Webware

Digg.com founder Kevin Rose is at it again with a Twitter directory called WeFollow. And although it's capturing much of the limelight right now, it's not the only service of its kind. In fact, there are quite a few sites that let you search for other users or see who the top users are on Twitter. While some are quite useful, you probably won't be surprised to find out that not all are created equal.

The standouts

TwitterCounter. TwitterCounter shows you your worldwide rank in terms of how many followers you have. The site includes a full list of the top 1,000 Twitterers, and regardless of whether you have 5 followers or 5,000, you can look up your own Twitter account to see how many people have added you in the past few days, how many you'll likely have in 30 days, and more. It's also a great spot to find folks you might not have known were on Twitter.

TwitterHolic. If you want all the functionality TwitterCounter provides, TwitterHolic probably isn't for you. Sure, you can search for yourself and others to see how many followers they have, and how many they've added over the past few months, but there isn't nearly as much in-depth data on the Twitter community at large. That said, it features the same list of 1,000 Twitter followers, and based on my testing it's just as accurate as TwitterCounter, which means follower counts are usually within 10 to 15 followers of the real figure. It's also a great place to find who the top Twitterers are.

WeFollow makes it easy to find people.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET Networks)

WeFollow. It might be new, but WeFollow has already made an impression on the Twitter Community. The site groups together Twitter users and messages using hash tags--words that can be added to your Twitter messages and begin with an "#". Twitter users can update their stream with a tweet containing up to three hashtags they want to be included in and WeFollow adds their messages into the proper categories. The user list in each category is organized by the number of followers they have. I was generally impressed by the service and found that it's the best of the bunch, even though it's not as full-featured as I would have liked. But for directories, it's top-notch.

The rest

Deep dialing service Fonolo is now open to everyone. Previously in private beta, the tool lets you browse company phone trees and dial straight to that section, skipping having to sit through tedious voice menus or remember specific buttons to press. Better yet, it does it all without you having to actually dial the number on your phone.

Since we last wrote about the service it's increased its list of companies from 50 to over 300. Still missing, however, is the option to record calls, which should let people easily document horrific or wonderful customer service experiences to share with others.

For a holiday angle on this, tools like Fonolo can be helpful if you're trying to save time calling hotels, car rental places, airlines, and retailers about return and exchange policies. In the case of Alaska Airlines I was able to go in and save about a minute and a half by using Fonolo to get to the right department.

The service will apparently remain free throughout its beta period. Possible monetization routes include pre-call advertisements, and a premium service that tacks on more features. There's also an iPhone app in development that will let you browse through and call companies, which is due in early 2009.

Fonolo's system lets you dial to a particular part in a company's phone tree. The service is now open to everyone.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Brownbook, a global business directory that allows users to edit information about companies, launched recently for visitors all over the world.

According to the company, Brownbook aims to combine the power of wikis, peer production, and social networking to change the way business directories are presented online. Instead of providing a directory for users, Brownbook allows users to edit and update business listings, provide reviews with video and photos, and receive rewards by commenting on businesses.

The premise sounds simple enough and some may think it's interesting, but after using it for a while, I'm not quite sold on its usefulness. I perused the site, looked for different companies, read reviews scattered across the service, and found myself asking the same question each time: what value does this site really provide?

It's not that a business directory isn't nice, but there are a slew of them across the Web, like Yellowpages.com and Yahoo's business directory, which present pertinent information in a much nicer package.

Brownbook claims that over 27 million businesses have already been indexed. But when I searched for a major firm like Wal-Mart, the site returned a results page that listed Canadian stores and their phone numbers, but little else. That may be fine for Canadian customers who want to know a particular store's phone number, but the rest of the world is left out. And after viewing incomplete information about each store, I quickly realized that it's much easier to use Wal-Mart's store locator to find important information instead of Brownbook.

Being able to add a business and comment on that business is the real draw of Brownbook. But after searching through the site for quite some time without finding any useful review, I can't help but wonder if people are willing to review a major accounting firm or Ford dealership like they review hotels on TripAdvisor or restaurants on Yelp. I doubt it.

