Here are the latest tools and services we've come to love, maybe you'd like to give them a try too.

Think you find a lot of great stuff online? You should try sharing it with people using Posterous. The user experience for this curation and blogging tool is remarkable, a real model for other app makers to check out. Posting by email, iPhone and a web bookmarklet are all really easy. My Posterous is here and Frederic Lardinois shares some of this favorite stuff here. If you like what we write about on ReadWriteWeb then check out the cool little things we find but don't blog about at the day job - or the things that will make it to ReadWriteWeb later. Posterous just went real time this week, too.

See also: How to Use Tumblr, Posterous and Other Light Blogging Services

Topify

Ever feel frustrated by the emails you get from Twitter? We did, until we signed up for Topify. From really smart "X is now following you" emails to the ability to reply to direct messages by email - Topify delivers Twitter emails like Twitter ought to. It's another project from Ouriel Ohayon, who's also behind the wonderful iPhone app sharing service AppsFire. Ouriel makes cool stuff.

See also: Ten Companies Twitter Should Consider Acquiring Next

Seesmic Web

The never-ending battle between Seesmic and Tweetdeck to see who can make the coolest Twitter client is great for users. Tweetdeck ate my groups last night in an upgrade, after I'd spent hours building them, and so I decided to give Seesmic another try. The Seesmic Web app is awesome and Mac users can turn it into its own app on the desktop using Fluid. The best of many cool features? List support! You can turn any list you're following on Twitter into its own column in Seesmic. Frederic Lardinois says he's been using this combo for a few weeks, I still have some kinks to work out.

See also: Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web's Future (From 18 months ago, how did our prediction turn out?)

Tweetie 2

The iPhone app Tweetie (iTunes link) made a major upgrade last month and we're loving it. Sarah Perez put this one on the list but everyone agrees - this is hot stuff. Will the forthcoming Seesmic Mobile app be as good? Will Tweetdeck's eventual support for Twitter lists turn into an awesome iPhone app? We'll see - but Tweetie's many rich features make it the app to beat right now. My favorite feature? The way the replies page can be pulled down like a spring to prompt a refresh. It's a little thing, but it's fun.

See also: The Favorite iPhone Apps of Five Geek Rock Stars

Aardvark

Aardvark leverages what it calls "the real-time web of people" to deliver answers to any question you have - from people in your social circle who know about the topic and are available at that very moment. Vark gets mixed reviews from some people, but I love it. From technical questions to practical ones about life to opinions about questions I have at work - I've been getting a lot of fast, helpful information from people on Aardvark lately. It's another app that scores very high on User Experience, especially in its iPhone and IM interfaces.

See also: The Robot Made Me Do It: Comparing 3 New Cyborg Q&A Services

Chrome/Chromium

Google's web browser is fast, it's really fast. It's hard to say goodbye to all the wonderful Firefox extensions we've been using for years - but it's harder to use any other browser once you've been using Chrome for awhile. We have high hopes for Chrome plug-ins, but even without them it's a joy to use. You can download Chrome for Windows here and Chromium for Mac here.

LazyFeed

LazyFeed is a topic-driven "discovery engine." It's basically a blog search client that brings in the freshest posts about topics you're interested in. A couple of months into using it, I'm still finding great content every time I fire it up. I've got this running in Fluid and it works great.

Want some serendipity on the iPhone? Try out competitor YourVersion's app. The first version isn't easy on the eyes, but it delivers roughly the same experience on the go.

See also: Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action

Those are some of our favorites lately. What apps have you fallen in love with this season? We'd love to know.

See also our previous installments in this series:
30 Days Later: 22 Apps We're Still Using One Month After Finding Them From one year ago!
Still Shiny: 23 Apps We're Using One Month Later From this Spring.
What We Use: A Tour of RWW Desktops (Mac & PC) Video screencasts.

The company is using the service Superfeedr to outsource its Hub management. Posterous joins WordPress, Blogger and TypePad among the popular publishing platforms to offer real-time feeds.

It's probably just a matter of time until Google Reader implements real-time feed consumption, but in the mean-time real-time blog feeds are quickly becoming a substantial portion of the real-time ecosystem. That ecosystem is best known for its high profile constituents Twitter and Facebook but now already includes far more than just those sources. These are very early days in the real-time web but the pace with which publishing platforms have adopted the paradigm demonstrates how easy it is.

