverers vs. followers: Expert users should be discoverers - they tend to be faster than others to identify new and high quality documents...SPEAR gives more credit to users the earlier they find high quality documents.

After analyzing more than 500,000 Delicious users and 2 million shared bookmarks, the solution produced a set of trustworthy users. No spammers were found in the top 200 recommendations.

While there are obvious uses for SPEAR in shopping and friend recommendation engines, says Noll, "The SPEAR algorithm itself is not restricted to the online world. We imagine to use SPEAR, for example, for estimating the expertise of researchers by analyzing scientific publications. Such publications - whether available as online versions or printed out on paper - provide all the information we need."

Expertise may have an algorithm across all industries. Be first and be fascinating. For more information on SPEAR visit Michael G. Noll's site.

Today, Faviki is releasing an upgrade to their service which will give you even better control over the tagging process, making bookmarking even easier than before. They're also announcing support for OpenID.

The biggest upgrade today is Faviki's enhanced tagging interface. In the past, Faviki struggled with some of the tag suggestions pulled out of Wikipedia because they were too long and too hard to enter for practical use. Plus, users wanted to use tags of their own creation, not the tag suggestions.

For example, if someone is tagging an article about the soccer player "Filippo Inzaghi," they may want to tag it by the player's nickname "Pippo." Before, this was not possible. But now, if Faviki doesn't understand a tag, it will pull in possible matches and ask you "What exactly do you mean by ______?" After you pick your selection, Faviki will remember your choice.

This is an important change for the service because it means users can tag web pages any which way they want, but they're still linked to the structured data on the back-end. That way, when someone searches through Faviki's community tags, all the web pages for that particular item or concept will appear, even if people tagged them using their own personal keywords.

Beyond Wikipedia

Another change in Faviki's service is the ability to define new tags. Prior to today, the service was limited to searching Wikipedia for tag suggestions, but now it has the whole web at its fingertips. If a tag is entered which doesn't match anything from Wikipedia, Faviki will search Google for relevant URLs and then ask if the links presented represent the same tag. As multiple users go through this process, Faviki learns what URLs best represent that concept and adds the new tags created by the users to its database.

API, OpenID, and More

Faviki has also just launched a Save/Edit API that provides a way to save and edit bookmarks from other applications. In addition, they've introduced support for OpenID. Other new features arriving today include a smarter autocomplete list, the ability to convert tags, spam control, the ability to export/backup your bookmarks, and a new tag description tooltip.

The only issue we have with Faviki is the same one we had before: there's still no import function available. That means you'll have to leave your extensive bookmark collection behind if you want to use this service. We suppose that it could be difficult to properly tag and match all of our old bookmarks, but without this feature, Faviki doesn't have the best shot at attracting the heaviest users of social bookmarking services.

But now, that's all changing...or so they say. The company has basically scrapped their original concept in a revamp that's more of a "makeunder" than it is a "makeover." The new Secondbrain focuses on making bookmarking simpler while ditching most of the service's other features.

What's Gone from Secondbrain

Regular Secondbrain users will have to deal with the most dramatic fallout from this switch, starting with the fact that some of their content has gone missing. Imported content like pictures, videos, bookmarks, etc. from other social media services no longer exists in the new Secondbrain. Only content imported manually or with the Secondbrain bookmarklet remains.

The new Secondbrain also no longer does social media synchronization or importing of Delicious bookmarks. These are temporary limitations as the company decides on how to reintroduce these features in a more user-friendly way. For now, Delicious bookmarks can only be imported manually by browsing for and selecting your exported bookmark file generated by Delicious for import into the service.

Also gone is the lifestreaming-like feature which let you follow other users and all the content they were sharing. Perhaps realizing that sites like Facebook and FriendFeed dominate in this area, Secondbrain has decided to switch this option off, now allowing you to follow specific collections only. These collections are sets of aggregated content (blog posts, photos, videos) on a particular subject. Here are some popular collections to give you an idea. All content added to Secondbrain has to go into a collection now, but it no longer has to be tagged - that has become an optional feature.

If you choose to use this part of the service, Secondbrain almost becomes an alternative RSS reader of sorts, pulling in filtered lists of "best of" content on topics you care about. Even better, you can just grab the RSS feeds for the collections themselves (a feature added last week) and pull them into your preferred feed reader instead.

Is It Worth Revisiting?

Overall, the new service may appeal to those who are still actively using social bookmarking and unlike similar sites like Delicious or Diigo, you don't follow people, you follow specific sets of content people create. (Diigo's "groups" feature would be the best comparison).

Still, the bigger question about the new Secondbrain isn't whether or not the new simplified service will appeal, but whether or not social bookmarking is even all that hot of a service anymore. It almost seems as if social bookmarking was just a pre-cursor to the social media sharing types of services we use today, like Twitter or Facebook. Because, really, if you want to casually share a link with your friends, what services do you turn to these days?

Social bookmarking still makes sense in some cases - like organizing research, sharing all the links discussed in a podcast, or compiling topic-based resource guides. In those niches, Secondbrain could still have a shot at staying afloat, but their real shot at glory may have already come and gone.