That said, adding a review was made simple by clicking the "Add a review" link and changing or adding information about a particular company is as easy as filling out a form and confirming the changes. That simplicity was welcome and could help the company grow as more people learn about the site.

But at its core, Brownbook is a directory site and so far, I just don't see any reason to use it as such. The idea of having a place to find important information about a particular company or franchise like mailing address, phone number, and location is fine, but with other services across the Web that present that information in a much cleaner way, I don't see a reason to use the site. And considering Brownbook is inherently subject to angry customers and bias, I'm not convinced the site can become a trusted source of important business information.

Getting stuck listening to automated phone menus can be downright dreadful. Some systems require half a dozen or more menus to get you to an actual human being. A service called Fonolo is trying to make this experience a lot easier by listing the entire phone tree on one page and giving you little call buttons to skip right to that part of the menu. The best part is that it actually calls you when it's time to talk to someone and you don't even have to do any dialing!

Fonolo is officially launching to the public in early September, but I got a sneak peek Monday. There are just 50 company numbers in the listing, but there should be several hundred by launch. One of the best uses for this technology is for calling department stores and banks--both of which can have five or more sub-menus that you must suffer though to reach a human. Digging around in Circuit City's listing I was able to find the department I wanted to call in just a few seconds, whereas it probably would have taken me about five minutes if I had called in.

As part of the sign-up process, you give Fonolo various numbers it can call--be it your office, home, or mobile line. Next to each option there's a call button that will let you pick which number you want the call sent to. You can track how long the call is and actually hang up from your browser; Fonolo is simply the routing the call.

Eventually the service plans to let you record these calls (potentially for sending to the Better Business Bureau or other such organizations), although the feature is currently disabled. You can sign up to use Fonolo before its September launch on this page.

Fonolo shows you how to skip some of the annoying automated phone menus you run into when calling many large businesses (click to see entire tree).

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Blogged.com, a site that started off as a ratings-powered blog directory has branched out into new territory this morning. It's now compiling the hottest news headlines by hand. Competing news tracking services like TechMeme, Google News, and BlogRunner use automated systems or a slight mix of automation and editorial choice to categorize news as it happens. Blogged's will be entirely human-driven.

The move is a bit of a gamble to get people in the door. Once a user is looking at a story, they can dig into Blogged's directory and check out its rating, hopefully coming back later to add their own. There's also a new search tool that will let you search both blog listings and individual posts based on topic.

I got to ask founders Kenneth Yeh and Gladys Kong about the people behind these story selections. Apparently the team of feeders is the same group who's behind the blog ratings. Believe it or not, that means they're getting paid to sit around and read blog content in over a dozen different categories. "Our editors have pretty good taste," Yeh said. Not to mention a job (Yeh says they're hiring).

That same taste is what determines which stories get front page placement, even if someone else breaks the news first. The company is hoping quality will rule over velocity, although Yeh expects them to have approximate speed to the competitors.

Still on the horizon are additional ratings for writers, and a way to comb news using those ratings. "We are still working on that piece, as much as ratings," said Yeh.

Blogged's new story page will track hot stories in different disciplines.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Spickr is a strange take on the browser sidebar. These creations usually require you to install a small extension into your browser that will give you a new menu on the left or right side of your browser (see Yoono, gDocs Sidebar, et al). Instead, Spickr's solution is to run everything inside top and side IFrames that contain a slew of links to various news and entertainment sites. Clicking on any of those links will load it up inside your browser while the Spickr interface remains.

Built in are a few tools like a Delicious bookmark viewer that opens up your saved bookmarks in the canvas while allowing you to hop back to open others. There's also an Add This sharing tool integrated in the top corner along with a search tool that replaces the one in your browser. It's the only way the service gets its cash (the same way your browser does), but it's also in there so you can do a search without getting jettisoned off the Spickr interface.

