Web Products

How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients

Last November we put up a guide to the most popular Twitter clients. For that post we looked at a random sample of 717 tweets from a handful of heavy Twitter users and identified 19 different ways people interacted with the service. Twitter has one of the fastest growing application ecosystems of any web service outside of Facebook. For this post, we looked at 37,248 tweets and found 142 different ways in which people interact with the Twitter service. Some of the results, which we presented in this post, were rather surprising.

Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web's Future

Loic Le Meur's video chat service Seesmic announced this week that it has acquired leading 3rd party Twitter client Twhirl. Seesmic is still in closed Alpha status right now - though we have invites if you'd like them: email marshall@readwriteweb.com with the word Seesmic in the subject line and we'll send you one.

How could the acquisition of an app that runs entirely on the Twitter API, by another service that isn't even publicly available yet be a big deal? Let us count the ways...

Chumby Gets $12.5M...Here's Why It's Taking Off

Chumby Industries, makers of the Wi-Fi video and widget displaying device, the Chumby, have just announced $12.5 million in Series B funding today. The company notes that this new financing is going to be used to "accelerate growth of the company, and expand and broaden the Chumby Network to other screen-based Internet connected devices." How did this little gadget get so popular? And why would you want one? Read on to find out.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Flickr's New Friend Finder: Data Portability or Privacy Violation?

This week Yahoo! owned photo sharing site Flickr launched a new feature - the ability to search your Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail contacts list for people on Flickr so you can add them as contacts. Many services let you do that, but almost all of them require you to give up the user name and password for your email. Flickr did it right and it was exciting, for us at least. GMail users are taken to a GMail page, where GMail asks for their usernames and passwords - then asked if Flickr should be given one time access or ongoing access. That's great. We've been calling on applications to use best practices and emerging protocols to access user data without asking for passwords for some time. The risks are too great, otherwise.

Some Flickr users, though, are really upset. They don't want anyone who has sent them an email to be able to easily find their photos on Flickr. What some people call Data Portability, others call a privacy violation.

MySpace Becoming a Portal to Artists' Own Networks

When MySpace first launched, one of its main draws was the music offered by independent artists on the site, something which generated a strong following among new musicians and their friends. These young artists were using the platform as a way to get their name out there, share their tunes, and attract a fan base.

Related: Live and in concert: Why MySpace music has a chance against iTunes (last100) and MySpace Music Store: Where's the Long Tail? (RWW)

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

April Fools Highlights

Top 10 Places to Get Fooled on April 1st

Observing April Fools Day has become a time-honored tradition for many web companies. Much like changing your logo to celebrate holidays, pulling a fast one on your users on April 1st is something that many web services and applications have really taken to heart. But keeping creative year-after-year is tough, and some companies have learned how to consistently deliver.

Exclusive: Sneak Peak at Google DreamAds!

ReadWriteWeb has discovered the existence of a stealth Google project, called DreamAds. It is a very ambitious project, topping even the wireless balloons which Google is also looking into. Essentially DreamAds is Google's latest plan to extend AdSense - this time into our dreams. It may sound far-fetched, but an inside source at Google told us that it is very possible thanks to the latest in cheap magnetic resonance scanning and mind-reading techniques developed at Stanford University. Our source also revealed the thinking behind DreamAds: Google is aiming to become the first company to monetize a totally wasted period of time in human life: sleep, which takes up almost 1/3 of our lives.

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

For those of you who don't know, the Chumby Touchscreen Internet gadget is a popular...and darned cute...gadget that can be customized with various channels that feature widgets, videos, feeds, games, and more.

To use your Chumby, you plug it in and configure it to work with your Wi-Fi network. Once that's done, you log on to Chumby.com and customize yours with the widgets of your choosing.

These widgets can be anything - web clips, RSS feeds, games, videos, Tweets, news, weather, a clock, photos, or a million other things. Some of the widgets come from deals made with content providers, like the widgets available from CBS, MTV Networks, MySpace, The Weather Channel Interactive, AOL's SHOUTcast and Scripps Networks.

The Chumby also has speakers, so you can hook up the Chumby to your iPod via the USB connector in the back and play your iTunes playlists with it.

Made for Hackers

However, what's really great about the Chumby is that the device is designed for customization. Want to hack, mod, extend, or improve Chumby? Have at it!

The Chumby lets you upgrade your Chumby in four different ways: developers customize the software, build Flash widgets, or even hack the hardware. Arts-and-crafts types can also mess around with the Chumby in their own way, decorating it or putting in a case of their own design.

Software: The Chumby is a Linux-based, open-source platform which means developers can do nearly anything with it. A quick glance on the Chumby forum shows posts about Python & Ruby for Chumby, Java for Chumby, Perl for Chumby, MTASC for Chumby, and much more.

Widgets: For Flash animators, the Chumby can be a showcase for your talents. Artists can upload widgets to the Chumby site and share them with the community so others can add them to their own Chumbys. These widgets are the bread-and-butter of Chumby, bringing most of the cool stuff like news feeds, videos, games, viewers, utilities, and other fun and/or useful tools to the device.

Hardware: The Chumby is made for tinkerers. You can open up the Chumby, take it apart, upgrade it, add to it, and mod it. They even tell you how and provide extensive documentation.

Crafts: You don't have to be a computer nerd to enjoy modding your Chumby, though. Even artistic types can enjoy making Chumby their own. The Chumby is designed so that the core electronics can be easily removed from its casing, letting you create your own look for Chumby without having to write code. See?

Modded Chumby on Chumby's flickr Group

You can even embed a Chumby gadget on your own web site to show people what your Chumby looks like:

Virtual Chumby

Now, don't you want one?

Author's Note: I have a Chumby and I love it.