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Facebook is working a new dashboard for developers to gain better insights about their Facebook applications, it was revealed during a Tech Talk at the company's Seattle office this week. The old analytics dashboard often contains data that is no more recent than 48 hours. The new analytics dashboard will be real time. The data will be anonymous - people won't be able to find out WHO is looking at what, just how popular different items are.

Facebook is building the solution with the MapReduce database HBase. The Tech Talk goes into more technical detail about how the solution was built and scaled.

Apigee is extending its console to be integrated into a provider's Web framework.

SoundCloud, PayPal and LinkedIn have been the first to integrate the Apigee service that lets developers explore an API from within the providers development environment and share it as a social object.

Apigee-to-Go is an iFrame of the Apigee console that embeds into the provider's CSS, allowing the site to be skinned and in the process make the experience transparent to the user.

Pattern is a collection of open source (BSD license) web mining modules for Python from the Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics Research Center. It contains tools for data retrieval, text analysis and data visualization and comes with over 30 sample scripts.

A new National Endowment of the Arts study has looked back into the data from the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Expanding the definition from "benchmark" activities (like going to the opera) to the creation and viewing of art or art-related content digitally has yielded a radically different picture of American's relationship to the arts.

The new definition shows a three-fold increase in the number of Americans taking part in art: from one in four to three in four.

Toad for Cloud Databases is a version of Quest's popular Toad tool specially designed for next-generation databases. So far it supports AWS SimpleDB; Microsoft Azure; Table services; Apache HBase; Microsoft SQL Azure; Apache Cassandra or any ODBC-enabled relational database. It can be downloaded here.

Revolution Analytics is a company that provides commercial support for the open source statistical programming language R. Its flagship product is Revolution R for Enterprise, a distribution of R that competes with other commercial statistical products such as SAS and SPSS. Revolution CEO Norman H. Nie was the co-inventor of SPSS.

The open data service Factual has just updated some of its datasets and has also released a new iPhone SDK. The Los Angeles-based startup describes the move as another step towards its goal of "comprehensive, accurate, and accessible local data."

Factual is an open platform for developers and publishers to build apps with its datasets, accessible through its APIs or via a ">download. The downloads, in CSV format, are free for smaller developers as part of this release.

Kovas Boguta, the head of analytics at Weebly and a guest author on ReadWriteWeb, has created another powerful data visualization, this time of the "the pro-democracy movement in Egypt and across the Middle East."

The visualization drew from Twitter use by Egyptians and influential others around the #jan25 uprising. Those writing in Arabic only are represented in red, only in English are in blue and overlap by various shades of purple. Influence, in terms of follows, are represented by lines and those who influence each other are located in proximity.

Today InfoChimps released Infochimpy, a Python client library for the Infochimps API. It's based on Tweepy, a Python library for the Twitter API.

The Infochimps API, launched last year, gives developers access to the many data sets such as archived Twitter conversations and U.S. Census information.

Last month Google released a paper on its high availability datastore Megastore. Megastore "blends the scalability of a NoSQL datastore with the convenience of a traditional RDBMS in a novel way, and provides both strong consistency guarantees and high availability," the paper says. Megastore is the technology behind Google's High Replication Datastore, which covered here previously.

It's a short paper, only 12 pages long. But in case you want something quicker, here are two summaries: