Google Rolls Out Twitter Timelines In Realtime Search

Last Updated on Wednesday, 14 April 2010 09:28 Written by Daisy Harley Wednesday, 14 April 2010 09:28

One of the biggest conundrums in realtime search is how to show more than just the most recent results. Sometimes you want context or the ability to see the most important status updates about a specific topic, but if the results go back too far they are no longer realtime. The various realtime search engines and Twitter itself are addressing this issue in various ways, such as by highlighting extra-popular Tweets up top and then flowing the rest chronologically below (that is Twitter’s own method).

Google is going a different route by adding a timeline view of realtime updates. The feature is rolling out over the next few days, and includes more than just Twitter updates. (It will be under options, when you click the “Updates” link). Until then, you can check it out here.

The timeline lets you go back in time to see what people were saying about any particular topic. It searches updates on Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, and MySpace. It is an attempt to recreate the conversation which occurred at a specific point in time about any topic.

Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/14/google-rolls-out-twitter-timelines-in-realtime-search/

AppsFire Hands Out iPhone / iPad App Star Awards (Videos of the Winners)

Last Updated on Monday, 12 April 2010 10:58 Written by Daisy Harley Monday, 12 April 2010 10:58

Freshly funded mobile app discovery startup AppsFire has handed out some App Star Awards to a number of developers of unlaunched iPhone / iPad applications this morning at the 360iDev conference in San Jose, California.

This was the second edition of the App Star Awards – the first one was held at the Le Web conference in Paris last year (check out the winners of the first edition).

This year, the winners received a free ad campaign with a good number of online publications, a brand new iPad and a 3 months worth of Animoto Pro.

AppsFire received more than 80 submissions for unreleased applications in 5 days, from developers in 20 countries, including Japan, Spain, Italy, Brazil and even Iceland.

Out of those, 33 iPhone and iPad apps were pre-selected by a professional jury, and for each of the 3 categories (‘Entertainment and Fun’, ‘Games’ and ‘Utility and Other’) the overall winner and the runner-up were announced at the conference just moments ago.

And the winners are …

Entertainment and Fun

Winner: Mixr (video)

“DJ App for iPad. Feels & functions like authentic turntables. Mixr gives you a DJ experience unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. Beautiful interface, professional mixing.”

Runner-up: PocketZoo – “Wikipedia for animals” (video)

Utility and other

Winner (and our personal favorite): LiveCycle (video)

“LiveCycle is the first wireless cycling computer and mounting system for iPhone and iPod touch. Leveraging the advanced features of the iPhone and iPod touch, LiveCycle provides users with a hi-res color interface, real-time performance feedback, GPS feature, data file system, and performance analysis.”

Runner-up: iMockups – “nice mockup tool for iPad” (video)

Games

Winner: IsoCards (video)

“IsoCards is a multitouch-gesture and physics driven deck of cards that allows you to play any card game you want. With intuitive controls such as cupping your hand at the top of you cards to reveal them to only yourself. You can also connect your iPhone to the iPad via Bluetooth so that you can literally hold your own cards, and then use the iPad as the communal cards.”

Runner-up: Jim & Frank – adventure game (video)

Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/12/app-star-awards-2010/

Check Out Tagxedo, A Ridiculously Cool Word Cloud Generator

Last Updated on Friday, 9 April 2010 10:29 Written by Daisy Harley Friday, 9 April 2010 10:29

There’s a new word cloud generator in Web town, and it’s a pure delight if you’re into visualization technology, words or better yet, both. Its hard-to-remember name is Tagxedo and it was built by developer Hardy Leung and released just a couple of days ago.

Leung says the inspiration for the app is Wordle, a word cloud generation tool we’ve covered once or twice in the past. Well, good news for Leung: even Wordle creator Jonathan Feinberg, who recently left his regular job at IBM Research to go work on Google Books, says Tagxedo is not so much an alternative as the next generation of Wordle, and a “leap forward” in both the layout algorithms and the design of the tweaking interface.

I concur – Tagxedo’s downright amazing.

You can use the app to create visually stunning word clouds like the ones I embedded in this post by inserting words (e.g. speeches, news articles, letters, slogans, themes, and so on). You can do so by uploading a document, entering a URL or simply by pasting text into the appropriate field. Tagxedo will size words appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurence within the body of text, leaving out small words like “is”, “are”, “do”, etc.

With just one click, you can rotate the cloud, modify its colors and font, and also alternate between themes and shapes as you please. You can even upload your own images and have the word cloud assume the shape of the image (e.g. Twitter), although Leung admits that the quality of the end result depends a lot on which images gets uploaded, as it’s a very complex process.

You can save word clouds as images at will (in pretty high resolutions, even), and Leung says a button to print directly from the app is in the works.

While in beta for a limited time, the application will remain completely free, and even when it won’t be in beta any longer Leung promises that a lot of the functionality will be preserved in the basic, free version. Hurray!

The app was built in Silverlight, and in case you were wondering why, Leung says:

“I’m technology-agnostic and hold the general opinion that the best technologies for the job should be used. For an application like Tagxedo where I deployed fancy algorithms to achieve better quality and faster respins, I believe Silverlight offers the best technology, over other technologies I’ve considered, including Html5, Flash, Javafx, Java Applet, and Server-side technology.”

His longer explanation on the choice for Silverlight can be found in the FAQ section.

On top is the word cloud for TechCrunch.com – can you guess where this one is coming from?

Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/09/tagxedo/