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.

Twitter has acquired two other companies so far, that we know of. Search engine and sentiment analysis service Summize became Twitter's own search engine and Values of N sold its assets so engineer Rael Dornfest could be brought into the company. Here are ten other startups we think that Twitter should consider acquiring next. Which kind of company would you most like to see become part of Twitter itself? We've got a poll below.

Some of these we think are likely acquisitions, some less so. In making this list we considered both functionality that would be helpful to have added to Twitter's own site and technology that would be worth buying instead of just building in-house. Whenever a platform company builds technology that a number of other startups offer, there is a risk of scaring other people away from investing in development that the platform could just reproduce. Acquisitions of startups on a platform probably increase the appeal of development though, as it's a chance to get in on the game.

Quite Likely, if It Hasn't Happened Already

Bit.ly is the most full-featured and popular URL shortener on the market right now and was recently selected as Twitter's own shortener of choice, dethroning TinyURL. Bit.ly offers all kinds of smart analytics, from real-time click tracking to semantic analysis of topic keywords from the links that people tweet.

One trusted industry source speaking on the condition of anonymity told us that Bit.ly servers "were moved into Twitter's racks months ago in preparation for this change" [of becoming the default shortener]. Bit.ly is becoming too important to Twitter to keep that functionality outside the company's own shop and the two companies share some investors. We will not be surprised at all if a Bit.ly acquisition by Twitter is announced sometime in the near future.

Could Happen...

Tweetmeme is another fast growing Twitter analytics service that tracks sharing on the service. With another chunk of new features just added today, the service is looking a whole lot like "Feedburner for Twitter" but with even more viral distribution possibilities. The Tweetmeme API is quite interesting and could complement Bit.ly quite well.

Twitpic is a popular way to share images on Twitter. The site faces a strong challenge from ImageShack's YFrog, but independent Twitpic would be a cheaper acquisition and is already well known among Twitter users. (Twitter should probably look at Enjoysthin.gs; it's got the best user experience.) An increase in imagery on Twitter would probably offer the company a lot more advertising real-estate.

Tweepz is a fascinating Twitter search engine that acts like a directory that lets you parse your results using various metrics gleaned from Twitter. Check out this search, for example. Twitter could benefit from making this kind of search available to users, advertisers and researchers - and Tweepz has already built it. See also Twazzup, another company doing interesting things with Twitter data.

Longer Shots

An iPhone app company could be a good buy for Twitter; there's certainly plenty of options. M.Twitter.com is a good mobile service already but someone specializing in super high-quality Twitter apps for the iPhone, Android and Pre could be good to bring in house. It could be AteBits, makers of Tweetie. There may not be enough reason for Twitter to buy one of these companies, though.

A desktop Twitter app company could help Twitter increase user engagement. Many of the most serious Twitter users (though not all) swear by desktop access. Twitter could acquire the most popular and arguably most innovative desktop app, Tweetdeck, or it could bring Seesmic in house. Tweetdeck would be cheap and shares investors with Twitter. Desktop apps may be too limited in appeal to be a compelling acquisition target.

Geo-location could be a good feature to add to Twitter. Search by user location could be made much more meaningful and the list of things that could be done with it is very long. Brightkite is popular and well developed, Shizzow is pretty and wouldn't be expensive. On the other hand, browsers themselves will likely all become more location aware in the near future and Twitter may be satisfied with its current location data.

A semantics company could bring structure to the Tweets, making them more useful and easier to advertise against. Right now links Tweeted are semantically analyzed by Reuters' Calais and sent to Bit.ly, but we wouldn't be surprised if Twitter was interested in scooping up a small semantics shop and helping it scale so that analysis was being done in house. Twitter may feel like semantics don't need to get that close to consumer users, though. (Disclosure, Calais is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.)

Topify is a widely loved service that intercepts your new Twitter follower notification emails and sends you much more useful ones. It's great but probably too easy for Twitter to just reproduce itself.

FriendFeed plus Twitter would be a match made in heaven. It would be an engineering powerhouse. It would be a step towards mainstream user adoption of FriendFeed, a service that can't make up its mind which end of the sophistication spectrum it's targeting. It's also quite unlikely to happen. If there's one related startup we can imagine turning down a Twitter acquisition offer, it's probably FriendFeed. (Though the investment-laden and highly ambitious OneRiot is a close second.) Nonetheless, it would be awesome if FriendFeed's cross-network aggregation, threaded conversations, groups, media support, search and more joined forces with Twitter.

Ultimately, it may be most likely that Twitter's next acquisition will be something vapid. A service that aggregates shopping Tweets, or celebrity Tweets, or something else that will fall short of taking advantage of the Twitter platform's huge potential to change the world. Twitter staff makes relatively simple use of its own service, so hoping that it will acquire companies that make it all the more powerfully sophisticated may be an early adopter's pipe dream. [Update: After some discussion this afternoon, I am thinking it's time to reconsider this position I've held for some time. Twitter staff is not full of dummies, I'm sure, and it has probably been inappropriate of me to write as if that's the case.]

Maybe not, though. We wouldn't be shocked to see Twitter pick up at least a few of the companies above. What do you think? Are there other services you'd like to see become part of the Twitter team even more than the above? It's a wild and woolly micro-content ecosystem out there - anything could happen.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Doug Coleman, Jolie O'Dell, Dana Oshiro , Lidija Davis and Steven Walling.

Twimailer's original developer, Jon Weatley, put the site up for sale on the SitePoint Marketplace in early March, right after he received a number of very positive mentions from promintent Twitter users like Kevin Rose and Tim O'Reilly. The site was put up for sale exactly one day after our own positive review of the service, and it eventually sold for $2,500.

According to Topify, the current seller, who is based in Romania, claims that he is too busy to maintain the service. Other warning signs for Topify were that Twimailer's site features no terms of service (something to think about before you give your Twitter credentials and/or email address to a third party!), and that the site still features Twimailer's now deactivated Twitter account. Twimailer also never notified its users about the sale.

This whole affair does indeed seem rather shady and we think Topify's developers did the right thing when they decided not to buy Twimailer. Topify's developers couldn't help to note that Twimailer, because of its small size, wouldn't be much of an asset anyway.

Use Twimailer? Change Your Password

Twimailer didn't take users' Twitter credentials, but, as we pointed out in our review, users had to forward their direct messages and other email from Twitter to the service, which would include any password change notifications. Twimailer is currently down, and if you are paranoid about somebody hacking into your Twitter account, this might be a good time to change your password.

More and more services are now using Twitter's oAuth implementation, which should make using third-party applications a lot safer by default. For Twitter web apps that don't use oAuth yet, however, it is worth considering their terms of service and other factors to see if this is a reputable company. Even then, though, there are still some risks, as this example from Twimailer clearly shows.

The benefits are clear, but just like with other services hoping to ride Twitter's rise to fame, the lack of a Twitter authentication mechanism means that you must give Topify both your login name and password, and redirect your Twitter notification emails to the Topify service. This requires a lot of trust on your part.  The good news is the site has a fairly broadly-worded privacy policy:

Privacy policy (of sorts): Rest assured we will never knowingly disclose, sell, give away or otherwise use any personal information collected during your use of this site (namely, the twitter usernames and passwords provided). Honest.

Finally, we would like to compare the 'enhanced' Twitter follow email between Topify and Twimailer. Topify in the last 24 hours has re-vamped their email to show the follower's information more clearly (see below), but there is one place where Twimailer still stands out - it lists the last 10 tweets from the follower, while Topify only shows one.

The scale, at least for us, still tips in Topify's favor though, for a few reasons. First, Topify adds more functionality than just an enhanced follow email. Second, although the privacy policy is still far from completely re-assuring, it's still better than Twimailer's. Third, we like that we can easily find Ouriel's Twitter and blog links, which we can't say for the somewhat mysterious creator(s) of Twimailer.

Last but not least, Ouriel has given ReadWriteWeb 50 free beta invites, so click on this link and get started!

