Like to hack on Twitter feeds, streams and APIs? Then there's good news for you this morning. Twitter has acquired a small startup company called Bagcheck, but the real score in the deal was bringing co-founder Sam Pullara onto the team. Pullara was previously the Chief Technologist at Yahoo where he lead many of the best programs at that beleaguered but technically awesome company.

Yahoo Pipes, Yahoo Query Language, Yahoo Search BOSS and other inspiring technologies that enabled hackers all around the web to roll out sophisticated mashups powered by Yahoo's backend were championed for years by Pullara. Not everyone liked him, but people who love to experiment with data have got to be excited about his coming to Twitter, the world's most promising stream of publicly available, semi-structured, real-time social data. Twitter's relationship with developers has been troubled at times, but Pullara's joining the team is the latest step the company has taken to make amends with its developer ecosystem.

What About Bagcheck?

The company Pullara co-founded may see its technology integrated into Twitter as well. Thomas Vander Wal coined the word "folksonomy" (a user-driven system of popular classification) and is a big fan of Bagcheck.

"What Bagcheck has done that is brilliant is make it easy to add things from around the web into the Bagcheck site through their 'BagIt' bookmarklet, which captures 'social objects' and keeps them well structured.

"Twitter is good (not great) for discussion of things, but is really lacking a good view of the social object, in the 'socially mediated object' sense that Karin Knorr Cetina used - where people having clear view of the object they were discussing had much better (accurate, robust, and constructive) conversations than those discussing things in the abstract.

"Bagcheck could provide that hook into social objects to bring things within clear view. This will help with resolving things like 'Which Planet of the Apes movie are you talking about?' and other ambiguous conversations."

If Sam Pullara can advance the kind of paradigm represented by Yahoo Pipes and YQL into the Twitter ecosystem, that would drop the already low technical cost of entry and greatly increase the power available to Twitter's ecosystem of developers.

Pullara can also work on big partnerships. He lead Project Hummingbird, which was Yahoo's search partnership with Twitter, but we hear he got even further with a Yahoo/Facebook partnership. Those are powerful additions to a hacker/executive resume.

You may remember when a megahyped search startup called Cuil, with tens of millions of dollars in backing, launched then faded away a few years ago? The developer that built the same interface with better performance in four hours, using Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS), was Sam Pullara.

This Spring, Twitter brought on Jason Costa, former developer relations manager at both Google and Facebook, to be the new Twitter developer relations manager.

Twitter is going to need to stock up on hot developer types, because Google Plus will open an API soon and the competition for developer attention is going to be massive. That's going to be great news for developers and the users who love them.

Some people say it's too late for Twitter; that it has mistreated its developer ecosystem too much to win against any viable challenger. Time will tell, but it seems clear that Twitter isn't going to just let all the hacker attention flow to the little upstart Google Plus without putting up a fight.

To check out this app yourself, navigate your phone to the URL designnews.isites.us. Read on for screenshots and a description of the geeky fun behind this little creation.

I began with a service called Widgetbox, which is very attractive and easy to use but in the end got replaced by the iSites site linked to above.

First, I bopped around the Web and found about 30 or 40 of the top blogs about design and typography. I uploaded them to the wonderful service Postrank, which let me filter out all but the top 10% of posts from those blogs that had received the most comments, inbound links, shares on Twitter, bookmarks on Delicious, etc.

I took those 40 or so filtered feeds and I put them into Yahoo Pipes. There I spliced them all together and put the resulting feed of hot blog posts from the design world into my mobile Web app as the first of three sections.

Then, I went to Listorious and I found a good-looking Twitter list of power-designers curated by Paul Olyslager titled UX-VIP. Nice list, Paul! Thanks for building it! I put that List URL into my mobile Web app and now Twitter updates from those 42 UX VIPs make up the second section of content.

Finally, I visited the design community Dribbble, where users upload screenshots of their works in progress and other users like and comment on them. It's an awesome site. One of the sections of that site is a Leader Board of the designers whose work has been Liked the most. I grabbed the RSS feeds of the top 35 peoples' images, put those feeds into Pipes, spliced them together into one feed and then fed them into the mobile Web app as well.

