Author: Frederic Lardinois

BlockChalk is an anonymous message board for your neighborhood. The company’s founders want to enable neighbors to interact with each other while protecting everybody’s privacy. At it’s core, BlockChalk feels a bit like an anonymous, location-based Twitter clone.

BlockChalk just released its native iPhone app (iTunes link) today and also offers an app for the Palm Pre and Pixi. Android users can access the service through a mobile website.

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Anonymity Makes for an Easy Setup

Given that BlockChalk is completely anonymous, you don’t have to sign up for the service or jump through any hoops before you can get started. Simply start up the app, allow the service to access your location data and you can see what others around you are saying. BlockChalk works worldwide and has active users in over 90 countries.

Features

BlockChalk keeps its feature set light and to the point. Besides posting your own messages, you can browse replies to your own posts and respond to messages publicly and in private. On the iPhone, BlockChalk also supports push notifications.

By default, BlockChalk doesn’t reveal a user’s exact location. You can, however, force the service to do so by typing [here] in a post.

One of the company’s co-founders, Stephen Hood, used to run the product team at del.icio.us and some of the same design aesthetics shows in BlockChalk. The design is simple, to the point and doesn’t get in the way of the product’s features.

Anonymity: Good, Bad or Just the Best Way to Get People to Share?

While using BlockChalk is a lot of fun, there is also something strange about the anonymity of the service. On the one hand, it will surely encourage those users who would otherwise be afraid to reveal their location to use the service. On the other hand, however, this could easily encourage vandalism. BlockChalk offers a profanity filter and the ability to “bury” posts, but only time – or an attack by 4chan – will tell if this will be enough to discourage disruption.

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Hearst is showing the Skiff e-reader at CES this week, but the company also just announced a deal with Format Dynamics that focuses on a very different aspect of the online content business: printing hard copies of websites. Printing from most websites tends to result in wasting lots of paper on printing empty pages. Often, the layout of the site also doesn’t look quite right on the printed page. Format Dynamics works with publishers to create printed pages that are professionally formatted – and in the process, the company also adds advertising to those pages.

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Hearst is rolling out Format Dynamics CleanPrint technology on GoodHousekeeping.com now, and plans a larger roll-out later this year on its other sites like Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Redbook, Popular Mechanics and Seventeen. Some of the larger websites that already use Format Dynamic’s technology include the Denver Post, Politico, CNN Money, Slate and the Wall Street Journal.

Format Dynamics takes a publisher’s HTML code and reformats it into a multi-column layout. The service then adds advertising to these printouts based on criteria set by both the advertiser and the publisher. Advertisers are charged per printed ad.

Catering to Big Publishers for Now – Self-Serve Services Coming in the Future

For the time being, Format Dynamics is only working with larger publishers, but the company’s CEO Ethan Holien told us that a self-serve product for small publishers is also on the company’s roadmap.

Question: Do People Still Print?

We couldn’t help but wonder how many people actually still print anything from a website. According to Holien, this number is higher than most people expect. He couldn’t disclose the exact data – though the company does offer detailed statistics to its customers. The only statistic we were able to get was that for a typical news site, about 0.5% of all visitors print out news reports. According to Holien, for other types of content, this number can often be much higher and given the content on GoodHousekeeping.com, Hearst will likely see printout rates higher than 0.5%.
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TweetDeck‘s iPhone app just got a much-needed update. Version 1.3 brings a slew of new features that finally puts TweetDeck back on par with its competitors on the iPhone. The app now supports Twitter lists and Twitter’s new geotagging API. The app also offers optional support for Twitter’s new retweet style, and the TweetDeck team has made a number of smaller tweaks and fixes that make the app faster and more stable.

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Lists

TweetDeck for iPhone keeps the app’s well-known column-style layout and still syncs any changes directly with the desktop app. It’s great to see that TweetDeck now supports lists. However, unlike other apps – like Tweetie 2 – TweetDeck for iPhone doesn’t allow you to create new lists or even add new users to an existing lists.

Location

In today’s announcement, the TweetDeck team puts a lot of emphasis on the new geolocation features in the app. You can now choose to geotag all of your tweets automatically or just add your location info to select tweets only.

The app can now also display a map with an overview of all geotagged tweets in any given column (including columns that display persistent searches). Just click ‘more’ in the bottom right corner and the option to see all the tweets on a map will appear. Given that very few people currently tag their tweets with location data, however, chances are that your map will look rather empty. Over time, though, as more apps start to support this feature, these maps will hopefully fill up with more tweets as well. For now, this is an interesting feature, though it is probably only useful for a small group of users.

Using Geotagged Tweets for Weather Reports

Once you have upgraded to TweetDeck 1.3, also have a look at our story about how the National Weather Service in the U.S. is using geotagged weather reports from Twitter users during severe weather events. You just have to add the hashtag #wxreport to your geotagged tweet if you want to help out.

