"You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps," Flip Kromer of data marketplace Infochimps told us, "and you've got a web app." Today's announcement of the availability of location data means the same thing: you take this data, mash it up with any other data with location information and you've got an app. From Digg or StumbleUpon for your favorite coffee shop to political and disease tracking - there's a whole lot that's possible.

Users will have to be both prompted and incentivized. Fortunately, a location-aware Twitter experience is something that will enable developers to deliver value to individual users immediately and in isolation - it doesn't have to be one of those situations where "this will be cool once other people I know are using it."

With the announcement today of Twitter search results being added to Yahoo News searches, Twitter data is now being used by all three of the major search engines. (Google's implementation is still forthcoming, but the deal is done.) It might be one of the big players, but it's more likely to be small innovators that make creative use of the new location data.

These are possible Twitter use cases, but the standardized Activity Streams spec that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others now support also includes a geolocation field - so if the walls around Twitter ever fall to interoperability then we could be seeing innovations like these across all kinds of networks.

Here are some of the kinds of things we expect, or would like, to see.

"Party Over Here" Bot: Automated Geo-Replies

Want to know when you're near a certain type of public event, great wine shops or deals at Macy's? How about when friends, close friends or friends-of-friends are near? It's not hard to imagine a bot that you subscribe to on Twitter, that then auto-subscribes to you, notices when you "check in" at a new location and automatically sends you a reply when whatever or whomever you're interested in is near that location.

There are all kinds of bots built on Twitter already, but one that can mash-up your physical location with its data store is going to be a lot more useful than a bot that tells you when a sensor noticed your plants need to be watered.

These are the kinds of services that will incentivize Twitter users to expose their location data. Assuming a substantial number of people make that choice, here are a few other examples that come to mind.

Articles Being Shared From This Coffee Shop Today Include...

Think people just stare at their computers in public these days? A service like this could shake that up. How about a StumbleUpon implementation that lets you stumble and read articles from people who've Tweeted from the same place you're in. Imagine walking down the street and considering two competing coffee shops; what's been on the reading list of each today?

News at 11: Local Interest Survey Tool

Think local TV news and newspaper companies would be interested in a stream of hot topics in their local area? They'd be foolish not to; what a great way to discover breaking local news to report on.

Does your local newspaper print a selection of letters mailed-in each week, but list the number of total letters received on the hottest topics? Imagine capturing that local chatter from a much larger sampling of people. Local tweets plus an entity extraction algorithm.

Cop Watcher

Imagine taking a map of tweets discussing criminal activity, or police misconduct, in a city and comparing it with a map of the same from local police agencies. Some places that warrant more official attention could be exposed.

Inventory Forecast

If people in a certain city are twittering like fiends about a new product hitting the market, store orders, marketing and other parts of the supply chain could benefit from an earlier warning about it.

Politics & Marketing

People in Oregon are sharing a Huffington Post article about today's health care reform announcement a lot? In Seattle, Washington perhaps not so much? Political organizers of a certain persuasion could find that information actionable.

How about unearthing Twitter users posting about environmental issues who also live in areas with environmental issues that an organization is working on.

Want to measure local effectiveness of marketing campaigns? Imagine Radian6 or ScoutLabs using the location API. That's only a mater of time.

Flu Trends+

Think Google's use of search data to map out global disease trends is cool? Why stop there? How about pro-active messages (via Twitter) when there's an increase in messages about being sick in your area?

Of course all of this will work better if more people are using Twitter and if people expose their location data, but that may very well happen. Prompting and individual incentives could be big drivers. The degree to which Twitter data is open for analysis by outside parties is a huge asset.

What would you like to see cross-referenced with Twitter location data?

Thanks for visiting ReadWriteWeb - we want to thank P2P-powered real-time search engine Faroo for making it possible for us to bring this site to you. Faroo is an innovative way to find out the hottest, freshest content on the web. Like SETI-at-home, Faroo's distributed architecture is indexing the real-time web while ensuring user privacy by avoiding centralized storage of data. The company says it can do things with Chinese-language content that no other real-time search engine can, too. Check it out at Faroo.com.

Typical of what we like to think of as the company's "mysterious charm," the feature has been unveiled six months later with a brief post on the Twitter blog. The new geotagging capabilities can already be seen in certain third-party apps and might even come to the web interface sometime soon.

Apps such as Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro, and many others are already supporting location-based data for tweets.

"The added information provides valuable context when reading your friends tweets and allows you to better focus in on local conversations," writes Twitter platform/API man Ryan Sarver in the blog post.

