5 Insightful TED Talks on Social Media

As social media has become a game changer for industries across the board, you can bet the experts at this year’s TED conference will have their sights set on peeling back the hype and getting at the core of what social technology has in store for this year and beyond.

Perhaps the best part of the TED conferences is that videos of the talks are archived and free to view right on the organization’s website. Given the wealth of insight we’re sure to see tomorrow, we thought we’d whet your appetite by highlighting a few recent and exceptional talks from TED’s past, with a focus on social media.

1. Alexis Ohanian: How To Make a Splash in Social Media

We’ll start things off with a real-life social media parable about how the biggest and most effective forces on the web usually take shape by accident. Alexis Ohanian of Reddit.com tells the quick and hilarious story of how the social web provided some unexpected help to Greenpeace in halting the Japanese whaling industry. Internet marketers take note: The meme is all powerful, and it cannot be controlled.

2. Clay Shirky: How Social Media Can Make History

In this talk, consultant, professor and author Clay Shirky discusses the unprecedented immediacy of real-time citizen journalism made possible by social media and the nearly ubiquitous access to mobile web technologies. From the election crisis in Iran to the massive earthquake that shook China in May of 2008, Shirky discusses how media is made on the ground, as-it-happens, via the social web.

3. Evan Williams: Listening to Twitter Users

With a couple of anecdotes building the ultimate social media case study, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams discusses how a little side project called Twitter became a game-changing phenomenon with the help and input of the very users who made the service a success. From innovative marketing uses to core functionality, Williams provides the evidence for what we knew all along: Users know best.

4. Stefana Broadbent: How the Internet Enables Intimacy

As social media changes our social lives, speculation has abounded for years on how the web may be disconnecting us from intimate interactions in favor of meaningless quests to rack up followers and “friends.” Not so, says Stefana Broadbent, who explains that social networks function the same way online as they do in real life. While we may have lots of friends, we only really communicate regularly and meaningfully with a handful of them, and social technologies like e-mail, texting, and tweeting allow us to do so more often across time and space.

5. Seth Godin: The Tribes We Lead

From professional sports mascots to balloon animal makers, some communities are so extremely niche that they could only properly thrive on the Internet. So argues blogger and author Seth Godin, who believes that our revolutionary new connectedness has brought human culture back to its roots, and that tribes (groups of people mobilized around a shared interest) are the present and future of all web content.

(from mashable)

Google Real-Time Search Invades the Intranet

Google’s freshly launched real-time search is the big news of the week. And as it turns out, real-time search is not just limited to public searches on Google.com, but is also available to Google Search Appliance users.

Now, if your intranet or Web site search is powered by Google’s enterprise universal search appliance, you too can take in real-time tweets related to search queries.

There are two key differences to point out between Google.com and Google Search Appliance. Google Search Appliance users will notice that real-time search is limited to just Twitter feeds for the time being (you’ll have to forgo Facebook Page updates and the like for now), and tweets are displayed in a separate search box. So while Google.com’s implementation shows tweets appearing inline with other results, intranet search will highlight them separately.

If you’re a GSA user, you’ll want to have an administrator follow these instructions to turn on real-time tweets for search. You’ll also have the option to enable the functionality for all users, individual users, or allow for users to self-select their real-time preferences.

The Google Enterprise Blog writes:

“Social information is important for businesses: employees searching for information needed to do their jobs benefit from real-time news too. They might be developing a new breakfast cereal, or designing a marketing plan for a clothing line, or writing strategy report for a political campaign. In all of these cases, understanding what is being said just as Twitter users are saying it can be invaluable.”

The addition of Twitter updates to enterprise search seems like an natural extension of Google’s new-found focus on real-time. If you’re a GSA user, share your thoughts on the development below.

Amazon Improves Kindle Battery Life and Adds PDF Reader

Just in time to remind holiday shoppers, Amazon has announced an 85% battery life increase as well as a native PDF reader application for the Kindle digital book reader. Whereas the previous battery life topped out at about four days with wireless access turned on, the updated Kindle will run for seven days without needing to be charged.

The native PDF reading support is nice too, since previously users either had to pay a $0.10 per conversion charge or go through several steps in order to convert documents from PDF to the Kindle format used by the eReader. Now PDF can simply be transferred via USB connection or emailed to the user’s @kindle.com email address to be added to the Kindle.

