As a small team, Gowalla, like its rival Foursquare, doesn’t have a lot of resources to devote to building apps on all the mobile platforms, so this is a good solution for the time being. Eventually, the plan is to have native apps for all the big platforms, Williams says.

But the most-loved child will remain the iPhone app for the foreseeable future. In fact, version 1.3 of that app has just been submitted to the App Store for approval, we’re told. Williams says that it should alleviate a lot of the check-in and place adding issues that users were experiencing in previously versions, which we touched on here.

Yesterday, Gowalla also added Twitter feeds to venue pages on their web site. This allows you to see what the official Twitter accounts for those places are saying at any given time. They also began appending place’s Twitter names to your tweets when you check into a place on Gowalla. See an example here.

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Update: Yep. Now suspended.

Update 2: MSNBC is now saying that the account was never in their control in the first place. It was previously sending out MSNBC headlines, but then today went off the deep end, obviously. So I guess this is a lesson in controlling your online brand.

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So what do we know? Well, the company is definitely in the mobile space. In fact, it’s a “BIG mobile play,” founder Ben Keighran tells us. Keighran, who in 2006 started Bluepulse, a mobile messaging app, has most recently served as the lead advisor to Aardvark for their mobile strategy. There’s apparently no website for the company yet, but they do have a Twitter account, which features one tweet: “Working on something sekret… ”

We managed to squeeze a logo out of Keighran, but that’s about it. He also told us that we should hear more about Chomp early next year, but for now, they will remain shrouded in secret. Still, someone must have liked something they heard about Chomp if they were able to in just 10 days get a seed round of around $500,000 – $550,000, which is what we’re hearing.

We’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

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Let me remind everyone that Apple rejected a Someecards application last month partially due to the fact that one of the cards included was mocking Hitler (and more specifically, the film Inglourious Basterds). They flat out rejected it, didn’t require a certain rating for the satire, just rejected it. So when you see Mein Kampf in the store, complete with a swastika as its icon, you’ll forgive me if I’m a bit dumbfounded.

Not only that, the app is rated 9+. So apparently, 9 year-olds are good to go to read about the “Jewish plot” and other anti-Semitic bile. Also perfectly fine for the App Store are apps that focus on upskirt pictures, and Asian Boobs. But satire? Nope, that’s too hardcore.

This version of Mein Kampf is in Spanish, so maybe that’s what allowed it to slip by the App Store guardians. But that’s no excuse. If the Nazi logo didn’t raise a red flag, I’m not sure what will. The point is that Apple is so ridiculously hypocritical (or, at the very least, incompetent) with its selection process and it just keeps getting worse.

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At the end of this month, Thing Labs will close a $600,000 round which is basically an extension of its Series A from back in June of last year, co-founder Jason Shellen tells us. This will bring its total funding to $2.2 million. But this round is more notable for who is involved: angel investor Ron Conway, Steve Olechowski (the former COO of Feedburner, now at Google), and Greg Yaitanes, who was an early Twitter investor, but is better known as a director of Fox’s hit show House. He’s also directed episodes of Lost, Heroes, Grey’s Anatomy, and many other popular TV shows.

Polaris Venture Partners, which did Thing Lab’s initial round is also re-upping to put in some more money we’re told. Thing Labs initially sprung out of Dog Patch Labs, a San Francisco-based incubator that is run by Polaris.

Shellen first unveiled Brizzly at our first Realtime Crunchup back in July, and he will be appearing at our second event later this month.

[image: Fox]

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Earlier this week, Seesmic rolled out support for the new Twitter Lists for its Desktop client. Today, that same functionality comes to its web-based client. And with it comes a bonus: Geolocation support.

Now, to be clear, most users still won’t be able to use this geolocation support just yet, as Twitter has yet to enable it for most users. But if you do happen to have it, Seesmic supports it. As you can see in the screenshot, it looks pretty nice. If you see a little location marker on a tweet, you can hover over it to bring up a Google Map overlay showing where that tweet was sent from.

Last week, we previewed Tweetie 2.1, which will include geolocation support as well. Seesmic’s method looks like it may be a bit easier since it only requires a hover state to get to a detailed map of where the tweet was sent from, whereas Tweetie 2.1 requires two clicks (to the tweet and then on the tiny map to get a more detailed version).

