Webware

Professional networking site LinkedIn's platform, previously a closed offering for select partners, has opened up to developers at large, according to an announcement Monday on the company blog.

Well, sort of. Building an embeddable widget on LinkedIn, unlike Facebook's, still requires a stringent application process. But LinkedIn's own code has now been opened up so that developers can integrate it into their own sites. It's launched a developer site for those interested in features that let site users access their LinkedIn profile and contacts externally. They still have to request a key to get into the platform's application program interface (API), which means that LinkedIn widgets likely will not be coming to office prank-calling Web sites any time soon, despite that they could make it much easier to robo-call your boss and ask if his refrigerator is running.

One of the first participants, for example, is desktop Twitter client TweetDeck, which says that it will soon allow users to plug in their LinkedIn contacts' status updates alongside Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace contacts.

LinkedIn has about 50 million users as of last count.

The new 0.30 version of TweetDeck, due out Wednesday, supports MySpace. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's my demographic. But who the heck cares about MySpace?

The MySpace addition to TweetDeck, though, shows how much CEO Iain Dodsworth wants TweetDeck to become, in his words, "a browser for the real-time Web."

I like TweetDeck a lot. I use it and Seesmic Desktop in equal proportions. But I'm not sure I want my Twitter client to get all fancy and over-ambitious. Twitter is hard enough to manage even with a good, clean client. If TweetDeck adds support for other real-time feeds--Dodsworth mentions Last.fm, Songkick, and Doppler, for example--then I worry about the clarity of TweetDeck's Twitter experience getting murky.

Although there are some integrations that can work. I welcome TweetDeck 0.30's improved Facebook support. It now supports photo streams and makes it easy to update Facebook directly from Twitter, among other features. While Twitter and Facebook have different feature sets that make mixing the two networks in one application a little weird, in TweetDeck they run in separate columns and stay nice and separate. (Seesmic Desktop can merge streams from Twitter and Facebook in a single column, quite successfully.)

TweetDeck 0.30 has MySpace support (not shown, because who cares?).

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Other improvements in the new version of TweetDeck include even tighter Bitly integration, down to the app's automatic and instant conversion of long links to short ones as you type them (cool) and the capability to drag photos directly into TweetDeck to post them to Facebook (also cool). You can also click on a hashtag in a tweet to kick off a new search column for that tag.

TweetDeck also gets a new list of recommended Twitter accounts for users to follow, and the way you add users is particularly elegant: you can add a whole collection of Twitterers in a topic, like "Journalists," and TweetDeck creates a new column in the interface to follow just those accounts. Unfortunately the process for getting accounts on to the TweetDeck recommended lists is opaque or "editorial" at the moment, although Dodsworth does say he'll move to a crowd-sourced model shortly.

The new version's user interface appears to be cleaned up. However, it's really that some options are now hidden in second-level menus.

And still missing is an option to get a notification sound only on @replies or direct messages. Sometimes I run Seesmic Desktop just for that one feature.

In sum, version 0.30 is a decent upgrade to TweetDeck, although the app is approaching feature overload with its continuing addition of new services.

Previously: New versions of Tweetdeck, Seesmic square off

Some of us have multiple Twitter accounts that we need to manage. We have an account for work and an account for personal use. In that case, switching between usernames can be a pain. Luckily, there's an easy way to manage multiple Twitter accounts with some basic apps.

We've taken a look at a couple of services that will help you manage those accounts on your computer, but what about when you're away from home?

We have you covered there too. Let's take a look at iPhone apps that help you manage multiple Twitter accounts.

Manage multiple accounts

LaTwit Although LaTwit lets you post updates to multiple accounts, including those from Twitter, Identi.ca, and others, its interface is difficult to get used to. In fact, it detracts from the experience of using the app. If you're looking for other features, LaTwit also lets you post multiple tweets if your update exceeds the 140-character limit. But for $2.99, it might not be worth the price tag.

LaTwit has a convoluted design.

(Credit: LaTwit)

SimplyTweet SimplyTweet comes in two flavors: a Lite version for those who want a free app and a paid version with all the SimplyTweet features, which includes multiple user accounts. Don't let SimplyTweet's name fool you--it's not so simple. The app lets you draft notes, update your stream with iPhone photos, and more. It has a slew of features. The paid version is available for $3.99.

Besides multiple accounts, SimplyTweet also lets you view conversations.

(Credit: SimplyTweet)

TweetDeck TweetDeck is my favorite mobile Twitter client. Like its desktop alternative, the app provides a column view, making it easy to see all kinds of Twitter data pass you by. Plus, it makes it extremely easy to manage multiple accounts, creating a scenario where updating all your accounts will only take just a few seconds. TweetDeck also shortens URLs before you post to your stream. Overall, it's a great app. And since it's free, you'll probably like it even more.

