There's an interesting, but tiresome discussion going around about whether FriendFeed contributes to the conversation or the noise. While we've already reviewed how FriendFeed can contribute to other problems such as information overload, the answer seems obvious that FriendFeed both contributes to the conversation and the noise. Here's a look at both sides of the coin.

Adding to the Noise

There are dozens of ways that Friendfeed adds to the noise. For one, it pulls in one of the noisiest services out there: Twitter. At least 10% of Twitter streams have much to do about nothing and filtering out this noise is hard to do on FriendFeed. Secondly, for those that don't entertain certain services that FriendFeed aggregates, that's extra noise.

For example, I hide all Flickr, Twitter, and Seesmic items unless they have a comment on them. I'm not a heavy user of Flickr nor Seesmic and most of the items that my friends on FriendFeed may be sharing from these services, I probably wouldn't be very interested in. At the same time, some services that I have FriendFeed aggregate may be completely irrelevant to another member of the community.

Adding to the Conversation

One of the most popular reasons for being on FriendFeed is for the conversations and not necessarily for the lifestreaming part of the equation. This leads to a plethora of discussions on FriendFeed. Even Scoble has gone as far as calling it a "talk show". Infamous "Bitchmemes" develop overnight on FriendFeed. It can remind users of a Harry Potter duel, though instead of wands and spells, there are words and links to back up the facts.

At the same time, users of FriendFeed add to the conversation with almost everything that they share...almost. For me, Google Reader Shared Items, RSS feeds and stumbles via StumbleUpon are services that add to the conversation. In fact, the items from these services continuously to start numerous conversations, thereby helping to balance out the noise-to-signal ratio on FriendFeed.

Catch-22

Is there another lifestreaming backlash around the corner? Probably not. While some are questioning the "conversation fragmentation" problem on FriendFeed, it doesn't necessarily add to the noise. The fragmentation is just a byproduct of the same information being shared in more than one network of friends, and users that run in more than one circle that may continuously see the same information. This isn't a problem of FriendFeed, but rather a problem caused by the various groups within FriendFeed, which Julian Baldwin expresses other great thoughts about.

In the end, the question shouldn't be whether or not FriendFeed contributes to the noise or to the conversation, but more about how much FriendFeed is contributing to both sides of the coin. This only reinforces why filtering is the next step to better contribute to the conversation while reducing the noise levels.

Just last week we wondered if video messaging services Seesmic will take over the world. Looks like we won't have to wait for our answer any longer. A service that was once just just a blip on the radar made a rather huge leap today, a leap that could catapult the service past Twitter. Earlier today, the Hollywood crew members starring in the new film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull took the time for a cool Q&A on Seesmic!

Q&A On Seesmic

Live for the Q&A, the Guardian's Jemima Kiss had some questions for at the all-star cast that consisted of Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, George Lucas, Shia Laboeuf, Karen Allen and Cate Blanchett. Some of her thoughts on the ordeal are:

It's a simple enough idea but incredibly exciting; I just posted a few direct questions to Spielberg and Karen Allen (Marian was always one of my favourite heroines) and it's quite a buzz watching them reply directly to your own questions.

Simple enough indeed, and the videos are generating massive headlines for Seesmic. Though all of the videos werent posted in realtime, Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur notes on his blog:

I wish we would have given some notice to our community but we did not know obviously until the last minute if it would happen or not and the production team had requested the videos being posted in private first, then unlocked, which would not have allowed us enough interactivity.

Star Studded Seesmic Pages

Here are the links for the Seesmic pages of the stars and we've also provided a few of the Q&A videos at the bottom of the post.

• Steve Spielberg
• George Lucas
• Harrison Ford
• Shia LeBoeuf
• Cate Blanchett

Will Seesmic Take Off?

There will definitely be benefits from the stars showing up on Seesmic. In fact, the service is already experiencing an influx of replies and user activity. However, we wonder if that's just due to the appearance of the celebs and how long activity lasts. Whether or not this publicity stunt will catapult Seesmic into the web stardom is the $200,000 question on everyone's mind. We have our guesses, but first we'd like to hear your thoughts in the comments section!

Videos From Seesmic

There's no doubt that the focus of the web is shifting to the community. At the forefront of this shift is social media. Social media can be loosely defined as the movement of community contributions in an effort to help one another. There's plenty of giving, taking, promoting, and marketing. In an effort to also contribute, here are 5 great ways to contribute to social media.

