Thanks to a tweet from Evan Williams earlier today, I went and checked out a new site called Fuelfrog. The site is an extremely simple way for tracking your gas mileage via Twitter. The upside of this is obvious: it’s a quick and easy way to track your mileage. When I’m sitting in the car, prior to filling up a new tank I can simply type in the mileage on my odometer and the price per gallon and the number of gallons filled from the last time.

One downside to this is that when you get to the gas station to fill up your tank, you don’t remember what you paid last time. This is why I would suggest that Fuelfrog provide the opportunity back fill information. Rather than having to remember the price paid per gallon and number of gallons purchased from last time, it will simply apply those numbers for the next time you fill up and apply the current mileage to the previous entry. This would streamline things extremely well.

While I haven’t had extensive experience with this tool yet, I’m going to begin using it regularly. The one downside is that by using this tool via Twitter, I will expose my fuel budget to the world. While this isn’t really a significant portion of my budget, I wouldn’t use Twitter to track all of my expenses. I’m not sure what useful information will pop-up but I’m sure something will. Integration with Twitter is genius and I can see a whole set of other services implementing a similar integration in the near future.

Do you think this application is useful? What other types of applications do you think would be useful through integration with Twitter?

We have all heard it, “Content is king on your website… update, update, update.” The idea is simple, if you want people to explore your brand and visit your website you really need to provide a reason for them to come visit you.

When working on a personal brand or trying to create public momentum to creating the perception of action is always a challenge. When working you are most likely always doing something to create public momentum, having lunch with a potential client, meeting with the biz dev guy, reading a book on marketing; but to put all of these updates on a website is not only tediouse, the ROI isn’t as great as you might think.

This is where twitter steps in. Twitter offers badges, “what am I doing now” icons, that you can embed on your website and forward updates from your twitter account. This small but innovative step for a website can create followers out of people who aren’t yet ready to make the jump to twitter.

Think about it like this: You work for a small political actions department somewhere, you tweet the days events and have them posted to your website. You have coffee in the morning with a staff assistant, read a report on congressional spending before lunch, lunch with a old associate at a PR firm, the afternoon is spent writing proposals and you happy hour with some of your hill friends.

By tweeting those events, and having them post to your website, you have taken a regular day of work and turned it into a branding tool for your company or yourself. The people who view your site for information, and possible fund your operation, can now see how their interests are being promoted and their money is being spent.

Embedding twitter in your website turns your actions into a voice. Combine twitter with brightkite, with its picture uploading function, to post where you are while your doing something and you have found a way to continually add content to your website. More importantly you have found a way to show those who support you why they are supporting you.

Using the embed feature of twitter is a great way to engage people who aren’t ready to make the leap into social media yet. Remember, using social media as a tool to get your message out is useless if your message fails to reach the people you want.

This is just one simple tool for using social media to turn action into voice, a way to show people how what you do is helping them in some way. Making small updates to your website through twitter will allow you to stem the tide when it comes to making major updates to your site.

Do you know any other tricks for spreading social media to those who haven’t made the jump yet? Any way of show those who support you why they support you? I am also interested in any unique ways people are using twitter to create a voice. If you know of any let me know.

Back in 2005, Dodgeball.com which at the time was a rapidly growing company was snapped up by Google. By 2007 the developers called it quits and ended up leaving Google with some negative words for the global behemoth, “It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us – especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.”

What did Dodgeball.com do? Well pretty much the same thing Brightkite.com does: let’s you know where people in your network are located. The benefit of BrightKite.com is when you check in to the system with your location, you are occasionally notified if there are other people in your network within a given radius. I tried it out but unfortunately when I tried to check in for the first time via text, I couldn’t figure out what to type. It didn’t understand what I was typing in.

I think that was more of me not understanding how the system works but honestly it should have been able to find the restaurant I was at by me providing the restaurant name, city and state. One of the major downfalls of DodgeBall.com previously was that it didn’t work for cities that were more spread out. Perhaps that was because there weren’t enough people in the network.

Whatever the reason was, Brightkite could very well suffer the same fate as Dodgeball. The founders don’t seem to think so though. Nor do the investors in the company. This is another company that has come out of the Denver area and was part of the highly successful TechStars program. My guess is that this team has a good chance of success but I’m still not sure how they’ll solve the problem of wide spanning cities.

