Last week we surveyed you , the ReadWriteWeb community, about your favorite mobile applications. We asked for your top 5 mobile apps and ended up with nearly 200 different mobile apps in the post and comments! Today we reveal the full results, including the most popular mobile apps of our tech savvy readers. Earlier today our resident Mobile Web expert Sarah Perez listed ReadWriteWeb's top 10 Mobile Web products of 2009 . As for your choices, we discovered that you like social networking on the go (Facebook, Foursquare), Twitter clients (Tweetie, Twitterrific), Google (Google Maps, Google Mobile), and innovative mobile-focused apps (Evernote, Shazam). The top 16 is listed below, with commentary. Also at the bottom of the post you'll find a spreadsheet of the entire list. Sponsor Top Mobile Apps of RWW Readers Facebook 32 Tweetie 24 Google Maps 14 Foursquare 10 Evernote 8 Shazam 8 Google Mobile 7 Echofon (Twitter client for Mac) 6 Gmail Mobile 6 Pandora 6 TweetDeck 6 Twitterrific 6 Dropbox (to sync files) 5 Kindle 5 Spotify 5 Yelp 5 Many of our readers use iPhones, so the above list features more iPhone apps than apps from Android, Blackberry, Nokia, or other phones. Facebook was the most popular mobile app listed by you all. Facebook has been improving their iPhone app all year and this survey shows that our readers are liking those iterations. As Sarah Perez noted earlier today , "if any application deserves an "app of the year" award, it's Facebook 3.0 for iPhone." Not far behind Facebook was Tweetie, a popular mobile Twitter client which released a major new version of their app in September. Tweetie 2 introduced features like video tweets, offline mode, geolocation, and more. Other mobile Twitter apps to be mentioned multiple times include Echofon, TweetDeck and Twitterific. Google has always been popular in our Mobile apps surveys, since we began doing them in 2007 . They're listed 3 times in the above list, including at number 3 with Google Maps. Several mobile-centric apps (i.e. apps developed specifically for mobile, rather than the desktop computer) made our top 16 list. Foursquare is a trendy new mobile social network, Evernote is a great note-taking tool, Shazam is a head-scratchingly good app for identifying songs - to name just a few. Click here to see a Google spreadsheet featuring the entire list of nearly 200 mobile apps listed by our readers. SEE ALSO: Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2009 Discuss
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Your Favorite Mobile Apps: Facebook, Tweetie, Google Maps, Foursquare, and More
Twitter turned on its long-awaited Geolocation API today, meaning that users can opt-in to having their messages annotated with their exact locations. The significance of this is made clear by comparing it with last week's release of 500 million time-stamped Twitter messages for analysis. "You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps," Flip Kroner of data marketplace Infochimps told us, "and you've got a web app." Today's announcement of the availability of location data means the same thing: you take this data, mash it up with any other data with location information and you've got an app. From Digg or StumbleUpon for your favorite coffee shop to political and disease tracking - there's a whole lot that's possible. Sponsor Exposing location data is an opt-in feature for users, but 3rd party app developers are being told to "encourage your users to enable it by sending them to their settings page." Users will have to be both prompted and incentivized. Fortunately, a location-aware Twitter experience is something that will enable developers to deliver value to individual users immediately and in isolation - it doesn't have to be one of those situations where "this will be cool once other people I know are using it." With the announcement today of Twitter search results being added to Yahoo News searches, Twitter data is now being used by all three of the major search engines. (Google's implementation is still forthcoming, but the deal is done.) It might be one of the big players, but it's more likely to be small innovators that make creative use of the new location data. These are possible Twitter use cases, but the standardized Activity Streams spec that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others now support also includes a geolocation field - so if the walls around Twitter ever fall to interoperability then we could be seeing innovations like these across all kinds of networks. Here are some of the kinds of things we expect, or would like, to see. "Party Over Here" Bot: Automated Geo-Replies Want to know when you're near a certain type of public event, great wine shops or deals at Macy's? How about when friends, close friends or friends-of-friends are near? It's not hard to imagine a bot that you subscribe to on Twitter, that then auto-subscribes to you, notices when you "check in" at a new location and automatically sends you a reply when whatever or whomever you're interested in is near that location. How about a bot you can Tweet "@whereami" to and that @'s you back with a link or stats about the location you're in: nearby restaurant reviews, notable landmarks, crime rates, apartments for rent. Talk about augmented reality! How about a bot you can Tweet "@whereami" to and that @'s you back with a link or stats about the location you're in: nearby restaurant reviews, notable landmarks, crime rates, apartments for rent. Talk about augmented reality! There are all kinds of bots built on Twitter already, but one that can mash-up your physical location with its data store is going to be a lot more useful than a bot that tells you when a sensor noticed your plants need to be watered. These are the kinds of services that will incentivize Twitter users to expose their location data. Assuming a substantial number of people make that choice, here are a few other examples that come to mind. Articles Being Shared From This Coffee Shop Today Include... Imagine being the location-equivalent of Digg-submitter of your favorite coffee shop's hottest online articles each day. Most Twitter search engines index not just the 140 characters in a message, but the text in links being shared as well. If you think people like being the Foursquare mayor of a popular coffee shop, imagine being the location-equivalent of Digg-submitter of your favorite coffee shop's hottest online articles each day. Think people just stare at their computers in public these days? A service like this could shake that up. How about a StumbleUpon implementation that lets you stumble and read articles