This, of course, isn't all KwiClick does. Besides doing simple web searches, KwiClick also allows you to search YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr, Friendfeed, and it can take addresses and quickly display a map as well. And those are just the default services, KwiClick can also show you results from 10 more services, including delicious, Technorati, and Amazon.

Sharing and Videos

In addition, after installing KwiClick, a small list of icons will appear next to videos and images on YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr. These icons allow you to watch the video or display an image in the detached Kwiclick window, share it with friends, find related videos, or more videos from the same producer all while the video continues to play in the background. KwiClick also allows you to share interesting videos you find on most of the popular content sharing services, including Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon.

All of these results, as well as the embedded videos, are displayed in a dedicated window which always stays on top of your Firefox window. If you like working with mouse gestures, KwiClick also integrates nicely with FireGestures.

KwiClick Does Help You Get Stuff Done Faster

The most important advantage of using KwiClick is that you can perform searches without having to leave the page you are currently on. Microsoft, of course, is playing with some of the same ideas with its Accelerator features in IE8, and other plugins replicate some of KwiClick's features as well. But as an all-in-one tool, KwiClick looks like it could indeed make you more productive while using Firefox (though our own Marshall Kirkpatrick still loves his Drag and Drop Zones plugin for speeding up his searches).

On the infrequently-updated company blog, the sole remaining employee Mike Koss shared the news about the additional funding, saying it was a "small round" but enough to enable Faves.com to operate for 2+ years, even without increasing the site's revenue.

He also shared some of the plans he has for the new Faves.com, a site that will no longer be solely focused on social bookmarking in the traditional sense, but will try to increase its relevancy in today's era of the social web by allowing for integration with Twitter, Facebook, and other services.

Koss also talked about the Ma.gnolia disaster and, in the spirit of full disclosure, wanted to make sure Faves users understood the status of the service. Specifically, Koss noted that Faves exists in a fairly large-scale data center with four front-end web servers and six back-end database servers. Nightly incremental backups are made as well as weekly complete data snapshots, but no recent full-scale data recovery test has been done. He also said that improving site performance and reliability going forward would be one of the challenges he has to face.

On the one hand, it was refreshing to hear Koss speak honestly about where Faves is now and where it's going, but on the other, it can easily make one feel a little wary of using a service that was only recently gasping for air. That said, as long as Faves.com isn't your primary service for storing your bookmarks, it's probably going to be OK to just enjoy using it as the new social utility it aims to become. Now the question is: will you?

And we have a bookmarklet that makes it even better!

In addition, the new toolbar will allow users to see other stories on Digg from the same source, as well as related stories. Users will also be able to see some comments directly from the toolbar, though this is currently restricted to the latest, most controversial, and the most popular comments.

How to Get It

If you want to see the DiggBar in action, all you have to do is enter "digg.com/" in front of any URL, and the toolbar will automatically appear at the top of the page. Or, you can use our own DiggBar bookmarklet. Instructions for setting it up are at the end of this post.

More Features

The toolbar also features a prominent 'Random' button, that will, as the name implies, take you to a random page with a similar story that was popular on Digg in the last few days. This, of course, is very similar to what StumbleUpon does.

All of this, of course, will help to make Digg an even stickier site, as users will never quite leave the Digg experience behind, but at the same time, as MG Siegler points out on VentureBeat, this also shifts Digg's focus away from its own site, and turns Digg into a service.

No DiggBar Bookmarklet? No Problem - We Have One For You!

Sadly, Digg didn't provide users with a bookmarklet that would make it easy to quickly invoke the DiggBar without having to edit the URL, but our own Rick Turoczy just wrote up a bookmarklet for us - you just have to drag and drop this link to your bookmarks: digg bar.

After that, clicking on the link will invoke the DiggBar for any site you are currently visiting.

Streamy as a Social Media Aggregator

You can use Streamy as a self-contained system to read your feeds, follow other users, share posts with your followers, and even chat with them, but the service really works best once you connect it to other social media services. Starting next week, Streamy will also implement Facebook Connect for signing in to the service, so your Facebook and Streamy friends will be automatically synchronized.

When you open up Streamy, you are greeted with a homepage that can aggregate updates from your friends on various social media services, as well as a list of recommended stories.

Currently, Streamy lets you import your Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, and FriendFeed accounts, and from within Streamy, you can easily update your status on Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook. For Twitter, by the way, Streamy is one of the first services that feature authentication through oAuth.

Customization

Streamy's Twitter, Flickr, and Friendfeed pages are highly customizable. You can, for example, add widgets for specific searches, users, or your direct messages and replies to your Twitter account. The Friendfeed and Flickr pages only feature search widgets. Overall, these features feel a lot like what you can do in Tweetdeck, though the only problem is that the search widgets don't seem to auto-update.

RSS Reader

But Streamy isn't just a social media aggregator; it is also a very capable RSS reader. If you are a Google Reader or Bloglines user, you will be able to import your subscriptions, or you can import an OPML file from any other feed reader.

From within Streamy, you can just drag a link and a circular user interface pops up. To send a link to Friendfeed, for example, you just have to drop the link onto the Friendfeed icon.

