Ed Chi, area manager and principal scientist for the Augmented Social Cognition Research Group at PARC, told MIT's Technology Review that the way people use Twitter is that they "dip in" to the Twitter stream from time to time, but don't want to consume it all at once. The Eddi Project was created so that those brief dips into Twitter are more valuable to the end users.

The tool, Eddi, a Twitter client application named after the idea of eddies in a stream, has the barebones look of something built by data researchers as opposed to web designers. But its user interface isn't the most important aspect - it's the algorithms behind the facade that are its standout feature.

In order to filter Twitter's content, Eddi provides two tools: a topic browser that shows tweets broken down into categories and a recommendation engine.

Twitter Topics - And Not Just the Popular Ones

The idea of browsing Twitter by topic is not unique - plenty of Twitter apps do the same, as does Twitter's own search interface at search.twitter.com. But the problem with most of these systems is that they rely on keywords or hashtags - the latter being the annotations preceded by the pound sign (#) which users add to their tweets to make them searchable.

When there is a major event, such as the Icelandic volcano eruption, Michael Bernstein, a researcher at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT who is involved with the project, explained, the sheer volume of tweets provides a lot of information for an algorithm to use. What's harder is to figure out are the topics attached to tweets that are more unique.

"The essence of the approach is to coerce a tweet to look more like a search query and then get a search engine to tell us more," says Bernstein. After cleaning up the tweet, the tool feeds them into Yahoo's Build your Own Search Service interface in an effort to surface web pages related to the tweet in question. This helps the system to appropriately categorize the tweets into topics.

Recommendation Engine

The second aspect to the system is a recommendation engine that ranks tweets by how interesting they are to you. To determine this, Eddi's algorithms look at your own tweets and interactions with other Twitter users.

The new system will go live on the web for public testing sometime this summer. In the meantime, you can sign up for another of PARC's experimental Twitter recommendation engines, this one called ZeroZero88. Information on sign up is here.

Peretti is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, has taught at NYU and the Parsons School of Design, consulted for major brands like Sony Pictures and Procter & Gamble and created several viral experiments like the Nike sweatshop email and FundRace.org. However, he's best known for co-founding BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, ContagiousMedia.org, and the Eyebeam Open Lab. So if this "Website Taste Predictor" is also his creation (we've contacted him to confirm), you know it's not going to be your run-of-the-mill Twitter tool.

For what it's worth, we're nearly 100% sure about Peretti's involvement. The tool is hosted under his account on MIT's servers, he tweeted about it back on April 7th and he responded personally to a comment about it over on Digg (the fact that this post never hit homepage it a testament to all that is going wrong over there). However, while these clues seem to point to Peretti as the creator, you can never be too sure. We'll wait for an official word and will update accordingly.

Website Taste Predictor in Action

So what does the Taste Predictor actually do? Well, it doesn't just parse your Twitter history to spit back a list of links you've tweeted. That would be too easy.

It appears to delve deeper than that to function as a true recommendation engine. Whether it looks at keywords, follower lists or sites related to those you post links to, we can't be sure, but we do know this: the app gets it right on the money. And I mean downright scary right.

In my case, for example, the list returned included a large group of sites I read regularly consisting mainly tech-focused blogs and mainstream media sites plus a handful of sites I've been known to check out less often. What I don't know is how it figured out that I've been known to gaze at the occasional lolcat, fail photo, web comic or celebrity gossip post when my brain needed a break from all this tech. I certainly never tweeted about those things nor do I follow people who do. So how did it know?

More importantly, though, the tool actually pointed me to a few sites that I really should be reading more often like the image-heavy online paper Newser, the op-ed content network True/Slant and mobile app analytics site Localytics whose blog I just subscribed to.

In other words, the Website Taste Predictor is accurate and useful, or, as Peretti recently tweeted himself: "I think this is the kind of awesome new Twitter App @FredWilson was talking about!"

The immediate conclusion to jump to, from these questions, is that Twitter is eyeballing other apps, either to buy outright or to work with on its ad platform. It still remains to be seen how Twitter ads will play out in third-party clients and Twitter could be getting some market data for precisely that reason. Another way to look at it is, we get to see what third-party clients and services are on Twitter's radar and exactly how the company sees itself.

