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Posts Tagged ‘Popularity Contest’

Keep Your Friends Organized: Twitter Expands Lists Beta

Twitter rolled out a limited beta of its new lists feature to a larger number of users late last night. With these new lists, Twitter users can now organize their friends into groups. By default, these lists are private, but one of the most interesting aspects of this new feature is that users can also make their lists public – something many Twitter users have been looking forward to for a long time.

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Third-party Twitter clients and tools like TweepML, TweetDeck, Brizzly, Nambu and others all offer their own implementation of this feature, though Twitter also gave early API access to this feature to a number of third-party developers.

Currently, adding friends to a list is still a bit cumbersome and either involves a lot of clicks from a user’s profile page or a visit to the ‘following’ page. The list of users you follow, however, is organized in chronological order, so finding users on this list is quite hard.

One interesting aspect of this feature is that a user’s profile will now also show a section that highlights the public lists a user was added to. This could have some interesting social ramifications. After all, Twitter’s emphasis on follower counts has already created a bit of a popularity contest and now being part of a certain list that is being curated by the right person could add yet another dimension to this issue.

Of course, these new lists will open up avenues for a new products as well. Third-party tools, for example, can now look at the public lists and maybe create new algorithms to rank a user’s authority on Twitter.

Import/Export

Of course, these are still the early days for Twitter lists, but hopefully we will also soon see a feature in third-party clients like TweetDeck that will allow users to export their existing lists or import their new lists from Twitter. Chances are that this is just a matter of time and this will probably be a default option in third-party clients once Twitter rolls this feature out to the majority of its users.

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Rising to the Top: 5 ways indie developers succeed on the App Store
It’s no secret: there’s some Benjamins to be made on the App Store. In fact, the App Store is now a $2.4 billion dollar per year business, according to AdMob’s monthly mobile metrics report. Here’s another fun fact you probably already know: most app developers fade into the App Store abyss long before they ever find fame and fortune. Even if you ignore the junk apps and the million e-books each published as a separate app, you’ve still got a solid 5-10,000 apps clamoring to grab a piece of the App Store pie. Many developers feel like the App Store is akin to high school: an anarchic and ruthless popularity contest to see who’s got the biggest, well, um, you know what I mean.

That brings us to the $2.4 billion question: how do you succeed on the App Store? We’ve spent the last few weeks trying to answer that question and have come up with a list of tips and tricks that’ll help you edge your way into App Store glory. Now, none of these will replace making a good product or compensate for a million-dollar advertising and PR budget, but they’ll likely help you get noticed or keep your current momentum.

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Top 10 Most Exciting Web Apps or Services

Yesterday we asked what 3 web apps or services you find the most exciting right now. Not your 3 most used or favorite, but the apps that currently make you tingly with excitement. We got some great responses in the comments, so in this post we pick out our top 10 from your choices.

We’ve chosen the 10 in two batches. Firstly, the services that got the most number of mentions. As expected, these are well known apps that millions of people are using (or will use when it’s launched, in the case of Google Wave). We didn’t want this to be purely a popularity contest though, so we’ve also selected 5 lesser known web apps or services. Those apps all got multiple mentions and in our estimation they’re each worthy of being labeled ‘exciting.’

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Note: we offer the full list of apps voted for at the bottom of this post.

Top 5 Apps

1. Twitter 25 votes
2. Gmail 17 votes
3. Google Reader 11 votes
4. Google Wave 11 votes
5. Facebook 6 votes

This was fairly predictable, with Twitter well out in front. There’s been such excitement and activity around Twitter this year, that nobody could really argue against Twitter being the most exciting web or service around in 2009.

Twitter was followed by no less than 3 Google products, one of them as yet unreleased! (Google Wave). This shows that Google still has that aura of being ‘exciting,’ at least with ReadWriteWeb’s early adopter readers.

Facebook slipped in at number 5, so it too seems to have kept up its reputation for being innovative.

Top 5 Lesser Known Apps

6. Spotify (RWW coverage): this Swedish online music app is about to launch in the U.S. and is highly anticipated by that market. It’s so exciting that we’ve predicted it may even threaten Apple’s near monopoly iTunes product. We’ll have to wait and see what happens on that front, but Spotify certainly has a lot of people salivating! Other online music services mentioned multiple times in our poll were Blip.fm and last.fm.

7. Dropbox: this was listed as one of ReadWriteWeb’s 5 Favorite Online Storage Services in September last year. At the time it had only just opened to the public, but it has since gained many fans. Its integration with the desktop is perhaps the most exciting feature of this product. Other features we like are the sharing of folders and preservation of every revision of every file.

8. Seesmic: A number of Twitter clients were mentioned, like Hootsuite and TweetDeck. But one which has impressed us a lot in recent months has been Seesmic. In July we reported that Seesmic, previously only a desktop client, had released a web-based version and a new version of the Seesmic desktop. The web-based version of Seesmic recreates most of the features that are currently available in the desktop application. Our own Frederic Lardinois listed Seesmic Web as one of his 3 most exciting apps.

9. Wolfram|Alpha: Ever since Wolfram|Alpha’s admittedly much hyped launch in May, we’ve been tracking this innovative product closely. It’s a self-described “computational knowledge engine” and while it’s not quite the Google killer some predicted, it has many potential uses – which makes it an exciting app to follow for us.

10. Pubsubhubbub: With a name harder to say that ‘ReadWriteWeb,’ this new Google Code project has excited the web development community. It’s not a product, but a protocol. The project page describes it as a "simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom (and RSS)." In laymans terms, it delivers your RSS feeds to you much quicker – in near real time.

To understand the context of Pubsubhubbub and similar exciting initiatives more, read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s fine analysis of Distributed Social Networking.

There you have it, the top 10 most exciting web apps and services according to the ReadWriteWeb community! Let us know your further thoughts in the comments.

Here is the full list, a snapshot taken when the original post had 66 comments (sans links, but Google – or Bing – any app that catches your eye).

Twitter 25
Gmail 17
Google Reader 11
Google Wave 11
Facebook 6
Blip.fm 4
Dropbox 4
Hootsuite 4
Wolfram Alpha 4
Pubsubhubbub 3
Scribd 3
Seesmic 3
Spotify 3
Wordpress 3
Apture 2
Boxee 2
Delicious 2
Flickr 2
foursquare 2
getsatisfaction 2
Google 2
last.fm 2
PixelPipe 2
Posterous 2
Skype 2
TweetDeck 2
Xmarks 2
Appboy
Bespin
Bit.ly
Bloom
Brightkite
Caspio
chi.mp
Cliqset
Deezer
Digg
Dizzler
Dopplr
Edmodo
Evernote
Feedly
FriendFeed
Gmail chat
GMX Mail
Google Analytics
Google Analytics API
Google APIs
Google Docs
Google insight
Google Maps
Google Notebook
Google Voice
Hype Machine
Instant XRay
Instapaper
iWantMyName
JaJah
JobTitled
Jolicloud
Jott
justbought.it
Know Thy Congressman
kreeo
Lala
Layar
LinkedIn
metafilter
mint
MobileMe
My Name is E
Nanovor
Newsmap.jp
Pachube
Parade
Peoplebrowsr
PocketSmith
Ponoko
PopUrls
Prezi
Primal Fusion
Salesforce
Shapeways
SocialText
SoundCloud
Sweetcron
Tarpipe
TimeXchange.net
Tracer
Tumblr
tweetworks
Twitterfall
urtak
W3C QA Toolbox
XCODE
Youtube

Cat pic: Mr.Thomas

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