I’ve been doing some research over the last few days and have found that niche search is far from solved. Many market verticals are lacking an effective aggregator for timely content. The tools everyone needs are known, but they haven’t been implemented. Instead of true solutions, we find scraping sites that just suck in content and spit it out un-validated, unverified and unorganized. Because of the high costs of building robust tools, what results is a poor, incomplete collection of information, which quickly becomes stale.

That coupled with inaccurate supporting information, primarily due to high data-set costs, provides a less than desirable experience for users. Mahalo saw this in the generalized search market and put into place human editors who comb the internet looking for the best information and vetting user submissions. The result are guides of information that are informative and helpful.

How long will it be before we see Mahalo style sites targeting niche verticals? Who out there is working on a white label Mahalo which can be reused in these smaller markets?

If you develop code in PHP or any other language take 5 minutes to read this. It raises excellent points regardless of the language you author in despite it’s focusing on PHP. I particularly liked #7 Use a PHP Framework & #8 Don’t use a PHP Framework. It harkens back to point #1 Use PHP Only When You Need It. Hammers are good at driving nails, but they make terrible screwdrivers. The same can be said of frameworks which are not the panacea that many tout them to be. There is a good tool for each job - the roll of technology folks is to accurately select and implement the correct tool for the task - because not everything is a nail.

Curious how big the extended twitter universe (twitterverse) is, I decided I’d do my own investigation and provide results I found as a list of tools. Basically, it’s BIG. Google returns ~69.3 million hits for “Twitter.” Below is what I found relevant in the cream. You’ll notice I skipped Mac/PC clients. There are lots of great clients that people use for platform specific updates (perhaps a future blog post worth).

Websites:

• FriendFeed: Leverages Twitter Feed
• Quotably: Leverages Twitter Feed
• Twitter: The original site that started it all. Unfortunately it’s been highly unreliable over the last few weeks.
• Twitter Digest
• Twitter Mobile: Twitter’s official mobile website.

Spotting Trends (Techcrunch tweeted an even better one than these but I can’t for the life of me find it):

• PicoBuzz
• TweetVolume
• Twends
• Twitscoop
• TwitterBuzz: Tracks URL usage on Twitter (lots-o-TinyURL here)
• Twitt(url)y: Realtime tracking of “hot” URL’s

Tracking, Leaderboard, Ranking and Visualization:

• 5K Twitter Browser
• Tweeterboard
• Tweetmeme
• TweetWheel
• Twerp Scan: Users spewing SPAM
• Twist
• Twistori
• TwitDir
• Twitstat
• Twitter Blacklist: Users spewing SPAM
• Twitter Quotient: Brutally honest!
• Twitter Spectrum
• Twitterholic
• Twitter Stats
• Twubble
• Visual Twitter
• Who Should I Folow?: Find new folks to follow on Twitter

Voice Tools:

• TwitterFone: Private Beta Only
• TwitterGram

iPhone Specific:

• Hahlo
• iTweet
• MobileTwitter
• PocketTweets
• Twinkle: Requires Jailbreak
• Twitter for iPhone

Web Browser Plugins (a very short list):

• TwitBin: Firefox
• TwitterBar: Firefox

Social Networking Sites:

• Grazr Twitter Reader: Facebook
• Twitter: Facebook
• Twitter SyncMySpace
• Twitter Box: Second Life

Mobile Applications:

• Fring
• Jargong
• jTwitter
• Mobio
• MoTwit: En espanol (Spanish)
• Slandr: WAP site
• Tiny Twitter
• Twibble
• TwitterBerry: BlackBerry client
• WidSets - Twitter: Java client

Desktop Apps (Adobe AIR):

• Snitter
• Spaz
• Tweetr
• Twhirl: “a twitter client” is understated. Definite must have

Search:

• Flaptor Twitter Search
• Hashtags
• Summize: Amazing results
• Terraminds
• TweetScan
• TwitterSearch

Photos & Images:

• Mobypicture
• TwitPic
• TwitterGram: FlickrToTwitter

Mashups/Geolocation:

• TrackThis: UPS/FedEx/DHL etc package tracking
• TwitterLocal
• TwitterVision
• TwitterPoster

Blogging Tools (a very short list):

• Twitter Feed
• Twitter Tools: WordPress Plugin
• TwitThis

News & Politics:

• Alltop
• Politweets
• TweetWire

Survey Tools:

• Poll Daddy
• StrawPoll
• Twitter Census
• Twitter Answers
• Tweetburner URL tracking

Special thanks to franticindustries, Mashable and all of the assorted the commenters for the initial inspiration for this list. Also see Twitter Fan Wiki for a comprehensive list of apps. There are some big ones missing I’m sure, so YMMV with that list as with this one over time. All links/sites were active as of May 27, 2008.

Recently I needed a color picker for a project and spent a little bit of time reviewing JavaScript color picker tools for integration in the application. What I found was a wide variety of tools that are either hard to implement or hard to use. That aside, there were a few that were reasonable and so I’m calling them out here should anyone need such a thing. It should also be said that there is a lot of room for improvement in the utility space should anyone want to take a stab at improving color pickers.

