One of the best things about Twitter is its wildly creative ecosystem of applications built by people outside the company. Those apps have been constrained, though, by technical limits imposed on retrieving data from Twitter. Those limits are just about to be raised much higher and developers tell us that a whole new world of applications and features may become possible. Twitter's Director of Platform Ryan Sarver followed up on earlier public announcements this weekend with an email to developers explaining plans to raise the limit on the number of times an application can request information from Twitter for a single user to 10 times what it is today (from 150 req/hr to 1500/hr) and to offer everyone the same kind of paid access to the full "fire hose" of user updates that Google and Bing enjoy. People who build cool Twitter apps say this is very big news. Sponsor Twitter developers say the new changes could lead to: Richer functionality for apps and services, beyond new user interfaces. More development around new features like Retweets and Lists. More real-time user experiences. Improved viability for the Twitter API. The Twitter API gets hit every time an application wants to look up a user's friends, their updates, their bio information and more. If you're building an application that analyzes, cross-references and offers useful and fun insights and features based on those types of information, then current API limits are a constraint on how much analysis you can perform, bake-down and present to your users. Raising the limits on developer access to user information will enable more processing to be done behind the scenes and more magic to be presented to end-users of Twitter apps. We spoke to some of our favorite developers about both the API limit increase and the fire hose access. Here's what they had to say. Iain Dodsworth, Tweetdeck "Not wishing to overstate the case but these changes will allow for the next generation of Twitter app. So far the ecosystem has mainly concentrated on providing numerous new UIs onto Twitter (with pretty good success I might add). Potentially the 10x API will signal a shift towards richer functionality & service development: Twitter 2.0. [emphasis added] "We're already working on functionality which mines and analyses Twitter data within the application layer which wouldn't be possible without a 10x API limit. I'm interested to see how the API scales with these new API limits." Loic Le Meur, Seesmic "The increased API limits allow apps to come up with new interaction models for Twitter, and also to catch up on all the new features Twitter added (new RTs, lists), which couldn't be supported properly with 150 requests per hour. " Justyn Howard, SproutSocial "On the 10x increase - Not too many people bump into the authorized limit today unless they run multiple apps, but that was by design. All of us developers built in controls to limit the calls, which has left power users constantly slamming the refresh button. So this does a couple of things: 1. It allows developers to loosen the logic throttling API calls which will create a closer to real-time experience for the end-users. 2. Also opens some new opportunities on cool things we can do which require the user API vs. Search (some things you can't get from the open API's, you need to use the user's account to do them). 3. Will open the doors for more secondary apps, where users previously couldn't have more than one or two [different Twitter apps] open without hitting rate limits, you'll see more people using niche apps in the background if they provide some capability beyond what Seesmic, Tweetie and Tweetdeck offer." On Access to the Firehose for Everyone Kevin Marshall, co-founder of innovative social graph parsing application provider Wow.ly , builds apps that have a clear need for increased rate limits. "This is great," he told us, "because the 150 per hour limit in conjunction with various API features (for example, the social graph API) makes it very difficult to pull off some more 'advanced' features I would like to build." On offering the Firehose to everyone, Marshall had an unusual and interesting response that demonstrates the maturity that this ecosystem is developing. It's not a simple matter of everyone chasing thoughtlessly after the real-time stream. "The more I do with and around social data, the less interested I seem to become in 'realtime' and the more interested I become in 'over time.' When I first started hacking on Twitter (and Facebook) apps, I was in love with the idea of parsing and analyzing data in real-time and I was very link/content focused. But the more I build and use these tools, the more I see the value in the history and the trails of the data set - especially when you consider that we are all living in a more asynchronous world then ever before thanks to things like blogs, Tivo, Hulu, iTunes, and other media-on-demand stuff. I don't think it's really so much about 'what are you doing right now' as it is 'what have you done that's interesting to me right now?'...and I think you get that by aggregating and analyzing." None the less, many developers will welcome the opening of previously selective fire hose access. Mailana founder Pete Warden says even his seed-funded company is looking forward to ponying up some cash. "This may sound counter-intuitive as a starving entrepreneur," he told us, "but the best guarantee the API will stay open and available is if Twitter makes money from it." "It gives developers the chance to move from being charity-cases to paying customers, and so gives Twitter a lot more reasons to listen to what we want. Anyone who wants to deal with the flood of data from the firehose already has to invest in some beefy hardware, (my server and bandwidth bills are thousands of dollars a month) so reasonable fees from Twitter shouldn't raise the barrier to entry by much." These changes are expected to go live soon and we look forward to seeing what they enable new and old Twitter apps to do. You can find and follow the RWW team on Twitter here . Discuss

