Are you addicted to Twitter? Do you have an iPad? Even if the answer to both is “no” right now, after you see Twitter for iPad, those answers are going to change — quickly.

Yes, the wait is over. Launching tonight in the App Store is Twitter for iPad — the first official native iPad app from the company. We all knew it was coming (Twitter even said so a few months ago), but it has been a long wait. It was definitely worth it.

Like most people, I wander into hyperbole from time to time. But it has now been a few days since I first played with Twitter for iPad, and I still think it is hands-down the best iPad app out there. It’s that good. With all due respect to Reeder, Instapaper, Flipboard, and Pulse, this is now going to be my go-to app for just about everything related to reading news. It’s simply such a great experience for reading tweets — and more importantly, reading the links your friends share.

What Twitter has done is create an amazing user experience for reading information. This is thanks to an intuitive user interface that layers on top of itself. So, for example, if I click on a link in my tweet stream, I’ll have a new layer that rolls over to show that webpage in a customized browser window. If you’ve used Flipboard, it’s somewhat similar, but better because it’s much easier to go back to where ever you previously were before you clicked the link. You simply swipe something to the side to move it temporarily or swipe it again to get it off the screen (in portrait mode anyway, where there’s less space).

Something else that’s awesome: when you highlight a tweet by clicking on it, it’s now pinned to the top or bottom of the screen as you scroll through your stream. This is great if it’s something you want to reference. A lot of thought has been put into these type of saving state actions within this app. It’s simple to save a draft and go back to it, for example (much easier than with Twitter for iPhone). Or to reference one of these pinned tweets in your own tweet.

There are also some great new gestures that Twitter came up with for this app. For example, if you pinch-outward on a tweet, it will unfold to show you more information about the Twitter user. Better may be the way you can swipe down with two fingers on any tweet to see a full conversation in context. It’s the little things like this that make the app great — Apple-like, even.

Overall, the app looks and feels quite a bit different from Twitter for iPhone (which Twitter built from Tweetie — developer Loren Brichter’s client that they acquired earlier this year). But Twitter’s Leland Rechis assures me it’s using all the same stuff on the backend. In fact, Twitter is now a universal app — meaning it’s one app that will work on both the iPhone and iPad, it will just look different depending on which device you’re using it on.

Rechis also says Twitter started experimenting with some newer things on the iPad version that haven’t yet been brought to the iPhone version, but undoubtedly will. A great example here is that when you click through to a user’s profile page, you’ll see at the bottom a list of users similar to that user that you may like to follow.

Rechis also notes the importance of the logged-out view — something Twitter worked on before the iPhone version launch. Twitter wants to make the service as useful as possible to people even if they don’t have an account. The idea, of course, is that they’ll hopefully sign up for one — and this app may give them the most reason to yet. When logged out, you’ll be able to see tweet streams based on hot topics.

“Tweets in general are not just what I’m doing, they have an incredible amount of metadata,” Rechis says speaking to why they created this layering idea for the app. Almost 25 percent of all tweets now have a link in them, he says. This app is perfect for those tweets, and content consumption and exploration in general.

Rechis notes that one of his favorite things about tablets is how they eliminate window management. At the same time, you need some way to manage all this information. He notes that Brichter’s original concept was stacks of sheets of paper that you quickly shuffle through. Other members of Twitter including Rechis refined that idea and the end result is Twitter for iPad.

That’s roughly 750 words about the app — but you really just need to see it, and use it. It will definitely be my go-to way to browse Twitter from now on. It’s that good.

Look for it in the App Store shortly. It will be a free download.

Update: I should note that for some of these more advanced gestures, there is a slight learning curve. That said, you can do everything without using those gestures, so it’s not a big deal — it’s just icing on the cake. And yes, Twitter is trying to come up with the best way to teach users about these new gestures.

Excited about your new Facebook page but don’t know what’s next?  What does a truly advanced company look like in social business?  They can say yes to seven or more of these ten criteria.

We’ve been interviewing the most sophisticated brands in the world when it comes to social business for our upcoming report on “Enterprise Social Strategists Role”.  We’ve come to learn which companies are advanced and why.  Secondly, I meet a variety of companies who tell me they are “Very advanced, having done this for a few years, and have dozens of Facebook efforts” but when I ask them some specific questions on their sophistication, they often retract their statement.

How to tell if your Company is Advanced: 10 Criteria Of Social Business Maturity.
Corporations that have these and other following elements in place, may truly be sophisticated when it comes to social business:

