Yesterday, Google announced the winners of the Android Developer Challenge I, a contest that awarded cash prizes to the most innovative and promising applications designed for the upcoming mobile OS, Android. The ten top teams received $275,000 and 10 other teams received $100,000. The ADC Gallery lists all the winners as well as the finalists.

Although Google has already named their winners, we decided to browse through the gallery to find the apps that we're most excited to use. Some of the apps, like for example, cab4me, may have been declared a winner, but we know not everyone lives in a major metropolitan area where hailing a taxi is a part of everyday life. Instead, we picked out some apps that have more universal appeal. They are as follows:

The App That Backs Up Our Contacts: PhoneBook 2.0

An app that backs up your contacts for you to a remote server can give you piece of mind in case your phone is ever lost or stolen. However, the app isn't just a backup tool. PhoneBook 2.0 combines mobile social networking with your address book to let you share your mood, location, and photos with your friends.

The App That Keeps Us From Getting Lost: BreadCrumbz

Sure, sure, the phone has Google Maps, but BreadCrumbz is even better. Instead of getting directions, you get picture-based routes so you know to turn at that huge oak tree or the building with the blue awning. Your friends can make routes for you and record them with the camera and GPS.

The App(s) That Save Us Money: CompareEverywhere and GoCart

There are not one, but two, apps that basically do the same thing: compare prices and save us money. Using the camera, you can "scan" the barcode of an item by snapping a picture. The app will then comparison shop for you. You can read online reviews and even create price alerts if the price drops. CompareEverywhere also lets you use the GPS to find nearby stores and then call them directly.

The App That Lets Us Store Files in the Cloud: Teradesk e-Storage

This one wasn't a grand prize winner, but looks like a handy app to have around. With Teradesk, you can store files in the cloud with file transfers that allow for pause control, resume, and full recovery of broken transfers. You can share files with friends via Bluetooth and MMS and the app even integrates with Google Docs.

The App That Keeps Us Informed: Life360

There were several of these "alerting" apps, but only one that won the grand prize. Life360 is an app that sends you messages from your family and local community. You can be alerted to a danger in the community (rabid dog on the loose!), but you can also just receive messages from family, too (mom's running late today). This is a personalized alert system that displays only the messages you need to hear.

The App That Lets Us IM And Blog: Maverick

No Google phone would be complete without an app that lets us use GoogleTalk to IM our friends. Maverick lets you exchange messages, location, and multimedia content in the form of audio clips, photos and scribbles (drawings created on the mobile phone) with other Maverick clients, Gtalk users, or iChat users. You can also use the app to publish content to Blogger.

The App(s) For Social Music: TuneWiki or Diggin

Another case of having two great apps - this time, for music. TuneWiki won the grand prize with their social music maps that displays audio, video, and lyrics. You can also use the GPS to see what other people are playing nearby in real-time. Although only a finalist, Diggin looks interesting, too. This app lets you listen to thousands of streaming radio stations and downloads the album art for what you're listening to automatically.

The App That Lets Us Whiteboard With Colleagues: ShareYourBoard

Did your co-worker miss the meeting? Now you can get them up to speed with ShareYourBoard. Designed specifically to capture and enhance whiteboard images with edge detection, geometry transformations and image enhancement, ShareYourBoard takes great pics in any angle, any lighting, and with any type of whiteboard or markers used.

The App That Tells Our Phone How To Behave: Locale

Maybe you shouldn't have those rockin' ringtones turned on at the office...and perhaps that wallpaper is a bit inappropriate, too. Instead of having to adjust your profiles yourself, you can use an app that knows how to do so automatically. Using Android's built-in GPS, Locale will let you set up "Situations" (like At Work, At Home, In a Meeting, etc) which you can have automatically triggered by setting conditions like location (via the GPS), time, or other conditions which you add. The app can then adjust your ringtone, wallpaper, and other settings automatically.