The most intuitive tool for non PhotoShop users is the one provided by ColorJack. The layout is typical of PhotoShop but without the RGB, CMYK and other color models being in the foreground. Those tools, while useful to designers and production shops, are meaningless to application users. The hue slider is intuitive and easy to use and the picker works in all browsers. What I did find complicated about the picker was it’s ability to easily integrate into a form that might require multiple color selections (such as a layout editor) and the Dynamic HTML placement was unreliable. It did have the least technical feel though ultimately making it the easiest to use. jQuery users be warned, you may need to tweak some of the code as there’s overlap. The widget includes the core functions it requires.

My personal favorite is from John Dyer who provides a clean PhotoShop like implementation. While I’ve not had the opportunity to use it on a site, and therefore have no experience with the level of difficulty integrating it, I have a feeling this will find it’s way into many administrative tools I’ve got on the roadmap over the next few months. The look at feel is clean and simple and the code is structured in a logical. I’ll likely be working to combine his code into a smaller package that I can easily add as a method to my input classes for the task (much like the tool below from WebReference.

The last color picker I want to call out is a detailed article on how to build useful picker from WebReference.com. It integrates cleanly multiple instances on a single form and has two different “modes” one as a simple scale (seen below) and another as a photoshop like tool. Obviously with a little time, this would be easy to modify to suit your needs (assuming you wanted to take away either the PhotoShop gradient or the color strip).

What none of these tools do is help with making good color choices. While I offer a tool to assist in finding some level of color harmony leveraging complementary colors, It would be neat if one of these tools let you find a set of colors based on the color wheel. Use mathematical operations, it’s possible to determine clash, complementary, split complementary, analogous, monochromatic and so on. Perhaps it’s time for a re-write of that tool?

I’ve been experimenting with Twitter for just over 4 months now, using it in my personal and professional life. There seems to be a large and still growing developer community building up around it churning out great applications, including one I heard about (via @purplecar on twitter of course). The application by tweetclouds.com aims to create a tag cloud (much like the one on this and many other blogs) from your tweets; you can see mine here in all it’s glory.

If you’re on twitter, follow me - I’d love to hear from folks who are experimenting with new ways of extending twitter.

Some other interesting tools include Twitter Stats, which received some coverage on TechCrunch in January.

Quite possibly my favorite is TwitterVision, a nice mashup leveraging the public tweet stream and google maps to visualize the public feed. Incidentally David Troy (the author) has also created FlickrVision, basically the same app but using photos instead.

There’s also Twitterholic a top 100 twitter user board, Twubble a great way to find people you might be interested in following (recently featured on FaceReviews), Twitterverse another cloud app but for the entire twitter universe and if your totally lost as to why anyone uses twitter, I recommend the Twitter in Plain English video by CommonCraft.

If I’m missing a way cool web based app, please let me know in the comments below. I’ll save desktop applications for another post, there certainly are plenty of those too!

Recently I looked at my headphones when packing for a trip. They are six year old Bose QC-1 - the original QuietComfort noise canceling - they still sound wonderful. While figuring out which essentials I wanted inside the airplane cabin, laptop, book, pen & paper, iPod… I wasn’t sure if I should put my huge headphones in the computer bag along with their bulky case adapters spare batteries and the like, or just check them. They really are big - as one would expect from an over the ear headphone - and have a lot of “stuff” that goes along with them.

I bought these headphones when I was working in an open office environment. I wore them primarily at my desk to reduce the drone of co-workers and office automation equipment- think Office Space - so I could focus on my tasks. Now, I work from home and occasionally use the headphones for Skype and iChat, long plane rides without the family, working in the yard and the gym. I still enjoy music, but it’s rarely a personal experience for me anymore.

Every day I spend hours working on finding the right solution for the problem at hand. This manifests itself in finding more efficient algorithms, better resource allocation, better communication structures and the like - all creative problem solving which at it’s core is about choosing the right technology for the job. Why shouldn’t I do the same with my personal technology once in a while? After all, it’s the sense of accomplishment when something works well AND efficiently that keeps me up late at night, excited to work on a project.

My headphone technology was no longer serving it’s purpose. My requirements and needs had changed. The Bose QC-1’s were no longer the right tool for the job. It was time to make it more efficient. In algorithmic terms, the Bubble sort was no longer working, it was time to improve the performance; time to upgrade to a Quicksort. I required portability, decent sound quality and significantly reduced size. I had only one of the 3 basic requirements, decent sound, met.

I now work differently and am more mobile. The headphones I use should be too. I had decided it was time to say goodbye and replace them with something smaller and easier to travel with. My headphones shouldn’t be bigger than the device that’s powering them. The QC-1’s went up on eBay and I began the search for something smaller, lighter and easier to live with. Any audiophiles want to chime in on what would be a good replacement? I can’t wear ear buds (they fall out of my ears) and don’t like on ear headphones. In-ear buds seem to be the best option for me and I’d love to hear your thoughts.