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Have you ever wanted to create an iPhone app, but can't code your way out of a wet paper bag? Users of NewsGator's NetNewsWire iPhone news reader will have to wait a little longer for the next version of that application because its creator, Brent Simmons, has been busy working on a new iPhone framework called TapLynx. The goal of TapLynx is to help users generate topic-focused media applications for the iPhone without any programming required. The first application, created by Simmons, has already been built for All Things Digital.

Feedinvader is an interesting Firefox plugin that combines an online feed reader with a news ticker right underneath your bookmarks bar. The feed reader in the back-end is currently mostly for managing the feeds in the ticker, but with a bit of additional work, it could also become a great reader in its own right.

The core of the plugin is the ticker, though, which also features a nice pop-up with a story's excerpt when you hover the mouse over a story. While a lot of similar tickers can be distracting because the developers insist on making new stories scroll horizontally, Feedinvader just fades stories in and out, making the ticker far less intrusive.

Twubs - it's not the mean-spirited nickname the kids called us in high school, nor is it the Miami Vice detective opposite Don Johnson. Similar to Hashtags.org, Twubs is a Twitter aggregator that allows users to contribute on breaking news, popular trends, shared conferences and memes such as #followfriday and #musicmonday. In addition to indexing basic tweets, the service also displays photos and videos that share a common hashtag. Earlier today Twubs launched a free conference suite in the hopes that conference planners will take a cue from Gnomedex founder Chris Pirillo and incorporate back channels and live feeds into their events.

The PR Firm MWW Group has just launched a new, cross-platform mobile application designed to bring the best RSS content to those in the public relations, marketing, and advertising fields. The application, called M.insight, features hand-selected RSS feeds from blogs and news sites which deliver relevant articles which you can read and enjoy without the hassle of having to set up and configure an RSS reader.

Ohpan, the scrolling news ticker web site we covered a few months prior, recently released an iPhone application which uses their same recommendation engine technology to deliver you the best content. As with their main web site, the iPhone app lets you rate the content you see to allow Ohpan to learn your preferences. However, the app also takes advantage of the iPhone platform to offer localized content as well as some other unique features.

This post originally ran under the title Groups: The Secret Weapon of the Social Web. Since it's a holiday in the US and things are slow today, we thought readers might appreciate seeing this post again. Today might be a good day for you to take some time to create some key groups for yourself.

Social interaction online is not very sophisticated. The news feed model of conversation has taken over the social web, from Facebook to Twitter to FriendFeed to MySpace, but by itself it doesn't serve us very well. That's where the creation of groups of sources comes in.

According to a new report from website monitoring service Pingdom, Feedburner had an uptime of 99.94% over the last two months. Feedburner, which a lot of publishers use to manage their feeds and get usage statistics, was acquired by Google in 2007, and even though Google has kept the service running, a lot of users have been unhappy with various aspects of the service. With a 99.94% uptime, though, there is good evidence that the core function of the service, making feeds available, stands on solid ground - which, of course, we would expect from a service that runs on Google's servers.

Love it or hate it, but there's no arguing that the go-to aggregator for finding the top tech news of the day all on one page is none other than the news portal Techmeme. It's the site that catches you up when you get behind, lets you know what happened while you slept, and tracks the buzz (and yes, the echoes, too) of the tech blogosphere. Other competitors exist, but no one - not even Google - seems to be able to compete.

So why even bother covering yet another Techmeme wannabe? Because competition is important. Techmeme may do a great job, but innovation can still be found elsewhere.

Social interaction online is not very sophisticated. The news feed model of conversation has taken over the social web, from Facebook to Twitter to FriendFeed to MySpace, but by itself it doesn't serve us very well.

That's where the creation of groups of sources comes in. Various services have different ways for users to separate their "friends" into different groups, viewable by topic, category or type of connection. Facebook is making changes today to make it easier to break your Facebook Newsfeed into groups. That's going to be very important. The best Twitter applications offer group functionality that the site itself doesn't. MySpace offers no such feature, yet. The Facebook news prompted us to try to articulate the value of group creation online. By better understanding the value that groups can deliver, we can better strategize our creation of groups.

Sometimes the low-hanging fruit holds the most potential - but it's hidden in plain sight. Facebook opened up the activity streams of users' friends this week to outside developers to put into new interfaces. The showcase examples in the news were things like Facebook-inside-desktop-Twitter applications. A San Francisco developer named Teck Chia saw another opportunity.

Chia built a Facebook application that you can grant permission to pull your Facebook newsfeed out of the site and publish as an RSS feed. It's called Newsfeed RSS. It's a simple thing, but it's an important development in the gradual opening of the walled garden that Facebook has been. Just to give you some ideas, here are five things that can now be done with the Facebook RSS feeds that Chia has set free.