While Twitter might be going through a rather rough time right now, a lot of developers are still banking on its success. There are already a lot of desktop clients available for Twitter, but besides some cosmetic differences, most of them look and act very much the same. TweetDeck, which released a new beta today, takes a refreshingly different approach by not only integrating support for search through Summize, but also by adding groups and by displaying more than one column at a time.

Features

TweetDeck is an AIR based application that was first discovered by Louis Gray. The major difference between TweetDeck and other Twitter clients like Twhirl, Snitter, Twitteriffic, and AlertThingy, is that it displays more than one column of information at a time. In TweetDeck, you can define columns for your replies, numerous searches in Summize, as well as groups. You can define up to 10 different columns.

The developers seem keenly aware of Twitter's problems and provide you with a status message at the bottom right of the client. We have seen it alternate between "Pretty much okay" and "Rate limit exceeded'" today. There is also an indication for when the last tweets were received in the bottom left corner of the application.

Columns

The column display can be rearranged according to taste - only the "All Tweets" column is fixed on the left side. Having all these columns open at the same time obviously means that TweetDeck occupies a lot more screen estate than other Twitter clients - however, the amount of information displayed is far greater as well. For some, this is a trade-off worth making, while it might be a deal-breaker for others.

Groups

The groups function is very useful, especially for people who follow a lot of people, but still want to be able to quickly see what their closest friends (or competitors) are saying. Usually, these messages are easily drowned out in the mass of tweets that come in at any given time.

Once a group is created, you can make changes to it by clicking on its name.

Right now, when you create a group, TweetDeck doesn't display a list of all your friends right away. As TweetDeck becomes aware of more of your friends over time, this problem disappears as TweetDeck's internal database picks up on your friends, but this might be quite confusing and frustrating for first time users.

Preferences

One area where TweetDeck could use some more work is in its preferences - right now, there pretty much are none. You can't change the speed by which it checks for new tweets, there are no themes to chose from (why, by the way, do all AIR apps have to be so dark?), and there is no way to change the size of the fonts.

Verdict

TweetDeck is probably not for everyone, but especially with Twitter's track function still being offline for now, the ability to have a persistent Summize search right in the client is a great feature just by itself. Once the group function works a little bit better, I would venture to guess that a lot more people will start using it. But even in its current state, it is definitely worth a closer look.

It’s not the 4th of July without the Coney Island Hot-Dog Eating Contest (that’s how we celebrate in Brooklyn, by stuffing our faces with as many hot dogs we can fit). This year’s winner is defending champion Joey “Jaws” Chestunt, who won in overtime from six-time champion Takeru Kobayashi.

Both ate 59 hot dogs during the 10 minute contest (down from 12 minutes in the past), and then the contest went into overtime to see who could eat five additional hot dogs the fastest. CNN has all the details, but Kurt Dietrich’s wonderful Flickr photos tell the story best.

Happy 4th of July everyone. Try to go easy on those hot dogs.

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The Iranian parliament is set to debate a draft bill that would add a number of crimes to the list of those that can result in execution, among them "establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy." Apostasy means the abandonment of a religion. The official Iranian news agency reports that the bill is intended to "toughen punishment for harming mental security in society."

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Iranian_Parliament_May_Develop_Death_Penalty_for_Bloggers';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';Iran already imprisons bloggers for challenging the government and executed 317 people for other crimes last year, up from 177 the year prior according to Amnesty International.

The French Press Agency reported on the bill yesterday and according to The Committee to Protect Bloggers, the BBC's The World radio show will offer a more in depth report in the coming days.

Blogging is wildly popular in Iran, where a new generation of young people frequently challenge the old, hyper-conservative religious government. The Committe to Protect Bloggers says that Iran is "among the worst offenders in terms of harassing, arresting and imprisoning bloggers, as well as students." You can see the group's extensive coverage of Iranian cyber-censorship and harrasment of bloggers here. The Iranian government has blocked access to Facebook, Yahoo! and Flickr, among other sites.