For example, when the survey asks who you follow, you can choose between actors, celebs, coworkers, industry experts, family, friends, local businesses, musicians and news sources. What about government agencies and political figures? The hundreds if not thousands of absolutely hilarious joke and humor accounts, like Shit My Dad Says and Drunk Hulk?

In the end, we're just as interested in the answers to these questions as Twitter is, and we're hoping the company releases the data to the public at some point. Not likely, but we can hope, right?

One final note, if you do fill out the survey you have the option of giving your Twitter name and an email address to possibly be added as a candidate to test new products in the future - for that reason alone, I'm willing to tell Twitter what my favorite clients are.

The toolkits are user created lists of their most used, favorite apps that either manipulate, add on, hover around or otherwise interact with Twitter in some fashion.

The site just launched last fall and has since doubled the number of applications listed. And already, the website offers a Yelp-like atmosphere for users to find the apps they need, offering peer reviews and lists of user favorites. This latest feature will take it one step further.

While the site already does something to point out the top apps in their categories, sometimes there's nothing better than learning from those you admire - and thus, OneForty's Twitter Toolkits. Today's launch features tool kits by startup guru Guy Kawasaki, Drew Olanoff, the social media consultant whose cancer we can blame for everything, Steve Rubel, one of the leading public relations bloggers on the Web, and Beth Kanter, the leading nonprofit technology consultant in the country, and more.

The feature seems like a simple, if not obvious step for the Twitter app store to take, but it falls in line with what we've seen of Twitter already. Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick, for example, wrote last February how he subscribes to an RSS feed of certain people he follows to find out who else he should be following. In the Twittersphere, it really is all about who you know, and not what you know, and we imagine this would hold true when sifting through nearly 3,000 Twitter-based applications.

OneForty sent us the following list of featured toolkits available on the site today:

Toolkits to be Spotlighted at launch include:

* Twitter Indispensable Tools by Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki)
* Essential PR Tools by Edelman's Steve Rubel (@Steverubel)
* Cancer Killing Chemo Toolkit by Drew Olanoff (@thatdrew)
* Brand New to Twitter? by Twitter for Dummies (@dummies)
* Starter Apps for Nonprofits on Twitter by Beth Kanter (@kanter)
* Must-Haves for Startups by Greenhorn Connect (@greenhornconnect)

We've just found a new, completely free app that will zap those bots and bad users in just one click. It's fully customizable, so you can tell the blocker what you personally consider to be a spam account. And you can choose to simply unfollow those users, block them or report the accounts to Twitter, as well - again all with just one click. StopTweet is definitely one of the more useful apps we've seen lately, and it also helps us all do our part to clean up the Twitter universe.

Here's how it works. You tell StopTweet what behavior you think is spammy by defining a few important parameters. The first parameter is follower-to-friend ratios, which StopTweet considers on a scale of 1 to 100%. I personally think it's sketchy when none of the people you follow have returned the favor. I like my friends to be engaged and engaging.

Next, you tell StopTweet how many tweets you'd like your followers to have on a scale of zero to 30. This won't work on the spambots that ping 500 people with the same "LOOK AT THIS CRAZY BRITNEY VIDEO!!1!", but it'll certainly get rid of inactive accounts and users who aren't really adding much value to your network.

It works for followers and friends, and you can take one of three actions (unfollow, block or report) on the account StopTweet finds. StopTweet also comes with three convenient presets for light, medium and aggressive scans.

The app also has a tab to see your own list of spammer accounts, but we weren't able to click through due to a possible bug in the very new app.

"We didn't like any of the applications that were already out there. They were all too complicated for the average Twitter user," wrote creator Joi Company, which also created Twitstatus, a keyword-based Twitter widget generator. "The application is extremely easy to use, and allows you to only block who you want to block without hassle. On top of all this, it's free. Most of the apps we found charge a monthly or yearly fee. We do not."

We think StopTweet is a genuinely useful app, and we recommend that you give it a shot and let us know how it works for you.

Although it might be a great interface for newbies, that app isn't recommended for power users. But we just found one that is - for desktop use, anyway. It's an agile bit of hotness that's as responsive and unobtrusive as you'd ever want, and it can also provide you with a stock-ticker-esque UI that will satiate all your info-social needs. Meet SocialVisor - the Twitter app.

