We recently told you about 5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice , and now we wanted to remind you about a resource that can get you advice straight from the horse’s mouth: Larry Cheng’s extensive list of 131 top blogs from venture capitalists and firms – a priceless tool for any entrepreneur looking for free advice. The blogs are ranked by their number of Google Reader subscriptions, though Cheng, himself ranked 33rd, says, “there are many great blogs with fewer subscribers as the number of subscribers doesn’t necessarily correlate to the quality of content.” Nevertheless, resources like this are a great tool for keeping up with what the VC’s are talking about, but how can one possibly manage a blogroll so large? Thankfully, there are plenty of solutions for managing RSS feeds so you can stay on top of it all. Sponsor Along with his list, Cheng offers Google Reader bundles of various breakouts of the list. If 100 blogs is too much, you can alternatively subscribe to the top 10, 25 or 50 blogs. Or if you only want to read blogs from your neck of the woods, there are location based bundles for California, Massachusetts, New York, Europe, Canada and Israel. If you just can’t get enough VC blogs, there’s also an option to get the whole kit and caboodle – over 130 blogs total. Whichever bundle or bundles you choose, Google Reader is an excellent way to filter through your feeds. The best solution for managing a large list is a feature Google recently rolled out: sort by magic. The more you use Google Reader, the more it learns about what kinds of stories you read, and it reflects these trends when it sorts a feed by “magic”. Another tool for sorting through a heavy list of blogs is to use OPML files and filter them through PostRank – a process we described in great detail last January. In short, PostRank takes your list and creates a new feed, sifting through the noise and filtering out only the best and most popular posts. The only drawback is it takes time for PostRank to determine which posts are more popular, periodically dumping out a dozen or so posts at a time. If you really want to stay on top of the VC game, applications like Snackr can provide a scrolling marquee of your feeds across your screen while you continue to work on other things. Snackr is built using Adobe AIR, so it’s compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. Discuss

Read the original post:
How To Keep Track of Over 130 Top VC Bloggers

This week we ran a reader poll , asking for your votes on the top Web products of the year. Thousands of you voted for up to 10 products, from a list of 100 selected by the ReadWriteWeb authors over December. The poll has now closed and we’re pleased to present the ReadWriteWeb community’s Top 10 Web Products of 2009 . Here is the final top 10: Sponsor 1. Twitter 2. Google Chrome 3. Google Maps 4. Facebook 5. WordPress 6. iPhone platform 7. Google Apps 8. Adobe AIR 9. Hulu 10. TweetDeck So there you have it, Twitter was the best product of 2009 according to ReadWriteWeb readers! Relatedly, Twitter desktop client TweetDeck made the list at #10. Google had 3 products in the top 3: Chrome (#2), Maps (#3) and Google Apps (#7). This more than justifies their selection by our editors as Best BigCo of 2009 . Honorable Mentions, #11-25 The following products missed out on the final top 10, but they were all popular picks among our community. Many of them are startup products, so they can be proud to say they’re among the top 25 products of 2009 according to our readers. In alphabetical order: Android platform Bing DropBox (note: DropBox was missing from the original top 100, but we’re including in the top 25 due to the number of comment-votes it received on the original post) Evernote Facebook iPhone app Feedly Google Voice Open Calais Posterous Mint Spotify Tumblr Tweetie Wolfram Alpha Woopra That’s it, the culmination of our Best Products 2009 series . Hope you all enjoyed it and we look forward to another year of innovation in web technology in 2010! Discuss

Here is the original post:
Poll Results: ReadWriteWeb Readers Pick The Top 10 Products of 2009

