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Amazon’s content delivery service is hoping to make its money by allowing customers to pay as they go when using the service. Pricing has not been made public.

While the initial content delivery offering won’t compete with the major CDNs like Akamai…and Limelight…when it is released, it has the potential to down the road if Amazon adds some specific product functionality.

According to an Amazon Web services blog posted Thursday:

Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels wrote in a separate blog that his company is “expanding the cloud” with this service: “Using a global network of edge locations this new service can deliver popular data stored in Amazon S3 to customers around the globe through local access.”

This new (and as yet unnamed) service will provide you with a high performance way to distribute popular, publicly readable content to your customers all over the world, with low latency and high data transfer rates.

Amazon’s service will allow customers to store their content in an Amazon S3 holding tank and then mark it as publicly readable when its ready. According to Amazon, customers will then “make a single API call to register the bucket” and have a domain name assigned for their content. When clients “request the object via the returned domain name they’ll be routed to a nearest edge location,” which aims to deliver content at high speeds.

GigaOm’s Om Malik said that Amazon’s service will be disruptive to content delivery network (CDN) incumbents, such as Akamai and Limelight Networks:

Clarification at 8 a.m. PDT: The Amazon.com Web services blog posting was not written by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. He wrote a related blog on the subject.

Seeking Alpha’s Dan Rayburn agrees, with one caveat:

Amazon.com is in the midst of creating a new content delivery service aimed at developers and businesses that it expects to launch by year’s end.

Amazon is going to bring a level of transparency to a business that has a sales model much like an brokerage firm in the 1980s. Amazon wants to make buying CDN services as simple as buying a book. Amazon executives told me that company is going to be charging its customers on usage instead of long-term contracts current players foist on their clients.

Cuil will launch on Monday, and in a refreshing (and gutsy) move, the site is just plain launching. There’s no weasely “beta” tag applied to the service. Costello thinks it’ll be good enough to use from day one.

It won’t, though, be as complete as Google. While Google has had failures in extending its brand (Froogle, Google Base), its collection of services that are affiliated with its mainstream search product, like Google Maps, Image Search, and desktop search, can make switching away from Google difficult for users. Costello realizes that Cuil needs to layer in additional services, but as he said to me, the company has to start somewhere.

Cuil's homepage.

As a business proposition, Cuil is obviously a big bet. While search is a monetizable business, it’s hard to change the behavior of a generation of Web users who think “Google” is a verb. No other search engine has come close to entering the public consciousness like this. Of course, Cuil doesn’t have to trounce Google on day one. It took Google quite some time to surpass Alta Vista and Yahoo in the search wars.

I have not had a chance to spend much time with the engine. I’m getting open access to it the same time you are. I did get a preview. It’s a very serious effort, and it has enough funding to get off the ground and become a player.

The most important difference between Cuil and Google is its ranking system. Rather than assigning priority to pages based on inbound links as Google does (”Pagerank”), Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to divine their relevance to a search query. Costello bristled when I asked if this was a semantic search engine like PowerSet (recently sold to Microsoft). Costello said Cuil’s search is “contextual,” and that, “we’re trying to understand the real world, not the Web.”

The service also displays images from Web results whenever possible. It all adds up to search results pages that are much more attractive, and useful, than Google’s.

Context-based indexing also presents a juicier target for search spammers, but as Costello says, “that’s a success problem.”

What this means, in the real world, is that Cuil results are automatically categorized. When you search for a common name, for example, Cuil will give you a result page where results for different individuals with that name are groups under tabs. It will also break out sub-topics related to each name. In Cuil’s canned demo, if you search for “Harry,” there are different tabs for “Harry Potter” and “Prince Harry of Wales.” On the Harry Potter tab, you’ll get further sub-links devoted to actors, Gryffindor dorm-mates, etc. “We have a strong ontological commitment,” Costello told me, meaning that parsing search results into readable chunks is a very big part of the Cuil value proposition.

See also: Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, Hakia, etc.

Cuil really does a better job of displaying search results.

It’s one thing to have a nice interface and show users good results, but the size of the Web index that the engine has access to matters a lot as well. And this is where Cuil makes its boldest claim. Costello says that the engine is launching with 120 billion pages indexed, well over the 40 billion he says Google has (although see Google’s latest bluster about the company’s power at Web indexing). Costello also claims that Cuil’s Web crawler is three times faster than Google’s, although it wasn’t clear to me if he meant that is per search computer or for the entire system. Compared with Google’s globe-spanning data network of data centers, some literally set up near dams so they can tap hydro power more efficiently, Cuil’s two puny data centers hosting less than 2,000 PCs total will have to run pretty fast to outpace Google’s crawlers.

Another potential advantage of the context-based search is that it allows Cuil searches to be more respectful of user privacy. Unlike Google, which simply has to track every single click to refine its index, Cuil’s context-based search does not. In practice, the distinction may be moot because Cuil will need to track clicks to see if their results are actually working for people, but it could serve as a marketable distinction.

Upshot: Cuil is certainly worth trying out. If you like it, services to put it in front of your face (a browser toolbar, and widgets) are coming soon.