The App That Scans Our Eyeball and Saves Our Passwords: BioWallet

Honestly we wouldn't care what this app did, but it happens to be a "safe wallet" that stores sensitive information (passwords, certificates, documents, conversations, notes, pictures, etc.). The info can only be accessed through iris or handwritten signature based authentication. Oh come on! It does retina scanning! We didn't get an Android phone to play space monkey games, now did we? This one delivers pure geek cred.

Yahoo's wildly popular photo sharing site Flickr is a lot of fun to use, but it really helps to take some time and learn how to use it well. We've recently engaged more seriously with Flickr and wanted to share some quick tips that we think will help you get more out of it, too.

Some people want to know how to do marketing on Flickr or use Flickr in nonprofit organizations, but in this post we're going to talk about ways you can enjoy the Flickr more for any purpose.

Set Up Publishing By Phone

The single biggest factor in changing our relationship with Flickr has been taking the time to set up publishing for photos taken by mobile phone. It's really quite easy. Just go to the email tab in your Flickr account and make note of the unique email address for you to post. Then pick up your phone, create a new contact named Flickr and enter that email for the contact.

Now take a photo and send it by MMS (Multimedia Message Service) to your buddy Flickr. Like magic, that photo will be published to your Flickr account. The subject line of the email will be the title, any text in the body will be a description. Knock yourself out, it's super fun. I don't know why it took us so long to figure out how this works, but we're betting that many of you haven't yet either.

Turn on Creative Commons Licensing

It's easy to turn the default setting for new photos uploaded to Creative Commons Attribution (our favorite) by visiting the Privacy & Permissions tab in your account. Unfortunately there's not clear, working links from Flickr to an explanation of the different licenses. Here they are on the Creative Commons site.

CC Attribution is a license that says other people can use it and change it, including in a commercial context, as long as they give you attribution as the creator. It greases the wheels for quick and easy media sharing. That's good and it would be nice if more quality media was licensed this way. We keep a link to the Creative Commons by Attribution search on Flickr in our browser toolbar and use it frequently for photos in posts. Those could be your photos we and others are using!

Take Even Better Photos

Attendees of the Gnomedex conference this year (which was a huge home run, by the way) were treated to an opening session with photographer Kris Krug about how to take better photos. That session isn't available yet in video, but Krug is a fun guy to pay attention to. Other popular photography bloggers worth checking out for inspiration and occasional instruction include Thomas Hawk (see his January post Top 10 Hacks on Flickr), Scott Beale (one of our 10 favorite sources for finding wonderful things), Epic Edits (see their post Five Fantastic Flickr Photographers), Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir and Jeremy Cowart. We're sure readers here can share some more good ones.

Those folks are all fancy pants, though, and many of us just want to have fun posting photos from our phones. Check out this handy 5 minute video from VideoJug about how to take better mobile phone photos. Thanks go to Amit Agarwal again for posting this one last year. We're excited to try out some of these tips.

Share Screen Shots

Another way we've been using Flickr lately has been to share screen shots of interesting things we find online. Some of us here at RWW use Jing for this, others use the beautiful Mac app Skitch.

People like interesting screen shots and these apps make it really easy to shoot them up to your Flickr account with just a click. The reigning king of this practice right now is Chris Messina, but you don't have to be a super-early adopter to make screen shots on Flickr useful. Skitch makes annotation easy as well and sharing annotated screen shots is a great way to explain things to people.

Turn on Your Grease Monkey

We use a number of Grease Monkey scripts that enhance the Flickr experience. If you aren't familiar with Grease Monkey, you must learn about it because it's great. See our recent post How to Start Using GreaseMonkey in Under 5 Minutes. Specifically, we use:

• FlickrPM puts links to viewing and profile options in all the right places, where they aren't right now on Flickr.


• GreasedLightbox sets up real quick little image slide shows from almost any page. It can also be a pain to use when you're on Flickr, to tell the truth. It works better on Ffffound, which is another great site if you like imagery.


• AutoPagerize lets you zip through page after page of Flickr photos with no clicking or page load delays.

What are your favorite GreaseMonkey scripts for Flickr?