While the native PDF support will also be made available to existing owners of the Kindle (or at least, some of them — Amazon’s announcement doesn’t specify what the requirements are) via a wireless firmware update, the new battery life-infused Kindle will apparently only be rolling out to new buyers.

It’s a couple of minor but nice updates, and a good excuse for Amazon to capitalize on the fact that the holiday season’s other hot digital book reader, the Barnes & Noble nook, is already completely sold out for reportedly the remainder of the holiday gift-giving season. That’s more bad news for B&N, who are also busy fending off a lawsuit from Spring Design over its Alex eReader — which shares some of the key design principles with the nook, a similarity Spring Design says is no accident.

Are you considering picking up a digital book reader for yourself or a loved one this holiday season?

How Google Wave is Changing the News

It’s not too often that legacy media learns a new mass communication tool along with its audience. But that’s exactly what’s going on now because of Google Wave. Although it’s still invitation only and in preview, the real-time wiki collaboration platform is being used by some media companies for community building, real-time discussion, crowdsourcing, collaboration both inside and outside the newsroom, and for cross publishing content.

Google Wave may seem familiar to older users of the Internet, who have been using the parts that make up the whole of the platform for years. Wave, however, brings those pieces together cohesively to allow users to share photos, embed videos, and converge other Google applications such asGoogle Maps and Google Calendar to create customized blocks of user-editable content on the fly. Here are four ways that newsrooms are using Wave.

Using Waves to Foster Engagement

Using Google Wave allows newsrooms to reach out to their audiences and invite their active participation on news stories. In the process, waves become a vehicle to create an engaged local community who can also play a role in the newsroom. That may redefine how news is gathered, reported and presented to its audience, blurring the boundary between newsroom and community bulletin board.

Chicago Tribune’s RedEye blog started its first public wave on November 10, and since then it has attracted more than 300 blips. Following that success, Stephanie Yiu, RedEye’s web editor, and Scott Kleinberg, senior editor of digital and print, now lead a half-hour public wave session every day.

“It’s a lot more live than Twitter because it’s like you can see people typing and everybody gets to know each other,” she told me. “It’s really about connecting with our readers on a new platform. We’re learning with our readers and moving forward together.”

RedEye sends out tweets promoting each wave with a link asking Twitter followers (those that have access to Google Wave) to join the conversation. Yiu told me the daily wave is a discussion about RedEye’s cover story. During the last 10 minutes they ask participants for suggestions on how to make the wave better.

What makes Google Wave so useful is the community building aspect, according to Yiu. “The great thing is once it ends at 11 o’clock, it keeps on going. They keep on talking,” she said. Yiu is hoping it will be a cool way to get feedback, such as movie reviews, from their readers that that they can also run in the RedEye print product, which is something they’re already doing with Twitter.

Using Waves As ‘Town Squares’

Robert Quigley, social media editor at the Austin American-Statesman, has started two public waves so far. “People are enthusiastic and they want to talk about news. I was surprised how much discussion there was about the news,” he said.

However, said Quigley, the challenge right now is keeping public waves on topic. If they get more than 50 blips discussion grinds to a halt, reported Quigley. He added that in order for Google Wave to work during a news event, there needs to be the ability to moderate and or easily spin something into another wave and link to it in the first wave to keep it on topic. He stressed Google Wave is in its early stages and in preview, but there’s definitely potential with it, so these are issues that could be addressed in the future.

“We’ve been looking for years for collaboration with the public in a meaningful way and this could be the tool,” he said.

Quigley is eager to keep pushing the envelope with Google Wave to see what it possible. He told me, for example, that he wants to try a participant’s suggestion to embed a Google Calendar with links to waves listed within it so users can follow that calendar with the wave schedule. He also hopes to try the map gadget the next time Austin gets hit with an ice storm. He said he would embed a map into a Google Wave and then people could report conditions at their house. Users could edit the map as weather conditions change.

Google Wave has the potential to become a virtual “town square,” where otherwise separate gadgets applied to content created by journalists and enhanced by the wave’s users can be used to provide an accurate, detailed description of what’s happening locally.

Wave as a Newsroom Content Planning Tool

Chris Taylor, online editor at TBO.com, is also the online breaking news editor in charge of planning content for his converged newsroom (which includes the Tampa Tribune, WFLA-TV and TBO.com). Each night he emails a content budget to the deadline team, but he is now also using a daily wave that others in the newsroom can add to, edit, etc. Taylor said there are about 15 people on this wave and he has requested more invites from Google to get more people involved.

