Imagine if Tom Paine, or Benjamin Franklin, or Emma Goldman had the power to cast their passing thoughts, while walking down the street, to thousands or millions of people all around the world, with ease, in minutes. They would expel the building material of a mason, wouldn’t they? That power is now in all of our hands, thanks to a new class of mobile applications that’s maturing very quickly. Mobile podcasting apps are now powerful, easy to use, free and tied to big social networks for distribution. The latest to hit the scene is Cinch , from BlogTalk Radio, which landed in the Android marketplace this morning after several months on the iPhone. Sponsor Cinch is a relatively simple app, and it has its technical issues on occasion, but it’s absolutely revolutionary and so far could be the best in its class. Users launch the app, hit record, speak into their phone, press stop, give their recording a title, aim it at their Twitter or Facebook friends, and then hit publish. Within minutes the recording is uploaded to the Cinch servers and a link to listen is pushed out to the designated social networks. I’ve been using Cinch on the iPhone for months now, to record my thoughts about art and the internet , about writing, or the soundscape from the train station in my home town. I marvel, every time, at the fact that I can publish my thoughts so effortlessly in audio out to the world now, from wherever I am. Just like blogging made text publishing and distribution more accessible and democratic than it had ever been before in human history, mobile audio publishing apps like this are truly world changing. The availability of Cinch on Android is an important event. Cinch isn’t the only mobile podcasting app available for today’s smartphones. AudioBoo is another one that you might enjoy on the iPhone. It’s far more attractive visually, has more features, more users and appears to have fewer bugs. It has a 5 minute time limit on audio recording, though. That’s very inconvenient, as the timer is usually out of sight up against my ear. I also regularly have 6 or 7 minute long thoughts. I haven’t hit the time limit on Cinch yet. Social media apps come and social media apps go, more launch every day than anyone can keep track of, but some of them are worth taking pause and considering the implications of. The power of instant, mobile, global audio publishing in your pocket, for free? That really means something. Discuss

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Socailtext is adopting Twitter annotations for a new service it is calling Socailtext Connect. The service is a method for connecting legacy apps by surfacing events that appear in an activity stream. The service, now in beta, uses the work done on the Twitter annotations spec to create a social layer that makes events in systems readable both by machines and human. The connector serves as a bridge between an on-premise or cloud-based enterprise application. Sponsor It’s the machine-to-machine communication that makes this most significant. In many respects it’s a reminder of how far we have come since the first versions of RSS became such an integral part of the Web. RSS, Atom and other syndication technologies have shown us how the Web can be programmed for machines to communicate, trigger events and provide us with information and insights for our daily work. It’s that connection which makes annotations powerful. Apps can be connected by providing, to use a metaphor, an invisible thread that finds the event and pulls it to the surface. But is this new? It’s similar to Salesforce.com’s activity stream that surfaces events from the Force.com platform. It’s also similar to Socialcast , which pulls in updates from legacy applications into an activity stream. The annotations that Socialtext is adopting is part of a deeper effort to build on the work done in recent years to preserve what many call the open Web. The Socialtext news is also a sign that the enterprise is advancing faster with activity streams than their consumer counterparts. Today, the Web is transforming in a way that requires machines to better communicate. This is especially true in the enterprise where the Web is the network that operates both internally and externally to systems of multiple varieties, such as wireless networks and fast emerging smart systems. One trillion sensors will emerge in the next five years on everything from smart meters to heart devices. That means the Web becomes just a part of the Internet, serving as a system to connect other systems. Socialtext co-founder Ross Mayfield says activity streams are quickly evolving into application streams. As more software emerges so will be the need to connect machines to trigger events. People will be notified through this complex network. Socialtext Connect will provide the ability for events from these systems to be passed as a message that people or machines can subscribe to and follow. An application could subscribe to another application that triggers an event such as a reminder to a system to replenish an inventory system. These “app bots,” as Mayfield calls them, serve as an environment for messaging. Michael Cote , an analyst with Red Monk, made the point in conversation that there is this new interest in messaging services. Annotations fit that bill to some extent. Is middleware the new hot stuff? It is starting to seem that way as the need continues for that special glue that can connect all aspects of the dynamic supply chain. Discuss

