Twingly Channels: A Personalized, Social, Real-Time Memetracker

A few weeks ago, we wrote about Swedish startup Twingly and its stealth memetracker Twingly Channels. Tonight, Twingly is launching in closed beta. In the past, Twingly has brought us a microblogging search tool, a search engine for blogs, and a global ranking system for blogs. Twingly Channels essentially lets users to create their own personalized real-time memetracker. To sign up for an invite, click here with the code “TechCrunch.”

As we wrote previously, Twingly is a mix between Digg and FriendFeed. Twingly Channels lets users to create their own personalized social memetracker by collecting feeds and search terms covering any topic or event into a channel they share with others. And the site has real-time functionality. Users can post links posted by users, content from RSS feeds, and real-time search results for terms from blogs and microblogs (i.e. Twitter). The resulting stream is filtered into a Friendfeed-like channel where people can comment on, like, or dislike incoming items.

Channels will be public by default, but to comment or subscribe you will need to sign up. Twingly will also employ a ranking system to filter content using a proprietary alogorithm. Every item coming into the channel is continuously ranked using links from blogs, Tweets, user comments and likes. The highest ranked items are shown in the Popular view. Twingly Channels can also be used by companies for brand tracking and social media monitoring and can be kept private for these purposes.

The site could be useful for aggregating RSS feeds, tracking specific content on blogs and microblogs and then sharing that content with others, all on one site. The blog/microblog search is powered by Twingly’s search engine which tracks close to 26 million blogs around the world. It’s similar in some ways to Streamy.

MySpace Music Launches Down Under: Now Live In Australia And New Zealand

When it comes to free media streaming, the United States is flush with premium content from great sites like Hulu and MySpace Music. But aside from a handful of exceptions, the rest of the world is out of luck. Today, the balance changes a bit: MySpace has just launched its hugely popular MySpace Music service in Australia and New Zealand, bringing those regions unlimited streaming of songs and albums from all four major music labels, as well as many indies.

AU/NZ users will have access to the same features as the US site, including shareable playlists, artist activity feeds, and other social functionality. But there is at least one notable difference: while MySpace Music launched in the United States with Amazon as its partner for purchasing digital downloads, the AU/NZ version has teamed with Apple’s iTunes. MySpace wouldn’t comment on whether this is foreshadowing a larger partnership, but we may well see the Apple deal extend stateside. MySpace likely had an exclusive partnership with Amazon for the US launch, but it’s been a year (which may well have been the length of the deal), so it may soon be free to explore other options.

Since launching last fall, MySpace Music has been something of a bright spot for the otherwise faltering social network. The site has seen a tenfold growth in traffic since launching, with the US portal drawing 18.95 million users (it’s also the #1 site in time spent for the all important 18-34 demographic, though some of this can be attributed to the fact that users can leave it playing in the background). MySpace Music also recently rolled out a much improved homepage and has seen a number of exclusive releases.

Larry Ellison Still Hates “Cloud Computing Nonsense” (Video)

According to Wikipedia, cloud computing is a paradigm of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. According to Larry Ellison, it’s nonsense and water vapor.

The chief executive of Oracle last week at the Churchill Club sat down with former Motorola CEO Ed Zander for a fireside chat about the future of the company he co-founded, the pending acquisition of Sun and the implications thereof, and the state of the economy in general.

Most amusing however, was his ranting on cloud computing, captured on video by TechPulse360. Of course, we’ve heard his refreshingly critical take of the buzzword du jour before, but he continues to make it a valid point:

Buzzd Is An iPhone App Built For Party Crashing

A couple months ago, we wrote about SocialGreat, a cool service that uses Foursquare’s location APIs to determine the hot places that people are hanging out at. It’s a good idea, but it’s limited to Foursquare data [update below], which is still a relatively small service. Buzzd, on the other hand, pulls its data from Twitter and other Buzzd users, for a bigger picture of places that are hot.