Use a Bulk Uploader

Grabbing a whole bunch of photos from your computer and putting them on Flickr is easier than you might think. We think Flickr's own bulk uploader is fun to use. Thomas Hawk prefers JUploadr.

GeoTag Your Photos

Did you know you can open a drop-down menu in the Flickr search box and search by location? You can also go directly to http://flickr.com/map and search by location. Flickr, all of Yahoo really, does a great job understanding location data - but you've got to play to win, you know? Many people (ourselves, for example) have never found geotagging on Flickr very easy to do.

Enter this awesome bookmarklet from startup Loc.alize.us. It makes geotagging your photos super easy, if not downright fun. You can increase your discoverability, participate in the geotagging scene and feel smarter by grabbing that bookmarklet, renaming it in your browser toolbar and then going to town. Which town? You'll be surprised by the sophistication of Flickr's comprehension of location information.

Follow the Flickr Blog To Keep Up to Date

Flickr has a really active community and thriving forums, but subscribing to the company blog is a good idea to stay up to date with new features. If you don't want to read all the entries there, and some of them are more important than others, then consider subscribing to just the highly discussed posts from the company.

Have Fun Off-site

It's not just on Flickr itself that you can have fun with your posted photos.

Last week Flickr released a handy slide show tool for embedding slide shows of your or any photos on a blog or social network.

There are lots of great ways to visualize Flickr photos by tag, but Tag Galaxy will probably knock your socks off if you haven't seen it before.

Turning on Flickr sharing in FriendFeed is a great way to bring more of your friends into the photo part of your life. You can hook up with the RWW staff's personal FriendFeed accounts here if you'd like to see our photos and other activities.

Dave Winer's FlickrFan is a screen saver slide show of Flickr photos from you, your friends and some important international news agencies. It can be a little tricky to set up but it's a lot of fun to use.

If you're coocoo for cocoa puffs over these kinds of tools in general, check out this long, long list of Flickr tools from QuickOnlineTips.com.

How do You Like to Use Flickr?

These are some of our favorite tips for using Flickr but we're sure many of our readers can suggest even more. Flickr is a canonical service in the Web 2.0 world. It's really worth spending some more time with. With less time than it took you to read this whole article, we think you can set up some systems that will make Flickr a much more enjoyable part of your life.

Today, Comcast announced that it will amend its Acceptable Use Policy and add a clause to it that will establish a "monthly data use threshold" of 250 GB per month. This effectively puts a cap on the amount a Comcast user can download per month and codifies an informal policy Comcast was already enforcing. While 250GB is a large amount of data right now, it won't be once a large number users start watching HD streams which can easily take up numerous GB per hours.

That's a Lot of Data

Comcast's announcement tries to put this limit into context. According to Comcast, 250GB amount to:

• 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
• 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
• 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
• uploading 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

It's interesting that, judging from this, Comcast seems to add up uploads (photos) and downloads to get to these 250GB, making it an even smaller number - especially for those who upload large numbers of photos or videos, and, of course, for those who share a lot of files on Bittorrent. In Comcast's defense, the cap is agnostic to what service you use to burn up those gigabytes.

But Not if You Are a Power User

Comcast also cites that the median monthly usage be customer is 2-3GB a month. While some commentators have thought that this number is too low, we don't think it really is. For most broadband customers, broadband is simply always-on Internet. They don't necessarily make use of al the services available to them.

The problem here, however, is that the more advanced users also tend to use an exponentially larger amount of data. A standard movie might clock in at 2GB, but an HD movie can take easily take up more than 10GB.

It's All About Video

Also, these kind of limits are bound to stifle innovation in the streaming video business - and not even necessarily because people will start running out of bandwidth, but because there will always be a little voice that will keep nagging Comcast's users that they might be hitting the data cap if they download that movie.

We have to admit, though, that 250GB are a pretty high cap and, as Larry Dignan points out, it sure beats having metered Internet access. However, looking into the future, 250GB might be nothing once more people start using more data-intensive applications.