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Social media is going to rule the Web until at least 2012 – according to a post by Justin Kistner , a Social Evangelist at web analytics company Webtrends . Kistner also claims that Facebook has become the king of social media. In a panel at a Portland event today called Lunch 2.0, Kistner said that the current era of the Web “is Facebook’s game to lose.” Data from Google Trends suggests that the term ‘web 2.0′ became popular in 2005 and peaked in mid-2007 (as measured by how many times the term was entered as a search term in Google). Towards the end of 2008 ‘social media’ started to get popular and then rose steeply in 2009. Sponsor If the above chart is to be believed, social media overtook web 2.0 in popularity at the end of 2009. I’m inclined to trust this data, as it matches other data sources we have reported on in ReadWriteWeb over the past couple of years – for example a Nielsen Online report from March 2009 stating that people spent more time in 2008 using social media than on personal email. The ‘news references’ chart (the secondary chart below the main one) is also interesting. It shows that over 2009 news media organizations used the term ‘social media’ far more than ‘web 2.0.’ Partly that’s because ‘web 2.0′ has always been an awkward term for anyone outside the tech world to understand (“You mean there were two Webs?”). But it undeniably also shows that the term ‘social media’ began to be bandied about in news media a lot in 2009. And not coincidentally, that’s when Facebook and Twitter became very popular in the mainstream. Nowadays, it’s hard to walk anywhere in a metropolitan center without seeing the logos of both Facebook and Twitter. Last week I was in New York and snapped a photo of a local eatery promoting its Twitter account at the counter. OK, this was New York. But I am seeing both Facebook and Twitter being increasingly used by a wide variety of businesses, online, on TV and in the real world. The rise of social media is impacting many industries, including news media itself. Kistner points to a Hitwise study which showed that Facebook is sending more traffic to news sites than Google. This isn’t necessarily true for all news sites (Google is still ReadWriteWeb’s biggest traffic source, for instance), but Facebook and Twitter have become significant drivers of traffic for most news organizations. I’m inclined to agree with Kistner that there is at least another year or two of growth in social media adoption, so 2012 sounds like a good bet for social media to peak. What do you think, will 2012 be the peak for social media? Or will the Social Media Era last for even longer than the Web 2.0 one lasted? Discuss

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While the majority of Twitter users reside within the United States, there is also a massive international population of users sharing info and links in various languages around the world. Tweetmeme , a service for sharing and tracking links on Twitter, announced today that it serves a half of a billion retweet button impressions each day on nearly 200,000 websites worldwide. To keep up with this growth, and the international Twitter community, the service is rolling out support for languages on buttons as well as automatic translation for retweets made on its site. Sponsor The buttons now support seven languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Portuguese. For international users, the words “tweets” and “retweet” have been translated into these various languages, making the process of retweeting links via Tweetmeme more accessible. According to a blog post today , the service will include more languages in the future, and it plans to leverage its community of international users to help them do so. Additionally, using Google Translate , Tweetmeme will now automatically translate tweets users wish to share in their native language. “This automatically detects if translation is required and prompts you when it has made the change, it is a simple one-click to revert the translation if that is not what you desire,” said Tweetmeme in a blog post today. It’s encouraging to see language support reaching more third-party services as the international Twitter community grows. Personally I am still waiting for the popular desktop and mobile applications to begin automatically translating tweets from users I follow who tweet in multiple languages. This, of course, is challenging due to the shorthand slang that Twitter’s character limit produces, but it would be an invaluable feature to users like myself who happen to follow people who often tweet in a language other than my own. Discuss