With Buzzd, which is launching its free iPhone app today, you simply load the program and it will bring up a list of venues close to you that are currently popular based on people talking about them on Twitter and Buzzd. It also uses some location data pulled from Twitter. Right now, that data is pulled from users’s Twitter profiles, so it is imprecise, but with the Geolocation API (which may be sort of live already) that will soon change.

If you click on a place, you can learn more about it, including how far away it is, its phone number, and a description of it. You can also see “buzzes” about it, meaning the things people are saying about a place on Twitter and in the Buzzd community. And you can “Buzz It,” meaning you can tell the community you are at a place and give a short description of what it is or why it’s good. And you can send that info to Twitter.

To do all of that, you have to create an account on Buzzd and sign-in, but one nice thing about the service is that you can see all of this data without ever creating an account. If you really don’t care about buzzing data yourself, you can simply use it passively.

There is certainly an upside to using data that is purely location-based, as it is with SocialGreat, but until location-based services truly take off, services with a lower barrier to entry, like Twitter, are going to have much more data to offer up. And you can clearly see that with Buzzd.

Buzzd has actually been around for a little while, but it has mainly existed on the mobile web and as an app on the BlackBerry. There’s a good reason for this: It was one of the original BlackBerry Partners Fund receipients. But the lure of the iPhone proved too strong, and after one meek attempt at an app, this new version of Buzzd looks like the real deal. It’s not a complex app, but it’s good for what it does.

Last month, the service had 500,000 active user over the web and its BlackBerry app, we’re told. Those numbers should undoubtedly jump with this new iPhone app. As it gains users, you can imagine them doing slightly more interesting things such as allowing users to say if a venue is good or bad, rather than just if they are there or not.

The business model will revolve around advertising, but the company is doing some interesting things in terms of striking deals with some locations to get their places featured.

You can find Buzzd here in the App Store. Again, it is a free download.

Update: We originally had said that SocialGreat only pulls in Foursquare data, but it now pulls in more, including data from Brightkite and GraffitiGeo. Still no Twitter data yet (the big source), but you can imagine that when Geolocation is ready, they may just do that.

Spotify extends playing offline to desktop – Are you getting this Apple?

BREAKING: Well, look out iTunes. We’ve said previously that Spotify didn’t look like it was going to compete with the Apple iTunes Store. It’s streaming, freemium music service after all, not a download store.

It also recently launched an iPhone app that only subscribers can use.

But perhaps the hint of their strategy lay in the fact that on that app you could save playlists and tracks for offline playing (if, say, you were on a plane), though you can not access any kind of MP3 file for sharing of course.

All that changes today because later today Spotify will extend the ‘Offline mode’ that is available on Spotify Mobile and bringing it to the desktop version of Spotify.

Spotify Premium subscribers (£9.99-a-month or £120 annual subscription in the UK) will be able to select their playlists and set them to be ‘Available offline’. Those playlists will then be synced to your computer so it will be possible to listen to your playlists with no internet connection. Handy for the garden shed or the local park perhaps.

In addition to offline mode, Spotify has also added Paypal to the list of available payment methods this week for users in the UK. Spotify does not sell MP3s (you can download them via 7Digital, iTunes Store and Amazon MP3).

This move must surely now have completely new implications with its relationship to Apple iTunes. We’re not saying that Spotify is poised to kill off iTunes – far from it. iTunes is deeply ingrained in the mainstream consumer mind and Spotify is some wet behind the ears startup that, although popular, has done no mainstream marketing to date. In addition, users will be limited to how much music they can download to offline mode.

But this ability to play offline must surely change things. Streaming music services have not had much impact on Apple, if at all. Being able to play offline is a different ball-game altogether. Why buy and download masses of songs when you can shift your listening patterns to your tastes without bill shock, especially for that offline holiday.

The service is targetting a Q4 US launch.