Interface

When we looked at Streamy's first beta almost two years ago, the service looked very different, though the core of the service, as well as the innovative drop-zone interface and the highly responsive AJAX interface still remain. Streamy also still features a very interesting chat function (including group chat), which used to be at the core of the original service, but has now been pushed towards the sidelines in favor of a stronger focus on social media aggregation.

One cool feature of Streamy is that you can drag and drop almost everything. This means, for example, that you can drag a shortcut to your favorite blogs to Streamy's title bar at the top of the page.

A Few Things We Would Like to See

Of course, Streamy isn't perfect. It is currently not possible to reply to tweets directly from Streamy, for example, which is definitely a problem, especially considering that you can comment on FriendFeed items directly from Streamy. On the other hand, though, Streamy won't let you 'like' a FriendFeed item. Streamy's co-founder Don Mosites, however, tells us that these features are in the works and should become available soon.

One feature we would also really love to see in Streamy's RSS reader would be the ability to get a river-of-news-style view for folders. Once you subscribe to more than twenty blogs or so, going from one blog to the next to see what's new just becomes tiresome. Again, Don tells us that this is just a matter of flipping a switch, and we hope Streamy will do so soon. For now, you can just drag and drop your folders to the title bar and Streamy will open a river-of-news-style view for you when you click on the icon there.

Verdict

Once Streamy adds those features we mention above, it can easily become a great alternative to Google Reader and Tweetdeck. It's already one of the most fully-featured social media aggregators we have seen. We highly enjoyed testing the service over the last few days and we highly recommend that you give it a try as well.

With Image Spark, the traditional moodboard becomes something much easier to share. Image Spark allows users to create Web-based moodboards, built from collections of images they find online. Then, they can share those boards with colleagues and clients - or simply keep them as a reference point for future inspiration.

Now, why wouldn't Flickr or Skitch suffice? For pure image capture, you're going to find Image Spark very similar to other image services. What makes it different is the "moodboard" functionality. Unlike other services that gather images but limit the display options, the only thing limiting Image Spark moodboards is the user's imagination.

Want one image to dominate? Need to overlay several images to create the right effect? Just looking to break out of the traditional grid arrangement? Image Spark will allow you to arrange your moodboard however you would like. Resize images, shuffle them around, overlap them. Do whatever you need to do to effect the appropriate mood.

The service is easy to use. Simply install the Firefox plugin and begin right-clicking on images you find inspirational. Tag them with keywords or phrases and they'll be added to your library. If you're not finding anything inspirational, you can visit the Image Spark community and add other users' finds to your library.

Once you've gathered images, you can visit the site to begin composing a moodboard by dragging and dropping images on the moodboard canvas. Moodboards can be displayed publicly for sharing or they can be marked private.

Even if you're not creating moodboards, Image Spark is still a resource for inspiration. Why? You'll also find a community of Image Spark users sharing both images and moodboards that are sure to spark some ideas.

Image Spark is free. Currently, users are limited to two moodboards and 1GB of space. To begin assembling your moodboards, visit Image Spark.

Moodboard image courtesy of Image Spark user "Samuel."

When we first reviewed Qitera, we already liked it a lot. Qitera's main emphasis is on creating a search engine for your bookmarks, no matter whether the bookmarked sites were on the public Internet or hidden behind the paywall of a for-profit database. Qitera is a very capable social bookmarking site with all the standard features you would expect, but what really sets it apart from its closest competitors is its search functionality.

Search Engine Integration

Whenever you do a search on Google or Yahoo after installing or updating the Qitera plugin, the top three search results from your bookmarks will automatically appear at the top of the search results. These results will include your own bookmarks, as well as bookmarks from your friends and colleagues on Qitera.

As Qitera's Joerg Lamprecht points out in the announcement, we often search for the same things over and over again (and so do our friends). By first displaying search results from sites that you have already bookmarked before showing results from the Internet, you can break this cycle and get faster access to a set of search results that you have already marked as relevant by bookmarking them in the first place.

From a business perspective, this integration with Google and Yahoo also makes perfect sense for the company. By seeing the Qitera bookmarks every time you search, you are far more likely to return to Qitera and make it the default app for your bookmarks.

Last month, Qitera also released a better integration with Yahoo's delicious. You can now import your delicious bookmarks to Qitera, though sadly, this is only a one-way street so far. We would also like to see the possibility to sync your Qitera bookmarks back to delicious.

In the last two months, Qitera has also addressed a few of the other problems that we discovered when we first tested the site. You can now, for example, get an RSS feed with the latest updates from your social network on Qitera, and the service now also finally recognizes duplicates.

Coming Soon: Qitera for the Enterprise

Qitera has also announced that it is developing an enterprise version of its service, which it will be launching at Cebit in March.

First of Its Kind?

We think this integration with Google and Yahoo is a great step forward for Qitera, and we are not aware of any other social bookmarking service that has created a similar plugin. If you haven't tried Qitera, we definitely think it is worth a try.

For a more in-depth look at all of Qitera's features, please refer to our review of the service from last December.