This morning, I moderated a panel on Twitter Applications, at LeWeb, featuring:

• Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck
  
• Laura Fitton oneforty
  
• Barak Hachamov, My6sense
  
• Marco Kaiser, Seesmic
  
• Sean McCullough, Ping.fm
  
• Daryll McDade, Microsoft
  
• Mario Menti, Twitterfeed

The panel lasted for approximately one hour, and is embedded above, courtesy of UStream.

Disclosure: my6sense is a new Paladin Advisors Group client. I am Managing Director of New Media for Paladin.

At LeWeb 2009 here in Paris, France, I participated in a panel on Twitter applications and the Twitter platform, featuring TweetDeck, Seesmic, TwitterFeed, OneForty.com, my6sense, Ping.fm and Microsoft. Following the panel, I sat down with Iain Dodsworth of TweetDeck and Nick Halstead of Tweetmeme, getting the opportunity to talk with each of them about the origins of their product, how they are working with Twitter, and what's next. In these free-form podcasts, we also talked about competition, business models, and their approach to innovation.


Talking With Tweetmeme's Nick Halstead


Talking with TweetDeck's Iain Dodsworth

Both podcasts were recorded using CinchCast on the iPhone from BlogTalk Radio.

When you follow as many people as I do on Twitter and other social networks, there is clearly the potential to feel as if you are going to miss something if you are not continuously connected. The sheer waterfall of information rushing into your Twitter client of choice is also often a confusing mess, with status updates mixed in with location check-ins, and actual, real, news, photos or video. Twitter's recent move to offer users Lists, helping to group relevant people, is a step in the right direction, but it still doesn't solve the issue of relevancy - finding information that is personally applicable to you, based on your own interests. Yesterday, my6sense, best known for their iPhone application that uses digital intuition to surface the best news for you from RSS, introduced mytweetsense, applying their strong digital intuition to your social streams.

As an advisor to the company, I have had access to mytweetsense for some time, and it is the first time I have really found Twitter useful as a news source, rivaling RSS. The product learns from my own activity, seeing what topics and sources I like to read, and surfacing the very best tweets from the more than 10,000 people I follow and bringing them to the top.



mytweetsense surfaces the best Twitter content to me on the iPhone
I have set up mytweetsense to look only for tweets that contain links. my6sense then presents relevant tweets, with links, as part of my news stream, either alongside my RSS updates, or in a folder dedicated to social streams. Clicking on a relevant tweet then presents an excerpt and headline from the shared link, much like you see on Facebook or other sites.

The idea behind mytweetsense is fairly simple, even if the implementation is hard, which explains why my6sense is the first to debut such a personally relevant filter for Twitter. mytweetsense does more than just surface interesting headlines and links, but it also parses the downstream URL and surfaces content that is relevant to me. That means that in a sea of @replies and personal conversations, mytweetsense can find me links on items I am most interested in, such as Google, the Real-time Web, Apple and iTunes.





mytweetsense displays Tweets with links like RSS with previews
If you are someone who is used to staring, unblinkingly, at your Twitter client, seeing a flow of updates from all your connections, you know that not every update is relevant to you. Even the most highly-selective lists can be overrun with data that is not personally relevant. While I still follow individuals through Tweetie, mytweetsense brings me the best content directly. Considering that I don't have hours to thumb through feeds and tweets on my iPhone, finding the most relevant content and only spending a few minutes at a time, but still not missing what's most important, is critical.

In October, I asked if Twitter could replace RSS for sharing the best content from the Web. Despite others saying RSS is dead, I believe it is alive and well. But with mytweetsense, many of the limitations in quality and relevance that have plagued Twitter are eliminated. It essentially turns my tweets into RSS and gets me the best stuff, period.

Disclosure: my6sense is a new Paladin Advisors Group client. I am Managing Director of New Media for Paladin.

After a November preview of Stalqer, a location sharing application which connects you to your existing Facebook social graph, the application underwent a notoriously lengthy review cycle by the nice folks at the Apple iTunes Store. More than a month later, the program is now available for free download - joining the fray alongside more visible players Foursquare and Gowalla for geolocation.

(Download Stalqer from this iTunes link)



My Location and Friends' Updates on Stalqer

As noted in November, Stalqer is less about owning a specific venue and showing the frequency of visits. Instead, it operates around real friend connections, through Facebook, highlighting others' current locations, and their updates over time. You can even get Push notifications for specific friends, if you want notes on where they are at all times.



You can configure Stalqer to update your location in the background, through its use of a dedicated e-mail account on the iPhone, and see a feed of updates from all your friends in chronological order. Alternatively, you can zoom in on a specific friend and get the story on their recent travels.



Stalqer Updates Friends' Feeds and Connects with Facebook Friends
Developer Mick Johnson's focus is less about gameplay and more about reconnecting or expanding social relationships, separating his app from some of the others - which for the most part, I have not used. Stalqer, however, occupies a central role on my iPhone. I assume as the product increases in circulation, I will be able to find even more friends nearby with whom I can connect in real life. That's not necessarily "Stalqing", but just staying connected. (Get Stalqer Here)