Discuss

Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Exchanging information with your banks used to be a hassle. Keeping track of credit card purchases was often a question of waiting for statements to arrive by mail and then entering data by hand. Today, free tools like Mint, moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track all of this information. Thanks to this, you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before.

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Editor’s note: This story is part of ReadWriteWeb’s Personal Finance series, a weekly, three-month-long look at how the Internet has transformed personal finance. Up until April 15, which is the deadline for U.S. readers to file their taxes, we’ll be looking at how personal finance has evolved, analyzing top web tools and posting video of our conversations with the people who are shaping the online world of personal finance.

If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati.

Mint: Leading the Charge

Currently, the two most well-known online tools for personal finance management are arguably Mint and Intuit’s Quicken Online.

Mint stood out from the pack early on because the company made it extremely easy to keep track of all your expenses. After giving Mint access to your bank and credit card account, the service simply downloads your financial information at regular intervals and organizes it. Mint can even track your 401(k) for you.

Mint launched in September 2007 and quickly became the darling of the Web 2.0 world. Unlike most of its desktop-bound competitors, Mint managed to talk to virtually every bank and credit card issuer from day one. In October 2008, Mint came out of beta. Today, the company has more than 1.7 million registered users and sees roughly 700,000 active users every month. In October 2009, the company was signing up 30,000 new users per week.

Mint’s success didn’t go unnoticed by the incumbent market leaders and Intuit acquired Mint in October 2009. In November 2009, Intuit announced that it would begin to phase out Quicken Online in favor of Mint. Microsoft suspended sales of Microsoft Money on June 30, 2009 and doesn’t plan to compete in the market anymore. Correction: In December, Microsoft actually announced a plan to enter the personal finance market again with a Mint-like tool it is developing in collaboration with Citi.

Beyond Mint

While Mint gets most of the mindshare on the web these days, it’s by no means the only player in this market. Indeed, the success of Mint has given rise to a plethora of similar tools and legitimizes the efforts of companies that tried to enter this market before Mint.

ClearCheckbook.com, for example, launched in May 2006. The company focuses on bringing checkbook management online.

A number of other tools are competing more directly with Mint. Wesabe, for example, also focuses on giving users an overview of how they spend their money. Sadly, Wesabe makes downloading your information from your checking and credit card accounts a bit more difficult than Mint.

Since acquiring Exepnsr, Strands now also offers its own personal finance tool for setting up and tracking personal budgets and staying on top of your finances. Geezeo – which was founded in 2006, and also looks a lot like Mint, has a very strong focus on budgeting.

Most of these tools focus on the U.S. market, but more and more of them are also now available outside of the United States. Kublax, for example, offers a Mint-like service in the U.K.

Going Mobile

Just like almost every other category of online tools, personal finance tools are also making the move to mobile. Mint and Wesabe, for example, offer both an iPhone app and mobile-optimized websites. Most importantly, all of these services are also able to send out alerts to your phone – either through push alerts on the iPhone or as text messages. Whenever you run the risk of exceeding your credit card limit, for example, these services will send you an alert.

Of course, a number of banks have also gotten into this game and now offer their own mobile apps. The Bank of America, Chase Mobile and Wells Fargo apps are currently among the top 10 most downloaded free finance iPhone apps, for example.

When it comes to paying your bills, apps like BillMinder and BillTracker make it easy to never forget when a bill is due.

What’s Next?

Over the last few years, the web has clearly transformed the way we use personal finance software. Over the next few months, we will have a closer look at the current generation of personal budgeting and finance tools on the web. We will also analyze the current trends around online finance software.

This is the first post in our upcoming series about personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati.

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Until now, all the news on the hyperlocal news site EveryBlock was compiled by the site’s editors and algorithms. Today, EveryBlock launched a nifty new feature that allows its users to post stories to the site and notify their neighbors about interesting events in their neighborhoods. The new feature allows users to post anything from news alerts to questions and classified ads on the site. These alerts will also now appear in EveryBlock’s newly enhanced iPhone app (iTunes link).

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These announcements will be clearly labeled as thus and messages will also be published to nearby neighborhoods, ZIP and block pages so that other users in the immediate vicinity can also see them.

Currently, EveryBlock is only available in a select number of cities in the U.S., though the service plans to expand its reach in the near future. MSNBC acquired EveryBlock in August 2009.

Creating a 21st Century Community Message Board

As EveryBlock’s founder Adrian Holovaty noted in today’s announcement, the new feature is “intentionally open-ended.” EveryBlock wants to give its users the ability to send out announcements for “every imaginable purpose” and describes this new feature as a “21st century community message board.” To enhance this interaction between users, every place page on EveryBlock now also features a discussion board.

Overall, this is an important move for EveryBlock. The site is now more interactive than ever before. Thanks to these new user contributions, the information on the site will also now become even more timely and relevant, too.

Discuss

Once upon a time, microblogging was all about simplicity. Today, even services like Posterous that started out as very simple and easy-to-use tools have begun to add more and more features. Microblogging, however, can’t get much simpler than TXT.io. The service offers nothing more than a simple text interface. No more, no less. You log in with a Google account, type your message and hit “post.”