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Twitter 2.0: API Rate Change Could Lead to a World of New Apps & Features

Earlier this year at the SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with Wolfram|Alpha 's Russell Foltz-Smith. Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a "computational knowledge engine," a nerdy and unfortunately not very intuitive description. Because it's hard to grok, most people have categorized Wolfram|Alpha as a new type of search engine. The site got a lot of press when it launched in May , as many pundits saw it as a challenger to Google. However in our own extensive tests of the product before launch, we concluded that it isn't a "Google Killer" and that it has more in common with Wikipedia. Even now there is still confusion about what Wolfram|Alpha is and what its main use cases will be. In this interview with Russell Foltz-Smith, we discuss what people are using Wolfram|Alpha for now; and more importantly what its uses will be in the near future. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Wolfram|Alpha: What is it Good For? Wolfram|Alpha is a product that was built on top of founder Stephen Wolfram's Mathematica product, a software tool for mathematicians that was initially released in 1988. The aim is to allow users to type human-like statements and have computations done on those. Wolfram|Alpha was first conceived and started development about 4 years ago, and just 6-8 months ago the team gave serious consideration to taking the product to a wider consumer audience. I started out by asking Foltz-Smith what the Wolfram|Alpha team thought of all the media hype around their product, particularly about the "Google Killer" theme which many media outlets reveled in. Foltz-Smith replied that they were expecting to be compared to Google, but not to that extent. Their team was a little surprised there wasn't more discussion around Wolfram|Alpha's similarities to Wikipedia and Freebase (although he noted that ReadWriteWeb certainly covered that!). Regarding the Google comparisons, Foltz-Smith said that they didn't give into the hype - they stuck to what their goals were. I remarked that many people still seem confused about what Wolfram|Alpha does and what it can be used for. Foltz-Smith said that people will use it for different things. The crux of the product though is that it allows people to compute and calculate things. But will mainstream people use Wolfram|Alpha? Right now, it seems to be focused on mathematicians. Foltz-Smith replied that yes, eventually Wolfram|Alpha will find a mainstream audience. It has started specific, but it will go broader. First, he said, it has to "pass a test" with "serious users" - by which he means academics and computational users. If it's useful for them, claimed Foltz-Smith, it will then go mainstream. Use Case: Education One real-world use case we talked about was using Wolfram|Alpha in education. Russell Foltz-Smith said that Wolfram|Alpha could be used to automatically generate problem sets for students, and then research those sets. A recent article in education website Chronicle.com argued that Wolfram|Alpha may have a less desired effect: encouraging cheating and laziness in students. This is because Wolfram|Alpha not only solves complex math problems, it "also can spell out the steps leading to those solutions." Stephen Wolfram told Chronicle.com that computer-algebra systems like Wolfram|Alpha actually improve education - because they allow students to explore complex problems on their own and intuitively determine how functions work, rather than just learn rote processes. Wolfram claimed that "it's better to let them [students] stand on that platform and go further." Either way, it's clear that Wolfram|Alpha and similar computational software will force the education system to adapt and change. Students now have a new (and certainly easier to use, as it's on the Web) platform on which to compute things. There's no point in the education system pretending it doesn't exist. If you're interested in tracking the progress of Wolfram|Alpha in educational settings, there is a wiki devoted to 'Teaching Undergraduate Math with Wolfram|Alpha.' Use Case: Computational Journalism This one was described to me as "anomaly spotting." For example with the current interest in swine flu news, Wolfram|Alpha could be used to fact-find and compute interesting trends. As Foltz-Smith described it, Wolfram|Alpha could "automatically enhance news." Foltz-Smith noted that CNN and other major networks do this already (analyze data), but that it's expensive to do. The end results on CNN are added value things like interactive maps and fancy diagrams. Wolfram|Alpha could make this type of data gathering and analysis presentation inexpensive and common place amongst all kinds of news operations - including good old blogs. Use Case: Sports Watching Imagine sitting in your sofa in the lounge, remote control in one hand and your favorite beverage in the other. You're watching the Friday night game on TV, it's a close game and you're curious about which team has the better chance of winning. Why, check Wolfram|Alpha of course! In real time, Wolfram|Alpha could compute statistics about not just the history of the two teams - but the history of the location of the game, the weather, the season so far, etc. As Foltz-Smith explained it, Wolfram|Alpha would be able to do "chained queries" - queries made up of multiple parts. For example: which quarterback had the best winning record in games played in the rain during the 1970s. Other Use Cases We also discussed medical and scientific use cases. Although there are early examples of Wolfram|Alpha in health, such as a nutrition label generator , Foltz-Smith was generally cautious about medical uses - because a lot of health data "can't be wrong." He noted that in use cases like medical research, the issue of data fidelity is key. For example with the human genome, you have to take great care of that data and associated algorithms. Also he explained that as something like the human genome scales, how do you do QA? Foltz-Smith admitted that the Wolfram|Alpha team is still working on these and similar issues. But they have a lot of people devoted to solving this problem. Some types of data could be crowdsourced, e.g. in linguistics, but other data needs different approaches. Conclusion It was interesting to hear about some of the potential uses of Wolfram|Alpha. We at ReadWriteWeb think this product has a promising future. If Web 2.0 was about creating data (user generated content, to use the most familiar term for this), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Wolfram|Alpha is premised on using and computing data. Let us know in the comments what use cases you see for Wolfram|Alpha, and whether you're aware of similar computational web apps. See also: Wolfram|Alpha: Our First Impressions Wolfram|Alpha in Action: Our Screenshots Mixed Emotions: Our First Hands-On Test Of Wolfram|Alpha Wolfram|Alpha Launch: Here's What You Need to Know Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Update Discuss