1. Clear understanding of their customers socialgraphics. Clear understanding of how their customers use social media by knowing the socialgraphics of your customers.  Granular knowledge of where their customers are, which behaviors they use, who they trust for information, and how they influence their peers in the context of their own products.
   The true test? Your company can adjust budgets of your integrated social strategy based on data –not gut feel.
2. Your organization is in Hub and Spoke, Dandelion, or Holistic formation. Social technologies enable all employees that want to talk to customers to do so.  This means a massive change inside of your organization to get ready.  Your company is sophisticated if you’ve organized in the Hub and Spoke, Dandelion, or Holistic and all employees clearly know their role, process, and contact points.
   The true test? A product crises has emerged on YouTube on a Friday evening before a three day weekend and you can sleep peacefully.
3. Corporate website integration: Social sign on. When customers come to the corporate site, they can see which one of their friends uses which product, and what they think about it.  Common technologies would include OpenID, Facebook Connect, and other social sign on technologies.
   The true test? You can disable your corporate registration page and use social logins instead.
4. Personalized corporate website based on social data. When a prospect (someone who’s never logged into you website before) arrives to your corporate website, they receive a customized experience based on their social IDs.  This would be based on Social CRM infrastructure, social sign on technology and a large inventory of personalized content.
   The true test? The voices of the consumers real world friends emerge above that of the brand right on the corporate website, see Levi’s foray.
5. Thriving advocacy program: customers are actively selling on your behalf. The sophisticated marketing program isn’t really the company talking much at all, instead they’ve a thriving advocacy program and word of mouth program that encourages customers to recruit prospects for them –all unpaid.  Learn how to do this, by reading this piece on Forbes.
   The true test? most leads are coming in through existing customers –not your sales team.
6. A community of customers supports each other, reducing support center calls. A company that has a thriving branded community where customers are self-supporting each other with little aid from the brand or the support team is a sign of a sophisticated social support program.
   The true test? A majority of customer support issues are resolved by community faster, with greater satisfaction than your dedicated support team.
7. Anticipation of prospects and customers using Social CRM technology.  Brands can anticipate before a customer has a problem, or grab leads “right out of the air” by using brand monitoring software, intelligent keyword monitoring and responding to be faster than real time using Social CRM strategies.
   The true test? sales and marketing are getting leads before the consideration phase, and the support team reduces inbound calls by triggering the community to resolve a potential issue before it’s escalated.
8. Innovation of new products with customers using web collaboration.  Companies that use these same tools to glean input from customers (ethnographic data collection) or create private communities, or use collaboration and innovation tools like Ideastorm or Uservoice and build new products and services demonstrate true sophistication.
   The true test? faster time to market on products because consumers have dictated the specifications, and less inventory as the product is built on spec.
9. Supply chain is influenced by social data in real time. Social media isn’t just about marketing and support, but is very valuable in listening to customer signals then to anticipate which products, services, and teams should be when and where.
   The true test? Your company is sophisticated if you’re using social data to adjust your supply chain in real time based on customer signals from checkins, tweets, and plancasts.
10. Real time reporting of revenues, costs and efficiency:  I’ve met with some of the most advanced teams, and they have clear reporting and can measure the increased revenues (over the total cost of the program) to tell their executives the true ROI of their business program.
    The true test? Real time dashboard measures the health of all social channels revenues, CSAT, sentiment and overall program costs.

We’ve done research on the roadmap for companies to reach these 10 levels of nirvana, but have found few companies that have done a few, or even a majority of them. If you know of any companies that have achieved five out of ten of these criteria, we’d love to know, please leave a comment.

New York City startup BankSimple today disclosed that it raised its first venture funding in a round led by First Round Capital, Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures, and Village Ventures, along with seed investors SV Angel (Ron Conway) and Nauiokas Park (Amy Nauiokas and Sean Parker), and . But it did not disclose how much it raised. I’ve confirmed that the round was $2.9 million, with an additional $190,000 raised last year in convertible debt (which converted to shares with this round), for a total of $3.1 million raised.

BankSimple has not yet launched. It is trying to develop a better interface for banking, working with financial institutions to actually hold the deposits. “Anything the customer sees is what we do,” says CEO Joshua Reich. BankSimple is creating a new front-end experience for bank customers both online and through mobile apps. The service will simplify their accounts into a single account and gives them a dashboard to see how much they are saving, how much they can spend, and how close they are to reaching financial goals.

The whole point is to simplify people’s financial lives by giving them a modern Web interface and realtime data linked to their accounts. So when you are about to reach an overdraft, you might get a notification on your phone. The first customers will be required to own a smartphone so they can download one of BankSimple’s mobile apps (iPhone and Android will probably be first). They will be able to deposit a check by taking a picture of one with their cell phone camera. Customers will also get a bank card tied to their account.

“The way banks work is they shove products down the throats of consumers,” says Reich. The more products you sign up for with your bank, the more fees they can charge. BankSimple will not make money from fees. Instead it will split the net interest margin with its partner banks (the net margin interest is the difference between the rate at which banks lend out money and the rate at which they pay depositors). It is looking to partner with wholesale banks to take care of the back end.

This strategy of focusing solely on the user experience contrasts with Betterment, a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist which also tries to simplify the online banking experience with a single, smarter account, but does hold deposits. Reich acknowledges that “we would certainly get more revenues if we did it ourselves,” but does not want to be distracted by regulatory compliance and managing large pools of money. Plenty of banks do that better than BankSimple could. Instead he wants to focus on what banks don’t do well: building a technology company and making the customer experience less harrowing.

Twitter officially disabled Basic authentication this week, the final step in the company's transition to mandatory OAuth authentication. Sadly, Twitter's extremely poor implementation of the OAuth standard offers a textbook example of how to do it wrong. This article will explore some of the problems with Twitter's OAuth implementation and some potential pitfalls inherent to the standard. I will also show you how I managed to compromise the secret OAuth key in Twitter's very own official client application for Android.

OAuth is an emerging authentication standard that is being adopted by a growing number of social networking services. It defines a key exchange mechanism that allows users to grant a third-party application access to their account without having to provide that application with their credentials. It also allows users to selectively revoke an application's access to their account.

Read the comments on this post

…as I said, “more to come”.

You may have heard of the Double Rainbow Video. The guy who filmed this, Paul “Bear” Vasquez, lives in Yosemite and in the past month has gotten huge traffic for his ‘vivid’ reaction to that double rainbow. We hooked up with Bear to learn more about him & show him how to capture a full on double rainbow with Windows Live Photo Gallery using our panorama stitch feature. It’s so intense!

