SAN DIEGO--The list of Twitter clients grows every day, and for many people, finding just the right one is a crucial decision. Being able to track and manage multiple accounts is essential, but doing so can create somewhat of a chaotic flow of information.
At DemoFall 09 here Tuesday, DotSyntax unveiled the latest version of its already-popular Digsby social-media management tool, and the new version is geared specifically towards helping solve the Twitter chaos problem.
The new Digsby extrapolates from what it already does with social media offerings from MSN, Facebook, Yahoo, and others. Among those tools are a one-click status setting, easy switching between IM conversations, and seamless tracking of multiple e-mail accounts.
Now, Twitter implementation has become a key component of Digsby. It's the "first Twitter client designed for the mainstream audience," DotSyntax boasts.
The first innovation, the company argues, is a flipping around of the Twitter client standard, in which the stream of tweets is displayed newest first. Instead, Digsby shows the oldest first, so that it is easier to read threads from the beginning.
The client then tracks which tweets you've read so that you don't have to read an entire thread in one sitting. Instead, the tool can bring you back automatically to where you were if you don't finish reading a thread.
Another new approach is defining who are the most important Twitter users someone follows, and separating out everyone else they follow into one column. That means only the most important Twitter users will be in a primary column, making it more simple to see the most important information in your feeds.
There are other new features, as well, but one that I think is the most elegant and useful is adding a reply button to new tweet notifications. As a long-time Twhirl user, I both love and hate the constant pop-ups that let me know I've got new tweets in my feed. But if I see something I want to respond to in one of those pop-ups, I have to switch out of whatever I'm doing, bring up Twhirl and take action. By comparison, Digsby will allow replying to those tweets right from the pop-up.
I'd like to get my hands on the new application and see how it really performs. But it seems like one of the most promising Twitter clients I've seen in awhile, and if a critical mass of others agree, it could become the next standard-bearer client.
SAN DIEGO--It's great to see modern technology applied to experiences we've all had for years. One thing that many people share is the difficulty of getting the most out of traveling, and helping others benefit from what we've learned on our own travels.
After seeing the presentation Tuesday morning at DemoFall 09 from TravelTrac, I'm hopeful that this dynamic may be changing.
TravelTrac enables users to share their travel experiences in real time, with easy uploading of photos, videos, and more.
(Credit: TravelTrac)The main idea behind TravelTrac is to "share adventures as they happen." This works by enabling people to use their iPhones to share their experiences as they have them. Users can post videos, photographs, their location, and journal entries, whether they're online. If someone is online while doing the posts, the content goes live right away. When not online, those posts go live the next time a user connects.
TravelTrac is built around the concept of creating traveling communities, and the company has broken down its users' experiences into three main areas: MotoTrac, for those who travel by motorcycle; TrekTrac, for those who travel on land by car, train, RV, or other vehicle; and SailTrac, for those who prefer maritime travel.
Regardless of which method someone travels by, what's nice about this is that it allows users to share the best parts--or the worst, if that's what's important in the moment--of their journeys, and for everyone else to benefit from that knowledge. And because the service allows the sharing of a wide range of media, it means that there will be a new form of collective memory of traveling, no matter where people go.
And that is exactly what modern social media and devices like the iPhone are supposed to be about. It's nice to see someone applying these things to something so many people do.
Could the odd confluence of a US Airways jet crash-landing in the Hudson River and Barack Obama's presidential inauguration finally push Twitter over the top and into the broad mainstream consciousness?
That could be the case, according to statistics released Tuesday by Hitwise, an Internet analysis firm.
Hitwise reported that as of Tuesday, Twitter, the popular microblogging service, had for the first time surpassed the market share of visits of the hit content aggregation site, Digg.
According to Hitwise.com, the market share of the microblogging site Twitter has now caught up to that of the aggregator Digg.
(Credit: Hitwise.com)According to Hitwise, Twitter now stands at number 84 in its Computers and Internet category, one space up the chart from Digg.
A glance at a chart tracking the share of both services reveals that Twitter has been slowly, but steadily, gaining on Digg over the last few months, finally matching--and even passing--Digg last week. Hitwise said that as of the end of last week, Twitter was netting 0.021 percent of traffic in its Computers and Internets category, just a touch up from Digg's own 0.021 percent.
Perhaps a driver that allowed Twitter to overtake Digg was the tremendous interest last week in Twitter users' reports of the US Airways crash in the Hudson. One photograph of the plane, posted to TwitPic.com, a service that allows mobile Twitter users to append photos to their tweets, was viewed so many times that it took TwitPic's servers down for a while.
Hitwise noted that the general rise of social media has fueled Twitter's recent success, with many users of the site coming from services like Facebook, or MySpace, whereas Digg's traffic comes in large part--38.8 percent last week--from Google.
But in another report issued recently, Digg still far outweighs Twitter when it comes to total users, according to Compete, a site analytics service. Compete reported that Digg had 34.4 million users as of December, while Twitter lagged far behind at 4.4 million.
At the InterPlay social-gaming conference in San Francisco Thursday, representatives from Zynga, Social Gaming Network, Meebo, Kongregate, and InsideFacebook talked about the future of the medium.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)SAN FRANCISCO--Huge social media services like Facebook and MySpace should allow application developers access to intelligence about their users' behavior.
That was the message from Mark Pincus, CEO of social-gaming network Zynga Thursday as he and others spoke on a panel called "The future of online social gaming" at the InterPlay conference here.
The confab is the first devoted entirely to social gaming, and it has attracted a packed house for a series of discussions on things like advertising and marketing on social games, how to fund such games and how to build these games on social media platforms.
But in the morning's first panel, Pincus and others, including Martin Green, the vice president of business development for Meebo; Shervin Pishevar, the CEO of Social Gaming Network; moderator Justin Smith, who writes the InsideFacebook blog; and Jim Greer the CEO of Kongregate, talked about how social gaming has emerged as a growing and important platform.
One of the most interesting parts of the discussion came when the panelists began talking about how they could share information about the behavior of their users.
Pishevar suggested that it would be a boon to the social gaming industry if networks like his and Zynga could share information with each other about how their users play the games they create and make available on platforms like Facebook and MySpace.
"Data coming in about gaming interactions between friends is very valuable," Pishevar said. It helps social gaming developers build a "whole intelligence about the games people like to play, who they like to play against, and their skill levels. (It would be great) having a universal feed that connects all the networks."
But Pincus said that while he agreed that such a thing would be a big help, he thinks that doing so would violate the terms of service of Facebook and MySpace.
So he exhorted the big social networks to change the way they do things.
"Right now, it violates the terms of service on every one of these networks," Pincus said, adding that both Facebook and MySpace don't "allow for sharing user data. That's something we as developer community should make a case for them to change, that it's in the users' interest, in their interest, and in our interest."
Whether Facebook, MySpace, or any other social network would see the value Pincus suggested is an entirely different question.
On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.
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