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Wolfram|Alpha: The Use Cases

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! As machines learn to understand what the web means, what perspective will they understand it from? Who is teaching them? "Objective" descriptions of the world and the relationships in it can cause real problems, particularly for people with little power in those relationships. How will the emerging Semantic Web understand relationships and what will that mean for us as human users? Sponsor Editor's note: In this series, called Redux, we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2009. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Austrian researcher Corinna Bath argues that there is a real risk that the semantic web of the future will be built with the perspectives and assumptions of male computer scientists baked-in unconsciously - at the expense of everyone else. Background Corinna Bath is currently research fellow at the "Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society" in Graz, Austria. She's now working on engaging the several decades old study of gender and technology with the emerging world of the semantic web. What is the semantic web? We define it as a paradigm that makes the meaning of particular web pages understandable by machines - not just in full text searches or keyword categories, but in terms of which concepts are central to a given page and the relationships between them. The semantic web is hot. World Wide Web founding father and W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee says all the pieces are now in place for a semantic web to emerge. So is it a boy or a girl? When You Assume, You Make an... Corinna Bath did an interview last week for the Austrian Semantic Web Company where she articulates her concerns about gender and the semantic web. Unfortunately, the interview is extremely academic in language and tone - so we'll try to explain her arguments here. Her first argument is that the architects of the semantic web need to be very careful about the assumptions they carry into the creation of categories of relationships. Bath draws a historical parallel with the first phone books, where listings were organized by the names of the husband in each household. That appeared to the authors to be the logical way to do it at the time. It wasn't until after years of feminist political organizing led to general cultural change that the phone books changed. Why is this important? Because systems like the phone book help color our view of the world we live in and are the building blocks of basic inequalities. Too often, Bath argues, "binary assumptions about women and men are not reflected [upon] or the (gender) politics of [a particular] domain is ignored. Thus, the existing structural-symbolic gender order is inscribed into computational artifacts and will be reproduced by [their] use." Right: The Semantic Web made me grow this beard. Semantic web t-shirt via SpreadShirt. For example, the Dublin Core ontology concerns Documents. It consists of a list of elements that can be used to describe a document, including "creator," "contributor," and "isReferencedBy." Are there types of relationships that aren't included on the list but are important to an accurate understanding of a document? There probably are, and different perspectives could help articulate what those relationships might be. For example, some feminist critics argue that the Western cannon of almost every type of literature is full of work that men didn't give women appropriate credit for. Some argue that Albert Einstein's wife deserves substantial credit for his theory of relativity - should that be included in semantic markup wherever the book is cataloged? How should that relationship be described? Calling her a contributor would be controversial and wouldn't really capture the history - a new category may be needed. There are no shortage of ways to describe documents, events, people or concepts. The roster of people who will participate in the creation of a standard way to describe them will become increasingly important as machine learning becomes more important in our every day lives. Failing to take this seriously, Bath argues, could lead to the silencing of "minority views, quieter voices, and allows the dominant voice to speak for everyone, which seems highly problematic." Is Categorization Itself The Right Solution? The semantic web today is based largely on what are called "triples" - sets of subject, predicate and object. For example Marshall Kirkpatrick [subject], loves [predicate] Punkin' the Tabby Kitten [object]. (Hypothetical, I don't have any kittens and please don't send me any.) This way of describing things isn't beyond question, however. As Bath argues: Even the modeling concepts themselves should be questioned as Cecile Crutzen suggest, since e.g. the class concept and the inheritance concept lack to represent social processes, because of limited formal expressiveness for conflict, change and fluidity. Such an ontology abstracts from human sociality, situated action and real meaning construction processes. In other words life aint so simple: people change, conflicts and context matter and things in this world don't just get their meaning by one object bumping into another, one event leading to another, child inheriting traits from a parent, etc. Computer logic may necessitate simplification of some of life's richness - but this is nothing to take lightly. We're talking about helping computers understand meaning and that is not a simple or trivial matter. Is Knowledge Only The Absence of Doubt? Bath calls into question "computer science modeling that rests on the Cartesian epistemology," or the belief that way we know that we really "know" something is by having no doubt about it. If our semantic markup reading robot finds markup asserting that a certain relationship exists and does not find any markup asserting that it does not exist - ought we conclude that we've determined the truth of the matter? Particularly if not all perspectives on the matter have been taken into consideration in even formulating how the situation is described, then an assertion that a particular object has a certain property or two subjects have a particular relationship may be woefully inaccurate in describing reality. There are a lot of things people disagree about and there's a lot of knowledge that people deny for political convenience. The absence of doubt is not sufficient basis for determination of truth. Repeated attempts to disprove a theory make a much better basis for working knowledge. Or, as political blogger Karoli Kuns said to NPR's Andy Carvin this morning when Carvin asserted otherwise, "I'd argue that tag dissent balances folksonomies, not undermines." Let's talk about "working knowledge" and stop whispering about "truth", before the robot children hear us. Philosophy Aside, What Does This Mean? It means that as the language we use to communicate meaning to machines develops, we'd better watch out who is building it and what perspectives they take into consideration. Unconsidered assumptions could lead to a real disconnect between the meaning that machines know of the world and they way that millions of other people experience it. Bath isn't suggesting that the semantic web should be rejected, quite the opposite in fact. "I am convinced," she says, "that the perspectives I tried to sketch here can contribute to build better semantic systems or even prevent them from failure in function or on the marketplace." She has her own explanation why this is important: "With the use of the Internet we are already witnessing a radical change in practices of how knowledge is represented, stored and spread. In the future most of our work and life will involve the manipulation and use of information. It will crucially depend on the epistemologies, concepts and leading metaphors of the Semantic Web, which direction the semantic "human-machine reconfigurations" (Lucy Suchman) will take." That's a nice way to say that we need to work hard to avoid creating fascist robots that exercise a homogenizing influence on diverse human experiences. There are people who are doing semantic web work in directions that take this into account, but it's something worth considering for all of us. Disclosure: The author has consulting relationships with a number of pre-launched semantic web companies. Discuss

Continued here:
Will The Semantic Web Have a Gender?

