Here's an educated guess: You work with other people. You sometimes have to work on the same documents together. You send a lot of emails back and forth with those documents as attachments. They have awful file names like 0312_BigReport_v3_FINAL.pdf.

If any of that sent shivers down your spine, prepare to rejoice. You never have to do that again. Revisu is out of beta and into the wild, and you will be so glad. Instead of vague email comments and countless files in crazy formats, your team can just go to one Web address for the whole process.

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Revisu is a dropbox for documents you share with a team. It makes it easy to leave comments and propose changes to a document and track them over many versions. Team members can comments alongside the document or pin a comment to a specific place in it. It's an ideal way to leave comments on a visual design or text document, but it's hardly limited to those use cases.

The makers of Revisu tell an even scarier version of that attachments story. A major U.S. retail chain prints many millions of copies of its newspaper ad insert. The document is designed by a huge committee. Its contents are passed back and forth via email endlessly in horrible and huge Excel files.

When it's time to approve the final design, the whole team gathers in a room with the mockup projected on the wall. When someone in the room suggests a change, the team can't just note it on the projected draft. Someone has to open up the horrible email attachment Excel file again and note it there. In text. In a spreadsheet. Wouldn't we all be better off avoiding that grinding process? Revisu makes it simple.

Revisu understands all your typical file types, including Microsoft Office files, PDFs and images. The team is working on adding more, starting with project files for all the Adobe applications (it's pretty good at Photoshop files already). While Revisu has been big with designers and architects in the beta phase, the team is even talking about adding video capabilities.

Each document has a shareable Web address, so instead of attaching a file to an email, you can just paste in a link. Any file Revisu can understand, it will display in the browser. Gone are the days of incompatible versions of Microsoft Office. Everyone on the team can see the exact same document in their browsers, and all they need is the link.

Yes, Google Docs can do in-line comments and import Microsoft Office files and PDFs. But you can't put comments on the precise part of a design you're discussing. And good luck convincing Google to support Adobe Fireworks files. On the downside, Google Docs does have actual editing capabilities for simple file types like text documents. You can make the changes proposed in the comments, which Revisu can't do. But for design projects in Photoshop, that would be impractical anyway.

It would also be great if the Revisu workflow made it easy for the team to actually download edited versions of the documents in the correct format. The tool is still focused on making and sharing comments, rather than implementing them. But the major pain point for teams - that awful email process - is solved by this centralized place to comment.

You can sign up for Revisu now and see whether it's for you. The basic account is totally free, and there's a great reason for that. Freelancers who use Revisu for client work bring it with them. They say to their next client, or to their employer when they go in-house, "Hey, I use this great tool called Revisu to track revisions. Can we use that?"

The free account allows 10 simultaneous projects and up to 256 MB of storage, plenty of space for a small team. Big organizations can pay for more space. Revisu even integrates with Basecamp to help with project management, and there are more integrations and an API coming soon.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock

Discuss

News.me launched its free iPhone app this morning, which introduces Facebook integration, a saved offline reading list that syncs with the iPad app and Instapaper, and new, simple social dynamics of its own. It digests the links shared by Twitter and Facebook contacts, checks Bit.ly for their popularity, and presents a list of the top news stories in a clean, readable environment.

And now, within the News.me network, there is also a menu of simple, text-based reactions: "Ha!" "Wow" "Awesome" "Sad" "Really?" You can also write your own. These reactions have nuanced meanings. They make you think. They also make for interesting ways to browse for stories. It's these kinds of easy, subtle social dynamics that turn basic, single-purpose iPhone apps into paradigm-shifting social networks: think Instagram or Path.

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News.me has undergone several transformations, from an in-house New York Times experiment to a standalone Flipboard competitor on the iPad. It swooped in to save users of email news digest service Summify, which was bought by Twitter. And now, with a first-rate iPhone app, News.me is really firing on all cylinders.

