Tech Week in Review 12-11-09

There’s An Owl For That

Hootsuite for the iPhone is here and it boasts some unique features not available on other Twitter apps. Most notably, it lets you A. view statistics and B. lets you schedule your tweets in advance. You can easily manage multiple accounts, import your Twitter lists, and share files and photos. If the iPhone app is anywhere near as clean and robust as the web app, it should quickly surpass anything else available right now. More details on their blog.

Facebook Dismantles Walled Garden

Facebook’s biggest obstacle in trying to compete with sites like Twitter and Friendfeed is it’s privacy stance. It was built on the premise that people don’t want the whole world to see what their saying and who they’re saying it to. Many people on Facebook have private profiles that only close friends and family have access to. This limits Facebook because the most valuable resource it has can’t flow freely: information. Now, they have decided to flip the script with their new privacy policy. On it’s face, it is supposed to be giving users more power over their privacy settings, but it’s really a ploy to force users to be more public.

MySpace Shuts Down Imeem

In a surprising and pretty much grimy move, MySpace acquired Imeem and then immediately shut down the streaming music service. Sorry if I take this a little personal, but upon visiting http://imeem.com, I’m given a MySpace landing page that tells me my entire artist profile is gone. All my uploaded music…gone. User comments, stats, videos, photos, all gone. What does this landing page tell me to do? Create a MySpace Music profile. They say they will email me with more details, but they don’t even know who I am. Not only have they killed the website itself, but any apps once powered by the Imeem API are now useless since the API seems to have been cut off at the knees. More details over on RWW.

Google Finally Goes Real-time

You know it was inevitable. Now, you can see real-time updates in your Google searches. Data is pulled from around the web to bring you the latest updates on whatever you’re looking for. This will be both a blessing and a curse. Not only will you catch valuable nuggets of information, but you’ll also capture a bunch of noise. As illustrated by this screenshot:

(image via Bindu Reddy on FriendFeed)

At any rate, the following video from Google shows you real-time search in action.