ReadWriteWeb

Search tool Wajam is rolling out a new feature today to its browser extension that overlays links shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook at the top of the page when you perform a search on Google. (Or Bing.) Now Wajam puts a sidebar on the search results page when you're looking for something in a particular location.

Looking for a restaurant in Portland, or a vintage store in San Francisco? Now Wajam will show you who you know that lives in that city, what content they've shared concerning places there and any photos they've taken there. It looks like a great way to be reminded to look up online friends when you travel to a new real-world location.

Data marketplace and platform Infochimps launched a set of big new features this morning: a common geodata schema that aggregates information about places from multiple sources and offers it up in one API, an automated method of visualizing crowded geodata sets on a map called The Summarizer and a new method of allowing location data to be requested without knowing the latitude and longitude of a place.

If you look around where you find yourself in the world, physically, and are aware that there's really more to life than the naked human eye can see - the new Infochimps GeoAPI could be an important tool in shedding light on the quantifiable parts of reality previously hidden in a disconnected cloud of data.

Microsoft's Windows Azure DataMarket, the company's online store of various large data sets, has partnered with Colorado-based web mapping software service OnTerra Systems to offer a quick map view of all data in the data store that has a geographic component.

Data marketplaces are hot and likely to get hotter. Place, space, time and streaming are all key characteristics in an increasing number of data sets of interest. OnTerra's map app works in conjunction with Bing Maps. Bing has partnered with OnTerra on a number of mapping projects over the past several years. In January OnTerra released a service called MapSavvy WMS that helps business and security customers to capture web imagery of Bing Maps for a low subscription price.

Last month at SXSW, Infochimps, the self-described "Amazon of data," unveiled thousands of new API calls. The API calls, or plug-and-play bits of code that developers can insert into their applications, were released in hopes of soothing the headaches inherent in making data-dependent applications.

This weekend, a few developers took three headache-free days to make three awesome Twitter apps built on the Infochimps API calls.

Check 'em out.

Last night, the folks over at Infochimps, an online data marketplace - or the "Amazon of data," as they like to call it - were celebrating the launch of their new website and the thousands of new API calls it contains. These API calls are like plug-and-play bits of code developers can insert into their applications, so they can focus on other things like the overall design, the user interface and the features.

After only a few minutes of looking through the types of dataset queries Infochimps has on hand, I was excited about the kinds of new applications they could enable. How about an app that finds everyone on Twitter with a particular keyword in their bio and then lets you follow them or add them to a Twitter list, for example? Or an app that helps you identify the most influential Twitter users? These were just two of the API calls I saw in action last night, but there are thousands more (and they're not all Twitter-related, of course). If you're developing a new data-dependant application, Infochimps is a valuable resource you should check out.

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.

Sometimes highly accomplished people just have to join crazy little startups. It's always exciting to see what happens when they do. Data scientist Kurt Bollacker is one of those people; he's decided to join Austin-based bulk data marketplace startup Infochimps, one of the most interesting little companies we regularly write about here.

Bollacker's history is intense. He helped build one of the first search engines online for academic research papers, the first prototype for the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine where he was the Technical Director, he was a biomedical research engineer at the Duke University Medical Center, did research on long term digital archiving as the Digital Research Director at the Long Now Foundation and was the Chief Scientist at Metaweb, the massively ambitious semantic web project that Google acquired in the Summer of 2010. Those are some of the weightiest data projects in the Internet's young history; now he's joined InfoChimps. "The project that is Infochimps is in it for the long haul," Bollacker told ReadWriteWeb. "We're going to make something of lasting value. That's something I can buy into."

Internet speeds 100 times faster today? Distributed wireless networks spanning the oceans and outer space? Those are some of the projects researchers are working on today to remake the world of computer networking. In coming years as IP addresses run out, telepresence technologies are adopted, the Internet of Things brings sensor networks to the enterprise, and work forces become more mobile and distributed, network admins could have some intriguing new possibilities and challenging demands for network technologies.

Layar has had a busy week. The augmented reality software makers recently announced the inclusion of Skyhook Wireless' location SDK, a new local search feature called "Nearby" and a free embeddable AR viewer called "Layar Player" for iPhone apps. All the while, however, the company also showed off an experimental augmented reality technology called "sensor fusion" at Google Zeitgeist. The video below of the demo is pretty incredible, and could be beginning of a new generation of augmented reality.

We were in San Francisco yesterday as Microsoft unveiled the latest beta of Internet Explorer 9 and, like many present, we were impressed. From everything we saw, it was all it was hyped up to be - visually stunning, fast and full-featured. Then came the one, big catch - it's only available for Windows 7.

The Register says that it got the official word from Microsoft and if Internet Explorer 9 is something you want, then Windows XP just isn't going to do.