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For users who want to do a bit more with their text (link, underline, italicize, HTML headers, etc.), TXT.io offers support for the Textile markup language.

Features? What Features?

Besides this, though, TXT.io offers almost no other features. The service, for example, doesn’t allow you to add images to a post and developers won’t find an API to add to their tools. What TXT.io does offer, however, are RSS feeds and a mobile version of the site.

TXT.io is an experiment in minimalism and won’t appeal to everybody. Indeed, “elitist microblogging” is the service’s tagline. Sometimes, though, simple tools like this are exactly what it takes to bring us back to the basics. Minimalist text editors like Ommwriter or WriteRoom, for example, are popular because they only focus on one thing and do it extremely well.

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Copia, a new e-book platform, plans to take on the big players in the market by launching its own e-book store and a set of touchscreen e-readers. Copia also wants to combine numerous social networking features with its e-book platform and plans to sell its services to original equipment manufacturers (OEM). Copia’s e-book store will offer over 250,000 books from over 1,500 publishers, as well as 1,400 newspapers and over 750,000 free books from Google Books.

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Copia’s private, limited-invitation beta will launch this month. The company plans to expand this beta in March.

Copia bills itself as a hybrid solution, as the company plans to offer both consumer-facing e-book solutions as well as an open platform for OEMs.

Focus on Social Networking Features

On the consumer side, Copia wants to differentiate itself from its competition by giving its users a number of social networking tools. Community profiles on Copia, for example, are linked to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In addition, the service will offer collaboration tools that are mostly geared towards students. Users can highlight and annotate books, for example, and share these annotations with other users. Copia will also implement a rating system for book reviews.

OEM’s will be able to offer all of these features to their users as well. OEMs will also be able to integrate Copia’s e-book store into their own devices.

Copia’s E-Readers: Ocean and Tidal

Copia plans to offer six different e-readers with prices ranging from $199 to $299. The Tidal will offer a six-inch ePaper display and the Ocean will come in a basic six-inch version and two advanced versions with a nine-inch screens. Both of these models will come in three different variations. The most basic models will not offer any wireless connectivity besides Wi-Fi and won’t offer a touchscreen. The intermediate models offer touchscreens, and the high-end versions will offer touchscreens and 3G connectivity. All models come with tilt sensors and 4GB of internal memory.

These devices will go on sale on Copia’s site in April.

Can This Work?

We still have a lot of questions about Copia. We don’t know at what price the company plans to sell books and what DRM-solution Copia plans to implement. At the same time, though, the company’s plan to sell both e-books and compatible e-readers looks a lot like Amazon’s strategy and there can be no doubt that Amazon has been quite successful with this model. Copia, however, doesn’t have any name recognition yet and the e-book market is currently dominated by big companies like Amazon, B&N and Sony. If Copia is successful in getting enough OEM partners, though, it could establish itself as another major player in the market. The company’s e-reader lineup also looks like a potential winner.

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MailBrowser wants to make Gmail and Google Apps more useful by offering a consolidated view of all your contacts and attachments in a browser sidebar. In this sidebar, you can quickly search for contacts, see the latest emails you received from a specific contact, add calendar events and attach notes and tags to a contact. In many respects, MailBrowser looks a lot like Xobni for Gmail.

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Features

MailBrowser is currently only compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox on the Mac (OSX 10.5 and higher) and Windows, though the team is working on Safari and Chrome versions as well.

The plugin offers a rich set of features, including support for multiple Gmail and Google Apps accounts and rich previews of attachments. Another nice feature is the “trend” section that appears at the bottom of the sidebar. Here, two graphs show a timeline view of how many emails you sent and received from any given contact.

MailBrowser stores all your data locally on your hard disk, so no information is ever shared with the service. Because all the data is stored locally, MailBrowser also keeps a copy of all your attachments on your machine. The application also syncs all the data back to Google Contacts in the cloud, so any changes you make on one computer will automatically appear on another machine.

Xobni for Gmail

In many respects, MailBrowser is very similar to Xobni – a popular Outlook addon. Xobni, however, puts a stronger emphasis on giving you additional information about a contact by looking at the contact’s social networking profiles. MailBrowser plans to add this functionality in a future version. Currently, the service can only display details about a contact’s domain and website.

More Features Coming Soon

MailBrowser has big plans for the future. The company plans to offer support for more services (Yahoo Mail, Live Mail, etc.), integration with enterprise apps like Salesforce and integration with social media services like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Verdict

For now, MailBrowser works just as advertised. It doesn’t yet offer the rich feature set of Xobni, but the company is clearly working on that.

If you have a very large mailbox, it can take a while for MailBrowser to download and index your information. Luckily, the download process starts with your most recent email, so that you can be up and running long before your last email has been downloaded.