Competing link repositories like Guy Kawasaki's AllTop and Original Signal have had similar efforts for a while now, however, both of those let you see headlines and small scraps of stories. Spickr's approach is simply the links and a simple way to come back to the directory in case you get lost. It ends up being a great way to explore new sites you may have never heard of. My only qualm is the categorization, which is all over the place. The tech section in particular has subcategories that I think could be done a little better. That said, there are in excess of 400 sites, which is quite a bit to sort through. Hopefully, in the future users will be able to help edit and shape the categories and even get rid of sites they don't use.

The screenshot below really doesn't do the service justice. You can give it a go with this page by clicking here.

Spickr lets you surf a large directory of categorized sites quickly and easily without leaving the directory. And there's nothing to install either. (Click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Microsoft may be interested in acquiring Yell Group, the British-based parent company of directories like the U.K.'s Yellow Pages and the United States' Yellow Book, Reuters reported Tuesday. Yell isn't commenting, but shares of the company stock rose up to 5.4 percent amid the speculation.

Yell's properties do not include the U.S.-based Yellow Pages, which is operated by AT&T. Yell came to fruition with the debut of the British Yellow Pages in 1966, and expanded to the U.S. when it acquired Yellow Book USA for $665 million.

One of Apple's biggest blunders in creating its own directory of iPhone Web apps was to make the site suited for desktop users instead of people on the portable handset.

While the company has since made it easy for people to bookmark Web apps onto their home screens by adding a quick link from inside of Safari Mobile, the "official" directory of Web apps continues to be unapproachable for iPhone users unless they're on a speedy Wi-Fi connection. Widget directory Widgetbox has come up with its own solution and launched a directory of iPhone-friendly widgets that can be installed on the home screen as mini widgetized Web apps.

The directory interface is completely iPhone-friendly, and to go alongside it there's a simple how-to guide to turning bits of Web content into widgets that can be added to the directory just by tagging your work with "iPhone." Users without any sort of Web development experience will be able to make their own iPhone widget apps using Widgetbox's widget-building wizard, which I'm assuming will get iPhone-centric size presets.

The one thing I found underwhelming with most of the example iPhone widgets is that they look just like they do in the directory instead of taking up the entire screen. They also come with Widgetbox branding and links back to the directory--two things which are bound to take crucial seconds to load while on an EDGE connection. However, it's still a lot better than having to load the entire Web page, which in the case of BART's QuickPlanner tool (which serves up travel times for local Bay Area trains) means a nearly three-fold load time decrease from loading BART's home page.

You can navigate to iPhone.Widgetbox.com on your iPhone or iPod Touch to go to the directory. You can also check out the developer specs to make iPhone/iPod touch-friendly Widgetbox widgets here.

The new iPhone widgets directory (left) gives you a listing of tiny Web apps to run on your iPhone. When it comes time to 'install' them, you simply add them as a bookmark on your iPhone's home screen.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Professional networking site LinkedIn has launched the beta version of its business directory, called LinkedIn Company Profiles, with data provided by BusinessWeek and Capital IQ supplementing LinkedIn's member information. Over 150,000 companies and organizations are indexed in the directory, working it into a Hoovers-esque database that ties into LinkedIn's social features.

A LinkedIn Company Profiles page includes a number of basic statistics pulled from BusinessWeek's database, such as company size and history. But for the most part, the rest of the business' page consists of information from employees of that company who have LinkedIn profiles, like a list of "new hires" (LinkedIn members who have recently added a current affiliation with that company) and recent promotions, other businesses that have seen people hired from that company, and demographic tidbits like median age and education information.

At first glance, LinkedIn's business directory seems like it will be fairly useful for people who are looking to make connections at a given company, dig up information before interviewing for a job or accepting a position, or just looking for interesting facts. Accuracy, of course, is an issue when it comes to the data gathered from LinkedIn profiles--the networking site has 20 million members, but the workforce of one company (or even an individual branch of a larger company) may be represented far more heavily than another.

Google's company page on the LinkedIn Company Profiles directory.

(Credit: LinkedIn)