2. 12cast: After much anticipation, 12seconds.tv released their video application for the iPhone 3GS. The app allows users to create a short 12 second video clip and from here they can share the video's short URL with their friends through Twitter.

3. Twitvid and Posterous: Both Twitvid and Posterous allow users to create videos on their mobile phones and email them to be uploaded to the site. With Twitvid, friends receive a DM message with a link to the newest video. ReadWriteWeb recently covered Twitvid in a round up of Twitter video apps. Meanwhile, with Posterous, your files are instantly converted and embedded as a flash player on your site.

4.Livecast Bambuser and Flixwagon: Livecast, Bambuser and Flixwagon are all similar services that allow users to stream videos live to their channels, blogs and Facebook accounts. Depending on your community preference you can upload vlogs, short films and vignettes.

5. Qik: Qik allows users to stream live videos to their channels, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Justin.tv accounts. One nice feature of the Qik video for Android is that users can trim their clips via their phones before uploading them. ReadWriteWeb named Qik one of the top 100 products of 2008.

6.Kyte: While it doesn't support live streaming, Kyte's iPhone 3GS app allows users to record video and upload it to their channels in an extremely easy manner. The service also offers branded mobile sites for big name celebrities.

We know we're only skimming the surface. If your favorite app isn't listed above, let us know about it in the comments.

SHARED TRAVEL PLANNING: Both Tripit and Dopplr are fantastic tools for keeping track of itineraries and sharing travel plans with friends. Meanwhile Gliider is a great tool for saving large blocks of trip-related text and syncing them to offline folders.

gliider from jared richardson on Vimeo.

DIRECTIONS: TeleNav provides GPS services for a number of mobile devices including the iPhone. The tool offers voice driving directions, spoken address recognition, rerouting for accidents and traffic jams, and locates wireless hotspots, the lowest gas prices, parking lots and ATMs. TomTom for iPhone is also expected to be a great tool as the docking station doubles as a charger.

FOOD: Many of us are familiar finding food with the Yelp and Urbanspoon iPhone apps; however, if you want an authentic road trip experience you might want to consult Roadfood. This site lays claim to the "most memorable local eateries along the highways and back roads of America." We get heart palpitations just looking at the heaping plates of pulled pork, burgers and ribs. Meanwhile, if you're looking to picnic with something more healthy and sustainable, Local Harvest's farmer's market finder coupled with the Locavore iPhone app offer users the chance to find local in-season produce. Locallectual offers a similar tool with their iLocavore app.

VIDEOS & PHOTOS: One way to get images up quickly is to stream them directly from your camera. Eye-Fi uses a wireless connection to upload photos and videos directly to your Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Picassa accounts. If you want to live stream sans touch ups or editing, Eye-Fi is an extremely useful cordless solution. Other mobile streaming video and image options include Qik, Flixwagon, Stickam, Justin.tv and Kyte Producer.

GEO-TAGGING: AroundShare is a mobile application that allows users to publish photos to Google Maps. Meanwhile, Flickr's users can also organize their videos and photos on a map via the site's geo-tagging features. As for geo-based discovery, Flickr mobile utilizes the locational features of the Android and iPhone and allows members to explore public photos from nearby sites.

TRACKING:Google Latitude lets users share their location on a map in real time from their phones or computers. Maps can be embedded in public websites and road trippers appear as moving dots on the map. Imagine your best friend surprising you with Thai food just as you pull up to your hotel. Services like Brightkite and Loopt also broadcast your location; however, these services are based on push notifications rather than real time tracking.

TELLING THE STORY: The Whuffaoke group is using Dipity to aggregate their media. The service allows users to upload their Tweets, blog posts and photo sets to a map, time line and flip book interface. The nice thing about this tool is that it can either be embedded (as seen here) or shared via Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit or Digg. Other tools to aggregate road trip-related media include JS-Kit's Echo, Disqus or an embedded hashtag feed.

12seconds.tv is branching out of the little leagues and partnering with mobile livestreaming heavy hitters Qik and Flixwagon. The videos on Qik and Flixwagon can be pretty long, which means longer loading times for viewers. Now users won't have to worry about wasting time loading videos that they could've skipped. If you're a user of either service, the first 12 seconds of any video you record will be posted to your 12seconds.tv account. This move makes 12seconds.tv somewhat of a video aggregator. The service would be a great way to provide your network of friends with previews of your latest interview or wacky stunts that you record via Qik and Flixwagon.

More Mobile Options

The new partnerships also pushes 12seconds.tv into a wider mobile arena and expands the services current recording options, which was previously limited to a user's webcam or emailing a video to the service from your mobile phone if your device supported video messaging. Now you can do it all with a push of a button from the Qik and Flixwagon mobile apps.