"Now you can find out what live music is playing right now in your neighborhood or what people visiting Checkpoint Charlie are saying today about the anniversary of the Berlin Wall. These are only the beginning and we are really looking forward to seeing the creative uses emerge from the developer community."

As are we! But we might hold out on enabling the geo-tastic feature just yet. We've still got a few stalkers to shake, and we're waiting for the inevitable bugs to surface before we trust our favorite microblog with our favorite haunts, too.

In the latter parts of the study, the company looked specifically at social network membership data for users of the AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services. Not surprisingly, the study found that Facebook was the most popular network across the board. What's more interesting is how well MySpace fared in some cases. On both the Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services, Facebook only had a small lead. Here, around 20% of all Hotmail and Yahoo webmail users were found to be on Facebook and MySpace. What does this reveal about the Hotmail and Yahoo user base? That they're a little more behind the times? Or that they've been around on the net longer and at one time had created (and possibly now abandoned) their MySpace pages? Unfortunately, the study can't provide us with these sorts of answers.

The study also showed that Twitter is far more popular among Gmail users than anyone else. In fact, on the other services, it's 4-5 times less popular than Facebook. We would like to think that's because Gmail users are just more web-savvy and cool, but it's possible that it's because they're just younger than everyone else.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is the least popular social network, but as Rapleaf points out, many LinkedIn users may have registered with their business email instead.

Participation Levels - Hotmail Users have Most Profiles, Gmail Users Better-Connected

When it comes to how the webmail users participate on social networks, Rapleaf found that the majority of the users have only one social media profile. But the service where the average number of profiles is the highest might surprise you - it's Hotmail. There the average is 2.5 profiles per user. Hotmail is followed by Yahoo, then AOL, and it's Gmail users who have the least number of social media profiles. That finding seems odd considering that Gmail users are younger and more likely to use Twitter in addition to Facebook. In fact, it almost seems like this data doesn't even fit with the rest of the study.

However, the discovery that Gmail users are better-connected than the other users makes more sense. On average, Gmail users have the most friends on social networks with 46.2 friends while Yahoo users have the least with 40.0.

Since again, Gmail users tend to be younger than the rest, it goes to reason that they would be in a demographic where their peers are more likely to have social membership profiles. Older webmail users, meanwhile, are still signing up for these sites. Although baby boomers and other middle-aged folks are joining sites like Facebook in droves these days, social networks are still dominated by the young.

Methodology

For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age, gender and social networking data by collecting information from public social media profiles. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their original blog post. However, the sample size is large enough to form some conclusions about the members of these services, even if it relied on a particular subset of users.

Just for fun we did a search across Craigslist job postings in some cities around the US to see how many listings mentioned Twitter in each location. The top city this month? New York City, with 196 jobs welcoming Twitter use. If you live in Bismarck, North Dakota though - no one on Craigslist is looking for Twitter users on the clock.

1. New York City, NY: 196
2. San Francisco, CA: 159
3. Boston, MA: 115
4. Seattle, WA: 50
5. Chicago, IL: 50
6. Portland, OR: 41
7. LA, CA: 40
8. Austin, TX: 26
9. Dallas, TX: 17
10. Phoenix, AZ: 11

• Houston, TX: 11
• Denver, CO: 6
• Philadelphia, PA: 4
• Boulder, CO: 2
• Zero in Bismarck, ND

None the less, it's a fun list and may say a rough something about social media adoption by businesses in different places. Businesses that are down with the internet are generally down with the Twitter, it's emblematic of adult social media use these days. Most of the jobs listed were for marketers who would broadcast over Twitter, but customer service jobs were well represented too. There's a whole world of business opportunity on Twitter that's based on listening, but that will take a while to catch on.

Of course not all of these are good jobs - would you want to be "a full-time, experienced social media expert" working for $10 an hour? How would you like to be a community manager for a company that's raised $6 million in high-profile venture capital? "This is a part time unpaid job for 3-4 months that could lead to a full time position. Around 20hrs per week, but must come every day to the office." Times are tough, but those positions are a far cry from what some top bloggers and social media consultants are making. There could be some real gems hidden in these listings, though, and it would be interesting to study rates of pay in social media by location.

Are there any secret enclaves we didn't think to look in? Let us know if your town is unlisted but has a substantial number of search results in the jobs section for Twitter this month.

In the mean-time, see you in Boston!

See Also:
Reading Blogs at Work: Why You Should Do It & How You Can Make it Worthwhile

Working bird illustration by Pasquale D'Silva.

Le Meur told us that a native Windows client was something that Seesmic's users had been requesting for quite a while. The Seesmic team worked on this new client for the last few months, though the company managed to keep this development under wraps and today's release comes as a surprise. While there are quite a few good native Twitter clients for OSX, the most popular Twitter clients on Windows are currently AIR apps.