Here's the skinny:

• You can run your social streams as a retractable bar above your desktop screen.
• You can login to Twitter and Facebook and choose to see either or both streams.
• You can group your buddies any way you want, regardless of which site they use.
• You can access DMs, retweets, replies and mentions.
• You can see threaded conversations from Twitter.
• You can share and view links, updates and pictures on either or both networks.

And more other common features for third-party apps, such as retweeting, following or unfollowing, replying, liking/favorite-ing, commenting and more. And when you want to update, links are automatically shortened with bit.ly and character counts are tracked as you type, all from a simple bar above your other windows.

If a user clicks his "exclamation" icon, there's a slim popout for Facebook notifications. If you need to focus on other tasks, no problem - you can "pause" the entire firehose and resume any time you like.

When you don't need it, it retreats conveniently into the background. There are no annoying popups flooding your screen when your stream gets a little noisy

The app has been live for about a month, and it's just what the doctor ordered. It's an OS-agnostic AIR application, so it'll play nicely with Linux, Windows or Macs. We can see ourselves running this on the daily. One issue we had is that, while the visor does optionally dock at the top of the screen, when it's locked on top, we were unable to access our menu bars for maximized windows. It's still in beta, and a bit buggy, but what kind of early adopters would we be if we didn't admit this app has huge potential, bugs and all?

Give it a shot, and let us know what you think in the comments.

The biggest and perhaps best known competitor in this space is CoTweet, a truly enterprise-scalable solution for Twitter accounts with multiple users.
It's well-suited to brands or news organizations in particular, but BirdHerd might provide a low-cost alternative for small- to medium-sized businesses or other groups.

The other users they choose can then direct message the original Twitter account at any time. The DMs appear in the original account's timeline with a slash-via attribution system that lets users know who sent the tweet.

For example, I gave @Eston access to my account tonight, and he DM'd me this message, which was immediately broadcast to all my Twitter followers:

The BirdHerd website states, "At some point in the future, we will offer paid 'pro' plans with extra features, interesting stats and quicker response times." At the moment, all accounts are free with an invite code, and future accounts will always be available free of charge to any user. Additionally, beta testers will receive 2 months of "pro" features free.

The app is a collaboration between self-described "code ninja" Colin Brumelle of Mixed Content and design studio twothirty.

To access the site and use its awesome, group- and team-friendly features, use the code "rww" to login and set up your account. That code will work for the first 200 users; after that, you'll have to put yourself on a waiting list and hold your breath until the site goes public.

And do let us know what you think of the app in the comments.

It's not anything we thought we wanted, either, but after playing with TwitAlbums, we find the concept charming. Here's how it works: Using Twitter's OAuth function, users log in and create collections or "albums" containing multimedia content and text comments. They can invite whatever users they like to join them in adding files, and only the users they invite can see the content or comments. Best of all it looks like this little app already has a monetization strategy in place.

Users can then choose others to collaborate with them on the album. A tweet is sent inviting the collaborators to the album, and they are prompted to sign in via OAuth when they click the tweet in the link. This immediate request for account access without an explanation of the app might be a bit disconcerting for some, however. If an uninvited Twitter user clicks the link, they are given an "invite only" notice and denied access to the content.

Collaborators can add content, leave comments and invite other users, depending on the permissions set by the original album creator.

Finally, it's interesting to note that the app's creators have built in a mechanism for modest financial returns. Each uploaded file costs the user a single onsite credit, called a TwitSeed. Accounts come with 50 TwitSeeds, and more can be purchased in bundles of 100 for $1, 500 for $4, or 1000 for $8.

One thing we don't like is that the app pushes a ton of link- and hashtag-studded notifications into the user's Twitter stream. As with other apps that gain access via OAuth, from the infamous Spymaster to the successful TinyChat, this is a very fine line that most users would appreciate the app not cross.

Generally speaking, users won't have a problem with a single tweet or two, but a constant stream of app-related messages when the user is active on the site can only end badly. Worst of all, we don't see a way to opt out of these notifications, so we've had to delete these tweets manually, which does nothing to mitigate the swarm of updates for our friends using Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck. Particularly since the content is set up to be private, it doesn't make sense to broadcast tweets about each user's on-site activity.