There’s a big new search engine launching Monday: Cuil. Developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, it’s pitched as bigger, faster, and better than Google’s flagship search engine in pretty much every way. See video interview with Tom Costello, below.

(Credit:
Cuil)

Google announced last October that it was partnering with Nielsen to allow companies that buy its Google TV Ads to find out how many people actually watch the ads. The partnership gave Google access to Nielsen’s demographic data from aggregated set-top boxes so advertisers can see which ads are effective and can get additional aggregate information about the viewers, such as age and gender, according to Nielsen.

Google officially entered the television ad business in April 2007 when it announced it was partnering with EchoStar to sell commercials over the Dish satellite broadcaster’s 125 national programming networks. Under the EchoStar deal, advertisers use Google’s AdWords automated auction interface to bid on ad spots. Advertisers can upload their TV commercials and select the desired time of day and channel, as well as choose regional or national area coverage.

Google is partnering with NBC Universal to act as broker for TV advertising times on some NBC cable channels.

“The Google TV Ads platform is making television advertising more accountable and measurable and we’re pleased with our progress to date,” Tim Armstrong, Google’s president of Advertising and Commerce, said in a statement. “Our partnership with NBCU will help us bring the power of television to a broader set of advertisers as well as give our current advertisers increased reach through our system.”

The partnership will focus on the Sci Fi, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC, Sleuth, and Chiller channels, with the possibility of adding more channels in the future, the companies said.

NBC Universal will offer advertising time from several of its cable networks for Google to sell through its Google TV Ads service as part of a multiyear advertising, research, and technology partnership, the companies announced Monday in a joint statement.

NBC Universal and Google also plan to work together to adapt the Google TV Ad service for use in local TV markets. They are also collaborating on custom marketing and research projects using Google TV Ads to survey audience trends.

“With the addition of NBC Universal inventory, advertisers using the Google TV Ads platform can reach NBCU Cable’s national audience and gain access to viewership data at an unprecedented scale,” NBC Universal and Google said in a statement.

The Google TV Ads service, which launched in partnership with EchoStar Communications in May, can report second-by-second TV usage data, allowing advertisers to measure viewership of their ads more precisely.

So, in a relatively short period of time, the social structure has flipped. For as it is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the earth.

The future historians of the nerd ascendancy will likely note that the great empowerment phase began in the 1980s with the rise of Microsoft and the digital economy. Nerds began making large amounts of money and acquired economic credibility, the seedbed of social prestige. The information revolution produced a parade of highly confident nerd moguls–Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin and so on.

Over the years, I’ve become inured to David Brooks’ predictable platitudes about politics and culture. He’s been wrong so often on the big story of our times–the war–that I automatically tune out his musings on contemporary culture. But after stewing all weekend about his most recent New York Times column, I’ve got to get this off my chest.

The news that being a geek is cool has apparently not permeated either junior high schools or the Republican Party. George Bush plays an interesting role in the tale of nerd ascent. With his professed disdain for intellectual things, he’s energized and alienated the entire geek cohort, and with it most college-educated Americans under 30. Newly militant, geeks are more coherent and active than they might otherwise be.

And let’s not forget the likes of Hewlett-Packard and other sundry start-ups, which put Silicon Valley on the map. But that was long before the emergence of the era of 24/7 naval-gazing, so I suppose that doesn’t count as much today.

Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the
iPhone hordes. They honor him with videos and posters that combine aesthetic mastery with unabashed hero-worship. People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.

Um, sure David. On the basis of the most flimsy evidence, we’re expected to believe that a fundamental societal transformation is under way. I suppose that’s not as over the top as your Candyland declarations cheerleading our way into Iraq. But it’s as equally rooted in unreality.

(Credit:
http://www.pocketprotectors.com )

Writing about the ascent of the “alpha geek”–a contradiction in terms?–Brooks cobbles together a series of easy generalizations regularly tossed around as shorthand to explain more complex developments. Call it cliche as socio-economic analysis. To wit:

The iPhone hordes! Hide the women and children before they get “i-mashed.” Hoo boy. Brooks must have received special dispensation from The New York Times copy desk because this is rhetorical overkill to the point of being ridiculous. If there’s a political darling among the nerd set these days, it’s probably Ron Paul (though Obama definitely has the coolness factor). But defining a generation by the popularity of a commercial product is a Madison Avenue cliche waiting to be born. Maybe the ghost of Lionel Trilling will get so worked up about the cacophony of the blogosphere it will soon haunt the ramparts of Columbia’s Morningside Heights.

If anyone has the address of this “geek cohort,” please pass it along. Until then, I think that’s utter hogwash. I’ve watched several generations of college-educated Americans under 30 and beyond and, truth be told, there’s nothing in that history to suggest the current crop’s presumed group sensibility is going to last into middle age. And the only “newly militant geeks” I can point to usually surface when Twitter goes haywire during another of its prolonged brown-outs.