Some more background…

When I first showed the Windows Live team the famous “Double Rainbow” video back in July they thought it was hilarious. But when I said I wanted him to come and do a video with us, they looked at me as if I had been seeing rainbows all day…they thought I was kidding. I e-mailed Bear that night and sure enough, he responded, and with great enthusiasm.

I called him and gave him the lowdown on the project and asked if he would do a “Double Rainbow” redux. He was ecstatic! So we jumped right on it. He flew to Seattle and we had an absolute blast. After a 10 hour shoot we shared stories, ate delicious Vietnamese food (his favorite), and hung out with the crew.

Photo Caption: Bear and our crew. From left to right: Connor Lanman, Max Lanman, Adam Collins, Matt Garrett, Bear, Austin Chick, Michael Fishman, Andrew Sobey, & Shawn Anderson not pictured: Tommy Yacoe & Brendan Schlagel

We did a second video called “Meet Bear” where talks about his experience posting “Double Rainbow” and his love for sharing photos and videos with the world using Windows Live Essentials – video coming soon (will update post when its up). UPDATE: You can check out the second video called “Meet Bear” by clicking here!

Bear is something special. He’s entered the world of social media in hopes to share laughs, smiles, and insights. It’s not about the product, it’s about the people. It’s about the viewers, the users, it’s about you. And more importantly this project also shows how powerful sharing photos and videos can be. If tools like Photo Gallery and Movie Maker didn’t exist, Bear and I wouldn’t have met.

People can now share their lives with everyone and anyone, and can influence each other’s lives in a positive way. That’s what is so cool about Bear’s story.

Till next time,

-Connor

We’ve confirmed that wunderkind Jessica Mah is one week away from closing a hotly anticipated round of seed financing for her banking startup InDinero. Confirmed investors in the round (which still has three open spots reserved for valley VIPs like SV Angel) include 500 StartUps‘ Dave McClure, Microsoft’s Fritz Lanman, and YouTube’s Jawed Karim.

Part of the YCombinator class of 2010, InDinero aims to be the Mint for small businesses and is off to a running start as this latest round is set to close between 1 and 1.5 million. We’ve heard reports that she had to turn investors away, and Mah promises that more “juicy details” about the story behind the funding are yet to come.

Perhaps the closest we’ve got to a female Mark Zuckerberg, Mah founded her first startup at age of 13, and entered into the Computer Science program at Berekley at 15, where she started internshipIN.com. In raising over a million at twenty, the serial entrepreneur’s got a ways to go before she gets jaded.

Here’s recent video of her explaining InDinero’s usefulness and simplicity.

Apple announced on Wednesday a cornucopia of new hardware and software: sleek iPods, a brand new Internet-enabled video streaming device and new versions of its iOS software and iTunes 10. However, the most impressive to me by far was Ping, the music-only social network that Apple is opening up its 160 million existing iTunes users.

No, I’m not blown away by the 160 million number. What I’m impressed by is the thinking behind Ping.

Ping may function like a cross between Facebook and Twitter for iTunes by allowing you to follow celebrities, create social cliques and get artist updates via an activity stream. I think it could have tremendous impact on social sharing and commerce.

From a content perspective, there are three different types of media we love to talk about: movies we see, music we listen to and books we are reading. These are accepted social norms. In fact, many relationships are made on the basis of collective love of a movie and many friendships have started with mixed tapes.

It makes perfect sense for a music service to be social. I’m not alone: The popularity YouTube, the fast-growing MOG and the sadly defunct iLike and Imeem show that people gravitate towards music as a common, collective experience. A recommendation from friends on Last.fm often resulted in me buying many-a-few music tracks. My friends who listened to Thievery Corporation turned me on to The Broadway Project and Chris Joss, which I ended up buying on the iTunes store or via Amazon’s MP3 store.

This click-and-go-somewhere-to-download model of affiliate links can never match a unified experience. Amazon, for example, encourages bloggers and others to link to things they like and then get a piece of the action. This separates social from commerce and treats them as two discrete activities. On the post-Facebook Internet, I don’t think anyone can afford to keep these two actions distinct.

Ping, from what little I saw during Steve Jobs’ demo, allows a similar level of social interaction. It can tell me who my friends think are cool and the top 10 favorites of people in my social graph. Some of my friends are famous deejays. Others just have eclectic musical tastes. They can collectively sift through over 10 million songs and help with the discovery of music. This social-powered discovery is part of the biggest theme of our times: serendipity. About two years ago, when I wrote about serendipity, I said:

The problem is that there’s too much data coming online too quickly, and the traditional method of search that involves first finding and then consuming the information is not going to work for much longer. There just won’t be enough time for us to do that and still have a life. It’s a problem, and therefore solving it is an opportunity — a very big opportunity.

My belief has only been affirmed by growth in the amount of data available. With 12 million songs and 250,000 apps, the best way for Apple to enhance the iTunes store – aka its shopping experience — is through the use of social. Back in 2007, I argued that social networking was merely a feature that had to be embedded into applications to enhance their value. Apple has done a great job of that, but it’s also gone one step further, not only by adding a social networking layer to iTunes, but by meshing it with its commerce engine, the iTunes Store. And it’s made this experience available on both the desktop and its devices.

Apple received much of this social capability with the acquisition of Lala, an online music service, which as a standalone company used sharing of social objects to drive folks towards paid music downloads. Now Apple is only closing the loop by further sharing what users bought. I wouldn’t be least bit surprised if sales of music on the iTunes store rocket upwards, thanks to social discovery.

