Author: Mike Melanson

If you visit the DreamHost blog today, chances are you’ll give a quick guffaw, shake your head in dismay at the state of the Internet and quickly close the browser tab.

But if you take a moment to read all the way to the end of the post, you’ll find that the company has just announced the implementation of a one-click install for its open-source, white label microblogging service Status.net.

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The blog, which features a tattooed beer belly and a cat sitting at a keyboard, is really showing off the proof-of-concept (hopefully) tongue-in-cheek site, PetStatus, a micro-blog for pets.

Buried down at the very bottom of the post is the following nugget of exciting information:

Status.net, our new one-click software package, powers the entire operation. DreamHost customers can now install Status.net to their own domains with a single mouse click – making specialized Twitter clones at whim in a matter of seconds!

Triss Hussey first noticed the real announcement, saying if it hadn’t been for an email subscription to the blog it would have just passed on by.

We first wrote about Status.net a year ago, saying that the service could be an “incredible opportunity to analyze a rich and dynamic set of data about interpersonal conversation.” The company just announced the launch of its public beta last Tuesday. And our Own Alex Williams just took a closer look at the service’s future in the enterprise last week and argued that it “has the features that the enterprise customer wants and it has a strong developer community.” A one-click installation means we may start seeing specialized Twitter-clones reproducing like rabbits across the Internet.

We can only hope that PetStatus isn’t an omen of what’s to come.

Discuss

The fact of the matter is, we’re relatively far and few between, according to a study by Barracuda Networks. One day, we’re told Twitter is growing exponentially, the next, it’s a dying service that’s stalled out like your grandpa’s Studebaker. But does growth, or the lack thereof, actually translate into use?

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According to Barracuda Networks, the Internet security research company, Twitter looks to be an insider app, one that many people sign up for and never really use. Or perhaps it’s like the sixth grade dance, with a few doing the waltz and the rest lurking on the edges of the room, afraid to ask the girl from math class for a dance.

The company analyzed more than 19 million Twitter users and found that a surprisingly small number were actually brave enough to ask the girl to dance, so to say.

Out of the more than 19 million users analyzed, only 21 percent, or just under 4 million, are considered to be “True Twitter Users”, a term applied using some extremely lenient criteria. To be considered a “True” Twitter user, a user needs to have 10 followers, follow 10 others and have tweeted 10 times.

For the most part, Twitter’s explosive growth really seems to be a party that millions of people came, saw, and quickly decided to leave. But despite the sticker shock of these initial numbers, the report shows that those who decided to stay are becoming increasingly active. Last June, 30 percent of users had no followers, whereas only 17 percent are follower-less now. The same goes for people following other users – the number following zero, less than five and less than 10 have all decreased since last June.

So, maybe Twitter isn’t quite exploding and it isn’t quite stalling out. Instead, it’s still indeed growing at a very regular, unimpressive rate and most people decide they don’t want to use it after all. Quick, somebody do another study, before we think Twitter is just doing something average for too long.

Discuss

Twitter announced yesterday that it would finally be adding location support and, while they certainly appear to be doing it right, we have to wonder about the new feature.

Twitter seems like it’s a bit late to the game on this one, even though we’ve all been talking of the “location-based wars” lately. We already have Gowalla, Foursquare, MyTown, BrightKite and more – do we really need Twitter too?

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First, we have to say that we’re quite happy with the opt-in, “back out at any moment” method that Twitter is taking on including location into its service. Not only do its users have to opt in, they can even set the function to check every time they tweet as to whether or not they want to include location information. The specificity of the location data can also be chosen, whether you’re including exact longitude and latitude coordinates or just letting everyone know you’re in the hood.

So, on these points, we say “hurrah!” for doing the location thing right. Now, on to why we really won’t be using it much, nonetheless.

When Twitter first came out, it was both a protocol and a place. That is, it was a website, Twitter.com, based on the 140 character message backbone. While the website was our only choice for a while, outside of text messaging, we quickly moved on to third-party clients that did it all much better. And now we have smartphone apps, web apps and desktop apps. Nowadays, Twitter feels much more like a protocol than place.

We’ve already moved on and separated out our location-based tweeting into a completely separate part of our brains. We have Gowalla, Foursquare, MyTown and Brightkite. We have our Twitter interaction where we just say something and we have our Twitter interaction where we mean to share our location. It just seems that, for those moments where we want to share our location in a useful manner, we already have a way and, much like the third-party clients out there, these other apps already do it better.

