StatusNet released today a cross-platform desktop client for its open-source microblogging platform - the same foundation that powers the Twitter alternative identi.ca. Windows, Mac, and Linux users can download it here. It features support for multiple StatusNet sites (including identi.ca), notifications, search and more.

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StatusNet Desktop was built with Appcelerator Titanium framework and licensed under the Apache 2. The client’s quite good, especially for a first release, but it’s no TweetDeck yet (and of course, unlike TweetDeck, it connects to StatusNet sites Update: correction: TweetDeck supports StatusNet).

The Montreal based company launched an enterprise support service and a public beta for its hosted service in March. Initial enterprise customers included Motorola Corporation and Canonical Ltd. We concluded though the hosted service isn’t ready to replace Yammer, the enterprise offering is a strong contender. ReadWriteWeb is considering StatusNet for own status update/microblogging needs.

Socialcast, Socialtext Signals, Obayoo and blogtronixMicro are other competitors in the enterprise microblogging market.

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Shopping giant Amazon bought online auction phenomenon Woot today, and given the relative sizes of the companies, it can only be a move made with long-term Amazon strategy in mind. Earlier this afternoon we wrote about the deal as a victory for freaks and a marriage of light- and heavy-weight supply chains, but there’s something else going on here, too.

Woot is bringing real-time social shopping to Amazon. We pinged ReadWriteWeb reader Michael Vorel, the CEO of commerce, Internet marketing and consulting company Vastplanet for a brief comment, and he argued that this was a competitive move against the coming media convergence that will pit Amazon against TV shopping networks.

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Vorel:

“It’s an excellent move by Amazon. Amazon needed something that was real-time shopping, in the sense of a QVC or HSN [Home Shopping Network]. It gives Amazon the opportunity to tie together with existing retailers into a daily special. With the infrastructure and connections Amazon has, it could tap into these two communities to offer better pricing and a more successful operation.

Compete says Woot got 2.2 million unique visitors in May. Facebook referred 10.5% of that traffic, so it extends far out into social media.”

“The emergence of social shopping is evident in Woot, very similar to the special of the day on HSN. Amazon is looking for unique properties that fit the social shopping model that they can bring under their umbrella.

“Compete says Woot got 2.2 million unique visitors in May. Facebook referred 10.5% of that traffic, so it extends far out into social media.

“I think what we’re going to see from Woot is, we’ll see more interesting products roll through and maybe a hint of more categories per day. You could have a channel where you had it by category, Mens items, Women’s items, etc. That would allow a lot more people to play within Woot and a lot more money to be made.

“The products they [Woot] are selling are so slim margin, they needed to look at other ways to make money. Someone like Amazon could look at behavioral learning techniques, they could learn how to serve those people. I think it’s very interesting that both Zappos and Woot were big social media ecommerce companies and both were acquisitions.”

That sounds like a pretty smart take on the deal to me. Woot says it will maintain its functional independence, but there’s got to be some cultural cross-pollination in the plans. As media convergence brings Amazon into direct competition with at-home TV shopping, what better way to gear up than with one of the new geniuses of real-time social shopping, Woot?

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Zurich-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider CloudSigma announced yesterday that it has completed implementation of its carbon offsetting program, claiming its “carbon neutral cloud services are the first of their kind in the industry.”

The company boasts efficient, low impact cloud computing. The evaluation into the company’s carbon neutral status was conducted by myclimate, a Swiss non-profit organization.

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According to CloudSigma CEO Patrick Baillie, the company has adopted a strategy of “avoid, reduce and offset. By choosing an efficient data centre, using modern power efficient equipment and drawing electricity from one of greenest grids in the world, we’ve gone a long way to reducing our impact. Offsetting the remaining carbon footprint forms an integral part of our commitment to greener computing.”

CloudSigma’s ability to provide carbon neutral computing comes from several factors. Its data center, located in Switzerland, has one of the highest power efficiencies in Europe for a multi-tenant facility. And Switzerland as a whole has one of the greenest electricity grids in the world. By consuming electricity efficiently from largely low-impact sources, the company avoids generating a significant amount of carbon dioxide.

