ReadWriteWeb

Sometimes it's just hard to keep up. In this technology-focused niche we all live in there are new applications, new initiatives, and new platforms that spring up every day, not to mention constantly breaking news that fills our RSS readers. Take a day off and you're behind. Take an hour off and you just missed 300 more blog posts. In addition to the everyday struggles of information overload the average computer user deals with - like the overflowing inbox, for example - those in the internet/new media/technology space aren't just overwhelmed with new content, but also with new applications and choices to manage that content. What's a web-app loving person to do?

Chris Messina and Will Norris, two leading community figures working on distributed social networking, identity and data portability, are joining the staff of OpenID provider Vidoop, the company will announce soon. Messina and Norris have been working on a project called DiSo, an umbrella group working to bring open source distributed social networking technologies to market. They will continue the same work, now as a part of Vidoop. The company provides user login functionality to both consumer and enterprise web publishers, using an innovative system based on image recognition to replace passwords.

The RSS Aggregation niche has been very busy this week. Numerous changes and enhancements were recently made to RSS aggregator RSSmeme.

However, another service that was once exclusively for Google Reader users is expanding to give users a more accurate analysis of what's popular on the web. Today, ReadBurner announced a partnership with the personalized homepage service Netvibes.

Digg is in big trouble. We already know that Yahoo! Buzz, a beta social news service by Yahoo!, can drive a large amount of traffic and comments to websites. We also know the ongoing problems at competitor digg, which continue to be skated around by digg management. Now we have proof that Yahoo! Buzz is kicking some digg behind in terms of stats. According to a new report from comScore, in April Yahoo! Buzz for the first time did more traffic than digg - Buzz got nearly 7 million U.S. unique visitors in April, a 74% growth over March. What's more, about 51% of Yahoo! Buzz users are women, compared to just 39% women for digg. We have graphs below from comScore...

Twitter is often thought of as a mobile application, but the mobile version of the service that the company itself offers is maddeningly feature-bare. Users can't read replies via m.twitter.com, for example.

If you're looking for a good, full featured way to use Twitter on your phone - you need not look any further than Slandr. Hahlo.com is a close rival if you're on an iPhone, but those iPhone owners get everything fun - don't they? Let's talk about Slandr for the rest of us!

"The Internet is recession proof," is a sentiment we've heard trumpeted over and over and over again the past year. However, guest author Llew Claasen argued on this blog in February that paid search ads specifically are actually not recession proof, and a new report out today appears to confirm that a broad economic slowdown in the United States is starting to negatively effect the online ad industry.

FontStruct is a new online font creation tool from font seller FontShop that was officially launched last week. The site combines a Flash-based font maker (the Fontstructor) with a community site built around sharing, discussing, and building off of those fonts. FontStruct is free to use, as are all the fonts created using it.

One of the buzz phrases we've heard a lot this year is "data portability", which means the ability to move your personal data between different applications and vendors. It has its own standards group, called naturally enough DataPortability.org. Some of the big Internet companies have signaled their support for data portability - in January Google and Facebook joined DataPortability.org, and in February Microsoft announced a strategy shift towards Data Portability for its core products Windows and Office.

ReadWriteTalk host Sean Ammirati this week interviewed Chris Saad, the co-founder of DataPortability.org, to ask him how the group has been progressing - and perhaps more importantly where it's headed next.

It's no secret that YouTube's age demographics skew young, but young still means 18-34, and much of the content on the site would be inappropriate for children under the age of 13 -- the COPPA cut off age that YouTube adheres to as the minimum allowed for anyone to sign up on the site. Totlol is a new video site that launched in beta this week aimed at children aged 6 months to 6 years. The site is community moderated to ensure that video content is always appropriate for small children.

The Android Developer Challenge is a two-part contest whose goal is to encourage developers to build apps for the new Google mobile platform, code-named "Android." In this first round, dubbed "Challenge I," submissions were accepted up until April 14th. Yesterday, the top 50 entries were announced. Each of these application authors received $25,000 to fund further development of their app. We've dug through the list of winners to pick out our favorite apps and the ones we're most looking forward to.