Will it be the end of the Internet as we know it, especially once other ISPs start announcing similar caps? Probably not - but it might just put a damper on the Internet we had envisioned for the future.

Flickr image courtesy of dmuth

If you think regular online dating is still too slow and inconvenient, SpeedDate.com might just be the thing for you. The San Mateo based online dating service just raised $6 million in a Series B round from Menlo Ventures after raising a Series A round for the same amount in January 2007. SpeedDate.com sets itself apart from its competitors by allowing its users to quickly set up short webcam conversations.

According to SpeedDate.com, it hosts over 100,000 online speed dates a day. Part of this growth is surely due to the fact that SpeedDate.com is also a very popular application on MySpace, Beebo, and Facebook (though it was banned there for a while in July). Because of this, it is hard to track exactly how popular the site is, but according to Google Trends for Websites, the site is indeed growing at a rapid clip and a lot of its growth seems to come from outside of the United States.

While the press release doesn't go into any detail, it seems safe to assume that the company needed a new infusion of money to sustain its rapid growth. While a lot of its competitors are for-pay, SpeedDate has adopted a free model, though it is considering the addition of a premium as well.

Online dating is a competitive field, where large entities like Match.com, eHarmony, and Yahoo Personals seem to dominate, but at the same time, other sites like Randomate, WooMe, or OmniDate have been able to carve out a niche for themselves by putting different twists on the online dating model. SpeedDate.com, though, with its instant webcam conversations, looks like it stands a good chance to continue growing in this competitive field.

We were pretty excited when we first heard about Sweetcron, a self-hosted lifestreaming application developed by Yongfook. Today, after a bit of a delay, Sweetcron has finally released its software and we immediately downloaded and installed it ourselves. While it is still pretty barebone, Sweetcron represents a great solution for those who don't necessarily want to participate in the discussions on Friendfeed, but still would like to set up a lifestream.

Installation

Sweetcron is a self-hosted service, so you will need access to a server with PHP and MySQL running on it. After downloading the code, the install is pretty typical for that of self-hosted application. It's a bit more complicated than installing Wordpress or OpenTape, because you have to enter your data in numerous places and you have to edit your .htaccess when you want to install Sweetcron in a sub-directory.However, if you just follow the steps in the documentation, you should be able to install Sweetcron in less than 10 minutes.

After this, you just start adding your RSS feeds, and you are ready to go.

Final Result

The lifestream itself looks and works just like you would expect it, with a number of little surprises. One of the nicest features of Sweetcron is that it can format every new entry according to where it came from. A digg item, for example, gets a blue background, a Flickr items shows the photo on a green background with the caption underneath, and Twitter posts show in a blue box with your avatar in the top left corner (as long as you uploaded your avatar into the right spot in Sweetcron's directory structure).

By default, Sweetcron updates your stream every 30 minutes, but you can also set the cron service on your server to update more frequently.

You can write your own posts in Sweetcron as well, but the editor doesn't handle anything else but pure text and HTML code.

Bring Your Own Services

As of now, Sweetcron only creates your lifestream - if you want to add comments, Sweetcron recommends you install Disqus, and if you want to have a contact form on your site, it recommends you head over to wufoo to create one.

The two default themes are nice, especially the "Boxy but Good" one you can see in the screenshots here. Over time, others will surely start developing more themes and hacking the existing themes doesn't seem too hard.

Verdict

Sweetcron does exactly what it promises to do. It is important to note, though, that this is not a Friendfeed-in-a-box type service. Your lifestream stands completely separate from every other Sweetcron service (though you could create a master feed for a group by patching all the RSS feeds together and running them through another Sweetcron installation).

For those who just want to have a lifestream on their blog, for example, Sweetcron is a great solution, especially if you don't mind hacking Sweetcron to fit your own needs.

There are, of course, various other self-hosted applications that have a similar feature set (see Mark Krysnky's list here), and many of them come as Wordpress plugins, making their installation very easy. Few, though, give you the flexibility of Sweetcron.

