#NewTwitter, Google Instant, iTunes 10, and more

[Wade Roush]

Thanks, everyone, for joining my Google group. I'll be using the list as an additional channel to let friends know about the most interesting technology and business stories on my plate recently. Since Xconomy pretty much *is* my life these days, these notes will give you a pretty good idea of what I'm spending my time thinking about.

At this point, Google has all but confirmed that it's working on a social networking play, though it's not clear yet whether "Google Me" is going to be a coherent service comparable to Facebook or just a set of social-media upgrades to its existing tools. In an A-to-Z listing (from Aardvark to Zynga) I tried to round up the components Google is likely to draw on for Google Me, including a bunch of recent acquisitions like SocialDeck.

The biggest splash we've made since opening Xconomy San Francisco came after Apple released Apple TV and iTunes 10 on September 1. I wrote a column that week arguing that iTunes (with or without the new Ping social network) is the weak link in Apple's whole media ecosystem -- that it's encrusted with features that have no relation to one another, and is in need of a complete overhaul. The piece got Slashdotted, Techmemed, and retweeted by Tim O'Reilly and a few other tech celebs. Check out the comment section of that piece for an amusing assortment of personal insults.

When new stuff like iTunes 10 or Google Instant or #NewTwitter comes out, I can't help putting aside my work to play around with it (hey, it's research!). A day or two with Google Instant was enough to convince me that Google's new way of showing search results even before you're done entering a query is anything but a time saver, given that it presents so many more alternative information alleys to explore.

But it's not just all Google and Apple all the time around here, far from it. I published the seventh in a series of profiles of companies coming out of Y Combinator's summer term; this one was about an "anti-Facebook" called The Fridge. The previous YC S10 companies profiled in this series were InDinero, 1000Memories, GazeHawk, Hipmunk, Rapportive, and AdGrok. And just so the folks at Pier 38 wouldn't feel left out, I wrote about a Dogpatch Labs startup called WiseStamp that makes cool custom e-mail signatures.

Two more fun stories to mention. I took a close look this week Get Satisfaction, a service that consumer-facing companies can use to crowdsource customer support to customers themselves. And finally, today, I cast a skeptical eye on Twitter's effort to start building more Twitter tools in-house. My attitude is that Twitter's developer community has been doing a pretty good job, creating great apps like TweetDeck and Flipboard, and that while Twitter for iPad and the company's new site design are nice, the company should probably concentrate its efforts on warding off the Fail Whale.

Thanks for reading. Stay in touch, and feel free to send me your comments or story ideas!