All of this isn’t to say that including location data isn’t a great idea. It could be followed up with some seriously interesting uses as more and more location data becomes available in the Twitter stream for outside apps to use. Too bad Twitter went the honorable route, however, and gave people a choice. For most of the tech savvy crowd out there, who use Twitter the most, we’ re not sure that the Twitter homepage is going to be where we choose to include our GPS data. Most services have already found a way to include that data, by using Twitter in the way its been used best – as a simple messaging protocol that lays at the heart of some very cool interaction. Why would we want to enable the core to track us? That’s just throwing our location data out there in the wind, to be gathered and used by whoever wants and that’s not really the point. Context is what makes location important.

Where will all this location based tweeting come in handy? Real life situations like Haiti and Iran. And in some cases, maybe for good and maybe for bad. There is surely something to be done with all this data, but we can tell you one thing – in our day to day tweets, we will not be turning the GPS on.

But enough about us – will you be using Twitter’s new location feature? Will you say yes when it asks or are you already satisfied with sharing your location with third-party apps?

Discuss

A ReadWriteWeb Guide

Ever since its inception, the Internet has blurred the boundaries between author and audience. Whether you’re a blogger, a pillar of the printed word, a podcast coinnaseur or a developer dealing with the latest CMS, navigating the next step in Internet publishing can be a feat.

So, hit up these 10 events at SXSW Interactive 2010 to say goodbye to Gutenberg and hello to the interactive, multimedia, real-time, crowdsourced and community-funded future of online publishing.

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This is part of a series of ReadWriteWeb guides to SXSW Interactive 2010. If this guide isn’t your cup of tea, be sure to check back for more information soon!

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income

Wanna ditch that desk job for the cubicle-less life of a professional blogger? What better way to kick off your SXSW Interactive 2010 than with a book reading from the editor and founder behind ProBlogger, Digital-Photography-School.com, and Twitip, three blogs that collectively reach over 3 million unique readers a month. Before you get into any panels predicting the death of this or that, let’s start off with how you’re going to start a blog and become rich, wealthy and wise.

The Revenge Of Editorials

If book readings aren’t your bag, then how about a workshop on how to get to the bottom of all this content we create by the second?

“As the Internet has accelerated the creation of all types of content, it’s become more and more difficult to sift through that content and find something of quality. We’ve tried it with machines and even mass consensus but the results are either wrong or lowest common denominator. The irony in all this is that we really need other humans to help us. The vast breadth of content on the Web only highlights what we’ve always relied upon: the valued opinion of others.”

Critical Tits: Rights, Cameras and the Immediacy Age

What happens when every member of an audience suddenly becomes an author? Eyes from every angle and a battle over the right to create versus the right to privacy. Come watch as CNET News‘ Daniel Terdiman and Burning Man’s Andie Grace surely take two separate sides on this issue.

“The EFF recently argued that Burning Man’s not as open or nurturing as people think, and uses the DMCA to control photographers’ rights. This caused a firestorm of controversy, forcing Burning Man to say its interests are protecting its trademark and attendees from being exploited by unscrupulous photographers. This panel will explore the tensions and the legal/community issues this controversy raised.”

Funding Your Projects from the Crowd

“Crowdfunding inverts much that is wrong with traditional funding by breaking down the barrier between creators and audiences, and turning fundraising into a interactive experience. This panel brings together several perspectives from the world of crowdfunding to explain different approaches to raising money from the audience for bloggers, artists, podcasters, developers, filmmakers, musicians, and more.”

Wikipedia Gets an Upgrade: Collaborative Video

We can’t really get away with talking about the wild world of online publishing without mentioning one of the founding fathers of all that is interactive and communal – Wikipedia. But can Wikipedia really take the next step and go to video?

“Wikipedia is the most successful collaborative experiment in human history. Now it’s getting a big upgrade: video. OGG Theora video paired with open source tech by Kaltura is evolving the wiki and prompting some big questions. Can wiki video work as well as wiki text? What does video mean to the Wikipedia community? How long until Grandma can hop in and improve the video entry on her favorite old crooner?”

Transmedia 2010: Are We There Yet?

While we’re at it, not only have we left the printing press in the dust, but our standard categorization and assembly of media may be on the way out too. So, let’s throw the baby out with the bathwater and get to talking transmedia. And you thought Wikipedia might be complicated.

“The promise and possibilities of transmedia storytelling have been on the horizon for several years. The concept involves immersive storytelling that utilizes multiple media outlets concurrently to enhance and advance the narrative. Some see this as a better way of totally involving an ever more fragmented and distracted audience. So join us for a “late breaking” assessment of the state of the movement. Has transmedia finally arrived?”

ReadWriteWeb’s Party

Continuing along with the idea of traditional and less-traditional media, we’d love it if you stopped by our party on Sunday night! We’re cohosting with NPR, PBS and a few others at KLRU’s Legendary Austin City Limits Studio. We’ll have live bands, Tex-Mex nosh, margaritas – the quintessential Austin experience. Free shuttles will be available at the Hilton.