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In December, I visited Parrot‘s development labs in Paris to check out the company’s newest project. While Parrot is mostly known for its Bluetooth headsets and speaker systems, the company’s newest project combines augmented reality with a remote-controlled helicopter. This helicopter – the AR.Drone – features four rotors that keep it stable and a front-mounted camera that is linked to an iPhone or iPod touch. The rig is controlled via an iPhone or iPod touch and the device’s screen can show an augmented view of what the helicopter’s camera sees.

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AR Meets the Real World

What’s most exciting about this product is how it combines a real helicopter with this augmented reality view. Instead of just looking at an augmented view of the world through the phone’s camera, you get to see the world through the drone’s camera. The iPhone takes the view of the camera (via Wi-Fi) and replaces markers with anything from walls to dinosaurs.

During our discussion with Parrot in December, we couldn’t get any information about the price of the AR.Drone out of the company’s representatives. Given how sophisticated the hardware is, however, chances are that it won’t be very cheap. The drone, for example, features two cameras. Besides the camera that feeds the video to the iPhone, the drone also features a second camera that is mounted underneath the structure and augments the drone’s autopilot.

Hands-On With the AR.Drone

We got a chance to play with a prototype of the AR.Drone in Parrot’s labs, and it took a while to get used to the controls (the app uses a combination of the phone’s tilt sensors and on-screen controls to manipulate the drone). The video on the iPhone was surprisingly clear and didn’t show any noticeable lag. Sadly, we didn’t get a chance to try out the AR features of the app, though.

Parrot will launch the AR.Drone later this year. The company plans to demo the helicopter at CES this week but the exact date of the public launch remains unclear.

A Drone for Developers

In its current iteration, the hardware and software is clearly laid out for gaming, but Parrot also released an SDK that will allow developers to use the hardware for other purposes as well. It will definitely be interesting to see what games and other tools the developer community will come up with once the AR.Drone is launched. Parrot told us that it hopes that developers will look at the hardware as a platform, and the company hopes to create an active developer ecosystem around the AR.Drone.

More Videos

Click here for more videos of the AR.Drone in action.

Disclosure: Frederic met with Parrot during a trip that was partly sponsored by Parrot.

Google is holding a press event to showcase the new Nexus One and possibly some other mobile innovations today. We already know quite a few details about the phone itself, but hopefully Google will also have a few surprises up its sleeve. The press conference should get under way at 10 a.m. PST and we will live blog the event here.

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We will post updates as they happen. Keep reloading this page to see the latest news.

10:00 a.m. As usual, the event is running a bit late.

10:06 a.m. Getting started. VP of Product Development takes the stage to talk about the Open Handset Alliance.

“We will unveil the next generation of the evolution of Android today.”

Thirteen new members will join the OHC – including: NEC, China Telecom and Freescale.

Recapping the history of Android hardware (G1, myTouch, Droid)

10:10 a.m. “A year ago we had 1 device, now we have 20 devices on 59 carriers.”

Google wants to prevent fragmentation – talking about compatibility test suite.

“Android today is about getting more users onto the mobile web.” Android users search the web over 30-times more on Android than on feature phones.

From the beginning, Android was always about being developer friendly.

Talking about being able to multi-task (a subtle swipe at the iPhone?)

The Next Step in the Android Evolution

10:15 a.m. “We are only in the early stages of the evolution of Android.”

Volume and variety of Android devices has exceeded Google’s expectations. “But we want to do more.”

Wants to work closer with hardware partners to showcase the software.

Announcing the Nexus One

“Where Web Meets Phone”

10:18 a.m. Google calls this a new category of phones: “super-phones”

On stage now: Peter Chou, CEO of HTC.

Talking up the Nexus One: “The Nexus One is one of the best designs from HTC.” Outstanding display, fast processor.

“It pushes the limits of what is possible on a mobile phone today.”

Chou leaves the stage after posing with the phone…

10:22 a.m. In depth look at Nexus One

Erik Tseng takes the stage to demo the phone.

Hardware: 3.7 inch AMOLED display – WVGA. “Deep contrast and brilliant colours.”

1 GHz processor – fast processor = less slowdowns.

Trackball works as notifications tool. Will pulse when you get new messages.

130 grams – 11.5 mm thick

Sensors: light sensor, proximity sensor.

5 megapixel camera

New for Android: active noise cancellation – using two microphones.

10:29 a.m. Google will offer custom engraving (just like the iPhone…)

“With this hardware, we think we have half of the story. It’s the combination of hardware and software that makes this such a great phone.”

No surprise: Nexus One will come with Android 2.1

10:31 a.m. New features in 2.1: Customization

More homescreen panels – more widgets

Example: weather widget: knows where you are from GPS

Google expects to see more widgets from 3rd-party developers

Showing live wallpapers.

10:35 a.m.3D capabilities of the Nexus One and Android 2.1

App launcher: new twist – 3D scroll-wheel – icons sit on a 3D wheel instead of a flat page

New photo gallery – written with CoolIris

Everything scrolls smoothly – quite impressive. Looks just like CoolIris on the desktop.