Amazon, which recently started experimenting with Facebook Connect, has similar ideas, but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. On Amazon, I’m reduced to reading reviews from absolute strangers for music. I have a handful of friends who have impeccable taste in non-fiction business books, are all members of Amazon, and they already use email to share new book suggestions with me.

What if they too could share their likes and dislikes via a social layer inside Amazon.com? Or what if I could follow my favorite authors and get updates on their books? Much like Apple, Amazon owns book-based social service, Shelfari, and should find ways to embed the social layer inside of all Amazon products and connect its tens of millions of users.

Like Apple, Amazon too has a lot more data about its customers and their behaviors and could create a compelling discovery experience. I believe with tens of thousands of products in its store, the retail giant needs to figure out ways to surface content and other offerings smartly.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Ever since it became stable enough to use on a day-to-day basis on a Mac last year, Google Chrome has been my browser of choice. Other browsers have been adding some nice features — but Chrome keeps adding them faster. And today on its second birthday, that rate of change isn’t slowing down.

Google has officially rolled out Chrome 6 as the latest stable version of the browser today. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone using the dev or beta builds of the browser, but it’s nonetheless an important mark as it means it’s stable enough for mass consumption.

Remember that it was just two years ago when Google surprised the world by announcing a new browser (a little early) via a comic. The next day, we got the first shots of what the browser would look like — and it was released as a beta for Windows users. It actually looks pretty much the same today, but it’s now much, much faster (and when it launched it was already faster than most browsers out there).

Google says that Chrome today is a full three times faster when it comes to JavaScript performance versus Chrome circa 2008. The rapid speed increases have also undoubtedly pushed rival browsers to become faster, so we’ve all benefited.

Arguably more important to me is that despite adding all the new features – and extensions — Chrome still seems lightweight today. I fondly remember the good old days of 2004 when I first started using Firefox as my main browser and thinking how fresh and lightweight it felt compared to the atrocity that was IE. Firefox, sadly, got bloated over the years. So far, Chrome hasn’t put on the same weight. Here’s hoping it never does.

As I said, Chrome is also showing no signs of slowing down from a development standpoint. The browser is already in the process of morphing into version 7 as well. Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome is based on, has been hit version 7 a couple weeks ago — and the dev build of Chrome just went 7 as well. Google has said they hope to iterate every six weeks going forward.

These next few months are going to be arguably the most interesting times for the browser yet. The Chrome Web Store will soon open, bringing tightly integrated web-based apps into the browser. And then, of course, Chrome OS is due before the end of the year.

Happy birthday Chrome.

Chrome then:

Chrome now:

Of all topics, this is one of the perennials. People want more traffic, more attention, more awareness to their blog. It’s fair. We work hard on our blogs. We want more attention and traffic. If your business depends on volume, this is especially important (for instance, if you’re using ads). Getting traffic is a tricky business, and it requires a lot of experimentation. I’ll tell you what’s worked for me, so far, and I’ll tell you what you might try. Maybe others will educate us both in the comments on their best methods.

The first few seconds of someone’s attention are the hardest to pass. If you have a lame blog post title, no one’s going to want to read the post. For whatever reason, we react to “how to,” we react to “7 great,” we react to all kinds of things. Not sure where to look? I stole this advice from Brian Clark years ago: go to the grocery store, buy some ladies’ magazines like Cosmopolitan, and learn how THEY write headlines on the front page.

This entire series (and most of my blog posts) use graphics to catch your eye. It’s an easy way to get one’s attention. Screen captures help. Video helps. There are tons of ways to get people into a receptive space with your material, and graphics are just the easiest one.

Now that we’ve got a decent title, decent graphics, let’s be quick about your content.

Keep your posts brief (unless you want tons and tons of bookmarks). People don’t have all day to read. If you can keep your posts between 250-500 words, that’s in alignment with most people’s attention spans. Hey, you’re welcome to write whatever length you want. You asked me how to grow traffic to your blog. I can only give you results that I’ve tested. When I write a super long piece, I get much less involvement with it.

I’ve written about making shareability a priority. If you don’t have easy-to-share buttons on your blog, you’re missing the easiest way for people to see your stuff on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and all the other sites where it would matter. Sharing out is a great way to make some more traffic happen. I also automatically push my posts into Facebook with their notes feature. I have an automated post into twitter via @broganmedia, but don’t do this same effect on my primary @chrisbrogan account.

In my case, subscriptions to my blog matter. I want people to subscribe, because I don’t necessarily survive on ad revenue. If you’re trying to monetize via ad revenue, and if your ads are in the header and the sidebar, a subscription really won’t help you get more traffic. If for whatever reason you want people to come to your website directly instead of via your RSS feed, you might want to obfuscate where you put your subscription information.

If you’re like me, you ask for the subscription all the time. In fact, I’ll ask now. You’re not yet subscribed? Enter your email (I respect your privacy):

Over in the Third Tribe, we talk about guest posts quite often as a great traffic-builder to your blog. Find someone who has a very similar kind of blog topic to yours (not sure where to start? Check out Alltop), and offer a guest blog post. Oh, and then actually follow through. I have heard recently from my friends who accept guest posts that often, people ask for something, get approval, and then don’t take an action. That doesn’t sound like a good plan. Just FYI.

This is one of those points where people disagree. I blog daily. Truth be told, I’m up to 2x a day most days. Why? Because the more I blog, the more people subscribe. I learned it from some of the larger blogger sites out there.

Lots of people justify once a week, or once every two weeks. That’s fine. But if you want to grow traffic to your blog, that’s a very long slow crawl towards that growth. That said, no matter which frequency you’ve chosen, stick to it. The moment you drop off the map, people who haven’t yet subscribed to you lose sight and move on.

