Real-tme feed publishing startup Superfeedr has quietly turned on automatic location data in the feeds it republishes from around the web, we confirmed with the company today. Founder Julien Genestoux explained the feature using Twitter as his example, but the same content extraction and analysis is being done on all kinds of feeds run through the service. “If you turn geolocation on in Twitter, then your feed will include geolocation in your Tweets and we’ll just push that through,” he said. “If you don’t do that but you Tweet about Austin, we will deliver the latitude and longitude for Austin in the XML.” In other words, developers building apps on top of Superfeedr’s real-time feeds will now know programmatically what geographic locations are discussed in the content coming through the feeds. Future feature? Subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL. Sponsor Genestoux says he is using a number of 3rd party services to extract this data, including the Yahoo Placemaker API . Along with this location data, the service also offers automatic language identification and is working on entity extraction and sentiment analysis. The prospect of subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL is an exciting one, though Genestoux says he’s just beginning to develop it. Could that facilitate a location data stream that crosses and goes beyond the siloed location based social networks so widely discussed these days? We suspect that it could. Superfeedr could be described as “FeedBurner 2.0″ – for a more real-time and meta-data savvy web. The company was funded this Fall by real-time incubator Betaworks and media mogul Mark Cuban . Betaworks announced today that it has raised $20 million more to build out its portfolio of companies like Superfeedr, Bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Tumblr and more. Discuss

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As we profiled in our Never Mind the Valley series last month, New York is increasing its stronghold on the east coast startup scene. The city’s rich media and international business ecosystems make it the perfect launch pad for startups looking to leverage these markets. One other reason the city has seen successful growth of entrepreneurship is the holding company Betaworks , which shows no signs of slowing after raising $20 million from Intel, AOL, RRE Ventures and several others. Sponsor It is a little harder to place a label on Betaworks compared to other similar entities that some would call incubators. The important thing to know is that Betaworks considers itself a holding company and will not only invest in companies but will hold and operate some of them as well. Having previously raised $8 million in 2008, the company has put their money to good use; Betaworks’ history includes helping start companies like Bit.ly and Chartbeat , while investing in other real-time Web apps like Tweetdeck , and helping in the sale of others like Summize, which was acquired by Twitter in 2008. Needless to say, the company seems to know which horses to bet on, which is likely the reason why several corporations and investors teamed up to refresh their capital. Along with Intel, AOL and RRE, investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Softbank and The New York Times Company all contributed to help Betaworks keep moving forward. The real-time Web is a trend we’ve been following very closely at ReadWriteWeb as evidenced by last fall’s Real-Time Web Summit . For startups in this space, especially those on the east coast, Betaworks is a great resource and potential investor. The new funds will not only go toward helping bolster their already impressive list of companies, but also to bringing fresh new companies on board. As with the recent $750 million raised by Battery Ventures , the large collaborative investment in Betaworks is another solid indicator of returning venture capital dollars after a lackluster 2009. Discuss

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If you visit the DreamHost blog today, chances are you’ll give a quick guffaw, shake your head in dismay at the state of the Internet and quickly close the browser tab. But if you take a moment to read all the way to the end of the post, you’ll find that the company has just announced the implementation of a one-click install for its open-source, white label microblogging service Status.net . Sponsor The blog, which features a tattooed beer belly and a cat sitting at a keyboard, is really showing off the proof-of-concept (hopefully) tongue-in-cheek site, PetStatus , a micro-blog for pets. Buried down at the very bottom of the post is the following nugget of exciting information: Status.net, our new one-click software package, powers the entire operation. DreamHost customers can now install Status.net to their own domains with a single mouse click – making specialized Twitter clones at whim in a matter of seconds! Triss Hussey first noticed the real announcement, saying if it hadn’t been for an email subscription to the blog it would have just passed on by. We first wrote about Status.net a year ago, saying that the service could be an “incredible opportunity to analyze a rich and dynamic set of data about interpersonal conversation.” The company just announced the launch of its public beta last Tuesday. And our Own Alex Williams just took a closer look at the service’s future in the enterprise last week and argued that it “has the features that the enterprise customer wants and it has a strong developer community.” A one-click installation means we may start seeing specialized Twitter-clones reproducing like rabbits across the Internet. We can only hope that PetStatus isn’t an omen of what’s to come. Discuss

