It's been a number of months (if not longer) since Yahoo showed any love to its Upcoming events service. Since acquiring the service in October 2005, the service has seen just one re-design - and few additional features since. However, in a largely-uncovered announcement earlier in the week, Upcoming now offers a new Jumpstart feature that scans your Pandora, last.fm and iTunes libraries and then follows your favourite artists on the service - alerting you to forthcoming gigs listed on Upcoming.

Whilst other services, including last.fm, allow you to easily view your favourite artists, it's an interesting addition to the Upcoming service - and hopefully means that Yahoo are now looking at ways to build on a largely unloved product.

Facebook is the most popular photo sharing site in the world, but its photo upload tool has always been clunky and frustrating to use. No longer, thanks to a prototype New Photo Uploader that will hopefully displace the current upload tool very, very soon. Instead of the slow, tough-to-navigate system that loads up thumbnails of every. photo. in. your. pictures. folder. by default (ugh!), this new version has navigation that looks a lot more like what you're used to in Windows Explorer or the OS X Finder.

Facebook ditched the old-school Java uploader they'd been using since 2005, and built a plug-in from scratch with newer tools. Aside from looking better and running a lot more smoothly, the new uploader can also run in the background, so you don't have to stop browsing while you wait for your pics to upload. The first time you try to upload photos after turning on the prototype, you'll be prompted to install the Facebook plugin. It doesn't take long, and it's well worth the extra 30 seconds to get a better, faster photo uploader.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Trillian, the excellent all-purpose chat app we've loved for years on the PC, just made the leap to the iPhone.

There are a lot of things to love about this pocket-sized version of Trillian, including its great-looking interface and its support for several different chat services. You'll need to sign up for a free Astra account if you don't already have one, but it's nice that Trilian's existing desktop users can just plug and play with no account setup required.

Little perks of Trillian on the iPhone include push notifications (yay!) and the ability to send photos. Managing contacts is also pretty easy. In fact, Trillian's the first iPhone chat app I've seen that has a straightforward way of moving contacts between groups.

I do have a couple of minor bones to pick with Trillian, though. First, no landscape keyboard? Seriously? IM is a typing-intensive activity, and the iPhone's small portrait keyboard doesn't cut it for fast and furious chats.

Second: it takes two clicks to close your current chat (the "more" button and then "end conversation"). Can't we just get a close button? These are minor issues with what's otherwise a great app, and a decent value at $4.99, especially if you use more than one chat service at a time.

[via CNET]

With everyone going gaga over Twitter lists, it was only a matter of time before someone built a third-party service for creating and managing lists. Enter Listerine. Instead of making you go through pages upon pages of people you follow, this handy web app shows all your Twitter friends in a drag-and-drop interface.

The friends display shows mutual friends with a heart icon, and people who don't follow you back with a star. There's a search field, in case you follow so many people that even this compact grid layout is too difficult to navigate. To add a friend to a list, just grab their icon and drag it. Perhaps Listerine's coolest feature is the ability to direct-message everyone on a list. This works great if you want to invite your local list to an event, or DM your team at work.

[via Lifehacker]

Seesmic sure picked a weird time to announce a new Windows-native Twitter client. It's one of the most popular clients running on Adobe's cross-platform AIR platform, which just hit version 2.0. AIR was everyone's biggest complaint about Seesmic, so it makes sense that they'd want to ditch AIR on at least one OS. Creating a native app also allows for drag-and-drop Twitter list management and plug-ins for various third-party Twitter services.

Plugins so far include the user recommendation service MrTweet and the index of popular links, Tweetmeme. Other Twitter-like services will also be able to integrate with Seesmic through the new service. This doesn't necessarily mean the end of development for the AIR version of Seesmic, unless they come out with a native Mac client too. The Mac Twitter space already has a lot of great apps, though, so I'm not sure that'll happen.

To get beta access to the new Windows client, you'll have to sign up for Team Seesmic.