Facebook used to be dominated by White and Asian users, but tonight the company announced results of a demographic study of its users concluding that the percentages of Black and Hispanic users of the site are now approaching their percentages of the population in the general US public. Hear that? Facebook scientists have looked at the data and everything is ok now. For months, we've been calling on Facebook to open up user data in an appropriate way for the public at large to study. Sponsor It's an invaluable bird's eye view of the interactions between 350 million people around the world. There are probably a lot of social patterns of interaction between people that could be discovered in that data - some not pretty at all. For now, though, Facebook has analyzed the data in-house and given itself a cheery report card. More analysis appears to be forthcoming, so we'll see what we're told about what really goes on on Facebook - but that data ought to be made available for outside analysis. In this case the data wasn't anonymized, it was analyzed by two in-house staff members and two grad students from Cornell and Princeton. The group compared users' last names on Facebook to US Census data about the percentage of people with those last names who reported particular racial backgrounds. Once a larger number of Facebook users have public profiles, something that's probably happening very rapidly thanks to the radical new privacy settings the company began recommending to users last week , then analyzing things like names, friend lists and associations won't constitute a violation of user privacy anymore. That might not sound like something many users are comfortable with, but one way or another there is a lot of potential for social good (not just advertising) made possible by aggregate user data. Perhaps co-incidentally, perhaps not - the new privacy regime will remove the primary objections to bulk analysis of user data. Presumably something will need to be done to make the data available in bulk and in an appropriate format for outside analysis, though. The example we've offered most commonly in calling for this data to be released is the history of what's called Real Estate Redlining. When in the 1960's both US Census information and real estate mortgage loan information were made available for bulk analysis, it was proven that banks around the US were discriminating against home loan applicants in traditionally African American neighborhoods. That was a big deal and we suspect that there are patterns of comparable importance, both positive and negative, hiding in Facebook's huge store of data. For contrast and illustration, consider the conclusions drawn by popular dating site OK Cupid in an analysis of dating inquiry response rates between its users of different races . In heterosexual pairs, male inquirers on OK Cupid were far more likely to get a response when they were white. Black, Hispanic and Asian men saw terrible response rates from women on the site. White men were least likely to respond to inquiries from Black women and they were by far the most likely to say that they preferred to date people of their same race. Both white men and women were quite unusual in the likelihood of their saying they preferred to date people of their own race. Take that, people who commented on the Facebook study tonight saying that people don't see race any more! It certainly appears that we do. It will be interesting to see if Facebook is willing to publish data that shines a less positive light on its own user base. Most likely, outside parties would be more apt to expose data like that. The world could use some more self-awareness, Facebook, but it's important that such self-awareness not be hand-delivered by scientists on your own staff, with your financial interests as their bottom line. Discuss

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Facebook Becomes More Racially Diverse, Ought To Release Data for Outside Analysis

