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The Paris-based Twitter search engine and meme tracker Twitscoop rolled out a live tag cloud for Twitter today. While a tag cloud was always a major part of Twitscoop's design, having it update in real-time makes it a lot more interesting to follow. Twitscoop is also a very capable Twitter search engine that can hold its own against Summize.

With all the frustration, confusion, and support going towards Twitter this week, a break from Twitter might be just want the doctor ordered. This weekend users have been asking for alternatives to Twitter. In this post we answer that question in a variety of ways. Here's a look at several alternatives to Twitter both online and offline, that will help reduce Twitter's stress levels and temporarily minimize user frustrations.

Multimedia messaging service Utterz is launching an expanded offering Monday morning that will allow users from 17 additional countries outside of the US to post to the service with their mobile phones. Utterz combines voice, video, photos and text to facilitate conversations either on the Utterz site, through Twitter or on your own blog off-site.

In addition to the local phone numbers for 17 additional countries, Utterz is also launching threaded conversations (small but important), webcam video capture and a newly designed site. The cow motif will likely stay, but whatever. (Update: Upon seeing the relaunched site, there's actually a whole lot less cow action! I kind of miss the cow, now that it's gone.)

Loic Le Meur's short video messaging system Seesmic made a number of announcements here at DEMO but when I got to sit down with him, that wasn't the subject of our conversation.

I wanted to talk about microblogging as a phenomenon, but the biggest take away I found from our conversation is the Seesmic's short video messaging is really different from Twitter. Both are important but so are the differences between them.

Six Apart this morning launched a plugin for their MovableType blogging platform that aggregates and displays a user's activity from social web sites. Similar to FriendFeed, the Action Streams plugin displays things like, your latest posts to Twitter, images from Flickr, videos from YouTube, or events from Upcoming. The plugin is available this morning as a free download for MovableType 4.1 and currently supports 75 difference services.

Earlier this week we announced our Best BigCo of 2007, Facebook. In this post we're announcing our pick for Best LittleCo. We're also asking for your nominations for Most Promising Web Company for 2008.

These picks are something we do every year, this being the 4th year. Last year's Best LittleCo was YouTube, with Sharpcast selected as Most Promising. In 2005 37Signals was Best LittleCo and Memeorandum (now Techmeme) and Digg were joint Most Promising. In 2004 Ludicorp, creators of Flickr, was Best LittleCo and Feedburner was named Most Promising.