Personal review time: I have such an established workflow for reading news that I never expect to get much out of a social filtering app like this. I practically never launch Flipboard, for example. I do my best to read my entire Twitter stream, I diligently knock off all my RSS feeds throughout the day, and I save everything to read later in one place (admission: I switched from Instapaper to Readability for iOS when it came out last night).

I didn't use the News.me iPad app, but I liked it. Now that I've had the iPhone version, though, the whole service has worked its way into my day. With the new social dynamics, News.me now allows me to build a small, trusted network of friend-editors from within my social networks.

I follow lots of news people on Twitter, several are on News.me, and I can follow them within the app. Now there's a new layer for commenting on the news in more detail outside of the noisy Twitter and Facebook streams. The app also has a menu for "Reactions" from your News.me network, so I can see only the stories to which my chosen editors reacted.

The synced read later functionality is fantastic, and the fact that it pushes to Instapaper is downright magical. I hope Readability integration is on the way, too, but hey, one thing at a time. My only complaint is that the scrolling is a little bit laggy at the moment, but the interface itself is stark and lovely.

News.me's small team has impressive pedigrees. CTO Michael Young is the former lead technologist at the NY Times R&D lab. Developer Rob Haining also built Epicurious. Designer Justin Van Slembrouck designed the NY Times Times Reader application for the desktop, as well as Wired for iPad.

This monster team is in an enviable position. It has a nice runway of funding from Betaworks and a great problem to solve: surfacing the news that matters. While competitors have given up and joined the flock, News.me has been building the first social news filter dedicated to adding meaning to the unrelenting jabber of online news.

I hate "It's-the-this-of-that" tech news stories, but I hope this comparison is meaningful: What Instagram is to photos and Path is to personal moments, News.me is to news. It's a one-thumbed way to connect with people over the news of the day. You can download it from the App Store for free and see what I mean.

Discuss

Buzz Contacts for iPhone is the latest offering from savvy apps, makers of the popular alternative calendar app, Agenda. Both apps take built-in iOS apps and offer new interfaces to save users time and sanity. Actually, Buzz takes on three apps at once: Contacts, Phone and Messages. It also uses FaceTime, a feature another popular third-party contacts app doesn't have.

If only Buzz handled the receiving of texts, voicemails and missed calls, you'd never need those other apps again. Instead of presenting contacts in a long, scrolling list like the built-in apps do, Buzz lets you add favorites to big, tappable grids of four people at a time. You can sort the grids into groups like "family," "friends," "work" or whatever you want.

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What Buzz Does Do

When you add someone to a grid, you can choose your preferred method for contacting them: phone, FaceTime, email or text. On the grid, the person's name is shown along with the icon for your chosen method of contact. Double-tapping on that tile shows you the rest of the options. Within a group, you can swipe right through pages of four people at a time, or you can swipe left to see the condensed list.

You can also easily send group emails or texts to some or all members of the group by tapping the bar at the bottom. You can open a blank message or use "status taps" to pre-load a message like "Running late. Be there soon." Finally, there's a dialer, so you can place calls to people who aren't in your contacts.

That's all there is to it. It's a simple, beautiful interface for performing some of the iPhone's most integral functions efficiently.

What Buzz Doesn't Do

The biggest drawback for any contacts app is that you can't receive inbound communication through it, so users must still have Messages and Phone visible somewhere. It's not really a replacement; it's just a faster manager for outbound communication. You also can't add or edit contacts through Buzz, which is a little bit of a pain.

The other things Buzz doesn't do are best illustrated in comparison to Mysterious Trousers' Dialvetica, another popular contacts app. I'm sure the makers of each app are groaning right now, since they're already rivals in calendar apps. But one isn't better than the other. They're different philosophies. Which one works best for you is a matter of personal style.

Dialvetica manages your contacts for you. It's a changing list that sorts people automatically by whom you contact most. In Buzz, you sort contacts manually, putting them into groups. In Dialvetica, there's no setup time, but the drawback is that your contacts move around. You have to set Buzz up yourself, but things stay where they are once you put them there.