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Flock , the “social” Web browser formerly built on top of Mozilla’s Firefox, has just made a radical change. It’s now powered by Chromium, the same technology found in the underpinnings of the speedy (and rapidly growing ) Google Chrome. Long decried among many early adopters as slow, busy and buggy, Flock today aims to change those former perceptions with the launch of its overhauled browser. The company describes the new Flock as “simple,” “clutter-free” and “lightning fast.” Sponsor Flock’s New Pitch The headline on Flock’s new beta download page says “better than Internet Explorer,” but that’s not how the alt Web browser Flock used to sell itself. It used to describe Flock as a “social browser,” one that kept you in touch with your social networks from a central location. Today, the focus of the sales pitch seems to be less on the “social” elements and more on the browser improvements themselves. We don’t blame them. After all, the audience of early adopters Flock is aiming to please had effectively written it off years ago. In fact, last May, we asked our readers ” why don’t you love Flock? ” and ended up with 115 reasons in response, most of which boiled down to issues with the browser’s bugs, clutter, speed and design. But today, everything you hated about the old Flock is gone. Flock is now just another port of Chromium, although one which still seems to have its own take on certain design elements, including default fonts and button styles. Chrome’s separate controls and settings menus are combined into one, for example, in order to make room for the sidebar toggle button which alternately displays or hides the right-side column which houses the ever-updating social stream from your connected networks. New Features: Posts, Groups, Social Search That’s not to say that Flock isn’t still focused on the social. That remains its key differentiator. But let’s be clear, if you you only hear one thing about Flock today, the company wants you to know it’s “all new and improved!” , not that it’s a “social browser.” We did want to know about the social elements, so we took the new Flock for a spin. Besides the sidebar, another new feature lets you organize people from across your networks (think Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) into “groups” labeled as you choose. You could have a group for work, one for family, etc. It’s like Twitter lists, but for all your networks. And you can choose to just display one group in your sidebar instead of all your friends. This, obviously, is a bit labor-intensive to set up, especially if you follow hundreds or thousands on Twitter. It would be better if Flock could retrieve your Twitter lists and let you add to them instead. Maybe that’s a feature for another day, though. No good social browser would be without a status update box, so of course Flock includes one. You can tweet or post to Facebook by clicking the conversation bubble icon next to the address bar. This lets you immediately share the page you’re currently visiting with your friends and the link is automatically shortened using bit.ly’s URL shortener for your convenience. But perhaps the most notable feature in Flock is its social search functionality. Something the major search engines are still experimenting with themselves, social search is smartly incorporated into the new browser. If you want to perform a typical Google search, you would just type it in the combo address/search bar as you would in Chrome and hit enter. However, for social search, Flock’s auto-suggest feature retrieves results from your network of friends and presents these options as clickable items below the traditional search options and suggestions that appear. For instance, I typed in “droid x” and was shown the three most recent tweets about this latest Android phone. Beneath these, there’s a link to see what all my friends are saying, which pulls back older tweets and other social updates, too. Had my friends been posting on other social networks like Facebook and YouTube, these results would have displayed as well. A Winner? As with any new software, it’s too soon to know if Flock’s latest update is a winner. The overhauled, revamped browser seems stable, simpler and more functional than before, but more thorough testing is needed to say for sure. Of course, any additional feature requests will have to be carefully considered by Flock – the company went overboard with features last go-round and likely doesn’t want to do the same again. We do have to share one major drawback we discovered immediately, though: Flock is lacking a bookmark editor! Our carefully organized folders have turned into chaos in Flock, so be warned. Early reviews offer a wide gamut of opinions from one saying that the new Flock is now just a “very good plugin for Google Chrome,” to another saying Flock has a chance at becoming the writer’s browser of choice. Given that it’s in beta status right now, we’ll hold off on a final opinion ourselves, but we can at least say this: Flock has made itself worthy of a second look, if not a total switch. Flock is available as a Windows download only for now, from here . Discuss

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