Six Apart Opens Up TypePad APIs, Relaunches Pownce As TypePad Motion

Blogging software pioneer Six Apart this morning announced that it’s debuting TypePad Cloud Platform, a new service that enables developers to use the service’s API to build social applications while leaving the storage, infrastructure and organization of the data that is core to such tools to TypePad’s so-called ’smart cloud’. Synchronously, Six Apart is introducing and open-sourcing TypePad Motion – the first application to launch on the new platform – as the phoenix rising from the ashes of Pownce (which the company picked up late last year).

This is an interesting move for a number of reasons. Let’s tackle TypePad Platform first and take a look at Six Apart’s forray into the community microblogging space afterwards.

TypePad Platform and Developer Program

The TypePad Platform will essentially enable developers to use structured social objects (think blogs, posts, comments, people, activities, groups and tags) to more easily build social applications on top of a cloud network. While this is obviously mostly a developer-oriented product, Six Apart CEO Chris Alden in a blog post wrote that this will also benefit bloggers, whether they’re part of a business or organization that uses TypePad for online publications or individual bloggers who share their life with a close circle of friends and family.

For larger publishers and online businesses, Alden writes, the TypePad Platform could be another alternative for them to incorporate blogs and social networking into their websites, thus offering an alternative to local software solutions or hosted SaaS solutions. Personal bloggers will ultimately benefit from more applications that enhance TypePad’s core functionality, he expects.

Starting today, interested programmers can head to the fresh TypePad Developer Program website to obtain an alpha version of the TypePad API for free, with commercial versions of the TypePad Platform set to debut later on. Time will tell if the initiative will end up creating an ecosystem of third-party developers much like rival Automattic has managed to assemble for WordPress over the years.

TypePad Motion

Six Apart recently added some Posterous-style microblogging flavor and real-time blogging capabilities to TypePad, but is now switching to full throttle with the launch of TypePad Motion. The new service is the inaugural open source app built by Six Apart developers for the new TypePad platform and incorporates many of the features of the late Pownce. It’s also reminiscent of Jaiku, Tumblr and the recently introduced Yahoo Meme service.

The service is already live here, so I played around with it a little and found that it was far from anything remotely spectacular in terms of functionality or wealth of features. You log on with your Typepad account and add text (no character limit, links, photos, online videos and audio) to your Motion profile. Other community members can subscribe to your new blog and comment much like any other microblogging / lifestreaming service. That’s about it, although the open-source aspect is interesting for the future.

Six Apart says the TypePad Motion app evolved from the Pownce codebase & community. It’s written in Python using the Django framework (GitHub). An example of a customized Motion blog is this showcase for the Future of Web Apps conference where the above announcements were made today.

A leader playing a good hand by broadening and diversifying its product line, or too little, too late? What’s your take?

Google Adds New Options To Make Search More Timely, Less Spammy, And More Personal

Maybe it has something to do with competition from Bing, but all of a sudden Google is really interested in guided search. Last May, it launched search options in the left-hand column of the results page which let you filter results by type, time, and other criteria. Today, Google is adding a new set of options geared at making results more timely, newsy, and personal. It also lets you filter out commercial results when you are not in a shopping mood.

The new options include the ability to see results from only the past hour (that’s so near-realtime) or for a specific date range. You can also filter for results only from news, blog, or book search. (Basically, these options bring some of Google’s standalone search verticals into the main search experience).

Then there’s the spam filter. You can “fewer shopping sites” or “more shopping sites.” When you choose more shopping sites, product prices appear up top. And if you are trying to go back to something you’ve already seen but can’t remember exactly where it was, you can personalize results by seeing only sites you’ve already visited. Or you can choose to only see new sites, and make the search more of a discovery tool. (You need to be signed in and have Web History enabled for these last two options to work).

Most searches on Bing also bring up a set of guided options on the left. But whereas Google is choosing to apply a set of search options consistently across all queries, Bing takes more of customized approach based on what you are searching for. For instance, it usually shows related searches to your query and lets you filter by type of search as well (shopping, local, image, video). The search options change on the fly depending on the search.

Which approach do you like better—consistent categories (Google) or customized categories (Bing)?