The one thing Dialvetica definitely does that Buzz definitely doesn't do is Google Voice. If you have a second number with Google Voice, it's in Dialvetica as yet another call and text option. That would be a great feature in Buzz as well.

Buzz Contacts from Ken Yarmosh on Vimeo.

You can download Buzz from the App Store for $0.99.

Discuss

Last week, I got a kind of tweet I hadn't seen before. It was an audio-tweet from TinyVox, an app for iOS and Android that lets users send voice messages to anyone on the Web or just keep them as memos. That doesn't sound like a new idea, but that's the point. As you can see from the interface, TinyVox is all about recovering an old, beloved medium we've lost: the heartfelt mixtape.

My audio-tweet was from Srini Kumar, developer of TinyVox. He wanted to know what I thought of the app's "voicemail on Twitter" approach and its retro cassette tape aesthetic. I said I'd be happy to check it out on the condition that we conduct our interview asynchronously, back and forth over TinyVox. So we did, and I learned more about communication than any social app has taught me in a while.

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Srini:
@jonmwords cool path article - stealing the News Feed? taped with audio app TINYVOX

The metaphors are all over the place with this app. Srini called it, at various times, "voicemail on Twitter," a "mix tape," an "audio brainstorm" that can be a "throwaway" just for getting ideas out, and "podcasting for everyone." It was hard to decide how to use it. I figured concision was a good rule of thumb, so I just shot off a brief question about the medium itself.

Jon:
Question 1: About whether or not this is a new kind of medium taped with audio app TINYVOX

Srini came back with a huge response, full of passion and color and drama... and it was really, really long. But it was clear that he intends the app to be all of those things and more. Whatever we can do with our voice, Srini wants TinyVox to help us do more.

Srini:
The Tyler Durden effect ? taped with audio app TINYVOX

I loved what he had to say about the honesty and unsettling newness of communicating this way, aloud, spontaneously, without constraints. But exchanges of 10-minute messages didn't seem sustainable to me. This began to seem like a problem with the way the app works. Tweets are constrained to 140 characters, and that's why the medium works. These "audio-tweets" break that wide open.

So I asked Srini whether he agreed:

Jon:
Question 2: On the tendency (temptation?) to go long in this medium. taped with audio app TINYVOX

Honestly, I sort of expected him to take a hint and rein it in for the next answer, but he didn't. He came back with another six minutes of rhapsody, pushing me on the cultural norms that made me want short, tight answers. It's hard to concentrate and really listen to someone, even when they're sitting right in front of you. Would we be better to each other if we worked on that?

Srini:
we're spanning time taped with audio app TINYVOX

So I did. I practiced the art of paying attention, and I listened to every word. I found myself sympathizing with his whole message much more deeply than I do on Twitter. A Twitter person is just a picture, a handle and a burst of text. But committing to listening to a six-minute tape of someone's voice makes you follow his train of thought wherever it goes. I learned much more about where his head was at than I do about people in a comment thread.

For my last question, I let myself open up the same way. I asked him about the nostalgia and sentimentality of TinyVox itself and where the app is going:

Jon:
Question 3: about how the TinyVox recipient gets to keep the sentimental metaphor of the mixtape. taped with audio app TINYVOX

Srini's answer was vast again, but it was really exciting to hear from a developer with so much love for the interaction he's designing. Rather than summarizing where TinyVox is going, I'll leave you with Srini's audio answer. TinyVox is available for iOS and Android, and I'd be interested to hear how you find ways to use it. Share them in the comments here.

Srini:
the mixtape in the cloud taped with audio app TINYVOX

Note: the timestamps are off for the recordings in this exchange because I didn't realize that TinyVox is better about privacy than I initially thought. It doesn't post clips to the Web unless you explicitly tell it to, so I had to ask Srini to re-upload them after we were done.