Features

Being a native client, Seesmic can now also make use of some of Windows' built-in features like a system-wide spellchecker or Windows 7's location services. While Twitter hasn't launched it's location API yet, Seesmic will now be able to tab into this data quickly.

The new client will also allow users to drag and drop their friends' avatars into user lists.

Just like the current beta version of its AIR app, Seesmic for Windows will support Twitter's userlists and while the look and feel is similar to the AIR app, the Windows client also features vertical tabs in the sidebar that allow users to quickly switch between different views (all, accounts, userlists and searches).

Plugins for Seesmic

For developers, of course, the new plugin infrastructure also means that they can now offer their services directly in a Twitter client. The current version already showcases plugins from TweetMeme and MrTweet. According to Le Meur, this will also allow other Twitter-like services to build their own plugins and build their own columns in Seesmic without having to establish a formal relationship with the company. In a few weeks, Seesmic will launch a plugin gallery to showcase these extensions.

What About the AIR App?

Seesmic will continue to develop its Adobe AIR client for the time being, though chances are that the company is also looking at developing a native Mac client.

Update: There was a mistake in Sysomos' report. Twitter.com's share actually grew slightly from 45.7% in June to 46.7%. We apologize for the confusion.

Compared to Sysomos' last study of Twitter clients in June, Twitter.com's share fell from 55% to 46%. As Twitter's growth is slowing down, these numbers make a lot of sense. New users tend to use Twitter's web interface at first and then migrate to a third-party client. If Twitter.com's market share among Twitter clients is dropping, then this can be seen as a strong indication that the number of new signups is going down as well.

TweetDeck: The Client of Choice for Active Twitter Users

TweetDeck doesn't just have the largest number of users, it is also the tool of choice for the most active Twitter users. Sysomos analyzed the number of tweets posted by active users based on their primary Twitter application. On average, TweetDeck users send out 1.24 tweets per day, followed by Seesmic users (1.18 tweets/day) and HootSuite (1.11 tweets/day). Users of all the other popular clients like Tweetie, Twhirl and Twitterific update their status less than once a day. Those who prefer Twitter's own web interface only send out 0.67 tweets per day.

How Many Clients Do You Use?

Sysomos also analyzed how many third-party clients Twitter users normally use. Looking at active Twitter users only - those with at least 50 tweets in the last 5 months - the study found that 82% only used a single application. 14% used two applications, 2.35% used three and then the numbers drop off quickly. Only 0.01% of all active users used 6 or more clients. Chances are that a lot of active users use different mobile and desktop clients (Tweetie on the iPhone and Seesmic on the desktop, for example). This would explain why quite a large number of users use two clients.

The Suggested Users List, commonly abbreviated "SUL," has long been a source of controversy for the company. Meant to offer a helpful introduction to Twitter novices about what sort of interesting people, companies, and services can be found on Twitter, the list has angered many who felt it was a way Twitter could show favoritism towards some accounts while ignoring others potentially more worthy of inclusion.

Noted tech legend Dave Winer argued that Twitter was taking an editorial interest in their service, and one that rapidly inflated the follower counts of those blessed with Twitter's "gift." Meanwhile, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis offered the company half a million dollars for three years on the list. (Twitter didn't take him up on the offer.)

The benefits to getting on the list are great indeed. Users added to the SUL, gained on average of 53,000 new followers after being on the list for a week and 170,000 within the first month. Some users even gained as many as 370,000 in the first 30 days.

For a service favored by marketers, businesses, and other self-promoters, placement on the SUL was a surefire ticket to Twitter stardom. New followers meant more traffic to the websites linked in the Twitter updates and more traffic meant more money could be made through on-site advertising. It was almost as if Twitter itself was writing you a check.

Thankfully, in this case, Twitter has listened to their community and is planning on a more egalitarian system. The only question now is how will they know which accounts to suggest? Of course, there is still the old stand-by method of importing your email address book to suggest users you already know who are on the service. But what Twitter plans on offering sounds a little more robust. Perhaps they will introduce an algorithm that takes into account a Twitter user's "authority?"

If that's the case, Twitter may be jumping out of the proverbial frying pan and into the fire. This is because there isn't solid agreement as to how "authority" should be calculated. Late last year, Twitter app Seesmic creator's Loic Le Meur started a heated back-and-forth on the matter when he wrote a blog post which said that Twitter should rank search results by the number of followers you have. More followers meant more authority, he said. Social media guru and blogger Robert Scoble quickly countered saying that the number of people you follow was actually a more important number as is the number of retweets, the number of favorited tweets, the number of inbound links to a tweet and the number of clickthroughs on an item in Twitter search. Soon, the entire tech blogosphere was engaged in the discussion with seemingly every blog weighing in with their opinion.