Over December we have published our best Web products of 2009 over ten posts. This week we’ve opened up our selections for you to vote on . The poll is embedded below and we invite you to select your favorite web products of 2009. You can vote for up to 10 products. If you don’t see one of your favorites in the list, note it in the comments and we’ll count that as a vote too. We will announce the final top 10, along with the full results, this Friday . After one day of voting, here is the top 10: Sponsor 1 Twitter 2 Google Maps 3 Google Chrome 4 Facebook 5 Hulu 6 Adobe AIR 7 WordPress 8 TweetDeck 9 iPhone platform 10 Evernote Note: the poll is randomly ordered, but you can also view an alphabetical list below. What are your best products of 2009? (multiple choice) ( polling ) Top 100 Web Products of 2009, Alphabetical Aardvark ActivityStreams Adobe AIR Amazon EC2 Android platform Appsfire Apture Arduino Basecamp BBC’s Semantic Music Project Bing Blip.fm BNO (Breaking News Online) box.net Boxee Brightkite ChartBeat Cisco Collaboration Citysense Clicker Cliqset Collecta Data.gov DBpedia Echo (JS-Kit) Evernote Evri Facebook Facebook iPhone app Fedex SenseAware Feedly Fever Foursquare Freebase FreshBooks Glue Google App Engine Google Apps Google Chrome Google Maps Google Search Options and Rich Snippets Google Voice Hootsuite HP CeNSE Hulu IBM’s sensor solutions ioBridge iPhone platform Jimdo Jive Software SBS 4.0 Jolicloud Layar Microsoft Windows Azure MindTouch Mint Mir:ror MOG Moshi Monsters Mozilla Raindrop New York Times APIs OneForty Open Calais OrSiSo Outside.in Pachube Posterous Postrank present.ly PubSubHubbub Rackspace Cloud Drive Regator Ribbit RSSCloud Salesforce.com Seesmic Shazam SocialCast Socialtext Spotify StockTwits Superfeedr Tornado (FriendFeed framework) Tumblr TweetDeck Tweetie Tweetmeme Twidroid Twingly Twitter Vuze Wetoku WideNoise Wikitude Wolfram Alpha Woopra WordPress Yahoo Query Language (YQL) Yelp Zemanta Zoho CRM Discuss

See the article here:
Interim Results: Vote Now For Your Favorite Web Products of 2009