How To Save Journalism

With Drew Curtis of Fark, Jeff Webber of USAToday, Kelly McBride of The Poynter Institute and Matthew Palevsky of The Huffington Post, find out how the Internet is going to save, not kill, jouarnalism.

“Much has been said about the death of journalism, but little has been offered in way of solutions. This panel will focus on solutions instead of problems, consensus viewpoints from both old and new media, and offer new insights into the operational structure of journalism and media for the 21st century.”

A Brave New Future for Book Publishing

Bringing it back down to a realm we’ve almost forgotten, what about the life of the good old book? What’s coming next? Will we break out of the binding?

“Call SXSW 2009’s infamous ”New Think for Old Publishers” (aka ”Geeks School New York”) a missed opportunity. How did book publishing become the last media industry to embrace digital and how will this change? New publishing models, strategy and a brave future for books and we who love them.”

R.I.P. Content Management System

What better way to end your SXSW 2010 with a timely prediction of the death of CMS as we know it?

“The medium is the message. On the web, the medium is community. This shift has made legacy CMS products as outdated as scribes and printing presses. Open source technologies are disrupting this market and moving into mainstream enterprises. Join Drupal founder Dries Buytaert as he discusses how social publishing will bring content and community together.”

Those are our SXSW Interaction recommendations for publishers of all stripes. If you’ve got suggestions or feedback, let us know in the comments! See you in Austin, folks!

Discuss

AppleInsider is reporting this morning that some trusted sources are predicting a “full-on solution” to multitasking in the iPhone 4.0 OS, which is set to be released this summer. Already, the iPhone shows that it is capable of multitasking with bundled apps like iPod and Nike+, but the update is said to handle a number of security and interface issues.

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Already, jailbreaking the iPhone shows how the device is fully capable of multitasking, but opens up the device to malware and poorly designed third-party apps that can make a full restore necessary.

As AppleInsider points out, the real benefit of closing off the iPhone to multitasking is that there are no malicious apps running in the background, hijacking your phone. You are, after all, carrying a constantly GPS enabled multimedia recording device with you. At the same time, it would be absolutely wonderful to be able to listen to Pandora while using the MapMyRide app to track your bike ride across town, or any other number of combinations currently unavailable.

But beyond security, AppleInsider discusses the issues of user interface that we might not think of right off the bat. In other operating systems, switching between apps is simple, by way of a taskbar or system dock. On the iPhone, multitasking is often handled by a small strip added at the top of the screen, but this would become messy for multiple applications. Perhaps we’ll see a new hardware solution to accompany this issue with the next iPhone “4GS” this summer. And, as Gizmodo points out, if we get multitasking for iPhone, can we really be expected to accept an iPad that can’t do the same?

While AppleInsider says that its sources have predicted this “full-on solution”, it notes that the much called-for feature has been falsely rumored, by their own articles nonetheless, on three separate occassions over the past year. In addition to this, it says that two of the biggest problems – resource conservation and battery life – were not addressed by their sources. Would we really want these features if it meant a bogged down device we had to charge every hour on the hour? And is this just another case of the boy who cried wolf? Let’s hope not.

Discuss

If you’ve ever done SXSW before, then you know about the music here in Austin. If you haven’t, let us tell you now – there’s a lot. But how do you find it all? And how do you find out which show is best? And how do you share blogs, photos, videos and tweet about it all at once?

SuperGlued, which has integrated with both Foursquare and Twitter, will be your your one-stop shop for the more than 1,200 bands that are set to invade Austin over the next week and a half.

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SuperGlued is a can’t-miss app for navigating SXSW without having the schizophrenically switch between iPhone apps just to keep up. With the release of a new version of its iPhone app, users can find shows, buy tickets, tweet and read what others are tweeting, post photos and check-in to Foursquare. And if you find yourself at a lame show, the new “Where My Friends At” feature will let you know what shows your friends are seeing so you can ask them if it’s any better.

A new partnership with BandsInTown not only helps the service find all the shows going on, but lets you buy tickets from your iPhone. And for special events, like SXSW, Superglued brings all the shows together into a separate event listing.

Aside from the iPhone app, the website lets you continue to interact around the shows you’ve seen long after they’ve ended. Rush Doshi, who co-founded SuperGlued with Gawker CTO Tom Plunkett, told us on the phone the other day that SuperGlued is the water cooler for everyone to gather around and talk about that crazy show they saw last week.

“The idea came about from going to a lot of shows and wondering about who else was there – it just seemed that there was no one place to go to see what everyone else thought,” said Doshi. “We built SuperGlued to be that place.”

SuperGlued connects with Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr, so when the shows all over, you can both add and check out blog posts, videos, set lists and more from the website.