from people who've Tweeted from the same place you're in. Imagine walking down the street and considering two competing coffee shops; what's been on the reading list of each today? News at 11: Local Interest Survey Tool Think local TV news and newspaper companies would be interested in a stream of hot topics in their local area? They'd be foolish not to; what a great way to discover breaking local news to report on. Does your local newspaper print a selection of letters mailed in each week, but list the number of total letters received on the hottest topics of the week? Imagine capturing that local chatter from a much larger sampling of people. Local tweets plus an entity extraction algorithm. Cop Watcher Imagine taking a map of tweets discussing criminal activity, or police misconduct, in a city and comparing it with a map of the same from local police agencies. Some places that warrant more official attention could be exposed. Inventory Forecast If people in a certain city are twittering like fiends about a new product hitting the market, store orders, marketing and other parts of the supply chain could benefit from an earlier warning about it. Politics & Marketing People in Oregon are sharing a Huffington Post article about today's health care reform announcement a lot? In Seattle, Washington perhaps not so much? Political organizers of a certain persuasion could find that information actionable. Want to know what news outlets are on the ascent with people of a certain political persuasion? Cross reference your shared links from users in a location and a map of political contributions for the last election. Want to know what news outlets are on the ascent with people of a certain political persuasion? Cross reference your shared links from users in a location and a map of political contributions for the last election. How about unearthing Twitter users posting about environmental issues who also live in areas with environmental issues that an organization is working on. Want to measure local effectiveness of marketing campaigns? Imagine Radian6 or ScoutLabs using the location API. That's only a mater of time. Flu Trends+ Think Google's use of search data to map out global disease trends is cool ? Why stop there? How about pro-active messages (via Twitter) when there's an increase in messages about being sick in your area? Of course all of this will work better if more people are using Twitter and if people expose their location data, but that may very well happen. Prompting and individual incentives could be big drivers. The degree to which Twitter data is open for analysis by outside parties is a huge asset. What would you like to see cross-referenced with Twitter location data? Thanks for visiting ReadWriteWeb - we want to thank P2P-powered real-time search engine Faroo for making it possible for us to bring this site to you. Faroo is an innovative way to find out the hottest, freshest content on the web. Like SETI-at-home, Faroo's distributed architecture is indexing the real-time web while ensuring user privacy by avoiding centralized storage of data. The company says it can do things with Chinese-language content that no other real-time search engine can, too. Check it out at Faroo.com. Discuss
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What Twitter's New Geolocation Makes Possible
The social media data company Rapleaf has just released the final parts of their 3-part study involving the demographics and online behavior of webmail users. In the first part of the study , gender and age data was examined and revealed some interesting findings...like the fact that Gmail has more female users than male, for example. In the final sections of the study, the company has turned its attention to social networking data to discover more details about webmail users' social media profiles, memberships and network preferences. Sponsor Social Network Membership Data In the latter parts of the study, the company looked specifically at social network membership data for users of the AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services. Not surprisingly, the study found that Facebook was the most popular network across the board. What's more interesting is how well MySpace fared in some cases. On both the Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services, Facebook only had a small lead. Here, around 20% of all Hotmail and Yahoo webmail users were found to be on Facebook and MySpace. What does this reveal about the Hotmail and Yahoo user base? That they're a little more behind the times? Or that they've been around on the net longer and at one time had created (and possibly now abandoned) their MySpace pages? Unfortunately, the study can't provide us with these sorts of answers. The study also showed that Twitter is far more popular among Gmail users than anyone else. In fact, on the other services, it's 4-5 times less popular than Facebook. We would like to think that's because Gmail users are just more web-savvy and cool, but it's possible that it's because they're just younger than everyone else. Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is the least popular social network, but as Rapleaf points out, many LinkedIn users may have registered with their business email instead. Participation Levels - Hotmail Users have Most Profiles, Gmail Users Better-Connected When it comes to how the webmail users participate on social networks, Rapleaf found that the majority of the users have only one social media profile. But the service where the average number of profiles is the highest might surprise you - it's Hotmail. There the average is 2.5 profiles per user. Hotmail is followed by Yahoo, then AOL, and it's Gmail users who have the least number of social media profiles. That finding seems odd considering that Gmail users are younger and more likely to use Twitter in addition to Facebook. In fact, it almost seems like this data doesn't even fit with the rest of the study. However, the discovery that Gmail users are better-connected than the other users makes more sense. On average, Gmail users have the most friends on social networks with 46.2 friends while Yahoo users have the least with 40.0. Since again, Gmail users tend to be younger than the rest, it goes to reason that they would be in a demographic where their peers are more likely to have social membership profiles. Older webmail users, meanwhile, are still signing up for these sites. Although baby boomers and other middle-aged folks are joining sites like Facebook in droves these days, social networks are still dominated by the young . Methodology For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age, gender and social networking data by collecting information from public social media profiles. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their original blog post . However, the sample size is large enough to form some conclusions about the members of these services, even if it relied on a particular subset of users. Discuss