CloudSigma works with the non-profit myclimate to assess the company’s total greenhouse emissions, not just in the hardware and electricity required to run the servers, but in employee travel and office space and equipment. myclimate also develops and supports carbon offset projects around the world that reduce greenhouse gases, such as energy efficient cookers in Peru.

As a Greenpeace report in March pointed out, the rise in big data and cloud computing could lead to a huge increase in CO2 emissions if steps aren’t taken by the industry to reduce energy consumption and offset the emissions. According to CloudSigma’s Baillie, “We are taking the lead amongst cloud computing providers in voluntarily adopting efficiency policies and fully offsetting any remaining environmental impact.”

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Gadget, wine and T-shirt online auction company Woot has announced that it is being acquired by Amazon.com. The nearly six-year-old Texas-based company has combined unorthodox community marketing tactics with an atmosphere of shopping urgency to create a vibrant e-commerce experience.

Woot’s core service is to offer one highly discounted item for sale each day, until either time or inventory runs out. The items are of variable quality, but are often just good enough to buy, and the whole experience is a lot of fun. It’s an unsurprising acquisition by Amazon, but could have an impact on the larger company.
Update: Read this analysis from an ecommerce perspective - Woot + Amazon = Real-Time Social Shopping

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Woot’s take on commerce is self-effacing, frenetic, community-driven and fun. The company writes un-serious descriptions of the products it sells and does a daily podcast interacting with listeners.

If you thought Zappos was a gonzo company acquired by Amazon, Woot probably takes the cake. It’s a testimony to the fact that you don’t have to be a buttoned-up wonk to succeed online (though we probably all knew that already, right?).

Supply Chain Speed-Up

As we wrote about the Zappos acquisition 11 months ago, Amazon has mastered the art of the scalable supply chain and is in a strong position to drop the costs of any business it acquires substantially.

As we wrote last year:

Lora Cecere, VP of value chain services at AMR Research, says she agrees with Busch. “It’s now a multi channel play,” she told us. “Zappos deals with quick cycles, Amazon has longer cycles and is warehouse centric. They are really dealing with different supply chains. I wonder if it wasn’t a preemptive move to block another competitor from acquiring Zappos.”

Much of the same could be said about Woot. It will likely compliment the Zappos team and philosophy and help make Amazon all the more agile. Woot said today that it would operate independently, but it’s also safe to assume that the culture of Woot will have an impact on the culture of Amazon. It could even make the mega-retailer a little more fun.

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Mzinga has announced the latest version of its SaaS enterprise social software suite OmniSocial, with improved control panel, expanded analytics, mobile apps and more. The new features were made available to customers yesterday.

Mzinga has amassed an impressive client list, including ABC, Ford, Chevron, Amazon.com and AOL. It says it has over 300 clients with a total of over 40 million users.

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OmniSocial is an SaaS suite with features such as to do lists, discussions, blogs, chat, social networks, wikis, file sharing and polls. Clients use it for both internal intranets and collaboration and as an external, customer facing solution. OmniSocial’s features can be easily integrated into existing web pages with embeddable code. For example, ABC News uses OmniSocial for comments.

The new version of OmniSocial’s control panel makes it easier for organizations to customize and administer deployments of the service. Previously, Mzinga offered professional services to customize and manage implementations.

The new version also offers expanded analytics and reporting, features which have been in beta for a few months. Organizations will be able to track not only simple stats such as how often users post, but gauge the users reputation and influence in a community based on who reads their posts, how often their posts are read and other metrics.

OmniSocial users can now share content through Facebook feeds using Facebook’s API, and integrate OmniSocial features into Sharepoint sites. Additionally, Mzinga is now offering customizable OmniSocial iPhone and Blackberry apps.

Although OmniSocial now offers more self-service options through the new control panel, Mzinga still offers social media consulting, brand and reputation management and professional moderation services.

The enterprise social media market is quite crowded, but Mzinga cite Jive and Pluck as its primary competitors.

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If a thousand social networks bloom, with cross-network communication and real-time replies, how will you manage to find and share the best things that your friends put into your stream? Innovative social network aggregator Cliqset launched a new version this morning that offers a very interesting answer to that question. Cliqset is a service that lets you publish and subscribe to 80 different social networks, from Twitter to YouTube to Delicious to Foursquare.