Provide Fresh Content

Here at ReadWriteWeb we pride ourselves on being able to provide you with fresh content! While there's no escaping the "echo chamber", being able to provide a fresh perspective on the news goes a long way to helping out with social media. Every thought and opinion is unique even if all parties agree.

You can also venture out of your comfort zone and into unknown territory for better insights for providing fresh content. It's no easy task, but it can be done.This not only helps break away from the "echo chamber" effect, but allows you to experiment, discover, and learn about variety of subjects you might not have previously considered. In doing so, you'll expand not only your audience, but social media.

Spread The Link Love

Once upon a time, linking to others was a rare thing. It used to be a common fear to abstain from linking to others in an effort to keep your audience. Building a "walled garden" around content is counter-productive to social media. Spreading the link love is actually one of the best things you can do for social media. Not only does it help with networking, but for social media this is a great way for users to find great content. This is also another way to spread ideas that others might have never. Not only will others appreciate the love, but so will your audience.

You can spread the content of others by using Google Reader's Shared Items feature to share your own link blog of great content that you've read. "Retweeting" great links on Twitter or "liking" things in Friendfeed are other great ways to share and promote ideas in an effort to contribute to social media.

Roll Your Own

While there's plenty of ways for users to contribute to social media, developers can also play a large part. What's revolutionary about social media content is that it can be based on standards like RSS and XML. To quote Phil Glockner of Scribkin, "this lends a lot of re-interpretation of the data available for the taking." Some of the most popular Twitter apps are an example of this.

Mashup platforms are getting easier to develop for. Developers no longer need to know C# when you have platforms like Google App Engine, Django, and Yahoo! Pipes to play with. In an effort to contribute to social media, why not "roll" your own mashups. Developers can take advantage of these platforms to extend the functionality of social media tools such as Twitter and Friendfeed. RSSmeme developer Benjamin Golub did it today with Tweet 2 Tweet by utilizing Django and Google App Engine (reviewed on SheGeeks).

Share Your Findings

A new application pops up everyday. While we all want to be the first to talk about a new app, sometimes we hold out on these findings.Directories such as FreshAIRApps, which we reviewed earlier, aim to help users discover these new applications. Share these findings with your audience by reviewing it on your blog, stumbling it on StumbleUpon, or even with a "tweet" on Twitter.

This helps the social media community to advance in many ways. Your findings could be exactly what someone has been searching for high and low for weeks. Since applications can serve a multitude of purposes for users, your reasons for using one app could be used for entirely different reasons by someone else. However, the discovery of these purposes can't happen unless you continue to share.

Stay Active

Of all our picks, staying active is the most important contribution you can make to social media. Social media requires active participation within the community. It's an act of both give and take. While it's perfectly fine to be a lurker, if something strikes your interest, don't be afraid to voice your opinions and share your knowledge of the subject. Want to learn more about something? Ask a question. With social media, the community is there in an effort to help you benefit from not only the web, but life.

Sharing Really is Caring

These are just a handful of great ways to contribute to social media. Keep in mind that contributions to social media are also beneficial for other niches and the web community overall. So if you haven't started your link blog or have been hesitant to tweet that new app you discovered, now is the perfect time to start.

Andrew Sorcini lives in Los Angeles, works as an animator for Dinsney and is the most powerful user that social news site Digg.com has ever seen. Known at Digg and elsewhere as MrBabyMan, Sorcini has submitted a site-leading 2,400+ stories that have hit the site's coveted front page. Those front page submissions have delivered an estimated 50 million pageviews to the sites the submissions came from. A good number of those submissions have been RWW articles, and we appreciate that.

For months, a small but outspoken number of Digg's millions of other users have complained about seeing as many as three or four MrBabyMan submissions on the front page at one time. As we write this he has two front page stories. Those successes are outshined, however, by the most popular story on Digg Friday night: a cartoon accusing MrBabyMan of stealing stories from smaller Digg users.

Just before noon on Friday, Sorcini submitted the image on the left to Digg. An obtuse critique of the US Federal Government's economic stimulus plan, the image was apparently on the minds of more people than just MrBabyMan. Just after noon the image on the right was posted by Kimberly Vogt, a software engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Security, girlfriend of Digg QA Analyst Jeremy McCarthy and a rare non-employee to have reciprocal friendships with many of the top staff at Digg.