Third-party Twitter apps have access to nearly all of Twitter's functions. Even the new lists feature and the new retweet format can be supported by any ambitious developer. It's sort of strange then, that Twitter's people search is just now getting an API.

Now that this missing API is finally here, the ability to search for users should be popping up in your favorite Twitter program very soon. "Find people" on Twitter's site works by search both name and username, which is something apps couldn't achieve with the (admittedly very handy) "go to user " function.

If you're a curious developer, go check out the official announcement on Twitter's API announcements list.

Who doesn't love a superficial pop-psychology tool? Analyze Words purports to reveal the personality of Twitter users by analyzing their recent toots tweets. The resulting analysis is broken down into three main categories: Emotional Style, Social Style, and Thinking Style.

Each main category consists of three or four ratings; for example, Emotional Style consists of Upbeat, Worried, Angry, and Depressed. Social Style's ratings are Plugged in, Personable, Arrogant/Distant, and Spacey/Valley girl, and Thinking Style's ratings are Analytic, Sensory, and In-the-moment.

Unfortunately, Analyze Words doesn't do any intelligent filtering - for example, retweets are analyzed along with regular tweets, so if you happen to retweet a lot of other people's content, the analysis won't really reflect your own words. But maybe I'm just being touchy because Analyze Words told me I'm a worried, arrogant / distant sensory thinker. Or something like that.

There's been a flurry of news and views surrounding Twitter's retweet feature as it rolls out to more users this week. To sum up, limited introduction of the new feature was announced, then it was halted to fix some bugs, and now it's back on again. No big deal, but the user reaction to the new retweets has been so enormous and so polarized that Twitter founder Ev Williams saw fit to write a rare blog post on the subject.

The feature received heavy criticism from some users (including confused celebrities) who didn't understand that retweets will start appearing in your stream with the icon of the original poster. The words of someone you don't follow have always been able to end up in your stream as retweets, but now you'll see an icon, too. Don't freak out. If you see someone you don't like, you can go to that user's settings and block retweets from him or her. That's right: you have control over your retweet settings for individual users.

Ev's response in support of retweets includes two very strong points. Number one: formalizing retweets and showing the original poster's icon clears up any confusion about who wrote what you're reading. It also means you only see the message once, even if 17 of your friends retweet it, which makes for a tidier Twitter stream. Number two: the new system makes retweets trackable. You'll be able to click on tabs to see retweets by others, retweets by you and your tweets, retweeted. This wouldn't have been possible without formally coding the retweet process into Twitter.

This isn't a web-only feature: app developers already either support it or are working to make sure they support it soon. Some of them even have more elegant presentations of retweets than the web interface. In the meantime, chill out when you see a strange face in your stream. This is the new way of things on Twitter, and it's actually pretty cool.

Bump, the impressive iPhone app that lets you trade contact info and other data by physically bumping two phones together, isn't just an iPhone app anymore. Bump for Android has arrived (so sayeth TechCrunch, at any rate), and it covers Bump's biggest weakness: you had to have an iPhone to use it. Between iPhones and Android devices, Bump now has the potential to become a common way of swapping contact info.

In addition to the Android launch, Bump also polished up its iPhone app. The new version, which is in the app store now, taps into Facebook to compare address books with your bumping buddies and see whether you have any contacts in common. You can also send either a message or a newsfeed post to yourself via Facebook when you bump someone new, so you can remember to get in touch with them later. These features haven't made their way to the Android edition of Bump yet.

[via TechCrunch]

Twitter fanatics were disappointed when the hotly-anticipated update to Tweetdeck's iPhone app was pulled from the app store due to bugs, but it's available again today. The upgrade is a big one, including some of the most important features of the Tweetdeck desktop version. The biggest deal might be Facebook integration, a feature that keeps Tweetdeck competitive with its main desktop rival, Seesmic (which has Facebook support, but has yet to launch an iPhone app).