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Long a proof of concept more than an app you’d use, Cliqset can be so forward-looking it hurts. Today’s relaunch brings it closer than ever to making it my #1 choice for ways to interact with the river of news - in theory. The next few weeks should be even more exciting for Cliqset, with the introduction of an iPad version, Chrome desktop pop-ups and Facebook search integration. The service remains rough around the edges, but I sure love what the company is doing.

Cliqset used to be a lonely place, displaying only content from other people you knew who had signed up for Cliqset (not many). Now you can read anyone’s Tweets through the service, and the interface for sorting, replying and watching conversations may be the most sophisticated we’ve seen yet.

For example, if a well-known person throws out a Tweet (or if you do) and it gets a number of replies, you can view that Tweet alone on a page in Cliqset, with replies to it streaming in below it, pushed to your browser in real time.

The service’s integration of the Google-led Salmon messaging protocol lets Cliqset users message across social networks, something Cliqset hopes will be adopted by many social networks and breathe new life into the long tail. If you can message people on Status.net from inside Twitter, there’s all the more reason to take a long look at Status.net’s interface, for example.

Curation is beautifully implemented in Cliqset, it’s easy to push any item into a curated stream that other people can subscribe to in real-time. That’s really nice, and just cries out for iPad integration.

Right now the little company appears to be struggling under some launch-day traffic and its ambitious may never be realized if scalability remains a killer. There are also a number of little design considerations, though the site is very pretty, that seem unintuitive to this human user. Cliqset is warming up though, it feels less like the brilliant super-dork at a party that you can’t have a conversation with every day.

The Future of Cliqset

Cross network, real-time streaming and curation? Sounds like something I want on my iPad. Sure enough, Cliqset says that’s not a big stretch at all. An iPad style-sheet will be in place in a matter of weeks.

Likewise, the reason I stay with Tweetdeck for my work-Tweeting is because of the pop-up notifications for high-priority columns. Cliqset says the new Chrome HTML5 desktop notifications API is something it is working on and expects to implement soon.

Finally, how about some Facebook search? I don’t understand why so few services have implemented search across not just Twitter but public Facebook messages as well. Neither does Cliqset, and the company says that’s right around the corner as well.

Speaking of Tweetdeck, Cliqset says it is doing API work of its own that should enable Tweetdeck to serve up streams from 80 different social networks very soon. That sounds very cool, and like something that deserves its own coverage.

Cliqset is the most sophisticated, forward looking tool for stream reading on the internet today. It’s also awkward, unstable, confusing and full of more potential than actualized usefulness. But that balance changes a little more with every iteration. You should check out Cliqset - sooner or later it could win you over.

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It’s been 75 silent days since iPhone app sharing service Appsfire submitted version 2.0 to Apple for entry into the App Store, but in the meantime, the company has released a new way of finding apps. Instead of solely relying on recommendations from friends, Appsfire now offers recommendations on your next downloads with a popular app tracker called AppTrends.

The introduction of AppTrends comes alongside announcements that ex-Jaiku co-founder Jyri Engestrom has joined on as an adviser and that the company has received a new round of funding from Lerer Ventures.

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AppTrends is the first live ranking of iPhone apps outside of the App Store, according to the company. The rankings are determined by looking at Twitter and seeing what apps people are talking about most. The service looks at iTunes URLs (even those shrunk using URL shorteners like Bit.ly) contained in tweets, ranking not only by the number of mentions but also by the influence of the Twitter user. The list of apps, which currently sits at 20 but will soon expand to 100, updates every hour and shows how apps have moved up or down in the listing in the last one, 12 and 24 hours. In addition to the listing, clicking on each app will show what people are saying about it on Twitter. For each, a link is provided to preview the app, read a description and download or buy the app.

Aside from offering a list of what’s hot to the consumer, AppTrends also looks to provide insight to app developers on why their app is moving up or down in the listing, by seeing what people are saying about the app. According to the company, the App Store ranking is “updated at best once a day” and AppTrends has shown trends quicker than the App Store on several occasions.

For now, the site is just a list of 20 top apps, but soon it will include localization with rankings by country, rankings by category (such as games or health and fitness), access to a history of app rankings and notifications for developers.