Meanwhile, List support looks solid in Seesmic Web as well. As you can see in the other screenshot below, when you hover over a Twitter username, you have an option to add them to one of your Lists. Another web-based Twitter client, Brizzly, rolled out it support for Lists last night. The plan is to have all Brizzly “Groups” (a feature that worked like Lists) synced with Twitter Lists by tomorrow. Presumably, Seesmic will have its lists synced with Twitter Lists tomorrow as well.

It’s not yet clear when Twitter will do a wide roll-out of its geolocation support, but with several third-party services looking ready to go, it seems likely that it will be realatively soon. Following Lists full launch last week, Twitter has also begun testing its new Retweet funtionality to a small set of users.

Along with Lists and geolocation, Seesmic Web has a new Trending Topics area it is rolling out today as well.

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When it was first unveiled at our Realtime Crunchup in July, easily one of the best features of the web-based Twitter client Brizzly was Groups. Basically, it allowed you to sort your Twitter followers into subsections, to make specific groups of users easier to follow. Of course, with Twitter’s new Lists functionality, you can basically do the same thing. So Brizzly is screwed right? Nope.

First of all, Brizzly has decided to make Groups play nicely with Lists — very nicely. Starting tonight, Brizzly is importing all of the Lists that its users have made on Twitter and it will begin showing them within Brizzly. But that’s not all: It’s also going the other way. Any Group that you made in Brizzly will be converted to a Twitter List. To be clear: A private Twitter List. So no, no one will be able to see that you put them in the “Loser” Group on Brizzly.

And of course, Brizzly does much more beyond Groups. Notably, it recently added Facebook support. That alone is worth the price of admission right there. But Brizzly also offers Direct Messaging capabilities that are superior to twitter.com. And it allows you to upload photos to its servers. And it displays pictures and video inline, in your tweet stream. So Brizzly should be just fine even with Twitter’s Lists now rolled out to everyone.

Brizzly expects the Groups to Lists transition to be complete by tomorrow night, co-founder Jason Shellen tells us. Here are the other main features he laid out in an email:

• We display, sync, create and navigate Twitter lists
• We provide an infinite scroll view of lists so you can scroll as far
  back as you like into a list
• Users who had created Brizzly Groups will see their groups migrated
  to Twitter Lists marked as “private”, but of course users can change
  that to “public” at any time
• We expect the migration to be done for all users by some time tomorrow night.
• Lists can be viewed by “tweets” or by “members”
• Lists are easy to create within Brizzly and make use of our
  auto-fill for users you are already following for easy creation

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In a post on its blog, Twitter notes that the “noisiness of the conversation” has led Trends to be less interesting. So beginning today they’re going to be experimenting with ways to surface more relevant tweets in this area. While they don’t come out and say it, the implication here seems pretty clear: They’ll be in some way curating the topics and the tweets. It’s not clear if this will be algorithmic or manual yet.

Actually, Twitter has kind of been doing this with topics for a while. When a spammy topic gets into Trends, Twitter quite often will remove it. But this sentence, “Specifically, we’re working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful,” seems to suggest that it will be curating tweets within trending topics as well. And that it may even in some way rank tweets to show more relevant ones for the topic at hand.

Twitter notes that users may not notice the improvements at first, but soon they will. Their wording is also interesting in that they note that this is about “unearthing more value in search.” Again, that would seem to suggest that Twitter is thinking about the bigger picture of how to rank tweets based on relevancy (not just in Trending Topics). That could be by user authority, which has been a sticky issue in the past.

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As you can see in the video below, the idea behind AT&T’s system is that you can walk around a city with a phone in your pocket and get alerted when a nearby retailer has a deal for you. Users of Foursquare and soon Loopt will recognize this concept, but AT&T’s idea is a bit different. By using AT&T’s network as the bridge to be constantly updating your location (assuming, of course, you opt-in to such a feature), these retailers are able to push these coupons to your phone via SMS. Currently, something like Foursquare requires that you “check-in” to a place to see that there is a deal there or nearby.

Naturally, this could get very annoying to a consumer if they don’t like the place offering the deal, but customization is the key to this. A user could, for example, say they like Mexican food, and those types of coupons would pop-up when they were in the vicinity.

Obviously, a system like this could be very lucrative for retailers and restaurants who want to entice the impulse buy or just increased foot traffic in stores. It could also be lucrative for AT&T if they were to strike deal with these retailers to serve these up — or even just charge SMS fees.