Live Streaming Goes Mainstream

The real news here is that mobile live streaming will now be available to a far wider audience than ever before. Qik is clearly positioning as a mass market product as well, while some of its competitors like Kyte have specifically shied away from going after this market and, so far, only support high-end Nokia S60 phones.

Now that Qik is becoming available to a larger and more diverse audience, it will be interesting to see if we will also see new ways of using it, as well as new controversies around the privacy and copyright implications of live streaming. Hopefully, Qik's competitors, including Kyte and Flixwagon will soon follow suit and release their software for mainstream phones as well.

If you are wondering about the video quality of these live streams, here is a demo from Qik:

Mobile carriers have invested heavily in building out their 3G infrastructures and they now are in need of recouping those costs. By offering compelling applications and services that take advantage of the increased bandwidth, they have the opportunity to generate additional data revenue. A livestreaming application such as Flixwagon certainly fills that need.

The new platform will allow mobile carriers the ability to create a customizable version of the Flixwagon mobile app where additional features unique to the carriers' handsets and mobile software could be added.

The livestreams created by the Flixwagon users can then be streamed to the web, either on the Flixwagon site itself or onto a proprietary web site owned and operated by the mobile carriers themselves. Users can set privacy controls within the app, allowing their streams to either be public or private. They can create groups of friends and family for private streams, which they can configure in the app's settings.

The Platform For Media Organizations

After a Flixwagon livestream ends, the video is made available for later viewing. This makes the offering ideal for news organizations who want to incorporate footage from citizen journalists into their web sites or feature older footage in their broadcasts.

MTV has worked with Flixwagon in the past on a number of endeavors, including three 30-minute livestreams from backstage at a Jonas Brothers concert. Those videos alone hit the Flixwagon site with a total of 6 million streams over the course of one weekend. They also worked with MTV to stream political coverage as a part of the "Choose or Lose" campaign. For this, Flixwagon helped in getting live footage from the Republican National Convention, the Democratic National Convention, as well as exclusive videos filmed back on Super Tuesday, 2008.

VP Candidate Sarah Palin in an MTV interview via Flixwagon, Super Tuesday

Although the company is not announcing partners at this time, VP and co-founder, Sarig Reichert, hinted that there is already interest from a couple of carriers both here in the U.S. and in Latin America.

At the moment, the Flixwagon service supports Nokia devices and the iPhone (via an app for jailbroken phones). However, they will be adding support for additional platforms such as Java-enabled phones in the near future.

We'd like to warn all of our readers that jailbreaking your iPhone is not illegal, however it does void your warranty with Apple.

Today on the Qik Blog, Qik announced support for jailbroken iPhones running the 2.0 iPhone OS firmware. According to their post, users can expect regular updates to come through the pipeline as the days wear on. While the settings for Qik are minimal and unsatisfying at the moment, the interface for the Qik app is awesome. Unlike the Qik app for the Motorola Q, you cannot set tittles and descriptions via the Qik app on the iPhone.

Qik developers recommend using 3G or WIFI when livestreaming from the Qik app. Unfortunately, EDGE is just too slow.

Flixwagon Launches on the iPhone

While Flixwagon's registration and setup is a lot easier than Qik's, I'm not a fan of the interface. Where Qik takes advantage of the iPhone's entire screen estate, Flixwagon ops for a square box. After doing a quick test of the app, video quality is pretty decent and certainly on par with video quality from my Motorola Q9c on Qik.You can also edit titles and descriptions directly from the app.

Start Livestreaming From Your iPhone

We'd like to warn all of our readers that jailbreaking your iPhone is not illegal, however it does void your warranty with Apple.

To get Qik and Flixwagon on your jailbroken iPhone you first need to jailbreak your iPhone. Their are two programs available for jailbreaking your iPhone:

• Pwnage for Mac users


• WinPwn for Windows users

It goes without saying that one of the most popular AIR applications is the Twitter client, Twhirl. Although it never got a write-up by any top blogs, it seems that everyone discovered this app on their own anyway. One of the best things about Twhirl is that it can be used to connect to multiple Twitter accounts. This is very useful for those that keep a Twitter account for personal use and a separate one for a business or service that they run. The Twhirl app demonstrates how AIR apps bring the web to the desktop, as it can dock in the system tray, just like a real desktop application does. You can search Twitter users, view their timelines, and choose to follow or unfollow them as you like. You can also search the public timeline in a feature that is powered by another web service, terraminds. Twhirl automatically fetches your friends' status updates, direct messages, and replies, while color-coding different types of messages. You'll receive both visual and audible notifications of tweets, with new messages displaying in a preview pop-up. Within Twhirl, you can easily post links via the URL-shortening feature provided by snurl.com. The app is skinnable and comes with multiple color schemes built-in that you can choose from. Overall, Twhirl is one of the best Twitter clients, and one of the best AIR apps, too. Download it here.