Discuss

The smartphone explosion has invited a bum-rush of new apps - and extensions of old ones - vying to be the way we discover places. Companies big and small are fighting to be the best location data platform. Google and Yelp struggle for dominance of business listings, and valuable geo data providers like SimpleGeo are selling for big bucks.

ReadWriteWeb gets tips about new consumer-facing location apps every day. We like the futuristic whiz-bang idea of augmented reality, so we tend to write these up every once in a while. But geolocation apps have not yet caught on in consumers' minds. That's because most offerings focus on monetizing location, leaving the user interface as an afterthought. Today, I think that changed. I found Localscope, the first location app I've ever used that I think I'll use every day.

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A Browser For the World Around You

Localscope is currently available for iPhone and webOS only. This is actually the launch of version 2.0; the app has been around for almost a year. Version 1 helped users find things nearby using publicly available geo data. It was a nice interface, but not a unique offering. Version 2.0 is much more than that. It's a browser for the world around you.

The app has three views: gallery, map and augmented reality. None of these interfaces is new to the market, although Localscope's UI design is striking.

But here's the difference: while a photo discovery app like Trover or a business finding app like Yelp can show you its own content through these same kinds of views, that's all it has. Localscope lets you toggle between whichever location-enabled service you want to find something nearby.

Localscope has both a search mode and a discover mode. When you choose a mode, it goes straight into the view you last used, and a scrolling list of services appears across the bottom. They include Panoramio, Google's map-based photo network, Instagram, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Google and Bing, as well as the open-source service Wikimapia. Siloed services like Yelp are conspicuously absent.

Find What You're Looking For

The app will grab full location info, usually from Google, when you choose a place. But you don't have to search for a restaurant; you can just go find neat spots people have photographed on Instagram or tweeted about. That's the kind of exploration that drew me to Trover, but Trover is its own network, while Localscope searches across a bunch of different, more popular ones.

The best touch is the compass, though. You don't have to hold your phone up in the goofy augmented reality position. The app uses the phone's compass, and it displays the direction of the object you're looking for everywhere, even in the list view, using a floating compass icon. You can start walking right away. It never takes more than two or three taps to find something that interests you and start looking for it.

This is what I've been waiting for, a location app that isn't about gathering data from me, but about showing it to me. And having access to so many services means that the exact thing I'm looking for is bound to be in here somewhere, never more than a few slides and taps - and then a short walk - away.

Localscope is available in the iTunes Store for $1.99.

Discuss

The smartphone explosion has invited a bum-rush of new apps - and extensions of old ones - vying to be the way we discover places. Companies big and small are fighting to be the best location data platform. Google and Yelp struggle for dominance of business listings, and valuable geo data providers like SimpleGeo are selling for big bucks.

ReadWriteWeb gets tips about new consumer-facing location apps every day. We like the futuristic whiz-bang idea of augmented reality, so we tend to write these up every once in a while. But geolocation apps have not yet caught on in consumers' minds. That's because most offerings focus on monetizing location, leaving the user interface as an afterthought. Today, I think that changed. I found Localscope, the first location app I've ever used that I think I'll use every day.

Sponsor

A Browser For the World Around You

Localscope is currently available for iPhone and webOS only. This is actually the launch of version 2.0; the app has been around for almost a year. Version 1 helped users find things nearby using publicly available geo data. It was a nice interface, but not a unique offering. Version 2.0 is much more than that. It's a browser for the world around you.

The app has three views: gallery, map and augmented reality. None of these interfaces is new to the market, although Localscope's UI design is striking.

But here's the difference: while a photo discovery app like Trover or a business finding app like Yelp can show you its own content through these same kinds of views, that's all it has. Localscope lets you toggle between whichever location-enabled service you want to find something nearby.

Localscope has both a search mode and a discover mode. When you choose a mode, it goes straight into the view you last used, and a scrolling list of services appears across the bottom. They include Panoramio, Google's map-based photo network, Instagram, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Google and Bing, as well as the open-source service Wikimapia. Siloed services like Yelp are conspicuously absent.

