Tweets about this, Tweets about that; there are Tweets flying all over Twitter about all kinds of things, but no easy way to display one or more of them gracefully on a website or blog. Until tomorrow, that is.

In a post today on the company’s blog for media companies interested in using the service, Twitter highlighted ReadWriteWeb’s use of screenshots in highlighting the smartest Tweets about last week’s HP/Palm deal. “But the truth, of course, is that a pasted-in image of a tweet is a bit of a hack,” the company wrote. “We have an alternative to propose; it’s coming tomorrow.” We emailed the company and they told us what it is!

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Robin Sloan, who works on Media Partnerships at Twitter, explained thusly:

The alternative is super-simple: just a little script that generates a block of HTML that looks just like an embedded tweet, but is just normal HTML text (instead of a flat image). Should be a handy tool — (I know I plan to use it a lot on Twitter Media).

That sounds like a small but exciting feature!

Uber-curator Robert Scoble has been talking about the need for some easier way to curate social media signals. Of this new feature, he told us by phone from Israel: “It’s nice. It’s a good little step along the path that we need to get to real time curation. I’d like to be able to bundle Tweets and tag them.” Scoble recently wrote about what he calls the 7 big-picture needs of real-time curators, and embedding Tweets wasn’t one of those. “A curator is an information chemist,” he wrote in that post. “He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule.”

This is a little reminiscent of European blogger Robin Good’s argument a few years ago that a concept called Newsmastering was going to become the chic occupation at any firm with business touched by the online river of news. For some reason that hasn’t happened yet. It seems that online curation, editorial selection of items flowing through dynamic collections of online sources, has proven too removed from direct, immediate and crude value to have caught on with more than a handful of companies, most of which were already in the publishing business.

Twitter has high hopes for its favorite feature and may very well be adding more curation-type tones to that in the future, as well.

Either way, starting tomorrow, you’ll apparently be able to click a link and get some code you can paste onto a blog to display a Tweet. That’s cool.

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Twitter has released its first official application for Android 2.1 and Google will be open sourcing the code in the app soon. 

Twitter for Android app features a share button in your favorite applications for sharing links and images via Twitter.

The Twitter Blog provides more details. "Reading tweets is easy in a bunch of places on your phone. Quickly access your timeline with the home screen widget, view a tweet location on a map, and see your friend’s latest tweet in your phonebook, GoogleTalk list or any application that uses Android’s QuickContact bar."

"We had a great time working with the Android team and are thrilled that Google will be open sourcing the code used in this app in the near future. We look forward to the amazing experiences developers will create using Twitter APIs in their upcoming Android apps."
 

The new version of Tweetie, the iPhone Twitter application acquired this month by Twitter Inc., says it contains a surprise. What’s the surprise? When you pull down the stream of Tweets to refresh, a slot machine appears.

The slot machine’s wheels spin, then stop. Some percentage of the time you’re rewarded with a little graphic telling you that Tweetie will soon be known as Twitter for iPhone (congrats to you!). This sure looks like the future home of advertising on Twitter for iPhone, doesn’t it? Twitter’s Sean Garrett says that’s not the case, “The slot machine thing is just a fun way to get the word out about the upcoming change from Tweetie to Twitter.” It sure looks like prime real estate, though.

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Now, there may not be ads up there in the future, but offers, promotions, paid inspirational haiku – something? That placement just seems too valuable for the company to let it sit there empty. Just as ads are coming to Twitter (relatively unobtrusive sponsored Tweets at the top of search results) so too can we imagine the free iPhone app will have ads. This seems like as good a place as any to put them. It’s an easy assumption to make: tech investor Dave McClure freaked out on Twitter today calling them ad units, and the thought certainly crossed our minds when we saw them yesterday. Time will tell…

Storm trooper image from MotivatedPhotos.com.

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Professional social LinkedIn launched a new feature today that has tons of promise: the ability to follow new hires, departures, job postings and more at particular companies. It’s pretty awesome to have a newsfeed of company updates across your sector of interest, as an employment-o-phile (I love hearing about people’s jobs) this seems like a feature I’d really enjoy.

Unfortunately, the implementation is a big disappointment. The condescending, pageview hungry attitude that colors so much of what LinkedIn does is all over this new feature as well. I’ve recorded a short screencast tour of the feature below. Let me know if this drives you as nuts as it does me.