This is just a proof of concept at this point, but you can probably bet something like this is coming soon. And the next logical step after that is the Minority Report system. “John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right about now!”

[image: Dreamworks & 20th Century Fox]

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Today in San Francisco, AT&T held a Tech Showcase to show off some of the new innovations they are working on in their labs. One such thing I got a demo of was a way to use your iPhone to search television content simply by using your voice. While you may think something like this is less than ideal, it’s fast and very accurate. Watch below as the demonstration goes from simple to more complex. And, of course, a regular touch-based remote is included as well to select things.

By the way, none of this is actually happening on the iPhone or on your actual TV. Instead, your iPhone is connected to AT&T’s service where it does the voice filtering on its end — and it’s still this fast. This project isn’t quite ready for consumer use, but as you can tell, they’re not far off either. I would replace my cable box with something that has this in a second.

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The idea of ad “retargeting” is not at all new. A ton of big brands and advertising platforms use it to try to lure users back to sites using the fact that they know they already visited once. The difference with Adroll’s new RoundTrip product is that they are making the practice accessible to any online advertiser to use. Previously, this type of campaign was reserved for those who were willing to spend a lot of money for this much more highly targeted ad type.

With RoundTrip, Adroll is specifically aiming for small and medium sized brands. They’re doing this by not requiring a minimum spend threshold which customers have to pass in order to have access to retargeting ads. This makes sense as Adroll has always been about targeting the so-called “long-tail” brands with its method of rolling up these smaller brands to get to a size that will still attract some bigger advertisers.

And this makes sense for a lot of these smaller brands as most of the time people probably aren’t coming to a site to do an impulse buy. Instead, they may simply be checking out a product to decide if they should buy it later. With retargeting, ads can remind users about this product they’ve checked out in the past and may be ready to buy now.

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Perhaps you’ve heard the stories over the past several years about honeybees mysteriously vanishing around the world in large numbers. The root cause is believed to be something called Colony Collapse Disorder, which causes bees to stray from their hives and die. This is bad news since honeybees are vital to pollinating a lot of different types of foods we eat. They’re also vital to making ice cream, which is why Häagen-Dazs is supporting this TwitCause.

Starting today and running through November 11, Häagen-Dazs will pay $1 for the first 500 people that tweet everyday with the hashtag #HelpHoneyBees. The money will go towards both a UC Davis research project to further look into Colony Collapse Disorder, as well as help fund the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, which aims to teach people about how to create their own honeybee farms.

[photo: flickr/cygnus921]

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Twitter has a problem: A number of users tweet, then lose interest. It needs a way to reengage them in the site. And tonight it’s starting to test one way: Notifications.

The test is currently only rolled out to a “limited” number of users right now, according to this update. But those who have it should notice an indicator similar to what Twitter does to let you know there are new search results on a query (see a capture above and below). There’s another service that does these types of notifications for new messages also: Facebook. Yes, Twitter for once is taking a playbook from its rival rather than the other way around.

When Twitter was still a young service, it used to auto-update with new tweets as they came in, in realtime. That was one of the first features killed off as the service began to explode in size and was having trouble scaling. FriendFeed implemented a similar live-updating stream before the Facebook acquisition, and that seemed to help boost engagement. Twitter currently offers live updating stream with its widgets.

There has always been some debate as to whether a constantly updating stream is better than notifications. Twitter is clearly now choosing the latter. When FriendFeed first launched it, plenty of users complained that the live updating was moving too fast. Seeing as Twitter is much larger than FriendFeed ever was, that could be an issue. The notification method is probably easier on server load than the constantly moving stream, as well.

As you can see in the screenshot below, these notifications shows up in the titlebar as well (just like with Twitter Search).

[photo via stephromanski]

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Google News has just launched a pretty cool new feature: Create your own news section. As you can probably guess, this allows you to create a new area of your Google News personalized page (you have to be signed-in) for anything you want. You simply fill-out a section title, put in any search terms you want it to look for, select a country, and you’re set.

Previously, you could make customized sections for Google News, but it was limited to single queries about topics. With multiple queries, this is much more comprehensive. And the pages look a lot nicer with images automatically pulled in. You can also now filter by source locations, restricting items to a single country or even state.

Also nice and new is that you can publish these section you make to a public directory. If you do that, anyone can then subscribe to (and rate) the section you’ve created. There are quite a few good ones that have already been created in this directory, like Mobile Technology.

