In late October, after Bit.ly had firmly established itself as Twitter's service of choice, it looked like URL shortener service Cligs would close down. As of today, the company will see a new management team as social bookmarking service Mister Wong has agreed to acquire it for an undisclosed sum. Sponsor Says Clig's founder Pierre Far, "I'm very happy with Mister Wong as they have an excellent track record of building large communities and keeping them happy. They also have the resources to continue the development of the service and keep it competitive in the market. Cligs has always been a side project, but the service grew too big to take care of in my spare time." Far began his quest for a buyer in early October. In August ReadWriteWeb covered the commercial demise of URL shortener service Tr.im and its subsequent resurrection as an open source release . A number of services have failed to find exit strategies in this crowded space so it appears that Far's deal with Mister Wong is fortunate one. When we asked Far where short links go when they die, he pointed to 301works.org . 301works is an Internet Archives initiative created to preserve short URL links in the event of a shutdown. If a short URL company faces closure 301works takes control of shortening domain services and ensures that links remain intact. While the technical side of the program has not been completely laid out, a number of companies have agreed to show the 301works seal including Bit.ly, Cligs, Twurl , Awe.sm and AppsFire . To apply check out 301works.org here . Discuss

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Where do Short URLs Go When They Die?

A new website aims to publicize the details surrounding the much-maligned iPhone application review process - Apple's secretive procedures that have been under heavy scrutiny this year, especially since the FCC's involvement regarding Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application. Notable iPhone developers have publically called out the company for this "broken" process and some have even announced their retirement from creating iPhone apps, including Facebook app developer, Joe Hewitt , based on philosophical differences with the perceived tyranny of the Apple gatekeepers. Sponsor On the recently launched site, App Rejections , iPhone developer turned blogger Adam Martin, has begun to document individual app rejections in an effort to help the development community understand what they can and cannot expect from the company's stringent, and sometimes seemingly arbitrary, vetting process for new apps. According to the site's About page , Martin writes that "it's now gone from 'easy' to 'tricky' to avoid getting your app rejected by Apple." And since Apple has refused to document or discuss the matter of application rejections, he was inspired to create this website as a place to collect all the known application rejections. The App Rejections site itself is in the format of a basic blog. There aren't catchy headlines, images, or accompanying snarky commentary in the individual posts as you would find elsewhere in the tech blogosphere - especially on TechCrunch where documenting high-profile app rejections has become somewhat of a pet project of blogger MJ Siegler. At the most, Adam may inject a few opinions of his own as to how certain things could be improved, but he clearly isn't on any sort of vendetta against the company. Instead, each post details point-blank exactly why a particular application was rejected, examining information about the APIs used or rules broken in each case. The site also documents when formerly rejected apps finally make it through to the App Store in posts titled "approved" or "overturned," the latter referring to apps whose developers started some sort of appeal process. Although the site is brand-new, with only two pages of posts so far, it could easily become an invaluable resource for iPhone developers confused by Apple's murky review process which can sometimes lead to apps sitting in limbo for months on end before any word from Apple is had. Developers looking to have their personal experience documented on the site are advised to contact Martin via his company's Twitter account, @redglassesapps . Discuss

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New Website Publicizes iPhone App Rejections

