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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.

very cool: 5.000 VR-panorama-shots in more than 40 cities: 360cities.net …

(via Google Blogoscoped)

Janko Röttgers, author of “Mix, Burn & RIP” (sort of german “standard” literature on the digital music revolution) wrote a Giga-OM-post on LastTube, another take on YouTube vs. Last.fm, questioning the economic eligibility of mashed up webapps. I had similar thoughts when Google released My Maps few weeks ago… like those niche mapping-apps’, last.tv & LastTube will probably be rendered obsolete once Last.fm is launching their original video-features. on the other hand, given the minimal investment required for most of these mashups, it’s probably only fair to leave financials aside and see them as fun projects which can at least help creative developers to get their name out there.

ps: btw, I had an interesting talk with a friend who’s currently doing an internship at a small independent label in Vienna - his job includes looping the label’s compilations all day long to push their artists within Last.fm

MoniTwitter iterates on the idea of using Twitter to monitor web-servers. instead using the direct messaging API like my script, I guess MoniTwitter is posting to a particular account which you subscribe to (nothing wrong with that, just don’t forget to switch to private mode!). if for whatever reason you’re not able to use your own customized script, MoniTwitter is a fine alternative.

update: a quick test of MoniTwitter failed, at least I didn’t get any notification after 10 minutes of downtime

if you think Twitter is all about personal micro-blogging and basically a waste of time, think again. with their recent API-extension, it’s now possible to integrate Twitter as a cost-free SMS gateway into your own applications (like the guys at Tupalo have already done).

of course there are loads of SMS-based monitoring services out there, but the good ones aren’t free, and most aren’t very customizable. my simple demo PHP-script monitors any number of web-servers and alerts me by direct SMS if one of them goes down. just insert you account-credentials and make it a 5min-cronjob. keep in mind that you’ll need two Twitter-accounts for this kind of application, with the sending-account added as a friend to the receiver. otherwise the script can be easily customized and extended for you own needs…have fun!

ps: it might be a good idea to simultaneously run the script on two independent machines on different locations!

Google is further narrowing down the space for niche mapping-mashups like frappr and flagr (and to some extent even more complex apps based on the Maps API, like austrian newcomer Tupalo) by releasing their My Maps feature. My Maps lets anybody create geo-mashups without the need to code, including photo- & video-annotation. sharing of maps is currently read-only, but I guess collaborative editing is the next logical step (click for some of my places).

(via GigaOM)

this one has been around for a few days… David Troy is mashing up Twitter & Google Maps for that global-village feeling, plus he’s built a search-interface on Twitter user-data. while waking up today, I had a useful twitter-idea myself, maybe I can put it together after the game tonight