This has had significant success amongst business travelers who are looking for a familiar face in new surroundings. Nevertheless, the company also offers an iPhone Social Atlas service where users add reviews and tips to their favorite destinations. If this sounds familiar it's because services like Foursquare and most recently Gowalla have gotten iPhone users into the habit of checking in and leaving tips at their favorite haunts and watering holes.

Perhaps the latest Dopplr acquisition is just Nokia's effort to beef up the Plazes team and create the Ovi App Store version of an already growing trend towards location-based games and reviews.

1. What He's Having: There are moments in life when the stars align and you find yourself in Thailand during a full moon festival, Italy during an olive harvest, or Fiji for the biggest surf waves of the year. You could take your chances, or you could consult Joobili. Joobili is an event-based travel recommendation system where users enter their desired travel dates, country of travel and interests. From here the Joobili community suggests a variety of events with a map view of the results. Rather than planning your trip blindly, you can hit (or miss) every major festival, sporting event or concert tour on your travel route. TripSay and I Want to Go There also offer crowd sourced tips on favorite travel spots. Meanwhile, NextStop members entice your inner-adventurer using pictures and short 140-character descriptions.

2. The Whole Fam Damily: Are you traveling with a large group? Triporama lets users plan by committee. Similar to Evite, hosts create a group home page and invite friends and family members to contribute. Members can store and share travel research, assign tasks, conduct polls, build itineraries and integrate maps. While this is an extremely useful tool, be warned that if you ask for someone's opinion, you'll probably get it. TravelMob is another great tool offering similar group planning functionality.

3. A Clean Bed: With hostels, it's a crap shoot as to whether or not you're going to end up in a room with a drunk couple or a mentally unstable ex-pat. And if you're traveling on a budget, hotels can be expensive. Air BnB offers fantastic deals on nightly rooms, sublets or vacation rentals. Site members rent out their fully-furnished rooms, apartments and homes. For the price of a horrible hotel in New York, you can often get a luxury apartment with kitchen facilities. iStopOver is a similar service, but users can also rent out office space. This way you can extend your stay, finish some work and still have time to enjoy the sights.

4. Map Happy Directions: Whenever you see a travel brochure with the phrase, "The city's best kept secret" on it, you know this is an outright lie. Real secrets travel by word-of-mouth and are far from the noise of the tour buses and gift shops. AMap.to allows users to add links, videos, images, directions and comments to a map. This is a great way to share your favorite restaurants and parks and help others find them. The service offers the option to upload a shortened URL to Twitter, Facebook and Digg. Be choosy with what you upload, after all, it's only a matter of time before the cult of Lonely Planet travelers flock to online communities for new suggestions. If you're looking for spots in the US, TripCart offers travel mapping for drivers. Users can share and plan their routes and rest stops on the way to major and not-so-major attractions. Now you can get lost in that maize maze you've always wanted to visit.

5. Posse Up: Sometimes you've been on the road so long that you just want to see a familiar face. Dopplr lets frequent travelers share their location and travel plans with friends. Similar to TripIt, the service lets us upload itineraries and share them to schedule a rendezvous. While not specific to travel, Whrrl, Loopt and RWW's most promising company of 2008, Brightkite, are also great geo-based friend tracking tools.

6. Home is Where the Heart Is: Steven Tyler sings, "life's a journey, not a destination." But honestly, after 20 hours of connecting flights and airport food, sometimes the destination looks like a lifesaver. For five dollars FlightTrack ensures that we find our airport gates, catch our connections and make our way home. The premium version costs $10 and allows users to sync with their TripIt itineraries. NextFlight also tracks departures for more than 1,100 airlines. Meanwhile Flight Status tracks arrivals, departures and your baggage. And for those of us lacking a good sense of direction, Gate Maps helps us navigate confusing airport layouts and make it from gate to food court to gate.

• Gregg Brockway, President & Co-Founder, TripIt
• Marko Ahtisaari, CEO & Co-Founder, Dopplr
• Hugh Birch, VP of Product Development, Yapta
• Jonah Sigel, VP Business Development, PlanetEye

We welcome your suggestions for discussion points, either in the comments here or by tuning in LIVE to the show - via Calliflower or Facebook - and participating in the chat room.