Then I clicked publish! (Well, I put together a few little graphic assets for Widgetbox, iSites whipped up some for me.)

Both of these sites charge about $25 per month to host the apps their services are used to create. (Once a publisher pays for it, readers can access it for free.) That meant, I found out (after doing all the above, like a dummy), that my birthday present for my friend was going to cost $300 for a year. My wife and I really like Brianne a lot, but I thought that would be a bit extravagant. I told Widgetbox that their $25 per month for up to 50,000 impressions might make a lot of sense for many people, but for a one-off app likely to get 100 impressions a month it sure would be nice if I could pay an affordable fee to turn my up-and-coming designer friend on to their fabulous platform!

In the end Widgetbox didn't work for me anyway because there was so much feed splicing insanity going on behind the scenes that the app would time out almost every time I loaded it.

Enter iSites, a similar if so-far less polished service which works similarly but caches the contents on the back end for maximum user experience!

I gave iSites the same feeds, they generously shared an app's worth of hosting at no cost (you can add it too, go ahead!) and they said they'd consider one-off pricing. (Widgetbox also donated an app, it just didn't work as well for me.) iSites also offers a 30-day free trial. The iSites apps need some more work, and the company says that's underway, but they're really pretty good already. Liking and Commenting on content is very cool - sharing on Twitter is very much not, yet.

A person could create mobile Web apps like this on any kind of topic and they sure are fun. Maybe I'll start a Kickstarter campaign to see who wants to pitch in on apps like this for other topics.

Either way, fun with feeds - fun with mobile Web app publishing platforms!

See also: How to Track the Future of the Music Industry

Many new technologies work best in concert; the functionality of one application can be vastly improved by using it together with another one. Here are some of our favorite examples of apps that work best together, followed by some favorite workflows from friends of ReadWriteWeb. We hope you'll share your favorite combos in comments, too, so we can all learn some new things.

AideRSS plus Snacker

RSS news ticker Snackr was an app that people either loved or hated when we first wrote about it here. The attractive Adobe AIR interface is now even more compelling now that you can sync it with your Google Reader account (as of last week). One of the best uses we've found for this ever-flowing stream of news though has been to fill it up with "best of" feeds from AideRSS. AideRSS is an app we've written about over and over again here because it's just so darned useful and cool.

Put the two together though and you've got a stream of just the breakout hits from high traffic feeds. We enjoy and recommend reading the top stories on topics like the semantic web, mobile and recommendation technology through Snackr - but we're sure you can build your own easily.

Ma.gnolia (or Del.icio.us) plus Feed.Informer

You can do a whole lot of different things with social bookmarking tools like Ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us, probably including some things most readers here aren't familiar with. One of our favorite things though is to pick a particular tag from your account and run the RSS feed from that tag through a handy little service called Feed.informer.

You can display any amount of the feed on a web page with just a few lines of embed code, including the "notes" field for your tag as editorial or summary information. The result is a little news section for your website, powered by your social bookmarking tool. It's a great way to continue sharing found items online that don't warrant an entire blog post.

FriendFeed and MuxTape plus FluidApp

We wrote here earlier this year about a fabulous mashup of mixtape service Muxtape and single-app browser creation tool for Mac called FluidApp, but it's also really useful to combine FriendFeed and Fluid.

Most of the other standalone FriendFeed apps are hard to use (excluding the wonderful mobile app FFtoGo) but putting your friends' feeds and conversation in a standalone browser makes it easy to follow along without losing the FF tab in your browser. FriendFeed's auto-updating keeps the dedicated browser up to date and the FF favicon looks great in your dock.

Single app browsers fall into the "seems stupid until you try it" category, but put the right app in there and you'll enjoy it.

Windows users can check out Bubbles, a service that was reviewed and discussed recently at Download Squad.