You can always market your blog the good old fashioned way. I’ve had people hand me business cards at events that had a compelling question or interesting graphic, and then a URL to their blog. More often than not, I’ll at least check out the post. You might make postcards and bring them to the places where your prospective readers might congregate. For instance, if you write a restaurant blog, why not have a business card tray by the mints? Make an offer, just like you do with any other kind of marketing.

Often times, we sit around inside the fishbowl of social media and hope people from outside will find us. Here’s a hint, hero: the people you need are out there wondering what they can do to learn more about the thing you’re talking about. Go get ‘em, tiger.

I’m a big fan of the basics: write about what they need, make sure they see that you wrote about it, make it easy to carry on the relationship, make it easy for them to promote you to others.

Seems like a simple formula, and yet, we go through all kinds of hoops to come up with trickier methods. Try this one first. What do you say?

After looking at the different approaches to filtering for Relevance, I have been seeking a way to map them visually. There are many different startups competing in this space along with the giants, and a way to map them in a matrix would help us see the big picture of how the battle for relevance is evolving on the social web.

What are the fundamental ways in which these approaches and startups differ? These could form the axis around which we can then proceed to map them.

Filtering either works by showing us the most popular stuff being shared online, or by understanding our individual preferences and surfacing personalized content. Thus, we have the following axis:

You either search for content or you see it serendipitously without seeking anything specific. Search is actively initiated by the user and is goal-driven, while serendipitous discovery is gifted with the user being passive at the receiving end. This gives us our second axis:

We combine these two axes to form the backbone of our visualization. We then place different services within our matrix as per their core filtering approach. The result is the Filtering FOR Relevance Matrix (FORMAT) as seen below:

Let us now look at each quadrant closely.

This is the simplest and oldest of all. Search powered by algorithms to surface most popular content online. This also includes other Twitter search services like Topsy. These services are powered by algorithms such as PageRank, PersonRank, Resonance, etc. to surface the most popular result relevant to a query.

This approach dominated the Web 1.0 era before the advent of the social web.

Services in this category help you find the most popular content being shared online across different social networks. These were the next to evolve in the Web 2.0 era, beginning with social bookmarking services like Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.

There is an element of personalization provided by many of these, in that you “follow” some users, but the motive behind such following is less to seek personalized content, more to seek trending, viral content.

Note how Digg is attempting to move from this quadrant to the personalized quadrant, and facing hurdles along the way.

A breed of services has evolved around delivering personalized recommendations and content tailored for your needs. Hunch learns about you and acts as a “taste engine”, while Blekko allows you to personalize your searches with slashtags. Google is making forays in this space with its Social Search service, which tries to personalize search results based on your social graph.

This is the hottest space where most of the competition is today.

Twitter Lists are personalized (created by you) and deliver fresh, serendipitous content relevant to your interests. Facebook Likes give you serendipitous discovery from your personal friends. Flipboard provides a social magazine based on your personal social circle on Facebook and Twitter. My6sense delivers new content using ‘Digital Intuition’. Vertical networks like Last.fm deliver music recommendations based on your individual taste. Personalized Twitter newspapers give you fresh content filtered by your social graph on Twitter.

Note how Datasift lies at the center of the matrix. This is because Datasift is a platform providing different filtering services and approaches. Developers may use the platform to develop different services and apps that can lie in any of these quadrants.

So what is the point of this exercise? Using FORMAT:

• We see the big picture of how services providing relevance and filtering are evolving.
• We see how personalized serendipity is the holy grail of the social web right now.
• We see how different services relate to each other and who is competing with whom and how.
• We see how identifying the target quadrant is important for any new startup in this space.
• We see how users provide friction when a service tries to change quadrants (Digg).

If you are involved in a startup aiming to provide filtered, relevant content to users, which quadrant would you target? See how FORMAT helps?

[Updated at 1:05 p.m.] Mariner Energy, owner of the production platform, said in a press release that no hydrocarbon spill has been reported after an initial flyover of the incident.

"Mariner has notified and is working with regulatory authorities in response to this incident," the statement said. "The cause is not known, and an investigation will be undertaken. During the last week of August 2010, production from this facility averaged approximately 9.2 million cubic feet of natural gas per day and 1,400 barrels of oil and condensate."

The company also said no injuries have been reported.

[Updated at 12:48 p.m.] David Reed, a paramedic on board the Rowan Gorilla II oil rig located 14 miles from the platform that exploded told submitted an iReport saying he saw all thirteen workers rescued from the water.

“We were up here in the radio room and all of sudden we saw a whole bunch of smoke coming from the platform," Reed said. "Shortly after all the radios started lighting up like a Christmas tree. They called any helicopters in the area, any boats in the area to respond, they were saying there were people in the water. There were multiple people in the water.”

See Reed's iReport of what he witnessed

WWL: Coast Guard reporting production platform incident

WDSU: Production platform explodes in Gulf

iReport: Did you see the explosion? Share images

[Updated at 12:32 p.m.] White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday that the federal government has "assets ready" to respond to any environmental problems resulting from the explosion of an oil platform off the coast of Louisiana.

[Updated at 12:31 p.m.] All thirteen people aboard a production platform that exploded in the Gulf are accounted for and safely on a commercial vessel according to initial information, the U.S. Coast Guard said in a statement.

"We continue to gather information as we respond with full force, and have oil spill response assets ready for immediate deployment should we receive any reports of pollution," the statement said.

[Updated at 11:53 a.m.] U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Bill Colclough tells CNN that 12 people from the production platform are in water immersion suits as they await rescue.