UPDATE: The podcast is available for download here.

Unfortunately, frequent flyer miles will only provide so much detail. That's why the latest project from Dopplr - the site that helps you keep track of your comings and goings, as well as those of your friends - is so interesting. They're offering to answer a variety of travel history questions by providing Dopplr users with Personal Annual Reports that will help them visualize their travel during 2008.

As the Dopplr team gathers data for each individual, there will likely be some interesting metrics and trends that appear at the macro level, too. We remain hopeful that Dopplr will choose to publish an aggregate view of travels for all users. They've already hinted at one interesting aggregate metric.

Travelers who used Dopplr to record trips in 2008 should expect their reports to arrive by email, this week. In the meantime, the Dopplr team has released a sneak peak of the reports. The subject? What United States President-elect Barack Obama's Dopplr account might look like if he had one:

If you're a frequent traveler who hasn't yet tried Dopplr, perhaps 2009 would be a good year to give it a try. At the very least, you'll have a better picture of where you spent your time this year - even if you don't really want to answer the question of how many miles you logged.

And when it comes to keeping track of the techie crowd and their travels, Dopplr is one of the best resources around. Now, they're giving users a view into some of those travel patterns with Dopplr city pages.

Looking at even a few pages reveals some interesting trends. Austin, Texas, USA, for example, gets a heavy influx of Dopplr users in March. Why? The annual pilgrimage to the SXSW interactive festival. Portland, OR, USA, by contrast, shows a definite uptick during the summer months. London, Paris, and Tokyo have steady traffic throughout the year. (Obviously, I could spend hours just thumbing through these cities.)

But there's something else interesting happening here - which Marshall Kirkpatrick mentioned recently. To make the reports a little more aesthetically appealing, the city pages pull in images of the respective cities from Creative Commons licensed content held on Flickr. Not only does it provide more context for the city, it offers yet another venue for Flickr users to showcase their work. All thanks to Creative Commons.

Unfortunately, while the image concept is laudable - and often beautiful - many of the randomly selected photos tend to obscure the graphs of the travel data. So, if you're looking for beautiful images, you're in luck. But if you want to read the data, sometimes you're going to have to strain to see it.

Nonetheless, Dopplr city pages are well worth a visit. It's great to see Dopplr exposing some of the interesting data points that the company has been accumulating about its user base. And I'm a firm believer that any time this sort of data is made accessible, it's always wise to take a cursory look, for my own edification.

To see city pages in action, register or log in to Dopplr and search for the cities that interest you - or try clicking through some of the cities from your trips.

According to FriendFeed's Bret Taylor, the problem was caused by an malfunctioning API client. At the time, he didn't know whether the problem was accidental or intentional, so they disabled the API client and researched the IP address to determine where these messages were coming from. They then got in touch with the developer to let him know what was going on.

As it turned out, the service at fault was Gridjit, a social portal service still in alpha that uses both Twitter's and FriendFeed's APIs to allow you to view and interact with both services from Gridjit's web site.

As soon as FriendFeed got in touch with Gridjit, Gridjit's founder, Ray Grieselhuber, disabled the service's ability to post statuses, comments, and likes from within Gridjit and shut off access to the account management screens. After a day's worth of research, the problem was discovered - it wasn't a security issue, just a bug in the code. The issues is being addressed now and the affected users who had comments posted under their name were contacted via an email that read:

I'm sending this to let you know about a bug in Gridjit's code that caused a comment to be posted to FriendFeed in your name.

I spent the day reviewing the system and performing security audits to ensure that that this was not a security violation - it was not.

Rather, it was a bug in the system that caused the extra comments to be posted based on some obscure query patterns. I'm taking steps to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.

If you would like to see the comments and delete them, the FriendFeed links can be found here:

http://friendfeed.com/e/6def167a-f3d2-4711-aebd-6f8171919178/http-www-geeky-gadgets-com/

http://friendfeed.com/e/8be20617-8d57-478c-a367-98da5d02a8a0/Not-a-complete-list-of-top-diggers/

I sincerely apologize for this. The quality of your experience with Gridjit is very important to me.

Additional details and updates will be posted on the Gridjit blog (http://blog.gridjit.com).

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Ray Grieselhuber

Write APIs - A Cause For Concern?