We think this app would work well for younger users, social media addicts and long-distance friends, especially if the above-mentioned issues are addressed. What do you folks think so far; does TwitAlbums have what it takes to become a widely used Twitter application? Would you use it, and what would you use it for? Let us know in the comments.

We've spent the past couple of days testing and retesting a slew of these sites, and we are ready to present our top five picks for sharing video content on Twitter. Read on to find out which app comes out on top and which ones didn't make the cut.

Type: Twenty-five second webcam uploads that are embeddable and linkable with Twitter-enabled comments.

Test Video

4. BubbleTweet is a service we've been trying and testing for several months with mixed results. However, the premise is great for Twitter. The site lets users upload a simple, 30-second webcam recording, which then shows up on Twitter as a small, unobtrusive "bubble" of video over the web interface. BubbleTweet also lets users upload prerecorded video content.

Type: Thirty-second webcam recordings or video uploads that appear in a video bubble over the Twitter web interface.

Test Video

3. TwitVid.io is the Twitter-friendly video recording and uploading tool from video website-creating service Fliggo. It allows users to record up to ten minutes of video from a webcam or upload videos they've already created and tweet a URL. Co-founder Chrys Bader also tells us they're getting ready to launch an iPhone app soon.

Type: Single-user webcam recordings of up to 10 minutes or video uploads from a drive.

Test Video

2. Twitcam is a pared-down offering of parent company LiveStream. It runs a Twitter-based chat program alongside the video itself, and videos are archived for linking and embedding after the fact. Unfortunately, the tweet/chat module only allows users to send out one tweet every 30 seconds, which minimizes the real-time fun to be had. Still, it's been one of the easier, more fun apps we've tried today.

Type: Single-webcam live-streamed video with Twitter-based chat module and post-stream archive of video and chat.

Test Video

1. TwitVid is a great little app we wrote about recently that allows users to record and upload video from a webcam or any video-enabled mobile device or to upload prerecorded video. They also have a nifty iPhone app that works like a charm. The site also lets users auto-post their TwitVids to other sites such as Facebook and YouTube. Best of all, each video has its own "like" and "retweet" buttons as well as Meebo-powered chat, all of which feed back into the Twitter stream. As far as Twitter integration with video, we tend to think TwitVid does it best.

Type: Single-user webcam/mobile recordings with retweet, chat, "buzz," and other Twitter options.

Test Video

According to a post on i.document, the technical details about TwittARound are as follows:

"The whole application was developed in Webkit (UIWebView/Safari Mobile). A native Cocoa wrapper delegates location, compass and accelerometer to Javascript in the UIWebView. The 3D scene is based on Safari Mobiles brilliant 3D CSS transforms. The AJAX part is done with jQuery."

When using TwittARound, the avatars of nearby Twitter users float through the top of the screen where the live video feed is displayed. Tap on any of the avatars to see their Twitter feed which will show up at the bottom. It's a simple but elegant way of interacting with an augmented reality.

Apple Doesn't Permit AU Apps

Unfortunately, TwittARound and all other augmented reality apps in development, won't ever make it to the iTunes App Store because they're built using non-public APIs. Officially, Apple's iPhone SDK does not offer access to any APIs for manipulating live video, forcing developers to use the available but unsupported ones instead. That's a shame because as you can see, there are a lot of unique concepts out there for implementing Augmented Reality on the iPhone.

In fact, this is one important area of development where Google's Android OS has the edge. Already, we've seen new AU Android apps like Layar come about - an app which could very well represent the future of augmented reality.

Even on the Nokia platform, AU is surging ahead. Earlier this year, for example, the creator of the "Heroes" TV show announced his upcoming AU app called "TEVA" which will use Nokia's video recording features in a new ARG mobile game.

Sadly, unless something changes at Apple, the AU developer community will simply move on to other platforms, leaving iPhone users behind. However, there's still hope. According to some hearsay out there, Apple is interested in enabling these types of apps. In other words, it could be a question of "when" and not "if." We only hope that they do so sooner than later.

TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis methods to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. It compares the content of a user's tweets to a baseline reading Zarella built by analyzing over 1.5 million random tweets and shows the areas where that user stands out. It also reminded us of two other fascinating apps that show how long a user has been on Twitter and with whom they hold most of their @reply conversations. Being socially minded journalists, we've made bookmarklets for all three services.

Profiles with updates that are protected cannot be analyzed by TweetPsych.

Let's take a look inside the mind of a few Twitter users. Most of the social media elite tend to have fairly impersonal tweets; hence, their TweetPsych profiles are relatively homogeneous catalogs of upward mobility, obsession with professional affairs, and moral imperativism. Here's a profile of a photographer/mother/homemaker/blogger in Georgia:

In marked contrast, here's a 20-something, male entrepreneur in Virginia:

We thought TweetPsych was so nifty that we, a.k.a. Marshall Kirkpatrick, made a bookmarklet. Drag the text TweetPsych into your browser's bookmar bar, visit a Twitter profile, then click the bookmarket to see an analysis of a Twitter user's profile.

Other tweet-analyzing apps we love are Mailana, which shows Twitter conversations and links between different users within and beyond a given user's network, and WhenDidYouJoinTwitter, which shows the date a user joined Twitter (or the date the user implemented the most recent iteration of his username). The WhenDidYouJoinTwitter bookmarklet is also available at that link.

Here's Mailana at work:

This app is particularly good at showing the hubs or connectors in your network, and can also be useful for making new connections with other users. You can use the Mailana bookmarklet on any Twitter profile.

Best of all, try out Marshall's 3-in-1 bookmarklet LittleBirdie to see what each of these apps finds from the Twitter users you love best. Simply drag the text link into your browser's bookmarks bar, visit a Twitter profile, and start analyzing/judging the heck out or everyone you do (and don't) know.

It's a simple app that allows users to send any lyrics they remember to @LyricRat. In return, users get a title, an artist, and a link. The link then directs users to a LyricRat page with album art, reviews, and links to Amazon for instant gratification and MP3 downloads. We put LyricRat to the test and think it's a great app for an awful lot of music.

Sweet, no? However, we did manage to stump the app on a couple counts. A showtune lyric returned something that wasn't even a song, which was a strange glitch to witness:

And LyricRat had no idea about these lyrics from the Ataris:

That being said, with a little work, it could be a great app for a ton of music. We didn't see the option to download individual MP3s, a must-have function for impulsive song purchasing. Also, the app doesn't handle misspellings or mistakes very well, so type carefully. For example, we turned in a slightly mangled version of Lit's My Own Worst Enemy and LyricRat told us we must've been humming Southern Cross by Crosby, Stills & Nash.

Still, for a quick mobile lookup via Twitter or a friendly game of "stump the app," LyricRat does the trick.

Like Clipmarks, Amplify works via a browser extension. When you click the button it adds to your toolbar, orange boxes appear on the page you're viewing allowing you to select the text you want to clip. You can also select text using your mouse. The boxes surround the text up until a paragraph break, so if you want to add more text to your clipping, you just have to click again on the following sections until you've grabbed all you want to save. Images can be clipped as well.

The next step is to click the "Click Here to Amplify it!" button. That brings you to your clip blog's "Save page" where you can fill in more info like the title of the post and any additional commentary you want to add. By the way, your clip blog is called a "Clog," which is kind of funny, but to be honest, we're not entirely sure the term will catch on.

The clip blog reminds us a lot of Tumblr site, a scaled down blog platform for sharing tidbits from around the web. (If you'd rather post to your Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, or LiveJournal site, you'd be better off using the Clipmarks solution instead.)

Before you post to your "clog," you have the option to check a box and post the clip to Twitter. You can even customize how the beginning of the tweet should read. If you look further down the page, you'll see a link that says "post this clip to Facebook, Delicious, or Clipmarks." Clicking here will take you to a new page where you can configure these services, too.

Once you've added the additional services, they'll be checked by default every time you clip something and post to your clip blog. If you don't want to always tweet or update Facebook, you'll have to uncheck the checkboxes on the "Save this Clip" page with each use of Amplify. We wish there was a setting that would let those boxes be unchecked by default for those of us who don't want to over-share.

If you decide later that you want to add or remove services, you can no longer do so from the "Save clip" page of your blog - you'll have to log into Amplify and access your Admin settings from there - a bit of an annoyance, but one we can live with.