Here’s what else this is great for: Vanity searches. As with most search products, the real key thing everyone wants but no one likes to talk about, is to be able to find information about themselves. This new Google News section creator is rather brilliant for that if you say, work for a tech blog that appears quite often in Google News.

“MG News” is probably the new pinnacle of Google News.

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That’s not to say it’s not a nice looking product — it is, but there have been some changes that make me confused as to what Apple exactly is trying to do with this thing. From a design perspective, it makes sense. The new remote now has the brushed aluminum and black button exterior that graces both Apple’s MacBook Pro line and the iMac line these days. The original Apple Remote was all white plastic (aside from the top sensor), that matched the older iMacs that it originally launched with.

Back in those days, the remote made more sense. First of all, it came with most new Macs. This, alongside Apple’s Front Row software, made it seem obvious that Apple was going to start taking media (beyond just music) very seriously across the Mac line (for a while it even came with Mac laptops). But today, the remote doesn’t come standard with any Apple product aside from the Apple TV (for obvious reasons). Instead, it’s a $19.00 add-on, even for the new huge 27-inch screen top-of-the-line iMacs (which seem like a natural fit to watch media on).

Also odd: while the original white remote had a magnetic back to allow it to easily stick to the side of the iMac, the new remote does not. That means this remote is yet another piece of clutter sitting on your desk if you opt to buy one. It would seem that Apple doesn’t really care about you using this remote anymore, even though without it, Front Row is basically useless. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to use it over simply using iTunes if you have to sit at your computer to do it anyway.

But the oddest thing about the new remote has to be that Apple has for some reason decided to move the Play/Pause button from the center of the navigational circle to the lower right side of the device, shifting the Menu button left to make room. That might make some sense as just a straight-up ergonomic design change, but the weirdest thing is that the center of the navigational circle is still a button, that does the same thing as the Play/Pause button.

Yes, Apple has added a new useless button. Again, Apple. The company that hates buttons.

Apple’s documentation for the new remote provides little insight, but they do label this new center button as “Select” rather than Play/Pause. But again, it does the exact same thing. Could there be some new funtionality for Front Row in the future that takes advantage of the Select button? Maybe. But even launching something like the new iTunes Extras content now being packaged with movies doesn’t seem like it would need its own button.

Here’s something else: Apple doesn’t even bother mentioning it on the main Remote page on its site, but this new remote does work with the Apple TV. Again, from a design perspective, this makes sense as the new remote looks much more like the Apple TV than the white one that currently comes with it. But again, the remote’s phantom button does nothing different from the Play/Pause button aside from the fact that holding down Play/Pause brings up movie chapters, while holding the phantom button does not seem to. Odd.

There is one definite advantage of the new remote: It’s much easier to change the battery. I have friends who have stacks of old dead white remotes simply because they didn’t even realize you could previously change the battery. So that’s nice, but does it really warrant the $19 price for a larger, heavier remote that no longer sticks to the iMac? Probably not.

If you want a good remote for iTunes and the Apple TV, just use your iPhone or iPod touch. Apple’s own Remote app makes it much, much more useful than either of the physical remotes. You can, for example, do a search by typing on the device’s keyboard rather than being forced to do a ridiculous amount of clicks to manually enter each letter on the Apple TV’s onscreen keyboard. It’s also much better for scrolling through a bunch of titles. Really, it’s better in every way imaginable. The only downside is that you have to own an iPhone or iPod touch. But if you own an Apple TV, chances are you probably own one of those as well.

I really don’t understand Apple’s thinking with these remotes. It would seem that they’re clearly inching towards products with less buttons and more touch elements, but this new remote is the opposite of that. There’s been a touch screen remote rumored for some time now, but this is what we got instead? What gives, Apple?

Update: A few things from some insightful commenters:

1) It’s also a bit odd that the new remote does not feature an Apple logo anywhere on it. The old one did on the back.

2) It’s true that aluminum is not a magnetic metal, but neither is plastic, which the old remote was.

3) I had forgotten about this, but the old Apple Remote is very similar to the original iPod Shuffle. It’s certainly possible that Apple was using the same manufacturing for both, and with that Shuffle long retired, it was easy to move to a new type of remote.

4) Apparently, the Play/Pause separate button also allows you to stop/start content when you’re not specifically in that section. That could very well be why Apple did this, but that is also not very intuitive since the buttons do the same things the rest of the time.

