Twitter side:
One of the best things about the Brizzly Twitter interface is the trends. Sure, it pulls the trends like every other service out there. But you’ll have to admit that half the time you have no idea what some of those trends are, right? Happens to me all the time. Brizzly allows you to put an explanation to a trend or amend a current explanation. Love it.

The twitter interface also does some neat things, like show you image uploads right in the tweet rather than having to click away to see the image. You can make groups, which are essentially like the newly released Twitter Lists.

Facebook Side:
This side doesn’t really have anything new. It’s pretty much the full Facebook interface right there with your news feed, your wall, and your information. Still it’s nice to have that. You can reply to comments written on your wall or posts, etc.

For lovers of service consolidators out there, Brizzly is an obvious thing to try. Check it out and let me know what you think.

UPDATED: I’ve got 10 Brizzly invite codes. Leave a comment to get yours.

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I’m still getting the hang of this, but you can get missions based on where you are and check in in different places (bars, restaurants, shops, etc). There you can drop items, for other people to pick up when they arrive, you can pick up items other people have left behind for you, etc.

You get points (or “stamps”) for every place that you visit and check in. If a place you’re in doesn’t currently exist in the Gowalla listing, you can easily add it and get a stamp. You can also complete missions and trips to get new “pins”. You can also get push notifications about your friends, new missions, etc.

It’s an interesting idea to say the least. I’m not sure how good this particular game is, but I’m sure it will open up the flood gates and many more apps will come out with similar gameplay. I’m very excited about what I’m calling Social Gameworking and how it may change the location-based social networks.

Apps like Loopt are nice, but they have a fundamental thing missing. Besides simply knowing where my friends are, why should I use it? But actually playing a game would be awesome. Imagine a scavenger hunt around your city with thousands of people playing all the time. Love it.

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I looked at my last month’s usage and I was able to go down to 545 SMS (sent + received). From there I set my next goal to be under 300. This current billing period, which ends on the 22nd, I have used 176. So I have a 3 weeks for no more than 124 SMS which will be hard. Still, this is a significant improvement on the previous month in which I was already at about 300+ at this point.

How am I doing it? Social Networking. As it is I only use about 45 minutes of talk time for a whole month. Most of my communication is done via Facebook, Twitter, AIM, and (soon) Skype. Most of my friends are on at least one of the mentioned social networks. The only reason I haven’t been able to completely eliminate SMS is because most of these social networks don’t support Push Notifications on the iPhone and I’m unable to completely rely on them.

As you may already know, AT&T recently announced that they’ll allow apps on the iPhone to use voice over IP on the 3G network. What does this translate to? Use Skype (or other apps) to make your calls from anywhere, without using your minutes. The only thing that will keep me from using it all the time is the fact that Skype does not yet support Push Notifications. Imagine getting a notification for a call and it’s from Skype. You can talk all day long and it doesn’t affect your minutes at all.

In fact, since I’m only using about 45 minutes of talk time, why would I even need a voice or SMS plan? all I need is the data plan. In fact phone companies may begin to move towards a data plan model rather than minutes-per-month/SMS model.

The hard part about trying out this experiment is getting all your friends and family to contact you using these Social Networks. If all else fails I usually recommend emailing me, since I’ve always got my iPhone on me it’s as good as SMS.

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The redesign now emphasizes their topic search even more. It’s simply the biggest thing on the page. The sign-in form is now a simple and attractive pop-down box and I love it. I’m a big fan of pop-out boxes and modal windows when used properly.

As of now the home page is the only thing I’ve noticed they’ve changed. Have you noticed any other changes?

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The way I’ve got my setup going is I’m having it download my “loved” tracks. Any track I mark as loved through SweetFM will be automatically downloaded to my iTunes once the song ends playing. Presumably after it’s recorded the stream. My question is whether LastFM has the ability to block the application.

You can get the application from Choco Moko here.

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It’s basic, but the interface is super clean, and adding multiple analytics reports and feeds is super easy. The app is $1.99, which may not be worth it for people who have already shelled out several dollars for other statistics apps, but still if you’re in the market for a simple one, Ego is the one.

Click on the image for a larger preview.

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The experiment I’m running has several sides to it. For one, you have to be on all the major social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter primarily). But secondly, and this is the hardest part, you have to make people get used to contacting you through these mediums.

The Tools You’ll Need
AIM: This is the most efficient app I’ve found to be able to communicate with friends without using SMS thanks to AIM’s push notifications. The app keeps me logged in for 24hrs which is great for friends who work in offices and have AIM on their computers. They’re able to get an immediate answer from me since the push notifications make new IMs act like SMSs.

