In fact, it’s little more than the browser-independent toolbar you see on the top of links shortened and shared with their su.pr service. It does tie in to your StumbleUpon account and let you thumbs up/down pages, share them with your friends via email, Facebook, and Twitter, but the whole experience just isn’t as smooth (or fun) as I find the Firefox or IE toolbars.

In their official post about the release, StumbleUpon has this to say:

“We’ve also heard some claim the Chrome extension is no different from web stumbling. Actually, Stumbling via the Chrome extension is quite different from web stumbling in a number of important ways. For one, you can receive shares directly in Chromebar; for another, you can add your own discoveries. Also, frame-breaking sites do not remove the Chrome extension; and the overall Stumbling experience is faster and more responsive. Good stuff, huh?”

True, submitting new stumbles and receiving shares is a big part of the experience — but it just feels to me like “something” is missing.

What do you think? How does the Chrome extension stack up?

The personal code makes sense — you could leave it stuck on a bathroom door, or on your resume/CV for example — but I can’t quite work out what a ’status QR barcode’ might be. Is it for coded, hidden messages? For fan pages it makes perfect promotional sense — a band poster with a QR barcode on, for example.

A little digging shows that the QR codes are generated by m.facebook.com, so this is certainly a mobile-oriented service — but still, other than leaving your ’status’ on a wall somewhere (imagine scanning someone’s QR code only to find out it says ‘LOL, made you look!’), I can’t work out what it’s for.

I’m sure someone will work it out soon.

[thanks to Sam for the tip!]

Update (08:52 EST): Ooh, they seem to have disappeared again… pro, Facebook!

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This platform will allow site owners to integrate Twitter information and features directly into their sites. For example, a blog with @anywhere integration would allow a user to hover over the blogger’s name to pop up a Twitter box where the user could see if he/she was following the blogger, follow them if not, and even tweet the blogger directly from the site.

Additionally, the @anywhere platform can act as a login provider, similar to Facebook Connect.

This will be launched soon on a number of sites including; Bing, The New York Times, Amazon, Meebo, Youtube, Salesforce, Digg, Yahoo, etc.

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If you were wondering about the validity of the dollar value that TweetValue comes up with for your Twitter account, check out this sparkling copywriting gem displayed prominently on the TweetValue’s front page:

“Get ready for some bling-bling and some tweet-tweet!”

Yeah, so there’s that.

The site seems to have achieved a high level of popularity recently, which would explain why it is running slowly and having occasional rendering problems. More than anything I see TweetValue as a fun little gag, and a way to gain totally meaningless bragging rights over your friends.

For the record, TweetValue puts our @DownloadSquad Twitter profile’s value at $970. What’s yours?

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The Hotlist has been lurking under a more confusing name for some time, and now it’s back to being a “hotlist”. It shows users what’s going on right now, and which pages are getting bookmarked the most right this minute.

The People feature is actually new. Not much to say about it, but that it lets you “send” links to people via Delicious. I would’ve told you more about it, but to use it you actually need…friends.

One thing Lee here helped me figure out is that when you click a count next to a link (“how many people bookmarked”) you get a list of all the people who bookmarked it, and then you can add them to your network and at least pretend they’re your friends (or stalk them) and see what they’re bookmarking. Neat!

The update is, as you’d expect, freely available for download via the Palm App Catalog.

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Okay, let’s get right to the juicy stuff: Twitter’s long-awaited business model is finally going to kick in soon, according to Twitter’s head of project management and monetization (say that title ten times fast!) Anamitra Banerji. Twitter’s plan for ads isn’t to slap them obnoxiously on the main page, though. Instead, they’re going the Google route, and placing the ads within search results.

That should provide enough ad views and clickthroughs to make Twitter some dough, while keeping the ads at least somewhat relevant to users. But will they be UGLY? We don’t know yet, although Techcrunch pondered some possible design options. One thing is certain, though: people will be royally cheesed off if the ads look like regular tweets. Customers hate feeling like someone’s trying to trick them (the customer writing this column sure does, anyway).
In apps news: Seesmic’s new Twitter app for BlackBerry now integrates the company’s latest purchase, Ping.fm. In case you’re not familiar with Ping, it’s a way of pushing your status updates to several services at once — convenient! Possibly spammy, but convenient! Seesmic for Blackberry also includes multiple account support and photo uploading, amongst other nifty features.