For all its supposed simplicity, Really Simple Syndication or RSS has continued to confuse and intimidate millions of people online years after its introduction. What can be done to make RSS more mainstream? Google plans to roll out a small but simple feature that could go a long way. We wouldn't be surprised to see every blog publishing service follow suit.

"Follow this blog" is a clear call to action and those words will soon grace the header of every blog on Blogger.com around the web. When users click that link they'll be taken to either a tab on their Blogger dashboard, presumably if they have an account and are logged in, or be introduced to Google Reader, the company's RSS reader. It's a simple, brilliant plan and we wonder what took so long.

What it Will Look Like

As this new feature is rolled out over the coming weeks, it appears that users will be brought to three key screens.

Blogger users will now see a mini version of Google Reader in their dashboards.

Apologies for the blurry pic, that's what Google posted.

Google Reader users will get a new folder for "blogs I'm following," and new users will apparently be shown Common Craft's fabulous 1 minute introduction to Google Reader.

Why It Matters

RSS is life and work changing technology. It's what makes an ecosystem of blogs possible by lowering the investment required by readers to follow and support a larger number of blogs than they would visit manually. It's what keeps those podcasts coming after you might have forgotten to download episode after episode. It makes search an ongoing practice instead of a one-off shot in the dark. RSS is huge, but the name alone intimidates many people who ought to be diving into it.

Surveys over the years have offered a wide range of estimates of the extent of mainstream RSS adoption. We know, though, that many many people do not ever use the technology.

"Follow" is clear language that we expect to go over well. It aims at the long held goal of getting people to use RSS without asking them to embrace the acronym. Update: Several people have argued since we posted this that "follow" will be far more clear to young users of social media sites like Facebook than to older users. Do you think "follow" is still too unclear? We think it's pretty good, but let us know in comments or the poll on the right.

We expect that Blogger.com blogs will see a big increase in subscribers following this change and we would not be at all surprised if other blogging platforms, Wordpress in particular, roll out "follow" language and links soon if the Google move is well received.

When Google acquired the microblogging service Jaiku in October of last year, many people had high hopes for Jaiku's future. Would a Google-flavored Twitter soon show up everywhere from iGoogle to the upcoming Android handset, we wondered? Instead, news from the company slowed to a trickle and the doors stayed locked to newcomers - signs that many took to mean Google had essentially abandoned the service. But today, things are happening at Jaiku once again - most notably, unlimited invites are now available. Is Jaiku poised to make a comeback?

At the time of the acquisition by Google, Jaiku was a promising competitor to Twitter. This was before presidential debates were taking place via tweets or the Mars Phoenix Lander was announcing the discovery of ice on Mars. In fact, in many ways, Jaiku was thought to be the superior service, considering its features like threaded conversations, easy group creation, and RSS import. But once Google got its hands on the service, a whole lot of nothing seemed to happen.

Now, we're tentatively raising our hopes once again. As VentureBeat reports, Jaiku is back after several days spent offline in a move to Google's datacenters as they continue their move to Google's App Engine service, the Google answer to Amazon's web services stack. In addition, there is now a brand-new TOS that existing users must accept upon login, which brings the original up to Google standards, presumably.

However, what's most exciting is that users now have unlimited invites to share with their friends, a step we hope is just the first of many in Jaiku's rebirth. Yet, as exciting as a Google Twitter-like service is, so much time has passed that Twitter has the market share and mindshare of those that want to participate in a micro-blogging community. Jaiku has a long battle ahead if they truly want to compete now.

There has been a lot of speculation recently about an impending update to iTunes. Version 8.0, among other things, is supposed to finally bring a recommendation engine to the digital media player application. While that's interesting from a music discovery perspective, it is even more interesting to consider what this could mean in terms of an iTunes+iPhone based social networking experience.

iTunes (launched 2001) and the iTunes music store (launched 2003) have come a long way since they were first launched. The application has gone through various iterations, gaining significant features such as podcasts (2005), videos (2007), games, and applications (2008) along the way. In the process, selling billions of songs, millions of movies, and over 10 million applications in the first week of the app store's launch. Needless to say Apple has built an experience that with all it's parts combined is unparalleled in both its features and the breadth of its catalog of content.