Features background sync with Picasa Web Albums

10:39 a.m. Voice Commands

In 2.0: Voice queries (“directions to nearest Ikea”)

In 2.1: Every text field is now voice-enabled.

Voice recognition learns every time you speak a query.

10:42 a.m. Sneak peek at Google Earth for Android

Also voice-enabled.

Clearly making good use of the fast processor. Everything scrolls very smoothly.

Buying the Phone: Google Hosted Web Store

10:45 a.m. How to buy the phone?

Google will sell the phone in its own web store.

Keeping it simple: buy phone without service ($529) – or with service from partners (T-Mobile $179).

For now, T-Mobile only. But: “Expect to add more carriers and hardware in the future.”

Verizon Wireless and Vodofone will join the program.

Web Store

10:49 a.m. Demoing the Store

Purchasing all done in the store – no need to go to the physical store.

10:54 a.m. Recap

First phone of a series of phone – more operators, devices and countries coming in the future.

Showing demo video right now.

Q&A

11:00 a.m. Question: Why only such a small amount of space for app storage?

Answer: Soon, you will be able to store apps on SD cards

Question: Will it ship today?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Is this an iPhone killer?

Answer: Choice is a good thing.

Question: Whose inventory will the phone come from? What will you do to make the App Store more well-known?

Answer: Unlocked phone comes from Google. Regarding the Android Market: Marketing for Nexus One and new Web Store will be essentially online. Focused on making the store better.

Question: Why was it necessary for Google to design the phone? Why not just have an HTC phone that runs Android?

Answer: Google didn’t design the phone – HTC did. Google is just the retailer and worked mostly on the software.

Question: What would convinces somebody to buy a $530 phone?

Answer: That’s choice at work. “This is the early stages of a longer journey.”

Question: Google isn’t known for being a retailer.

Answer: “We shouldn’t focus on retailing.” Google wants to offer a complete solution and give consumers choice. Retail part is very important but just another channel – not a channel that will replace other channels.

Question: What’s the revenue opportunity for Google?

Answer: These super-phones are great for accessing the Internet and that’s where our business is. Hardware sales are not the big deal – just wants to get more people on the mobile web. “If you want the best possible Google experience you come to the store and get the device.”

Question: Will it support tethering?

Answer: In future versions. Not a strategic issue but just something Google needs to implement.

Question: Is the physical keyboard dead? Will Google start to sell more products online?

Answer (from HTC): We offer lots of different phones and people can choose what best fits for them. This design is focused on the form-factor and screen. HTC offers other devices for “keyboard-lovers”. From Google: The new voice input works very well and Google will soon offer other devices as well.

Question: Will other counties support multi-touch on the Nexus One?

Answer: It’s a software thing. “We’ll consider it.”

Question: When will Google Voice launch publicly? What about the other phones that are coming soon? Will something awesomer come next month?

Answer: Other manufacturers will add more devices. “If you need a great phone today – the Nexus is a great phone.” (Nothing about Google Voice in the answer.)

Question: Google wants to do revolutionary stuff? What’s revolutionary about this phone? Why does Google get behind this phone if it’s pretty average? Why not revolutionize the pricing structure with an ad-supported phone?

Answer: This is a baby step. Let’s get the store going and then we can see what comes up in the future.

Question: Will people be able to check out the phone in retail store?

Answer: We want this to remain pure and simple. Marketing this online-only and selling online-only.

Question: What’s the difference between a super-phone and a regular smartphone?

Answer: The big differentiator is the openness of the app store. This is as powerful as your laptop was a year ago.

Question: Question for Motorola: Will the Nexus One cannibalize sales of the Droid?

Answer: We try to deliver the best products we can. Will upgrade software on the Droid.

Question: Why does Google feel the need to change the way phones are bought? What’s broken about the current system?

Answer: We are trying to optimize efficiencies. Just like web store revolutionized the way you buy a camera, Google wants to do the same thing for phones. After there are enough phones out there, you can experience it through using somebody else’s. Marketing just increases prices.

Sidenote about partners: We would love to sell for Verizon and Vodafone right now – just have to integrate the IT.

Question: What can users expect in terms of software upgrades? Users never really know what phone will get the upgrade.

Answer: HTC wants to upgrade all of its phones (nothing specific). Google argues that some phones simply don’t have the hardware capabilities for the upgrade. The intention is to make sure everybody gets some kind of future-proof hardware that can get upgrades for a certain amount of time. From Motorola: Intention to upgrade the device to the best software that the hardware can run. Not every device supports the 3D capabilities of Android 2.1, for example. Backward compatibility slows down innovation.

Question: Will Verizon get unlocked phones?

Answer: Unlocked phones are a problem with CDMA phones. Will only be sold with Verizon plan.

Question: Will you port Google Voice to the iPhone or will you suppress this to give Android an advantage?

Answer: Google Voice team isn’t opposed to having its app run on other platforms.

Question: Didn’t Google say it won’t do a phone?