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To be fair, the company says this is only the beginning and that there is more development of this feature on the way. It’s hard not to be cynical about it though, as LinkedIn does things just like this all the time. There is also the ability to customize which kinds of company updates get delivered in your LinkedIn email newsletter, and maybe that will work out great for the stuffed-shirt-Blackberry wielding crowd, but the social media users the company seeks to connect with need more and better ways to consume this information!

There is a feed of your network updates you can subscribe to, but it’s filled to the brim with imported tweets and the most low-value LinkedIn updates like new friend connections. Please oh please, LinkedIn, why can’t you just make it easy for your users to get clear notifications of when people and companies make job changes and hires, in an interface of our choosing, so that we can come back to LinkedIn if we want to read more? It’s maddening.

We’ve been complaining about this for years and the company keeps coming to us saying “you’re going to love what we’ve got to show you next!” But new developments continue to have the same limitations. It’s a heartbreaking loss of opportunity for all parties involved.

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Dutch mobile augmented reality (AR) developers Layar announced today the launch of the world’s first mobile marketplace for AR content, bringing a new model for the monetization of mobile AR to the Android and iPhone platforms. Anyone looking to take advantage of the excitement behind AR experiences can now create AR content, syndicate it on Layar’s platform and benefit from its use by charging users a small one-time fee to access it.

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The Layar Reality Browser is accessible on the iPhone 3GS and eleven different Android devices, and has been downloaded over 1.6 million times. Users of the application can select from various content layers, such as nearby tweets, Wikipedia articles or even local businesses, and can locate them by holding their phone in their field of view. Using the phone’s GPS, accelerometer and compass data, the application can place markers on the screen to show where various objects exist based on their locations in the real world.

Previously, these various content layers have been entirely free to use, but now with the implementation of a content marketplace business can create branded AR experiences and sell them through Layar. The application uses PayPal to process the transactions, and right now the buying of layers is only available in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

Some of the paid content layers launching with the platform include tour guides, home buying guides and augmented greeting creators. One layer, which sells for $1.95, displays recent criminal activity from SpotCrime.com in over 300 U.S. cities, and another provides an augmented park map for Disneyland and Disney World at a price of $3.45.

One of the more unique layers available on the platform allows music fans to discover the actual geographic locations where some of the most famous album covers were photographed. Perhaps this layer will help fans of the growing “sleeveface” photography meme take their creations to the next level.

Layar is taking a cut of each sale – 40% to be exact, which is actually higher than the 30% Apple takes from purchases made in the AppStore. The company sited “the costs for the platform, legal, administration, banking and others” in Wednesday’s press release as the reasons for the 60/40 deal with developers.

The introduction of a marketplace into the mobile AR space could be an enormous boon to the community as it will incentivize companies to create layers. The possible influx of content into the Layar store could work wonders for expanding the AR user base, but the company’s 40% cut off the top could also prevent some developers from using the platform.

Either way, Layar’s content store is a big leap forward for mobile AR developers who have been searching for better ways to monetize their products. Desktop AR is years ahead of mobile in terms of revenues, but as more computing moves more onto portable devices, stores like Layar’s could lead the way toward reversing that trend.

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HP bought Palm today, as you no doubt have heard, for more than $1 billion. What does it mean when a company among the most venerable in Silicon Valley but outside the consumer tech limelight of the day, acquires another company that created the handheld computing market and continues to innovate radically, but has fallen far out of public favor? HP is a company with extensive social software experience, so I’m excited to see what it can do with Palm’s widely admired WebOS mobile platform.

Below we’ve posted some of most interesting short ruminations on the news, from the first few moments after the announcement, from smart industry thought leaders. There are a lot of different reactions out there, what are your thoughts about these ones?

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Tim Bray, who recently left Sun after the Oracle acquisition, joined Google and blasted Apple in a blog post calling the iPhone a “a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers.”

Dion Almaer, well known innovative web developer at Palm, is excited.

Joe Hewitt, the man who built the Facebook iPhone app, gives Palm’s mobile OS a thumbs up.

Hearst Digital Media’s Seamus Condron is not so sure.

That’s a great question, so we asked it of HP. Senior VP of Strategy Brian Humphries told us today that “the issue over the years has been Palm’s ability to prove financial viability and with HP in the picture those concerns go away. We’ll invest substantially in building a developer community. Further, you take this OS onto other platforms and you give people an opportunity to participate in an ecosystem play.”

Mobile developer Tim Sears sees a potential iPad competitor.