And this was only a casual discussion among Twitter users based on one person's suggestion. Imagine what an official policy change by Twitter will lead to! Clearly, no matter what the company comes up with, it's bound to be heavily debated and discussed. In any event, it will definitely be worth the wait to find out what that is.

Got that? The President went to China, was asked about Twitter and it was streamed live on his Facebook page. How the world has changed.

He's never used Twitter! Shocking, given that his account with 2.6 million followers has even been "verified" by Twitter headquarters! (Update: As a reader points out in comments below, the Twitter website says that verification is given to accounts representing organizations and public figures, but doesn't verify who's actually Tweeting the Twittle.)

Twitter is Important

Meanwhile, is this not a changed international communication landscape? In these frictionless self-publishing tools, with real-time worldwide message delivery and network effects in listening, distribution and learning - there is something so powerful that it's a matter of international diplomacy.

Whitehouse Press Secretary Robert Gibbs scoffed at Twitter this summer and told CNN the site was blocked on Whitehouse computers, something that subsequent reports apparently disproved but interesting none the less.

It's no laughing matter, though. The impact of Twitter-like services really is like, in type if clearly not intensity, the changes the world saw with the advent of the telephone and the railroad. CNN and live cable coverage of Tiananmen square, Twittering (or not) from China: these fit into the same category of disruptive tools for international communication.

Maybe you should try it sometime, Mr. Obama. And while you're at it, you should ask someone to brief you on the movement for distributed social networking standards. A speaking gig in China would have been a great opportunity to sing the praises of decentralized, standards-based, interoperable, free-market competition in communication technologies. That's the next part of the Twitter story.

If you'd like to join the ReadWriteWeb team in discussing matters of global importance (or not) on Twitter, you can find us here.

A small startup company called InfoChimps released for sale yesterday three very large sets of data extracted from 500 million Twitter messages. Included in the offering are the senders and recipients of 1 billion @ messages, Retweets and Favorites. We wrote in-depth about the release late last night. This morning we interviewed Iain Dodsworth, creator of the most popular Twitter client, TweetDeck, about the value he might find in that data and the direction he's aiming to take TweetDeck in the future.

Dodsworth: Straight off the bat - an archive of tweets could form the basis of a profiler and that's very interesting. Sentiment analysis (which I am ALL over) requires that kind of base corpus.

RWW: InfoChimps isn't releasing full text yet, but they would do a custom slice if you wanted it.

Dodsworth: It's the historical element that a large number of services are missing and where they will fall flat - analysis based on the last few hundreds tweets is almost pointless.

RWW: I'm curious what "a profiler" might mean to you and what this data could help make possible in those terms.

Dodsworth: For me a true profiler would be akin to the holy grail - we would analyse who a person converses with, who RTs them the most, essentially all interactions. Then we would track activity metrics (how many tweets sent, replies) and then we would analyse language patterns (usage of certain words) to ascertain how they express themselves and pinpoint sentiment. Off the top of my head this could lead to elements of intention prediction and I'm steering TweetDeck to have this kind of very very basic Artificial Intelligence at its heart.

I'm currently researching intent predicition inside high frequency trading systems and it's fascinating and could directly relate to TweetDeck and social media systems/services in general.

[Dodsworth's background is in developing for financial services, at places like Prudential Financial and PricewaterhouseCoopers.]

RWW: What would intention prediction look like in this context? On twitter?

Dodsworth: At its most basic if TweetDeck could predict what the user was probably about to require next, based on current activity, then it could start to collate that data in the background - cross twitter/facebook/linkedin data for example. I'm looking at it right now from a cross-service data gathering perspective where our servers do the gathering and hopefully get around the issues of API limits for example.

This is based on future functionality we're mapping out now which is a lot more complex than looking at someone's profile or seeing how many RTs one of your tweets has.

I'm thinking the scope is full social graph rather than just twitter/facebook.

RWW: I guess I'm having a hard time imagining "what the user was probably about to require next, based on current activity, then TweetDeck could start to collate that data in the background - cross twitter/facebook/linkedin data for example" might look like. Like, if I'm looking at a person's profile, I'd probably like to see their LinkedIn data?

Dodsworth: Good example...or see how a certain person you're tweeting with right now stacks up against "similar" people you've spoken to - a box could pop up mid-conversation and give you a tonne of metrics on this person. How full of [crap] are they? Are they a social media guru? Would you be wise to tell this person anything sensitive? Based on previous language patterns, is the person you're tweeting with right now probably lying? A bit out there but possible in theory.