Answer: We don’t do hardware.

11:43 a.m.: And that wraps up today’s live blog. Thanks for reading!

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Flixster just announced that it has acquired Rotten Tomatoes, the popular movie review site, from IGN Entertainment. IGN is a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Flixster is one of the world’s most popular movie communities and currently features about 2.3 billion ratings and reviews from its users. Rumors about this acquisition surfaced in late December, when Kara Swisher first reported that a potential acquisition of Flixster by MySpace would hinge upon a merger of Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster, though Swisher’s sources later argued that the deal would look exactly like the agreement the two companies announced today.

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The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

A Natural Fit

Combining Flixster’s user-generated reviews and Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates reviews from top movie critics, seems like a natural fit.  Flixster also has a strong presence on social networks through its Facebook and MySpace apps.

Even before this acquisition, Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes already partnered in some key areas. Critic reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, for example, already appeared on Flixster’s site and in the service’s mobile apps.

According to today’s press release, IGN plans to refocus its efforts on building out its game-related and men’s-lifestyle offerings. Rotten Tomatoes clearly didn’t quite fit into this new focus.

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Smartphone users are becoming increasingly comfortable with using their phones to shop online. According to new data from Compete, about 37% of smartphone users have purchased something with their handset in the last six months. Among the most popular items that these users bought were music, books, DVDs, video games and movie tickets. At the same time, though, Compete also found that smartphone users are very likely to abandon shopping sites that haven’t been optimized for mobile usage. Almost 8% of smartphone owners who tried to buy something from their phone were simply unable to do so.

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Most Popular Shopping-Related Activities: Price Comparison and Finding Reviews

Researching products is still the most popular shopping-related activity on the smartphones. According to Compete’s survey, 41% of iPhone users and 43% of Android owners check sale prices while they are shopping. Surely, the popularity of mobile apps like ShopSavvy and RedLaser – which make checking prices as easy as scanning a barcode – will only drive these numbers up in the coming months.

The second most popular shopping-related activity for smartphone owners is finding consumer reviews. 39% of iPhone users and 31% of Android users use their devices for this.

Big-Ticket Items

Only 9% of iPhone users and 11% of Android users said that they would buy big-ticket items over $500 from their phone. In general, the majority of smartphone owners are most likely to buy lower-priced items under $10.

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Seesmic has acquired Ping.fm, a status update service that allows users to update posts on over 50 social networks through SMS, mobile apps, IM services and 3rd party apps that support the service. Seesmic plans to integrate Ping.fm into all of its applications in the near future. In addition, Seesmic’s users will be able to send updates to their favorite social networks through Ping.fm’s email, SMS and IM gateways. Ping.fm’s founders Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough will join Seesmic as full-time employees and continue to work on Ping.fm.

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Neither Seesmic nor Ping.fm disclosed the terms of the acquisition. It’s worth noting, however, that both Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman invested in Ping.fm in December 2008. Update: Joi Ito just confirmed that this acquisition now makes him an investor in Seesmic.

Seesmic’s founder Loic Le Meur notes that he hopes that this acquisition will allow the company to speed up “its vision of becoming your default application to stay in touch with your friends and constantly managing your online social presence.” Through Ping.fm, Seesmic’s users will soon be able to easily update their status on a wide variety of social networks like Ning, Yahoo Meme, Yammer and Status.net. Seesmic already offered built-in support for Facebook, Linkedin and MySpace.

According to Le Meur, Ping.fm currently has over 500,000 registered users, though the number of active users is likely far smaller. In total, Ping.fm posts about 200,000 updates per day. Seesmic’s own Twhirl has offered support for Ping.fm since early 2009.

Seesmic Wants to be a Lot More Than Just a Twitter Client

Given Seesmic’s vision, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the company is interested in broadening its scope beyond Twitter. The acquisition of Ping.fm gives Seesmic all the necessary infrastructure like SMS and IM gateways to execute this vision. Ping.fm offers it’s own URL shortener and gives users access to detailed statistics about how these links were used.

One of the most interesting aspects of the company’s recently announced native Windows client, for example, is that it includes support for a plugin architecture. This will allow developers to integrate support for virtually any social network into Seesmic. In the near future, Seesmic plans to expand this feature to all of its clients.

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During the 2008 presidential campaign, politicians and reporters quickly discovered the power of Twitter. These days, Twitter has become yet another tool for politicians to get the word out about political initiatives and for reporters to reach out to their readers. In October, social media analytics firm Sysomos took a closer look at the political Twittersphere and how politicians like President Obama and California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger use this tool and who they connect with on Twitter.

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Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Specifically, Sysomos’ Alex Cheng, Mark Evans and Nick Koudas were interested in examining who the most followed politicians on Twitter are and “how those within the political Twittersphere behave in terms of their follower/followed patterns.” In order to do so, they created a list of 168 accounts of influential politicians, reporters and bloggers from the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. that comprise the core of the political Twittersphere.