Colclough told CNN there are reports the production platform, which is for both oil and natural gas, is still on fire.

"We don't know what caused the rig to catch on fire," he told CNN, noting the incident is under investigation.

Asked about concerns regarding oil leaks or pollution, Colclough said "there are reports the rig was not actively producing any product, so we don't know if there's any risk of pollution."

Mariner Energy is a leading independent oil and gas exploration and production company in the Gulf of Mexico. About 85 percent of the company's production comes from offshore assets, with a growing share of that coming from deepwater developments.

The explosion comes nearly five months after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded April 20, killing 11 people and causing oil to gush into
the Gulf of Mexico, leading to one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

[Updated at 11:43 a.m.] U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Bill Colclough tells CNN that all 13 workers involved in the production platform explosion are accounted for, but one person is injured.

Coast Guard Choppers are on the way to the site 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay.

[Posted at 11:33 a.m.] An oil production platform has exploded 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana, with 12 people overboard and one missing, the Coast Guard said Thursday morning.

Rescue attempts are under way for at least 12 people, Coast Guard spokesman John Edwards told CNN. 13 people were on board the production platform total, Edwards said, noting 12 have been accounted for, but one person was missing.

The accident took place 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana on the Vermilion Oil production platform 380, which is owned by Houston-based Mariner Energy.

The Coast Guard has multiple helicopters, an airplane and several Coast Guard cutters en route. It's unknown if there are any injuries.

Today Apple launched their new music social network Ping (basically a clone of Last.fm), and in Apple’s promotional image for the new feature, they very obviously removed a thread of Tweets from Lady Gaga’s timeline where she clearly spoke out celebrating being pro-gay, about California’s anti-gay marriage legislation, Prop 8.

Seriously.

Apple, we see you.

::pause for the scream of WTF on loop in my head thinking about my gay friends who work at Apple.

Those of us who live in the SF Bay Area know that when Lady Gaga was in town for her San Jose shows, she paid a visit to Apple Headquarters and got a tour. Everyone around here wondered why. This was likely when it was discussed, pre-launch, that they would use her for the Ping page example. She shot a video there for them, it was in the Apple keynote. So either she knew her messages of tolerance (which sell quite well, by the way) were going to be censored, or Apple did not tell her. I wonder which it was.

Here’s the Daily Swarm with the story (thedailyswarm.com).

BUT — I screencapped her timeline just now so you can see what Apple removed. Apple’s version for Ping launch:

Her *actual* timeline:

It’s free and comes with a slew of touch interface bells and whistles built right in. The app is intended to allow for seamless navigation between tweets, photos, web pages, videos and other media and updates. It’s also usable even for those who don’t have Twitter accounts.

Twitter for iPad [iTunes link] has a few new UI touches that you haven’t seen elsewhere. These features are custom-designed for the larger screen and touch capabilities of the iPad. It also caters to what the iPad was made for: media consumption rather than creation. Twitter’s Leland Rechis, a mobile UX designer, writes on the Twitter blog that the iPad is “a device that really lets content shine.”

The main interface is a series of panes that can expand and retract based on the kind of content the user wants to access. “Tapping on a Tweet opens a pane to the right. Depending on the content in that Tweet, you’ll see a video or photo, or maybe a news story, or perhaps another Tweet. You can continue tapping on Tweets, opening new panes, and getting new content as long as you’d like,” wites Rechis.

Media viewing is optimized for the iPad, as well. Videos play in-line with other content and can be loaded while you’re browsing through your timeline. You can pinch a video to view it fullscreen, too.

Finally, Twitter has really done some interesting things with touchscreen capabilities in this app. When you pinch a tweet, you’ll see details about the author and have a list of actions you can take, including reply and retweet. A two-finger pull-down gesture will show the entire conversation around a tweet.

It’s a creative way to approach multitouch app building, and we look forward to playing with it ourselves. We’re also really looking forward to what apps may come to other tablets in the future.

The iTunes release is rolling out right now; if you can’t get the latest version of the app right now, wait a bit and try again. And of course, let us know what you think of Twitter for iPad in the comments.

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Part of the new iTunes 10 software, announced and launched yesterday, is a significant new social networking feature for iTunes called Ping. It allows you to comment on music, 'like' it a la Facebook, or rate it. Ping is also very similar to Twitter, in that you can 'follow' people and music stars. All of this happens inside of the iTunes application, either on your computer, iPhone or iPod Touch.

We took the new feature for a spin and came away intrigued, despite some initial flaws. We do however wonder at the overly commercial focus of Ping. Is this really about social networking, or mostly for Apple and artists to sell more music?

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To access Ping, you first need to download iTunes 10 onto your computer. You'll need to also download 300+ MB worth of iPhone Software Update, to get it on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

On the computer, once you've downloaded iTunes 10 click the iTunes Store link in the sidebar. You'll see a "Get Started" link in the top right of that page (also 'Ping' appears as a menu option in the sidebar). You'll need to turn on the Ping feature and agree to Apple's privacy policy. After that, create a profile.

Note that you may encounter issues with uploading a profile photo and connecting to Facebook. If you wait for about 10 minutes, eventually your photo will upload. However Facebook Connect appears to be broken at this stage. We assume these are technical teething issues.

Once you have your profile set up, you're invited to follow other people and also stars like Lady Gaga and U2. This is very similar to how Twitter works, except that it's all happening inside of iTunes (on your computer or on your iPhone or iPod Touch).

Ping isn't entirely intuitive. It took some head scratching to figure out that to actually post content, you need to be in the iTunes Store. You can't create new content from within Ping itself, although you can comment on what others have added.

