Who Joined Twitter When? Twitterholic Knows

Twitterholic added a couple of neat features.

First, they now sort Twitter users by when they joined.

They also now sort Twitter users by location. So, for example, you can now see who has the most followers among San Franciscans or New Yorkers.

In addition, you can also sort Twitter users by the number of updates or by how many they follow.

Finally, you can combine these. So now it's easy to find out who in New York has been on Twitter the longest. In addition, you can also now track the overall top 100 list via RSS. Here's the feed.

Visual Wikipedia Adds Context to Wikipedia

One of the key themes we'll see emerge this year is an evolution in user interface design and information architecture. It seems to happen every year.

In 2008 we saw the news feed and real-time web rise. In addition, we watched as social networking became more deeply embedded into an array of experiences, like news sites. Over the break I had a chance to update my XBox 360 to the new experience and I was knocked over by the design and new social networking features (note: Microsoft is an Edelman client).

What's next or 2009? I am not sure, but I do agree that context will become increasingly an important theme. Read Write Web has a great post summarizing where context is heading.

For an early taste of things to come, check out Visual Wikipedia. They're really on to something. The site, which is unaffiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation, layers on a ton of context around Wikipedia articles. It gets you thinking about what search and/or news delivery might look like one day.

For example, check out this article on Web 2.0. It's a reproduced page from the main Wikipedia site but it also includes an awesome map that points users to other relevant entries.

That's not all though. At the bottom of each page Visual Wikipedia pulls up videos from YouTube, as well as links to other services that offer additional context - Google, Yahoo News and Google Maps, to name three. This is the kind of context I wish that Mahalo would provide. When you couple their human-powered curation with contextual features, the result is something bigger.

In 2009 I am sure we'll see more experimentation with user interface design. It will be interesting to see which new models emerge and stick but I like where Visual Wikipedia is going.

links for 2009-01-04

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  twitter moms: the influential moms network
  
  
  Moms who Twitter, federated and ready for ads.
  
  
  (tags: twitter moms net Networking blogs)
  
  
• 
  
  12 Changes For 2009 | Success Begins Today
  
  
  Great list.
  
  
  (tags: 2009 lifehacks)
  
  
• 
  
  FT Techfeed - FriendFeed
  
  
  A Friendfeed Room managed by reporters in the Financial Times San Francisco bureau. It welcomes comments and conversation.
  
  
  (tags: FriendFeed Journalism financialtimes Newspapers)
  
  
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  blog.reddit -- what's new on reddit: Sponsored Links on reddit
  
  
  Reddit starts integrating sponsored links next to the content.
  
  
  (tags: reddit socialbookmarking advertising)
  
  
• 
  
  Youngest Blogger - Top 100 World's Youngest Bloggers
  
  
  The top 100 world's youngest bloggers - by one count.
  
  
  (tags: Blogs kids)
  
  
• 
  
  Tagging Strategies For Successful Social Bookmarking | Social Media Explorer
  (tags: delicious tagging socialbookmarking)
  
  
• 
  
  The Ultra-Mega 2009 conference list--80+ events to note - Susan Mernit's Blog
  (tags: events conferences 2009)
  
  

Scribd and Zinio Offer Full-Length Books in a Browser

Two digital publishing sites have quietly started rolling out electronic books that can be viewed just using a web browser.

Random House is now offering several full length books for free on Scribd. The choices include The Surgeon, a 2002 novel by bestselling author Tess Gerritsen. What's also significant here is that Gerritsen is making the book available as a DRM-free PDF download.

Meanwhile Zinio, a site that offers digital magazines and textbooks, is expanding into mass-market books. Zinio has opened a digital bookstore that features a handful of titles. These include technology tomes like Social Media Marketing in an Hour a Day.

It's great to see the publishing industry experimenting with new formats. I personally think that book publishing is primed to see the same kind of disruption that the music business saw earlier the decade. This is why I am a fan of sites like Safari Books Online.

As mobile devices become more sophisticated, many consumers will aspire to do more in their browsers. This includes, for some, reading books. I think this will lead to a lot of experimentation with different business models. Two that come to mind are a-la-carte pricing for specific chapters and/or books that are free and supported through advertising.

Scribd, which has seen strong growth this year, and Zinio won't be alone. Google could start monetizing out of print books or even current bestsellers in a manner similar to what it has done with magazines. In addition, I would be highly surprised if by year's end the Amazon Kindle wasn't just a gadget but a platform that operates on many devices, including most mobile phones. They will increasingly face pressure from the iPhone.

It's early going and electronic reading is not for everyone. However, millennials and their younger sibings expect all media to be searchable and available in chunks. So this is why I am bullish about ebooks and think they will have a breakout year in 2009.

WhosTalkin Launches Social Media Search Aggregator

One of my hopes for 2009 is that we'll see greater innovation in the social media search space - both free and premium. I have a bunch that I am trying out now: SM2, Zuula, Blogscope.net and Wikio and others. What follows is a first look at a new site called WhosTalkin that launched its public beta yesterday after seven months of development. (Hat tip to adthinktank.com)

WhosTalking is a metasearch engine that in one place aggregates results from the major free tools for scanning blogs and blog comments, news sites, social networks, video hubs, image, forum and tag sites. It rolls up results from over 60 sites, such as BackType, Technorati, IceRocket, Google Blog Search, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Twitter, Board Reader and many more.

The site has a nice interface that displays results using frames. Just click on the navigational links on the left hand side and they show up on the right. The quality of the results, I find, is hit or miss depending on the source. For example, Bloglines and Backtype results feel very fresh. However, Twitter search results are lacking compared to what you get from search.twitter.com.

In addition, there are two other major limitations. First, you can't view all results in a single view, even by channel (e.g. blogs, social networks, etc.). The other is that you can't save searches or generate RSS feeds - at least yet. These and other services are forthcoming for paid subscribers. There is also a URL API for developers.

At first glance, I am excited about WhosTalkin. There was a ton of innovation in the social media search space in the middle part of the decade. Then it seems like a lot of people talk their eye off the ball once Google Blog Search launched and when Twitter bought Summize.

Given that WhosTalking is pulling results from other sites, I expect they can improve the quality of results rather quickly. Although you have to wonder how the other sites will feel about having their data scraped.

Still, given the way the landscape continues to expand, I think an aggregated approach like this one is the right way to go. And this is a good first effort. If WhosTalkin can improve the timeliness and relevance across all the engines they crawl, then it could become a serious player since they leverage everyone else's databases.