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.

Yahoo might be in some finical problems, but man can they set the world on fire when they need to. I follow everything Yahoo because I have been using the service since I discovered the internet over a decade ago.

Yahoo has been putting a great deal of muscle behind its mobile division and they have a good product in their Yahoo Go mobile application. Yahoo announced today that they will be launching a new service called Yahoo oneConnect. My heart fluttered.

Basically oneConnect is going to borrow the Yahoo Go platform and create one mobile application that allows you to seamlessly integrate social networks with your mobile phone. I know what your saying, “I already have a mobile application for ____.” Yahoo oneConnect will be different.

After using the Go application I can say that the platform is pretty sturdy. Go creates nice visuals and allows for network intergeneration from my mobile; always a plus. OneConnect plans to intergrate the following social networks into a mobile platform; Bebo, Friendster, MySpace, Dopplr, hi5, Twitter, Facebook, last.fm, Flickr, and LinkedIn.

The thing that amazes me is that Yahoo is making all of this into a mobile application. If Yahoo can integrate all these applications to my mobile and to my Yahoo contacts I will be able to stay up to date with all of my social network contacts IN ONE PLACE. I can’t even do that on my laptop, let alone my smartphone.

All of these integrations will be covered in the PULSE section of the oneConect application. To be honest it sounds like Yahoo might have a ‘Killer App’ here. I really can’t see someone who is integrated into social media not wanting to use this app, if it works.

Again, using Go as a model you can assume that oneConnect will work on most of the phones that Go works on. You can also assume that Yahoo is going try and saturate the phone market to capitalize on mobile intergeneration before its competitors can.

I am excited about this development, but are any of you out there excited about it? I know I would love to be a beta tester for this product (Yahoo you have me email address PLEASE contact me) and I will be following oneConnects development as it happens.

WooMe, the online network for fast, virtual introductions recently secured another sizable round of funding and is closing in on 100,000 users just a few months after its launch. The site offers a place to host or join back to back speed sessions with people, live in voice and video.

WooMe is very easy to use and gets right down to its business: making people introductions faster and easier. Access to rich profiles prior to discussions, a privilege competitor Speeddate does not grant, makes the selection process slightly less hit-or-miss. In addition, within sessions, users can list their interests or preferred discussion topic keywords so that other Wooers can instantaneously relate.

This feature certainly facilitates discussion and alleviates some of the awkwardness of speed dating. When thinking about first dates or introductions, one often conjures up the agonizing memories of nervously firing questions, desperately searching for common ground. WooMe displays that common ground just as the first word is uttered.

Furthermore, much like the Facebook application Define Me, Wooers can choose words to describe each other. These tags are used on personal profiles to build reputations. These basic networking tools provide a decent amount of metadata to make the process of meeting people more enjoyable and relevant.

As others have suggested, WooMe has the potential to expand beyond speed dating. Interviewing for all sorts of purposes seems to be the logical step toward advancing the service, but I’m not convinced that it is the right environment—at least not currently. When I began interviewing for jobs, I made sure to update my various social networking profiles accordingly, removing information I felt might be deemed inappropriate by company insiders.

Access to my profiles is permission based, but there was always that looming “But what if…?” If WooMe is to become a site for professional recruitment, access to profiles, defining characteristics and interests is going to have to be regulated because I don’t see an employer particularly appreciating an interest in “foreplay” or “kinky” as a defining characteristic. Or maybe he or she will, depending on the company—only kidding.

The point is, if WooMe is to become a trusted platform for meeting other professionals, it will have to address the issue of the service’s inherently casual nature. I doubt LinkedIn or Monster would be the success it is today if social or more personal information were readily available to users within the service.

But in the meantime, if you are into speed dating or other types of quick and casual conversations, give WooMe a spin.

Stefanie Olsen over at Cnet has covered a topic near and dear to my heart. She recently posted an article on a program called Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disaster (InSTEED).

“We’re not talking about pulling the red phone out of the bottom drawer here,” said Rasmussen, a former adviser to U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, referring to Twitter and Facebook. “We’re talking about using ubiquitous, free software that is repurposed when necessary to fit into a humanitarian need.”

This ’simple’ quote gives the entire scope of what InSTEED is trying to cover. I used to work at the Pentagon so I can translate that ‘govermentese’ for you.

What Mr. Rasmussen is saying is this: the private sector has come up with a pretty good idea and the government is going to adopt those tools as needed.

InSTEED is the brain child of Dr. Larry Brilliant. His goal is to create open source solutions that can help people and agencies communicate in the event of an emergency.

Olsen’s article gives the example of combining Twitter’s multi-channel bot framework with Google Earth’s geo-tagging service to create an emergency communication tool that can work in less than stellar reception areas.

The application of these services as an ad hoc emergency network is nothing short of brilliant (pardon the pun). Twitter is the perfect tool for cross platform communication, signaling phones, emails, Facebook pages, and a myriad of other networks.

Combining all this information in a Facebook style network will allow humanitarian agencies to reach thousands of people who could provide information and services.

I have been racking my brain all morning thinking about social tools that can be used to help create a humanitarian network. Do any of you out there have any ideas? Let me know.

Paisano, that’s his name, over at the thepaisano wrote a great post about sneaking social into enterprise. In his blog Paisano details how he is a systems administrator and he has to block many of the social sites that he finds enjoyable. Paisano laments on the dull drums of creating SOP’s for his company but soon begins talking about using social media and web 2.0 as tools instead of distractions.

Paisano talks about using practices he learned in his blogging, tagging and hyper linking, to create more fluid online documents for his fellow employees. He is able to create interactive documents that allow his workmates to access forms and files with speed. This is a simple enough move and not that social, but any time you really help someone accomplish a task faster it is quite rewarding.

Paisano’s real epiphany came when he created a meeting for his coworkers on Zoho so they could all collaborate on a document at the same time. I believe this technique, of demonstrating the power of online collaboration and social networking, is the best tool for winning people over. Paisano boasts that they were able to complete work that would have taken days in almost no time.

I had a similar experience while I worked at a PR firm where we had a shared document with a client and hashed through a press release in 5 minutes; verses the several hours would have normally taken.

This got me thinking, what other social tools could I use to help in the business world? Sure I could chat through a messenger client around the office instead of emailing, but could I twitter with my office on ideas? I could create a shared document on Google documents, but could we start editing them from our mobiles? Could brainstorming sessions be podcasted so our other offices could download them and listen when they had time?

Do any of you out there have any good tricks for using social media or web 2.o to help you in your professional life? I am always looking to stream line things around the office.

While attending the D.C. Capital Cabal networking event the other night, I got into a conversation with Jimmy Gardner about various Twitter applications for the P.C. Jimmy suggested using Snitter since it gives audio alerts each time you receive an @reply on Twitter. Yesterday, while browsing through my RSS feeds I stumbled upon another Twitter application called Twhirl. This application is my first experience with Adobe AIR and I have to admit that it was a pretty smooth experience.

Twhirl is the best Twitter application I’ve used so far. Twhirl is also really useful for the more than 30 percent of Twitter users with multiple accounts. For those highly active users, Twhirl provides users with the ability to login to multiple accounts at once. I also enjoy the @reply audio alerts since I can’t possibly read through all of the tweets that move across my screen on a daily basis.

The use of Twhirl further emphasizes my new found Twitter addiction but hey, I might as well embrace it rather than fight my desire. Twitter has become my own personal chatroom and I have to say that I am thoroughly enjoying it. I am also seeing more people join the conversation which means Twitter is growing at least within the group of Twitterers that I’m listening to. If you want a simply to use and well designed Twitter application, check out Twhirl.