We at ReadWriteWeb condemn the application of the death penalty to bloggers as itself an abhorent crime. Cultural relativism has its place, but this isn't it. We want to offer our support to the new generation of Iranian young people struggling for freedom online and elsewhere, in any way we can, short of a US invasion of the country.

As Twitter began to fail on a regular basis, many of its users turned to other micro-blogging services to continue on with their 140-character lifestyle. Some returned to Jaiku or Pownce, others starting plurking, and just recently, an open source Twitter clone launched called identi.ca which has people "denting" (Yes, really - it won the vote). And then there are the true social media addicts who joined each one of these services as they launched. For these folks, maintaining a presence in all the communities can be difficult, which is why finding a universal status updating service can help.

To update your social status on multiple services, there are several different options to choose from. We've listed some of the most popular ones below:

HelloTxt

HelloTxt was one of the first status updating services to arrive and still has the biggest list of supported services - currently 21 - to choose from. This list is the largest thanks to HelloTxt's support of several Twitter clone services that were either built for or that have attracted a non-English speaking userbase like the popular Italian service Meemi, the German and French Frazr, and the Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French beemood.

HelloTxt is also available on the go on your mobile at m.hellotxt.com, via email, and via SMS. There's a facebook application, too.

Supported Services: Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, MySpace, Brightkite, Bebo, LinkedIn, Hi5, Plaxo, Tumblr, Meemi, Beemood, Plurk, Gozub, Frazr, Numpa, Mexicodiario, Feecle, Fanfou, Identica.

Ping.fm

Ping.fm is a newcomer, still in private beta (get in with the invite code "pingyoulater"), and is fast becoming a popular competitor to HelloTxt. It doesn't have any of the smaller, foreign language services, but it still has a long list of services available - 17 in total at the moment - including a couple that HelloTxt misses like Xanga and Blogger.

In addition to the Ping.fm Facebook app, Ping.fm integrates with IM services like AOL, Google Talk, and Yahoo! Messenger. There's also an iGoogle Gadget, a mobile web page, and an iPhone web app available. Profilactic uses Ping.fm's API to power their status updating service.

Supported services: Bebo, Blogger, Brightkite, Facebook, hi5, Identi.ca, Jaiku, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plaxo Pulse, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, Xanga.

Sendible

Sendible is the latest addition to the list of social media message-sending apps, this one more focused on the ability to schedule your messages than to do mass updates. Although the service supports several different services with more on the way, they have not yet provided an easy way to update all the services at once. However, the fact that messages can be scheduled is Sendible's unique feature, which is why it will have some draw - at least until another competitor comes along offering this and universal updates, too.

Supported services: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, SMS, and email. They will also soon be supporting Friendster, Hi5, Orkut and Xing.

Read our review of Sendible here.

SocialThing!

Somewhat mistakenly hailed as a competitor to FriendFeed, SocialThing's goal is really to be more of a "digital life manager" instead. Yes, it does stream your social media a la FriendFeed, but it also allows you to interact with that stream by sending data back to the supported services. In addition, you can use SocialThing! to update your status at any time by clicking on the "Post" link found on the top-right of the homepage.

Supported services: del.icio.us, Digg, Last.fm, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook, flickr, Pownce. In progress are LiveJournal, MySpace, and RSS. Users can also vote on what services will be added next.

Read our interview with SocialThing! founder, Matt Galligan here and a review of SocialThing! here.

Minggl

Minggl is a social interaction manager that comes in the form of a browser toolbar for Firefox 1.5+ and IE6+. With this toolbar, you can auto-login to your social networks at once and stay updated with the latest info about your friends' activity on the various services. Via its "Status Blaster" feature, you can also easily update all the multiple social networks Minggl supports at the same time.

Supported services: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg

Apps!

There are several apps out there that allow you to interact with the various social services you use without logging into the services' web sites. However, the problem is that most of these apps focus on just one or two services, usually FriendFeed and Twitter. If that's all you need, then there are tons of apps to choose from including Twhirl, Alert Thingy, bTT, feedalizr, and mySocial AIR. (Plurkers can use Plurkair or Plurk It.)

