Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Late last night in Texas — at the infamous and indefatigable SXSWi convention — Digg’s CEO Jay Adelson showed the world a new and revamped version of Digg. This overhaul, which has been five years in the making and the primary focus of the Digg team, will elicit a dramatic change in the slow, unwieldy and demagogic nature of the service.

Along with the usual Web 2.0-esque streamlining (rounded corners everywhere, I bet), Digg will become faster, more responsive and instant. Users will now be able to submit pages and Digg other submissions even if they’re not logged in. This fundamental change, according to Adelson, will see the number of daily submissions climb from a meager 20,000 to millions per day — “can you handle that much content?” gloated the proud CEO, no doubt throwing his head back to emit a maniacal cackle.

To accompany the new site, Digg is also dropping its old MySQL back-end in favour of a new, ‘very, very fast’ infrastructure.

Dubbed ‘Digg 2.0′ by CNET, there’s no sign of when the new version will be rolled out to the general public, but there is a holding page at ‘new.digg.com’, where you can enter an email address — presumably to join an open beta, when and if it comes.

Digg 2.0 almost ready for prime time: faster, less draconian originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 14 Mar 2010 11:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Utilities, Social Software, iPhone

Upcoming, the venerable social events calendar that was founded in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, has undoubtedly seen better days. There are other places to post events and invite friends now — notably, Facebook — and Upcoming has dwindled in popularity. There’s still a goldmine of great events on the site, though, especially if you live in a big city. Happening, a new Upcoming client for the iPhone, makes those events fun and easy to explore.

I had my doubts about the usefulness of Upcoming, but Happening’s use of geolocation made it easy to find events near me. It turns out that pub quiz hosts love Upcoming with a passion, and I happen to love pub quizzes. Result: one test run of Happening revealed something to do on every night of the week.

Location is what really takes Happening above and beyond the Upcoming web interface. When you’re out with your friends and having trouble deciding what to do, the web interface is little help. If you’ve got an iPhone on you, though, Happening delivers in two taps.

Version 1.1, which was just released on the App Store, offers the all-important option to add events to your Upcoming calendar. To be perfectly honest, though, I didn’t even have an Upcoming calendar until I had Happening.

Full Disclosure: Happening was created by one of our favorite Download Squad writers, Nik Fletcher.

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Happening iPhone app breathes new life into Yahoo!’s Upcoming originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Finance, Freeware, Social Software

Stock traders are among the many groups of people who have taken up Twitter as a way to discuss their interests. They’ve even developed their own shorthand; a stock symbol is typically prefaced with a dollar sign, such as $MSFT, and tweets that discuss stocks often end with two dollar signs.

Stock Tweet App has taken these conventions and used them to build a custom interface for viewing Twitter with a scrolling live stream of all stock-related tweets. Alternatively, you can use the Custom Stock List option to type in the symbol for a few stocks you’re interested in tracking, and only tweets concerning those stocks will be shown.

We’ve previously covered StockTwits in this space, and while they cover the same ground functionally, the styles of the two sites are very different. Of the two, I prefer Stock Tweet App, but there’s a sneak peek of a new beta version of StockTwits available which is worth checking out.

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Stock Tweet App makes tracking Twitter stock discussions easy originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0

Urtak is a simple, non-Flash website which lets you craft a survey widget. Each question can be answered with yes, no, or maybe, and once you reply, you get a pie chart illustrating how others replied to the same question.

To see how many other people answered a given question you need to hover over the pie diagram (thanks, Aeomony!). There is also a nice Javascript animation as you post your answer and the widget scrolls to the next question. It’s very social, as can be expected, and integrates with Facebook. If you’re not so much into the Facebook scene (and I wouldn’t blame you), you can still embed it into any other site (or perhaps even a forum post) by copy-pasting a Javascript code that they provide for you.

The site seems to be fairly established (”4,382,533 Responses Served”, they say), and is refreshingly clean of any ads. I wonder how they make any money.

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Urtak lets you create nice-looking surveys originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Video, Web services, Social Software

Chatroulette, the anonymous video chat service that has captured the Internet’s imagination (and free time), is known for wanton nudity and crazy stunts. That’s because of the “anonymous” part of Chatroulette. You can be anyone you want, and you can wear anything you want (or not)! However, Chatroulette isn’t as anonymous as we previously supposed.

A new site called Chatroulette Map has begun the process of matching IP addresses with locations and screenshots. That means you can see, on a map, where that weird naked guy, attractive dude, or fake Jonas Brother was really chatting from. It’s not a real-time service (yet), but the database has nearly 2500 screenshots mapped as I write this.

So, think twice next time you take your ‘personal belongings’ out on camera. It might just put you on the map.

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Chatroulette Map exposes the locations of your “anonymous” chat partners originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Internet, E-mail, Social Software

The Outlook Social Connector first debuted back in November 2009, and at that time, only LinkedIn was supported. Today, the MySpace plug-in has been made available, and now you can see your friends’ easily-excited, angst-ridden emo updates in Outlook!

