Here are some of the highlights from the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. This week we brought you ‘The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients’, we explained why Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web’s Future, we analysed the latest developments in MySpace music and Flickr, and we peeked into the future of the Chumby – the Wi-Fi video and widget displaying device. There’s also a bit of April Fools fun, web geek style!
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Web Products
How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients
Last November we put up a guide to the most popular Twitter clients. For that post we looked at a random sample of 717 tweets from a handful of heavy Twitter users and identified 19 different ways people interacted with the service. Twitter has one of the fastest growing application ecosystems of any web service outside of Facebook. For this post, we looked at 37,248 tweets and found 142 different ways in which people interact with the Twitter service. Some of the results, which we presented in this post, were rather surprising.
Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web’s Future
Loic Le Meur’s video chat service Seesmic announced this week that it has acquired leading 3rd party Twitter client Twhirl. Seesmic is still in closed Alpha status right now – though we have invites if you’d like them: email [email protected] with the word Seesmic in the subject line and we’ll send you one.
How could the acquisition of an app that runs entirely on the Twitter API, by another service that isn’t even publicly available yet be a big deal? Let us count the ways…
Chumby Gets $12.5M…Here’s Why It’s Taking Off
Chumby Industries, makers of the Wi-Fi video and widget displaying device, the Chumby, have just announced $12.5 million in Series B funding today. The company notes that this new financing is going to be used to “accelerate growth of the company, and expand and broaden the Chumby Network to other screen-based Internet connected devices.” How did this little gadget get so popular? And why would you want one? Read on to find out.
SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY
Web Trends
Flickr’s New Friend Finder: Data Portability or Privacy Violation?
This week Yahoo! owned photo sharing site Flickr launched a new feature – the ability to search your Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail contacts list for people on Flickr so you can add them as contacts. Many services let you do that, but almost all of them require you to give up the user name and password for your email. Flickr did it right and it was exciting, for us at least. GMail users are taken to a GMail page, where GMail asks for their usernames and passwords – then asked if Flickr should be given one time access or ongoing access. That’s great. We’ve been calling on applications to use best practices and emerging protocols to access user data without asking for passwords for some time. The risks are too great, otherwise.
Some Flickr users, though, are really upset. They don’t want anyone who has sent them an email to be able to easily find their photos on Flickr. What some people call Data Portability, others call a privacy violation.
MySpace Becoming a Portal to Artists’ Own Networks
When MySpace first launched, one of its main draws was the music offered by independent artists on the site, something which generated a strong following among new musicians and their friends. These young artists were using the platform as a way to get their name out there, share their tunes, and attract a fan base.
Related:Live and in concert: Why MySpace music has a chance against iTunes (last100) and MySpace Music Store: Where’s the Long Tail? (RWW)
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
April Fools Highlights
Top 10 Places to Get Fooled on April 1st
Observing April Fools Day has become a time-honored tradition for many web companies. Much like changing your logo to celebrate holidays, pulling a fast one on your users on April 1st is something that many web services and applications have really taken to heart. But keeping creative year-after-year is tough, and some companies have learned how to consistently deliver.
Exclusive: Sneak Peak at Google DreamAds!
ReadWriteWeb has discovered the existence of a stealth Google project, called DreamAds. It is a very ambitious project, topping even the wireless balloons which Google is also looking into. Essentially DreamAds is Google’s latest plan to extend AdSense – this time into our dreams. It may sound far-fetched, but an inside source at Google told us that it is very possible thanks to the latest in cheap magnetic resonance scanning and mind-reading techniques developed at Stanford University. Our source also revealed the thinking behind DreamAds: Google is aiming to become the first company to monetize a totally wasted period of time in human life: sleep, which takes up almost 1/3 of our lives.
That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