Publishers making the move to real-time feeds not only offer their users a chance to appear first in front of readers, they also substantially reduce technical infrastructure requirements for publishers burdened by the need to poll periodically to check for updated content.

You can find my new curated blog on Posterous here.

Many people are only just coming to know the newer services like Posterous, so in this post we give you 5 tips to get the most out of them. The post is in the same vein as our earlier How to use Facebook one.

Blogging started out in the early days as a text-heavy medium; and to this day professional blogs (such as ReadWriteWeb) rely mostly on text. But the whole point of light blogging - sometimes called micro-blogging - is to be more casual and colorful. So post lots of media: photos, video, audio. Most light blogging services offer a browser bookmarklet, which enables you to post media at the click of a button.

Here's an example of easily published media from a Posterous blog called ReflectionOf.Me:

2. Subscribe to Other People (& Re-Blog)

One thing that hasn't changed about blogging is the sense of community. Half the fun of maintaining a blog is reaching out to your network. So be proactive in finding people who blog about similar things as you, then link to them and even re-blog their posts (copy and paste - it's much more accepted in light blogging than in professional blogging!).

At this stage, the market leader Tumblr still offers you the best chance of finding like-minded souls - due to the sheer number of people using it. Here's an example of community from a Tumblr user called rudie. Note the "following" panel on the right, which lists the other blogs that rudie follows.

3. Aggregate Content From Your Other Apps

With light blogging, you needn't even spend time actually blogging - because you can pull in content automatically from other apps. While FriendFeed and even Facebook are common methods for many of us to aggregate our content from across the web (a.k.a. 'lifestreaming'), it's just as easy to do so using Tumblr, Posterous or Soup.io.

To the right is an example from my own Soup.io blog. Every week Soup.io polls last.fm and automatically publishes the top 5 artists I've listened to in the past week.

4. Customize Your Theme

All of the leading light blogging services offer a variety of colorful themes. If you're handy with HTML and/or CSS, you can customize your template too - if you want to make it unique. Here's a cool MySpace-esque design from Tumblr user Juice in a Box:

5. Don't Take it Seriously

It's not called light blogging for nothing (actually it wasn't called light blogging at all, until we clumsily coined it!). Services such as Tumblr, Posterous and Soup.io make it very easy to experiment with blogging, have fun, see new things, meet new people. Why not give it go...

From Sween's Tumblr blog

We're curious to know which of these services our readers use. Let us know in the poll below, or make a comment if yours is not listed.

In the example to the right, I posted a video of a band I like to my Soup.io blog by simply inputting its MySpace video embed code and adding a couple of lines of comment. Much less effort than writing a post on ReadWriteWeb ;-)

Compete data shows that Tumblr is the clear leader in this market, with Posterous about to overtake Vox as number 2. Note: we didn't include wordpress.com or blogger.com, because they are much larger than all of these and are used for different purposes too.

Here is our poll, please select the light blogging service you use most often. There are many smaller services around, so the list below is certainly not comprehensive. If yours is missing, add it to the RWW comments.

We always liked Posterous, which launched last July, because of the simplicity of the service. Just one email to post@posterous.com will get you a new blog, for example. Over time, however, the company has added lots of additional features, including the ability to use your own domain name, track subscriptions through Feedburner, and embed a wider variety of media files. In addition, Posterous also launched a very nifty iPhone application (iTunes link) last month.

Given that Tumblr is probably Posterous' strongest competitor, it only makes sense for Posterous to give users an option to import their Tumblr blogs.

The new themes still follow Posterous' minimalist design philosophy, though given that users can edit the CSS themselves, they can now take control of their own designs.

When Posterous launched, the only way to upload content to the site was to email it to post@posterous.com. If you hadn't already registered an account, Posterous would automatically set up a blog for you and email you back with all the details. The iPhone application follows a similar philosophy, though with a strong focus on pictures and videos. You don't have to register for the service to upload pictures - your new Posterous domain name will appear at the bottom of the screen.

Another nice feature of the app is that you can easily add new pictures and videos to an album without starting a new blog post.

Good, But Not Perfect

Not everything is perfect, however. While the app does a nice job with media content, you can't actually use it to forward links or just straightforward text to your site.

Once you are registered with Posterous, you can also choose to forward your images to a number of services like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, or your own blog. From within the app, however, you can't control where your images go, though you can turn Posterous' auto-post function on or off from within the app when you start a new album.

