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Originally set to launch in “early December,” Twidroid surprised us by launching the next version of the popular Android Twitter client here on the last day of November instead. Twidroid 3.0, which is now available in the Android Marketplace, is a major update for this mobile application, introducing new features like geolocation, in-app image previews, threaded conversations, and, most notably an extensible plugin platform.

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According to the release notes, the updated Twidroid app includes the following new features:

• Threaded conversations
• In-app image previews for twitpic, yfrog, twitgoo, phodroid, posterous and twitter profile images
• In-app link previews
• Twidroid plugins 1.0 + example on our website
• Action menu design streamlined with icons
• Share option for single tweet
• View large avatar in profile
• Saved searches sync with twitter
• Marker for tweets annotated with geo information
• Report spam
• Remember timeline position setting (default: on)
• Jump to top in timeline button
• Autocomplete usernames for timeline and replies
• Bring up tweet box directly by typing @
• DM list now with avatars
• Friends/Followers now available in free version and moved to profile view

The update also includes a fix for HTC Hero image upload problems, which users of that handheld will undoubtedly appreciate.

As you can see from the list above, the new Twidroid is now a worthy competitor to its iPhone rivals, especially Tweetie 2.0, which also introduced similar features like threaded conversation and geolocation only months ago. In fact, Twidroid may have just one-upped its competitors as it is now one of the first mobile applications to introduce a plugin platform.

Twidroid Does Plugins

Twitter client plugins are just now started to be heavily discussed, thanks to a post by web guru Dave Winer which argued for the need of a programmable Twitter client. Loic Le Meur, maker of the Seesmic application, then followed up by expanding upon his vision for Seesmic’s development platform. Having just announced his move from Adobe AIR to Windows for the continued development of the PC-based Seesmic Desktop application, Le Meur writes that the app is now ready to become a programmable client. When launched, the desktop version of Seesmic will allow third-party developers to build features or services that can be integrated into Seesmic’s core application.

Similarly, Twidroid’s plugin platform offers the same type of promise, albeit on the mobile platform. Thanks to this new functionality, third-party developers can extend Twidroid with features like URL shortener integrations or additional sharing features, notes the website. To kick off the launch, the company has introduced a sample plugin for Google Maps integration which shows a Twitterer’s current location on a map and allows them to update or annotate that location as well.

Adding a plugin architecture is a major achievement among Twitter client applications – and certainly among the mobile set – as it will allow the apps to become highly customizable and personalized creations unique to each and every user’s needs. The only problem with plugins is that those you add in one client may not be available in another. That is, plugins added to the upcoming version of Seesmic won’t necessarily be available in Twidroid and vice versa. This points to a need for Twitter itself to become the extensible platform and not each individual app. However, in the meantime, regular users of Twidroid will certainly enjoy this added functionality as they begin to customize the app to their liking.

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Node.js is an Evented I/O for V8 javascript. Node’s goal is to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs. This is in contrast to today’s more common concurrency model where OS threads are employed.

Thread-based networking is relatively inefficient and very difficult to use. Node.js will show much better memory efficiency under high-loads than systems which allocate 2mb thread stacks for each connection.

Furthermore, users of Node are free from worries of dead-locking the process – there are no locks. Almost no function in Node directly performs I/O, so the process never blocks. Because nothing blocks, less-than-expert programmers are able to develop fast systems.

Node is similar in design to and influenced by systems like Ruby’s Event Machine or Python’s Twisted. Node takes the event model a bit further – it presents the event loop as a language construct instead of as a library.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://nodejs.org/
License: MIT and GPL License

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Pixmac: Stock Photos, Royalty Free Pictures and Images

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We’ve discovered an adorable yet highly useful little product that could significantly ease some pain and lead to greater levels of productivity for smartphone developers.

It’s ridiculously simple as a concept, yet it allows for more creativity, freedom, and portability than any other tool we’ve seen for mobile developers, hands down. The product of a design shop and a web development lab, both based in Australia, these nifty and inexpensive toys have been popping up in offices all over Silicon Valley. Read on to learn the secret behind your favorite mobile dev’s favorite Christmas present.

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It’s made of paper.