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Foursquare is rolling out its service in 15 European cities today. This list (below) includes many large cities on the continent, and also many of the hottest tourist destinations. So this is great not only for our European friends, but also for those of us who decide to take a Euro trip. Now that you can check-in in these 15 cities, there can be a whole new game element to vacations.

One city being added is Paris, which is good news for people who will be attending the LeWeb conference in December. Here’s the full list of new cities:

Paris
Madrid
Barcelona
Berlin
Munich
Prague
Geneva
Rome
Manchester
Dublin
Brussels
Athens
Stockholm
Copenhagen
Helsinki

Previously, only Amsterdam and London were available in Europe.

These 15 new cities pushes Foursquare’s total city count to 53. Just a few weeks ago, Foursquare added 15 other cities (all in the U.S. and Canada), so they’re clearly moving fast now to roll out widespread coverage.

The most popular way to use Foursquare remains its iPhone app, but the service is also quickly expanding its smartphone support. The service raised a $1.35 million seed round in September.

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There are actually a number of new or tweaked features in Friend Connect, but the overall gist of the changes is that they will allow site owners to offer a more personalized social experience to their visitors, while making it easier for visitors to connect with each other. “Normally we do one feature at a time, but this is a set of features,” Friend Connect product manager Mussie Shore tells us, noting that this is a special launch to his team.

The key to the new functionality for site owners is being able to get more information about their visitors. For example, depending on what Friend Connect widgets you install, you can have a questionnaire that comes up the first time a user shows up on your page and signs in with Friend Connect. This may sound like it would be annoying to a visitor, but assuming you don’t install it as a giant overlay when people first hit the site, it could actually be very useful for both parties. Site owners will be able to target content to visitors based on these answers. And visitors will be able to find other like-minded Friend Connect users that also visit that site.

Site owners will also be able to use this data to create personalized newsletters. And perhaps most importantly, they can also use it to serve up better ads from AdSense. By knowing some of your interests, Google can obviously go beyond just contextual ad serving. So naturally, this information is also useful for Google as well.

But from a social perspective, this is really about using all of this data to build out Google’s social layer. With it, Google can do things like build different social profiles for you on different sites (depending on that site’s content). The goal with that is to encourage users to interact more — you know, like on a social network, like the one that has the rival connect product and 300 million users.

But some of Friend Connect’s new interaction methods sound a little clumsy (though we haven’t tried it out since it’s not live yet). Basically, if you see a user who is a member of the site you are currently on, you can click on their face and get an option to message them. Doing so will share your email address with them, and if they choose to respond, they will obviously share their address with you. The idea is to foster communication even outside of Friend Connect, Shore says.

Staying true to its goals from Friend Connect, Google has also created APIs for all of its new features, to allow third-party developers to tinker with things. But for the more casual users, which Shore says make up most of their overall community, Friend Connect offers a very simple way to do installations.

Google will also package all of the data it gathers from Friend Connect to give it back to the site owners in useful and interesting ways, such as overall stats and graphs. When I asked Shore about the privacy implications of this he replied that they’ve been telling the partners they’ve already started working with on this to “think of it like tweeting.” The idea there is that any information a user puts into Friend Connect is public.

So will this shift mindshare away from Facebook Connect and towards Friend Connect as the important social layer for the web? Not if Facebook has its way with the new Open Graph API in the works. Still, Friend Connect is no slouch. In the 10 months since it officially launched, there are now 9 million sites with it implemented in some way. This has led to Google seeing 500 million 30-day active users, with 2 users now joining every second.

[photo: flickr/ginnerbot]

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Here’s why this is interesting: As Amazon clearly notes at the end of its email (copied below), you will earn referral money for anyone that clicks on these links and buys a product. Obviously, links that bring in referral fees are nothing new, this has been going on with blogs for a long time. But Twitter users do love to click on links, so this feature could actually mean some real money for popular Twitter users with a massive following. And it’s yet another way that companies — and now even Twitter’s users — are making money off of Twitter, which Twitter won’t see a dime of (presumably, anyway).

Something else to think about: A lot of blogs disclose when they’re supplying you with a referral link that they will make money from (though certainly not all of them). But on Twitter, that’s going to be hard for people to do even if they wanted to because of the 140 character limit. Other social sites, like MySpace, for example, do not allow you to post affiliate links. Twitter, it would seem, has no problem with this. In fact, at least one employee tweeted that he was excited for the launch.