2009 has been a big year for mobile and real-time technologies, which is reflected in our selection of the top 10 Web platforms of the year. It’s the final instalment of our series of top products of 2009 . As we noted in last year’s round-up , a web platform can be as simple as an API (like Twitter’s) allowing external developers to tap into a company’s data. It can also be software and services, like Amazon’s Web Services. Or it can be a fully fledged development platform, such as iPhone SDK and Adobe AIR. Whatever the case, platforms on the Web allow people to build on top of another company’s product, so we think it’s an appropriate way to close our Top Web Products series. Sponsor ReadWriteWeb’s Best Products of 2009: Twitter As Twitter ‘s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver repeatedy pointed out during his presentation at this year’s LeWeb, Twitter and its ecosystem of third-party developers have a highly symbiotic relationship. Twitter’s APIs are still rate-limited and Twitter won’t make the full firehose of feeds available to all of its developers until early 2010. There can be no doubt, however, that Twitter has managed to create one of the most vibrant developer communities around its platform. Over the course of the year, Twitter introduced a number of new APIs, including a geolocation API that makes it easy to attach geodata to a tweet and the controversial retweet API . With Twitter Connect, Twitter also released a competitor to Facebook Connect, although this tool hasn’t found widespread adoption yet. Facebook Just like Twitter, Facebook ‘s success has increasingly become dependent on the third-party ecosystem that has grown up around the Facebook platform . According to Ethan Beard, who manages the development of the Facebook Platform, over 500,00 applications have been developed on top of the Facebook platform and over 250 million users use at least one of these. The Facebook platform is not just about letting users play games like Farmville and or novelty apps like SuperPoke. Facebook Connect, for example, is becoming increasingly popular as a sign-in mechanism on third-party sites. Over 80,000 sites now utilize Facebook Connect, 60 million Facebook users use it and two-thirds of all the sites in the Comscore 100 index currently use it. WordPress.org Without any doubt, the world of blogging would look very different today if it wasn’t for Automattic’s open-source version of WordPress . The core open-source WordPress project is driven by a passionate group of developers, but a majority of development happens in the community that builds plugins for WordPress. Earlier this year, WordPress released version 2.8 of its self-hosted product, a major overhaul of its core product. It includes a new interface and new options for plugin developers, including the ability to install and search for plugins from within the admin interface. Among some of the most popular WordPress plugins are an image gallery , an SEO tool and an analytics package . iPhone We admit that our choice of the iPhone as a top web platform could be somewhat controversial. After all, Apple’s less than efficient approval system and the closed nature of the platform have even led some developers to abandon development for the iPhone altogether. There can be little doubt, however, that Apple has created one of the most successful mobile developer programs. The App Store now features over 100,000 applications and an increasing number of web services now offer versions of their products that are specifically geared towards the iPhone’s Safari browser. This year, Apple extended the SDK with a number of new and improved features when it released version 3.0 of the iPhone OS . These updates include better support for 3D gaming, augmented reality apps, easier access to maps, in-app purchases and support for push notifications. Android Android came of age in 2009. It was still a relatively unknown mobile operating system in the consumers’ conscience in 2008, but this year not only saw a large increase in developer activity but also a strong interest in Android phones like the Motorola Droid . Thanks to the open-source nature of the project, Android made it easy for developers of augmented reality applications to test their ideas long before Apple offered the necessary APIs on its platform. While the Motorola Droid features Android 2.0 already, most other manufacturers don’t offer this update for their customers yet. Next page: Top 10 Web Platforms of 2009, 6-10 Data.gov 2009 saw a number of interesting developments in the Government 2.0 movement . One of the most high-profile backers of this movement was – surprisingly – the US government. With Data.gov and similar government projects that feature APIs, developers can now access a wealth of information that was previously hard to access. By providing API access to this data, the U.S. government has opened itself up to more scrutiny , as citizens can now analyze this data with unprecedented ease. New York Times APIs No other news organization offers as many APIs as the New York Times – although the Guardian’s Open Platform was also a strong candidate for this list. Over the course of this year, the New York Times opened up an API for accessing an archive of all the paper’s stories since 1981 and APIs to access information about the U.S. Congress and the New York State legislature . There can be little doubt that the newspaper industry needs to find new ways to monetize its product. For some papers, this has meant making it harder for consumers and developers to mash up their content. The New York Times, however, has decided that increased openness is a better strategy. [disclosure: RWW syndicates content to NYT] Google App Engine With App Engine, Google gives developers an easy way to develop and deploy cloud applications through a comprehensive set of services and APIs. This year, Google introduced Java as an additional language in the App Engine’s repertoire. App Engine now also supports XMPP , which has allowed a number of developers to create services that push real-time updated to IM clients or third-party applications. In addition, Google also announced a pricing structure for App Engine in February. In November, Google had to face some negative publicity around App Engine, when it became known that some hackers were using the service to host a bot net. Overall, however, the service has not suffered from any major security issues so far. Azure Azure is Microsoft’s big push towards cloud computing. While it is still too early to judge the success of this platform, we think it would be wrong to underestimate Microsoft’s commitment to this space and the size of its developer ecosystem. While Amazon and RackSpace’s cloud services are clearly more popular than Microsoft’s new service, there can be little doubt that the arrival of Microsoft in this market will help to push the incumbents towards more innovation. Adobe AIR While Adobe AIR is nowhere near perfect, very few other platforms have the same cross-platform reach as AIR. It allows developers to create one application and distribute it for all the major operating systems. Thanks to its auto-updating features, AIR also makes it easy for developers to keep their install base up to date. This year, Adobe launched AIR 2 , which now allows developers to access mass storage devices, drag-and-drop support for remote files and rudimentary support for P2P networking. In addition, AIR 2 also enables developers to use the multi-touch capabilities of modern screens. Those are our picks! Let us know your thoughts or what we may’ve missed, in the comments. Discuss