The daily wave accounts for all the content the newsroom knows is coming or is chasing down. There are about 40 stories in a wave and each story gets a paragraph and after each story is a blip. “Anything we can do in a newsroom of this size [to help] the content we produce to keep from falling through the cracks is a plus,” Taylor said.

When Taylor comes into work in the morning he can immediately get caught up on the status of all items in the newsroom budget by checking the wave. He said reviewing the wave at his desk takes one-tenth the time of having meetings.

“I think using it for this will get people comfortable with wave, which is my ultimate goal,” he said. “As we get more comfortable with it, we’ll be able to be where our audience is.”

Turning Blog Posts Into Public Waves

Andrew Nystrom, senior producer of social media and emerging platforms at the Los Angeles Times, collaborated with social media reporter Mark Milian on the blog post “How Google Wave Could Transform Journalism” that ran on the newspaper’s web site a couple of months ago.

Among some of the ideas listed in the post were: collaborative reporting, smarter story updates, live editing, discussing while reading, and a transparent writing process. Nystrom said in an email interview they’re looking at all the potential uses that Milian posited in the blog post. In a case of “eating his own dogfood,” so to speak, Milian even embedded the post as a wave and it has since received more than 350 blips.

“That experiment was definitely an eye-opener. My understanding of Wave has always been that it’s a valuable tool for small-team collaboration. So to see it succeed as a larger-scale crowdsourcing tool was unexpected to say the least,” Nystrom said by email. “People quickly swarmed the wave and provided a ton of really smart insights. Things we had never thought of.”

He added that they’ll definitely do more of this and that it’s just a matter of identifying which topics would benefit from collaboration.

“Ideally, every post would plug into wave because I love the inline commenting system. But I don’t want to flood the ocean,” according to Milian. “When we do another piece on Google Wave, or on something that begs for crowdsourcing, you will definitely see it in Wave.”

(from mashable)

Google Translate Now Talks and Translates in Real-time

Google’s tool for translating text between 51 languages, Google Translate, has just added some very nifty and very useful features, with the biggest change being the addition of instant, real-time translations.

While the company hasn’t removed the “translate” button from its service, it should because now the proper translation will appear in real-time below the text box. It’s actually quite amazing: you can type in complex words and see their roots as you type. It also allows you to craft sentences faster and more efficiently in other languages.

Google Translate’s two other additions are nearly as impressive. Another new feature helps English speakers pronounce and read non-roman languages (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Korean). Clicking “Show romanizaiton” will provide you a phonetic representation of the translation so you can read it off instantly. Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian aren’t supported yet. However, Arabic, Persian, and Hindi now have a feature that allows you to type out the words as they sound (in English) and convert them to native script.

Finally, Google’s added text-to-speech support for English translations: just click the speaker icon to hear your translation. Overall, these new features are a good upgrade to Google Translate, especially the real-time translations, which we think may change how people interact with the tool.

If you want to learn more, Google’s provided a video demoing these new features:

Now Anyone Can Host Their Own (Experimental) Google Wave Server

Google promise to let developers improve the code and they did. They promised federation for Wave, meaning that anyone could take the Wave code and run their own private or public wave server. Google took the first step towards the full federation of its real-time communication platform by announcing that the developer sandbox version of Google Wave is open for experimental federation.

Let’s be clear: this is a very early stage test of federating the Google Wave code onto non-Google servers. It only affects the developer sandbox, meaning that the preview version of Wave that most people are using is not a part of this test. However, it is a big step in making it a widespread product, rather than only a tool of early adopters. Businesses and individuals can begin testing their own local copy of Wave. This is just the beginning of Google’s legitimate attempt to upend email as the standard for web correspondence and communication.

If you’re a developer with a sandbox account and want to get started, Google has published some installation instructions for a Java version. Be warned though: there will be a lot of changes occurring over the next few weeks, many of them based on developer feedback.

Barnes and Noble going International

Want to be the head of Barnesandnoble.com’s international business? Because they’re definitely hiring a whole team, and they’re starting at the top.

Recruiting firm Russell Reynolds Associates is representing Barnes & Noble in a search for the “head of their international business,” according to a source who was contacted about the position. The job entails building the international business for BN.com from scratch, hiring the team and “building the infrastructure outside the U.S.” They prefer the executive live in New York, but Europe is ok, too. Global ecommerce experience is preferred.