Innocent enough, right? It was submitted in the humor category and Vogt now says the image was submitted "all in good fun."

Either way, it provided an opportunity for angry Digg users to lash out at MrBabyMan. At 7:30 Sorcini posted a message to Twitter reading: "If this is how the majority of the Digg community feels, I'll quit. I won't be a part of a group that doesn't want me" - with a link to the critical, remixed cartoon.

By eight o'clock that evening the Vogt submission hit the front page of Digg - two hours before MrBabyMan's original submission went popular. At midnight a link to Sorcini's Twitter message hit the front page with the title "MrBabyMan Might Quit Digg?" By the time the bars closed Friday night more than 2000 people had voted for Vogt's cartoon and there were 750 comments left between the two negative posts. Vogt's was the most popular of all submissions made to the site on Friday. A heated debate raged in comments between Digg users of every degree of psychological maturity and perspective on the issue that you can imagine: should MrBabyMan go or should he stay?

The Charges Against the BabyMan

There are a number of criticisms that Digg users levy against Andrew Sorcini. The primary one, which Vogt's cartoon remix refers to, is that MrBabyMan submits duplicate stories that other Diggers have submitted, knowing that his superior prowess will eliminate any chance that the original submission will hit the front page.

The next criticism is that MrBabyMan uses an unfairly large network of friends and spam-like "shouts" to garner favors and give his submissions an artificial momentum that they don't warrant on merit alone.

Finally, it's frequently whispered that MrBabyMan and other top Digg users are being paid for submitting stories. There are certainly people willing to pay them.

MrBabyMan and Friends Respond

Criticism reaching this peak really upset Sorcini. He and a group of friends who often engage in hours-long group chats on Skype decided to write up a summary of the situation and see if they could find someone to write about it. A contact brought them me. I spoke with the group of six people for more than 3 hours late Friday night.

MrBabyMan's friends say that top digg users never knowingly repost something someone else already has unless the initial post is poorly submitted and not doing well. MrBabyMan says he never sends shouts to promote his stories and he doesn't get paid for what he does on Digg. The relationship between submission, promotion and money is more complex than simple pay for diggs, though.

I came away from the conversation with a number of conclusions. The dominant one is this. Andrew Sorcini's MrBabyMan persona is sitting at the top of a small network of loyal friends, made up of people like SEO marketers, PR agents turned would-be social media experts and other unsavory folk. That circle is further surrounded by an even larger network of millions of Digg users who try to have fun on the site but also wish they could find success there. Many of them no doubt with they too could find a way to make a living in the snake-oil filled circus that is "new media marketing," as many of the top Digg users have done.

In the middle of all this mess, though, MrBabyMan is one of the most warm hearted, genuine and in many cases naive people that you will meet anywhere. The Emperor is the only one wearing clothes.

Is He Gaming the System?

MrBabyMan says he has added friends to help promote stories because that's how the rules work, if he didn't need to do that he wouldn't. He believes that most of his critics are new users who haven't had enough experience yet to know how the site works. He says he's totally accessible and can be reached by anyone who wants to talk to him - though he didn't know that the email addresses on his profile were visible only to his friends until it was pointed out to him in our conversation.

"All I ever wanted," he said, "was just for the stories to live or die on their own merits. If everyone was on a level playing field I would love that - because I still have the skills to find the great stories...I'm not complaining about the algorithm, but I don't want to be vilified for working within the parameters of it."

Money and Digg

While Sorcini's editorial genius has put him in a place of total dominance over a site that symbolizes success for a world of marketers facing disruption of traditional media - MrBabyMan is one of the few people in the upper echelon of the Digg community whose income is completely unrelated to his activities there.

While mid-tier Diggers are far more likely to be engaging in pure pay-for-play, other people at various points in the hierarchy are building careers as "new media experts." The experience that lands them the consulting contracts they live on? A demonstrated history of success in promoting stories on sites like Digg. These people aren't being paid to Digg stories - they are being paid to do other things (like advising on social media strategy) because of their success on Digg. There may be nothing wrong with that (this author has a private consulting practice in vaguely related matters as well) but to claim that top Digg users invest as much time and energy into the site as they do entirely "for the love of it" and "to share good stories with people" - with no economic incentive, short or long term, is a cynical joke.