Blogger Mark Hopkins points out that HP is on an acquisition roll. Deals we’ve spotted over the last 12 months include: cluster file storage software vendor IBRIX, global consulting company EYP Mission Critical Facilities and network infrastructure manufacturer 3Com $2.7b.

Lon Seidman, startup founder, points to a missed opportunity by Microsoft. Many people agree. Business Insider says this is all about HP trying to “end its reliance on Microsoft Windows as the basis for its hardware gadgets.”

Was it a bad deal for the investors? Leading financial blogger Dan Primack does some quick evaluation of the impact for Elevation Partners, the VC firm that singer Bono is a part of that put hundreds of millions into Palm. Primack says the sky has not fallen.

Former Autodesk and Edelman PR exec Caroline Kawashima is unmoved. Tech media guru Sam Whitmore retweets.

Online comedy guy Justin Kownacki is appropriately meta.

Huffington Post’s Adam Clark Estes makes a good joke.

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Austin-based data aggregation service Infochimps released several major sets of data extracted from the Twitter API today, as well as Infochimp’s first application and API based on one of these datasets.

Updating the “Twitter census” data it released in November 2009, the datasets and histograms Infochimps made available today include ones that track Twitter users by follower count and by profile page color (used to make the visualization below).

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“Fresh Twitter Data”

While the two sets are among those available for no charge, Infochimps sells the more in-depth and extensive datasets it’s derived from Twitter, proving there’s a continued marketplace for this sort of information. For $300 you can buy the dataset containing an hour-by-hour breakdown of the occurence of hashtags, URLs, and smileys in the 1.6 billion tweets created between March 2006 and March 2010. For $250 you can purchase a dataset extracted from those same 1.6 billion tweets with all mentions of stock tokens and related keywords.

These datasets can provide incredible insights into real-time trends and conversations, as Twitter captures how we relate to one another and what sort of information we share. While information from Twitter has been culled to assess which websites we’ll like and which movies will perform well, analysis from Twitter and from the expanding social graph is really just beginning. Like, for example, the ability to track the time and mention of stock names. The new dataset of stock information offered by Infochimps hopes to demonstrate to the financial industry what the music and film industry already know: big data is a powerful prediction tool.

Trst.me, a Page Rank for Twitter

In addition to releasing information about the counts and keyword content of our tweets, Infochimps offers a new analytical tool: Trst.me, a ranking system for Twitter users. Infochimps has taken 40 million Twitter users and assigned them a score from one to 10 using an algorithm similar to Google’s pagerank calculations. The Trst.me application demonstrates what Sarah Perez wrote here last month: that Twitter influence is not solely based on follower count, but rather by the influence of your followers. In other words, your rank would increase far more by having Justin Bieber follow you than by having me do so. According to Infochimps co-founder Flip Kromer, the company plans on adding additional metrics to this tool so that responses and retweets, as well as influence around a particular topic, can be taken into consideration.

This “trst.me” rank – available as a dataset, an API, and an application – can be used by developers, researchers and businesses to target, rank and understand Twitter users. Access to the API will cost $150 per quarter, but could hold a lot of possibilities for developers wanting to be able to weight Twitter influence or filter those tweets around a particular stream.

Kromer says the decision to build an API was a response from developers he talked to at Chirp, many of whom wanted a quick and agile tool for development, but not necessarily access to the full databases Infochimps can provide.

The Future of Big Data

In 2008, Infochimps released a scrape of Twitter data which was later taken down at the request of the microblogging site over user privacy concerns. But Kromer says Infochimps received Twitter’s blessing at Chirp earlier this month for the release of today’s datasets. In an interview today, Kromer said he was excited about the potential for this and other social media information – most notably public Facebook data. He says he recognizes there are privacy concerns and that people “feel different” about their Facebook and Twitter data, but he argues that open data needn’t be a “nightmare” and hopes to demonstrate the benefits of building “awesome stuff,” including apps and analytics that can “democratize access” to information about users’ interests and behaviors.

As a recent article in The Economist observed, we are at the point of an “industrial revolution of data,” with vast amounts of digital information being created, stored and analyzed. There seems to be ample opportunity in the fields of data aggregation, analysis, and visualization. With a corpus of over 1.6 billion tweets, Infochimps has certainly given us a lot of data to get started on.