Barnes & Noble is no Amazon, but it is a billion dollar company and they have an upcoming ebook reader that kicks the Kindle’s butt (it’s so easy to love unlaunched products, isn’t it?).

NoNotes Makes Attending Class Optional

Quick Pitch: NoNotes.com is a transcription service for students. Students can record lectures while paying more attention in class, then upload their recording to be transcribed by NoNotes.

Genius Idea: Last week, you might’ve seen the story about the Georgetown student that’s looking to hire a personal assistant to help deal with the overwhelming life of … being a college student (I can’t wait to hear his plan for dealing with the real world).

In any event, NoNotes is a service for that type of individual. The company provides a transcription service aimed specifically at college students, allowing them to record lectures, upload them to a website, and then have written notes prepared for them.

The company uses the tagline “you do the learning, we’ll take the notes,” but you can imagine how this service might be used in practice. Jokes aside, there is something to be said for paying attention to the lecturer in class as opposed to furiously trying to keep up taking notes, and this is the need that NoNotes looks to satisfy.

Like a personal assistant though, NoNotes will cost you money. One hour of class time costs $11.75, with discounts if you buy hours in bulk. That might make it cost prohibitive for many college students, though you can imagine groups of friends chipping in and then drawing straws to see who attends and records a lecture. The company is looking to build its customer base in part by hiring reps at universities.

Google Maps Navigation Becomes Reality on the Android

When it comes to maps, Google has had nearly everything: great satellite imagery, huge coverage, and even some basic navigation features, but not what everyone that’s ever used a GPS device really wants: turn-by-turn navigation.

This changes today, as Google just released a beta version of Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0. Here’s a quick overview of the features:

- Search in plain English – quickly search and navigate to places, businesses, landmarks
- Search by voice
- View of live traffic data over the Internet.
- Search along route – find locations near your current path
- Satellite view – you can view the same satellite imagery you’ve seen Google Maps, on your phone
- Street View – check out what the exact surroundings of a location look like

Google Maps Navigation does two very important things for Google: it makes it a competitor to established GPS firms like TomTom and Garmin, which should make this space a lot more interesting, and it suddenly makes Android – the only platform this app is currently available on – a lot more desirable. And – you guessed it – the first Android 2.0 phone to support this app is the upcoming Motorola Droid.

Check out a video overview of Google Maps Navigation and some screenshots below.

Starbucks Goes Mobile: Pay For Coffee With Your iPhone

Starbucks and the iPhone are sort of the perfect combination. You can browse the web for free on the AT&T hotspots, you can buy in-store songs from iTunes right from your phone, and now you can use two new official iPhone apps.

Now available in the App Store, myStarbucks (iTunes Link) and Starbucks Card Mobile (iTunes Link) let users find their nearest Starbucks and manage their Starbucks Card. If you live near one of 16 stores in the Seattle or Bay Area, you can even pay for your purchases with the Starbucks Card Mobile app via barcode.

Starbucks is a little late to the store-locator game, as a number of unofficial applications — both free and paid — already exist to show store locations or keep track of your Starbucks Card balance, but the official apps offer a lot of functionality, great design, and an unbeatable price — free.

In myStarbucks, you can find the locations near you, either by entering in your address or letting the app use your iPhone or iPod touch’s built-in GPS or WiFi locator. You can search for stores based on certain factors, like drive-thru, operating hours (are they open now) and what type of food they offer. You can also add a store to your favorite’s list and call the store directly from the app or invite people in your address book to join you for a latte.

One of the cooler features is the ability create your own drink configurations — hot and cold –and save them. The order is viewable and you can show it to a barista if you are in a hurry. Hopefully, the pay via iPhone option is rolled out across more locations, because combined with the drink configuration tool, it would certainly make grabbing coffee more convenient.

What do you think about store-branded iPhone apps? What are some of your favorites?

Online Backup Unlimited for $5 per month

We all know how important it is to backup our computers, but studies consistently show that most computer users — even those that know better — don’t.

As Internet connections get faster and storage becomes less expensive, online backup services like Backblaze, Mozy and Carbonite have stepped-in to help consumers back up their data.

Not only are these services useful, they are also very inexpensive. Most of the services offer unlimited (truly) storage for your online backups for around $5 a month. Now, granted, storage prices are constantly decreasing, but how can companies make those sorts of claims?

