You know an internet startup idea has become a trend once there’s a site that’s aggregative all of the sites that provide a specific service. 8coupons does just that for the numerous group shopping sites out there now. While Groupon may be the most popular of the group shopping sites, Living Social, and numerous others have created their own group shopping services. Rather than visiting every site each day, 8coupons will aggregate all the offers in your city for you.
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Just as farming games like (Lil) Green Patch, Farm Town and Farmville once surged in popularity, the city-building genre is rapidly gaining players.  Playdom’s new Social City has gained 5,600,000 users in 2 weeks and is an excellent example of a city building game; it has great graphics, a pleasant interface and some great social features.  On the other hand, the game seems to be more about the “City” and less about the “Social”.  We review the game below.
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UNO, a family card game which has growing in popularity over the last 30 years, has been adapted to a great Facebook game (which you can play here) that seamlessly integrates real-time multiplayer gameplay and pleasing graphics.  The game has been gaining momentum on Facebook, hovering around 3,700,000 monthly active users and is listed consistently in the top ten for “Card Games” on the Facebook Games dashboard.  We review the popular game below.
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With the rapid growth in the use of Twitter, there’s bound to be a growing interest in tools to analyze Twitter statistics and social graphs, even while on the go. Tweeb is the latest application to do just that, and it’s for the iPhone. Tweeb is developed by D.C.-based Ken Yarmosh and Mobomo.
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Google has acquired Social Search provider Aardvark for $50 million, as reported minutes ago by TechCrunch.  Aardvark is a service that connects people with questions with people with answers by utilizing instant messaging an email.  It integrates quite intelligently with Google Chat, for instance, and the first time you sign up and ask a question, you’re immediately pinged with a friend request from the Aardvark chat bot.  The fact that Google is picking them up says a lot about the type of social features they want to introduce into their products moving forward.
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Buddy Media has been busy lately, pushing some of its newer products onto big brands seeking better engagement with consumers via social media applications. The company that brought us app-vertisements and helped solidify their existence as viable alternatives to display ads has launched four new Facebook pages this week for Parents magazine, the National Jean Company, the Shoebox (which is a sister company to the National Jean Company)and Better Homes and Gardens.

Here’s a quick rundown of a couple of the new applications, outlining how they work within the Facebook community.
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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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