A year ago we polled you, the ReadWriteWeb community, on your favorite mobile apps . It's become an annual tradition to run this survey, so in this post we're collecting your top 5 lists for 2009. To get you inspired, the ReadWriteWeb team have listed their personal favorites below. We first ran this poll in November 2007 , before Apple's App Store opened on July 10, 2008 and when Android was but a twinkle in Google's eye. At that time, the 5 most mentioned mobile apps were the Gmail Java app, Google Maps, Opera Mini, Fring and Shozu. In November 2008 we began to see popular web services being mentioned as favorite mobile apps too: Facebook, Twitter, last.fm, FriendFeed. Also newer mobile-focused apps like Evernote and Brightkite. Read on for the 2009 edition of this reader survey... Sponsor Note: ReadWriteWeb's iPhone app is coming soon! To be notified as soon as it becomes available, email notify@readwriteweb.com . Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb founder and editor (iPhone user): Diamedic; diabetes data input and monitoring tool that I use multiple times a day. Encamp; new Basecamp project management app that the RWW team has just begun using. Shazam; amazing song discovery app that I use regularly, e.g. holding up my iPhone to the car radio to identify cool songs! Evernote; notes service which I was late adopter of, but it's since become essential. Tweetie 2; my current Twitter app of choice on the iPhone. Marshall Kirkpatrick, lead blogger and VP Content Development (iPhone and Android): Aardvark Tweetdeck SuperSearch Regator Appsfire Sarah Perez, feature writer and RWW's resident Mobile Web expert ("Only 5?" she replied to my Basecamp message...Sarah uses iPhone): Facebook Tweetie 2 Yelp NYT Mobile Bump (app for swapping contact details) Frederic Lardinois, writer (iPhone): Tweetie2 Beejive, for IM Notifications picposterous Pandora Jolie O'Dell, writer and RWW Community Manager (Blackberry): TwitterBerry Flickr Jolie notes (and you can sense the frustration!): "The BlackBerry user of the group has few options and fewer favorites. In fact, I'd almost post a response rant about how the development for BlackBerry devices AND the OS make enjoyable user experiences a near-impossibility." Dana Oshiro, writer (iPhone): Foursquare Tweetie Breaking News Online Aardvark Yelp, or OpenTable Alex Williams, ReadWriteEnterprise editor (Blackberry, who notes that "the experience is just awful."): Yelp Slandr Facebook Gmail Google mobile Jared Smith, RWW webmaster (Blackberry and iPod touch): RadarScope; weather radar viewer for iPhone and iPod touch. TouchTerm; on-the-go SSH for iPhone and iPod touch. MyKite; BlackBerry Brightkite app. Yatca; BlackBerry microblogging client that supports Twitter and identi.ca with seamless inbox integration. Google Sync for BlackBerry; "while not true push, it works so quietly and seamlessly I don't give it a second thought." Now, RWW readers, it's time for your feedback! Let us know in the comments below what your favorite mobile apps are and what mobile device(s) you use. Please limit this to 5 apps , so we can identify trends more easily and report back on them in an upcoming post. Discuss

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Your Favorite Mobile Apps of 2009 (Reader Survey)