You can find out more about Amazon’s rules for this type of stuff on its FAQ page. Below, find the text of the email that was sent out to Associates members.

From: Amazon.com Associates Program
Date: Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 12:05 AM
Subject: Amazon Associates Now Integrates Directly with Twitter

Dear Associate,

Today we are excited to announce the launch of a new feature called Share on Twitter. You can access Share on Twitter from the Site Stripe and post to your Twitter account from Amazon detail pages in just two clicks.

The Share on Twitter feature is easy to use. Simply log in to your Amazon Associates account and then visit any detail page on Amazon.com. By clicking on the Share on Twitter button in the Site Stripe, a new window will open and an Amazon-generated message is pre populated in the ‘What are you doing?’ text area of your Twitter account (you may be asked to log in to your Twitter account). That message will include a shortened URL that already includes your Associates ID. You’ll have the option to edit this message or simply hit the ‘Update’ button to post to your Twitter account. When Twitter users click on the link in your post and make a qualifying sale, you’ll earn referral fees. That’s it.

For more information about how you can use social networks in connection with your Associates account, please visit our Social Media FAQ.

Also, did you know that you can stay connected with Amazon Associates by following us on Twitter, becoming a fan on Facebook and joining our group on Linkedin? We’ll post program announcements as well as top deals and promotions.

Please tell us what you think of our new Share on Twitter feature using hashtag ‘#AMZNSOT’ on Twitter or contact us via the contact form. We want to hear from you!

Sincerely,

The Amazon Associates Program

[photo: flickr/177]

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The Twitter Blog has a post about it right now, but co-founder Biz Stone has cheekily written it entirely in Spanish. We’ll go ahead and translate it for you:

Earlier this month we invited volunteers to translate into more languages Twitter. Thanks to these enthusiastic volunteers, Twitter is now officially available in Spanish. You can change the language or visit Twitter.com Settings and change the language setting in the option at the bottom right corner.

Some [Spanish-speaking users] Pepe Aguilar (@ PepeAguilar), Manu Ginobili (@ manuginobili), Jose Hernandez (@ Astro_Jose), Andreu Buenafuente (@ buenafuente), Juan Fonseca (@ Fonseca) and La Moncloa in Spain (@ desdelamoncloa) had discovered the Twitter value even before we released the translated version. We hope to offer Twitter in Spanish means more people able to access and enjoy this service.

Welcome!

Spanish joins Japanese as the only languages besides English that Twitter currently supports. But more are coming soon, as Twitter previously noted that they’d like to have the “FIGS” languages. The “S” in there is Spanish with the others being French, Italian, and German.

Official support for other languages should undoubtedly help Twitter continue to grow after stalling a bit in recent months. And this Spanish support should also kneecap Meme, Yahoo’s Spanish Twitter clone (which is now also in English).

Twitter also has a new official Spanish account to follow on the service.

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Previously, Loopt was more of a passive service — you started it up on some device and it kept track of where you were. Other users could see where you were if they opened the app too, but generally it wasn’t about pinging your friends to let them know where you are and what you were doing. But Pulse makes Loopt much more of an active service. It recommends hot places, hot events, and lets you know what your friends are up to.

This new feature is already live on Loopt’s website, but as we alluded to back in May, this will also be a part of the Loopt 2.0 iPhone app, which should be released shortly. But things have even changed since then. As you can see in the screenshots, a key feature of this new Loopt is the idea of the “Check In.” Obviously, this is a direct reaction to competitors like Foursquare and Gowalla which are built around that very idea. This is a key part of the new Loopt as checking in helps it recommend things for your friends to do.

But Loopt is also using other data to recommend places. It has a partnership with Zagat to get restaurant information and pulls data from sources like Citysearch to further its recommendations. All of this data has allowed Loopt to create what founder Sam Altman refers to as a “local search engine.”

And this is altering Loopt’s business as well. As we’ve previously covered, location is a potentially powerful tool for business models involving things like coupons. Foursquare is starting to delve into this, but it isn’t yet making money from it. This new version of Loopt is taking full advantage of this. The company has already struck deals with partners such as Jack In The Box to serve up virtual coupons when users of Loopt are nearby a restaurant.

Fans of Loopt will still recognize many of the features of the service, but everything has been improved, Altman says. One thing not included however is Mix, Loopt’s service that helped users potentially find dates. That was spun off into its own app last month.