One last challenge that I see for this company is the problem of dealing with large convention centers and college campuses. We want to be able to specify our location within areas that share the same address. Ultimately, my guess is that they’ll eventually integrate GPS into the phone. Have you used the program? Do you find a lot of utility in it?

Yesterday, Digsby announced that they now provide support for Facebook. This now makes is the chat application with access to the most chat platforms. The only downside of Digsby is if you have multiple chat logins, you are going to have to scroll through a lot of usernames.

Also, if you have set up aliases for different users on another chat platform, it doesn’t transfer those over. That can get pretty annoying when you have a couple hundred contacts on AIM or another chat. It also sucks that you can’t sort users by name within status. Aside from that, Digsby is an awesome application. The fact that Facebook chat has been extended beyond the platform is also really great.

For the past few years, I been suggesting that chat needs to be integrated with a social platform. This is a great first step to that. The only downside about the integration so far is that profiles don’t show up directly within the chat application. I’m sure this will be a future feature via a Digsby Facebook application that enables you to make your profile information accessible via Digsby.

While I’ve spent most of this post making suggestions about how Digsby could make their application better, Digsby is one of the best chat applications out there. I now only need to have one chat application open to be able to talk with all of my friends. If you are looking for a simple to use and highly function chat application, Digsby is probably the first one I would recommend. So if you want to get Facebook chat on your desktop, along with Twitter, AIM, G-Chat, and a whole slew of others, go download Digsby.

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to sit down for lunch with Laurence Hooper and Dan Goodman, the creators of Loladex. I discussed what their new application is about. The new search service has been launched completely on Facebook. The purpose is to integrate social features into search and include reviews of local businesses. This service could build a dedicated user base just as Yelp has given the simple ability to post reviews of places you have visited.

If you look closely, Loladex has limited each of their reviews to 140 characters, the same number of characters limited to text messages. As I mentioned in conversation with the Loladex founders, it would be amazing if I could get off a plane anywhere and simply text what the best local restaurants are. The system would return the results based on what my friends have replied with.

I mentioned the same thing to D.C. based Hungry Machine previously when they launched their relatively popular Restaurants application. The best part of Loladex is that you can rate practically anything. Want to find a local doctor or dentist? Check out how your friends have rated them and get feedback. Currently I use Twitter for asking these types of questions but Loladex could bring this service to the masses.

The primary challenge for Loladex will be building an initial user base. If I can review any company that is in my community and get responses via text as well as through Facebook, I’ve found a useful service. If my friends aren’t using though it’s not very useful for me. If Loladex can build a dedicated user base I can see this application gaining a lot of traction. Considering that Loladex is based in D.C. I can only hope for their success!

When I woke up this morning one of the first things I read was Mike Arrington’s review of Quotably. I went and checked out the site and was very impressed. Quotably enables users to track the conversations taking place on Twitter and view all the participants involved even if they aren’t following each other. This is substantial because so frequently we miss out on a large part of the conversation because we aren’t following everybody involved.

Thanks to Quotably you can view the entire conversation even if you aren’t following everybody. This is highly beneficial because now you can understand the context of everybody’s tweets. Aside from being useful for Twitter users, Quotably also has P.R. potential. Almost a year ago I was discussing with somebody about using a similar model to tracking the reach of various articles on the web and the impact on brands being mentioned in those articles.

It was a tool for P.R. professionals but ultimately a duplicate system for tracking the reach of any message on the web would be significant. Brands hire P.R. firms for providing monitoring services and those that monitor the conversation view the discussion from a somewhat disjointed perspective. This puts everything in context which is awesome. Do you see any other potential uses for this service?

Rafe Needleman has a post up today about a new social bookmarking site called Diigo. I’m always extremely hesitant about installing new tools on my browser but for this article I decided to give it a whirl. After registering (which has an excessive number of steps), I restarted my browser and started testing out the features.

One useful feature that stood out was the ability to share clips from web pages you are visiting with friends as well as other visitors. I immediately went to my own sites to see what other visitors had come to the site. Aside from being able to see their user avatar and view their profile, there wasn’t much additional utility to the browser add-on. As of now del.icio.us takes care of most of my social bookmarking needs. It would be great if del.icio.us could suggest new friends but for now that’s the only feature that I think is lacking.

Rafe came to a different conclusion and is a fan of the new tool. I figure you can only build a social bookmarking utility so many ways but I’m sure there are plenty of people that disagree. While I like being connected with new people via my browsing behavior, I’m not sure how an introduction would proceed. “Hey, so I saw you browsing my blog … you like it?” Alternatively, if you’re browsing a gaming website you could find people that are equally addicted to games such as dolphin olympics 2.