While in this particular case, the issue was relatively minor and more of a strange occurrence than anything, it was only through FriendFeed's quick action that the entire service was not affected by this programming bug. Of course, it was also helpful that Gridjit is still in private alpha testing at the moment, so there aren't a lot of users currently using their service.

But what if this bug had come from another service that was heavily used? And what if it had been a web app that's far more mission-critical than FriendFeed?

The problem with providing an open API (that is, a write API) is that all it takes is one programmer to have a big impact on a service. Like in the case of Gridjit, it may be an accidental bug in their code, but it could have just as easily been someone with a more malicious intent.

So instead, via the BONDI initiative, OMTP will define what interfaces developers need to access when writing apps that tap into more sensitive functions on the mobile device. BONDI will expose those handset features to the developers while also protecting the users from any fraudulent or malicious activity.

In addition, the web services that result from the BONDI initiative will incorporate the various open and proprietary work currently in progress in this area of mobile development so as not to cause more fragmentation.

As today's mobile phones become more like mini-computers, the need for standards and security is paramount. The members of OMTP agree. Having standards will "encourage more developers to create unique, exciting applications for mobile web 2.0," says Arnd Gallmann SVP Terminal Technology at T-Mobile.

We couldn't agree more and are now eagerly awaiting the plethora of services that are sure to result from this move.

But email faces increasing competition. Chat, text messages, Twitter, social networks and even lifestreaming tools are chipping away at email usage. In this post we take a look at what's happening and assess if email is in danger.

Twitter was invented because there was a gap in public broadcast communication. Doing Twitter over email would be clunky, if not impossible. The ability to post your personal statuses, decoupled from the ability to subscribe to people you're interested in, put Twitter on the map. People are sending direct messages via Twitter instead of sending an email.

Email is perceived as work, while Twitter is still thought of as fun. Twitter messages are short, use is casual, and Twitter is a cute piece of technology loved by the earlier adopter crowd. People send Tweets complaining their Inbox is full.

The Twitter experience is lighter because of the user interface. With Twitter, we're presented with a scrollable list of messages.

With email we need to select the message and drill into it. Traditionally email clients show only the subject line, so even if the message is short, the user needs to click. And all these clicks add up.

The Outlook Problem

Email is a workhorse. Microsoft realised that business people want one tool to do it all, so email was enhanced with calendar, to do lists and other features.

The problem: all this was slammed on top of email, which became the entry point into a black hole known as My Inbox. Short and long messages, business and personal emails, tasks, events - all stacked on top of each other.

Outlook is a powerful piece of software that lets you organise and sort, but you have to drive it. For many, email is hard work and a mess that needs to be dealt with.

Simpler email clients, like Gmail, focus on how to be a better email client instead of being a hammer for all problems. An innovation like aggregating conversations has huge impact on productivity.

In the years Microsoft was adding more buttons to the toolbar, they should have invested more on the core innovation around email and productivity. Wiring in NLP and semantics to extract things like People, Events and Places would be a good start. Designing emails around use cases like "this is a meeting, this is a project, this is a friend" would go a long way towards helping avoid the Inbox clutter.

Breaking Down Email

Since email was the first killer app for the web, it's used for everything. We're now observing a fragmentation cycle where we're discovering better ways of passing around information and getting things done.

Email is fundamentally great at substantial person-to-person communication. The following diagram illustrates why email is facing competition. It cannot effectively support broadcast (except for spam) and it's still poor at helping with tasks and projects.

Tools like Basecamp and Highrise from 37Signals are showing there's a way to better project management and CRM while leveraging information in emails. If the Twitter service stabilises it's likely to win over people permanently because of its simplicity and playfulness.

Social networks incorporate direct messaging and chats, making it easy for people to talk directly, bypassing email. These communications are easier than email; they're integrated into the flow and more accessible. To be fair, they're aimed for brief messages.

The increasing speed of our lives and global connectivity reduces the need for lengthy emails. If we're in touch more often, then we reveal less every time we talk. Shorter, more frequent exchanges are replacing the lengthier communication of the past.

Corporate Safe Haven?

Even if consumers shift away from email, it is difficult to see how enterprises could. Microsoft has done a wonderful job winning that market and ensuring companies would not function without an Exchange server. A typical proprietary bloatware, Exchange and Outlook handle it all. It doesn't seem feasible for companies to shift away from email anytime soon.

