Reviews

September 4th Web Picks

Well, after quite the weekend in Las Vegas and the recovery period that followed, I’ve managed to stop planning my return trip long enough to compile this edition of Web Picks. A couple of good sites plus a facebook application and a Google Earth ‘easter egg‘ round out this week’s list:

• Natuba is a social aggregation site that you can build using your updates to YouTube, Twitter, LiveJournal, Blogger, Wordpress, flickr, MySpace, TypePad, Live Spaces, and Photobucket. It provides you an admin page to add your services and customize your page which then provides a one-stop shop for your ‘lifestream’ updates. This is really a pretty cool, easy-to-use site for those who want to aggregate their information from multiple services. However, there are a couple of drawbacks including the lack of facebook integration and lack of support for self-hosted sites (Wordpress, etc). In their defense, you can add any custom RSS feed (including that of a self-hosted site), but it just isn’t quite the same… Anyhow, this is a very straightforward service that is great for a basic lifestream source, with very easy service integration. Check out my test page here.

• Clearspring.com is a site where you can create your own web-based widgets for embedding in your blog, website, profile, etc. The site gives you the option of creating a Flash, web site, or image widget and does a good job of walking you through the process of constructing your widget. I haven’t actually created a full widget, but from my experience of just poking through the process, it seems to be the easiest site I’ve found for creating your own widgets without relying on other developers.

• Twitterment is a really cool site that allows you to compare subject popularity in Twitter updates. It is very similar to Google Trends, except it only includes the frequency of keywords used in worldwide Twitter updates. It also shows a short zeitgeist that displays the up-and-coming terms as well as the declining terms. An example for comparing ‘lunch’ and ‘dinner’ shows a basic graph showing hourly and daily summaries. A pretty cool site to briefly check out trends on Twitter; still in beta, so definitely some room to grow. (Follow me on Twitter here)

• Twittervision provides a worldwide map that displays Twitter updates from around the world (obviously, not every single update is shown, just a steady stream of them). This is available in a Google Maps frame, or as a 3D view based in Google Earth (requires Flash 9). I recommend the 3D view option (located in the upper left corner). Also, this site has a facebook application for embedding this advanced Twitter map into your facebook profile; a pretty cool tool if you like to follow all sorts of Twitterers. (Follow me on Twitter here)

• A new facebook application that is pretty astounding is Socialistics, a statistical analysis app that provides really cool graphs and tag clouds based on a variety of variables within your friend’s network. You can get a cloud based on 5 different factors: Popularity, Proximity, Cities, Birth Year, and Relationships and you can view graphs based on 13 variables ranging from Current Location to Number of Wall Posts. This is the most advanced social graph statistical engine I’ve seen yet, and definitely the cleanest interface, as well. There are also a few features still in development, including the creation of study groups and supgroups. All-in-all, this app is the best way I’ve found to analyze your social graph, especially if you have a lot of friends with varying data…now if only facebook would add application support to its groups, this type of tool could be used to do amazing things for tweaking group content or offerings based on detailed demographic data. Get the Socialistics application here.

• This last addition is technically not a web-based tool, but rather an Easter Egg found inside Google Earth. If you zoom into the US and hit CTRL+ALT+A for Windows or Command+Opt+A on a Mac, a window will pop up giving you an option to fly either an F16 or an SR22 prop plane and a multitude of international airports to launch from! It takes some time to get used to the controls and get the hang of it, but this is probably the coolest hidden feature I’ve ever encountered on a program, because it allows you to fly through Google Earth terrain, 3D buildings, etc. Thanks to Mashable for the heads-up!

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