Mac OS users have it even better, though - they have access to a downloadable app, MoodBlast, which updates Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce, Jaiku, Facebook, Skype, Adium, and iChat.

However, what we're really in need of is a cross-platform app that does the same. For example, Ping.fm or HelloTxt on AIR would rock. Someone build that please?

Read a review of Twhirl and Alert Thingy here.

Google's Street View launched in the US last May, but expanding the service to Europe is proving to be a bit more difficult for Google. The Google Maps blog today announced the release of Street View for the route of the Tour de France, but privacy activists in England are anything but amused by the prospect of Google starting to photograph the streets of London.

England's Privacy International doesn't trust in Google's ability to automatically blur faces. While in the US, photographing people in the street is absolutely legal without the need to ask for consent, in the UK, anyone who appears in a photo that is used commercially has to grant consent. Google is rumored to have started taking pictures in the UK this week.

However, Google's experiment with its face blurring technology in New York shows that they are quite capable of employing this technology. Google already blurs all license plate numbers in Street View as well.

This is, of course, a week where Google's privacy policies have been in the news almost every single day (and where Google finally put its privacy policy on its front page). After losing the private data of quite a few of its employees and being forced to release the records of its YouTube users to Viacom, Google was probably hoping to make the news today by having a little Uncle Sam in Street View to celebrate the 4th of July and by releasing Street View for the route of the Tour de France (after all, this is the first European appearance of Street View).

The launch of Twitter clone Identi.ca earlier this week caused a bit of a blogstorm because it appears to have a solution to Twitter’s all-too-regular downtime. (That problem has reached comical proportions, with the familiar Twitter Fail Whale now appearing on T-shirts and kitschy art).

Identi.ca’s answer to Twitter’s scaling issues is by open-sourcing its code and encouraging others to host Identi.ca on their own servers, thus distributing the load. The service also supports other open standards, such as OpenID and a new one called OpenMicroblogging. Based on OAuth, the OpenMicroblogging standard is aimed at making it easy for people on other messaging services to subscribe to Identi.ca users and vice versa.

Identi.ca is the brainchild of Canadian developer Evan Prodromou, who explains the thinking behind the project here. He has a lot of good ideas. In particular, we agree that decentralizing Twitter is the key to making it scale better, although there are other ways to do that as well. The service is also based on the idea that you can take your data with you at any time to any other microblogging service.

But for now, Identi.ca is only for super-early adopters. It lacks some basic functionality, such as the ability to search for other users to follow or to import your contacts from other services. (I guess you are supposed to e-mail all your friends the link to your Identi.ca profile so that they can subscribe to you or just hope they find your name on the public feed). These problems are easy enough to address, and Identi.ca has along list of features it is working on.

The bigger problem with Identi.ca is simply that it is not Twitter. However annoying Twitter’s erratic outages may be, it still has the advantage of having many more users than any other competing service. If everyone is on Twitter, what’s the point of going to Identi.ca? That can change over time, obviously, especially if Twitter does not get its act together. But the inconvenience of switching means that it still has time to fix itself.

That does not mean Twitter can afford to ignore the excitement generated by Identi.ca. In fact, it should adopt some of its ideas, like decentralizing its messaging system and making it easy for people to export their friends and data to other services.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Polymeme is a new memetracker that bills itself as "a polymath's guide to news." Polymeme is the brainchild of Evgeny Morozov who started the project because of his frustration with most current memetrackers and the echo chamber effect often associated with them. Polymeme is based on Drupal and uses Reuter's OpenCalais to tag and index the 25,000 blogs it tracks.

Polymeme is trying to create what it calls a 'social infrastructure' for the non-tech and non-US politics blogospheres by creating an outlet for bloggers in fields ranging from economics to social science and education.

Polymeme is an ambitious project and it goes up against more established meme trackers like Tailrank, Megite, Techmeme and Memeorandum, as well as the broad range of social news sites like Digg, Newsvine, and Yahoo! Buzz.