MrBabyMan may be one of very few people in the upper echelon for whom that is the case. He says he does no outside consulting and gets no payment for his activities on Digg. He's got a good job working as an illustrator for Disney. You could say the man helps create fairy tales on Digg, as well. The story of the democratically based user generated news site, driven by people in it for the love of the community, may be one fairy tale Sorcini helps propagate.

Surprisingly, the man doesn't have the sense to monetize what he does do online very well at all. He's the host for the excellent social media podcast The Drill Down, where the most successful users on sites like Digg discuss what's in the news and often news about the social media sites themselves. A small audience of rabid, new media savvy listeners get The Drill Down as a podcast or watch it streamed live on UStream video.



Sorcini does go to the trouble to sell ads on the Drill Down, but he asks his advertisers for so little money that it will hardly buy him a nice dinner each month. Adds on the podcast hosted by a man who has helped deliver probably 50 million page views since joining Digg two and a half years ago - are essentially free. Everyone reading here should go buy an ad right now, you'd be a fool not to given the price point.

That's genuinely not what it's about for MrBabyMan, he's not in it for the money. He just likes Digg, and he probably likes all the power he's got at the site - even if he does have to fend off a hostile cartoon from National Security geeks who happen to be a Digg employee's girlfriend sometimes.

He's human, too, so sometimes he fudges a little. "The only promotion I do," he said, "is Digging the stories my friends submit and keeping the chain of Digging going. That's the same thing everyone does and that's the system Digg has set up." Blind digging of friends' stories because they're your friends' stories, if that's what Sorcini is talking about, is frowned upon as contrary to the supposed essence of the site.

Generally speaking, Andrew Sorcini appears to be honestly dedicated to delivering value to the people of the Digg community. By being an entirely un-paid player in the game - he may be almost the only person in his circle whose exclusive motivation is benevolent. There's nothing wrong with making a living as a social media expert, though the term tends to be very loosely defined, but in their revolt against the financially incentivized, conspiratorial gaming of social news - those unhappy Digg users may have picked the least logical target in the guy at the top. There's no shortage of creeps in that scene but by all indications, MrBabyMan isn't one of them.

Is the kind-hearted MrBabyMan just a patsy for a shadowy world of less honest Digg power users? Is part of his job as top dog to be the fall guy when mass user distaste of other peoples' influence peddling and grey-hat tactics needs a scape goat? All of that seems possible. More likely, though, there's no one way to look at this story. The only constant, when I look at these events from different perspectives, is that Andrew Sorcini is a uniquely valuable member of the Digg community - whether they always appreciate him or not.

As you may have heard, we're big fans of RSS here at ReadWriteWeb. We've covered many RSS readers, aggregators, sites, and services in the past and have provided RSS tips in posts like "Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader" and "6 Ways to Filter Your RSS Feeds." We also like reading feeds and sharing some of our favorites with our readers. Over the past year or so, we've provided access to many RSS feeds and OPML files we thought our readers would enjoy. However, until now, those files have been spread out amongst our archived posts. Today, you can get access to all the RSS resources we've shared with you right here.

ReadWriteWeb Network

Of course, we have to begin by sharing our own feeds with you. The ReadWriteWeb network has several different feeds you can subscribe to, including:

RWW Network Feeds

• ReadWriteWeb
• ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-Up
• ReadWriteTalk (RSS)
• ReadWriteTalk (Add to iTunes)
• Last100
• AltSearchEngines

Some of the RWW Network writers also maintain their own personal sites you can subscribe to:

RWW Network Bloggers OPML (Download Here)

• Marshall Kirkpatrick (Personal)
• Josh Catone (Tumblog)
• Sarah Perez (Personal)
• Corvida (Personal)
• Sean Ammirati (Personal)
• Alex Iskold (Personal)
• Steve O'Hear (ZDNet)

Or just grab a "Best Of" OPML file for all of these: (Download Here)

RSS/OPML Files We've Shared

Our primary OPML resources come from this January post called "What's Next on the Web: a ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008," where we put together OPML files for the biggest trends in 2008: Open Data, Recommendation, Semantic Web, Mobile, and Visualization. From the post "WikiLeaks, Censorship and the Watchdog Web," we provided readers with many ways to keep track of leaks and news, one of which was a Governement Watchdogs Site OPML file. When we wrote about "How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet," we provided a "Best of the Weird Hunting Blogs" RSS feed created with Yahoo Pipes. And yesterday, on the article about "Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web," we rounded up some of the best Gen Y blogs into one OPML file.