Twitter: There are countless twitter clients for the iPhone (and others) out there that will do the job. The only problem is that there aren’t any clients that I know of that use the push notifications. This does create a problem for being able to respond immediately. This problem will for sure be solved soon enough. I definitely have my favorites in this category, but I would suggest using a light app for quick load times like TwitterFon. TweetDeck takes a little longer to load, but has way more functionality.

Facebook: This is a no-brainer considering everyone and their mom is on it (literally). On my previous post I detailed Facebook for iPhone’s upcoming update and its impending addition of push notifications. Once that goes through SMS will effectively seize to matter.

It really amazes me at how ridiculous and late to the game big corporations can be. They should be begging us to buy SMS plans. Join me in this experiment and free yourself of redundant plans. You’ll save at least $10 a month.

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As a priority Open Government Initiative for President Obama’s administration, Data.gov increases the ability of the public to easily find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by the Federal Government. Data.gov provides descriptions of the Federal datasets (metadata), information about how to access the datasets, and tools that leverage government datasets. The data catalogs will continue to grow as datasets are added. Federal, Executive Branch data are included in the first version of Data.gov.

There are three ways to find useful information; through the “Raw” Data Catalogue, the Tools Catalogue, and the Geodata Catalogue.

“Raw” Data Catalogue
Through this method you’ll be able to find/download platform-independent, machine readable data (e.g., XML, CSV, KMZ/KML, or shape file formats), as well as a link to a metadata page specific to the respective dataset. To put that in plain english that means that whatever documents you find you’ll be able to download the raw information in different file types. CSV and XLS seem to be the most popular at the moment. Searching through this method can be a little strange for the first time user that doesn’t really know what he/she is looking for, but with some direction this is awesome. You can also reorder your results based on the type of file that you need which is a nice touch when generating lots of them.

Tools Catalogue
This is probably the most interesting part of the site. You’re able to find information based on government agency (FEMA, DHS, CDC, etc), category (Health and Nutrition, Science and Technology, etc), and more, including results that have web widgets. It also provides Data Mining and Extraction Tools which allow you to produce maps, tables, or charts of the subset of data that are specific to your interests or to build your own dataset taken from a data source. Pretty neat stuff.

Geodata Catalogue
This is a more direct way to download data from the different sources Data.gov gathers information from.

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Techcrunch is reporting that Facebook will be getting a major update “very soon,” and bring changes including:

1. The “new” News Feed
2. Like
3. Events (including the ability to RSVP)
4. Notes
5. Pages
6. Create new photo albums
7. Upload photos to any album
8. Zoom into photos
9. Easier photo tagging
10. Profile Pictures albums
11. A new home screen for easy access to all your stuff, search, and notifications
12. Add your favorite profiles and pages to the home screen
13. Better Notifications (they link to the comments so you can reply)
14. Quickly call or text people right from the Friends page
15. Messages you are typing will be restored if you quit or are interrupted by a phone call

All of these changes are welcome to an App that has needed some updating for a long time. However, the fact that we’ll have to wait until the end of the summer to get push notifications is quite ridiculous. AIM implemented push pretty much the day that the iPhone OS 3.0 was released. How could it possibly take this long to implement? Regardless, I’ll be a happy camper “very soon” when it is finally updated.

Check out the TechCrunch article for screenshots of the App.

UPDATE: TechCrunch is now saying that the new version will also allow for video uploads. Badass.

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1. First of all, the way that the iPhone handles all of these Apps is a little ridiculous. 4.0 should introduce some form of App management, perhaps a stacks-like feature from the Dock.

2. Overhaul of some of its native Apps. Notes, Weather, Photos, and Calendar come to mind. They’re outdated and we don’t get enough options.

3. Online connectivity with most major social media networks. The option to share videos on YouTube is nice, but I wanna be able to send photos directly to Twitter, Facebook, et al.

4. Faces and Places. iPhoto does it decently enough, and by the time the iPhone OS 4.0 comes out, new iPhones with much more powerful processors will be ready to ship (most likely multi-core). With that power they could perhaps implement some form of a Faces feature, also allowing you to share and edit those photos, as well as Places.

5. Multi-Tasking is another big one. Apple is known to be very creative with the way they handle software. Put those great minds to work along with some powerful (and long lasting) iPhones and you’ve got background tasks.

Let’s face it, the iPhone is becoming more and more like a computer. The more things they add the less reasons some people have to buy a laptop. All of this stuff WILL be available on the iPhone, we just don’t know when.

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