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MySpace has taken a bold step and allowed a large quantity of bulk user data to be put up for sale on startup data marketplace InfoChimps . Data offered includes user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes . Friend lists are not included. Remember, Facebook and Twitter may be the name of the game these days in tech circles, but MySpace still sees 1 billion user status updates posted every month . Those updates will now be available for bulk analysis. This user data is intended for crunching by everyone from academic researchers to music industry information scientists. Will people buy the data and make interesting use of it? Will MySpace users be ok with that? Is this something Facebook and Twitter ought to do? The MySpace announcement raises a number of interesting questions. Sponsor The 22 sets of data being made available are cheap. Prices range from $10 for raw dumps from the MySpace API to $300 for everything broken out by latitude and longitude. Subsequently derived data sets can be put on sale by InfoChimps users as well, with a revenue split. Analysis coming from the data could include things like music trends per zipcode, popular URLs being shared, etc. MySpace is generally thought of as a social network on the decline, but if it is able to position itself as the place to do music still then its hundreds of millions of users could remain engaged. Will data scientists want this data, though? Time will tell, but MySpace has long done cooler things with data than competitors Facebook and Twitter and people haven’t gotten terribly excited about it yet. Related: See today’s coverage of the cancelation of the Netflix Challenge due to privacy concerns. Bulk user data has tremendous analytical potential and both Facebook and Twitter have thrown the breaks on 3rd parties offering up their user data more than once. We covered InfoChimps’ offering of bulk Twitter data in depth this Fall , but the marketplace quietly removed that data after Twitter asked them to “wait” for a second time. In February we profiled Pete Warden ( The Man Who Looked Into Facebook’s Soul ), a developer who planned on putting a huge pile of Facebook user data online for academic analysis. As we wrote in that article: If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. Days later Facebook contacted Warden days later and asked him to hold off on release of that data as well. Last week Warden posted open source code for harvesting the same type of bulk user data from Google Profiles , so the game’s not up yet, not by a long shot. Why is this kind of big data interesting? This rational may be less applicable in the case of MySpace given its focus on music, or it may be more applicable given the allegedly poorer user demographics on the site compared to Facebook, but here’s how I explained my interest in big social network data analysis in general, as part of a discussion about an excellent special report on big data in the Economist this month . I think in big data there lies a lot of hidden patterns that represent both opportunities for action and for reflection. At RWW we’re working on trying to find ways to mine data to find news first (we’ve got some interesting methods employed already) and personally, I think the world is an awfully unfair mess and I’m hoping that data analysis will help illuminate some of the hows and the whys. Like the way that real-estate redlining was exposed back in the day by cross referencing census data around racial demographics and housing loan data. That illuminated systematic discrimination against black families in applying for home loans in certain parts of town. So too I think we’ll find a lot of undeniable proof of injustices and clues for how we might deal with them in big data today. What will we see come out of MySpace’s bulk data? What could we see come from Facebook and Twitter data if only they would let people get their hands on it? Time will tell. Discuss

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The fact of the matter is, we’re relatively far and few between, according to a study by Barracuda Networks. One day, we’re told Twitter is growing exponentially, the next, it’s a dying service that’s stalled out like your grandpa’s Studebaker. But does growth, or the lack thereof, actually translate into use? Sponsor According to Barracuda Networks , the Internet security research company, Twitter looks to be an insider app, one that many people sign up for and never really use. Or perhaps it’s like the sixth grade dance, with a few doing the waltz and the rest lurking on the edges of the room, afraid to ask the girl from math class for a dance. The company analyzed more than 19 million Twitter users and found that a surprisingly small number were actually brave enough to ask the girl to dance, so to say. Out of the more than 19 million users analyzed, only 21 percent, or just under 4 million, are considered to be “True Twitter Users”, a term applied using some extremely lenient criteria. To be considered a “True” Twitter user, a user needs to have 10 followers, follow 10 others and have tweeted 10 times. For the most part, Twitter’s explosive growth really seems to be a party that millions of people came, saw, and quickly decided to leave. But despite the sticker shock of these initial numbers, the report shows that those who decided to stay are becoming increasingly active. Last June, 30 percent of users had no followers, whereas only 17 percent are follower-less now. The same goes for people following other users – the number following zero, less than five and less than 10 have all decreased since last June. So, maybe Twitter isn’t quite exploding and it isn’t quite stalling out. Instead, it’s still indeed growing at a very regular, unimpressive rate and most people decide they don’t want to use it after all. Quick, somebody do another study, before we think Twitter is just doing something average for too long. Discuss

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