In addition, Tweetdeck for iPhone now has video uploading via 12Seconds.tv, taking advantage of the video capabilities of the iPhone 3GS. It also uses the device's GPS for a "nearby" feature that lets you read tweets from folks in your vicinity. Although I take every opportunity to bash Twitter's trending topics, fans of that aspect of the service will now find it in Tweetdeck. One feature I won't bash, though, is the address picker, which lets you choose a contact from list so your @replies are without typos.

Combine all those features with details like a landscape keyboard mode and the ability to save drafts, and you've got a pretty solid version 1.1. If you've been using and enjoying Tweetdeck, this update should be some sweet icing on the cake.

For the last few weeks I've been looking for a suitable RSS reader application for my iPhone. I've found myself frustrated with long-time favourite NetNewsWire (which currently lacks any of the Google Reader sharing options) and the Google Reader web UI. Much like every Twitter client out there, I've bought my fair share of RSS readers for the iPhone and after much testing I have finally found a new favourite: Reeder.

Reeder [iTunes Link] has all the relevant sharing options I've craved in one place - and best of all is stylish as hell. There's plenty of applications with custom user interfaces on the iPhone - some more successful than others - but Reeder balances the familiar with custom elements, and as a result the interface looks great when browsing (and reading) content.

If I had any complaints about Reeder, it's that the application lacks the ability to view your friends' shared items within the application, but given the sheer style and speed of the application it's a small oversight. If you're looking to pick up a copy of Reeder, the developer has dropped the price to $0.99 until version 1.1 ships - and available now on the App Store.

If you ever let a helium balloon float away when you were a kid and wondered where it eventually ended up, you already know what Balloons for the iPhone is all about. This cute little app lets you launch a virtual balloon with a message and a photo attached. Anyone with the app installed call pull down balloons near them -- Balloons uses the iPhone's location services -- and read messages.

I grabbed a few balloons to see what it was all about, and it was more addictive than I expected. My first balloon was an ad, launched by some marketer near my city (Boo! Hiss!), but then things started getting interesting. I caught a balloon that had drifted from London to Texas to Arizona, picking up new notes along the way. Balloons reminds me of the message-in-a-bottle feeling of the early days of the Internet -- "Hey, who else is out there?"

I tested the Lite version of Balloons, which is free. There's also a $2.99 version that adds the ability to track your balloons, in case you get really serious. TUAW interviewed the developer at this year's WWDC.

Have you ever actually clicked on any of Twitter's trending topics? I don't want to sound like the old guy telling whippersnappers to get off his lawn, but trying to read almost any Twitter trend gives me a headache. There's so much spam with popular hashtags attached that even people who care about the trends aren't getting a great user experience. Twitter realizes this, and they're going to do something to cut down the noise.

The precise something that Twitter intends to do isn't really clear. Biz Stone's blog post is full of ambiguous language: "We're working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful." It's not clear whether this means manually filtering trends in some way, or whether Twitter is introducing an algorithm to weight tweets by relevance. I think the average Twitter user is less concerned with the technical details, and more concerned with how effective this experiment will be at reducing junk tweets.

[via TechCrunch]

I once called BeeJive the best chat client for the iPhone, and for good reason: it supports several different chat services, offers push notifications, and has a user interface that makes chatting on the iPhone about as easy as it can feasibly be. BeeJIve just keeps getting better, too. The latest version, 3.1, now supports group chats in AIM ... almost.

Group chats are a great feature that I'm sure Beejive will fully implement soon, but I'm not a fan of the way they work now. To start a group chat, just click the plus button and add multiple contacts. So far, so good, but here's where things get sticky: the only option is a private chatroom. You have to invite contacts to allow them in.

There's also no control over the name of the room. It's just Beejive plus a random string. Also, you'll want to turn notifications off if your room is very active, because having your phone beep or buzz for every message in a fast and furious chat is a wee bit obnoxious.

I know these are all minor quibbles, but it would be great to have a separate "start group chat" button, with the ability to create and name a public room. For now, though, I'm not complaining too much when an already-excellent chat client adds a useful feature it didn't have before.