At LeWeb today, Ryan Sarver, Twitter's Director of Platform, took the state during the morning session. He stressed that Twitter needs the developer ecosystem if it wants to continue to grow. Sarver also announced that Twitter will give all developers access to the full firehose feed in early 2010. In addition, Twitter will also soon launch a new developer site, increase the rate limit for services that use OAuth and launch a new API for browser-less apps. Sponsor Walking through the history of Twitter, Sarver noted that the core value of Twitter is openness. The first Twitter application was written in January 2007. There are now over 50,000 application in Twitter's ecosystem. This, Sarver notes, shows how developers can use simple APIs to create rich experiences. Sarver also noted that 50% of the company's traffic now happens on partner sites and through applications. For Twitter, according to Sarver, it's all about growing the market and building out the ecosystem. Throughout the keynote, Sarver stressed that Twitter can only be as successful as long as its developers are successful. Sarver pointed out 3 companies that have manged to monetize Twitter: CoTweet , OneRiot and TweetMeme. Coming Up: More Transparency, Improved Communication and a Business Model Going forward, Twitter wants to offer even better tools for third-party developers in its ecosystem. Twitter wants to be more transparent with its developers and improve its communication. In addition, the company wants to improve the utility of its API. Twitter also plans to announce a business model that allows it to share in the success of its partners. Everybody Gets Access to the Firehose Most importantly, Twitter is opening up the firehose of tweets to all developers. Sarver didn't announce any details, but this is obviously a very important move as it will give more developers the ability to build applications that need real-time access to every tweet without having to get Twitter's permission. Soon, developers who use OAuth will be able to ping Twitter more often than services that still use Twitter's old authentication mechanism. Twitter will soon deprecate its old non-OAuth authentication mechanisms. In addition, Twitter will launch an API for browser-less apps. Twitter also plans to launch a new developers site to educate its developers and will soon host its first developers conference. Image credit: @scobleizer . Discuss

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Twitter: All Developers Will Get Access to the Firehose in Early 2010

The Google Chrome team released a beta version of its Mac browser this morning and opened up an official gallery of browser extensions . That's exciting news because the addition of more than 300 extensions, combined with blazing speed and good stability, makes Chrome the best browser on the market today. We got a chance to talk with Nick Baum, Product Manager and Brian Rakowski, Director of Product Management at Google Chrome this afternoon and they shared a number of interesting tidbits with us about the nature and future of extensions in Chrome. Sponsor Chrome was released more than a year ago and users have been clamoring for extensions ever since. Rakowski and Baum said that a request for extensions was bug #18 filed in the browser's bug tracking system - it's something that Firefox has conditioned users to expect. Now those extensions are here and it's a very interesting story. Understanding the Versions of Chrome Between Chrome, Chromium, dev and beta releases, things are getting a little complicated. Here's how it breaks down: Chromium is open source developer channel, "the bleeding edge" of Chrome development. That's what we've been using here on Mac and it's the only Mac version today that supports extensions. It's untested and less stable than the other versions. We've been using it for months, though, with only occasional problems. Chrome is the official release. There are 3 versions of Chrome: dev , beta ( Windows or Mac ) and stable (Windows only). The vast majority of users use the stable version, Mac users got beta build 4.0 today. Dev builds come out every week or so and are at most 1 week behind Chromium. Baum and