ReadWriteWeb

In the two weeks I have been using Wisdom, an iPad and iPhone app that gives you detailed demographic data about your Facebook friends, the number of users has gone from just over 4 million to just under 6 million. Part of that rapid growth is most likely attributable to an extensive advertising campaign on the iPad version of the New York Times (which is where I first heard about it).

When you see as many apps as we do at RWW, you begin to feel like it's all been done. So many of the everyday jobs for apps to do can already be done by at least one app (if not dozens). How many ways can you share photos with your friends? How many social networks and check-ins and restaurant-discovery services do we need?

Lately, we've started to see a new class of app emerge just for managing these tasks across their various apps. The idea of apps for our apps sounds ridiculous, but some of them are neat, and some are downright lifesavers. Here's a round-up of apps you should use if you want to bring your many social networks into one dedicated place.

Apple just blew everybody out of the water. It is astonishing, really. Revenue of $46.33 billion? Yeah, Greece called. It is looking for a bailout. Anyway, there is one number that is making mobile developers across the world salivate: $700 million.

That is the amount that Apple paid out to iOS developers in the last quarter. Apple has paid out $4 billion cumulatively to iOS developers through the App Store. If we extrapolate those numbers considering Apple's 30% take of App Store purchases, the company did $1 billion in gross sales through the App Store in the quarter. Mobile developers: this is the carrot you are chasing.

Go ahead and check those work emails on your smartphone: a new study says it's time spent checking Facebook and other "personal" social networks that is stressing you out.

It gets worse: the more times you check your smartphone, the higher your stress levels. The study also suggested people who are used to getting lots of text messages and push notifications on their phones will feel stress levels rise if they hit a stretch where their phones are silent. In the worst cases, study subjects experienced "phantom" vibrations when, in fact, they had not received an alert.

Grooveshark may have been booted from both the iTunes App Store and Android Market, but that's not stopping the controversial music streaming startup from forging ahead with its mobile strategy. Rather than going back and forth with Apple and Google, the company has taken matters into its own hands by launching a Web app that forgoes Flash in favor of HTML5.

The Grooveshark HTML5 app can stream music from any modern mobile browser, including Safari on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Until now, the service wouldn't work on (non-jailbroken) iOS devices, since the desktop Web app for Grooveshark utilizes Flash for playback.

Path 2.0 is the first newfangled social app I've been able to get my friends to use since Facebook complacency set in. I had my reservations at first, when I was worried that Path would turn out to be nothing more than a pretty mirror for gazing at oneself. For a while, it was pretty lonely in there, but after using Path to document my week on jury duty, I knew the app could offer something meaningful.

As it turned out, the Path experience wasn't only compelling to me because I'm a professional nerd. Over the holidays, I showed Path to a bunch of my best friends, and they all fell in love with it. Now that I have close people there, Path has become important to me. It's on my home screen, and Facebook is not. Path is not on the Web; it's a place in itself, and that's why it matters.

When technology pundits say mobile is exploding, many people just shrug and say "of course." Many people might not fully comprehend just how big mobile is growing and the enormous ecosystem that it now encompasses. Mobile computing through smartphones and tablets is growing four times faster than the PC and Internet evolutions of the 1980's and 90's. People are now using mobile apps more than the Web and the gap continues to widen.

In research done by mobile analytics company Flurry, users are spending 94 minutes a day with their mobile apps versus 72 minutes on the Web. Author Charles Newark-French attributes the drop to people using mobile apps to access Facebook more often than the Web. Can Facebook really have that type of affect on user behavior?

Last month, I wrote about a startup with a win-win proposition called BetaBait, which helps beta apps connect with testers. It allows developers to list their app in an email to interested testers for free. It charges $50 for a sponsor slot featured at the top of the email. No-brainer, right?

Co-founder Cody Barbierri wrote in to let me know that, in the two weeks since launch (and it was over the holidays, too!), they added over 1,400 testers and 250 start-ups. The email was getting too long, so they've revamped the process. Only newly submitted apps will be in the email, and the rest are listed on the BetaBait site.

While visiting relatives over Christmas I was faced with the rather grim prospect of being in New York, where the New England-Miami game was locally blacked out.

A generation ago I would have been forced to wait for halftime updates during the Jets-Giants games, but Twitter and a slew of apps designed specifically for sports fans allowed me to follow the game in real time (I also got to watch the Jets lose, which wasn't a half-bad consolation prize).

But these apps aren't just for when you can't watch the game -- they're great supplements when you're glued to the television or in the stadium and worth downloading before the NFL Playoffs kickoff on Saturday, as they help cut through a lot of the clutter and deliver the information most relevant in helping you understand (or vent) about what's happening on the field.

A lot is made of Android platform device updates. Is your phone going to be getting Ice Cream Sandwich? According to the latest numbers, Gingerbread is the dominant version of Android in the wild, with version 2.2 Frozen Yogurt still on more than 30% of all devices. What about Apple? iOS 5 has been available for about three months. How many users have upgraded their phones to the newest platform?

Apple does not publish platform numbers the way that Google does for Android. To determine how many people are using different versions of the operating system we went to app developers and analytics companies to get a clear picture of what version of iOS people are using.