Do you see any need for adding another social bookmarking tool?

Want to track the rapid growth of MySpace applications? Now you don’t need to refresh the MySpace application directory. Thanks to the D.C. based HungryMachine team (who recently launched LivingSocial), you can now graph each of the applications. This is an initial revision and while the directory isn’t pretty, it gets the job done.

SocialMedia, the creator of the original Appsaholic which launched on Facebook early last year, probably won’t be too happy with this new application. The best part about the MyAppsaholic site is that it is already in leaderboard format, similar to Adonomics aside from the application valuations which many have criticized for being unrealistic. The HungryMachine team will be adding features as requested.

If you’d like to see more features go Twitter Eddie Frederick and he’ll add them. The next few weeks are going to be exciting as we watch one platform launch after the other. Many are betting that MySpace is the next top platform to launch on given their large user base. Conversely, I’ve heard many criticize statistics on MySpace’s user base claiming that the numbers are inaccurately represented due to the massive number of bots being used to spam users.

While Comscore and Nielsen may not be completely accurate, you can rest assured that MyAppsaholic is providing accurate statistics on MySpace application growth. Go check it out!

Just this morning I twittered how my guinea pig (Kathrine) was squeaking up a storm and I wanted her to twitter what she wanted. I thought this was a joke until I came across the oddest post on webware.com about plants learning to use twitter.

The group is called Botanicalls and they have created a pretty awesome DIY kit for twitter services. The circuitry seems almost to simple and the idea is just dumb enough to work. I say that because in the military we are taught KISS (keep it simple stupid) as a way to solve the most complex problems.

The basics are this: Your plant sends you a message via twitter that it needs watering. You can reply by sending a message that waters it. Thats it… it’s that simple.

I see the implementation of twitter in this regard as a step toward the future! The type of future where I can water my lawn from the internet, feed my dog from my cell phone, raise my kids from around the world. Honestly, the potential here is almost limitless.

Imagine when some of those creative DIYers get a hold of this. I really can see an amazing use for private twitter accounts doing things like turning lights on, opening car doors or just about anything else you can get your mind around.

Projects like this are exactly the type of thing twitter needs to get accepted by the main stream. Creating twitter bots will allow for mass syndicated distribution of commands for work. I mean this, the more people find a utility for things like twitter the more we are going to find everyone using it.

I am really racking my brain about some of the neat things that you could do with twitter and this DIY project. Do you have any low level tasks that you would like to see accomplished via twitter? I am going to find a way to twitter to my Roomba to clean my apartment before I get home.

Let me know if you can think of any cool projects that you would like to see “twitterized”? Let’s brainstorm some cool ideas and hope they get made. Now if I can just find a way to twitter me up a sandwich life would be perfect.

I am completely addicted to twitter. In the short time that I have been on twitter have nearly sent a 1000 messages and made some great contacts. I ran across a blog by Mike Stopforth claiming he doesn’t get the point of twitter. He proclaims that twitter demands too much of his time and he has no time to spare.

Mike complains that he needs to be online 90% percent of the time to really benefit from twitter. I say that is fine. I am online 100% of my awaken hours. I hate to admit it, but my phone keeps me online and mobile 24 hours a day. I pay a hefty phone bill to have this feature but to be honest I couldn’t go with out my mobile internet.

As for the complaint that twitter takes up too much time. Twitter is an after the fact form of communication. I can spend as little or as much using twitter as I want. The key benefit I find in twitter is I can access it as little or as much as I want. No one on twitter gets upset if I don’t respond to them right away because they understand that twitter doesn’t mean I will give an instantaneous response.

People who view twitter as a form of communication like chat or standard sms are missing the point. Twitter is a microblog, it is an ongoing chronicle of what I think and do. Like any blog the goal is to have a conversation with your readers, but that conversation isn’t always guaranteed. At best I can hope that someone finds my twitter musings interesting enough to respond.

I have said it before and I will say it again, to really get the value out of twitter you need to find a way to go mobile. Using it when you can find time to use it really makes twitter fun and interesting.

I have to admit, I try to get some of my friends using twitter and none of them seem to be ready to make the jump. Is twitter to far removed from standard communications services to gain a real following? Have any of you had problems trying to convince your friends to explore the world of twitter? Maybe you think twitter is useless, let me know.