What it does

We all are becoming more and more accustomed to turning to Twitter when we have to look up information. It is only fit, then, that different directories will crop up, giving us a good overview on any concept that we may be interested in. That is exactly what this website does – it collects information on different Twitter businesses, many of which include promotions.

This database can be browsed both alphabetically and by number of followers – the latter will give you something of an idea of the standing of each business. Moreover, the homepage highlights these businesses that have attracted the biggest numbers of followers so far, so that you can always see who are making waves online in a more or less immediate fashion.

Appropriately enough, you can tweet every featured company as links for doing so are provided.

On the other hand, if you want to have your business featured on the site you can do so effortlessly. This process involves setting down tags and so on. Furthermore, you can let twitterers know about any promotions through the site, and draw more attention to your business this way.

In their own words

“Twibs was created by a small group of people with one purpose: Give twitter users a place to find businesses on twitter. We are big believers in the power of twitter to connect customers with businesses. We’re working on making it easy for consumers to find businesses, both local and national. Keep in mind, we’re just getting started, so there may be small glitches and features missing, but don’t worry, we’re working hard for you to keep helping consumers find your business on twitter!”

Why it might be a killer

It is a direct way of knowing which businesses you can count on when it comes to the famed micro-sharing platform.

Some questions

How many businesses are already featured on the site?

Link: http://www.twibs.com
Our Review: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/twibs-com-twitter-business-directory

 

If you’ve ever wondered how the Internet was born, but can’t be bothered reading a whole book on the subject, check out this short animated documentary from Milah Bilgil. Entitled History of the internet, it does a great job explaining time-sharing, file-sharing, arpanet and internet. The video uses a new type of info-graphic called PICOL icons, which will soon be made available for free on picol.org. PICOL stands for Pictorial Communication Language – it’s a project that aims to create “a standard and reduced sign system for electronic communication.” PICOL is free to use and open to alter.

Sponsor

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Discuss

Papervision – Augmented Reality (extended) from Boffswana on Vimeo.

A digital design shop in Australia, Boffswana, shows off a neat parlor trick in the video above. It places a 3D Flash character made with Papervision into a regular Webcam video using nothing more than a paper printout. (Update: Oh, and you can print it out yourself and add the character to your own video).

Eat your heart out, George Lucas.

(Hat tip to Cory O’Brien).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Soulseek, which was creted by former Napster programmer Nir Arbel and visibly resembles early versions of Napster, is not one of the most popular filesharing apps. It doesn’t have the mainstream appeal of Kazaa or Limewire, nor does it garner the press attention of BitTorrent. And that’s all probably fine with its users, who tend to gravitate toward more independent musical fare. But Soulseek has done something the others haven’t — made the jump to the iPhone.

Developer Errrick created iSlsk, a new filesharing client for jailbroken iPhones that works with the Soulseek network, by basing it on open source versions of the client for the Mac. “I saw all the capabilities this little gadget had and then thought ‘why didn’t someone already do something like this?’” he told TorrentFreak.

iSlsk lets iPhone users search for and download files directly on their phone. The software also imports downloaded files to the iPod music database so that they can be played with native iPhone controls.

This is not an application you'll ever see in the upcoming official iPhone application database. Apple certainly won't let applications that a) potentially facilitate illegal file sharing and b) cut into their iTunes Store revenue into their official app distribution channels. If iSlsk and other music and video sharing applications catch on, will we continue to see jailbroken iPods even after the release of the official app store? Even if Apple starts selling phones that aren't tied to AT&T?

A video of the of the app in action is below:

Yahoo’s Tom Coates today finally released FireEagle at ETech 2008. Seeing Tom in the office for quite a while getting everything ready makes me very happy to announce that it is out and invite you to come along and sign up for the beta to start testing and – even more importantly – developing applications for it. This is FireEagle:

Fire Eagle is an open location services platform offering web, mobile, and desktop developers a simple way to build new location-based applications while also ensuring that consumers have complete control over their data, including how, when and where their location is made available. Want to easily make your site responsive to a user’s location? Or, maybe you’ve found a way to capture someone’s location and you want to find cool apps to plug it into? By doing the heavy lifting and connecting you to a community of geo-developers, Fire Eagle makes it easier to build location-aware services.

Once you got in you’ll be able to download development kits in several languages including PHP, Python, Ruby and of course JavaScript. All the API calls are REST and the API authentication is handled via OAuth. The output format is either XML or JSON. The code is licensed with BSD and you can even contribute to the FireEagle source at a code repository.

The available API calls are:

user

Returns the location of a specific user in a location hierarchy format.

recent

Returns a list of users of the application who have updated their location within the given amount of time.

within

Takes a Place ID or a WoE ID and returns a list of users using your application who are within the bounding box of that location.

update

Sets a user’s current location using using a Place ID hash or a set of location parameters. If the user provides a location unconfirmed with lookup method then Fire Eagle makes a best guess as to the user’s location and updates.

lookup

Disambiguates potential values for update. Results from lookup can be passed to update to ensure that Fire Eagle will understand how to parse the location parameter.

You can learn more by watching the video of Tom explaining FireEagle at ETech.

The uses for a service like this are endless. From sensible search applications that show you places of interest nearby your current location up to real-life games of high-tech hide and seek everything is possible.

Remember Connect360, the app that let you stream music and video from your Mac to your Xbox 360? It’s just been updated to support XviD and DivX functionality to match the fall upgrade you installed earlier this week. It still costs $20 if you haven’t purchased it before, but you can try it for free to see if it works for you. If this were the policy for everything, we’d have a lot of half-eaten bananas at the supermarket, along with much cleanup needed in the diaper aisle. [Nullriver]