Obviously, we can’t really know if the fact that somebody follows somebody else actually means that they are reading all the updates and the political Twittersphere is arguably a bit larger than the sample that Sysomos looked at here. For this study, Sysomos only looked at accounts that had over 5,000 followers and the team acknowledges that it had to make some editorial choices to keep the study manageable. The fact that the map of all the connections between the 168 accounts weighs in at 16 MB shows the complexity of this study, so some editorial control was obviously necessary.

Here are some of the highlights from the report:

The President

With over 2.33 million followers, President Barack Obama is the most followed politician on Twitter, though he is only being followed by 56 members of the 168-member political Twittersphere. Among Obama’s followers are Al Gore, Portland’s Mayor Sam Adams, London’s Mayor Boris Johnson and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Newt Gingrich also follows Obama’s updates, as does blogger Marc Parent (@mparent77772)

There is probably a reason why relatively few political influencers follow Obama. After all, if you want updates from the president, his Twitter account is probably one of the worst ways of following him and most of the updates on Obama’s account aren’t very interesting. Other politicians like Schwarzenegger and John Boehner also update their accounts far more regularly.

Politicians and Political Reporters

Among politicians and reporters, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos follows 105 members of the 168-member political Twittersphere Sysomos analyzed, followed by the Newshour (104), followed by John Boehner (98), the Huffington Post (98), and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (92).

Within the political Twittersphere, Schwarzenegger is also the most followed politician and Stephanopoulos is the most followed media personality.

Daryl Cagle, the cartoonist for MSNBC.com, is the #1 media personality that other reporters follow on Twitter.

News Organizations

Besides looking at individual reporters, Sysomos also examined the larger news organizations in the US. CNN’s Breaking News account (@cnnbrk) has over 2.75 million followers, followed by NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) with 1.51 million and Good Morning America (@gma) with 1.37 million. CNN doesn’t really follow anybody back, though, while the NPR Politics account follows close to 117,000 Twitter users and Newsweek (@newsweek) follows 97,000.

The members of the political Twittersphere as identified by Sysomos that are most likely to be followed are the PBS Newshour account, the Huffington Post and the LA Times.

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In what has become a Christmas tradition, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales posted a personal appeal for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation earlier this month. On the first day alone, the nonprofit raised $430,000 from 13,000 people. Today, Wales announced that Wikimedia reached its fundraising goals. In total, the foundation managed to raise $7.5 million. Last year, when Wales posted a similar appeal, the Wikimedia Foundation received $6.2 million from 125,000 donors.

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Still No Ads

Wikipedia and other Wikimedia properties like Wikiquote or Wikibooks could easily find enough advertisers to finance these sites. In order to remain as independent and impartial as possible, however, the Wikimedia Foundation prefers to rely on donations from users.

It is worth noting, though, that the Wikipedia does have deals with some other companies like France Telecom’s Orange. These businesses license the site’s content and share advertising revenue with the Wikimedia Foundation.

The Wikimedia Foundation has fewer than 35 employees and needs roughly $10 million per year to operate. About 340 million users access Wikipedia per month. According to Wales, this represents “almost a third of the Internet-connected world.”

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Chances are that you are getting at least a few emails and IMs with links to YouTube videos every day. While watching these alone can be fun, Synchtube turns this into a far more social experience. Synchtube allows you to share and discuss a video in real time with up to four of your friends. The first person to enter the room controls the playback and also has the ability to change videos.

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Features

To get started, just head over to Synchtube.com and copy and paste a link to a YouTube video into the box in the lower right corner. Then send out the link to the room to your friends and start the video once they have arrived.

In our tests, the service worked just as advertised. The chat room itself is basic, but it fulfills its purpose without getting in the way. The video sync sometimes lagged behind a bit by up to 4 seconds. This is definitely within an acceptable range, however.

Just like these commenters on Reddit, we would love to see a few additional features in the app, including the ability to create playlists, search for videos within the app or give control over the room to another user. The developers have promised to continue to work on this app and plan to add more advanced features in the near future.

Verdict

For now, if you are looking for an easy way to watch YouTube videos with your friends without having to install a desktop app like DeskTube, Synchtube is one of the easiest apps to use. The app has some limitations, but for the vast majority of users, the current version should work just fine and most of the current issues will surely be fixed in the near future.

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According to a new report from Cambridge University (PDF), students aren’t interested in being able to read eBooks and eJournals on their mobile phones. Instead, users are far more interested in opening hours, location maps, contact info, and access to the library catalog. Most respondents were also far more interested in getting alerts by text message than being able to use library resources over the mobile web.

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Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

According to the researchers, libraries that serve colleges should invest in text alerting services, and text reference services instead of mobile web services. With text alerting services, users could receive alerts when books are due, for example, while text reference services would give students access to the library reference desk over SMS. The report also advises libraries to allow mobile phone use in their buildings, “as long as they are set to silent or to flight mode.”

It is important to note that the researchers only surveyed users at Cambridge University and the Open University, so these results are somewhat skewed and only apply to the U.K., where text messaging is even more prevalent than in the United States.