Loopt also offers some things that Foursquare doesn’t such as the ability to see where all your friends are checked in on an actual map (rather than just a list of where they are). And you can also see not only that friends are at a particular place, but how others have rated it (with a smiley face or a frowning face). This allows you to see if a restaurant is not good, for example.

The iPhone is proving to be a boon for location-based services, but it also has a very big weakness: Third-party apps cannot run in the background. This is one reason why the previous version of Loopt didn’t work well on the device; it kept track of your location, but only when you had it open. Loopt recently launched a new feature that allows you to get around this by pinging your phone to get your location with the help of the carrier. But that service costs extra money, a huge barrier. Moving to the concept of check-ins seems like a better way to keep people using your application.

So can Loopt take on the younger location-based upstarts with its new features? We’ll see, but Loopt has a couple of big advantages: 1) It works on over 100 mobile devices (Foursquare, for example, works on only a few right now — but any phone can access its mobile website). 2) Apple seems to love Loopt. They’ve included it in commercials, and routinely feature it in the App Store.

Disclosure: Loopt offers a TechCrunch branded version of the service here.

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The List Widget is exactly what you’d expect: A widget that you can place on your blog that displays a list of your choosing. One nice thing is that this can be a list you made or one any user has made (that is public). If you simply type in a user’s name, it will show their lists in a drop down menu. You then give the list a title, a caption, customize its look and feel, and you’re good to go.

But here’s why this widget is pretty cool: It basically is a way for you to create your own curated Twitter stream anywhere on the web. Obviously, you won’t be able to do things like tweet from it (though there is a reply button that comes up when you hover over a tweet — this directs you back to Twitter), but people are already making some great Twitter lists (like us and Scoble) and this is a great way to put them to work without having to go to Twitter itself.

You can choose how many tweets to show, set the intervals, hide hashtags — there are a good number of options. Best of all, these widgets offer something that Twitter itself doesn’t: Realtime auto-updating. Basically, this widget is kind of like a better, more customizable version of Twitter.com.

The List widget joins Twitter other widgets for profiles, search, and favorites. Find them all here. I’ve embedded our TechCrunch team list below.

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So what’s new? Well, there are a ton of small bug fixes, but also some pretty big additions. There are two that you’ll probably care the most about: New-style rewtweets and geolocation support. We got an early alpha build of 2.1 to try out, and it’s looking good.

Retweets

While Twitter has yet to enable the new-style retweets or geolocation for most accounts, Tweetie 2.1 offers a glimpse of how it will work. Tweets from accounts with the new retweet function show up in Tweetie 2.1’s stream. As promised, these are the tweets from the actual person who originally sent it, rather than the person doing the retweeting.

But Tweetie 2.1 highlights these retweets in a nice way. First of all, you see both the user icon for person who originally tweeted the item and the person retweeting it. The original tweeter’s icon is big, while the retweeter’s icon is small and stuck in the lower right hand corner (see image). These tweets are also tagged with a pinkish-red triangle in the upper right hand corner to let you know this is a retweet. Clicking on these tweets takes you to a page that shows you the tweet from the original source, but also says at the bottom “retweeted by @USERNAME.”

The way to retweet something in Tweetie 2.1 remains the same: You click on a tweet (or swipe a tweet in the stream) and hit the box with the arrow icon. The top option is “Retweet.”

There’s a growing concern that Twitter’s new retweet rules will cause some confusion (it already has) in users’ streams. But the way Tweete 2.1 handles it is solid, both giving recognition to the original tweeter and showing the tweet to be a retweeted item by someone you follow. Other third-parties thinking about how to handle the new retweets should look to Tweetie 2.1 as an example.

Geolocation

Likewise, Tweetie 2.1 also shows off Twitter’s new geolocation support. Again, for accounts that have it turned on, these tweets show up in Tweetie 2.1 with a tiny red location pin in the upper right hand corner. Clicking on these tweets takes you to the tweet’s page which also has a little map preview below it showing what city the tweet was sent from. Clicking on this map loads up a larger Google Map inside of Tweetie 2.1 that pinpoints the actual location with a red push pin.

If you want to geotag your tweets, you hit the 140 character counter at the bottom of the tweet input box. This brings up tweet options including a new “Geotag” button in the upper right. Clicking on this will first load up Twitter to ask you to authorize the app to see your Twitter location. Assuming you allow this (and again, this isn’t yet turned on for most users — though it is live for some), Tweetie will places a small red pin right next to the 140 character counter to indicate your tweet is geotagged.

