TweetDeck has rapidly climbed the charts of popular Twitter clients since its debut last July, and with new capital backing, developer Iain Dodsworth continues to add more features to make the product practically indispensable. In the latest update, to debut tomorrow, Dodsworth adds new features that will help you communicate with a global audience, in multiple languages, monitor stock data, and even send your tweets by e-mail. And just think, this is one of Iain's minor point releases, not a major update - which is also in the works.

TweetDeck, as you recall, is a popular AIR application, easily recognizable by its tight multi-column format, which lets you follow all your Twitter data, be it updates from friends, replies, direct messages, search terms and groups. In fact, the success of TweetDeck has spawned different software products to emulate its interface, including FriendDeck, a tool for following FriendFeed, and most recently, Alert Thingy.

Tomorrow's iteration includes the ability to translate tweets you have both received or written into any of nearly 3 dozen languages. If you want to tweet outside of your native language, simply write your tweet in TweetDeck, click the dual-bubbled conversation bubble on the right, and select a language. A few example translations of my "I am not a Twitter addict, but I can see how that would happen." are below.

French: Je ne suis pas un accro à Twitter, mais je peux voir comment cela allait se passer.
German: Ich bin kein Twitter Süchtigen, aber ich kann sehen, wie das passieren würde.
Italian: Io non sono un tossicodipendente Twitter, ma posso vedere in che modo che accada.
Polish: Nie jestem uzależniony Twitter, ale widzę, że jak by się stało.
Vietnamese: Tôi không phải là một Twitter addict, nhưng tôi có thể nhìn thấy như thế nào mà có thể xảy ra.

Also, as not everyone is yet a Twitter addict, you might find yourself wanting to share items from Twitter to friends by e-mail. Now, using TweetDeck, you can mouse over any individual tweet, click "Other Actions", and select e-mail, which will pop open your default e-mail program, and set up an e-mail that says "Tweet forwarded by @yourusername", and includes the Twitter user, the tweet itself, and a little note: "Sent via TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com). You can see Iain demonstrate the e-mail from TweetDeck function below on video:


Click to see a demo from Iain Dodsworth
(Opens in a New Window)
You can also translate or untranslate individual tweets from this "Other Actions" menu.

Another interesting function to debut tomorrow is the ability to turn your TweetDeck into a full-fledged StockTwits terminal, showing your Friends, Portfolio, Recommended, Commentary and Everyone columns. If you are a StockTwits user, and have added stocks to your portfolio, you can see what the entire StockTwits community is saying, be it on AAPL, YHOO, GOOG or MSFT. See the screenshot below for what mine looks like (sans friends) following just Apple, Google and Sirius Radio.


The updated point release will hit TweetDeck.com tomorrow. If you're someone who skips point releases and wants a full update, you'll need to keep waiting, but I've been told it's not all that far away. Expect Iain to tackle major issues such as memory, multiple accounts and more then.

As Twitter grows in use, so grows its influence, and the total number of times the most popular items are shared and retweeted from user to user. As with Techmeme, Digg, RSSmeme and other sites that try to find the most interesting shares of the day based on user votes, Tweetmeme crawls the vast Twitter network and watches for frequently popular shared links, images and blogs. (See our initial coverage in July.)

Today,Tweetmeme expanded its offering with a pair of new features aimed at making the site more sticky. The first is a tag cloud, which analyzes the shared content, finding other words that Twitter users have included in their tweets, and displaying them below the items in their "popular links" page. The second is a leaderboard, which highlights those Twitter accounts which have most frequently been the first to share the most popular links.


In terms of determining influence and popularity, you've always seen a push/pull between enabling a gatekeeper with the power to move items up and down, and letting the crowd decide. Tweetmeme believes solely in the crowd - even featuring the total number of times the item was shared. Today's top shares are in the 400 to 600 range through all of Twitter.


Accounts on the leaderboard aren't much of a surprise - including RSS feeds for TechCrunch, Digg, popurls and ReadWriteWeb, for example. Additionally, the cloud below each item is tempting to click, but not functional. In theory, it'd be good to click on an item in the tag cloud and see other shared links that have the same tags. Maybe that's coming, but it's not yet here.

You can catch up on the most popular items, as determined by Twitter, at http://tweetmeme.com/.

While venture capital is said to be very expensive these days, hard to obtain, and with questionable potential returns given a closed market for public offerings and multiples for mergers and acquisitions, companies on the periphery of blogging appear to still be hot. We saw Auttomatic acquire Intense Debate late last year. You also remember strong funding rounds for my personal favorites, Lijit and Disqus, who are adding strong search and commenting functionality to sites like mine. Now, you can add Outbrain to the list, following this morning's announcement the company scored a $12 million round to expand its blog rating and recommendation platform.

Now, before you cry foul and ask where the money is in such a little widget, as is tempting, you can read between the lines in today's release to see that Outbrain has bigger plans - ones they no doubt shared with their VC partners, and not necessarily with me.

Outbrain is talking less about a widget, and more about finding great content across the Web. As one VC partner said, "Finding great content is getting both more difficult and more important... Outbrain's personalized recommended links offer great value to readers by combining their collective wisdom..."

If you think about it, Lijit and Outbrain are solving similar issues, from different angles. Lijit scours your personal blog and your social network of approved sites to find content you are searching for. Outbrain analyzes your individual posts, your previous blog entries and other blogs in their network to provide recommendations of what to read next. Both are useful, and both are getting traction. And it's good to see that good ideas are going to be rewarded, even when times are more difficult.

WebVan's debut in the 1990s as a way to order groceries online and have them shipped to your home or business sounded like a fantastic way to leverage the power of the Web. But as we all know now, the costs of deploying expensive, expansive warehouses in many metropolitan areas, not to mention the costs of delivery and promotion, were way beyond what was sustainable. Hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital, not to mention stock holders after the firm went public, went up in smoke, as the company spiraled into bankruptcy.

The idea may have been ahead of its time or just poorly implemented, but it stands as a tragic example of where hope came ahead of logic. And now we're seeing it again - with all the news around Sirius XM Radio's potentially filing for bankruptcy, after the struggling satellite radio company found that slowed growth in the face of lower native car installations, competition from iPod/iTunes/iPhone, and the inability to pay massive accumulated debt, have combined to make the current plan unsustainable.

And again we have what looked like a very cool idea, costing billions of dollars to deploy, on the brink of failure. And again, we see shareholders who believed in the idea, ahead of the reality, getting wiped out. In what's already been a horrific last year for the stock market, Sirius' freefall has been notable - especially considering it's not involved in banking or real estate.

A few months ago, in a podcast with Wayne Sutton and Kipp Bodnar, I said we "knew" Sirius would pull through because it had a compelling offering, and that threats to its business were overblown. Boy, was I wrong. I may have been looking forward to getting Sirius Radio with my next car, whenever that happened, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen any sooner than my dialing up WebVan for some eggs and milk.