Part of what we like most about this new service is that it offers some insight behind why something is popular, beyond Apple says so. Looking at how apps move up and down within the rankings, and being able to see why, is a step beyond a simple list of top downloads. Beyond that, we hope that looking at tweets might move past those simple app rankings provided in the App store, which we can’t help but look at with suspicion.

AppTrends is live as of today and already showing the hot of the hot. At the top of today’s list? The just-released Hulu Plus, of course.

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From Katherine L. Walter, Co-Director, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, Professor and Chair, Digital Initiatives & Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Lincoln, Nebraska centerNet, an international network of digital humanities centers with over 200 members worldwide, today announced the launch of a beta web site. This is a work in progress, and comments and suggestions are appreciated.

http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet_new

We hope to add some new features in time, including a “members section” with more information about each of the centers. BTW, descriptions that now appear were contributed by centers and organizations themselves, and in some cases may need to be amended.  If your description is one of these, please send us revised text.

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available. It provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, e-prints, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Mobile analytics and tracking firm AdMob has just released its latest mobile metrics report, a monthly snapshot of the smartphone industry based on data generated by ad requests within its network of 23,000 mobile websites and mobile applications. This current report, the last of its kind, notes the company who plans on reinventing the report to make it “more useful going forward,” focuses on long-term trends across the industry.

Not surprisingly, the company found that Android has seen rapid growth thanks to the launch of new devices, Apple is still the top manufacturer and iPads are having an impact on mobile Internet traffic worldwide.

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Details on the Data

Before delving into the numbers themselves, it’s important to note how AdMob generates this data - it uses its own network of ad requests, a metric which provides a slice of smartphone pie, but not perhaps the best snapshot of the industry as a whole. Some contend that AdMob’s data slights that of RIM (makers of Blackberry), but even if so, there’s still relevance to be found within AdMob’s numbers, given their wide sampling. Changes within its network can speak to wider industry trends, which is worth examining.

Another important item of note is that AdMob was acquired by Google, makers of the Android operating system. The acquisition was announced back in November of 2009, but it took until May for Google to close the deal, due to a pending FTC inquiry into anti-trust matters. The regulatory body unanimously approved the deal in late May, citing Apple’s entry into the mobile ad market industry as evidence of competition.

AdMob notes that the majority of the data in the report pre-dates the Google acquisition.

Just the Highlights

Disclosure out of the way, here are the latest findings, highlights first:

• 92 countries generated more than 10 million request in May 2010, up from 27 countries in May 2008
• Nokia leads in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe
• Apple leads in North America, Oceania and Western Europe
• In May 2010, smartphones generated 46% of traffic in the AdMob network, up from 22% 2 years ago
• 24% of May’s traffic was via Wi-Fi
• Mobile Internet Devices (including the iPad, PSP and iPod Touch) consistently have accounted for 10% of traffic over the past year
• 57% of Apple devices in AdMob’s network are outside the U.S.
• Traffic from the Android platform has grown 29% month-over-month since May 2009
• iOS and Android users spend 79 minutes per day using apps
• iOS and Android users download about 9 apps per month

Android Gains Thanks to New Devices

The introduction of numerous Android-based phones has allowed the mobile OS’s market share to increase dramatically over the past year, AdMob finds. But what’s most interesting is seeing what those gains look like, graphed out.

In this chart, for example, you can see a sharp increase in Android’s market share while Apple’s iOS market share drops. In February, Apple appears to have a 50% share, but by May, it’s down to 40% worldwide.

And as of May 2010, 7 of the top 10 smartphones run Android, notes the report. These include the Motorola Droid, HTC Magic, HTC Hero, HTC Dream, Motorola CLIQ, HTC Droid Eris and Samsung Moment. The top smartphone, however, is still Apple’s iPhone. Nokia’s N70 and 6300 have also remained in the list over the past two years.

The report also looks at how both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android OS register higher mobile Web and mobile app usage, relevant to their actual market share.

While again, AdMob’s numbers are not meant to be definitive, there is a notable trend here - Android is gaining, and gaining fast. Worldwide, however, Apple still dominates while Symbian dominates in particular regions…at least for now.

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