"What we want is to see people use this to build web apps," Infochimps co-founder Flip Kromer told us today. "You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps - and you've got a web app."

This is particular, extracted data though - not the full text of Tweets. "We're trying to be careful," Kromer says, "we are not yet exposing the contents of tweets." And this data isn't cheap if you want the numbers broken out by the hour instead of the month.

This is a very big move because most developers struggle to get access to a large quantity of data from Twitter.

Here's what InfoChimps is putting on sale:

1. Hashtags, links and smiley emoticons used across Twitter on an hour-by-hour basis.


2. @ messages, RT and favorites and who they came from: 1 billion relations, making what the company calls a "conversation metric."


3. A useful if less exciting set of data that will help developers map user ID numbers from search.twitter over to the different ID numbers used in the primary Twitter API. These systems were never merged and it can require a lot of API calls to merge user data.

The company believes it is capturing about 10% of the total data on Twitter right now, but Kromer says that he believes he can ramp that up to 30%.

Data as a Pot of Gold

InfoChimps is a bulk data marketplace with more than 5000 data sets in its catalog so far. The vast majority are free and were added by the company's own staff, but not all. The decades-old polling firm Zogby International, for example, is selling some Iraqi polling data through InfoChimps. Cross-reference that polling data with publicly available data about civilian casualties in Iraq and you can see some interesting patterns, InfoChimps' PR rep Josh Dilworth told us. (Dilworth is known as the most data-savvy PR guy in the Web 2.0 world and also represents Wolfram Alpha and Twine.)

The company hopes that it can sell the data derived from sitting on the Twitter API as a demonstration of the value that this and other data sets have. InfoChimps says it can help companies monetize data that they'd otherwise be paying to serve up through repeated API calls, if at all.

From sentiment analysis (not yet an option with the current InfoChimps data set) to social graph discovery (definitely an option), we've written extensively here before about the impacts that social data could have on business, social and political policies in the future.

John Zogby, founder of polling firm Zogby International, spoke to us at length (in a separate phone interview several months ago) about the value of using online social networks to measure public opinion. "We've been particularly known for innovating and polling new technologies," he said.

"83% of all households are online today and 92% of likely voters, so with online polling we are today about where the country was with telephone penetration when telephone surveys started. Social networking is not as representative as online access [in general] yet, but I'm comfortable with caveats: that you can do a random sampling, so long as you claim that's what your universe is, as long as you don't extrapolate to all Americans, etc. It has tremendous, tremendous value.

"I know that the landline era is coming to an end - not today or tomorrow but we've got to find new and different ways of doing our work. It's the same kind of crossroads as the '70s, when we moved away from the door-to-door and mail-in results to the landlines.

"Online, frankly just like telephone, doesn't have the minority population, but for market surveys you may be looking for a different kind of consumer.

"We know that the landline phone is pushing us away; we know that we can't use the cell phone in the same way; and we know that we've got to reinvent this industry [of measuring public opinion]. What's happening are simultaneous new technologies and at the same time growing penetration of these new technologies. We're riding a bucking bronco."

Use Cases

The conversation metric data that InfoChimps is selling is the most exciting to me. Imagine a third-party app using historical social-conversation data to filter Twitter or other messages based on the strongest social connections that I or other people have. Imagine, for example, social Q&A service Aardvark combining the Twitter Lists API with this InfoChimps data set for a scenario like this: "You have a question about stock options? How would you like us to find a person who knows about that, is regularly conversed-with by people on Robert Scoble's Twitter list of Venture Capitalists and is available right now?" That sounds pretty great to me.

The possible applications are many. "I see Twitter as a data acquisition device for what people talk about and how they relate to each other," InfoChimps' Kromer says.

Right now InfoChimps is selling the hashtag and link dataset for $8,000 and the social metric data set for $9,500. Eventually the company will likely move to a subscription model.

How They Got the Data

How did InfoChimps get the data? The company hits the Twitter Developer API 20,000 times an hour (the standard for developers) but takes big swaths of data each time it does. "I have a priority queue," Kromer told us.

"I can set a search term, and for each search term I can get 1500 tweets per API call. If I get 1500 tweets at a time, then the number of wasted tweets at the end of a series of searches is the smallest. If I'm searching for a term and get less than 1500 results back, then I forecast how long it will take to fill that number of results back up to the maximum and move it down the priority queue accordingly. On the lowest priority I have searches for RT or http. There will always be 1500 results for that. It's only API calls that limit me. As is, it's like a fisherman setting nets: what matters is that dinner is tasty."