See the original post:
Top 10 Web Platforms of 2009

Originally set to launch in “early December,” Twidroid surprised us by launching the next version of the popular Android Twitter client here on the last day of November instead. Twidroid 3.0, which is now available in the Android Marketplace, is a major update for this mobile application, introducing new features like geolocation, in-app image previews, threaded conversations, and, most notably an extensible plugin platform . Sponsor According to the release notes , the updated Twidroid app includes the following new features: Threaded conversations In-app image previews for twitpic, yfrog, twitgoo, phodroid, posterous and twitter profile images In-app link previews Twidroid plugins 1.0 + example on our website Action menu design streamlined with icons Share option for single tweet View large avatar in profile Saved searches sync with twitter Marker for tweets annotated with geo information Report spam Remember timeline position setting (default: on) Jump to top in timeline button Autocomplete usernames for timeline and replies Bring up tweet box directly by typing @ DM list now with avatars Friends/Followers now available in free version and moved to profile view The update also includes a fix for HTC Hero image upload problems, which users of that handheld will undoubtedly appreciate. As you can see from the list above, the new Twidroid is now a worthy competitor to its iPhone rivals, especially Tweetie 2.0, which also introduced similar features like threaded conversation and geolocation only months ago. In fact, Twidroid may have just one-upped its competitors as it is now one of the first mobile applications to introduce a plugin platform. Twidroid Does Plugins Twitter client plugins are just now started to be heavily discussed, thanks to a post by web guru Dave Winer which argued for the need of a programmable Twitter client. Loic Le Meur, maker of the Seesmic application, then followed up by expanding upon his vision for Seesmic’s development platform. Having just announced his move from Adobe AIR to Windows for the continued development of the PC-based Seesmic Desktop application, Le Meur writes that the app is now ready to become a programmable client. When launched, the desktop version of Seesmic will allow third-party developers to build features or services that can be integrated into Seesmic’s core application. Similarly, Twidroid’s plugin platform offers the same type of promise, albeit on the mobile platform. Thanks to this new functionality, third-party developers can extend Twidroid with features like URL shortener integrations or additional sharing features, notes the website . To kick off the launch, the company has introduced a sample plugin for Google Maps integration which shows a Twitterer’s current location on a map and allows them to update or annotate that location as well. Adding a plugin architecture is a major achievement among Twitter client applications – and certainly among the mobile set – as it will allow the apps to become highly customizable and personalized creations unique to each and every user’s needs. The only problem with plugins is that those you add in one client may not be available in another. That is, plugins added to the upcoming version of Seesmic won’t necessarily be available in Twidroid and vice versa. This points to a need for Twitter itself to become the extensible platform and not each individual app. However, in the meantime, regular users of Twidroid will certainly enjoy this added functionality as they begin to customize the app to their liking. Discuss

Excerpt from:
Twidroid 3.0 Launches with Plugin Support

According to a statement made today by Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone, the company is interested in acquiring more companies to expand upon their current core set of features. At a news conference held in Tel Aviv, Stone was quoted as saying that acquisitions are “something we are definitely interested in. We made an acquisition last year that turned out to be an outstandingly good decision.” The acquisition he’s referring to is Twitter’s purchase of Summize , a real-time search engine that has now become search.twitter.com . Since that original purchase in summer of 2008, Twitter has made no other moves or indications that they were interested in buying other companies, seemingly more focused on quashing bugs, acquiring funding and partnering with major search engines like Bing and Google . Meanwhile, the ecosystem of Twitter applications exploded, and now includes hundreds if not thousands of apps powered by or integrated with Twitter’s service. But which of these apps deserve to become an official company offering? Sponsor Apparently, there may be a few apps that have already caught Twitter’s interest. Stone told the crowd in Tel Aviv that “our attention is grabbed by some of these developers,” and the company plans to “take a hard look at them.” What Companies are on Twitter’s Radar? Which applications do you suppose have crossed Twitter’s radar? Some insight may be found on Twitter’s “goodies” page where the company lists a handful of apps, widgets, and website buttons which Twitter users can browse through and download. Here, desktop Twitter clients like Twhirl and TweetDeck are promoted alongside mobile applications like Twitterific and PocketTweets . However, the complete app list seems a little out-of-date when compared with what today’s Twitterers are actually using, especially on the mobile front. According to a study from August of this year, iPhone apps like Tweetie and TwitterFon are just as popular as Twitterific – if not more so – as is the Blackberry app TwitterBerry . And the one-time popular Twitter app Twhirl, an Adobe AIR desktop client, has long since been overshadowed by the more robust TweetDeck and similar web counterparts. Among those web counterparts are the new tools from Seesmic and Brizzly , both of which have been garnering attention as of late, especially when they each introduced support for Twitter’s new “lists” feature earlier this month. But client applications are only a small slice of the entire Twitter app universe. There are also games, blog and email plugins, utilities, analytics and search tools, shopping services, URL shortners and so much more. Plus, there are sites that attempt to aggregate the chaos into some sort of meaningful structure, like the oneforty.com website, for example, often called Twitter’s unofficial “app store” by its fans. While we could only guess at which applications Twitter would want to adopt as their “official” clients or services, a good guess may involve some of the media sharing tools that have been popularized by a number of Twitter users wanting to share photos and videos in addition to plain text. TwitPic comes to mind as one of the top photo-sharing clients and TwitVid or Tweetube may be considered for video shares. These sorts of acquisitions seem to fit better with Twitter’s goal of expanding upon the core functionality of Twitter. Where before, the company was content with its simple 140-character updates, recent changes, including the integration of the URL-shortening service bit.ly , Twitter lists , geolocation features and a new implementation of the “re-tweet” structure seem to hint at Twitter’s desire to add more layers of complexity to the once-basic service. More Acquisitions Could be Too Much of a Good Thing However, Twitter needs to be careful not to add too much. Up until now, the service has grown organically , with a lot of its features and conventions implemented by its own user and developer community outside of the official channels. Bog it down too much with extra add-ons and new behaviors, and Twitter may scare off potential new users who already often struggle with figuring out what to do with the service in its simple form. Plus, longtime Twitterers may also be put-off to see their favorite clients or services ignored in favor of whatever companies Twitter chooses to bless through an acquisition deal. And once acquired, competing companies could wither and fade away, unable to compete, eventually leading their developers to cut their losses and move on. What Should Twitter Acquire? Earlier this year, we listed ten companies that Twitter should acquire next . Not surprisingly, some of the companies or their features have already been implemented, including bit.ly’s URL shortening service and the geo-location feature we mentioned. Meanwhile, another app on the list, FriendFeed , has already been acquired by Facebook, leaving our original list much shorter and now in need of an update. Given Twitter’s intentions to start a shopping spree sometime in the near future, we wonder what apps will make their list. We also wonder if more Twitter acquisitions will end up being a good thing for the company and the community as a whole, or if it will end up stifling competition in what is now a thriving ecosystem of innovation and development. We hope Twitter proceeds cautiously and wisely in this area – any major unwelcome changes have the ability to alienate the very community that made Twitter what it is today. Discuss