The report, however, also found that users of more advanced phones like the iPhone are far more inclined to read e-books on their phones than users of feature phones (no surprise there, given the difference in screen estate and quality). In the end, though, the report argues that it is currently “not worth libraries putting development resource into delivering content such as e-books and e-journals to mobile devices at present.”

Too Conservative?

While these recommendations seem reasonable based on the survey data, we agree with Lorcan Dempsey, a library blogger and Vice President of OCLC, who argues that with the advent of better eReaders and the iPhone, these survey results will probably look very different in just a few years from now.

As Sarah Bartlett from the Panlibus blog points out, the recommendations in this report are anchored in the past (getting SMS alerts about due books, for example), while now would be a good time to “re-imagine the library and its services.”

While some libraries are often conservative when it comes to adopting new technologies, we would think that starting to adopt some of these technologies like e-books and better mobile services now would help these institutions to remain relevant in a future where those large buildings in the middle of campus are already turning more into places for study groups to meet up and grab a cup of coffee than centers of academic research.

CC-licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user umjanedoan.

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Thanks to the recent proliferation of do-it-yourself iPhone app services, the next big thing in Apple’s App Store might just be vanity apps. Take, for example, Appsfire’s Ouriel Ohayon, who just announced the launch of his own iPhone app. Ohayon used Odiogo Apps to create this personalized app. Odiogo, which mostly focuses on providing text-to-speech services for news sites and blogs, allows users to add RSS feeds, Twitter updates and photos from Flickr to its apps.

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Odiogo’s apps also feature the company’s text-to-speech services, offline access and advertising support. For now, though, potential users still have to contact the company’s sales department to get their own apps and the price of these customized apps isn’t clear.

More Clutter or a Great Opportunity?

As the barrier of entry for creating customized iPhone apps continues to fall, chances are that we will see more and more vanity apps in the App Store. On the one hand, this could clutter the store with relatively useless apps. On the other hand, it could also provide a new source of income for independent bloggers who could use the apps to sell more advertising inventory or even charge a small fee for the app itself. Even bloggers with a small fanbase could reap the benefits of having their own iPhone apps.

The question, however, is if users are actually interested in installing a single-purpose iPhone app that only gives them access to the content of one blogger. In the end, these apps are less flexible than a good mobile RSS reader.

Apps like this probably make more sense for large multi-author blogs that publish a lot of content every day. On the other hand, the idea of being able to point their friends to their iPhone apps will surely prove to be irresistible for many people.

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Britain’s Conservative Party plans to offer a £1 million taxpayer-funded prize for a website that can “harness the wisdom” of voters. The price will be given to the team that develops a platform that enables large groups of people to come together online to solve common problems and develop new policies. According to the Guardian, some of the ideas for this site include services that help to identify wasteful government spending or rate the quality of schools and hospitals. It is worth noting, though, that the Conservatives will only give this prize away if they win the 2010 elections.

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Clearly, this move is meant to generate some excitement for the Tories in the upcoming elections, especially given that they haven’t been in power since Tony Blair took office in 1997.

A Great Idea or a Waste of Taxpayer Money?

Looking beyond the politics of this proposal, this idea clearly has something going for it. Jeremy Hunt, the U.K.’s shadow culture secretary, told the Guardian that, “there are currently no technological platforms that enable in-depth online collaboration on the scale required by government.”

One could argue, however, as the Liberal Democrat’s spokeswoman Jenny Willott does, that there are already lots of ways for people to collaborate and communicate online and that this is simply a waste of taxpayer money. Willott argues that sites like Facebook already allow voters to communicate with each other and the government. As we pointed out earlier this month, however, Facebook petitions can be manipulated rather easily.

In the U.S., crowdsourced projects like this have generally been funded by non-profits. ProPublica, for example, recently launched a project that allows citizens to track how the stimulus money is being spent.

Image Credit: Flickr user ohadweb

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If you want to help Mozilla to make Firefox better but you are not a developer, here is your chance. Earlier this year, Mozilla announced the launch of Test Pilot, the organization’s new distributed usability lab. Test pilots will be enlisted in various usability tests and will be some of the first to see some of Mozilla’s ideas for new user interfaces and Mozilla Labs products. We first wrote about Test Pilot when it was just a “still-in concept platform.” Now, however, you can download the Test Pilot add-on for Firefox 3.5 here and begin to help Mozilla make Firefox even better.

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Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

First Tests Are Coming Soon

For now, Mozilla will start the program with a survey that aims to get a better understanding of who is joining the Test Pilot community. The first actual tests should arrive soon after this first survey is complete.

Mozilla stresses that it will take its users’ privacy seriously. Participants have to opt-in and data will be stored in anonymous form. Only aggregate test data will be made available to the public.

Overall, this looks like a great project. Usability studies tend to be slow and costly, yet with Test Pilot, Mozilla will be able to quickly enlist feedback about new design ideas from its large community of users.

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