To add new content to your Ping stream, go to the iTunes Store and either comment on an album, 'like' it or give it a star rating.

The fact that you need to be inside the iTunes Store to create new content or like something, seems a rather cynical move to encourage people to buy more music. Why not let users search inside Ping for a song or album? Or, even better, let them right-click and comment, like or rate music from within the iTunes player?

To track - and optionally comment on - what others are doing, click on the Recent Activity feed in Ping.

Ping places more focus on feature accounts than Twitter, inviting you to "set your inner groupie free by following your favorite artists on Ping." The service comes pre-loaded with accounts for some leading pop, rock and other music acts.

These accounts don't offer much more than what the stars can already do on Facebook and Twitter. The main difference is that it's within an application where people can buy the music.

Overall, I can see Ping being useful for following friends who have similar tastes in music to me. In those cases, if they 'like' a new album then it's a great recommendation - and yes, I'm more likely to buy it. Also the ability to see which concerts they plan to go to is a useful feature.

However, Ping is probably not going to be very useful for following friends who don't share my music tastes. That could be most of them. You may be a mate of mine on Facebook, but if you listen to electronica then sorry I'm not very interested in the content you're liking (you probably feel the same way about the alternative music I tend to favor).

Have you tested out Ping yet? Let us know your verdict in the comments!

Withings, the Paris-based company behind the famous tweeting wifi body scale, has just scored 3 million euros from French VC firm, Ventech. It’s the company’s first round of funding and will be used primarily for the development of 2 new products, which should come out within the next 6 months.

For anyone who isn’t already familiar with the company’s first product, the tweeting wifi body scale, it’s a terrific wifi-connected device that tracks your weight. May sound simple but it can recognize up to 8 users and allows you to transfer your weight information to a computer, iPhone or iPad – which is where the Tweeting comes from, obviously. The product launched officially last year on June 25 goes for €129 in France and is a great little way to track a fitness program or diet.

For now, the 20-person company is entirely based in Paris but the product is distributed across several continents. The US accounts for roughly 40 percent of sales – as does Europe – and the rest of the world makes up the remaining 20 percent. With a partner in Japan, the startup it is planning to actively develop distribution in Asia – in Korea and Taiwan in particular.

The team still isn’t releasing info on the number of scales sold-to-date nor details concerning the 2 new products that are currently being developed. But we do know that one of the 2 will most likely be a similar, health-related product and other will be for more casual, everyday use.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been hitting refresh on the Apple iTunes website waiting for them to put iTunes 10 up for download. Sure, it has said it was available since this morning, but when you click through, it would still be iTunes 9.2.1 with a promise that iTunes 10 was “coming soon.” Links being shared on Twitter were likewise bogus. It was starting to look like a Duke Nukem situation. Well, it took several hours, but it’s finally here.

Apple announced iTunes 10 this morning at their event in San Francisco. The latest version is more than just a minor update, there are several things that have been reworks, including some UI elements. But the biggest addition is obviously Ping, the music social network Apple has baked into iTunes. I got a chance to use it earlier on some demo computers and on the iPhone/iPod touch — it’s very interesting. Now it’s time to see if 160 million built-in users agree.

From the 15 minutes or so I used it earlier, I can also say that it felt noticeably faster than version 9. This has been a huge complaint about the software in the past — that it’s too bloated. Of course, that was also on a brand new machine probably not packed to the brim with media — so we’ll see.

The oddest thing about iTunes 10 isn’t the icon revamp (goodbye CD) — I think it has to be the move of the close, minimize, and expand buttons on the Mac version. They’re now vertically aligned — like a traffic light.

This is the third post in a three-part series. The first part was Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification. The second part was Money changes everything.

Nick Carr, like the rest of the “Web rots our brains” contingent, views links as primarily subtractive and destructive. Links direct us away from where we are to somewhere else on the Web. They impede our concentration, degrade our comprehension, and erode our attention spans.

It’s important, first, to understand that every single one of these criticisms of links has been raised against every single new media form for the past 2500 years. (Rather than rehash this hoary tale, I’ll point you to Vaughan Bell’s excellent summary in Slate. For a full and fascinating account of the earliest episode in this saga — Socrates’ denunciation of the written word — I recommend the elaboration of it in Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid.)

Throughout history, the info-panic critique has been one size fits all. The media being criticized may change, but the indictments are remarkably similar. That tells us we’re in the presence of some ancestral predilection or prejudice. We involuntarily defend the media forms we grew up with as bastions of civilization, and denounce newcomers as barbaric threats to our children and our way of life.

That’s a lot to hang on the humble link, which — in today’s Flash-addled, widget-laden, real-time-streaming environment — seems more like an anchor of stability than a force for subversion. But even if we grant Carr his premise that links slow reading and hamper understanding (which I don’t believe his evidence proves at all), I’ll still take the linked version of an article over the unlinked.

I do so because I see links as primarily additive and creative. Even if it took me a little longer to read the text-with-links, even if I had to work a bit harder to get through it, I’d come out the other side with more meat and more juice.

Links, you see, do so much more than just whisk us from one Web page to another. They are not just textual tunnel-hops or narrative chutes-and-ladders. Links, properly used, don’t just pile one “And now this!” upon another. They tell us, “This relates to this, which relates to that.”

Links announce our presence. They show a writer’s work. They are badges of honesty, inviting readers to check that work. They demonstrate fairness. They can be simple gestures of communication; they can be complex signifiers of meaning. They make connections between things. They add coherence. They build context.