TweetDeck has multiple columns to help you view your tweets.

(Credit: TweetDeck)

Since Adobe Systems relaunched its AIR marketplace, I've been spending some considerable time there. There are so many great apps, it's hard to pick just a handful worth talking about. But after taking some time to sift through all my apps, I've selected my favorites.

Adobe AIR aps

Adobe Media Player If you're a Photoshop, Premiere, or Dreamweaver user, the Adobe Media Player will come in handy. The app lets you watch a slew of videos that train you how to use Adobe's applications.

Although there are videos for advanced users, there are quite a few videos that help Photoshop novices find their way around the sophisticated program. You can also save your favorite videos and go step-by-step during instruction. It's a great app for anyone who wants to be creative.

Adobe Media Player teaches you how to use Adobe programs.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

AOL Top 100 Videos If you're a music lover, you'll love the AOL Top 100 Videos app. Instead of forcing you to go to YouTube to find videos or search through Google, AOL Top 100 Videos lets you watch them all right from the app. Besides having an outstanding design, the app lets you share clips with friends, create a "favorite videos" playlist, and pick the genre of music you like. The videos load quickly, and the quality is stellar.

AOL Top 100 Videos is perfect for music lovers.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Desktop iPhone Desktop iPhone is one of the coolest apps in this roundup. You can experience the iPhone user interface, check the weather, and record voice messages. But the Desktop iPhone app's best feature is the ability to make phone calls from the app with an account from online phone company Ribbit. More features, including Google Maps, Calculator, and other options haven't been enabled.

Desktop iPhone lets you use the iPhone UI.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Update: The "Multiple-account support" section has been rewritten to correct my original misunderstanding of how it works.

The new version of Tweetdeck is out, a bit ahead of schedule. (You can also download Tweetdeck from Download.com.) As discussed previously, this version adds cloud synchronization and other features. But I found the implementation rough in spots. Here's a quick hands-on overview of the main new features:

Posting to multiple accounts at once is really easy.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Synchronization: The big feature: searches and groups are saved to your online Tweetdeck account, and setting up the account is easy. Now when you launch Tweetdeck on another computer these searches and groups will be there waiting for you. The interface for managing these is very bare-bones, however. There's no easy-to-view window of your saves searches, for example. You can see the queries you've saved in a drop-down list when you open the search box, but it'd be better if there were more management tools for people who create a lot of queries.

All searches and groups are automatically saved to the Tweetdeck server if you have an account, and of course they have to be synchronized before you can use them on another comptuer. You can't control when your items sync (it seems to be every few minutes), and if you delete an item permanently before it syncs, you'll lose it. You will get a warning first, though, advising you to wait a few minutes before you delete.

Multiple-account support: The good news is that it's really easy to tweet to one or multiple accounts from the input box. You just click on the accounts you want to send from. Easy.

New Replay All feature sends a reply tweet to everyone mentioned in the original.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

But a key element of the the interface, selecting which account you want to use when you create a new column to view, is initially confusing -- even though it will likely do the right thing for most users. If you want to add a new Friends, Mentions, or Directs column to your Tweetdeck window and you have multiple Twitter accounts in Tweetdeck, it will ask you which account your want the column to be for when you try to add it. If there's only one account option that makes sense for your choice -- if you have two Twitter accounts in Tweetdeck and you already have one Friends column showing and try to add a second, for example -- Tweetdeck will just automatically select the account that isn't displayed. This is probably what you want, but in my case, on a Tweetdeck installation with a lot of columns configured, not all of which were showing on the monitor, I got confused because the app seemed to be making a choice for me that wasn't what I thought I wanted. Turns out, it was.

In the original version of this review I criticized Tweetdeck for having an opaque method of selecting accounts to display, but Tweetdeck is actually much smarter than I first gave it credit for -- if still less than obvious.

Reply options: : There are some cool new activities you can take on each tweet you see. A "reply all" option creates a message that includes the @ addresses of everyone mentioned in a message. You can also block users, report spammers, follow and unfollow, and add users to groups directly from their tweets. These features will make power Twitterers happy.

Video support: If you get a Qik or a 12Seconds video, you can play it in the Tweetdeck interface. Nice. Still no support for Seesmic videos, though. Wonder why.

There's a new version of the Tweetdeck Twitter client, 0.26, launching tonight, following the earlier release today of a preview of Seesmic Desktop 0.3. Both updated Twitter clients look like significant improvements from their previous versions. Tweetdeck is also getting an iPhone app.

Tweetdeck 0.26

The big new features on the Tweetdeck side are synchronization and multiple account support. The sync feature means that users who have Tweetdeck on multiple computers won't have to re-create their groups and search queries on each computer. They'll log in, instead, to a new Tweetdeck account, and their Tweetdeck client will automatically download the saved data from whatever installation of Tweetdeck they last ran.