If you’re running Outlook 2010 Beta (which is very, very nice, incidentally), you’ll need to update your Outlook Social Connector (OSC) first. Outlook 2003 and 2007 users should be fine to go ahead and install the plug-in.

With LinkedIn for the businessmen, and MySpace for the children and bohemians, the only omission from the crowd are the exhibitionistic farmers over on Facebook. The Outlook 2010 blog is full of teasing hints about Facebook integration (and also a nice video showing the power of the OSC), but so far there doesn’t seem to be a download link. I expect it’ll pop up very soon, with Office 2010 only a few months away!

I was about to suggest that Outlook might finally replace Gmail as my email tool, but then I remembered that Google just opened its Apps Marketplace. How long will it be until we see Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace properly integrated into a side bar in Gmail? Moreover, with Chrome OS still on its way, wouldn’t it be pretty cool to have a single ‘home page’ with every new email, forum post, and status update since you last logged in?

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Outlook Social Connector now supports MySpace; Facebook soon! originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Features, Web services, Social Software, iPhone

In this corner, with a big head start, a huge userbase, and tons of features, it’s … Foursquare! In this corner, with millions of dollars in funding and a great-looking new design … Gowalla!

By now, most people know that Gowalla and Foursquare have been going blow-for-blow in the location-based social gaming fight. Despite entries from Google, Yelp, and (soon) Facebook, these two services have the strongest iPhone apps out there right now. But if you’re only going to sign up for one, which one should you pick?

Both Gowalla and Foursquare have their plusses and minuses, so read on for a comparison of their new iPhone apps (which both updated on Tuesday … ooh, drama!) and decide for yourself.

Continue reading Location Battle, Round 2: Foursquare and Gowalla both update iPhone apps!

Location Battle, Round 2: Foursquare and Gowalla both update iPhone apps! originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Twitter and Facebook both moved forward with their new location-based features today, with Twitter switching on geolocation features on Twitter.com, and Facebook announcing it will allow users to share their locations.

We already knew that Twitter’s move was coming, because Twitter’s location services have been part of the API and available in third-party apps for some time now. TechCrunch is reporting that geolocation was only on for Twitter.com temporarily, but that it should come back within the week, in time for SXSW. They’ve also got screenshots, in case you’re a “believe-it-when-I-see-it” type.

Facebook’s move is a bigger surprise. The New York Times broke the story, citing this new line in Facebook’s privacy policy: “When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.” Facebook hasn’t commented, but the NYT’s sources say its location plans include both the website and developer APIs for Facebook apps.

All of this points to the idea that location-centric apps like Google Buzz and Foursquare aren’t just a passing phase. Get used to location in social networks, because it looks like it’s about to arrive in a big way.

Twitter rolls out geolocation, and Facebook location sharing is coming originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Utilities, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Maybe you’ve heard of Foursquare — that trendy mobile app that lets you and your friends check in when you go somewhere — but chances are you haven’t heard of FourWhere. It’s a search engine for location-based social networks, starting with Foursquare, but planning to expand to Gowalla and others. Just like third-party apps started popping up for Twitter as it got more popular, you can expect to see a lot more of these add-ons for location-centered networks in the future.

So, what does FourWhere do, exactly? It’s like a mashup of Google Maps and Foursquare, allowing you to find venues and the comments people have left about them. Just right click anywhere on the map to bring up nearby venues. Clicking on a location shows you how many people have checked in there and what tips they’ve left. You can even filter out venues with no tips.

FourWhere is handy, but not perfect. I noticed that a lot of comments were labeled “more than 6 months ago,” when they were actually made recently. Also, one of the most important pieces of FourSquare information is missing: who’s the mayor? If you could use FourWhere to pick out vulnerable spots to grab a mayorship, it would be a lot more useful.

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FourWhere introduces search for location-based social networks originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Time-Wasters, Social Software, Web

Remember those sites that purported to tell you what your website is worth? Just type in a domain name, and out popped an impressive-sounding number that wasn’t worth the pixels it was rendered with. Well, now we have the same thing for Twitter. It’s called TweetValue.

If you were wondering about the validity of the dollar value that TweetValue comes up with for your Twitter account, check out this sparkling copywriting gem displayed prominently on the TweetValue’s front page:

“Get ready for some bling-bling and some tweet-tweet!”

Yeah, so there’s that.

The site seems to have achieved a high level of popularity recently, which would explain why it is running slowly and having occasional rendering problems. More than anything I see TweetValue as a fun little gag, and a way to gain totally meaningless bragging rights over your friends.

For the record, TweetValue puts our @DownloadSquad Twitter profile’s value at $970. What’s yours?

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TweetValue calculates the dollar value of your Twitter account - Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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