Doshi told us that they have made extra efforts to make sure that all of the SXSW shows are list, but if a show isn’t there, users can add shows via the website. With the number of shows springing up in parking lots and backyards, this is a must-have feature. In the near future, the company is looking to include show-specific merchandise in its iPhone app, letting you browse and even order show merchandise from your phone and having it shipped to your house.

Beyond SXSW, SuperGlued is available around the world with nearly 200,000 show listings, many of which it pulls from BandInTown and Last.fm, in 140 countries. So, wherever you are, get off your duff, download the iPhone app and go see some live music.

Discuss

For power users, the Twitter website is often just a thing of the past. We’ve moved on to third party interfaces with multiple columns, special user list navigation, search, and so on. But what about the novice user that wants something more than Twitter.com?

For that, there’s Brizzly, a web-based Twitter client that today is announcing the release of its awaited iPhone app, along with a neat feature or two.

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The web-based version of Brizzly takes the Twitter stream and opens it up for the average user. It expands shortened links into full URLs, making it easier to know what you’re clicking on, and turns links to YouTube videos or images into just that – embedded images and videos. In a way, it takes the guess work out of Twitter.

Today, the company is releasing a full-featured iPhone app that was built off of the skeleton of Birdfeed, the company acquired by Brizzly last fall. The app is a simple and doesn’t offer some of the opening up of Twitter that you find on the website, but that would be difficult for an iPhone app to do, with it’s limited real estate. Links are shortened and images hidden behind links, but that’s as expected. Still, it handles multiple accounts, each of which you can view in its own stream. It also supports lists, mentions and DMs – all the standard stuff you would expect.

As we mentioned the last time we wrote about Brizzly, when the company added Facebook to its stream, the tool tries to make the experience of twitter simple for the non-geek. In that way, it interprets and explains Twitter Trends, the hashtags that are most popular at a given time. The Brizzly staff looks at hashtags and writes up a quick little blurb that explains what the Trends are that day and why. The iPhone app prominently contains these guides as a separate tab called “News”.

Brizzly is expanding on this trend explanation feature with its launch of the Brizzly Guide on its website. The Guide gives each of these trends its own page, which is a “permanent source for up-to-date information on topics people are talking about,” it says in its press release. In addition giving these explanations a permanent home, Brizzly has acquired WikiRank, a visualization web application based on Wikipedia data. It will be “integrating WikiRank technology into the Brizzly Guide” the company says in its press release. We can only wonder what will come of that, but it sounds interesting.

Discuss

There’s nothing worse for a bicyclist than finding yourself a mile in to a two-mile stretch of shoulder-less, busy, highway-speed traffic with no alternative route. Before today, this was a common occurrence if you went to trusty Google Maps to get bicycling directions, but starting today, that has all changed.

Google has added bicycling directions, lanes and routes to Google Maps, meaning you no longer have to drive, walk or bus to get directions. And we can tell you, bicyclists are excited.

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Before now, the only option to cyclists to get even remotely appropriate directions, was to use the walking option, but this would still ignore bike trails. Google has heard the pleas of cyclists and, from first look, we have to say that the feature is well implemented.

We gave it a test to see if it would put us on some of Austin’s more bike unfriendly streets, but it managed to chose some good alternative routes and stick to the bike trails when it could. The directions got a little wonky when we threw it a few curve balls, but we expect this to happen with any mapping service, especially one still in beta. But, as we’ve learned, you can’t just go mindlessly follow directions, lest you end up in a lake.

The new feature also includes a “Bicycling Layer”, which shows bike paths and bike-friendly streets with or without lanes. Three different lanes appear in the layer.

• Dark green indicates a dedicated bike-only trail;
• Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
• Dashed green indicates roads that are designated as preferred for bicycling, but without dedicated lanes

According to Google, it has also taken steps to avoid uphill and long downhill routes, busy roads and even busy intersections. Google says that it even takes hills and other factors into account when calculating your trip time. “Assuming typical values for mass and for wind resistance, we compute the effort you’ll require and the speed you’ll achieve while going uphill,” Google says in its Lat Long Blog.

Google worked with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy to bring more than 12,000 miles of biking trails to its map, along with bike lanes and recommended streets for 150 cities across the country. Google makes sure to point out that the feature is still in beta, so feel free to tell Google the next time you find yourself on a crowded, shoulder-less highway because of Google Maps.

And for those of you headed to fair Austin this week, make sure to take a look at the new feature, because it includes all of Austin’s numerous bike trails and bike lanes. If you’ve never been to Austin for SXSW before, bicycling is the way to get around town and now you’ll know how to get there.

Discuss

It’s services like Put.io that are behind why Google executives argue desktops will be irrelevant in three years, why Steve Ballmer says Microsoft is betting the bank on the cloud, and why storage stats for the newest gadget are becoming less and less important.Everything is going to the cloud.