Lists

One thing not currently available in this build of Tweetie 2.1 is Twitter’s new Lists element. “In a perfect world Tweetie 2.1 will have list support, or at least experimental support for it.  It should be 100% by 2.2,” Brichter said when I asked him about it.

Twitter fully rolled out Lists to all users at the end of last week (after testing it for a few weeks with a group of users). Reactions to the feature have varied, but generally seem to be good. And third-parties are already popping up that are either built around the Lists API or are supporing it (Seesmic Desktop added it today).

Brichter also confirmed to me that Tweetie for Mac version 2 will support Lists as well. But he says that will be coming after Tweetie 2.1 for the iPhone is available.

Timing

Brichter says that if all goes to plan, Tweetie 2.1 could hit its final beta testing stage later this week. If that happens, he’ll presumably submit it to the App Store for approval soon after that. And those who were up in arms over the fact that Tweetie 2 cost money even for people who bought the original Tweetie, put down your pitchforks: Tweetie 2.1 will be a free upgrade for Tweetie 2 owners.

For those interested, here’s a big list of the changes in 2.1 so far:

• Geotag work
• New retweeting
• Post ‘message’ parameter through to custom Image endpoints
• Switch to WhatTheTrend
• Reorganized Search/More UI
• Accessibility work
• Image compression options
• Vidly, Mobypicture, and Posterous as video options
• New protocol handler to make it easier to install custom URL shorteners
• Fix TextExpander goofups
• Fix Japanese double-posting bug
• Fix email conversation
• Fix handling of iTunes links
• Google Mobilizer option (and custom Mobilizer)
• Fix rare hang when viewing reply chains
• Fix calling from address book page
• Fix cases where saving state doesn’t complete
• Disable browser rotation option
• Overlapr
• Report Spam
• Fix rare crash translating tweets
• Disable “mark as read” button when no unread – history=1 for j.mp
• Fix upsidedown image viewer and browser
• Disable Pinstripes option
• Fix tweetie:///post? style protocol handler
• Reorder Settings
• Link to Manual

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Sure, it’s not as good as being there, but it beats doing nothing. And it’s being done with the help of Modelinia, a site devoted to capturing the lives of super models. Enticed yet?

You can find the live stream on Modelinia’s Facebook page starting at 9 PM PT tonight. The streaming itself is being handled by Livestream, who will run it through 11:30 PM, we’re told. Klum’s Facebook fan page along with Modelinia’s page have nearly 700,000 fans, so if you do watch this, you definitely won’t be alone. And there’s a chat widget running next to the stream to talk with others watching it.

Modelinia’s goal with this wasn’t solely to stream beautiful people at parties, they also ran a costume contest with Klum to allow the best costume designers to win tickets to the actual event. Modelinia’s founder and CEO is Desiree Gruber, a producer to the Emmy-winning show Project Runway.

I’ll go ahead and embed the live stream of Klum’s party here as well. Don’t say we never give you anything.

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But this latest video almost had a very different tone. “I thought about writing them an anti-corporate anthem, something they could raise their tiny, furious fists to, but ultimately decided on this,” Mann tells us. Too bad, because that would be been awesome. It could have been “Another Brick In The Wall [Part 2]” for the 21st Century.

Representatives for Bing also wrote us after our “torture” post to point out the backstory about the students singing the Bing jingle. Apparently, they decided to do it on their own — or rather, their teachers decided to make them do it. Still, it’s very creepy. And as a number of readers pointed out, a little bit too much like Jesus Camp (trailer below Mann’s new video and the students singing his song).

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This means that not only can all users now finally make their own lists, but perhaps more importantly, you can now see which lists you have been included on. The latter is quickly becoming a new metric for measuring popularity on the service (which users seem divided about if that’s a good or bad thing).

And everyone will now have access to the third party sites already starting to pop up around the Lists API, such as Listorious, a Lists directory.

So, now that everyone can see them, be sure to check out our TechCrunch team list. Later today, we’ll also share some other interesting lists that we’ve been working on.

Update: As a side note, List descriptions should be coming in the next week or so, Twitter’s Vitor Lourenco confirms. This will definitely help users tell what the list is supposed to be, rather than simply relying on the list name.

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