Yes, the Notepod is the Moleskine of the digerati, an ingenious little sketchpad shaped like an iPhone. The front of each sheet features “52mm by 77mm of blank space floating in darkness,” and the back of each piece is a blank grid of graph paper, perfect, as the site says, “perfect for notes or jotting down the phone number of a hot geek.”

Notepods each contain 100 pages, and you can snag a 3-pack for around $18USD. Shipping will take between 7 and 12 business days, unless you’re lucky enough to live in Australia or New Zealand.

As we all know, the best ideas often hit you at inappropriate or inconvenient times. As Inventive Labs posted, “It’s incredibly fun to come up with an idea in the pub over a few beers;” however, how fun is it to decipher those indecipherable, scrawled-on and soggy cocktail napkins the next morning? Keep one in your bag, one on the nightstand – wherever inspiration strikes. It might be made of paper, but we think smartphone developers will find it a fun and simple productivity tool.

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As we reported Thanksgiving Day, web searches and traffic for online retailers during the holidays were significantly down as compared to previous years, according to research from Experian Hitwise.

However, this Black Friday showed a 4 percent increase in site visits versus Thanksgiving Day traffic – a stat that usually falls between those two days. The retail site that got the lion’s share of traffic this year was Amazon.com, which netted 13.55 percent of the traffic seen by the top 500 retail websites. Read on for a few surprising stats that might signal changes in the U.S. economy – and changes in how U.S. consumers will be doing their holiday shopping.

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Interestingly, Apple’s website saw the largest increase – by a huge margin – between Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday. Overnight, their traffic skyrocketed 110 percent. Traditionally, Apple’s online deals for this red-letter day in commerce were modest at best. However, this year, rumors of substantial discounts were leaked online and spread like wildfire.

The lesson: If you want to see a ridiculous upswing in traffic on a major American retail date, maintain relative stinginess and secrecy, then “leak” good tidings of great joy just before the big day.

Other sites that saw a significant traffic increase in this 48-hour period include Staples (47 percent), Dell (40 percent) and Amazon (9 percent).

So, Apple, Staples and Dell take the cake for getting the greatest traffic spikes overnight; how did websites fare on Black Friday overall?

As you can see in the graph below, Amazon and Walmart each performed admirably. What’s more, most sites saw a marginal increase in traffic over last year’s Black Friday traffic – as you’ll recall, the global economy had recently tanked. Do we see this as a sign of tentative optimism about the economy, at least on the part of American consumers?

Finally, who got the most downstream traffic from Black Friday websites? That would be our friends at Walmart, Best Buy, and Target – the latter of which more than doubled its downstream traffic from last year:

Details for Cyber Monday – traditionally the online retailer’s biggest day during the holiday season – will be available shortly.

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In a recent post on Twitter’s new geolocation feature and the kinds of apps it would allow developers to create, we received a comment from Bob Hitching telling us to check out GeoMeme.

GeoMeme is Hitching’s side project, a real-time web app and also a location-aware mobile web app for iPhone and Android phones. It allows users to see and compare trends in specific locations; for example, you could see the most tweeted-about musicians performing at an award show or the most-tweeted political buzzwords in a given state or town.

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Here’s how it works: Users choose a location on the map (powered by Google Maps), and they select from the list of current trending Twitter topics or type in two search terms to compare.

GeoMeme then measures and compares the number of matching tweets within the stated geographical area based on public data from a number of geotagged tweets from mobile Twitter apps.

For example, on this Sunday evening, we can see that the Vikings are beating the Bears… in Twitter mentions in Minneapolis, at least:

The app might also be interesting for brands. We can see here that legendary local burger chain In N Out wins over Carl’s Jr. in Twitter mentions in Los Angeles:

We can also use the app to check the pulse of holiday revelers in New York City:

It would be even cooler to see a sentiment-measuring feature; i.e., I’d like to compare tweets of the terms “liberal” and “conservative” in Virginia, then see what percent of those tweets were negative or favorable. Not all mentions of a given term are going to be good ones, after all.

Take GeoMeme for a test drive in your town to see what your neighbors are tweeting about, and let us know your thoughts in the comments! Do you think that with more development, GeoMeme could be a useful tool?

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