Amplify is a recently launched tool that lets you easily share web content across the social web. As a browser extension, the Amplify button is always there, no matter where you surf on the web. From Twitter to Facebook, Amplify offers a slew of social media networking, bookmarking and sharing sites that you can “amplify” your content towards.
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Twofish, the company that provides micropayments for applications, is announcing a few new products for its service. The new products mainly revolve around analytics and easier ways in which to get set up with Twofish. With these updates, Twofish is really looking to appeal to the developer community, gain new users and provide better ways in which to utilize the data it provides through its microplayment platform.

From its Easy Element product, the core service for Twofish, comes a new tool called Currency Starter. This is closer to a turnkey solution for developers that want to get started right away with a virtual currency option for their applications. Some of the options that come with Currency Starter include Google Analytics integration, and all the other basics needed for setting up a payment gateway for virtual currency. Twofish has a one-click purchase option for users, which saves their credit card information, along with account history which users have access to.
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Going along with other MySpace efforts to keep users on the site, the social network has enabled photo editing directly from users’ photo albums. Powered by FotoFlexer, the new MySpace photo editing options are available now for U.S. members. This makes personalization of images even easier, and more accessible to users from within the MySpace portal. International roll-out is expected in the coming months.

Promoting “creative freedom” the collaboration between MySpace and FotoFlexer allows users to do everything you’d expect from basic image editing to all-out bling. There are color effects, decoration options, distortion features, borders, and even wrinkle smoothers. Once a user has finished editing a given photo, it can be added to the respective album as a duplicate or replace the original photo.
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Tweeght is a new site that is a lot like Twitter, but is focused on enriching people’s lives with tweets published through its site. But what does that really mean for you? Share quotes, thoughts, or ideas–something Plinky is also moving towards. Express how you feel about someone else’s thoughtful tweet by voting it up or down. Find out who the most influential Twitter users are by checking the leader board. In essence, Tweeght is Twitter plus Pownce (without the multimedia) plus Digg.

And instead of competing with Twitter by building out its own community, Tweeght has just leveraged an existing Twitter API in order to enable Twitter users to submit their contributions directly through Twitter (that includes mobile updates as well). This encourages users to participate by making it that much easier to contribute–just sign in with your existing Twitter credentials.
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Twitter isn’t the most social site by nature, though it has some very social features that allow you to create some semblance of a community around your tweets and the tweets of your followers. But even with this inherent Twitter community it’s difficult to take that community outside of Twitter and use it to your benefit. An application called Twitter Remote displays which Twitter users have recently visited your blog or website. This essentially creates a MyBlogLog for Twitter-specific use.

The good thing about this application is that it comes with a widget that you can post on your blog or website. The widgets themselves are customizable in the basic dimensions. You’re able to change the color scheme, number of rows, and other parameters before placing it on your blog or website.
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Drop.io has a new Firefox browser plugin that makes i even easier to share files with friends and, more specifically, with friends on Facebook. With the new plugin, you can create new drops from items you find from across the web.

It’s got a convenient drag’n'drop option for text, links, files and HTML that you’d like to share, as well as drag’n'drop tabs to the drop.io logo for creating a link to that particular tab in that drop. You can even continually drag’n'drop files to the same drop or different drops, even while other files are uploading. Drop.io has also added some keyboard shortcuts to make the sharing process even simpler: hit control + shift + D in order to create a drop.io link to the tab you’re currently viewing.
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MySpace announced its support of OpenID earlier this year, with certain hopes for its potential alongside its own Data Availability initiative. Such an integration makes sense, especially in light of Facebook’s ongoing efforts to become the central platform for online social interaction. So how can MySpace hope to stay ahead? Deeper OpenID integration.