Likely we will see two trends. Google will continue to champion its solution, which, if successful, will bring much needed simplicity to email.

The second trend is simpler project management tools to reduce the functions needing to be done with email. The challenge is that they need to be seamlessly integrated with the email, ideally leveraging its content and automatically generating tasks, events, contacts, etc.

Conclusion

Email has been the blockbuster and the Internet killer app for the past few decades, but it doesn't have a monopoly. New more contextual ways to communicate are emerging and slicing pieces of the email pie, particularly in the consumer market.

We're likely to see a consumer shift from email towards more compact forms of communication, but in the enterprise the email hold is strong and unlikely to be replaced any time soon.

What do you think about the future of email? How have your communication patterns been evolving? What communication tools do you prefer to email?

Anton Talks About The Digg Recommendation Engine from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

Not all the users have these features enabled yet, but those of you who do can check by going to upcoming and checking for a red BETA label. The new upcoming system has three ways to sort it and the third option in the list, Most Diggs, is the one you're used to seeing, where all stories are presented in order of decreasing Diggs.

The first new option, Most Matches, looks at your history of Digging, compares it with other community members, and shows the stories in order of number of matches. In the case of the first story, you see the expanded view of the 'Recommendations via' list, and in the case of the second story, you see it in the compact version, not showing the user names and percentages, rather only the total number. For example:

The second new option, Most Recent, shows you the stories recommended by community members compatible with you, in reverse chronological order. You can also see why a story was recommended to you (via user name and percentage of compatibility with that user).

A new section in the sidebar, entitled 'Diggers Like You' shows you Diggers that are most like you in their Digging and submitting habits.

And finally, you can click on a user and compare exactly how much you overlap. In the screenshot you see below you can see the overlap between my profile and thediggboss's profile. In total we had 3864 overlapping Diggs in the past 30 days, which means our compatibility score over all our Digg activity is 38%.

Overall the design is great and there is a decent feature set. As far as what it is designed to do, it seems to function well. At the same time however, whether the engine will help content submitted by a fairly obscure user, remains to be seen. In the beginning, all your compatibilities are going to be with the people that you have been Digging and the people that have been Digging you back, i.e. your friends. It will require widespread use of the feature 'Diggers Like You' to help more obscure submissions travel to a lot of people.

It is also important to note that the recommendation engine will be a boon to advertisers as well (and of course Digg). By sending the most relevant links to the most relevant people, you can also send the most relevant advertisements to the right people (and ensure high-quality clickthroughs). Users get good content and related, hopefully non-intrusive ads, advertisers get the right potential customers, and Digg gets the money.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

Special thanks to thediggboss for providing the images.

So far, none of the larger search engines have been able to capitalize on the promises of semantic search. Most of the innovations in the space so far have come from small start-ups and even those never made any real inroads in terms of market share when compared to the keyword driven search engines of Google, Ask, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Powerset's technology might just give Microsoft the ability to differentiate its Live Search product from the competition.

"It's a trap. When you download it runs a validation check to see if you are running a pirated version of photoshop. Which then logs your ip back to Adobe HQ who then mark the ip address in the automated billing system. You will recieve [sic] a fine for $500 in the next 2 to 5 working days. Congratulations" -- luke16

The problem, though, that's not true. The book download is just a PDF file; it doesn't run a version check on Photoshop, it doesn't log your IP address, and SitePoint has no relationship with Adobe. Nonetheless, enough Digg users bought into luke16's active imagination that the story was buried.

"So anyone else in the digg community who might be interested in a full, print-quality Photoshop book -- sorry, you miss out," wrote Tilley. "All because some goose decided to throw around some unsubstantiated claim about the legitimacy of our giveaway. What's worse is that everyone believed him!"

Crowd Rules

SitePoint's experience is an example of herd behavior or groupthink, where the Digg group acted blindly on poor information, without rationally thinking it through. This is a problem with the wisdom of crowds concept: if unchecked, rather than coming to the best conclusion based on the wisdom of the group, a crowd can come to the worst conclusion based on dumbness that spreads from a single bad node.

