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Disqus is quietly testing an interface that allows site owners to rank and give credentials and labels to their commenters. The feature takes advantage of a trend towards being able to find experts through social search.

The project is called Disqus Ranks, and it should be rolling out shortly. Disqus did not return a request for information about the timing of the rollout.

The rise of social media has led to an exponential proliferation of content online and widespread demand for tools to filter that information. Popularity and relevance are the most common metrics through which to filter that content - but are they the best?

We asked three people building cutting-edge social software what they think the relationship between relevance, popularity and filtering is going to be in the future. They offered three very different responses. What do you think the future of information filtering will look like?

If you're a mobile app developer, one of your biggest concerns is getting noticed. Companies like Smule and Tapulous already have recognized brands; however, for the independent app designer, the promotion process requires a fair amount of strategy. One proven method of increasing downloads is becoming listed as one of the App Store's top selling services. We spoke to faberNovel's Baptiste Benezet to find out how indie developers can hack the App Store ranking algorithm.

According to Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow involved in Google's real-time search efforts, the way the company ranks Twitter updates in its search results is "definitely, definitely" more than a popularity contest. This quote came during an interview with MIT's Technology Review where Singhal stressed Google's focus on a Twitter user's overall reputation as a ranking measurement as opposed to simply tallying follower counts. That being said, it still sounds as if Google rewards Twitter's more popular users - that is, the heavily followed accounts on the service. Not only do these accounts have more value than many others, they have a lot of power, too. According to Singhal, when a popular user follows someone else, that other person's reputation increases as well.

According to a post on Google's Webmaster Central blog, Google is now discovering web sites by automatically scanning RSS and Atom feeds. This new process will help Google more quickly identify web pages and will allow users to find new content in search results as soon as it goes live. While not exactly "real-time," using feeds to identify updates to websites is an arguably faster method than the traditional crawling techniques Google has used in the past. And Google may get even faster in the near future - the post also notes that the company may soon explore using mechanisms like the real-time protocol PubSubHubbub to identify updated items going forward.

Despite Apple's recent addition of the "Apps for Everything" section to their website, a new feature that makes it easier for iPhone owners to find great apps by category, the sad truth is that app discovery is still a challenge that needs to be solved. Thanks to some 75,000 applications now live in the iTunes App Store, there are just too many to sort through these days. Numerous startups have sprung up, offering their own solutions to this problem, including AppBeacon, Freshapps, 16apps, Appsfire, Appolicious, AppShopper and others. However, no one site has figured out the perfect formula just yet. Now another online catalog hopes to succeed where others have floundered. The brand-new App Classics aims to be the "App Store's missing Hall of Fame," featuring only the apps that have stood the test of time and are worth the download.

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Many of the recent real-time search engines are based on Twitter. They use the URLs enclosed in tweets to discover and rank new and popular pages. In this post, we'll take a look at the quantitative structure of the underlying foundation, to determine the feasibility and limits of this approach. We'll also look at how to overcome these limitations by using the implicit Web.

According to the latest data from Hitwise, Twitter sends most of its traffic to Google, Facebook, TwitPic, and MySpace. Overall, Twitter sends about 1 in 5 users to social networks and another 1 in 5 to entertainment sites like Twitpic, YouTube, or Flickr. Even though some people think that Twitter is just a 'poor man's email system,' Twitter's clickstream profile is very different from that of most email services.

Red hot TV and movie site Hulu has added a major new feature this morning on the one year anniversary of the site. Logged in users are now able to securely pull in their list of contacts from Facebook, Google, MySpace, MSN and Yahoo. The company calls it "Hulu Friends." Though some skeptics have questioned the impact of social video watching, this kind of move is exactly what we've been hoping all sites around the web would do.

Identity providers are now making it easy for 3rd party content sites to turn content consumption into a social activity. From real-time conversation to recommendations, there's a whole lot of potential here. That said, we do have some concerns about Hulu's implementation.