This time, a partnership with the Flock browser and Vidoop’s authentication solution will provide a more seamless experience for cross-network applications but for a user’s browsing experience as well. Called the Identity in the Browser open source project, this is an opportunity for all three companies to push OpenID into the next realm.
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I have been holding off on buying the Ocarina application the iPhone despite it’s rise to the number one application as I couldn’t get myself to spend the 99 cents for an unknown application. After seeing Mike Arrington’s post on it this afternoon, I had to download it. The application is spectacular in that it enables users to play any song in any tone and has all of the features of a standard wind instrument (aside of course the lack of a place for air to exit to increase reverberations).
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If you are like me, there’s a good chance you are frequently looking for a great place to eat but don’t want to spend much time searching. You may also want to have an easy way to review sites in a simple manner right after you finish eating at a restaurant. If you are knowledgeable of all things web then you are probably aware of other services offering similar services.

Numerous Competitors

Yelp, for example offers a robust iPhone application for finding restaurants, bars, banks, drugstores, and more. You can then filter each of the stores or restaurants based on their rating, price, and distance from you. It’s a pretty useful application aside from one thing: you can’t review restaurants after you’ve visited them from the application.

A couple weeks ago I also wrote about the LivingSocial iPhone application. One of the many features that the application is the ability to write reviews on the go. This was immediately an open void in the market as Yelp has yet to fix reviews on the go. The additional benefit of LivingSocial is their integration into all the existing social networks which offer developer platforms.

The social recommendation space is rapidly getting crowded and as we rush to fill data into the system, there are going to be some serious challenges. One of those challenges includes consistency of recommendation engines within your personal networks. If half your friends are on one network and half on another, it’s difficult to determine which one to use.

Thummit and Simplicity

While numerous competitors exist in the mobile food recommendation space, Thummit is attempting to simplify things by limiting users to 140 characters, the same way Twitter does. The focus is to build out a robust SMS service and then extend the service to support as many communication platforms as possible. You can tweet your Thummit recommendation, text it to text it to the service, or update it from the Thummit website.

While the initial beta test is focused on the D.C. area, you can currently use the service anywhere in the country. For example I just ate at “The House” in San Francisco for lunch and was able to post a review directly to the site. The service then pulls in other reviews from around the web so that no sites appear to have a lack of content.

When I saw the demo at the LaunchBox Digital offices in D.C. last week, Sean Greene, the brain behind this new product, emphasized that the company is working to integrate many more features that make it easier to review restaurants. That includes automatically determining whether or not someone likes a place automatically via sentiment analysis.

It also appears that they want to take recommendations and simple voting beyond just restaurants. Food is simply the first place to test it out. For now the service is limited to restaurants but they may expand beyond that in the near future. I think keeping the service as simple as possible will be their key to success. What services to you use for social recommendations and social voting?

Also, if you’d like to register for the site, visit the Thummit site and use the invite code “hamburger”. Let us know what you think!

kontagent, one of the leading social analytics tools who also one of the recent winners of the fbFund, has announced that they are rolling out a refined version of their platform. The new version includes more streamlined instrumentation, a refined user interface, improved social user segmentation, improved viral channel usage and limits tracking, and improved account management.

kontagent is one of the leading social analytics companies, their primary competitor being Sometrics who provides less in depth analytics but does provide a platform which provides metrics for advertising. While the company is not willing to provide us with details on their traffic, a quick look at the company’s Compete.com statistics shows that they are being dominated by Sometrics.

Compete.com reports that Sometrics had over 1.7 million visitors last month and kontagent had almost 5,000 (see update below). Regardless of traffic, the company most definitely provides the most in depth analysis for any social analytics company and many developers are beginning to pay attention to them for that sole reason. The company is also preparing to announce details of partnerships with a few large companies.

What are those companies exactly? We have no idea because they have yet to release details but Albert Lai, CEO of the company (and speaker at our Social Ad Summit), says that there are a number of large applications and brands. Beyond that, we aren’t sure who the company has locked in. We hope to release more detail on that in the coming weeks. For now feel free to go check out kontagent for your in depth social analytics needs.

Update
Albert Lai contacted me to point out that Compete is tracking Sometrics ad calls in addition to webpage visits. This would account for the large discrepancy.

kontagenet Dashboard

kontagent Cohort Analysis

kontagent Engagement Analysis

kontagent Viral Analysis