The Software Side

While most of that is common knowledge, what most people overlook is the glaring lack of any community aspect to iTunes. There are millions of people, many of them with similar tastes, flocking to the same destination every day, yet they never interact with each other... because they can't. If Kevin Rose is to be believed, however, (as discussed on TWiT 157) that all is about to change with iTunes 8.0.

He says, '... the one thing I hear about iTunes 8.0 is that it's gonna do something along the lines of, um, looking at your music, and, uh, kind of recommendations based on certain things.' In other words, the next version of iTunes will monitor your media purchasing and consuming habits and correlate them with everyone else using the system to figure out which songs you will probably like but haven't bought/listened to. If you're a fan of collaborative filtering systems or internet radio (Pandora, Last.fm, etc), you're probably familiar with the idea already and that iTunes may be considering implementing this doesn't come as a surprise (I found myself wondering why this wasn't introduced 2-3 years ago).

While this feature itself isn't social and can be implemented entirely on the back end, the implementation required for that functionality is so close to a networked experience (monitoring of habits and correlation across users) that they might as well take a small next step and add a visible social layer with which those users can interact. In fact, if you look at the results from a 2006 iTunes survey, you will see the people want to be able to see what people with similar interests and tastes (i.e. friends) are purchasing and consuming, so they can experiment with and pick from the same selection. More specifically, consumers want:

1. The ability to view a friend's wish list, with permission.
2. The ability to view what a friend is currently listening to, with permission.
3. The ability to view a friend's playlist, with permission.
4. The ability to view a friend's recent purchases, with permission.
5. The ability to view a friend's favorite artists, with permission

What's also interesting about this approach is that it reaches the exact opposite conclusions of EMR's UK social networking study [PDF]. The study implies that social networks will be the content distribution channels of tomorrow, but the relationship may actually work better in the other direction. With the addition of networking and recommendation features to iTunes, the application could become the most efficient, most engaging, stickiest (always-on), and most profitable social network almost overnight.

But Apple's social networking potential doesn't end there. Remember Microsoft's 'welcome to the social' campaign that centered around the launch of its Zune digital media player? If you don't, you're not alone. The goal behind the campaign, 'to create a shared, social experience that will be shaped by the collective imagination of consumers and will inspire discovery of new music and artists,' was actually a formidable one. Unfortunately an inferior device, coupled with disasterous software integration made the campaign a $100 million failure.

Enter Apple.

The Hardware Side

With a formidable install base, great hardware and one of the most versatile mobile operating systems around, the iPhone is ready to herald in the future of mobile social networking. Furthermore, with 3G/EDGE/WiFi/GPS capabilities, the iPhone is a great tool for both networking as well as wirelessly sharing digital media like the Zune promised (but failed miserably at). Not only does the device work seamlessly with the iTunes software, but Apple's DRM is more consistent and perhaps more forgiving that Microsoft's (which was partly responsible for crippling the Zune's ambitions).

The Cloud

With a firm grasp on the software side with iTunes and on the hardware side with the iPhone, Apple is in good shape. Their killer app, however, could end up being the cloud. Apple already operates MobileMe (previously .Mac) which faciliates the management of contacts, calendars (events), email, photos, and any other files or digital media. Admittedly the service has been an utter failure since launch, but Apple has acknowledge the failure and is on the path to fix its shortcomings.

The previously discussed iTunes social networking and collaborative filtering (recommendations) system, coupled with the iPhone's versatile wireless communication and media sharing capabilities, topped off with media and information management (and sharing) in the cloud, the combo is no doubt ready to be our digital life (and relationship) manager. The only limitation of the network, however, (and it will be a deal breaker for many) is that unlike every other social network today, the experience will come at a steep cost. Knowing Apple though, I have no doubt it will be an experience worth the cost (especially considering what they had to deal with at the MobileMe launch).

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.