Update:We were recently informed by Ouriel in the comments that the updated notification email now contains the last 5 tweets, along with knowing if you are already following the person, and a link to promote Topify. You can see a screenshot of it here. Thanks, Ouriel!

The UI at Streamy is simple and fairly intuitive. Users land on the start page looking at a basic three column layout tabbed with start, streams, people, profile and options. The start page is dominated by "What's Hot Today" content and graphic links to suggest or save feeds in each category. Users can change this view by navigating across 11 news topics, from arts to video games. In this aspect Streamy is not really differentiated from sites like Digg, Netscape or other news sites. What does differentiate Streamy though is the combination of  "function tabs", the sharing zones and the chat interface. These function fields and sharing zones do the following:

Streams - Saved, shared, comments, friend's shared streams, the subscription finder, saves - filters and create a filter

People - Friends, groups, status stream, friends of, location, profile editor, create a group and send an invitation

Profile - Accounts, subscriptions, comments, personal info, image, groups, friends, website launch, IM and etc.

Options - Streamy configuration including; environment, password, streamy theme and several enable options

Sharing Zones - Drop the dragged news to save, email or save the stories

This utility is a simple reorganization of the way we do things on other sites, but the drag and drop capability potentially speeds navigation and promises great sharing/communication capability. Accessing and manipulating stories is really what Streamy is all about and functions like this can easily go viral.

The personalization aspect is present, but secondary to the user's ability to communicate directly while sharing stories. In a nutshell - users can talk while dragging and dropping news into any number of fields from the chat module to group discussions. In the screenshot below I demonstrate Streamy's drop zones, dragging aspect, subscription finder and interactive chat module.

So, what is it?

Streamy is the product of two very talented programmers whose innovation is unfortunately caught in the midst of a blog frenzy. It is wholly inappropriate to label Streamy as anything like a Digg contender this early, and the resultant elevated expectations will only retard the product's progress. A similar destiny befell Flock when it was released and dozens of others as well. Streamy is a highly functional social news networking startup. Users have almost unparalleled on-site communication with the flexible chat interface and excellent customization tools. Streamy is a "preview" of a next generation social news networking site. What else could it be - the filtering aspect (which Don told me was the heart of the vision) is largely dependent on multi-user input.

Sharing Elena Sanrtarelli with friend DJ - gotta love day stamps

Pros

Streamy has great potential because of the power of Ajax and the news portal. Don showed me innumerable ways in which the drag and drop can be utilized to share, save and otherwise disperse news. The site is quite elegant - almost beautiful aesthetically - and their spatial organization is superb. The pop up versions of the selected news stories combined with browsing buttons, makes Streamy superior to nearly all news networks and especially Digg.

The chat module is really what sets Streamy apart. Even though a module like this would be a redundancy on other apps, it is a valuable instant communication and transfer tool on a viral news service like Streamy.

Cons

Streamy has a big problem in "the degree" of differentiation it has from other sites. My argument with Don is represented in the screens showing Flock and Me.dium, and I used them to illustrate that I could effectively do anything Streamy can do elsewhere. Streamy is not far enough along to get a true measure of its filtering capability, but it is evident that social news, drag and drop and chatting is not going to rock the civilized world. The navigation is fair, but a pretty steep learning curve detracts from discoverability - as Josh Catone and I discovered earlier today. The demo helps very little and a few clicks lead to dead ends all-together. Essentially, the site needs user feedback to be able to live up to their claims of "semantic" and advanced filtering. 

Browse friends feed and stream menu

Conclusion

This is a shoestring development by two very talented developers, but it is not Joost or the iPhone - nor does it have the backing to be like that yet. Streamy is simply not ready for predictions this early in the game (Digg competitor or your new start page?). However, if they don't differentiate themselves more - and soon - then they may well become just the next "flash in the pan" startup. It is not really good news when neither of the developers can substantially describe their vision or plan of development (as was the case).

After all this, how would I describe Streamy? It's a promising news networking site currently in private beta testing.