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Gmail Users Better-Connected, More Likely to Tweet than Members of other Webmail Services
It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440. Just as Johannes Gutenberg's printing press brought books to the mainstream public in the 15th century, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web brought commercial publishing to the people. Sponsor The Web has always been a medium where people could just as easily write as read (yes, the read/write Web ), however it didn't reach its potential until blogging came along earlier this decade. Blogging Blogging not only allowed anybody to publish easily to the Web, it ended up shaking up the print media world. Blogging began in the 90s as a form of online diary - Rebecca Blood wrote a good pre-history in 2000. One of the early popular blogging services was Blogger.com , launched by Evan Williams (who subsequently became a co-founder of Twitter) and Meg Hourihan in August 1999 . The service was acquired by Google in February 2003, a couple of months before ReadWriteWeb began. At that point, 2003, blogging was still seen as an informal diary-type of publishing. Around 2004-05, blogging started to become accepted as a legitimate news source. This was around the time that ReadWriteWeb began to publish tech news, as well as analysis. By the end of the decade, many blogs were directly challenging newspapers - proving that a solid news brand, such as Huffington Post, can be created from almost nothing in a few years. RSS Blogging software was one part of the democratization of media. RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") was another. There were and still are different versions of RSS , created by Dave Winer and others. But whatever the flavor, syndication has had a major impact on media. Basically RSS allowed people to subscribe to updates from blogs and other publications. Using RSS Aggregators, people could read news from a selection of niche and general news publications. Blogs were the first to utilize RSS, but mainstream media followed during the 2005-06 period. Today it is very rare for a major news website - whether it be the New York Times or a leading blog - not to use RSS. Twitter & The Real-Time Web The next major development in news media occurred towards the end of this decade. It was of course Twitter and the Real-Time Web . To be fair, this has challenged not only traditional media - but blogs as well. Now anyone, whether they're a writer or not, can publish 140 characters to the Web. And it might end up as breaking news, as the Hudsen River plane crash proved earlier this year. Media in the Next Decade There is much talk of the mainstream media "dying" and blogs usurping traditional media companies like the New York Times. While it's true that blogs sometimes report breaking news stories or analyze them better than newspaper websites, I'm a big believer in the power of brand. Washington Post, Wall St Journal, New York Times - these are all powerful brands and they reach a much wider audience than the vast majority of blogs. The challenge of course for mainstream media is to (drastically) reduce their costs, because few people want to pay for content these days - news or otherwise. However, in my view the traditional news media industry is in much less danger of extinction than the music industry . Musicians can bypass record labels completely nowadays, but there will always be a need for news to be questioned, put in context and analyzed. The best media publications of the next 10 years will do that and be successful, the ones that don't will fade away. See also: Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music Discuss
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Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media
The New Oxford American Dictionary announced its Word of the Year today and like everyone else, the organization is keeping an eye on the internet. Its selection? unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook. Has Oxford Dictionary made the right selection? ReadWriteWeb's Founder Richard MacManus thinks not. I disagree with him; I think this is a very valid Word of the Year. We make our cases below and invite you to cast your vote in a poll. Sponsor Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb founder: "I think that's an odd choice for word of the year, as all the trends indicate there has been more social networking activity this past year - not less, as 'unfriend' implies. Facebook and Twitter have both rocketed in popularity in 2009. I'd suggest that more people have left MySpace and migrated to Facebook, than unfriended people on Facebook. "I also think that 'unfriend' is an ugly word, so for that reason it shouldn't be Word of the Year. What's more, I don't think my Mum or Dad would be familiar with the term 'unfriend.' Perhaps my father will pop into the comments and tell us for certain. But I look forward to the results of the poll!" Do You Think "Unfriend" is a Good Word of the Year? ( online surveys ) Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb lead writer: I think "unfriend" is a very appropriate word for the year as it fits with the way people are becoming more sophisticated in their social networking. People are deciding to do some editing of the friends lists they rushed naively into. 7 out of the top 10 searches performed on the Facebook Help Center page are about getting rid of your own social network profiles or your friends. Admittedly "unfriend" isn't one of those words, but you get the idea. It's easy in this new web to sign up for things, getting overwhelmed and ignoring streams of information is par for the course. But choosing to cancel receipt of a person's updates? That's a meaningful move. People fall for those "see who's searching for you" ads on social networks all the time. You'd better believe they appreciate the control that unfriending gives them. I'll bet that just about anyone online, no matter their level of technical knowledge, could tell you these days what it means to "unfriend someone." What do you think? Discuss
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Unfriending: Are People Online Shedding Friends? (Debate)