Great Features: Groups and Sharing from Your RSS Reader

There are three features that make Amplify the better choice for clipping, in our opinion: Twitter sharing, of course, but also groups and the ability to share from RSS. The groups feature lets multiple users from a business, organization, class, etc. create a community site to which they all contribute. Because the groups can be synced with Twitter and Facebook, this can be an easy way to keep up a shared Twitter account or Facebook page.

The other great feature for voracious RSS users is the ability to share clips directly from your feed reader, be it Google Reader or Bloglines. When you use Amplify from either of these services, it will find the source URL and link back to the original page - not the feed URL. That makes Amplify a handy way to tweet, bookmark, or share the best content from your feeds without having to open up the article in a separate window.

To get started with Amplify, sign in from the main page using your Twitter account. If you don't use Twitter, you can create an Amplify account instead. You'll then see the option to install the browser extension (Firefox only) which is the last step before you can start using the service. For more info on Amplify, you can view the YouTube video embedded below.

While such reminiscences undoubtedly wrench a wistful sigh from the breast of those who lived and worked in those heady days (like, before 2002), educating young would-be journalists about how early adopters and the tech-minded are consuming and helping distribute news is a necessary step to ensure the evolution rather than the extinction of American news services. Northwestern University has taken productive steps in that direction this spring and is set to present five interesting, student-created news apps this week.

The students have focused on easing creation and consumption of news while reducing costs of news production and enabling journalistic standards of research and factuality.

The body of work from this experiment includes sports story generator (Machine Generated Sports Stories, or MGSS) that writes sports coverage all by itself from box scores and play-by-play; a Microsoft Word plug-in (Easy Writer) that allows journos to research and fact-check stories as they write them without having to use a separate search engine; an iPhone app (News Feed) that provides the daily news in five- 10- and 20-minute chunks for news-hungry readers with limited time to read; and two Twitter apps.

Twitter News Service sends pertinent news links to users based on their posts. Either the tool will run in the background of Twitter or from a designated Twitter account that users choose to follow (or un-follow) as they desire.

Tweedia will combine news stories with relevant personal opinion and information on a given topic. By integrating Tweedia into a news site, readers get instant access to relevant Twitter posts. News outlets can place a Tweedia link at the end of stories that will either open a widget on the page or redirect readers to the Tweedia site.

Last year, Medill students built News Mixer, a site that mashed up local news with Facebook, allowing users to comment as they read even though many old-school news organizations still don't allow for comments.

Now all Northwestern needs to do is throw in the business school kids and a couple hundred thousand dollars; Startup Semester, anyone?

We wrote Brinker with these concerns, and his response was an interesting commentary on how folks use Twitter and how apps should adapt to those user habits and patterns. "Our experience is that Twitter is for fast, real-time consumption of content, not collaboration and file sharing in the editing mode," he wrote. "We find most of our users are focused on display-only content." And for display-only files, you could hardly find a simpler solution.

Here's how it works.

User A fills out this dead simple form:

Once the upload button's been clicked, the tweet is posted. That's it. TwitDoc gives User A the status ID for the tweet as well as a short URL for the file itself. Here's what the tweet will look like:

And here's what a text document looks like. PDFs fare well, too. TwitDoc uses Scribd for these files types, and Scribd allows the files to be emailed or embedded, for when retweeting just won't cut it.

The service is still fairly young, so kinks are being worked out constantly. For the time being, image files are a mixed bag. Everything gets sized to fit the screen width at the moment, so a small PNG was bloated and awful-looking, and a larger JPEG looked ok but was definitely smaller.

Also, the creators are working to expand the number of supported file types. Currently, in addition to image and text/Word files, TwitDoc supports PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations.

"Our primary focus is on sharing documents, but we also want to smartly handle all types of files as we grow," wrote Brinker. "Our plan is to identify the best handlers of various file types and route them the way we think users would want them handled.

"We also want the reader experience to be safe, fast, and easy," he continued. Especially considering the risk of virus transmission during file swaps, he wrote, "We do not think downloading files to users' machines is the right model for Twitter."

Brinker also wrote that TwitDoc has an open API and that his team is working with Twitter clients to provide support to those who don't use the Twitter web interface.