Does that sound so hard? Worth thousands of dollars? Here's what Kromer says:

"It's not magic. If you talk to people who use Hadoop and do social networking analysis, this is underwhelming. You take 30 million users, 1 billion links, adorn each link with info at the end of the link and acrue it with the person at the head of the link. That breaks conventional databases; the plumbing is hard. The math is easy but when you do it a billion times, it starts to get interesting. You have to be careful and clever. We plan to do stuff that is structural - a clustering co-efficient true pagerank."

Ultimately it's about specialization and data as a service. "The people we need to come in and connect this info with human beings," Kromer says, "aren't the people who should be wasting their time on the math. And the guys who are good at doing these things should not be building Web apps."

But Can They Get Away With It?

There's some question whether Twitter will allow InfoChimps to sell data based on Twitter data. Kromer says he'd much rather resell the data on a commission than have to do all the work he's done to set up the extraction system. But it was a year ago that InfoChimps caught the eye of people who love data: by releasing a large collection of scraped Twitter data.

The InfoChimps blog post for that read: "Big huge thanks to twitter.com: they have given us permission to share this freely. Please go build tools with this data that make both twitter.com and yourself rich and famous: then more corporations will free their data."

But then Twitter founder Evan Williams asked InfoChimps to take those data sets down until a Terms of Service for them could be figured out. That never happened, and communication between the two companies hasn't progressed very far over the last year.

InfoChimps does not have Twitter's permission to do what it did today, but Kromer says Twitter hasn't contacted them either. No one from Twitter headquarters has responded to our request for comment yet.

"We talked to our lawyer about this a lot," Kromer told us, "we are on absolutely solid ground with regards to copyright, user privacy and use of the API. This is clearly for the benefit of their community."

That's nice that Kromer feels so assured, but his attitude seems a little unrealistic.

We asked technology journalist Robert Scoble what he thought of the dilemma, and his opinion is pretty clear. "If Twitter wants to be a platform, they have to behave like a platform," he said. "Don't be king-makers. Let the marketplace choose the winners. If they are going to say nobody should study the data because we're going to sell that, that's not being a platform. Twitter tries to pick the winners and it pisses me off. They admit that they are king-makers. All that does is make everyone vote against them and hope a competitor comes around."

Perhaps time will tell. But these are very early days in what looks to be an era of widespread innovation built on top of social data analysis.

Using the OneRiot API, Taptu's new homepage presents a mobile-friendly search engine interface complete with search box and verticals for searching just the web, images, and now, "buzz." Previously, the site included verticals for music and video searches too, but those have seemingly been done away with in an effort to simplify the interface.

The new "buzz" section is where you can find the real-time results. Here you'll find content pulled from sites like Twitter, Digg, other social sharing sites and the company's own panel of users who have downloaded the OneRiot toolbar and are sharing their web-browsing data in anonymous aggregate.

While Twitter is clearly a source of breaking news, we've always found it a bit odd that OneRiot includes Digg in its "real-time" search engine. We've never thought of Digg as anything near real-time - in fact, it pales in comparison to Twitter when it comes to the speed with which information spreads. With the immediacy possible on today's web, sites like Digg seem much slower - painfully slow at times - often taking hours on end to feature the news that had already been buzzing on Twitter for half a day.

That said, Digg and other social news sharing sites can sometimes unearth news that had been overlooked by major media outlets, especially when focused on a particular niche like technology. For example, just think of how many stories you read on someone's personal blog or Reddit and never saw anywhere else on the web. By tracking niche websites like these as well as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, social bookmarking sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon, microblogs and URL-shortening services, Oneriot can discover links that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Taptu's new mobile search engine interface currently works on major touch-enabled devices including the iPhone, iPod touch, G1, Nokia N97 and 5800, and the BlackBerry Storm 1. The Taptu iPhone application will also be updated soon to include the additional functionality. You can test the new service yourself starting at 9 AM EST by pointing your mobile browser to www.taptu.com.

Of those who follow a brand on Twitter, nearly 44% reported that access to exclusive deals is the main reason. On Facebook or MySpace, 37% said that access to exclusive deals or offers was their main reason for friending brands.

43.5% reported following a brand to get "exclusive deals or offerings," which again is a statistic that companies should take note of.

An even higher percentage of respondents have "friended" a brand on Facebook - a whopping 40%. Considering that Facebook is a social network that started out as a way for college kids to network, this is a statistic that will make companies and organizations take note. If you want brand recognition on the Web, according to these statistics there's a very good chance that Facebook is a place you want to be.