Find What You're Looking For

The app will grab full location info, usually from Google, when you choose a place. But you don't have to search for a restaurant; you can just go find neat spots people have photographed on Instagram or tweeted about. That's the kind of exploration that drew me to Trover, but Trover is its own network, while Localscope searches across a bunch of different, more popular ones.

The best touch is the compass, though. You don't have to hold your phone up in the goofy augmented reality position. The app uses the phone's compass, and it displays the direction of the object you're looking for everywhere, even in the list view, using a floating compass icon. You can start walking right away. It never takes more than two or three taps to find something that interests you and start looking for it.

This is what I've been waiting for, a location app that isn't about gathering data from me, but about showing it to me. And having access to so many services means that the exact thing I'm looking for is bound to be in here somewhere, never more than a few slides and taps - and then a short walk - away.

Localscope is available in the iTunes Store for $1.99.

Discuss

"It's clear that the future of media consumption is tablets and mobile...if there's anywhere to be experimenting as a company, it's in the acceleration of content off the desktop. It's a whole new world and now we need new tools." So says Doug Imbruce, founder and CEO of Qwiki, a mostly-automated multi-media content creation system that today launches what Imbruce calls its true potential, unleashed: Qwiki on the iPad (iTunes).

All I've wanted to do since seeing it is spend time wandering through this app. It's fabulous and it's just beginning. If the company can execute its plans then this is going to be some seriously disruptive stuff. Some people hate Qwiki; those people will pay a high price for their cynicism - they'll miss out on one of the most enjoyable information consumption experiences to emerge in some time.

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What is this magical app? Qwiki is a technology that takes raw text, photos and videos and attempts to weave it all together into a short, dynamic presentation that makes sense. The system notes data types like dates and locations and creates original infographics to represent it.

There's simply something about having articles read to you, with pictures, maps and charts moving around the page dynamically and ready to touch that is captivating. The first use case, the desktop and now iPad app, uses text from Wikipedia and media from elsewhere around the web. Could you just read the Wikipedia articles for yourself? Sure you could - but will you? That's a fundamentally different experience from the lean back meandering through reference material that Qwiki makes you want to pour time into. There's simply something about having articles read to you, with pictures, maps and charts moving around the page dynamically and ready to touch that is captivating.

If you've tried Flipboard on the iPad - that does something similar, it transforms content into something tablet-friendly. Qwiki does that too, but whereas Flipboard's content is entirely human-driven, Qwiki has location and algorithms driving its editorial decisions. Both are great apps. Flipboard uses the famous iPad swipe motion far more than Qwiki does, Qwiki's use of big maps and swirling images is great on the iPad.

"Most companies don't have the DNA of both Art and Science," Imbruce says. "We do and that's why we can create such compelling products."

Is it perfect? No, but if you want to spend your time complaining about its shortcomings you just go ahead and do so - I'll be busy learning about everything from the history of my neighborhood to famous baseball players to the Ed Sullivan Show. I've consumed more encyclopedic content in the past week thanks to Qwiki than I have in a year otherwise. Maybe longer. Sometimes I wish the Qwikis were longer, but if I'm really interested in learning about a topic in-depth I can click through to the Wikipedia article and then to original sources. That viewers are left feeling just a little unsatisfied after each bit might be part of why the next one is so easy to click on.

Qwiki isn't for every situation. It's not a quiet activity and some people might not like the sound of the female robot's voice. If you try to use the Qwiki iPad app on public transit (as I did yesterday) people may look at you like you're a major snob from the future, given how futuristic and fancy the app looks.

Qwiki wowed people when they saw it demonstrated on the desktop - but the iPad app is much, much better. It's made for that form factor. That your iPad is mobile is significant too. The first thing the Qwiki app will ask you is for permission to access your location. Then, in addition to the Qwiki of the day, you'll be shown a map you can click to zoom into.