Hybrid Model

Polymeme is a hybrid system. Its front page is determined by a group of editors who pick the most interesting stories to be featured on the site from the pool of popular stories in the blogosphere as determined by Polymeme's memetracker back-end. This memetracker is never fully exposed to users, but the 'Popular Memes' section is determined algorithmically.

Because Polymeme only has a limited pool of editors, it can take some time for a story to appear on the front page. As Evgeny pointed out to us, though, having editors look for stories that would otherwise stay off the radar is 'a feature, not a bug.' Also, Polymeme argues that while the tech blogosphere moves very fast, other blogging verticals move a lot slower. In general, the site refreshes every 2-3 hours.

In many respects, this approach does resemble a newspaper or journal more than a memetracker - but maybe that doesn't come as a surprise, given Evgeny's background as a journalist.

Features

While the site works very well without creating an account, logging into the site allows users to personalize the news selection and create personalized RSS feeds or email alerts. What Polymeme doesn't do is create a personalized feed based on keywords or on a user's OPML file like Megite does. For now, the personalization options stop at choosing topics from a menu of different sections of the site .

Polymeme's Buzz section is another interesting feature of the site. Buzz is basically a tag-cloud interface to Polymeme based on the tags automatically created by OpenCalais, and while it broke once or twice during testing, it does present an interesting way for browsing blogs.

Verdict

Where Polymeme really shines is in the selection of blogs it tracks, which is extremely wide and global in its scope. Looking at the articles featured on Polymeme today, there is very little overlap with those of other memetrackers.

Polymeme is an interesting experiment. The hybrid model of tracking memes but also employing editors might seem a bit strange at first, but so far, the editors have done a good job at highlighting interesting stories that did mostly fly under the radar of the traditional memetrackers.

Whether Polymeme can help us break out of the echo chamber (or whether it just creates a bigger echo chamber) remains to be seen - for now, it's an experiment worth taking a look at.

Google Earth is turning out to be a great resource for scientists to visualize and communicate the phenomena they study. You can see the migration patterns of endangered and other threatened animals, based on data collected by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. (The image above shows the range of both the Northern spotted owl and the Mexican spotted owl).

Anybody can take geographical data and turn it into a layer on Google Earth. Scientists are doing this in droves. You can also track storms, the paths of solar eclipses, volcano activity, arctic ice melting, bird flu mutations and biomaps of emotional stress levels in different cities (see this Popular Science article for more info).

Since these are all KML files, they could be made into layers on the regular Google Maps as well. Although they wouldn’t look as cool, more people would see them.

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Mario Heiderich has released qUIpt, a library that uses the window.name property to store away useful data, in this case JavaScript.

How does it work?

• It checks for the contents of window.name while your page is being loaded.
• If there’s nothing inside the window.name cache the JS files defined by you are fetched via XHR
• The same happens if the users enters your site for the first time of his current browser session or if document.referrer is off-domain or empty
• After that the contents of window.name are being evaluated
• If the user requests the next page on your domain the JS files are directly taken from window.name - no more requests necessary

You can check out an example of it at work

For users of the Windows Mobile platform, visiting Facebook while on the go meant loading up the mobile web page in their device's browser. Meanwhile, Blackberry users have had their own downloadable app since late 2007. But now, as of today, there is at long last a downloadable application just for Windows Mobile users, FriendMobilizer.

Today Macrospecs, Inc. has launched FriendMobilizer, a new software application for Windows Mobile phones that gives you full access to your Facebook account. Unlike other Windows Mobile Facebook apps like Snap2Face, which only provides for photo uploads, FriendMobilizer gives Windows Mobile users an app that's comparable in feature set to the Blackberry version.

With FriendMobilizer, you can view your friend's information and profiles, write on their walls, browse photo albums, approve friend requests, view group and event invites, read your new wall posts, read the messages in your inbox, update your status, and more.