Does it often feel like a waste of time to download something just to watch it once and then delete it? Then Don’t. Use Put.io. Put simply, Put.io fetches files from the Internet and allows you to either store them there or immediately stream them.

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Put.io can get files from bittorrent, FTP, direct download and rapidshare, as well as from standard websites. It can even automatically keep up with downloads, pulling links from an RSS feed.

While the immediate question is one of legality, we do want to mention that, aside from pirated movies and television shows, there actually are a lot of videos out there available for download by bittorrent and other means. Beyond that, Put.io addresses the issue of legality and the DMCA, saying that “It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) and other applicable intellectual property laws. Responses may include disabling access for all users to the material claimed to be the subject of infringing activity and/or terminating submitters of the material ability to use the Put.io service at all.”

We gave the service a shot and it downloaded a 750 megabyte torrent in less then a minute. Although the service wasn’t able to stream the MKV format directly on the site (and we had the wrong DiVX player version), we gave it another shot with an AVI torrent and we had streaming video in under a minute. And Put.io stores the files so you can come back and access them again and again.

Currently, beta testers get 50 gigs of storage with 150 gigs of bandwidth. The bandwidth is not counted when downloading the files to the service, but instead when you access them – so repeated watching of a large file could surely reach that limit.

In addition to the basic functionality, you can share files and folders with friends and access files from anything that supports a browser, from your iPhone to your PS3. In addition to a mobile version, the service is planning to release an API as well as a Boxee plugin. The site is still in public beta, but Put.io is offering 300 invites to our readers. Simply visit this site and get an invite.

Discuss

Facebook looks to be partnering with event marketplace Eventbrite, a move may have been foreshadowed by recent design changes on the site. The announcement of a partnership was first noticed by a Facebook user who sent in a screenshot to TechCrunch this morning.

Facebook’s recent redesign has showed a much more public events page, a feature that would go along with selling tickets to events quite perfectly.

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The text of the announcement, which was hosted at facebook.eventbrite.com but has since been removed, read as follows:

Collect money for your event with Eventbrite

Eventbrite is partnering with Facebook to enable you to collect money for your event. Your attendees pay with credit card and Eventbrite collects the money on your behalf and sends you a check when your event is over. We charge a small service fee for every ticket sold. 5.5% + $.99c, which attendees pay, costing you nothing.

Eventbrite has helped event organizers around the world sell over 10 million tickets. We’re excited to help you sell yours and put some delightful cash in your pocket.

Until recently, the Facebook events page was primarily focused on one thing – the events you had specifically been invited to. That’s no longer the case. Now, clicking on the “Events” link in the left column brings you to a page that lists not only all the events you’re invited to, but any public events that any of your friends are attending.

This seems like a definite shift in focus toward becoming more of a go-to place for finding what’s going on around you instead of just keeping track of invites. And if companies can get in on the game and start offering events that users can purchase tickets for through Facebook, then we’re talking.

Eventbrite had already made it easy for its users to share events they created on the Eventbrite website on Facebook. This announcement would not only be sharing events, but allowing Facebook users to buy tickets through the site.

Update: We heard back from Facebook and this is what they had to say on the supposed deal:

EventBrite is currently testing a Connect implementation. We don’t have anything more to share at this time.

Discuss

Whether a website sells off your email address or forces you to install some pop-up plagued toolbar just to get 10% off your next online purchase, searching for online coupons can involve treading in dangerous waters. Enter CheapTweet, which uses both algorithms and crowdsourcing to verify its content, and suddenly looking for the best deals online isn’t quite so scary.

The self-described “Twitter-based social deals search engine site” does precisely that – it finds tweets about deals and coupons through a custom search algorithm and then allows its users to upvote or downvote the deals on its site.

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Tweeting deals, if your wondering, can be big business. In 2009, Dell made more than $6.5 million through Twitter deals and CheapTweet probably sent a few of those customers their direction. The ad aggregator is actually celebrating its 5 millionth indexed deal with a roll-out of a refurbished website, which includes upgrades to its search engine, the voting mechanism, a redesign and and new feature, the “DealStream”.

CheapTweet allows its users to search for deals by category and keyword and will customize the stream of tweets according to their votes and Twitter conversations. They can also up and down vote tweets, like they’ve become accustomed to on sites like Reddit, Digg or Google Moderator. The “DealStream”, which contains a user’s customized results, can also be read as an RSS feed.

As CEO Hayes Davis points out in a press release, CheapTweet is poised to help distinguish the good from the bad as more and more companies prepare to monetize through Twitter.

“Online channels will only become more cluttered, as social networks start to monetize with ads,” said Davis. “CheapTweet’s service makes it easier for shoppers to sort through the clutter online and shop more effectively.”