The semantic Web has long been heralded as the future of the Web. Proponents have said that Web experiences will some day become more meaningful and relevant based on the AI-esque computational power of natural-language processing (NLP) and structured data that is understandable by machines for interpretation. However, with the rise of the social Web, we see that what truly makes our online experiences meaningful is not necessarily the Web's ability to approximate human language or to return search results with syntactical exactness. The value of the semantic Web will take time because the intelligent personal agents that are able to process this structured data still have a long way to go before becoming fully actualized. Sponsor This guest post was written by Alisa Leonard-Hansen. Rather, meaningful and relevant experiences now are born out of the context of our identities and social graph: the pragmatics, or contextual meaning, of our online identities. My Web experience becomes more meaningful and relevant to me when it is layered with contextual social data based on my identity. This is the pragmatic Web. We need to better understand our identity as it begins to define our experience of the Web and the networked-enabled world we inhabit. Our online identity will increasingly be defined by three "pillars": who I say I am, what I do and say, and who I connect to (and who connects to me). To clarify, our online identities are comprised primarily of three specific kinds of data: Explicit or prescriptive data (i.e. the data that I input about myself: name, age, occupation, etc.); Activity or behavioral data (i.e. what I do and say online); Relationship data (i.e. my social graph and what my connections say about me). If we consider the power of this pragmatic Web (a highly relevant and individualized Web experience based on the ubiquity of our identity data), we find that it not only impacts individual user experience, but that it opens up entirely new opportunities for business online. The future is not "business as usual." Business models will be based on what Elias Bizannes of the Data Portability Project calls the "information value network-economic value," derived from services that focus on activities with comparative advantage and that leverage free access to data. Consider this: as media companies scramble to identify new and innovative ways to advertise to the sea of nameless, pixeled users who graze through their content each day, a rich supply of highly valuable identity data lies just beneath the surface, left unmeasured and unmonetized. Facebook is nothing more than perhaps the largest single database of this kind of online identity data: explicit, activity and relationship data. With the development of Facebook Connect, which allows for the "open" exchange of Facebook user data between Facebook and third parties, Facebook could conceivably (and will) create an Facebook Connect ad network (read: data exchange), supplied by the valuable and highly targetable user identity data that is currently siloed on Facebook's servers. This identity data within Facebook is what makes the activity in "social media" so valuable. But the centralization of identity data on one or two major networks (such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace) won't realize the vision of the pragmatic Web. So, how will the pragmatic Web come to be? How do we realize the power of a dynamic Web that is based on our identities? We do so by empowering individuals to access and control their identity across any site or service, through standards that enable data portability and open Web inter-operability. The resulting vision is that of a highly personalized, dynamic, relevant and remixable Web experience, yielding greater access to information through discovery, communication and collaboration. For enterprise, this could mean the rise of innovative new business models, based on data-driven value exchange. One final note on identity data as it relates to enterprise. As Bizannes points out, the value of this kind of identity data rests on the key factors of time and timeliness. Essentially, identity data is valuable only if it is recent. Facebook wouldn't be able to sell your (permissions-enabled) data to advertisers if it used your explicit data from a year ago rather than from today. So, Bizannes argues that real-time "access" to someone's identity matters most, and it's no longer about data "capture." Thus, as new business models arise out of monetizing permissions-enabled identity data, the value of the business models will depend on these entities having real-time access to the data. Guest author: Alisa Leonard-Hansen is a digital strategist and Social Media Evangelist at iCrossing , a leading global digital agency. She is also the Communications Chair for the Data Portability Project and blogs about the social Web on her blog, TheWebisSocial.com . Follow her on Twitter @alisamleo . Discuss

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The Future Is All About Context: The Pragmatic Web

It only took 3 years to go from HTML2 to HTML4, but the HTML4.01 specifications were published 10 years ago and even though today's web looks very different, we are still waiting for HTML5. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group started preliminary work on what is now known as HTML5 in 2004 and the W3C HTML Working Group was adopted this draft as the basis for the HTML5 specs in 2007. Some modern browsers already offer partial support for HTML5, but there are still quite a few issues that need to be resolved before we will see the finalized version of the HTML5 specifications. One area where there is still a lot of discussion is support for video in HTML5. Sponsor What Codec? Philippe Le Hegaret, the interaction domain leader for the W3C, talked about this issue in an interview with WebMonkey's Michael Calore . According to Le Hegaret, video support is still one of the main issues surrounding the development of HTML5. Safari and Chrome are both based on the same open-source WebKit engine. Video support, however, is not part of WebKit yet, so every vendor implements it differently. Currently, browser developer disagree over how to implement this feature and what codec to use. Apple wants to use uses H.264 and Mozilla, Google and Opera support Ogg Theora. As of now, HTML5 still includes the tag, but doesn't specify which codec to use. Transition from Plugins Until these issues are sorted out, users will have to continue to rely on plugins. Of course, the only way to do away with video plugins would be to make sure that every online video provider also adopted this new standard. As Le Hegaret rightly points out in the interview with WebMonkey, people don't like to install plugins, but everybody installs the Flash plugin because "if you can't see YouTube, your life on the web is pretty miserable. You're missing a lot." Le Hegaret acknowledges that there has to be a transition period before users can switch from Flash to HTML5 video. For developers, the fact that the video is not running in a plugin that can't talk to the browser is a major advantage of having built-in video support in the browser. With video in HTML5, developers can connect the video to the rest of the page and have actions on the page or video influence other parts of the site. What About Microsoft? At today's PDC keynote, Microsoft noted that it has to improve support for HTML5 in its browser. While the company didn't say a lot about Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft

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

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Seesmic Goes Native: Launches Windows-Only Twitter Client