Rakowski asked in our interview for us to please switch to using the Dev version for Mac instead of Chromium as soon as it supports extensions. Mac Dev Version Will Get Extension Support Very Soon Some of Nick Baum's Favorite Chrome Extensions So Far Aviary - screen capture and image editing Google Docs PDF/PPT Viewer Google Translate - truly, a wonder to behold Brizzly - an advanced Twitter experience, built by Baum's former co-worker on Google Reader, Jason Shellen Right now the official extension gallery won't allow Mac users to download extensions. Officially, at least. This bookmarklet will allow you to install them in Chromium on a Mac with just one extra click. (Thanks, MG Seigler , for finding that.) That bookmarklet will not allow you to use extensions in the official beta for Mac that launched today, just in Chromium. Baum and Rakowski told us today that the next dev build for Mac will allow extensions. That could be out as early as tomorrow morning or in a few days, and it's anyone's guess when extension support will come to the Beta version released today. (Who wants to use the Beta version when Dev is so much cooler?) Anyone can get extensions from an unofficial site called ChromeExtensions.org and if you're on a Mac it's probably most effective tonight to grab Chromium and the bookmarklet above. Then you can get extensions from the official site as well. Chrome Extensions Are Not Like Firefox Extensions Unlike Firefox extensions, Chrome extensions install without a browser restart and they update automatically. Too many extensions have been a part of the bloat that's made Firefox-use nearly intolerable for many of us, but the Chrome team says extensions will cause no more drag on Chrome performance than opening up a new web page in another tab would. That's a big part of the premise of Chrome, that every process is running distinct from other processes, so one tab can't slow or crash the others. It's an architecture well suited to running web applications, not just loading web pages, and it's great to hear that the extensions platform works the same way. GreaseMonkey? Oh, There Will Be GreaseMonkey One of the most enjoyable tide pools of innovation in the Firefox extension world is built on top of the Javascript user script plug-in GreaseMonkey . These tiny scripts re-organize web pages in radical ways for more usefulness and fun. Scripts like AutoPagerize will load the next page at the bottom of the one you're on, creating a continuous scroll, or WikiDashboard will insert a drop-down dashboard into every Wikipedia page to show a scatter plot graph of who has edited that page the most. The fun never stops with GreaseMonkey. What of Chrome, though? Guess where, Aaron Boodman , the creator of GreaseMonkey works now? That's right, on the Chrome Extensions team. Boodman recently made it even easier for GreaseMonkey scripts to be added to Chrome than they are in Firefox. A single click transforms the scripts into Chrome Extensions, at least for Windows users. We haven't found a successful Mac implementation yet, but we've got our fingers crossed that this will no longer be an issue when full extension support comes to Chrome for Mac. Red Hot APIs On the Way Baum told us today that the team "will add APIs for other data types soon, personal web history being a prime candidate, so extensions will be able to access that and manipulate it in all sorts of ways." That sounds great. It's one thing for a browser to promise not to sell my web history, but it's a whole new ball game when developers can build software that lets me derive all the more value from the history of my activity around the web. Bring it on, Team Chrome! We might feel a little guilty for abandoning the wonderful community project that is Firefox, but this new browser is just so damn good it's hard not to give it a serious try. It just so turns out, we have a particularly relevant sponsor this month that we should point to. Add-on-Con is a major event all about browser add-ons. It's being held in Mountain View, CA this Friday. Google is a sponsor and Aaron Boodman, the man behind GreaseMonkey and now working on Chrome Extensions, is a speaker. Check it out! Discuss