Online backup service Backblaze has decided to shed some light on how it manages to offer unlimited backup storage to its customers, while also easily expanding its own cloud-based storage platform. Today, Backblaze posted an entry in its company blog that explains what tools and hardware it uses to maintain cheap, efficient storage for its customers. Backblaze hopes that other businesses who are looking at building cloud-based storage solutions can use this information as inspiration or as a blueprint for themselves.

Yes, this is not a joke, the no fuss solution to getting all your data backed up securely. Online backup for only $5/month per computer for unlimited storage: backblaze

(from mashable)

13 Fantastic and Fun Image Generators

Whether you’re artistically inclined or not, sometimes you just need to whip up an illustrative or entertaining image for a blog post or presentation. The tools on this list help you generate respectable graphics in a jiffy — design talent optional!

Most of the tools on this list are web-based and as easy to use as filling in a web form. We’ve added a couple of desktop applications that make visual communication a lot quicker and easier, even for those of us without a ton of graphic design skills.

1. Warning Labels and Signs

Advising people to the dangers of the situation has never been so easy. Simply pick a label style, a warning icon, and enter your desired text into a simple web form and voila, you’ve got a standup warning label.

For a vertical sign-style warning image, check out the companion site Warning Sign Generator.

2. De-Motivational Posters

Annoyed by those superficial and unflaggingly insipid motivational posters we’re subjected to in dentists’ and corporate offices everywhere? Why not take a stance against mass-produced pseudo-solutions to important problems?

With the Demotivators tool you can easily generate a realistic illustration of the trials and tribulations of Real Life. Just choose an image from your desktop to create a motivational parody from, customize your image settings, add a title and de-motivational text and you too can contribute to the better psychological health of us all.

3. Street Signs

From the same fine folks who brought us the Warning Label Generator above is a tool for making funny and inappropriate street signs. Once again this is a simple web form; simply choose one of four background styles, input the text you want displayed on the sign, and choose an optional suffix (Road, Lane, etc.).

4. LOLcats

Almost no list is complete without a reference to funny cat pictures. On the internet, all roads lead to LOLcats, so you might as well make like the natives and start rolling your own.

The LOL Builder tool will help you achieve goofy captioned imagery of your favorite felines and other irresistibly cute animals in no time. You can upload your own photo or re-use an image someone else has submitted.

There’s even an advanced version of the LOL Builder for once you’ve mastered the basics, allowing you to adjust the position of your text and caption bubbles. Poster and “breaking news” bulletin styles are also available, and there’s no rule that requires an actual funny cat to be present. If you want to use any of these tools to make images with other themes, the Internet Police will probably not be showing up at your door.

5. Magazine Covers

This magazine cover tool from Big Huge Labs lets you upload an image or bring in one of your photos from Flickr (), Facebook (), Photobucket () or from a URL. You can customize the color palette, fonts, and up to 17 lines of text to generate your own custom print mag cover.

6. Tombstones

It takes a hardy soul to laugh in the face of death, but if you have the courage this tombstone generator might help. It’s a quick and painless web form that adds your custom text to the headstone.

7. Xbox 360 Achievements

This one goes out to the gamers in the house — especially those of you who experience that satisfying pang of joy each time the achievement badge with trademark sound pops up on your console.

You can make your own achievements with this handy tool, and we sincerely hope you put them to hilarious uses. Know of a funny Alterna-Achievement? Let us know in the comments.

8. Movie Posters

Another project from Big Huge Labs, the movie poster tool is a web form that helps you design a film-style poster from your own images. Choose an alignment for the photo, a poster style, text and accent colors, title fonts and colors, and enter your own custom text for the film title, taglines, credits and MPAA rating.

9. Garbage Pail Kids

Who else is old enough to remember these gems? Relive your youth, or your child’s youth, with this Garbage Pail Kids card generator. Modify the text badge, customize your font and the positioning of the text, and you’ve got your own gruesome custom and classic trading card.

10. Presidential Seal

Going from the cultural to the political, this simple tool lets you add your own verbiage to the official U.S. Presidential seal. And did you know the Vice President also has a seal? Can someone please alert Biden?

11. Add Photo Effects

The Tuxpi site offers a bunch of easy, one-click web-based tools for adding borders, captions, reflections, and other types of effects to your digital photos. You can turn any image into a postage stamp, wanted poster, pop art collage, and more.