Below you can get access to either the RSS or the OPML files for the feeds we've shared:

ReadWriteWeb 2008 Toolkit OPML Files (Save Each Link to Download File)

• RWW Open Data Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Recommendation Industry Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Semantic Web Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Mobile Feed Favorites OPML file
• RWW Visualization Feed Favorites OPML file

ReadWriteWeb 2008 Toolkit RSS Feeds (Subscribe - Copy & Paste to Your Reader)

• RWW Open Data Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW Recommendation Industry Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW SemWeb Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW Mobile Feeds - Best of Feed
• RWW Visualization Feeds - Best of Feed

Government Watchdogs OPML (Download Here)

• Wikileaks
• Wikileaks "Best Of"
• Cryptome's Greatest Hits

Best of the Weird Hunting Blogs RSS (Subscribe Here)

• LaughingSquid
• We Make Money Not Art
• Wooster Collective
• EveryoneForever
• WebUrbanist

Gen Y Greatest Hits OPML (Download Here)

• Ypulse
• My Gen Y Life
• Twenty Set
• Our American Shelf Life
• Millennial Leaders
• Lisa's Generation Relations Blog
• Modite
• Life Before Noon
• Generation Y Voodoo
• Personal Branding Blog
• Newly Corporate
• The Marketing Student
• Young and Frugal
• Employee Evolution
• PR Interactive

You can preview these RWW feeds in the widget below:

Bonus Content!

In the past, Marshall had also put together five of his favorite OPML on his personal site.

International Free Speech News (Download Here)

Not local, not issue specific, not necessarily from any particular perspective but big picture, popular news from folks who focus on environmental issues.

Contains:

• ACLU free speech press releases
• Article 19: Campaign for Global Free Expression
• Index on Censorship
• Institute for War and Peace Reporting
• Amnesty International news

Big Picture Eco News (Download Here)

Not local, not issue specific, not necessarily from any particular perspective but big picture, popular news from folks who focus on environmental issues.

Contains:

• Popular recent items tagged "environment" in Del.icio.us
• Environmental News Network
• Gristmill, the blog of Grist.org
• Sprol.com, using maps and pictures to examine eco troubles world wide
• Tree Hugger, eco news for the hip and urban 
• WorldChanging, a great group blog on many issues including eco solutions.

Non Profit/Net Squared (Download Here)

Feeds from non profit groups using Web 2.0 tools to share news about the non profit sector.

Contains:

• The 501c3 Cast, a great podcast about non profit work.
• Items tagged Net2 in Del.icio.us, a news wire promoted by Net Squared
• Net Squared Interviews, interviews of folks using Web 2.0 tools explicitly for social good.
• Net Squared Blog, group blog by staff and participants in the Net Squared community.
• Non Profit Online News, long one of the most respected sources on the subject.
• Today in Tech Soup, news from the non profit technology assistance group Tech Soup, parent of Net Squared.

Political Audio (Download Here)

Three of the most moving and informative news audio shows online.

Contains:

• Democracy Now!, a daily hour of powerful media.
• Free Speech Radio News, daily half hour from correspondents around the world.
• The Global Shortwave Report, weekly highlights from English language shortwave radio world wide - a paradigm shaker.

Vlogs - Video Blog (Download Here) 

Contains:

• Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth - Video, world traveling social justice multi media activist.
• Brave New Television
• Geek Entertainment TV, funny interviews with interesting people in the Web 2.0 world
• Vlog - Flux, awesome radical street videography

OpenID provider JanRain has launched an interesting project called Demand OpenID, which lets users click a bookmarklet whenever they are on a website that they want to request OpenID support on. It's a handy, if a touch rude, way to demonstrate user demand for OpenID on popular websites.

Right now the most popular services for users to demand OpenID are Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Facebook, Amazon and Google.