A smaller percentage follow a brand on Facebook for exclusive deals or offers (36.9%) - but still a majority.

Is this "connected consumer" crowd mainstream? Well, about 62% of the respondents still use Internet Explorer as their browser, with 30% on Firefox. So yes, they are.

It's interesting then to look at what are the homepages of these people.

While Google is unsurprisingly number 1 with 32.6%, Yahoo is close behind at 29.7%. MSN is still well used at 11.9%. We were most surprised that AOL is now only 7.9%. These statistics show that Yahoo remains a force among mainstream consumers, whereas AOL is slipping further behind.

We reported last week that smartphones have almost overtaken 'feature phones' as the cellphones of choice for consumers. Razorfish's survey shows that 56% of connected consumers now use a smartphone - i.e. one that has email and web capabilities.

As with the ChangeWave Research survey recently, Razorfish puts Blackberry (29.5%) ahead of Apple's iPhone (20.1%).

Another illuminating statistic is the number of people who now get their news from Twitter and Facebook. While nearly 80% of respondents still access "traditional news web sites," 33% get news from Facebook and 19.5% from Twitter. Only 27.3% get news from "alternative news web sites" - by which we presume they mean blogs.

Overall, these figures from Razorfish show that Facebook and Twitter are now major places for brands to be; as well as online sites where consumers get at least some of their news.

Wait a minute...the two social media companies with some of the most valuable, interesting data on the web made a deal and what do we get? Spammy Twitter streams clouding up our LinkedIn feeds and an occasional uptight Tweet on Twitter that was born inside LinkedIn? We're still waiting for the meaty announcements everyone says are coming someday soon - that Twitter and LinkedIn are open for business.

But is business just about broadcasting your marketing message? What about the listening part of doing business, thoughtful analysis, responding to actionable information and market conditions? Conversations with your customers and business partners?

Twitter is arguably better for listening than it is for broadcast and conversion of marketing messages. This kind of cross-posting deal falls short of the huge potential latent in the data both of these companies control and instead appeals to the craven broadcast-model of marketing. Challenging that broadcast-model is where many people believe social media derives its meaning.

What could this look like? It could look like an option to view the employer and job title of anyone you see on Twitter or through a 3rd party Twitter interface. It could look like Twitter opening up its fire hose for unfettered 3rd party analysis and development - then you'd see social graph and content analysis done that gave a big boost to the User Experience on LinkedIn. ("This LinkedIn user has been conversing with friends on Twitter who were talking about 'mobile,' 'Wisconsin' and 'gaming' over the last 2 weeks.")

Whatever the case may be, both occupational data (LinkedIn) and social messaging data (Twitter) are rich green fields for mashups and analysis - but these two companies are holding back the tide of innovation by refusing to offer a clear path to their data by outside partners.

LinkedIn partners with next to no one. Only large, established organizations like Business Week, the New York Times and now Twitter get access to LinkedIn data. Other services all around the web will tell you stories about reaching out to LinkedIn for API access and getting the cold shoulder.

We wrote about this concern three weeks ago ("LinkedIn Hits 50 Million Users; Still a Roach Motel") and the company told us then and today that big changes are coming to its API soon. That's great. That's something to look forward to, if cautiously. We're years into the LinkedIn Platform today and there's only a select few partners doing anything there so far.

Likewise, Twitter is fabulously open with its data in some ways (on a per-item basis) - but it's leaving a substantial number of outside developers frustrated because they can't get their hands on the full feed of Twitter data (the fire hose) to analyze. Startup companies that do appear to have relationships with Twitter tell us things like "We won't describe our relationship with Twitter to you and neither will anyone else who has one." That's charming. It's unclear whether anyone but Google and Bing have access to all the Twitter data.

Twitter investor and real-time web guru John Borthwick told us in another conversation today that he believes Twitter is just in its early days as a company, that there's nothing mysterious going on. "I'm hoping there will be a click-thru EULA [End User Licensing Agreement] to the firehose [someday]," he wrote. (Emphasis added.)

That sounds good.

So everybody's working on the wide-open web that so many of us want to see? Standards and APIs and open platforms to facilitate a new era of innovation are right around the corner?

Sounds great. For now though what we get is a little cross-network message broadcasting. Hopefully it's just the beginning.

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Web Trends

The Age of Mega Content Sites - Answers.com and Demand Media

Two companies that produce massive quantities of new content every day, Answers.com and Demand Media, are rapidly moving up the list of top U.S. web properties, as measured by comScore. Answers.com has risen from #26 to #13 in just two months, and Demand Media has risen from #24 to #15 in the same time period. Is the fact that these sites produce so much content, and are quickly gaining in popularity as a result, cause for concern about the future of the Web?