12. Skitch

Sorry Windows users, you’re out of luck on this one. Skitch () is a Mac desktop app that makes screenshots dead easy to edit and share. Simple edit tools allow you to overlay text, lines and simple shapes to your screenshots or other images. Skitch integrates with iPhoto, Aperture and Photo Booth to easily pull in your existing images or grab a shot from your webcam.

Once your image is ready, you’re one click away from sharing it to the web (publicly or privately), uploading it via FTP, or dragging it to your desktop. A history trail saves the images you’ve worked with for easy reference.

This tool is so useful it’s one of the few I have set to launch automatically on startup. I wouldn’t want to be on a desert island without it.

13. Comic Life

From the makers of Skitch is another great application for would-be doodlers and ad hoc illustrators. Comic Life is available for both the Mac and for Windows PCs, and helps you create professional-looking comic panels, photo albums, and other image layout template styles.

Have you ever torn your hair out looking for those great poofy comic fonts in Photoshop or other tools? That’s one of the areas where Comic Life shines, allowing you to easily drop in impactful lettering text to your images or panels.

More than that, Comic Life provides a fun and easy entry into getting more create ideas flowing with your images. This is the only paid app on this list, but at $24.95 for the standard and $29.95 for the deluxe version, it’s on the cheaper side of imaging tools that help achieve professional-looking results without spending a heinous amount of time. There’s a free 30-day trial as well so you have a chance to check out if it’s worth shelling out the registration fee for your needs.

(from mashable)

iPhone TV: Top iPhone Apps for Live Streaming Television

iPhone TV: Top iPhone Apps for Live Streaming Television.

Google Wave is Coming: 100,000 Invites Go Out on September 30th

Less than two months ago, Google dropped a spectacular surprise upon the world: Google Wave. The communication tool aspires to redefine not only email, but the entire web.

Well, in the last two months, Google and third-party developers have been hard at work testing out the system, fixing the kinks, and building some amazing extensions (which we discussed in-depth previously). Still, only a handful of people, almost all developers, have access. That’s about to change soon though: on September 30th, Google will start sending out about 100,000 invites for the next version of Google Wave.

Google made the big revelation in a blog post on the Google Wave developer’s blog. The post is part of an update on the Google Wave Hackathon, which allows developers to come to the Googleplex and work with the Google Wave API to build extensions such as Wave in Wordpress, a bot that allows you to easily place Waves in WordPress posts.

It looks as if the testing in the Google Wave sandbox is going well though – it opened up the sandbox to 6,000 new developers and up to 20,000 more will get access before the end of August. But this pales in comparison to the 100,000 users that will get access on starting September 30th.

According to Google, at that point Google Wave will appear on Wave.Google.com, instead of the Wave Sandbox. They will help further test for bugs, provide feedback, and play with apps. Google intends to invite groups of users, so the invites may not come out all at once.

14 iPhone Apps With Push Notification for Productivity

With iPhone 3.0 OS upon us, we’ve finally seen the delivery of much-needed push notifications from Apple. Applications that take advantage of this new feature continue to trickle in, and though the selection is slim right now, there are a handful of apps (some on their way) that should allow you to become more productive throughout your day.

With push notifications, you can now stop checking news for breaking stories, or forget opening your IM app to see if someone is looking for you – rather, you can get instantly notified instead. Let’s take a look at a handful of useful apps that can get you the information you crave even more quickly.

iPhone Apps with push notification

Chat and Instant Message Apps

BeejiveIM: Web – iTunes: By far, my favorite instant messaging app for the iPhone, BeejiveIM ($9.99) combines Google Talk, Yahoo!, MSN, AIM and more all under one program for your iPhone. Now you’ll receive IM notifications even when you have the app closed.

YoFrog: Web - iTunes: YoFrog ($.99) is a mobile group chat application that allows you to chat with all your friends or business associates (who also need YoFrog) at once. No more SMS mayhem! With version 1.1 (sent to the App Store last week and waiting for approval), you’ll now be instantly notified when your contacts are trying to chat with you. They also have a free, Lite version.

Textfree Unlimited: Web – iTunes: Textfree ($5.99) allows for unlimited text messages (for one year) to any other US mobile phone. You’ll need to set up a username for people to text you directly, so it’s not ideal for your contacts – but probably not a bad deal for anyone who sends a ton of text messages and doesn’t want to upgrade to their carrier’s unlimited plan. Push notifications for Textfree will now notify users as soon as a new message comes in (imagine that!). They also have a Lite version that limits you to 15 messages per day and is ad-supported.

