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Twitterfeed.com is probably the most well-known and used feed apps for sending site information (mostly blogs) to Twitter.  A lot of people use it, including CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the White House, and myself.  It’s considered the best tool for this job and it recently got even better.

At its most basic, you set up an account at Twitterfeed with your Twitter information, ad your RSS feed (or feeds), and the app will publish your feeds to Twitter automatically, as they’re received.  That’s nice, but most blogging software like WordPress has plugins for that.  Right?  So why is that special?

Well, first off, it’s reliable.  Second, that’s just the beginning of what Twitterfeed can do.  It also publishes to your Facebook account, and it can use PubSubHubbub to do all of this in near-real-time.  Twitterfeed also can link to your bit.ly account for integration with your stats management there and can use UTM tags for Google Analytics as well.

Recent improvements make it even more powerful, with several back-end updates having been made in October to increase the site’s reliability and ability to handle more feeds and data.  Those happened because Twitterfeed, once a one-man show (by its creator Mario Menti, a Londoner) sold a majority stake to betaworks and The Accelerator Group, which added more developers and funding.  As Menti put it, it was getting to big for him to do alone and would soon reach a point of breaking its current ability with the number of users climbing fast.  It appears he made the right choice.

Twitterfeed is popular for a reason (350,000+ users).  It’s easy to use, it’s free (unless you want advanced features), and it’s a great, reliable tool.  It’s entirely Web-based, so there’s no software or downloads, and its definitely worth using.  You can sign in using any of a number of popular IDs: AOL, Google, Yahoo.

Definitely a service worth using if you aren’t already.

If you’ve ever wanted to be in a band, then you know that most of the job is walking around looking at poster boards and phone poles looking for a group to audition for.  You also know that it involves a lot of stapling those kinds of things up to promote your band or look for a replacement member.

Musefy.com wants to take that part out of the equation so you and your band can concentrate on what matters: drugs and women.  I mean music.  Ya, music.

The site is basically a specialized social networking platform geared towards musicians.  You can scour locally or nationally for talent and friends.  Eventually, venues and events will be integrated as well, making this an all-in-one bulletin board of group sharing for musicians of all stripes.

Musefy is in open alpha right now and appears to be moving along fairly smoothly.  It’s poised to really make something of itself too, since Myspace is the old venue of choice for musical social networking and is quickly dying out.  The key here will be how specific Musefy can make itself to position itself as the MUSICAL social networking site while still attracting fans and potential fans.

The site itself, being in alpha, is a little short on features.  It is very nicely done and seems pretty robust for all that, however.  The profile-building and searching capabilities are extremely well done, I think.  This is a site to watch that could come out as one of the big phenoms of the next wave of Web 2.0.

This is another one of those apps that should have a giant warning sign on it when you go to get it: WARNING This app is extremely addicting. Clear your calendar!

It’s the latest experiment from Google.  Building Maker’s idea is to create three dimensional buildings from Google Earth aerial/satellite photos, street views, and simple geometric shapes.  Sound simple?  Ya, right.  If you’ve ever played SimCity or a sim(ilar) game, you know that simple doesn’t mean boring.  After a couple of hours of building building (ha), you start to realize that you may have to reschedule some of those appointments today.

You can choose between any of 21 U.S. cities, 16 European ones, or 9 Japanese cities (others are coming soon), then choose a block and a building and start to work.  It’s a browser app, though Mac users will have to download a plugin and you need a Google account to save your work.

Once you’ve chosen your building to work with, you can view it from several angles and then choose shapes to begin matching that building.  Think of it as Legos without the bumpy connectors.  You repeat some steps for each axis, getting the angles just right until you’ve got the basic shape of the building down.  Then you start on details.

Lots of details like gables, windows, doorways, balconies, rooftops, and more.  Before you know it, an hour has gone by and you’ve got a more or less complete building rendered.  99,000 more to go!

Like I said, it’s easy to really lose some time playing with this.  But it’s not really all fun and games.

What Google is working on in using this game-like platform to eventually create virtual walk-throughs of major cities worldwide.  Once this way of building cities is perfected, it could become a platform for rendering cities virtually.  What it seems they’re doing is matching actual buildings (what you start with as your “model”) with their rendered bits combined with the photographic shots from satellite and street views to create 3D buildings.

Using that data, they could eventually have these buildings entirely virtually-built by the computer so that 3D walk-throughs would be possible on Google Maps or Earth.  That would be really cool.

Alright, enough writing.  I have an apartment complex in Budapest to build.

Back in September, I wrote about Fix My Street and was pretty bummed that such a great idea was only available in the UK.  Sure enough, though, free enterprise comes to the rescue with an iPhone app for Americans that is basically the same thing.

