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a common saying in web 2.0-land goes: “one never gets tired of twitter-mashups”. ok, I just made that one up. anyway, here are the three most recent twitter-mashups I’ve come across worth mentioning, in ascending order of hotness (according to my bias).

Tweetwheel

Tweetwheel displays bilateral connections between your twitter-followers (or the followers of any twitter-account, since this info is free available as of recently). nothing more to say, except that the mashup seems to have a bug or two (I can’t open my personal wheel no more, which worked yesterday. neither can I refresh it).

Twistori

the brainchild of Thomas Fuchs (script.aculo.us) and Amy How, Twistori is the Google Zeitgeist of the twittersphere. it simply aggregates emotional tweets by keywords like love, hate, wish, feel etc. and displays them in a vertical scrolling way. simple, but somehow awesome.

Twitsay

developed by Max Kossatz, Twitsay is an iteration on Dave Winer’s Twittergram. the usecase: send audio-payloads to your Twitter-stream simply by using your (mobile)phone to call a special number. other than Twittergram - which is available only through a US-line (provided by Blogtalk-Radio, afaik) - Twitsay offers regular lines for austria & germany (soon to be extended to US & UK, as I ‘ve heard from Max).

I always liked Winer’s idea for its simplicity, but never actually tried it for reasons of cost. thx to Max, now I can.

this wednesday (30.4.) vienna’s (I guess) bloggers meet up at Blogtail 3. I just decided to join them for a beer or two, maybe you’ll come to

sign up here or on Facebook to get a free drink.

so I got an invitation to Microsoft Mesh last night (it pays to stay up late and follow @stevegillmor). in some way Mesh is Microsoft’s answer to offline webapps (think Google Gears, AIR), weaving the fabric that is supposed to connect multiple devices, and applications. in its current rendition (don’t forget, this is labeled ‘Tech Preview’), Mesh sets up a virtual desktop, which is used to synchronize file-folders among different computers and different users (if you wish to collaborate). next to each folder, a small history & message-board is displayed. being Ray Ozzies brainchild, it should be no suprise that this sounds quite a bit like what Groove has been doing for ages.

while you can access mesh through the browser [screenshot above] (and Microsoft obviously has learned a lesson here, since it works flawlessly on Firefox, and also on Mac), the real fun starts after installing the Mesh-software to your local Windows(XP/Vista)-PC. mesh-folders are now transparently included on your local desktop [screenshot below], syncing existing folders to the cloud is only a matter of few clicks. if nothing else, Mesh is a slick way to backup local data to the web (5gbyte for free doesn’t sound too bad, right?).

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meet Vienna’s finest geeks at Tuplao’s @ PLAY.FM. tomorrow night. no excuses!

while twitter.com still doesn’t provide search, Tweet Scan does a great job in monitoring the twitt-o-sphere, especially since you can subscribe to search-results via RSS. smart people may use this to monitor their brand/name/service, like Comcast apparently is doing.

if you’re still running WordPress 2.3.3, now might be a good time to consider an upgrade. a recent exploit seems to turn your blog into a spamlink-farm, which might ultimately lead to a site-wide ban from Google’s index (as happened to Austrian proto-blogger Helge). to check if your blog is affected, look for the existence of the folder “wp-content/1″. more info on the exploit can be found at wordpress.org, as well as an upgrade-guide to 2.5 (highly recommended).

I’ve installed WordPress 2.5 on my blogs last week, and so far everything is running smooth. plus, the new backend-interface is really looking niiice. however, keep in mind that some minor plugins aren’t working on 2.5 yet!

ps: 2.5 finally features automatic update of plugins… however this doesn’t work on both of my installs - everytime I try to update, I’m just prompted for FTP-credentials - any ideas? thx!

pps: is there a tool to import UltimateTagWarrior-taggings into WordPress’ own tagging-system?

when Andy Pealting sold BuddyPress to Automattic (makers of WordPress) a month ago, buddypress.org went into maintenance-mode. now that Andy had a chance to bundle the code into a handy SVN-repository, the site is back up again, giving every developer the chance to toy with BuddyPress. But what’s BuddyPressm you might ask?

BuddyPress will transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform.

BuddyPress is a set of WordPress MU specific plugins, each plugin adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact.

got it?:) [note, this won't work with your typical Wordpress-install, it's for WordPress MU only!]

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just found a very cool Adobe AIR-based desktop-app for accessing Google Analytics…try it out!

YouTube’s API - basically a read-only set of RSS-feeds and XML/RPC-calls - currently doesn’t support scripted upload or download of videofiles. My quick hack PHPTube offers this featureset in a cleanly encapsulated PHP-class. Special interest goes to the upload-functionality, which virtually allows the integration of YouTube as a video-storage-backend into any other web-app. And while there are several download-scripts out there on the web, I’ve yet to find another uploader.

I’ve originally built PHPTube for using it within PLAY.FM (talking about automated upload of video-footage from our live radio-broadcasts), but since these things take some time I’ld love to hear if anyone out there has some use for my script…a simple digg would do as well

Warning: due to changes in the YouTube’s HTML, all versions prior 0.1.7 are obsolete!

Download: PHPTube 0.1.7 (fixed bug in login)
Requirements: PHP, PEAR/HTTP

Attention: If you’re looking for PEAR, goto http://pear.php.net/ and read http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.getting.php!

Ports: Java-port of PHPTube (by James Schopp), Python-Port (by Sylvain Boily), Joomla-Plugin (download-only, by Mohamad Ballouk) - thx!

Using PHPTube? Consider a donation, to keep things rolling…thanks!

thx to Marcus, I finally rediscovered the SimCity-esque traffic-visualizer I mentioned some days ago. VisitorVille by World Market Watch is a Windows desktop-application building game-like graphic representations of webserver log-files. pages are represented as buildings, visitors referring from search-engines arrive in Google- or AOL-busses and carry a passport disclosing details like javascript- & flash-support and screen-resolution.

with monthly fees of USD 89,- for sites with up to 5.000 unique daily visitors, VisitorVille’s eyecandy seems quite costly, especially since the user-interface looks a bit outdated (think Windows 2000). moreover, the downloadable demo is restricted to a random dataset, which makes evaluation difficult. still I think the underlying idea of visualizing website-traffic in a metropolitan environment is original - so if you’re into traffic-analysis, keep an eye on a potential update to VisitorVille.