Twitter’s geotagging features are about to become a lot more useful. Instead of tagging tweets with your coordinates, you’ll soon be able to tag them with the name of a place. That offers a lot more flexibility and privacy than the current system, and it’s also reminiscent of location-based services like Foursquare. It would be awesome to have your Foursquare checkins set a Twitter geotag, instead of sending out an annoying tweet about where you just checked in, and this is the first step.

Twitter has also opened its API firehose — unlimited, realtime developer access to Twitter data — to a small group of new companies. Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopter, twazzup, CrowdEye and Chann Search are the lucky recipients of this VIP access. I’ve barely heard of any of these operations, but you can do a lot with firehose access, and I’m sure we’ll be learning more about them once they start developing new apps.

Twitter isn’t just an Anglocentric phenomenon. According to a new study by social media stats-crunchers Semiocast, only 50% of tweets are in English. That says a lot, both about Twitter’s impressive spread and its ongoing initiative to translate Twitter.com into several world languages. Although English is still Twitter’s most popular language, there are also large numbers of tweets in Japanese (14%), Portuguese (9%), Malay (6%) and Spanish (4%). You can check out the rest of the study in PDF format.

That’s Twitter news you can use for the first week of March! Tune in next Twitter Tuesday, when we might know more about those “nifty” new Twitter.com features that Alex Payne teased us with over the weekend. Same Twitter time, same Twitter channel!

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If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)

It’s a perfect storm of offering information and building excitement without actually revealing too much about what we can expect. Al3x, you tease!

TechCrunch speculates that Alex might be talking about baked-in geotagging, and cites third-party Twitter web client Brizzly as an example of a featureset that Twitter could duplicate. The advantage of bringing things like filtering, location-based search, and more powerful follower-management tools to Twitter natively is that they won’t have to deal with the delays or API rate limits that third-party devs face.

Do I think that popular desktop clients will suddenly become obsolete? Definitely not. Will Twitter’s web experience get a lot better? Heck yes, unless they try to crowd too many features into it. I’m looking forward to seeing what Alex’s mystery features entail.
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And it’s all because of darned Twitter and Facebook! Yes, they’re to blame: other major social networks (MySpace, LinkedIn, Classmates) saw a decline in unique users throughout 2009. Twitter, bolstered by a humongous 579% gain from 2.7 million to 18.1 million unique users per month, saw the greatest percentile growth in the social networking sector. Facebook, with a minuscule 200% expansion in 2009, is still by far the largest network with 207 million unique visitors in December 2009.

While worldwide average growth for social networks came in at 82%, the U.S. in particular saw a 143% increase. Believe it or not though, Australia actually clocks up the highest average use of social networks: they spend almost 7 hours a month, while the US and UK spend a paltry 6 hours each!

For more stats, read the full Nielson report.

[via Brian Solis]
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Meebo maintains your list of connected instant messaging accounts on their server. You can create a Meebo account on the iPhone, but it’s easier to log on to their homepage to create and manage your account there.

Once you’re all set, you’ll notice that Meebo memorizes your login information so that launching the app is as simple as tapping its icon on your home screen. Meebo launches very quickly, and then takes a moment to establish a connection with the Meebo servers. Once connected, your contacts will show up and you’re free to chat. Meebo includes push notifications, which allows you to stay online even when you don’t have the Meebo app running on your phone, just like Beejive does.

Meebo’s free price is compelling enough, but being fast and easy to use makes it a winner. Compared to Beejive IM’s lengthy list of configuration options, Meebo’s settings page is sparse. If you like finely tuned control over almost every aspect of your instant messaging experience on your phone, Beejive may be a better fit for you. But Meebo seems to have nailed the Apple-like experience of just getting it right out of the gate.

I can’t comment yet on the stability of Meebo’s connectivity having only tried it briefly, but the app certainly gives a good first impression. It will be interesting to see how their communications hold up, as the Meebo iPhone app will very quickly become a very popular IM option on the iPhone.

[via Mashable]

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