We’ve not only heard a number of rumors and anonymous tips on what the Twitter ad platform will look like, but other companies like 140 Proof have begun to enter the market, bringing tweet-like ads to third party clients. This doesn’t even account for the vast number of small businesses taking advantage of the service to pass out Web-only deals and coupons.

With all of these ads, CheapTweet will help weed out the bad apples. Its users down vote nefarious tweets, the algorithm cuts out spam using a form of natural language processing and the multiple tweets about the same deal are combined to cut down on the noise.

We think that a service like CheapTweet has found a perfect niche and its the ideal service to recommend to your less technically-savvy relatives, as well as those just looking for a deal. Like we said, searching for online deals can put you in some dangerous waters and this service helps clear out some of the flotsam and jetsam.

Discuss

After recent announcements by Foursquare of partnerships with big time players like Zagat, the New York Times and Bravo, Gowalla is fighting back with its own major media partnership.

Gowalla and the Travel Channel announced today that the two companies will be working together to offer “the integration of proprietary Travel Channel content into Gowalla’s social networking service.” Along with another deal, Gowalla has started to connect the virtual with the real, a direction we think will be key in succeeding in the location-based app arena.

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According to a press release, the agreement will begin with tomorrow’s premiere of “Food Wars” on the Travel Channel. In much the same way that Foursquare began offering special badges and information on venues featured in Bravo’s television shows, Gowalla will begin adding new features based on the locations in the show. Here’s the company’s explanation:

The first content integration will focus on the new series, Food Wars, a new Travel Channel offering where blindfolded participants choose sides to determine “Who Makes The Best Dish In Town.” Food Wars pits the nation’s most famous culinary rivals against one another for a final showdown, where a blind taste test will settle the debate. Locations used in the series will be integrated into the Gowalla platform and Gowalla users will be able to check in and find specific show information, along with the details of the culinary showdown that was filmed there, pick up Items specific to the show, and be awarded specially created passport stamps.

Gowalla also quietly released an Android version of its app this weekend, which is currently available for download in the Android Marketplace.

This comes just in time for SXSW Interactive, which is bound to have thousands of techies roaming Gowalla’s hometown of Austin. As the CNET article on the deal points out, Gowalla has led rival Foursquare in the funding realm, with $8.4 million in Series B funding last year. And while we do like the look of Gowalla, Foursquare offers real-life incentives, such as discounts at certain locations for becoming mayor. Well, just in time for the aforementioned SXSW, Gowalla will have some real-life incentives too – Austin’s homegrown Sweet Leaf Tea.

Now, the Sweet Leaf deal isn’t quite up to par with a Zagat partnership, but it’s one to keep in mind over the next couple of weeks nonetheless, as you’re wandering Austin’s streets and growing more dehydrated by the moment. (Yes, we know how much beer you really drink.) According to Gowalla’s blog, there will be virtual Sweet Leaf Tea cans around town that will be redeemable for the real thing, so keep an eye out.

Gowalla’s first foray into integrating its virtual collectibles with real-life goods came in early January, with its partnership with InCase, a maker of iPhone cases, among other things. As part of that deal, users could collect different InCase-branded virtual items and when they checked in at Apple stores, they had a chance of winning an iPhone case upon checking in. So just by going to a location, you were entering a contest for a real-world prize.

And really, it’s this sort of thing that we think will keep apps like Gowalla afloat. Long after the shininess of “checking in” and collecting “virtual goods” for their own sake wears off, real-life incentives will be there. Whether they come in the form of information, as is the case with the Travel Channel deal, or in the form of tasty sweet goodness, as with a can of Sweet Leaf Tea, we’re going to need something more than a virtual beatnik to keep us checking in everywhere we go. And of course, letting our friends know where we are, and vice-versa, is great, but if one company gets into the real-life game and another doesn’t, guess which one we’ll probably be playing.

Discuss

It was just about a year and a half ago now that we were hearing the bells toll for Internet radio service Pandora, but, as evidenced in today’s New York Times profile of the decade old stalwart, the service seems to be going nowhere but up.

While Pandora “has been on the verge of death, struggling to find investors and battling record labels over royalties,” according to the Times’ profile, a recent move by Warner Music may help to put one Internet radio station above the rest.

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The Times’ profile tracks the full life and times of one of our favorite Internet radio stations, describing the many reasons Pandora experienced its first profitable quarter in 2009 and looks to become even more profitable. But it might have missed out on one reason – Pandora will have the music that other free players won’t.

As Tom Conrad, CTO for Pandora, told us last month when Warner announced it would pull all of its licensed content from streaming music services, “Pandora operates under a different licensing structure and won’t be impacted by Warner’s apparent decision with respect to free, on-demand services.” This could be huge in keeping Pandora on track to break $100 million in revenue this year, as predicted by William Blair, a digital media analyst, in the Times article.

