2008 July 15 | money news blog

15 07 2008

Twitscoop: Real-time tag cloud, search engine for Twitter

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: World wide web, Web services, Social Software, Search, web 2.0

Want to know what people are speaking about on Twitter without actually bothering to go to Twitter? Check out a Twitter-focused search engine. Summize and Twitscoop can both help you answer questions like “does the new Will Smith motion picture stink?” or “is Nancy Pelosi really trying to ban Twitter from Congress?” But this week Twitscoop rolled out a nifty new feature that makes it even easier to see what people are speaking about without typing anything at all in the search box: a tag cloud that’s updated in real-time.

The video above should give you an idea of what the tag cloud looks like, but the video capture software slowed our personal down a bit, so imagine the whole thing sped up a bit. As more and more Twitter users enter keywords in their messages, the tag cloud is updated.

Twitscoop’s tag cloud should make for interesting reading during a major news event like a presidential debate. But even on slower news days, Twitscoop provides an overview of the conversations taking place among Twitter users. Sure, they’re probably not representative of the public at large, but they’re certainly representative of something… early adopters maybe?

[via ReadWriteWeb]

15 07 2008

PlanetEye: One stop travel planner

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, Search, web 2.0

PlanetEye is a new travel site that uses Microsoft technology and partnerships with third celebration services like OpenTable and Travelocity to provide a ton of information about in one place. Just enter a destination and PlanetEye will bring up a map with a bunch of dots representing points of interest. Click on a dot to see shared photos from that location.

You can also click on the hotels, restaurants, or attractions buttons in the sidebar to switch from the picture view to something a bit more useful. Or you can turn off the map and click on the City Guide to bring up a list of places to eat, sleep, and visit.

If you’ve registered for a free account, you can save information you find on the site to a “travel pack” which you can share with other users or just use as a tool for planning your own vacation.

[via AppScout]

15 07 2008

Guilty conscious? It’s ok i4Giveu.

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: Fun, Social Software, web 2.0

Ever did something that you wish you could take back? Maybe you snuck out of the convenience store without paying for that pack of gum or never returned that past due library book. Whatever the case maybe, why not voice it to the world and get it off your chest with i4Giveu.

i4Giveu is not just a sounding board, its members judge your confessions, rate them and ultimately decide if your confession is worthy of forgiveness. Of course, you too can dish out a bowl of moral soup if you’re feeling a bit high and mighty.

Oh, Internet… is there anything you can’t do?

15 07 2008

Waste more time on Twitter with Twitscoop

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: Blogging, Web services, Social Software

Twitter is a vast network of individuals posting about all sorts of different things. Take for instance this very second, members are posting about cupcakes, the military, Ferrari, mobileme, the Olympics and much more. But these topics change so swiftly you would be mad if you tried to keep up with them yourself. Thankfully, Twitscoop has automated this process so that you can continue to sit in front of your personal staring endlessly at other people conversation.

Twitscoop works by monitoring all the publicly available tweets out there and measures the frequency of the words used. The more mentions of a subject the more popular it must be.

Twitscoop then places them in alphabetical order in a Tag Cloud, the more popular the word the larger it is compared to the rest in the cloud. Mouse over the tag to find out who is talking about what, click on the tag and it will take you to a graph that will display the frequency of the topic along with the users. With all of this information available, you’ll be one well informed Twitter!

In our time with using the site we only had one gripe with it, the lack to sort the cloud via the size of the tag. This is only a minor complaint really but something that should be added for those of us out there that like a tiny order in our lives.

15 07 2008

Easy but powerful Drivepricing helps compute gas costs

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: World wide web, Utilities, Productivity, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Drive Pricing Sometimes the ideal web services are the simplest ones. Drivepricing lets you compute the cost of gas for your road trip.

With gas prices so high its nice to be able to know how much to put in the piggy bank to save up for the trips you have coming up this summer.

So when you’re going to visit grandma in Albany from Philly, you can drop your gas mileage in there and get an estimated cost of what you’re going to have to beg her for so you can get home.

Even if you don’t know your gas mileage they’ve a link to FuelEconomy.gov for you. Drop your zipcode in there, begin address, end address, the type of gas you use (which is a great feature) and whether its a round trip or not.

After a few seconds of loading, booya there you’ve it. Price per gallon and cost for trip.

Continue reading Google Lively: a 3D social networking/chat tool that nobody asked for

15 07 2008

Google Lively: a 3D social networking/chat tool that nobody asked for

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Google, Social Software, web 2.0

If you’ve ever thought it would be a good idea to embed a chat widget on your web site, Google has another proposition for you: Why stop there? Why not embed a 3D environment, let users create avatars, decorate a room, and chat with one another? The company has taken the wraps off of Lively, a 3D social networking/chat service that does just that. You can create or join Lively rooms through Lively.com or you can embed rooms on any site using a small snippet of HTML code.

We got our first clue that Google was up to something in the social networking/virtual world space last year when a student at Arizona State University snapped a screenshot of the signup page for a top secret Google project. At the time we guessed that Google was building a Second Life competitor. But since it’s a web-based service, it looks like Lively is more of an IMVU competitor. That should come as no surprise, since as VentureBeat points out, one of the founders of IMVU now works for Google.

15 07 2008

Facebook on your Mac desktop? It’s Facile

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Social Software

Facile is a Facebook desktop app for Mac, modestly described by the developer as “like Twitterrific for Facebook, but uglier.” We don’t think it’s particularly hideous, actually, and it’s a neat way to track friends’ status updates. It even supports Growl notifications.

With Facebook Chat being integrated into more desktop apps, there seems to be a demand for access to Facebook features without the website (and the ads). Facile makes Facebook status updates more meaningful and useful, because you can get them as they happen. If apps like this are widely adopted, we’ll definitely think of keeping our Facebook status more current. Heck, with Twitter’s current API limitations, maybe we’ll just feed our tweets into Facebook and let Facile do the work.

15 07 2008

Twitter reportedly buying Summize

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: Business, Social Software, Search

There have been reports flying around Twitter and several prominent blogs that Twitter is making a move to acquire Summize, a popular Twitter search engine. In case this is the first you’re hearing about Summize, here’s a rundown of what it does. It can search Twitter for any string — most importantly, an @name — which makes it indispensable when Twitter’s tracking function is down. Second, it aggregates and lists the most popular search terms, so you can get a sense of the Twitter zeitgeist.

It’s too early to speculate about what effect the acquistion could have on Twitter itself, or how the resulting service would look with Summize’s features integrated. We do love the idea of combining two services we use every day, though. Basically, we’re keeping our fingers crossed that these rumors are true.

15 07 2008

TweetDeck: Desktop client for Twitter helps you organize the chaos

Posted by: in Social Informant

Filed under: World wide web, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware, Social Software, Beta

TweetDeck is a desktop client for Twitter build on Adobe AIR. Nothing new there. That sentence could have described Twhirl, Snitter, or Alert Thingy. But TweetDeck has a few features up its sleeve that other Twitter clients lack.

The most noticeable difference is that TweetDeck has a multi-column view. You can glance at all of the latest tweets from your contacts in one column, see replies in another, and direct messages in a third. Or you can create groups of contacts (for example, a group of all your favorite Download Squad bloggers on Twitter), and see just updates from those contacts in a column.

You can customize the display by adding up to 10 columns, or removing columns you don’t need. The display is also resizable. There are no themes and no way to adjust the font yet. But the application is still in beta.

[via ReadWriteWeb]