Click on that map and you'll be taken to the city you're in. Zoom out, zoom in, wherever you move the map view too, Qwiki will flag the 10 most popular geo-located Qwiki items within your current view. I first tested the app while visiting San Francisco. That was cool. Then I tested it when I got home - that was engaging and felt useful. Then I zipped the map down to the town I grew up in. That was an emotionally evocative experience.

Imbruce knows it, too. "It feels really good to see a 16 year old view the Qwiki on Leonardo Da Vinci or to see my mother browse her grandparents' home town in Italy," he says. "This is a serious company, we're going to build something that's generationally significant."

Qwiki iPad App Demo from Qwiki on Vimeo.

Qwiki as Platform

While the Qwiki app today is pretty cool, it has platform aspirations. Here's what we wrote about Qwiki in our January post In Defense of Qwiki: The Machine That Reads to You:
Qwiki wants to let a robot make beautiful movies for you to passively learn about any topic, any text, that you choose. The web is an interactive place, but sometimes it's good to sit back and enjoy the fruits of that interactivity in a way that asks less of you as a user.

Traditional multi-media content is too expensive to scale to serve the long-tail of would-be consumers. The days of broadcast, mass-media as "the only game in town" are gone. If we're all going to get multi-media satisfaction, for all our obscure interests, a lot of it is going to need to be created by robots. Not all of it, but a lot of it.

"Within 6 months to a year we will have a platform that ingests content, makes it intelligently summarized and makes it available on all kinds of different devices including interactive television," Imbruce told me. "Publish once, play anywhere."

Imbruce says the company is choosing publishing partners to pilot with now. "We see extreme scale with 3rd parties deploying their content into Qwiki and we'll remix it without human effort."

A big part of the platform, in addition to ordering the images in time with the read text, is the creation of infographics. "If you boil down Qwiki it's the infographics," Imbruce says. "We've only got a handful of those now but we're going to offer a platform for thousands of types of infographic, most recent tweet, charts, foursquare check-ins. All the different types of infographics will become re-usable, too."

Qwiki and Legacy Publishers

Publishers have raised major objections to the transition of their content into other iPad formats that were different and not completely under their control. How will they react to the prospect of being Qwiki'd?

"Newspapers didn't want to go online 10 years ago, either," Imbruce told me.
"There's a survival instinct where most publishers have a bureaucracy that prevents them from producing a compelling UX. Just as the shift online left publishers unable to exert the level of control they wished, that same shift will happen in the shift to mobile. We haven't seen that reaction though, we've just seen enthusiasm.

"In 2011 any company's goal has to be to satisfy users or else they will die. Users have such a voice now that successful companies have to be user-centric. You can't monopolize media any more and tell people your product is good, it has to be good."

Is Qwiki good? I think it's great, but try it out for yourself and let me know what you think. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some fresh Qwiki content to consume.

Discuss

If you've ever taken a bunch of pictures on your phone and not immediately uploaded them then you're well aware of the problem - now they're essentially stuck on your phone. If you want to upload them to Facebook, you'll have to send them one at a time. Or you'll have to take the time to get all those photos off of your phone and onto your home computer.

Chute handles this by letting you quickly choose a number of photos and either share them with your friends or archive them online, making sure you never lose your photos again.

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"It turns out," said Chute co-founder Gregarious Narain, "that getting tons of photos off your phone is really hard to do."

Chute, he explained, helps you to wirelessly share photos with different groups of your friends and family. Once you have a bunch of photos stuck on your phone, sharing them can be painful. Chute lets you choose groups of photos, select a group of your friends, and share the photos with them. If you use sites like Facebook, Twitter or Flickr to do this normally, that isn't a problem, explained Narain. Any of these sites can be directly integrated with Chute so that, as you upload your photos to Chute, you can also share them on one of these sites.