Some earlier reviews of the app noted that any image that wasn't taking in landscape mode would appear on its side once uploaded to the service. In reality, however, it just takes a few minutes for the site to detect the orientation of the image and the problem will correct itself automatically.

Overall, this app is a good start. If you are at an event, for example, you could easily snap pictures and videos from within the app and upload them to your Posterous blog within seconds. Thanks to Posterous' ability to auto-post your files to other services, your friends don't even have to come to your site - the images will just go to whatever service they are already on.

The app brings Posterous' philosophy of keeping things very simple to the iPhone, though sometimes to the detriment of the user experience. Until the Posterous team fixes some of these issues with the app, we are more likely to just continue to email our media files and texts to Posterous than to fire up PicPosterous.

Most importantly, Posterous' new bookmarklet automatically extracts videos from sites like YouTube, Hulu, ESPN, Revision3, blip.tv, and many others. It also recognizes music on imeem and SoundCloud, as well as documents on Slideshare, scribd, and Docstoc. The bookmarklet also picks up on photos from flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa, and you can even include live video from Seesmic, qik, and justin.tv. In addition, the bookmarklet also recognizes embedded documents from these services on other sites and allows you to post them to your Posterous.

Autopost

Thanks to Posterous' auto-post feature, you can forward your posts to Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook, as well as to most major blogging services, including Tumblr. Sadly, Posterous does not (yet?) support posting to FriendFeed and it can't save a copy of your links to more traditional boomarking services like delicious.

Taking on Tumblr

Sadly, Posterous still doesn't offer an API that would allow third-party developers to easily create applications on top of the service. Tumblr, on the other hand, has cultivated a rich ecosystem of third-party apps.

Posterous, however, has a dedicated fanbase and the simplicity of the service has served it well over the last six months. This new feature will surely help it to gain a lot of new users, as it massively expands the usefulness and functionality of Posterous.

Setup

Posterous' setup process takes minimalism to the extreme - you don't even have to register. Instead, after sending your first email to post AT posterous.com, you will receive an email with your new blog's address. Those addresses, however, don't always look too pretty (think chris-hr12.posterous.com).

While this is not necessary, it's probably best to actually create a login at posterous and register an email address with them. Thankfully, once you register your email address and chose your own URL, all your posts will be transferred over to your new one automatically. Registration is dead simple as well - just enter your email address and a password.

Posting to Posterous

When posting to posterous from the site itself, you are presented with a rich text editor, not unlike the editor in Tumblr or Wordpress.

The best way to post to posterous, though, is through email, especially because the web interface can't handle uploads (yet?), while email attachments are handled quite beautifully. Posterous accepts pdf, doc, ppt, jpg, gif, png, and mp3 files.

If you send an mp3 file, posterous will create a flash player for it in the post. If you send more than one photo, posterous will automatically create a gallery for you (see screenshot). This works especially well when sending pictures right out of a photo application like Google's Picasa.

Documents are displayed through Scribd's flash interface.

Posterous can also handle most HTML tags and when sending a YouTube URL, it immediately embeds the video in the post.

Networking Still Needs Some Work

Posterous has some social networking functions, with user profiles and the ability to follow other users. There is nothing revolutionary here. However, it isn't possible to search for users, making the ability to follow quite a bit less useful. Posterous will recommend you some users to subscribe to, but without the ability to search for your friends or even just for keywords, this part of the application clearly needs a bit more work.

Security

The email interface, while posterous' strongest point in terms of usability, is also its weakest point in terms of security. Email addresses are easily spoofed. While posterous claims that they are able to filter out messages not send by you and will notify you if they suspect a security breach, there is probably a good chance that a nefarious user could send potentially incriminating posts to your blog.

Verdict

Security issues aside, posterous is a very cool new service. The ease of posting to it is going to make it very attractive to even novice users. While most blogging platforms always allowed for posting by email either directly or through a third-party service, few bloggers ever made much use of it, as the email addresses were always cryptic and the process often simply didn't work.

Posterous would also work very well for those who want to send quick updates from their mobile devices. There is, after all, no need to install any apps - simply send an email and be done.

While the microblogging/lifestreaming field is quite crowded, with Pownce, Twitter, Tumblr, Jaiku, and too many others to name, posterous might just be different and simple enough to set itself apart from the rest.