The Times compares Pandora with other services, such as Slacker Radio, noting that Pandora has one third as many songs but three times as many listeners. We can’t help but wonder if the absence of Warner’s discography might further imbalance this scenario in Pandora’s favor.

Update: Slacker Radio has informed us that they too will carry Warner Music titles. This is from a note from a member of Slacker Radio’s PR team:

Slacker has and has had since day 1 voluntary licenses with all major labels and 100’s of Indie labels. Slacker negotiated deals and then built a business around those rates. We have good relationships with Warner and voluntary licenses with them. We do offer and will continue to offer music from Warner.

According to last month’s article in the BBC, however, services like Spotify and Last.fm could be in trouble of losing a large portion of their music library.

While the sheer number of songs is obviously not the deciding factor here, it could be a big one. With control over artists from Frank Sinatra to the Bee Gees to Puff Daddy, Warner’s music catalog could be the distinction between life or death for any online streaming music service. And now, with deals with automakers and consumer electronic manufacturers, it looks like Pandora is here to stay.

And as the Times points out, with last month’s hiring of CFO Steve Cakebread, the company looks poised to go public in 2010. In the meantime, we wonder what will come of the competition when Warner music officially pulls the plug and leaves them without a “Stairway to Heaven”.

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Google looks to be following up the addition of its Google Chart Tools with a neat addition to Google Labs – the Public Data Explorer.

The purpose of the new tool, Google says on the new lab’s page, is to make “large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate”.

Google, with its access to an immense assortment of information, is in the perfect position to help us with ways to display this information.

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Just as with the Chart Tools, Google’s Public Data Explorer will allow users to directly embed charts and other visual tools onto their websites. The charts will be dynamically created, so if the data updates, so will the chart.

Google first got into the public data game about a year ago and has been including this type of data in its search results.

Right now, there are 13 datasets available, ranging from something as specific as Education Statistics of California to World Development Indicators from the World Bank. Google has just added five new public data sources: the U.S. Center for Disease Control (think Google’s Flu Trends), the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Eurostat, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, and the California Department of Education.

There are four choices for visualization styles – bar graph, line graph, map or bubble, and each has its advantage. After choosing a visual style, you can select what data points you would like to see and set variables such as time period.

Just as with the chart tools, we look forward to seeing how useful a tool like this can be for all those smaller organizations that don’t have the resources to hire a full-time web design team, but want to visually display data to help visualize trends. This could be a great tool for smaller journalistic organizations to compete with some of the big dogs.

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If you’ve ever used Craigslist before (and who hasn’t?) then you know it can be amazingly useful for some things and a terrible waste of time for others. If you’re a small business looking for an accountant or the best and cheapest way to outsource your HR, for example, then Craigslist might be asking for trouble.

Austin-based startup BidModo is launching a public beta today that hopes to simplify this process for small businesses and provide them with better information to make better decisions, instead of simply relying on word of mouth referrals.

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BidModo is a bit like the offspring of Yelp, the Better Business Bureau and Craigslist, but much shinier. In reality, comparing it to Craigslist is a bit of a disservice, as it offers so much more than text classified ads and email responses.

Instead of just putting an ad out there and getting back simple replies, the responses come from registered companies and are organized on a dashboard. Each company has an on-site profile, containing contact information, a company history, provided services, previous clients, certificates and licenses, and a list of references. Each company also has a rating card, which shows how that business rates with its clients on ten different characteristics, from bid timeliness to industry knowledge.

If you’ve ever used something like Craigslist, then you realize how hard, or even impossible, getting all of this information would be. You would practically need to hire a private investigator.

For end users – those posting the job – the service is entirely free and provides the user with information about bidders, vendor ratings and a dashboard comparing bids. Vendors only pay for selected leads. A vendor dashboard provides information on ROI, monthly sales data, ratings feedback and industry stats. And part of BidModo’s focus is on local business, so service requests only come from the region, which is something we think people, wherever they are, will stand behind.

“Prior to BidModo, I ran a video production company,” said founder Toby Schwartz in a press release. “I would regularly hear of companies in town turning to New York or San Francisco to hire for their video needs. And I can’t tell you how many times I’d meet people in Austin who would comment that they wished they knew I was here.”

Currently, BidiModo is live nationally, with over 80 cities and connections in more than 100 different categories.

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What’s the best way to leverage the most information out of 140 characters? Should you get to learning Mandarin so each character can be a word? Or start forming German-style pseudo-word hashtags to get the point across? Or perhaps, you could parse the natural language, encapsulate the tweet in meta data and go from there.

We’ve already seen additional information stacked onto our Tweets, as with the geo-location API released last November, but Cascaad’s SuperTweet API does more than wrap your tweet in client-provided data like GPS coordinates.