Google Analytics

For web site owners, measuring traffic and visitor stats are crucial tasks to managing the site and improving performance. With the Google Analytics AIR application, those who use Google's free analytics software can now view those stats without needing to log in using a web browser. This robust application allows for multiple profiles from different Analytics accounts. Within the app, all the visitors, traffic, and content reports are available, just as they are online. A tabbed interface allows you to easily switch between the various reports. Within each area, you can drilldown into the data to view things like goal values and data segmentation. The app provides animated, interactive graphs, making viewing the data just as useful, if not more so, than when you view it online. You can also quickly swich between the interactive reports to viewing them in a PDF format instead. These reports can then be saved or printed, just like any online PDF. Alternately, reports can be exported to PDF, Excel, or XML formats. Download it here.

RichFLV

RichFLV is an AIR app that lets you edit Flash Video (FLV) files. The app reads FLV metadata - while importing the video, the app outputs the number and types of tags found for video, sound, keyframe (Keyframe Tags), and data (DataTags). With RichFLV, you can read, edit, modify, or delete cuepoints and cut FLV files. You can also use the app as a conversion tool, and convert the FLV files to SWF (Shockwave Flash) format. The sound in the FLV can be converted to an MP3, as well. Although serving a niche audience, this popular app has already been downloaded 654 times from the AIR Marketplace. Download it here.

AgileAgenda

AgileAgenda is a project scheduling utility which lets project managers enter data about tasks. The app, an Adobe AIR Derby Best in Show winner, dynamically adjusts to the changing conditions of a project. It knows today's date and it will automatically adjust tasks that are or aren't complete based on that. Tasks can be moved, extended, or split as needed. A light table lets you view the tasks, reassign them, change their priority, or change the durations. And like most project scheduling utilities, a GANTT view is available as well. Your data can either be stored locally, or even better, on AgileAgenda's web service. AgileAgenda supports data sharing via XML or PDF exports and/or a web-based view on their web service. Download it here.

AOL Top 100 Videos

For some fun with AIR, check out the AOL Top 100 Videos application. This desktop widget lets you view the latest music videos, related artist videos, and special features provided by AOL. The music videos are sorted into various genres, like "Rock & Alternative," "Hip Hop," "Pop," "Country," "Latin," and there is also a category for the "Most Watched" videos. The Top 100 app offers three different views - a Standard View, which is just a normal window, a Full Screen View, and a cool, sidebar-like Docked View. You can bookmark your favorite videos and via the related info sections, you can purchase the album, download ring tones and more, while reading up on your favorite artists. Download it here.

Xdrive Lite

Xdrive Lite is a new AIR app that was just launched today, but it certainly has potential to be one of the better apps. With the AIR client app, Xdrive users can upload files and folders to the online Xdrive web storage service right from the desktop. When logged into the Xdrive Lite app, everything in your Xdrive folder is shown within the app in the upper portion of the window, and below this is a local browser. Uploading files and folders is as easy as dragging and dropping them from one pane to the other. A Transfers section allows you to view the progress of the uploads and downloads. The app can also be used to share files with your friends through email, or by grabbing the embed code or file link. Download it here.

That's just a brief look at some of the apps Adobe AIR currently offers, though I am sure there are many more that you might find just as good or even better [update: go2web20 followed up with more apps]. Do you agree with our list? In the comments, let us know who would be in your favorites!

(Note: some of these apps still require the beta version of AIR to run).

Inspired by the site Pulse of PDX, an aggregation of Twitter messages from users in the tech-rich town of Portland, Oregon (where I live) - these Pulse sites provide a model that could be used to create a central location for live discussions on any topic.

There's a bio page where you can learn about who is included on the site. Participants at launch include people like Ross Turk, Community Manager at SourceForge, Amanda McPherson, the Marketing Director at The Linux Foundation, Greg Stein, the Founding developer of Subversion, and many other people who are vendors, analysts and reporters on Open Source. Does that sound like a site worth checking out? I think it does.

These sites also have a mobile version and an RSS feed. It's a great way to check in on the day to day of the Open Source community.

What community would you like to see the Pulse of? News reporters, political campaigners and graphic designers come to mind for me.