Facebook plus Dapper

The RSS extraction tool Dapper is really powerful, once you figure out how and why to use it. Here's a 4 minute screencast we recorded about how to use Dapper but the sky's the limit with what you can do with this free tool.

One of the things we've done with it lately is scrape birthday notifications out of Facebook. Not everyone logs into Facebook everyday, but people tend to put their real birthdays into their profiles there. It's really nice to get those birthday notifications by RSS in another setting that you spend time in more regularly. Step by step instructions for doing so are available here.

Friends of RWW

We asked around and got some input from friends about what apps they like to use together. The responses ranged from combinations aimed to increase productivity to making the most of music listening. Here are some of our favorites.

Local Portland tech blogger Rick Turoczy says he likes to use Twitter search (formerly Summize), combined with Yahoo! Pipes and RSS to SMS service Pingie. We're not sure what he does with those apps together, but the magic results in his getting a lot of industry news before mainstream media outlets do.

MicroISV consultant Bob Walsh makes the most of his fleeting thoughts by sending voice recordings through Jott over to "memory extender" EverNote and "thence to various programs on my Mac." That's the kind of thing many of us have probably envisioned doing, we're glad it's working for Bob.

Susan Kirkpatrick (no relation) is a prolific multi-media blogger. How does she do it? [I] "send a blog post with a picture attachment via email to Utterz; it posts to Flickr, WordPress, Pownce and Twitter." We haven't used it a lot ourselves, but Utterz is pretty impressive and we here rumors that there is even more sophisticated developments being worked on behind the scenes there, too.

Virginie De Bel Air says she likes Last.fm + SonicLiving, a service that tracks your favorites on iTunes, Last.fm or Pandora and notifies you when those bands are coming to perform in your area. Utilitarian and rock and roll! We hadn't seen SonicLiving before.

Security and IT exec Greg Hughes likes to let his hair down and shout Shazam! sometimes. Specifically, Hughes says he finds himself using the Shazam music identification app to identify a song he hears and then Pandora to discover more that's related. All on the iPhone, too.

What About You?

What are your favorite apps to use together? There are so many new apps that launch everyday, we can't imagine the infinite permutations that users could come up with. Putting together multiple apps usually implies though that you're fairly comfortable with one or both of them, that they are equipped to live as something other than a walled garden and that each has stood enough of a test for users to believe they are stable enough to smoosh together.

Productivity? Fun? A combination of both, perhaps? We'd love to know what your favorite apps are to run together.

Photo: "Web 2.0 Crawl Yahoo Brickhouse: Nate Westheimer of BricaBox, Dave McClure, Gabe Rivera of Techmeme" by Brian Solis. Just imagine how great it would be if these app guys worked together!

Google Gears Turns One: Future is in Open Standards

Google Gears, the offline web application API it debuted last year at its developer conference, turned one this week. To celebrate, Google dropped the company name from Gears. The name change is a symbolic move aimed at reinforcing Google's commitment to working with existing standards communities and helping them to define better open standards for bridging online applications and the offline world.

See also: Google App Engine Announces Pricing Plan, APIs, Open Access; Why Google is Wooing Web Developers

The Ultimate Yahoo! Pipes Creations List

Yahoo! Pipes is one of the coolest ways to mashup the RSS feeds of various sites and sources to get the data you want. Since our initial coverage of Yahoo! Pipes, thousands of creations are now available. However, finding the best picks can be tough. ReadWriteWeb has done the hardest part and comprised a list of some of the best Yahoo Pipes created by users. We give you the ultimate Yahoo! Pipes list.

Strands Lifestreaming: What They're Doing and Invites for Readers

Recommendation service Strands.com launched a lifestreaming service this week that aims to pull together the company's wide range of services in particular media and online activity into one central place for users to share socially. The new Strands is a way to share your music, bookmarks, blog posts and other activity with friends, family and groups. It's a major entry into one of the most interesting sectors of the new web. We give it a mixed review...

See also: Recommendation and RSS: A Look at Two Readers Filtering the Noise

Semantic Tagging with Faviki

Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool that offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, and Diigo do not - semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki's suggestions don't just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.