If I can get all that in return, why would I begrudge the link-wielding writer a few more seconds of my time, a little more of my mental effort?

Let’s take these positive aspects of linking in ascending order of importance.

Links say “hello.”

A link to another site can serve as a way of telling that site, “I just said something about you.” This invites spammy abuse, of course. But it remains an elegantly simple device. Many bloggers still check their referrers today as they did a decade ago in the early days of weblogging. High-traffic sites can’t and won’t bother paying much attention to this, but out in the middle and nether reaches of the Web-traffic curve, this kind of link remains a valid and valuable social gesture.

Links show a writer’s work.

Any post or page with hand-selected links provides a record of the writer’s research, reading and sourcing. Some people are happier with this stuff collected at the end, as we did for centuries in print. But linking in situ gives the reader the information right where it’s needed. (If reading a link adds to “cognitive load,” surely the effort of scanning down to a footnote or, even worse, flipping back to an endnote piles on even heftier brain-freight.)

Links keep us honest and fair.

If you’re quoting someone and you link to the original, you’re saying to the reader, “Check my work — see if I’ve presented the other person’s point of view accurately and fairly.” This provides a powerful check on bullying and misrepresentation. It’s the rant without links, the disconnected diatribe, that’s suspect.

In a media environment where a dwindling number of participants believes that objectivity is either possible or desirable, the best yardstick for fairness we have is this: does a writer present the perspectives of those he disagrees with in a way that they feel is fair? Linking to those perspectives is a way for a writer to say: Go ahead — see if I got you right.

Links enhance trust.

Let me quote Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen, from 1999 (in a text I reread thanks to a link I followed from a discussion of my earlier post at Crooked Timber):

Not being afraid to link to other sites is a sign of confidence, and third-party sites are much more credible than anything you can say yourself. Isolated sites feel like they have something to hide.

Links knit context into the Web.

Most Web critiques includes ritual denunciation of the medium’s disconnected, fragmentary nature. And certainly there are plenty of fragments out there in HTTP-land. But the disconnected ones, by definition, don’t get read much. We read the posts and pages that get widely linked to.

A fragment that gets connected is no longer a fragment. It becomes a working part, a piece of a mosaic, a strand in a web. (There’s a reason these words are embedded in Internet history.)

It always amazes me to hear the complaint that the Web doesn’t provide readers with enough context. Then I realize that this criticism is usually made by print journalists. They are accustomed to having their words acquire a bountiful context on paper. Then, typically, their work is spat onto the Web by an automated content-management system — and served up without a link in sight.

Theirs is an experience of loss of context. But for the rest of us, writing for the Web offers more frequent and potent opportunities to give our words context than we’ve ever had before.

What pages shall we connect our words to? We have the entire rest of the Web to choose from! And the choices we make say worlds about our writing.

The context that links provide comes in two flavors: explicit and implicit. Explicit context is the actual information you need to understand what you’re reading. Here’s what I mean, if I can go all recursive on you for a moment: Let’s say you landed on this article out of nowhere. Someone sent you a link. (Now, right there Carr and the link-skeptics might say, “”There’s the problem! If you were reading a magazine or a book, that would never happen.” To which I can only say, if the opportunity to receive pointers to interesting reading from a network of friends is a problem, it’s one I am very happy to have.)

So you land on my page and you might well have no idea what I’m talking about, since this is part three of a series. Links make it easy for me to show you where to catch up. If you don’t have time for that, links let me orient you more quickly in my first paragraph with reference to Carr’s post. I can do all this without having to slow down those readers who’ve been following from the start with summaries and synopses. Again, even if the links that achieve this do demand a small fee from your working brain (which remains an unproven hypothesis), I’d say that’s a fair price.

By implicit context, I mean something a little more elusive: The links you put into a piece of writing tell a story (or, if you will, a meta-story) about you and what you’ve written. They say things like: What sort of company does this writer keep? Who does she read? What kind of stuff do her links point to — New Yorker articles? Personal blogs? Scholarly papers? Are the choices diverse or narrow? Are they obvious or surprising? Are they illuminating or puzzling? Generous or self-promotional?

Links, in other words, transmit meaning, but they also communicate mindset and style. By this, I don’t mean “stylish linking.” There have been fads in linking — the first and best-known was probably the playfully ironic, self-deprecating style pioneered by Suck.com in 1995 (I wrote about it in Salon a long time ago). They come and go, just as catch-phrases and tics in casual writing do. As with other link mannerisms, remnants of the Suck style survive in a few places; but mostly, Web users have rejected the practice of links that obscure or misdirect or joke. We prefer links that clarify.

The history of Web linking has been a long chronicle of controversies we didn’t need to have: irrelevant debates over issues like so-called deep linking (if you really don’t want to be linked to, why are you on the public Web?) or the notion of a power-law-driven A-list in blogging (if you want to become a celebrity, other media are far more efficient). To this list, we can now add the “delinkification” dustup.

It’s hard to imagine the benefit for ourselves, or for the Web, of a general retreat from linking. Writing on the Web without linking is like making a movie without cutting. Sure, it can be done; there might even be a few situations where it makes sense. But most of the time, it’s just head-scratchingly self-limiting. To choose not to link is to abandon the medium’s most powerful tool — the thing that makes the Web a web.

A long time ago, I wrote a column titled Fear of Links about the then-burgeoning movement of webloggers. I urged professional writers to stop looking down their noses at links and those who make them: “A journalist who today disdains the very notion of providing links to readers may tomorrow find himself without a job.”

That was 1999. Today, we live in that piece’s “tomorrow.”