As Facebook Ages, Gen Y Turns to Twitter

Facebook is getting old. No, people aren't getting tired of it, it's actually getting old, as in its population is aging. In May of 2008, the median age for Facebook was 26. Today, it's 33. So where are today's college students hanging out now? Well, to some extent, they're still on Facebook. Surprisingly though, they're also headed to another network you may have heard of: Twitter.

Amazon Turns Twitter into a Marketplace - Are You Concerned?

This week, Amazon sent out emails to their Amazon Associates members touting the latest addition to the company's affiliate program: a new feature called "Share with Twitter." According to the email, participants can generate "tweetable" links to any Amazon product after first logging into their Associates account. After updating Twitter, any person who clicks through on the link and makes a purchase will earn the participant referral fees payable through the Associates program.

Thanks to Mozilla, Web Gets Less Ugly, Good Type Gets Machine Readable

Recently, a consortium of type designers and web designers have gathered around a new font format specification called Web Open Font Format (WOFF). The format would allow more typefaces to appear across the web and to be readable by both humans and search engines. With support from Mozilla announced with the release of Firefox 3.6, the question of web fonts might be satisfactorily resolved in the near future.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

Enterprise 2.0: Declaring War Does Not Work

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week, Andrew McAfee made a few points about the approach to enterprise technology and how it might be changed. McAffee, of the Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, is considered the father of Enterprise 2.0. His views reflect how Enterprise 2.0 is evolving but still with a fair degree of resistance for its adoption.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad: Newbies Take the Stage

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, we witnessed some of the enterprise community's brightest new stars. Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad offered early-stage companies a chance to shine. In a gong-show like presentation series, the four finalists took to the stage to battle it out for the title of best newcomer.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

Discovering Great iPhone Apps: 5 Recommendation Services Compared

The iPhone App Store is a blessing and a curse. It's one of the best things about the mobile platform, but it's so popular that finding great new apps to download can be a real challenge. Where there's a monetizable pain-point, services will flower! Enter a variety of new iPhone app recommendation services that aim to point you toward your next download and pocket the affiliate fees for paid apps.

Below we've posted a chart comparing the features of 5 new services for iPhone app discovery.

The New MSN: Will More White Space and Local News Make You Visit It?

Microsoft announced this week a radical redesign of its MSN homepage. Today's MSN homepage for the US market is a busy mix of ads, hundreds of links and some customizable local news and weather widgets. The redesign, MSN's first major redesign since 2004, puts a new emphasis on search, local news, video and integration with social networks. The new page features more white space, a tabbed design and a new MSN logo.

The Very Strange Story of the Startup That Says It Made $10m Before Launching

Ben Behrouzi came from the shadowy Lead Generation business, but some people in that field said he played too dirty. Now he's got a real-time search engine that just came out of beta today, called Leapfish, and he says the company will already report $10 million in revenue this year despite having barely launched to the public. This is a strange story, so consider suspending your disbelief so you can see what Leapfish has to offer.

PayPal's X: A Platform to Pick Your Pocket

After waiting for two months for PayPal to release its much-anticipated platform, the day finally arrived for PayPal X. ReadWriteWeb first covered the company's announcement in late July and this week, at San Francisco's Concourse Exhibition Center, developers and press people waited with baited breath to see what was earlier described as a "platform as ubiquitous as the electrical outlet."

Ribbit Launches Google Voice Challenger

Ribbit announced this week the launch of Ribbit Mobile. Ribbit Mobile is a cloud-based VoIP telephony service that brings together web-based calling, smart call routing and voicemail transcriptions. It is hard to look at Ribbit Mobile without comparing it to Google Voice. Just like Google Voice, Ribbit gives users a new phone number or they can use call forwarding. Ribbit Mobile also has quite a few features that Google doesn't offer, including the ability to make calls from within the browser.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

In Seesmic's web interface, users can now simply hover their cursor over profile pictures and a menu will appear. This menu, among other things, allows Seesmic's users to add others to lists. One nice aspect of the web interface is that it auto-updates lists when new tweets come in. The desktop app - at least in the current version - doesn't do this and forces users to manually refresh lists to see updates.

Geolocation

In addition to supporting lists, the new version of the web client also supports Twitter's geolocation API. Seesmic users can't share their locations, but whenever a Twitter user broadcasts location data, a little pin will appear underneath the profile picture, and hovering over this pin will bring up a map. Only a few users actually have the ability to broadcast their locations at this point. Twitter is only giving platform developers access to this feature for now, but it should soon become a standard feature in mobile clients like Tweetie 2 and Twitterrific.