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The cloud fundamentally changes the way enterprise applications function. Increasingly we are seeing traditional enterprise applications emerge in the cloud and partner with other Web-based services that have consumer appeal.

In turn, we are seeing cloud-based consumer type services transform into enterprise grade offerings that provide customers with the same experience they get in their work as they do at home.

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IBM’s Lotus Notes is a clear example of how this symbiotic relationships is evolving.

Yesterday, Tungle, the calendar application, released a Tungle.me app for Notes users. Tungle allows users to view other people’s calendards and availability.

With Tungle.me for Lotus Notes, you can set custom availability and synchronize it with your Lotus Notes calendar. Once meetings are scheduled, they are automatically updated in the background.

The news follows a number of applications that have been introduced for Notes users. Those include services like TripIt and Gist. Tripit is a travel planning service. Gist allows Lotus Notes users to add dynamic profiles for people in an inbox, calendar and contacts list. Gist for Notes allows a users to have news, blogs, and tweets all in one place, find related people, emails, links, and attachments. It connects to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

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The cloud fundamentally changes the way enterprise applications function. Increasingly we are seeing traditional enterprise applications emerge in the cloud and partner with other Web-based services that have consumer appeal.

In turn, we are seeing cloud-based consumer type services transform into enterprise grade offerings that provide customers with the same experience they get in their work as they do at home.

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IBM’s Lotus Notes is a clear example of how this symbiotic relationships is evolving.

Yesterday, Tungle, the calendar application, released a Tungle.me app for Notes users. Tungle allows users to view other people’s calendards and availability.

With Tungle.me for Lotus Notes, you can set custom availability and synchronize it with your Lotus Notes calendar. Once meetings are scheduled, they are automatically updated in the background.

The news follows a number of applications that have been introduced for Notes users. Those include services like TripIt and Gist. Tripit is a travel planning service. Gist allows Lotus Notes users to add dynamic profiles for people in an inbox, calendar and contacts list. Gist for Notes allows a users to have news, blogs, and tweets all in one place, find related people, emails, links, and attachments. It connects to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

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The neighborhood boundary data provider used by Google, Twitter, EveryBlock, CitySearch and other companies has expanded to include top cities in South America, Middle East, Africa and Asia. Norwich, Vermont based Maponics says it now also offers deeper coverage for leading US and Canadian markets, with new neighborhoods in 100 cities.

Maponics says it is the first service to provide neighborhood boundaries on every populated continent on earth.

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The company uses a combination of proprietary algorithmic and manual methods to determine where a neighborhood begins and ends; boundaries are updated quarterly. The data becomes most exciting when it’s cross-referenced with other data sets. Twitter users, for example, will now be able to geotag and view Tweets by neighborhood in countries all over the world.

If you’re interested in learning more about Maponics, its sector and its relationship with Twitter, check out the excellent podcast interview DirectionsMag did with CEO Darrin Clement two weeks ago.

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Less than 10 weeks after launching, Google Buzz seems so far to have fallen short of capturing the hearts and minds of the social web. A new report from social media analytics service PostRank has found that 90% of the content published into Buzz is automated: 63% is piped in from Twitter and 27% is from automated RSS feeds.

So does that mean that nobody participates in Buzz? It’s hard to imagine more premium placement for a service than inside every Gmail inbox, so why hasn’t Buzz caught on? To be fair, it’s hard for any service to compete with the volume of imported Tweets and easily added RSS feeds. The fact that 10% of content published is added manually might even be seen as an early success… maybe.

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Of course the best part of Buzz is the conversations in comments. In my stream at least, I see some amount of conversation but it’s dominated by a few uber-geeks: people who loved FriendFeed before it was acquired by Facebook.

The whole Buzz model looks a lot like Facebook does these days, in fact. It doesn’t do much else for users, and there are fewer people being social there. Why use Buzz when your friends are on Facebook? Perhaps that’s the question and why Buzz hasn’t caught on.

We’re excited in principle about Buzz because of its potentially disruptive support for open data standards. Apparently it’s mostly robots who get excited about such things, though, as they are mostly the ones coming to the party so far.

There are some hardcore Buzz users discussing this…over on Buzz, too. If you do use Buzz, you can be our friend here. We never post automated content there.

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Our number one post this week was that Twitter’s archives will soon be housed in the hallowed halls of the Library of Congress. There’s got to be joke about librarians shushing tweets in there somewhere. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010. We wrote about Internet of Things threads you’ll be wearing soon, a real-time trip into Twitter’s past, and that augmented reality is going to the fishes on the Discovery Channel. Read on for more.