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Cascaad has released its first beta of the SuperTweet API, which it says will allow third-party Twitter applications to “add smart contextual information and monetization […], including semantic entity markup, nonintrusive in-text affiliate commerce links, related content [and] social relevance scores”. The SuperTweet provides users with “an at-a-glance view of additional information about stories, things and places discussed in the message, without forcing them to leave your application,” according to the API documentation.

The API allows developers to parse a tweet, identify separate “entities” and then gather external contextual information on those entities. It then adds this information to the original tweet to create a “SuperTweet”.

If a tweet mentions Lady Gaga, for example, the name “Lady Gaga” becomes a link to a biography pulled from semantic-web database Freebase. Next to that, the SuperTweet gives an affiliate link to Amazon, where you can go buy Lady Gaga CDs. And if a link to an article about Lady Gaga is included in the tweet, the SuperTweet provides a thumbnail preview.

In addition to wrapping these entities in contextual information, the SuperTweet API unwraps shortened URLs back into the original link so the user has an idea of what they’re clicking on. And, although not yet available in this release, the Conversation API will put the tweet in the context of a conversation, providing access to other public messages in the same conversation thread.

The challenging part of all of this is that the API needs to parse a rather variable piece of content – a user created tweet – and find the appropriate meta data. Just like a search engine, it needs to recognize misspelled words or other slight variations to find the proper content.

One Twitter developer we spoke with said that, while they like the idea of outside information being added to the base tweet, they have found the contextual results to be hit or miss. It would seem that the concept is solid, but the execution is still in the difficult learning stages.

While we like what we’ve seen of the SuperTweet so far, it will only be worthwhile if it can provide accurate results. If we tweet about the iPhone and it links to the Amazon page for the iPad, the service will fall flat on its face. Get this part right, though, and we’re willing to be you’re going to start seeing Super Tweets in some Twitter apps soon.

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There’s good reason tweets are limited to 140 characters – the microblogging social network was developed specifically with mobile in mind and 140 characters is the size limit for a text message. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Twitter has experienced a 347% jump since a year ago in people accessing the site via mobile browser.

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According to a comScore report, both Twitter and Facebook have experienced significant increases in mobile browser access over the past year.

“Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web,” said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile, in the company’s press release. “Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile.”

Just over 30% of smartphone users access social networking sites using a mobile browser, comScore reports, up from 22% just a year ago. Access to Facebook using a mobile browser grew 112% while Twitter grew a whopping 347%.

What do these numbers mean in terms of actual number of visitors? According to comScore, Facebook saw 25.1 million mobile users in January 2010, Myspace had 11.4 million and Twitter 4.7 million. As the report points out, “these figures do not include access of the social networking services by the nearly 6 million mobile phone owners who do so exclusively through mobile applications.”

As smartphones continue to grow in popularity, social networking services will get more and more traffic from mobile use, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see mobile access overtake other methods of access at some point in the future.

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It’s great to have everything customized to suit just you, right? You like your bed a certain stiffness, your oatmeal a certain thick and your coffee a certain sweet. How about your search results? According to an article by The Register, Google is working to “‘personalize’ as much as 20 percent of your web searches”.

While this might be good for some things, we’re thinking it could also be like formulating an answer before someone even finishes asking the question.

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The Register quotes Google software engineer Bryan Horling, who spoke this afternoon at the Search Marketing Expo, as saying that one in five searches are customized using a user’s location, web history or online contacts. “Between these three techniques,” Horling said, “just about every user who’s engaging with Google search today is affected.”

Horling explains that many of the changes, however, are rather subtle and usually involve rearranging a few results on a page and not providing an entirely different set of results. Google has tailored results on a large scale, such as by country, for years, Horling explains, but is now “applying it at a finer granularity.”

While people we are in contact with are often of the same mindset and our location comprises much of our interaction with the world, do we really want Google to assume this for us? If we are researching a topic that is normally completely out of our realm, do we really want the search engine to pull us back in, however subtly? Take Google’s “social search” for example.

“The idea behind social search is that we surface content from your social circle,” he said. If you know a particular person, for instance, Google may ensure that a document they wrote receives particular prominence on the results page.

Customizing search results, it would seem, can be like putting us in an echo chamber of similar ideas and opinions. If we look up technology related topics in Google, suddenly we are fed links from our tech savvy contacts that Google pulls from our Buzz stream. But what if we are looking for the outside perspective? Even if we aren’t intentionally looking for the outside perspective, we’re suddenly being subtly driven back to our own world view, as repeated by our peers.

While some examples, like searching for a bus schedule or searching for the words “coffee shop” seem self evident, we have to wonder how these one in five results are changing the way we search the Web.

And if nothing else, we’d rather be able to opt-out if we need, without having to sign out, delete our cookies, clear our cache and reboot the system.

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