Tweetdeck is also getting multiple account support. The lack of that has become a greater issue for Tweetdeck as more marketers and Twitter power users experiment with different online personas. The client continues to support Facebook, 12Seconds, and a few other networks. It also gets support for viewing Qik videos in the client itself, and for replying to them.

Tweetdeck won't store Twitter passwords in on its servers, but other than that, the sync feature will also replicate users' account settings across installations.

The sync feature will also connect to the new iPhone app. You'll be able to swipe to change columns, and the client will ready your saved searches and groups from your desktop Tweetdeck installations. The iPhone app has been in limbo in the Apple approval process for about 10 days, Tweetdeck creator Iain Dodsworth tells me, but he hopes to see it released to the app store soon. Kevin Rose got a preview.

Also coming in Tweetdeck: a new column for Tweetdeck newbies that highlights Twitter accounts recommended by Tweetdeck staff. Like Twitter's own recommended accounts list, it could help new users get started in the network, and make a big difference for the Twitterers who get a place in the column. Dodsworth is aware that there are issues around fairness and transparency on the Twitter default list, and he says he's open to experimenting with it. "If people flood us with [financial] offers to include them, then that may be the next test," he told me.

My take, based on a conversation with Dodsworth but no actual hands-on experience with either of the new Tweetdeck apps: The sync feature is key to locking users into the client, since it increases the value of each installation of the app for busy, multi-machine users, and by that I mean anyone with a computer and an iPhone. Dodsworth likes lock-in, as any smart CEO would. His vision for Tweetdeck is that, "It's a platform. It's a browser for the real-time Web."

I'm a multi-computer Tweetdeck user and am looking forward to trying this new version. It should be available tonight, 9 p.m. Pacific Time.

Seesmic Desktop 0.3

Tweetdeck challenger Seesmic Desktop is now in its 0.3 version. A younger app, this client is showing more differences between versions than Tweetdeck, and it's getting markedly better in each. Seesmic has also supported multiple Twitter accounts for longer than Tweetdeck, and the new client makes short work of posting a tweet to one Twitter account or to several, or to Facebook as well. There's also a nice tweet entry box that automatically shrinks unless you're typing in it. That's a nice space-saver that makes up, in a small way, for the way the client still hogs the left-most pane of the app with a list of accounts, groups, and saved searches. While that part of the interface is clear and useful, when I'm on a small laptop I do wish I could get it back for content.

Facebook users will find more features for them as well, including support for adding comments to friends' updates and a quick way to "like" posts.

Seesmic Desktop lets you participate more fully in Facebook.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Seesmic now also includes support for personal Bit.ly accounts. Almost all Twitter clients, including Tweetdeck, let you post short URLs using Bit.ly, but Seesmic Desktop is the only I know that will access your personal account on the service, from which you can see stats on all the short URLs you've created.

Version 0.3 also fixes bugs, like the previous version's tendency to want to reply to a Twitter post with a Facebook message, and is generally slicker and more enjoyable to use.

The Seesmic Desktop 0.3 version I tried is a "release candidate" and can be downloaded directly here. Existing users' installations of Seesmic Desktop will not auto-update to this version until later in the week, Seemsic CEO Loic LeMeur told me.

Which one?

Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop are both freaking great Twitter clients. Seesmic appears to have a bit more horsepower for dealing with multiple accounts and Facebook, but I still find Tweetdeck's single-account Twitter experience slightly more enjoyable. If Tweetdeck delivers on the synced multi-computer support tonight, and the iPhone support ends up being is as good as I'm hearing, it will make it very difficult for the mainstream Twitter user to move off of it.

Both developers continue to update their apps, though. So this battle is far from over.

How many competing streams of information do you need to keep track of?

I monitor three e-mail accounts, Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook to keep current with life and work. Those are my streams of continuous personal input, separate from the items that we all handle on an interrupt basis: phone calls, Skype, IMs, and people dropping by.

I don't think I'm unique in feeling overwhelmed. There's a ton of information we're all getting in real time today, and we need modern ways to process it.

Some of the services responsible for generating floods of personal information are also innovating in giving users ways to deal with it. Facebook, for example, redesigned its default view to present a stream of information that users could throttle by the judicious use of new filters. A lot of people didn't like it, but Facebook was on to something: the future of dealing with personal incoming information streams is real-time filtering.

OutlookDeck gives you TweetDeck-like features for your e-mail stream.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

This is the new way to handle otherwise overwhelming incoming streams: Set up smart filters, park a window showing them somewhere on your desktop, and watch them out of the corner of your eye. It's the continuous partial-attention concept that has been talked about for a while, and with the right software tools and sufficient monitor real estate, it is not nearly as distracting as you might think.

If you're a pilot or a particularly attentive driver, you'll see this as similar to situation awareness, the pervasive perception of all the parts of your environment and your orientation to them.

