The Web Services Report

Google Wave invites roll on, remain scarce

The initial hype for Google Wave invitations was massive and ended up leaving those who were left out of the first 100,000 disappointed. The good news is that Google has started to send out a larger volume of invitations again after having slowly trickled them out since the launch.

Google Wave's Stephanie Hannon tweeted Sunday that Wave had overcome some of its stability issues over the weekend and that they were sending out a lot more invitations. As of Tuesday, "Google Wave" is the top trending topic on Twitter and the results are filled with users (including myself) more

Twitter asks for help translating

In a decidedly Facebook-style move, Twitter is asking for its users' help in translating the service into new languages. To start, Twitter is focusing on translating the site into French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

Twitter is starting with a small set of translators, but if you want to sign up to translate the service to the language of your expertise, you can enter your information here. They're looking for translators for just about every language from Finnish to Thai. As translations of the site are completed, Twitter also plans to offer up the translation files to the developer community more

Foursquare adds London; Kevin Rose reveals investment

It's been an interesting week for Foursquare, the location-based social networking site.

On Sunday, Foursquare might have been referenced on an episode of "The Simpsons" that was filled with Twitter and Facebook references. On Monday, TechCrunch reported that Digg founder Kevin Rose outed himself as an investor in Foursquare while he was at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. And on Tuesday, Foursquare announced that London will be added to the growing list of cities where its service is available.

Through a tweet, Foursquare announced that it will be bringing the service to London more

Spiffbox entices users with cold hard cash

Spiffbox is looking to shake up social networking by rewarding its users with cash for participating. Recognizing that today we are inundated with friend requests, messages, and e-mails, Spiffbox supposed that people could be motivated to respond quickly by offering a financial incentive for doing so.

Spiffbox utilizes Facebook Connect and Twitter and is meant to build on top of pre-existing social networks instead of trying to build their own unique user base. Instead of trying to be another communication platform for you and your friends, it is intended to help you engage with people outside of your social graph. more

Hulu to stream Austin City Limits live on Facebook

This weekend, starting Friday at 10:30 a.m. PDT, Hulu will be live-streaming the Austin City Limits music festival. Hulu will be using its Watch Now application on Facebook, which has a live events box integrated so that users can discuss the concert as they watch.

You can see the schedule of acts on the Facebook application page for the live-stream. Unfortunately, the stream features only a fraction of the acts that are playing the festival. In fact, some of the biggest acts, including Kings of Leon, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Dave Matthews Band, and Pearl Jam are missing from more

Twitter launches 'Lists' in limited testing

Twitter on Wednesday announced a long-awaited feature to a small subset of its user base for testing. "Lists" lets users group Twitter accounts together for easy filtration.

For example, you can create a list of all of your work friends or one for all of your drinking buddies. By default, lists are public (although private ones can be created), so they can be shared with anyone on Twitter. Other users can then subscribe directly to one of your public lists if they are interested.

List sharing opens up a lot of possibilities for list curators to emerge on the service, more

Dropbox for the iPhone: 1,000 documents in your pocket

Dropbox was one of the companies that I was shocked to see didn't have an iPhone app when the App Store launched last summer. The service seems like it would mesh perfectly with the iPhone. After all, one of Dropbox's competitors, Soonr, launched its iPhone sync app in January. Unfortunately, Dropbox was MIA from our favorite mobile device for a long time. However, on Tuesday Dropbox released version 1.0 of its iPhone app. So, how does it stack up? Is it worth the wait?

This iPhone app is a great addition to Dropbox's offering. If you more

Google Docs rolls out student-oriented features

Google Docs' summer interns this summer were tasked with working on improvements and additions to the service geared toward students.

The results of their work, now available to try out, include new features such as an equation editor, superscripts and subscripts, document translation, improvements to surveys, and more outlining options.

While none of these features is groundbreaking on its own, collectively, they help round out Google's productivity suite, fulfilling some specific needs that probably prevented some from using the service.

A lot of people complain about the minimal feature set of Google Docs, as compared to market leader Microsoft more

Google adds anchor links to search results

Web pages have long included anchor links, which, when clicked, send you to a specific section of the page. Wikipedia uses them heavily to help users jump between headings and navigate the sometimes large articles more efficiently. Google has announced that it is now including these anchor links in search results. This is right in line with Google's mission of helping users to find the information that they are looking for as quickly and accurately as possible.

For an example of how this works, try searching for "nuclear fusion." As you can see, more

FeedFliks shows if you are a Netflix hog

FeedFliks' motto is "Get your money's worth from Netflix" and it comes with a variety of tracking tools to help you do just that. Josh Lowensohn covered this start-up a little more than a year ago, but since then FeedFliks has taken advantage of Netflix's API to build out an even more impressive set of features. FeedFliks allows you to see how long you have movies checked out, what your cost per movie is, as well as optimize your queue.

In its early days, FeedFliks used your Netflix RSS feed to pull its information, but the introduction of more