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Story of the Week: Twitter in the Library of Congress

• Twitter’s Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress
• Apple Announces iPhone OS 4 with Support for Multitasking
• 10 Smart Clothes You’ll Be Wearing Soon
• Goodbye, Gears – Google Docs Boots Plugin for HTML5 on May 3rd
• Top 10 YouTube Videos About Facebook
• New Google Docs Features: Added Co-Editing Capabilities, Similar To Google Wave

More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit

Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services, augmented reality, native app vs. browser-based, commerce and marketing, mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com.

Mobile Web

• Where Does Android Register on Google’s “Evil” Meter?
• Opera Takes a Back Seat to Safari on the iPhone
• Microsoft’s New Phone Gets the Social/App Balance Wrong

More Mobile Web coverage

Augmented Reality

• Discovery Channel Puts AR In Front of Millions of Eyeballs

More Augmented Reality coverage

Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report

We’re pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb’s latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future. This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user’s view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here.

Internet of Things

• 10 Smart Clothes You’ll Be Wearing Soon
• DASH7: Bringing Sensor Networking to Smartphones

More Internet of Things coverage

Real-Time Web

• Google’s Twitter Timeline Lets You Explore the Past
• Microblogging vs. Blogging: 5 Ways to Create an Open Twitter Alternative

More Real-Time Web coverage. Don’t miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb’s report, The Real-Time Web and its Future.

Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App

We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we’ve made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

• Entrepreneurs Under 30: Advice From Your Peers
• Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends: The Future is Mobile
• Apple’s Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games Developers

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations.

• New Google Docs Features: Added Co-Editing Capabilities, Similar To Google Wave
• Social Media Analysis: SAS Makes Its Play

ReadWriteCloud

Our channel ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

• Weekly Poll: What does Virtualization as a Service Really Mean?
• Drupal Founder Takes on Jive Software
• Another Cloud Computing Acronym To Drive You Bonkers

Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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Just about a year ago, Twazzup launched one of the more interesting Twitter search engines and one month ago, it became one of the first services to get access to Twitter’s full firehose stream. Today, the company is launching its first new service based on this full Twitter stream: Twazzup Insights. Insights is a real-time Twitter analytics service that displays a lot of interesting data about any given keyword, as well as a list of the most influential Twitter users that use this keyword. In addition, Twazzup is also launching its web-based Twitter client Twazzup Reader out of beta.

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Twazzup Insights

The new analytics service is still in private alpha testing, but a couple of teaser reports on the site already show the application’s potential. Besides displaying the number of tweets and retweets about a given keyword per hour, the service also highlights the top links about this topic, as well as a list of the top influencers, as well as the most often used hashtags and other keywords in these tweets. In addition, Twazzup Insights also performs a basic sentiment analysis on these tweets.

If you would like to get early access to this service, you can use the request form on Twazzup Insights, or send an email to info[at]twazzup[dot]com.

Twazzup Reader

Twazzup Reader looks similar to Brizzly, but offers a number of interesting features that set it apart from the competition. Besides offering all the standard Twitter features (lists, search etc.), Twazzup Reader also shows images and short text snippets from all the links that appear in your stream. In addition, you can also filter every stream, including lists and persistent searches, by posts with images and videos. Whenever you are feeling especially helpful, you can also highlight all the messages that include a question.

Overall, Twazzup Reader is a very capable web-based Twitter client and definitely worth a try.

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This morning’s presentations from Chirp, Twitter’s developer conference, have showcased the growth and the innovation of the service.

A few of the statistics announced this morning include:

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• Twitter has 105,779,710 registered users
• 300,000 new users sign up per day
• Approximately 60% of them are coming from outside the U.S
• Twitter receives 180 million unique visitors per month
• 75% of Twitter traffic comes from third-party applications
• 60% of all tweets come from third-party apps
• Since the new Blackberry application was launched, it has accounted for 7 to 8% of new sign
• Twitter now has 175 employees, up from 25 one year ago
• There are 600 million search queries on Twitter per day
• There are over 100,000 Twitter applications
• Twitter gets 3 billion requests a day through its API
• 37% of active Twitter users use their phone to tweet

While the company is making several announcements at Chirp, including the archival of all public tweets since 2006 with the Library of Congress, these statistics confirm the impressive growth and potential of Twitter.

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