One of the reasons I like TweetDeck (and several of its competitors) so much is that it makes social-network awareness easy. You can set up a console that shows you different columns for search results on multiple different queries, all at once. As your moods or needs change, you can turn on and off your queries.

For example, I run a "Webware 100" query when we're running the awards program; when I'm in the middle of covering a conference or tracking a hot news story, I set up queries for those items. I turn them off when the events wind down.

There's an old product category that desperately needs dashboard filters: e-mail. Sure, you can search in almost any e-mail product, and you can even save your searches so you can pop into them for quick peeks. Some e-mail clients, like Outlook, can also pop up alerts on screen when you get certain messages.

Neither of these solutions is quite right. What the heavy e-mail user needs is a way to quietly monitor incoming mail with desktop filters. And that's what the early-stage software experiment OutlookDeck does. Used correctly, it's a valuable productivity booster.

OutlookDeck looks like TweetDeck. It shows you multiple filtered columns of incoming items pulled from your Outlook e-mail app. It cannot replace the e-mail client itself, but it's a good tool to monitor your in-box for things important for you. For example, if you want to see all the messages about a project you're working on, or all mentions of a competitor, you can set up filters for those. (You can also use it to display your unfiltered in-box, but it's redundant for that purpose.)

The product was created by David Ing, who's been working on tools to improve e-mail since before this experiment. He previously wrote Taglocity, a system for reducing e-mail clutter in work groups by applying tags and filters to multiparty conversations.

OutlookDeck is very useful, even though its filters are coarse--you can't create complex queries, for example. And you can't save queries for later. It also does a poor job displaying text from e-mails that have HTML coding in them. But this small app does show how the constant social dialogue that people are getting accustomed to with Twitter, and Facebook, and FriendFeed is making its way into the hoary old communications medium of e-mail.

I like it. We are being barraged by streams of information, but with the right tools, it is possible to find a balance between getting too much information that takes too much of your attention, and not getting enough, which puts you out of touch in your own social airspace.

The popular multicolumn Twitter client TweetDeck got some serious competition last night, when Twhirl publisher Seesmic launched Seesmic Desktop, a direct competitor. But this morning TweetDeck shot back with a new version that addresses some of the issues the Seesmic said it was winning on.

The biggest change is better memory management. It's an under-the-hood fix, but it addresses a major complaint about the app--that it can eat away at system resources and drag down a whole computer. The TweetDeck blog says, "The memory leak has been plugged and now the latest version of TweetDeck will peak at a certain level and won't go any higher. So you can leave your TweetDeck running all day, all night, or forever if you really want to."

Last night, after I wrote a comparison of multicolumn Twitter clients, Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur harangued me to attack TweetDeck on the memory management issue. He was right that it's an important topic.

TweetDeck is also getting Facebook support (it was available previously, but required the user download a special beta version). It's limited to displaying (and contributing to) the status feed, but it works well.

What's new, TweetDeck?

(Credit: TweetDeck)

The program is getting tighter integration with URL shortening services (you can optionally preview a link before pulling it up in a browser), with Twitpic (images are displayed in the app), and with the video recording site 12Seconds (you can record videos directly from TweetDeck). By contrast, Seesmic Desktop doesn't yet have support for the competing video service Seesmic, although the older Twhirl app does.

There are other small but welcome improvements.

TweetDeck is still missing a major feature: It does not support multiple Twitter accounts. If you want to keep up with the replies to, or contribute to more than one Twitter account, you'll need a different app; I recommend Seesmic Desktop, Twhirl, and, for Mac users, Nambu.

WorldGaming, a site that allows console video game players to challenge each other to earn cash, announced Wednesday that it has officially launched to the public. Along with that announcement, the site has launched a 30-day online "launch party" that will give users the opportunity to join daily tournaments, earn cash, and receive sign-up bonuses.

WorldGaming allows users to challenge each other on genres like first-person shooters and sports games. The players add funds to their personal accounts and mutually decide how much cash to play for. After the game is over, WorldGaming verifies who won and awards the victor with the agreed-upon money taken from the loser's account. WorldGaming says the service is legal because it's a "game of skill."

Enterprise Content Management company Open Text, announced Wednesday that it has acquired digital media firm Vizible. According to the company, the addition of Vizible will help Open Text expand its digital media services and offer companies video, audio, graphics, and photography.

Open Text also plans to use Vizible's technology to help its clients syndicate their media content to consumers, businesses, and other customers over an open-standards platform. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Open Text will add the Vizible team to the company's Digital Media Group.

FreeWheel, a company that helps mobile app developers deliver advertisements, announced Wednesday that it has signed a deal with video site Joost to become the company's exclusive provider of video ads in the Joost iPhone app. The ads are now being displayed in the free Joost app.