JanRain's Brian Ellin says the project was inspired by blogger Aaron Hockley's recent oath to no longer comment on tech blogs that fail to offer OpenID login. Way to go Aaron!

Bumps in the Road

Unfortunately the service doesn't check to see if there's OpenID login already available on the site you're on - so my apologies to photo sharing site Zooomr, for example, if I made them feel at all defensive in testing.

It would also be nice if there was some way to know that the vendors were made aware of the demands. One way I can think of would be to publish a feed of each demand and ping the blogsearch engines with that feed. Then each demand would get picked up by company PR monitoring blogsearch feeds for mentions. I could set that up myself using a scraping service and FeedBurner, but that might not be so nice.

Early shortcomings aside, Demand OpenID is a great and simple idea.

Until now I've been twittering every time I get angry about the lack of OpenID somewhere. Now I'll use the bookmarklet. You should too, everyone should. Demand OpenID is built on the Google App Engine, so it can take the kind of click quantities that the lack of OpenID adoption around the web warrants.

Thanks to the Vidoop blog, a great place to unearth all kinds of OpenID related news like this.

Snackr is a new Adobe AIR app that lets you display items in your RSS feeds in a beautiful scrolling ticker on any edge of your screen. I am absolutely giddy about it after only a few minutes of use. Snackr is something you'd supplement your existing reader with, not a replacement. It is not for the faint of heart or information averse, either.

If you've ever fantasized about having the river of news flow straight into your brain, this is the closest I've seen yet. I've uploaded a small OPML file of my top priority feeds, limited Snackr to displaying items from within the last 5 days and am in heaven. Read on for screenshots and some critique.

Snackr was built by Narciso Jaramillo, a long time Adobe developer now working on the Flex product line.

Below is a screenshot of the live ticker, paused when an item is clicked. The scrolling is really smooth, story order is randomized. When you click on an item, the full text will appear if it's available in the feed. The link at the bottom of the pop-up will take you to the full post.

You can have Snackr running at the top, bottom, left or right margin of your screen. I clapped my hands and jumped up and down like a little school girl upon seeing each different view for the first time.

The idea is not to read every item here, but to give your eye some opportunity to catch items it might not otherwise. I love it.

Wishes

So far I've only got two requests for Snackr development. The site supports authenticated feeds (password protected, something Google Reader can't do) which is great. When I click on an item from a particular filter's RSS feed in my GMail account though, the popup window prompts but doesn't allow me to log-in. I wish that were different.

Second, once I uploaded an OPML file, I ended up with some feeds I wanted to unsubscribe from and had to do so one at a time. Bulk feed management would be nice. A javascript bookmarklet to add a feed to Snackr with a click, when I discover it around the web, would be great too. Media handling could be improved as well.

All in all though, I am very excited to discover the app. It was the first app I happened to look at on FreshAIR Apps today, an AIR site we reviewed earlier this week. I plan to spend a lot more time on that site, as AIR is a very exciting platform.

Six weeks ago, ReadWriteWeb published their definitive list of the top Twitter clients. The methodology for that list was watching the Twitter public feed and logging tweet sources. However, how does the list of clients people are using match up the list of the ones people are talking about? Using data from blog search engine Twingly, we decided to see which Twitter clients are getting the most buzz on blogs. The result is a list of the most popular 3rd-party Twitter-apps according to the blogosphere.

This is a guest post from Anton Johansson, a business developer at the Swedish startup Twingly.com, which developing a spam-free blog search engine focused on Europe.

Top 5 Overall

• Twhirl
• Mobypicture
• Twitterfeed
• Twitteriffic
• Terraminds micro search

ReadWriteWeb's public feed study in April also found Twhirl to be the most popular Twitter client. It was helped in the blogosphere by all the buzz created by its acqusition by Seesmic last month. [Incidentally, that also drove a lot of traffic to our Twitter clients list post as well. -- Ed.]

Top 5 Desktop Apps

• Twhirl
• Twitteriffic
• Snitter
• Tweetr
• Twitteroo

The top two desktop apps -- Twhirl and Twitterific -- are again the same ones ReadWriteWeb saw last month in their study. But after that, things deviate a bit. Snitter, Tweetr, and Twitteroo were all farther down the list in terms of usage, but are getting a disproportionate amount of coverage in the blogosphere.