Freebase: Dispelling The Skepticism

Freebase, the first product of semantic web company Metaweb, is an open, semantically marked up database of information that we called one of the "10 semantic apps to watch" last year. With $57.4 million in funding, a smart team, and a tech legend in Danny Hillis at the helm, Metaweb is considered to be one of the most serious players in the Semantic Web space. Yet the company's efforts to date have been met with skepticism. Particularly, people have asked how is Freebase different to Wikipedia? Jamie Taylor, the Minister of Information at Metaweb, spoke at the SemTech 2008 Conference that took place in San Jose last week in an effort to dispel some of that skepticism.

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality

For a few years now people have been talking about semantic search. Any technology that stands a chance to dethrone Google is of great interest to all of us, particularly one that takes advantage of long-awaited and much-hyped semantic technologies. But no matter how much progress has been made, most of us are still underwhelmed by the results. In head-to-head comparisons with Google, the results have not come out much different. What are we doing wrong?

See also: Making the Web Searchable: The Story of SearchMonkey

Android Is Out For iPhone Blood

Wednesday, at Google's I/O Event, the company demonstrated their Android prototype phone, a device which has been greatly improved since its last public outing at this year's CES and Mobile World conferences. Today, Android looks classy enough that you half-expected them to pull a Steve Jobs and announce that you could run out and buy it right now. During the demo, the company showed off some of the applications that will run on Android - like a Google Maps Street View app that drew cheers from the crowd. From the buzz surrounding the Google Phone at this event, it's clear that Android has a shot at knocking that other touchscreen phone off its pedestal.

See also: Google's Android: How Will it Compare to iPhone?

The Social Networking Arms Race

Last November, when Google launched Open Social we asked readers if Facebook would join Google's platform. The results were split right down the middle, but as we get farther from the Open Social launch, and the two sites continue to launch competing APIs (Google FriendConnect vs. Facebook Connect, for example -- the former banned by Facebook), that seems less and less likely. This is becoming a social networking cold war.

See also: How Many Friends is Too Many?

The Fork in the Road for Social Media

Social networking is at a major fork in the road. Down one road is adding more features to a walled garden and opening up just enough, so that users seldom need to leave. Most sites are going down this yellow brick road and the prize is clearly a big one. But they may end up back in Kansas. Down the other road, lies a future of being the primary repository for your connections (aka the social graph), but with this data available via open APIs to anybody who needs it. That is a utility type model, and as with any utility, it can be hugely valuable at scale.

See also: Sometimes Crowds Aren't That Wise

Who Are The "Digitally Savvy?"

A new report put about by consumer and media research firm Scarborough Research has revealed some interesting information about the section of the U.S. population that's being called the "digitally savvy." These are the consumers who are more likely to own high-tech items like DVRs, satellite radios, and VoIP phones and are more likely to engage in Internet activities that include blogging, downloading music, and other web 2.0 activities. In other words - they're us.

See also: When User-Generated Content Goes Bad

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Social Submission and Aggregation Yahoo Pipes

Social Site Submission Watch Dog
The Social Site Submission pipe allows you to keep track of all of your articles that are submitted to either Digg or Reddit. Just enter in your site url without the 'http://' (readwriteweb.com) and you'll receive a list of links of your site submissions along with the current number of Diggs your article has received. Grab the RSS feed to keep track of your site submissions.

Social Media Firehose
Search some of the most popular social media sites for brand, product, or keyword mentions with Social Media Firehose.

Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, Slashdot mashup v2
Grab a filtered mashup of news from popular submission sites like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot and del.icio.us.

Super Digg Feed v2.0
Receive configurable alerts for stories on Digg in specific categories or with a specified number of minimum diggs along with a host of information to help you decide what's hot and what's not in the Digg community.

Meta Search Alerts
Aggregate search results from Del.icio.us, Flickr, Google Blog Search, Google News, Icerocket, Live Search, Technorati, Yahoo News and more with Meta Search Alerts.