Here's how it works: When you upload photos to share with these friends, if they have the Chute app, they'll get a push notification. If they don't, however, they get an email with the photos embedded and attached to the email. And if they have the desktop app, they can download the photos and organize them offline.

The difference with Chute is that everything can happen wirelessly and the basic idea, said Narain, is that you can get all of your photos off of your phone and either shared or stored in the cloud, that way you never have to worry about losing your photos by losing your phone, having the hard drive go bad or anything like that.

"It's the simplest way," explained Narain, "to get to 'photo zero.'"

Chute will be available for iPhone and Android some time in March 2011.

Discuss

If you've ever seen New York data visualization specialist Nicholas Felton's Annual Reports on sites like LifeHacker or here on ReadWriteWeb, you probably remember the giggly feeling many of us feel when imagining that the beautiful charts and graphs he publishes were about the minutia of our own lives. Thanks to the New Years Eve release of a new iPhone app from Felton's company Daytum, those visualizations can illustrate your days, weeks, months and years.

In 2008, Felton's Annual Report stated that he took 548 subway trips, 107 taxis, 12 flights, 19 buses, two ferries and 64 visits to the gym that year. His average rate of movement through the year was just under 5 miles per hour and he's got some beautiful graphs to illustrate that. The new Daytum iPhone app makes it easy for you to track and graph those or any other kinds of activities day by day through your own life. It's a very well designed app, too.

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Josh Rubin wrote up the new app this morning on the blog Cool Hunting. "The app allows you to work offline--adding, editing and deleting entries--as well as keep track of favorite items for quick reference," Rubin writes. "... switching between accounts, graphing data or providing convenient access for common functions help the app retain its purpose of everyday use. Fully integrated with Daytum's site, the app can be used in tandem or stand-alone and for existing users it will import all of the past data you've entered at daytum.com."

Some users have reported bugs with the app, but I haven't seen any yet in my testing. The user experience is remarkably well designed. On every screen I've encountered so far, whatever I hope the app does - it does, smoothly.

It's a beautiful app and I hope I can remember to enter things into it consistently. So far I'm keeping track of push-ups and of articles here on ReadWriteWeb that I've edited. It's really easy to add any kind of action you want to track, though.

As with all these kinds of quantified self apps, the absence of a subcutaneous monitoring implant (as good as that is in the free will category) significantly raises the barrier to regular user input.

It's easy to chalk up interest in these kinds of apps as a New Year's fluke, fitness tracker RunKeeper for example dropped the price of its iPhone app to free on New Years Eve and today reported that it's seen an incredible 1 million downloads in 4 days!

We're seeing an increase in data-as-platform software and services all year long, though. These kinds of apps, services that allow us to capture data about what used to be called the off-line world in order to visualize patterns and learn of changes, are likely to be very big into 2011 and beyond.

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GAIN Fitness, a web based personal fitness service built by a team that includes two former Googlers, has launched in early Alpha mode to the public today. The service aims to help users make the most of the limited time to exercise, by recommending personalized workouts built from a list of 400 exercises and based on a user's goals and available time.

The GAIN team includes Nick Gammell, who spent two years doing financial modeling for YouTube and Google, and Robert Bailey, who was the lead visual designer for Google-acquired Picassa. It's rounded out by a Fullbright scholar who can do a one-armed pull-up and a software engineer with a demonstrated ability to lose weight quickly.

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At launch the website is quite simple (it is an Alpha, the company says) but looks like it could be a quick and easy way to get some exercise advice. Account creation doesn't appear to be live yet but the sample workout creator looks ok.

Given the backgrounds of the founders and the depth of interest in this market, GAIN is likely a startup to watch despite being a little confusing at present.

Call it "Sweatin' to the Oldies 2.0" or call it the quantified self, the application of web technology to improve real-world physical fitness is widely expected to be big.

Discuss

The browser is a beautiful thing, but it can be made so much better with the right tools. In the screenshot posted here, you can see new two tools in action - both of which you should check out right away.

