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If you’re eco-conscious and wondering how green those items at the store really are, well.. Now there’s an app for that.

GoodGuide, the product green rating site, has developed an iPhone app that uses your phone’s camera to scan the barcodes on items at the store and then retrieve their green creds for you.  The information is based on company practices, the product’s production cycle, and other information.

The information is said to be independent, scientific, and based on health and wellness as well as environmental data.  Products are given a rating from 1-10 in (appropriately) green dots under the product’s match information.  GoodGuide boasts a database of over 50,000 products so far, with more added daily.

Ratings are delivered with an overall and three categories, depending on the product type.  Food items will have health matches, for instance, while household cleansers would have environmental and toxicity ratings.  GoodGuide also tracks what is being scanned so that those products scanned most often without a match are put higher on the list to be rated next.

The app is available for free from the iTunes Store.  It uses Occipitat’s RedLaser barcode scanning technology, which integrates with the iPhone’s camera, and the GoodGuide online database of product information.

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 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.

This site is a comprehensive, centralized lifeflow platform, by their own description.  I would say it’s a social media sharing platform, which is the same thing, but doesn’t sound so “Web 2.0 launchy-mission-statementy.”  It’s based on a relatively old idea, but is much more all-inclusive and integrated than most apps of this nature.

Launching in September, Rrripple.com is in public beta.  It’s been in development for two years, however, and the site definitely shows that.

The focus at Rrripple is on real-life social networks rather than the somewhat disjointed ones we tend to create through the standard streams like Twitter or Facebook.  It’s made for sharing things with small, private, and relevant audiences like immediate family, close friends, church groups, and that sort of thing.  It could potentially be used by business who need to share documents and so forth as well, I think.

Of course, you don’t have to have a physical, real-life connection with those in your Rrripple network(s).  There’s nothing stopping you from inviting all of your Facebook friends or Myspace contacts to join your Rrripple network.  When you see how it works and what it does, though, you most likely won’t bother doing this.

Rrripple is a sharing tool.  It’s not a groupie site for playing Mobsters or Farm Town (I admit, I’m addicted to that one), it’s for sharing personal videos, photos, documents, voicemails, and so forth.  For doing that, it’s really slick.

The layout is like most apps of this nature: dark and techy.  That doesn’t change how well it functions, though.  Which is why I mentioned they’d been in development for two years.

Your media is laid out in chronological sequence so you can have photos that lead into video or explanation documents and scans of your yearbook tied with each other.  It functions primarily as a life diary in this respect.  You can ad sound, video, pics, documents, and all kinds of things to your Rrripple account for display.  You can mark things as private, public, in-network-only, etc.

The sharing part comes into play when your network is apprised of new additions.  Interactive messaging and other tools make it easy to chat about old times, remember something great, or congratulate on something new.

It’s easy to use, uses https for security, and works pretty well.  It’s worth a try and is free to use in beta.

Collaboration and design modeling sites aren’t anything new.  Since websites began, the need to involve the client in the site design and workflow has been a part of the professional design and development process.  Solutions for this range from very expensive and robust to free and useless.

IntuitionHQ.com is somewhere in the middle of that.  It’s very inexpensive (you don’t pay anything until you invite your client to look the design over) and aims at one goal: usability.

Web Design, of course, has two major goals: appearance and functionality.  A site can look really good, but be utterly useless or it can be ugly, but highly functional.  Good design aims for the center point between the two.  The hardest part of that, most of the time, is the usability side.  IntuitionHQ allows you to design something you like and let the client decide on the final aspects of usability.

The app also allows you to invite others to test out the site’s design without going “live” with it, so you can control who’s visiting and using it and what kind of feedback you get in that process.

IntuitionHQ is easy to use as well.  You create a virtual host by putting in a site title and the URL (mysite.intuitionhq.com) then it prompts for a username and password.  A few other details, such as your desired introduction and thank you messages for your testers/clients for that project.  Then you upload a screenshot of your site design.

Then you ad tasks for the testers to do and select sections of the site those tasks apply to.  So “click on the newsletter signup button” prompts them to (hopefully) find your newsletter signup button and click it on the first try.  This sort of usability testing, without having to include actual functionality, makes the life of the graphic designer much easier.

The idea here, remember, is to test usability, not functionality.  Once you have your test ready for action, you pay the $5 and go live with it.  At this point, you invite clients (or anyone else) to come check it out.  IntuitionHQ lets you send tweets, Facebook alerts, emails, etc. to do this.

Each task will have its results collected and you’re presented with a graphical representation and the numbers to correspond.  So if you have 10 testers and 9 of them were able to find that newsletter signup button right off the bat, it will tell you that.

Overall, a very useful, affordable, and functional site.  For most web development houses that deal with small business and clients, this is the majority of their needs for keeping the client involved in the process.  Definitely worth a look.

Tired of looking like you wear diapers under those khakis?  Want to look like a monkey sex god instead?  Bonobos.

(Cue the too-pretty male models, made to look like chimpanzees, with cheesy hats with little ears on them, on a white stage with white blocks to romp upon in their all-khaki trousers while chasing young women in summer dresses around the set)

Bonobos.

(Tinkling music with a hint of rainforest background sounds commences)

Bonobos.

(Then the marquee, in black lettering at center screen:)

Bonobos. When khaki brings out the jungle instinct.

Wow, I missed my calling.  I should be making fashion commercials.  There are three things that set Bonobos apart from most other khaki pants on the market: they aren’t Dockers, they make your butt look good, and they cost a lot.

Available only online and in limited quantities, these pants are upscale, trendy, and single-handedly battling KDB.  No, that’s not a secret Soviet agency of days gone past, though it could be a Communist Conspiracy of some sort.  KDB is Khaki-Diaper-Butt and it’s the sole mission of Bonobos to fight this evil phenomenon.

Amazingly, Bonobos is named after an endangered chimpanzee of the same name.  Which is interesting, since this chimp is primarily known for its unquenchable sexual appetite.   How does an animal that loves getting it on become endangered?  Maybe it’s better not to ask.

Bonobos appears to be a pretty successful endeavor so far.  The company has been in business for nearly two years, has 18 employees, and made $1.6 million in revenues last year.  With offices on both sides of the country (New York and San Francisco), Bonobos has an interesting marketing strategy.  Part hype, part fashion “business as usual” and part affiliate marketing, the company seems to be growing quickly.

The company’s founders, Brian Spaley and Andy Dunn, decided not to go the usual retail route because they found that most men prefer to just grab what they need and be done with it (perfect for online shopping) while women like to browse, handle the merchandise, and become involved with it (not good for online selling).  Since they do men’s wear, they went with the online-only model.

Great stuff and interesting to see a successful online fashion design company making it.