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5 Cool Things to Know About Google Chrome Extensions

Twitter is testing out a new mobile interface at http://mobile.twitter.com the company announced just minutes ago and it really is a must-see. Beautiful design and some unique functionality are built on top of the company's own API. It's a relatively simple way to interact with Twitter but below are three key features that weren't available on Twitter's mobile interface before. Two features, lists and saved searches, are missing so far - and that's enough to be a deal-breaker for this reviewer. Sponsor View what you're replying to when you reply. The new reply view displays the tweet that's the subject of your reply below the message composition box. All Twitter apps should do this! Threaded DMs You can see the history of Direct Messages between you and any user whose profile page you're on. It's similar to how Tweetie 2 does it and it's pretty nice. Oddly, there's no way to view all your most recent DMs though. That's something that will probably be fixed soon. Mobile Fail Whale That's right - now you can get the beloved Fail Whale, Twitter's error message, on your phone. It's fun the first time. We'll see how it feels after repeated appearances. Two Missing Features and One Dream Unfulfilled There are no support for Twitter Lists in this interface. Twitter without groups of some kind is a cluttered mess if you have a lot of people you're following. This new interface is going to be best suited to people who make casual use of Twitter. There's no access to your saved searches , on of the nicest things about the web interface. There is access to trending topics, though. That's further evidence that this is intended to be a "fun" mobile interface. As such, it's great. Finally, there's no utilization of the new Geolocation API . It's been a week already and no one has changed our lives with this API yet! All in all, it's a great improvement to the mobile site - but it isn't going to replace the Tweetdeck or Tweetie iPhone apps on my phone. Discuss

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Twitter Takes Features (and the Fail Whale) Mobile