Content Keyword RSS
This pipe will search news sources from multiple sites such as Digg, Technorati, Yahoo News, PRWeb, and Google News, compare content to remove duplicates and output a unique RSS feed full of content related to your keywords.

FriendFeed Minus Twitter
Get the latest from your FriendFeed stream, without the noise from Twitter.

Twitter Feed without Replies
Grab this feed to import your Twitter stream into social aggregation sites such as FriendFeed without your replies to users.

Twitter Link Moniter
Want to keep track of all those great links that your followers on Twitter send out? The Twitter Link Monitor pipe does that for you. Simply enter your username and the pipe will instantly grab all that great content you just don't want to miss out on.

Friends Name Alphabetical
Interested in knowing how large the followings of your followers are on Twitter? This is just the pipe for you. Friends Name Alphabetical provides a list of who your following and how many people are following them. Just in case you ever want to be nosy.

RSSmeme's Filters
The best and only filter out there for Google Reader Shared Items aggregator RSSmeme. Keep track of how popular your favorite sources are or find some of the most popular stories on RSSmeme with this Yahoo Pipe creation.

Pricing Alert Yahoo Pipes - Catch That Deal!

eBay Simple Price Search
This Pipe was designed to search with a specified price range in eBay.com. Add your search terms along with your minimum amount and maximum amounts to keep up with the best deals on eBay.

Amazon, Craigslist and eBay price watcher
Save time tracking the best prices for an item on Amazon, Craigslist, and eBay with this pipe creation.

Amazon Item Search
Searches for items by keyword on amazon.com Get the title, price and in the description you get the average rating. When you link some product just click on its link and you will be on this Amazon's product page.

Netflix To Amazon
Takes your Netflix feed for movies at home and replace each item with the most relevant results found on Amazon. Description include an image, pricing, and more. Grab your Netflix userid by looking at your personalized feeds on Netflix.

Bestselling Books
Keep up with the Amazons bestselling booklist. This Yahoo Pipe creation is updated hourly to include the most popular books on Amazon.

Amazon Books: Movers and Shakers
Find out what books are hot and what's going out of style on Amazon with this Yahoo Pipe.

Amazon Books: Most Wished For
I could never find that perfect book for a family member or friend. If you're in the same boat, keep up with Amazon's most wished for books and opt to go with the crowd. At least if they don't like the book you can blame it on the majority of Amazon's customers.

Media Yahoo Pipes

New York Times through Flickr
Here's a unique way of looking at the New York Times via Flickr photos. Keywords for NYT's homepage are passed through various filters to find matching photos on Flickr.

Last.fm Recent Tracks + Youtube: Last.fm meets YouTube
Find the Youtube videos for your Last.fm playlist.

Favourite Artists News
Keep up with the latest news on the artists from your Last.fm favorite artists.

Recently Played Streamable Songs (Last.FM)
A list of recently played songs filtered to only include songs that are streamable on Last.FM

Muxtape Recommendations
Enter your Last.fm user name and this Pipe will find featured Muxtapes that include at least one track from a favorite artist of yours. The Pipe is a little buggy so you may need to run it a few times.

Free iTunes Downloads - Videos
Keep up-to-date with the latest free TV and video downloads available from the iTunes US Store.

Free iTunes Downloads - Songs
Want to know about the latest free song download available from the iTunes US Store? Grab the RSS feed of this pipe to keep up.

New Movie Trailers
Grab the latest movie trailers from iTunes mashed with their video counterparts on Youtube.

YouTunes Top 100
A clone of the popular YouTunes pipe, find the music videos of the top 100 songs on iTunes.

YouTube tags to RSS
Be alerted when videos on Youtube are tagged with specific keywords that you may be interested in watching.

Did We Miss Something

Yahoo! Pipes is the first GUI builder for the biggest database in the world, the Web itself. This list is far from complete, but it's comprised of the best Yahoo! Pipes creations available. If you have a creation or know of one that didn't make the list, leave a comment down below and we'll be sure to review it to keep growing our list.