Last year, we laid out a set of rules to get the most out of a crowd. It might be a good idea to revisit those here:

1. Crowds should operate within constraints. To harness the collective intelligence of crowds, there need to be rules in place to maintain order.
2. Not everything can be democratic. Sometimes a decision needs to be made, and having a core team (or single person) make the ultimate decision can provide the guidance necessary to get things done and prevent crazy ideas and groupthink from wreaking havoc on your product.
3. Crowds must retain their individuality. Encourage your group to disagree, and try not to let any members of the group disproportionately influence the rest.
4. Crowds are better at vetting content than creating it. It is important to note that in most of the above projects, the group merely votes on the final product; they do not actually create it.

Digg's problem lies in the third point -- members were able to quickly spread undue influence on the group via poor information that caused undesired results before that information could be properly vetted by the group for accuracy. Eventually, more reasoned commenters on Digg shot down luke16's paranoid conspiracy theory, but by that time it was too late, the story had already been buried.

Digg probably gets it right far more often than it gets it wrong, but SitePoint's experience is a lesson in the dangers of letting a crowd run wild. Any site that relies on a crowd to organize information should be wary of things like this happening.

Using Muxfind is as simple as using any search engine - and you don't need a Muxtape login to access it. Above the search box, you have three options to search by: "Find Artists and Songs," "Discover by Muxtape," and "Discover by Artist."

The first option will simply return results either listing songs by the artist you searched for or the songs matching the song title you entered. Each link actually takes you to the muxtape where the song can be played, so you may need to scroll down in order to find it.

The second option, "Discover by Muxtape," will help you find new Muxtapes to enjoy. To use this option, you enter in the name of a muxtape that you liked, and Muxfind will return muxtapes that are similar to it, in terms of mood or genre, as best we can tell, that is. There is no info on how this matching algorithm works, but it does seem to return results from the same overall "genre" of music. For example, a muxtape by Stefan, which featured Bloc Party, Shins, and The Chemical Brothers, matched up with muxtapes featuring Moby, Depeche Mode, and Morphine.

Search by Artist on Muxfind

The final option also returns similarity-based results, but this time specifically by artist. For example, if you do a search for Radiohead, you'll get a list of results that link to muxtapes where a Radiohead song is included in the playlist. This option doesn't always work as well since some people's muxtapes are quite eclectic and include Radiohead tunes right along with NIN and Public Enemy, whereas others keep theirs more mellow as a whole, combining Radiohead with other mellow artists like The Postal Service or Modest Mouse.

However, that isn't so much of an issue with the Muxfind service itself - it just reflects the varying tastes of the users on Muxtape. If anything, this "problem" could be looked at as a feature instead because a user who strangely pairs Radiohead with NIN may just have a musical taste similar to yours, even if the two songs don't seem to automatically go with each other as being "similar artists." Much like a radio station simply plays artists in the same genre of music, Muxfind, in the same vein, could help you find online streams of artists in the same genre, too.

Conclusion

On A VC, Fred Wilson notes another reason that services like Muxfind and other user-gen search tools have value: they are "a bit of a quality filter." Because it takes time and effort to post something on the web, whether a playlist, a link, a photo, or video, the items that people actually take the time to upload are usually something worthwhile.

Muxfind isn't by any means the first or best music search/discovery service, Grooveshark, Last.fm, Hype Machine, Mixwit, and even iTunes offer ways to search and find new music to love. However, for those that love the muxtape format, Muxfind is worth a look.

The API itself should be done by the time summer arrives in the US, with more significant chunks available to the public within 6 months.

The New York Times has taken a lead in bringing newspapers into the digital landscape over the past year. In 2006, the company launched its specialized RSS reader built on the Microsoft WPF platform, but it was this past fall that things really started to heat up on the digital side of the Times.

The paper put out a Facebook application, which has been a modest success with about 1,500 daily active users. They followed that in October with the controversial decision to put reader comments on the main page of the paper's web site.

In November, the Times took Techmeme full on by launching its own news aggregator powered by the Blogrunner technology it had acquired. Blogrunner "is our answer to Techmeme, integrated with our main site. It is technology we've built ourselves, based on Blogrunner, a company we bought last year," NYT Tech Editor Saul Hansell told us at the time.

Then in January, the company made an investment in Wordpress, the popular blogging engine that powers their own blogs.