Top 5 Web Apps

• Mobypicture
• Twitterfeed
• Terraminds
• Twistori
• Summize

Launched just a few weeks ago, Twistori (RWW coverage) has already garnered a lot of attention. Interestingly, Twistori actually uses data from Summize, one of the more popular Twitter search engines -- and clearly one of the most talked about, as well.

Top 5 Mobile Apps

• Hahlo
• Cetwit
• Twitter Answers
• Twapper
• Twittai

There have been far fewer blog posts written about mobile Twitter applications in relation to other categories. Hahlo, the first iPhone and iPod Touch client for Twitter takes first place in terms of buzz, followed by Cetwit, a popular app for Windows Mobile. Twittai is a Java-based Twitter cell phone application.

Notes and Methodology:

We used the the list of Twitter apps on the Twitter Fan Wiki as our source of applications to watch for. The list contains 209 Twitter apps, most of which have not been linked to from the blogosphere at all.

LoudTwitter, an app that publishes tweets to blogs, was excluded because most of its links came from link backs included when the service pushes tweets to blog posts. They didn't get many mentions in posts specifically about them, but their autolinks generated a ton of links within the blogosphere.

Allen Stern points out that RSS filtering service AideRSS has added Twitter to its PostRank algorithm. AideRSS works by measuring social media interaction with blog posts, and then comparing them to what's normal for that blog. The service then algorithmically applies a ranking to each post allowing users to filter out only the best posts based on the theory that people will only bother interacting with the most interesting or worthwhile content.

We're huge fans of AideRSS at ReadWriteWeb. Not only have we written about them a lot, we've also used AideRSS to filter aggregate feeds for the top content for a number of our toolkit posts. Adding Twitter support is an interesting move because it confirms Twitter's growing influence in the social media space, and lets blog owners see how their content is being spread across the microblog service.

Since we published our first look at AideRSS last July, their PostRank algorithm has changed a lot. At launch, PostRank included information from comments, Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, IceRocket, and Bloglines -- now the latter three have been replaced with Twitter links and Google blog search conversations. Some of those changes likely had to do with API restrictions, some likely with just general tweaking to make the algorithm perform better.

Because AideRSS calculates PostRank against only that blog's past performance, the ranking is a fair representation of that blog's best work. For example, a PR 10 post on ReadWriteWeb would require different interaction metrics than a post on a small personal blog. PostRank would be easy to cheat -- you could comment a million times on your post, get your friends to Digg it, tweet it, add it it del.icio.us -- but since the service isn't measuring you against other blogs, there's really no incentive to cheat it.

AideRSS also announced support for OpenID.

The music search engine and Internet jukebox, Songza, lets you seek out any song on the web and stream it immediately. In January of this year, we announced the site's partnerships with Seeqpod and Skreemr, which allowed them to grown their online library to 28 million songs. Now, Songza grows again with a launch of a new Facebook app and the arrival of a Songza API.

The Songza Facebook app lets friends see what each other are listening to on the Songza web site. Whenever a song is added to your playlist, that information is posted to your mini-feed and your profile page. Your friends can then click the link to the song to be taken to the Songza site to listen to it for themselves. In order to use the Facebook app, you have to first sign up for an account at Songza.com

Songza in the Mini-Feed

Along with the Facebook app, Songza is now also offering RSS feeds for the site's top-played songs, the featured songs list, and each user's playlist of newly added tunes, which is found on the user profile page. With that last one, the user playlist feed, you now have the ability to add Songza to a lifestreaming service such as FriendFeed, for example.

The last part of the Songza announcement involves the launch of their API. By using the API, developers can build custom widgets and applications based on Songza data. The API can be used to access the featured songs list, a user's playlist, and the last ten songs a user has added to their playlist. At the moment, Songza isn't imposing any limitations on the number of times requests can be made to the API, but they do remind developers that their feeds only update every 15 minutes, so there isn't much point to polling more often than that. 

Because Songza finds its music on the internet, it can be useful for locating more obscure artists or live performances. And since the service doesn't allow for downloads, only streaming, it's legit. They even pay artists based on how many times a song was streamed via licenses with the major performing-rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC). However, the best thing about Songza is that you can listen to a song as many times as you want in its entirety, unlike Last.fm, whose on-demand service lets you play any particular song, too, but only in full three times before receiving a prompt to purchase it.