SeeClickFix.com is a free app for your mobile (also usable online) that lets you report problems to the proper authorities or the community at large.  Of course, it’s for non-emergencies, so don’t go surfing to this instead of calling 911.

Now people out and about can connect with their local area’s SeeClickFix portal and report potholes, broken street lamps, graffiti, and so forth.  If there isn’t a portal for your neighborhood or town, you can make one easily.  The town directory with email contacts for service departments, commissioners, etc. are all that you need.

You can also use SeeClickFix to see what others have reported and if you go by and happen to see that the pothole is question was filled in, you can update that.

This is a great tool that gives empowerment to the community at large.  It works on university campuses, at the street or district level, for whole towns, counties, and more.  Like any great app, it gives the people who use it the ability to affect more than their own individual sphere.

Some news agencies, including the New York Times and boston.com, are even using this as a local watch program for doing community-level reporting.  Definitely an empowerment tool that communities can get behind.

If you have a blog or website where you publish product reviews, you’ll be interested in this.  Here at Rev2, we obviously do reviews and so the new FTC rules will apply to us.  Those rules, under the Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, material connections to the products mentioned have to be disclosed.  Here at Rev2, of course, we do not receive compensation for the apps and websites we review, but we’ll still be subject to the new FTC regs.

This new service, CMP.ly, hopes to help site owners have a standard for disclosure so that reviewers aren’t giving mixed messages to their readers.  After all, is a review where the product was received free of charge in order to review it a “paid” review?  Do you need to disclose that you got a freebie to do it?  What if you own stock in the company that makes that product or app?  Do you disclose that?

CMP.ly puts up some pretty simple rules, numbered 1-5, that give those kinds of disclosures.  You then just grab the code they provide or copy the image with the information in it and use it in your reviews.

0 = No connection, unpaid, entirely the writer’s opinions.

1 = Based upon a review copy (freebie was given for review purposes, to be returned later).

2 = Given a sample by vendor/agency/brand (similar to freebie, but given as a keeper).

3 = Paid post with cash or other compensation (including cross posting) given.

4 = Writer is employee, shareholder, or has another business relationship involved in review.

5 = A custom disclosure which will be available from CMP.ly later for case-by-case use.

Those are pretty straight forward.  A graphic can be used (see below) or a simple link to the graphic’s information can be added to the review in question.  Since the links are so short (merely http://cmp.ly/0, for example), they can be easily tweeted as well.

Very cool and definitely worth trying (it’s free).  A good beginning to standardization for disclosure.

CMP.ly was introduced by Tom Chernaik and Kris Smith and its parent company is DigComm.  Chernaik’s background is in integrating music with technology and entertainment law.  Smith’s background is technology and he has been a part of several startups, including TechStartups.com.

There are a lot of inventory and sales management apps out there.  There are also a lot of reservation and booking apps for tracking your appointments and scheduling clients.  So far, it seems, never the twain have met.  Until now.

Checkfront.com is an online inventory, reservations, and sales management tool that also processes payments and even gives unified access to distribution channels.  In short, it’s an all-in-one small business back-end.  Even better, for the budget-minded, it’s Software as a Service (SaaS), so you only pay for what you’re using.

Originally built and tailored for the hospitality industry, such as hotels and bed and breakfasts, Checkfront has a lot of potential for other businesses in need of both reservation taking and inventory control for online sales or on-the-spot requests.  Like a hair salon that also sells proprietary beauty products that it may not keep in stock or only in limited quantities.

There are are a lot of possibilities for an app that can do everything Checkfront says it can and deliver on it.

Currently, the app is in beta, but appears very robust.  Some of the more tedious things like entering a lot of inventory data, allow for CSV import, but for the most part, setting up a new business on Checkfront is time-consuming.  There isn’t a way around that without making the app useless, though, so that’s not points away from Checkfront by any means.

Once you’re set up with some data, though, it delivers a lot of useful tools.  You can schedule appointment types in various categories (most of the defaults center on hotel reservations or dining reservations) with price tags included.  So the South Wing could be set up to have 8 rooms at $100/each per night, for instance, while the Presidential Suite has only one listing and is $300/night.  Ad in some specialty products that can be set up to be waiting in your room (say, special bath salts or organic cleaning service) with more price tags, and you’ll begin to see how versatile Checkfront can be.

Reporting leaves a little to be desired if you’re a serious graph hound and number cruncher, but for most it’s probably just about what you’d need.

The app is free to try and worth checking out.  Unless you’re very new or have some time, though, don’t expect to build your entire business into Checkfront in an afternoon.  If you plan to integrate it into your website, it does have an API you can have your developer link with.