The most noticeable difference between the Eco-edition of Flock and the standard edition is the new green theme. Instead of blue, the background and browser buttons are now green, which is a nice change of pace for regular Flock users, who have probably been checking the "Themes" page for a while now to no avail.

Eco-Edition

However, what really makes this new version of Flock green isn't the background - it's the content. In partnership with Discovery Networks, New York Times, Yahoo, TreeHugger, Grist, Ecorazzi and AllTop, the Eco-edition comes pre-loaded with all the best environmental content and features from these varied resources.

The customizable features where you'll find the pre-loaded content includes the Flock Media Streams, where photos and videos from the partner sites will be updated daily, the News Feeds, which come pre-subscribed to 50+ leading environmental sources, and the Favorites, where top environmentally-focused sites are organized for you.

Even if you're not that into environmental news and opinion, you can always just download the new version and remove the pre-loaded content while still enjoying the new green Flock theme.

The Eco-edition will be made available for download from www.flock.com/eco.

Great Idea, More Please!

We love the idea of a pre-customized version of Flock built around a specific topic, and would great to see other themed versions of Flock in the future. (A tech-themed one would be nice!) If you look through all the topics available at Alltop, for example, you'll see there are plenty of ideas for future themed editions - crafts, travel, tech news, moms, sports, photography, music (oh wait, that's Songbird), or design, just to name a few. Even better would be if these customized editions could be loaded and unloaded from within the standard version of Flock somehow.

Would you like a pre-customized version of Flock? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Called AB Meta, the format was developed in concert with a number of other web companies and is aimed to be part of a larger effort to pick up where existing Semantic Web and microformats markup leaves off. It's simple and extensible.

Bloggers who want to mark up particular pages or post pages with AB Meta can do so using Dougal Campbell's HeadMeta WordPress plugin. Some post-level meta data editing is possible with Typepad but Blogger users are out of luck. Hopefully someone will build a UI for self-publishers.

For commercial publishers and retail sites, the AB Meta standard should be much easier to implement across their sites. In addition to the new spec drawn up to describe objects, AB Meta also leverages existing Dublin Core markup when available.

Above is a sample of some simple AB Meta, below is an extended version.

AM Meta is based largely on Adaptive Blue's work developing its BlueOrganizer smart browser plug-in and SmartLinks contextual reference tool. Now that the company has come up with a robust, simple and extensible format for designating the primary object of a web page and describing its various characteristics - the next logical step is to open that format up and do some biz dev building adoption in web pages themselves. Though anyone will be able to index AB Meta, Adaptive Blue's products will presumably be the most advanced at first in what it can do with the markup of its own creation.

We're big fans of the semantic web here at RWW and (disclosure) Adaptive Blue CEO Alex Iskold writes some of the smartest posts about it that you'll find here or anywhere.

We have no idea what the "final network" will be, but it certainly seems to hint at the further social networkification of iGoogle. We think that's smart. In May of last year we theorized that start pages were very well suited to take on social networks like Facebook and MySpace. "Whereas Facebook is just launching their platform," we wrote at the time, "Netvibes and Pageflakes each already have an evolved and popular platform ecosystem in place. What they lack is the social scene." We called adding social interactivity features to start pages the "next logical step" for those companies.

A couple of months later, it appeared that taking on social networks was exactly what Pageflakes and Netvibes were planning to do. "Start pages will challenge the existing social networks - it's almost evolutionary for them to become social networks," wrote Richard MacManus.

In July, we laid out a plan to fix Yahoo! that revolved around building out a developer platform for their web-leading start page, MyYahoo! The final step of our plan was to make the platform social.

And just last week, Pageflakes was acquired by LiveUniverse, a move that we saw as a step toward the further socialization of Pageflakes. "Along with [MySpace founder Brad] Greenspan, LiveUniverse has original MySpace engineer Toan Nguyen on its management team. That's some serious chops in the area of social networking, which is where Pageflakes has been heading since ... last July," we wrote.

Google's announcement today may just kick off an industry wide trend toward turning start page properties into social networks -- often, as Google goes, so goes the web. That makes a lot of sense. Start pages generally already have rich developer ecosystems with many useful apps, and because they act as "first stops" for many users, they're already sticky. Adding in social networking functions just increases utility for users.