Conclusion

An API is a logical next step for newspapers. It will give developers access to their vast amounts of well-researched data, and allows the paper's brand to be spread easily across the web. More access to Times content and the ability to mash it up in new and interesting ways can only be a win for both readers and the paper.

"The web of the near-term future isn't about pages any more," wrote Marshall Kirkpatrick in his massive post on APIs in March. "It's about data, flying around, hopefully under the control of users, and offering a world of possibilities that few of us could have imagined just a few years ago."

The New York Times seems to understand that. Says Aron Pilhofer, the paper's interactive news editor, the goal of an API is to "make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data."

Warner is hoping for a few things from the DVD. First, to generate additional DVD revenue without much more cash put into production (now "Watchmen" can have an additional "ultimate" edition in witch both releases are edited together). Second, to help launch the movie project into a potential new franchise. "As television advertising becomes less effective because of declining TV viewership, movie studios need to reach a mass audience somehow, and having what amounts to ads sitting on store shelves is seen as a crucial antidote," writes the New York Times.

But it doesn't seem like it will work. If DVD sales are down -- off 3.2% last year, according to Adams Media Research -- why would more DVDs be the answer? Will an additional, direct-to-DVD release of a secondary storyline really help sell more DVDs four months later? Doubtful. Remember, Warner Brothers isn't putting the additional storyline on the "Watchmen" DVD as a value-add for fans, but instead asking people to shell out more money for additional content. It's an advertisement on store shelves, yeah, but one that you have to pay for.

The Reznor Blue Print

Speaking to the New York Times about the potential for a "megamovie" that edits together both "Watchmen" and the direct-to-DVD release, director Zack Snyder says, "The überfans of this property are going to go crazy for that." He's right. The überfans -- what Kevin Kelly might call "true fans" -- will buy anything related to the thing they're fans of. That was the concept behind the March release of the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV.

NIN frontman Trent Reznor realized that in order to make money, he needed only to appeal to his true fans, his überfans. He gave the first part of his four part album away for free on the Internet, and then offered higher quality downloads, and "deluxe" physical packages for a price ranging from $5 to $300.

The result was that his true fans ate it up. Reznor pulled in $750,000 in three days from sales of music to his core fan base, and may have picked up a few new true fans along the way via the free downloads.

The movie studios could learn from Reznor's blue print. Clearly $750,000 is not enough to recoup the costs of a $100 million movie, but the movie studios don't have to give anything away for free. What they should do is offer users a low cost, legal alternative to BitTorrent where movies can be had cheaply at high quality and DRM free. Then for the überfans -- fans of the director, writer, actors, or movie itself -- sell additional downloadable content, and offer high priced, physical "deluxe" editions with value added features, as well as all the normal movie merchandising and promotional tie-ins.

Alternatively, maybe simultaneously producing a direct-to-DVD release is a good idea. But make it a direct-to-web release, and use it as a promotional vehicle for the movie. Break it up into small chunks (under 10 minutes each), and put it out on BitTorrent and YouTube in episodic format for free leading up to the full DVD/download release of the main feature. That's akin to what Reznor did by releasing the first part of the Ghosts for free, and asking fans to pay for the rest of the album.

Conclusion

Speaking of a direct-to-web release, in addition to the direct-to-DVD side movie, Warner is planning a series of a dozen 22-26 minute animated "webisodes" that will attempt to create buzz for the film and introduce viewers to its complicated plot (more precisely, they will be semi-animated story boards narrated by an actor). That's a step in the right direction, unfortunately 26 minutes might be too long for the web format -- especially for what amounts to a narrated slide show. That demonstrates that maybe Warner just doesn't yet understand the new medium of Internet video.

According to Snyder, the webisodes will eventually be combined as part of a later DVD release -- which is the type of value-add that those überfans will pay for. But if the goal is to build buzz for a potential franchise, then studios should seriously think about the Reznor distribution blue print. It may not be as profitable in the short term, but could work at scale and help to turn some casual fans into true fans for future releases in the franchise.

ReadWriteWeb is ranked the 10th most popular blog in the world, according to Technorati. Our site is read by tech and media professionals, early adopters, developers, designers, analysts, CIO's, VC's, media execs, leading thinkers.

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