What you're looking at in that image is the page for a single Tweet, viewed using the brand new Chrome browser extension from Embed.ly, which displays embedded previews from 165 different publishing platforms and previews of any web link posted on Twitter. It's a must-have. Overlayed on top of that? The rapid sharing tool Cortex - probably the fastest way to post links to Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper and Tumblr. Click your mouse, hold for two seconds and that circle shows up. Move over one of the sections and you're on your way to sharing a link.

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Embedly makes beautiful use of web standards. Cortex is still a little rough around the edges; it could use a character count-down for Twitter, for example, and it takes some getting used to before it's easy to control. It's worth trying for a while, though.

What's the third? ReadOn.ly, a simple little bookmarklet that makes it easy to share links with fly-out quotes and tags that can be navigated to view all the most interesting quotes on a given topic found by other users. It's a really cool little service. There are others like it, see Sniply, for example, and each of them brings a different design element to the nascent field of content curation. There's clearly a whole lot of room for development in the field of curation and sharing.

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Fliptop, a new content subscription service, is one of several companies presenting at this week's DEMO conference in Palm Springs. Among a large group of startups, this was one of the first to catch my eye, making me think "wow, I need that!" In short, what Fliptop offers is a simple way to subscribe to a website's content. But unlike traditional RSS feeds, which just offer a direct feed which must be added to an RSS reader like Google Reader or FeedDemon, Fliptop's service provides more features, like the option to filter content by keyword, follow only select topics or categories and the ability to receive email digests of the just content you're interested in.

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For Web Publishers

The Fliptop service is available in two formats - one designed for website publishers and another designed for web surfers. The first provides an embeddable button that publishers can add to their site. When clicked, this button prompts the user as to which topics they want to follow. A sports site could set it up so fans could just check boxes next to their favorite team names, for instance. Another option below the checkboxes lets you further refine the content you choose by keyword filters. So, here on ReadWriteWeb.com, for example, you could follow news about "mobile, real-time web, apple" etc. (Keywords are separated by commas).

After picking your options, you click "Next" and then choose how you want to be alerted - either via a traditional RSS feed or by email, Twitter, Facebook, or SMS text. If choosing the email option, you can even configure how often you want to be alerted - once per day, once a week or immediately.

For Consumers

However, you don't have to rely on publishers to begin using Fliptop before you can try it. A browser bookmarklet is available which lets you drag-and-drop a Fliptop button to your web browser's bookmarks. Click the new "Subscribe" button it creates when you're on any page that has an RSS feed (look for the orange icon in the address bar of your browser). When clicked, you can configure how you want to follow that site. At the moment, your only options here are email or RSS.

The service is simple, incredibly easy to use and useful for anyone who feels overwhelmed by their news feeds. (Gadget blog readers, rejoice! This product is perfect for you!).

The only downside to the service as it stands right now is that it requires you to fill out CAPTCHAs when signing up. These spam blocking tools force you to type in the blurry words you see into a text box before confirming your subscription. And if requesting an email subscription, you then have to click yet another confirmation sent to you via email to assure Fliptop that you really did want to subscribe. We appreciate that the company is looking out for us, but two confirmations is at least one too many for what should be a speedier service, in our opinion.

Will Fliptop Make Website Subscriptions More Mainstream?

The real question now is whether something like Fliptop will encourage more people to follow a website's content via an automated mechanism, be it a customized, filtered RSS feed or an email digest. The idea of subscribing to a website directly via an RSS feed is one that, for whatever reason, never quite caught on with the general public. However, those same folks probably use RSS without even knowing it - like when they follow their favorite blog on Facebook, for example. The updates they track there are, in most cases, automated via RSS technology.

Fliptop could potentially reach these same sort of non-technical users too, thanks to its simple terminology (publisher buttons say "follow" not "subscribe"), a clean layout and easily understandable filtering options. Now it's just a matter of waiting to see if any web publishers pick this up and place it on their site.

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