One thing Pipes has not done before today is offer a way to display updated data automatically on another web page. That has finally changed with the release of some javascript badges from the Pipes team. They are nice, but they aren't really good enough, to be honest.

The second badge type is the geotagged photos badge. I'll be damned if I can filter Flickr by geotag in Pipes, no matter what I put in the the location field it doesn't work for me. Maybe you're smarter than me though and will appreciate this feature.

The final badge type is the slideshow badge, again displaying Flickr images.

What's wrong with these badges?

I display RSS feeds on web pages all the time, I love it. I use a great service called FeedDigest. Unfortunately, since its recent acquisition by a large Russian software company FeedDigest hasn't been very hospitable to new users. None the less, I use it all the time in important situations. I pay more than a hundred dollars a year for premium capacity there and I pay it happily. Yahoo! Pipes is really useful too - it's in the same class as Dapper and AideRSS in terms of usefulness, maybe even more useful albeit less easy to use.

For the more code savvy, MagpieRSS on your own server is the way to go. The idea behind these tools, though, is that they let progressively less technical people do progressively more powerful things. It's in that way that the Pipes team dropped the ball with these badges.

Why are the new Pipes badges suitable only in a pinch, or in inconsequential situations? First, contrary to what Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodney says in the demo video embedded below, these badges are not particularly customizable at all. They are a single line of javascript with one or two drop downs or fields to define traits like height and width. Perhaps heavier customization could be done with a lot of elbow grease and the Pipes backend, but for all intents and purposes these badges are uncustomizable. App vendors should stop calling skinnable displays "customizable" because a growing class of self-publishers wants much more. That's the case in the video publishing world and that's the case here.

Second, the output is via javascript, so it's invisible to search engines. Other alternatives provide PHP code to add to a page. You can do serious processing with Pipes, so why don't these badges enable you to finish a serious job?

I would love for Yahoo to provide real customization and search engine visible PHP output. That's my ambivalent but interested take on this announcement, let's look at the happy faces of Yahoo! folks showing us how it works.

Feed Rinse is a best of class RSS filtering application. It offers filtering by keyword, tag, author, title, etc. It supports regular expressions, has a built in profanity filter, and lets you upload your OPML file for easy importing of your RSS feeds (it can also export to OPML). And since we first covered it in April of 2006 it has gone completely free.

FilterMyRSS is a no-nonsense keyword filter that filters posts out by keyword. By that we mean that the service tracks posts for the keywords you want to filter and removes posts where it finds matches. It can filter by description, title, or category and offers some advanced XML options.

When we first reviewed 2or3things' Blastfeed in late 2006 it appeared to be shaping up as a good consumer filtering alternative to Feed Rinse. But since, the company has shifted gears and now offers Blastfeed as an enterprise filtering solution. Blastfeed's keyword filters can also be used to remix and republish blog feeds filtered for specific content -- for example, a fan site for a specific band could create a news feed from multiple general music sites that publishes only stories about that specific band.

Feed Sifter is an almost painfully simple RSS filter that filters in by keyword. Or, in other words, it watches for the keywords you enter and pushes stories to you that match those keywords. It can search for single keywords, or return stories that only match sets of keywords.

ZapTXT is a keyword filter (of the in variety) that returns results via email, instant messenger, or mobile phone. It is designed for people who prefer to consume RSS feeds via non-traditional methods (i.e., not via an RSS reader). ZapTXT also powers email, IM, and SMS alerts for sites like TheStreet.com.

For do-it-yourselfers, Yahoo! Pipes offers an easy way to create filtered RSS feeds. The RSS remixing application makes it easy to create simple filters. Just define your feed using the "Fetch Feed" module, connect it to a "Filter" module, which can filter either in or out by title, description, category, author, or date, and then connect it out to the Pipe Output. It isn't as comprehensive as Feed Rinse, but you do perhaps have more control. The example pipe below would filter our feed and return only posts that talk about "Facebook" in the title.