IM+ with Push: Web – iTunes: A popular instant messaging app, IM+ ($9.99) can now update you in real time when you receive an IM. You can manage IM with all of your contacts from any of the instant messaging platforms, including Skype.

To-do List Apps

RememberTheMilk: Web – iTunes: One of the most popular web-based to do list managers (and my go-to web app), RTM will now instantly notify you when you have a list item that’s due. The RTM iPhone App is free, but requires a Pro account with Remember The Milk for $25 per year.

ToodleDo: Web – iTunes: Another solid to do list manager, you can purchase their iPhone app ($2.99) to use with your free or paid subscription to Toodledo. Push notifications will let you know when an item with a due-date is coming up.

ReQall: Web – iTunes: ReQall (Free) is a unique information manager for to do items and other reminders. If you haven’t used it, I’d suggest trying it for a week to see if it makes sense for you. Open the app, speak, and let their system convert your speech into a to do item. The app now supports push notifications to instantly notify you of upcoming events.

Reminder Apps

BillMinder: Web – iTunes: ($.99 on sale) The next update of this bill reminder application promises push notifications. Just set your due dates and make sure notifications are turned on. Now you’ll never forget to pay a bill again… accidentally, at least.

NotifyMe: Web: Not to be confused with Notify.me, the IM notifier app, NotifyMe (price unkown) is yet to be approved by the app store, but promises notification for anything you can think of. Set it to notify you when your favorite TV show is about to start, when you are supposed to call back a client, or when you need to change the cat box! You’ll need to set up each alert, but the developer promises you can set up a new alert in as little as two taps. The free version (with some limitations) is in iTunes now.

Occasions: Web – iTunes: Occasions ($.99 on sale) notifies you of the birthdays and anniversaries of your iPhone contacts. You can also add more information about each contact or add reminders for people not on your phone’s contact list. For me, this is great. I manage all of my contacts in GMail and they’re synced to my phone automatically, so now I can get notified of the events in their lives, without having to do much extra work.

Other Apps with Push

AP Mobile: Web – iTunes: The popular free news app now supports push notifications of breaking news. However, it seems like it might not be working properly (serious lag time and not all notifications coming through). If this gets fixed, it could be very useful for those of us who can’t stand missing the latest North Korean missile launch.

AreMySitesUp: Web – iTunes: While push notifications are not yet available for this app, they promise that it’s coming. For an app that is built to “notify” you when your web site goes down – push would be ideal, of course. Their app is a free companion to the Premium membership on their site (starts at $25 per year). There is also a Lite version of the app that works with their free plan.

Zillow Real Estate: Web – iTunes: If you’re looking for a home, it doesn’t get much better than Zillow (Free). While you could always find houses for sale near your location (no need to enter an address), you can now get push-notified of new listings that match any of your saved searches.

E*Trade Mobile Pro: Web – iTunes: For the investors out there, you probably know you can already manage your E*Trade account with their iPhone App (Free), but now they’ve introduced push notifications. You’ll get stock and account alerts pushed directly to your phone’s screen. Next time you miss that big opportunity, it won’t be E*Trade’s fault!

Will Innovators Rise to Push?

While the apps that currently use push notifications are handy, I hope that developers will take this opportunity to do some things above and beyond your typical “message waiting” notifiers. E*Trade, Zillow and a few others get the idea. I’m waiting for the app that allows me to get notified of anything I decide I need to be notified about. With all the open APIs out there today, it’s bound to come along.

Things I want pushed:

1. Allow me to be notified when my car or house alarm goes off.

2. Google, let me be notified of a new Google Alert I have set up.

3. How about instead of giving me a big vibrating brick of plastic at the restaurant while I wait for a table, let my phone connect to your system and you can ping me instead.

4. I’d also like to know immediately when Albert Pujols hits another grand slam – or when any other sporting event I’m interested in occurs.

5. What about when I need two days of rain-free weather, within specific degrees, in order to paint a fence or deck. Should I really have to check the weather forecast every day? I’d rather have an app that did the work for me.

Sooner or later, push notification of almost anything will be a reality, making our digital lives even more real-time. What type of alerts would you like pushed to your iPhone?

(from mashable)