Click Image to See Larger Version

The application is currently available for both Windows Mobile devices and Pocket PCs and can be downloaded from the web site at www.faceofmobile.com. However, according to the company, the generic software platform developed for FriendMobilizer will soon be ported to other mobile OS's as well. In addition, the company plans to build mobile apps for other social networks in the future.

Microsoft has come out with a road map for the Ajax side of ASP.NET, which has been simplified to be just: Framework and tools in one versioned package; Ajax components will be released separately on Codeplex.

There is a bold goal at the beginning of the document (why is the doc a PDF/.doc and not just HTML!!!):

Make ASP.NET Ajax the first-class choice for all Web 2.0 developers

They are going to be catching up with richer CSS selection and DOM manipulation:

PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:

1.  
2. $query(“textarea.rich”)
3.   .addHandler(“focus”, function(e) {
4.     Sys.Debug.trace(“focused into “ + (e.eventTarget.id || “?”));
5.   })
6.   .setStyle(“width”, function() {
7.     return (document.body.clientWidth – 10) + “px”;
8.   })
9.   .create(Contoso.UI.RichTextBehavior, {
10.     showToolbar: true,
11.     fonts: [“Arial”, “Times”, “Courier”]
12.   });
13.  

We have got some animation going on:

PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:

1.  
2. $query(“.sprite”).animate([
3.     new Sys.Animation.FadeIn(300),
4.     {
5.       “style.backgroundColor”: “#ff0000”,
6.       “style.fontSize”: “2em”),
7.       duration: 500
8.     },
9.     new Sys.Animation.FadeOut(300)
10.   ])
11. );
12.  

What else?

• Accessibility
• Drag & Drop
• Client-side Controls and Behavior
• Interoperability: OpenAjax hub support
• Tooling, tooling, tooling

What does your CEO do? Paul Colton, CEO of Aptana, gets his fingers dirty. He just wrote a post about accessing COM objects from JavaScript with Jaxer.

This is possible as the JavaScript is running on the server, and this server is running on Windows. You can download the source code to check it all out.

PLAIN TEXT HTML:

1.  
2. <html>
3.      <body>
4.          <script runat="server-proxy">
5.              function rotate(angle)
6.              {
7.                  var img = COMObject("ImageProcessor.ImageProcessing");
8.  
9.                  img.LoadImage(Jaxer.request.documentRoot + "/photo.jpg");
10.                  img.RotateImage(angle);
11.                  img.SaveImage(Jaxer.request.documentRoot + "/new.jpg");
12.              }
13.          </script>
14.          <input id="angle"/>
15.          <input type="button" value="Rotate"
16.                         onclick="rotate(document.getElementById('angle').value);
17.                                 document.getElementById('img').src =
18.                                 document.getElementById('img').src + '?' + new Date()"/>
19.          <br />
20.          <img id='img' src="new.jpg"/>
21.      </body>
22. </html>
23.  

What if you could encode a Jar file as an image and trick the browser to run it? This is what Ben Lorica reported from a black hat briefing webinar:

During a recent webinar to promote the upcoming Black Hat briefings in Las Vegas, a group of hackers announced the creation of a hybrid file that can potentially bypass a browser's same origin policy. They created a GIF file that also happens to be a JAR file ( a "GIFAR" file). Once uploaded onto a web site, and assuming the web server runs a JVM, it allows one to run a malicious java applet on someone else's web server.

Details were not provided, since the hackers claim that Sun is still working on a patch. For more on hybrid (image) files as attack vectors, go to minute 41:23 of the webinar.

Tomorrow we celebrate July 4th, and a week later our long National Nightmare is over. On the 11th we deposit our 2G iPhones in the FriendFeed donation bins and officially hook ourselves up to the Enterprise iPhone. The ePhone will change how we work and play, and in the process free us from the tyranny of our jobs as consumers.

When the iPhone shipped last year, IT responded with a wave of dismissal to the shiny new platform. No keyboard, no push email, no secure deployability, and certainly no way to decommission the phone on exit from a company

Continue reading on TechcrunchIT >>

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