Continued here:
What Apps Should Twitter Acquire?

At Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference , Seesmic’s founder and CEO Loic Le Meur just announced that the company will release a native Windows version of its popular Twitter client later today. Seesmic developed this client on top of .NET . As Le Meur told us yesterday, the new client will be faster and use significantly less memory than the current AIR client. In addition, Seesmic will now also feature a Firefox-like plugin infrastructure that will allow developers to extend the application through a new, built-in API. Sponsor As usual, Seesmic will first make this new Seesmic for Windows client available to members of its Team Seesmic beta test community. Signing up for Team Seesmic is easy and you will immediately get access to all of Seesmic’s public beta products. Le Meur told us that a native Windows client was something that Seesmic’s users had been requesting for quite a while. The Seesmic team worked on this new client for the last few months, though the company managed to keep this development under wraps and today’s release comes as a surprise. While there are quite a few good native Twitter clients for OSX, the most popular Twitter clients on Windows are currently AIR apps. Features Being a native client, Seesmic can now also make use of some of Windows’ built-in features like a system-wide spellchecker or Windows 7′s location services . While Twitter hasn’t launched it’s location API yet, Seesmic will now be able to tab into this data quickly. The new client will also allow users to drag and drop their friends’ avatars into user lists. Just like the current beta version of its AIR app, Seesmic for Windows will support Twitter’s userlists and while the look and feel is similar to the AIR app, the Windows client also features vertical tabs in the sidebar that allow users to quickly switch between different views (all, accounts, userlists and searches). Plugins for Seesmic For developers, of course, the new plugin infrastructure also means that they can now offer their services directly in a Twitter client. The current version already showcases plugins from TweetMeme and MrTweet. According to Le Meur, this will also allow other Twitter-like services to build their own plugins and build their own columns in Seesmic without having to establish a formal relationship with the company. In a few weeks, Seesmic will launch a plugin gallery to showcase these extensions. What About the AIR App? Seesmic will continue to develop its Adobe AIR client for the time being, though chances are that the company is also looking at developing a native Mac client. Discuss

Read the original post:
Seesmic Goes Native: Launches Windows-Only Twitter Client