At last he didn’t peddle past the idea of the techno-elite as a tribe of bad-smelling, social losers with barely enough sense to wipe the snot off their faces. But Brooks’ assignment of a present-at-the-creation date for the “nerd ascendency” to Microsoft and the digital economy in the 1980s is subjective. He could just have easily moved the time line back to around the birth of Fairchild Semiconductor and the myriad successful tech companies later founded by its alumni.

“(Businesses) will rush to the community and try to connect, but essentially they won’t have a mutual purpose, and they’ll fail,” Sarner said. By a “mutual purpose,” he means a way to serve both the company putting out the campaign and the audience interacting with it: finding that balance is not easy. The quirkiest and most addictive campaigns often provide little value for the company and turn out to be fads, whereas marketing efforts on the Web often don’t go over as well with the public.

Adam Sarner, an analyst with market research firm Gartner, has projected that over 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies with Web sites will have undertaken some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes. But, he added in an interview with CNET News, 50 percent of those campaigns will be classified as failures.

There’s obviously no universal solution to social-media advertising and marketing, because every company is different. But Sarner offered a preliminary tip: to make sure that there’s a clear reason why such a campaign is instituted, and “get people talking” isn’t enough. “Are you discovering what’s going to be the new black next season?” he suggested as an example of a trendspotting-focused strategy.

He cited the Facebook craze as an example. The social network is “more for the community than it is for the bottom line,” and it’s tough for marketers to get their message in on a site that’s focused on communicating with your friends rather than finding stuff to buy. One of its more business-savvy advertising options, Beacon, on the other hand, was “more about the business trying to get value than it is actually about the customer.” Some Facebook users didn’t like it, and a public backlash ensued.

For some companies, a Second Life campaign would be a good idea if you were distinctly trying to target that segment of the population, Sarner explained, and could use the 3D technology to actually come up with something innovative. He cited the example of electric
cars. “If Honda has a new car and it’s going to be purely electric, you could’ve set a Second Life campaign up that’s promotional in nature,” he said. “The futurism angle of an electric car, it kind of fits the people in that segment.”

The problem with one of the most visible failures in social-media marketing–the number of brands that rushed headlong into virtual world Second Life two years ago–was that nobody was asking or answering those questions, Sarner said. Companies simply built “virtual headquarters” in the hope that Second Life would gain mass appeal, and then it failed to budge from its status as a niche forum for subculture and futurism.

Once you’ve answered that question, it’s time to pick and choose: whether to use existing technologies or build them in-house, whether the focus should be video or discussion or Digg-like yes-no voting, ad nauseam.

When asked whether the faltering economy will mean that businesses are cutting back on this largely unproven field of social media for marketing or customer relations, Sarner said he didn’t think so, and that many businesses will turn to the Web to stay in touch with consumers during a difficult financial climate. “This is going to be a lifeline,” he said. “You don’t ruin your customers, and your spirit of customers is probably the only thing you have.”

Sarner’s research deduced that by 2012, fully half of all purchases, whether online or offline, will have some Web-based component to them. That could mean searching for product reviews, reading about a new product on a blog, or comparing prices even if the purchase is ultimately made in a store.

Sarner plans to present his results at the annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008, which takes place October 12-16 in Orlando, Fla.

Gentry said there are no leads in the case, but the police will be inspecting video surveillance tapes from adjacent stores. Hervey said the party is taking extra precautions to prevent any further break-ins.

The break-in, incidentally, took place the night before Sen. John McCain spoke in Independence and Michelle Obama made an appearance in Kansas City, Mo. With 11 electoral votes up for grabs, Missouri is a critical swing state in the presidential race.

Tom Gentry, the public information officer for the Independence police department, said a digital recorder and a satchel were also reported missing. Police arrived at the campaign office, which is located in a strip mall, just before 6 a.m. on October 1. A window had been broken, and a desk drawer had been ransacked, Gentry said. However, 22 Eee PCs were left behind in the office.

“One of the tiny, white computers was actually removed from the table where it was sitting and placed on the desk where the Dell was,” Hervey said. “Somebody clearly had some time and was able to move things around.”

He said that over the weekend a string of thefts of political signs–both Republican and Democratic–were reported in the area as well.

First Gov. Sarah Palin’s e-mail account was hacked, and now a laptop with strategic information to help the Republican ticket in a critical swing state has been stolen.

Both Hervey and Gentry said the incident did not appear to be a random break-in.

“There are several businesses in that little mall, and there are other businesses that have more valuable things in them,” Gentry said. “This is a predominantly Democratic county, and there are a lot of hot-heads on both sides, as usual.”

A Dell laptop belonging to the Republican party’s regional coordinator in Independence, Mo., was stolen on the night of September 30 out of the party’s “Kansas City Victory Office.” The Independence-based office supports Republican party operations at all levels, from the presidential ticket down to candidates for regional state representative seats.

“As of today across the state there’s a noticeable security presence upgrade at all of our offices,” she said.

The laptop contained “information you’d expect the coordinator for a GOP national campaign to have,” such as information on areas to target for support, said Tina Hervey, communications director for the Missouri Republican party. Hervey could not say whether the information on the computer, issued by the Missouri Republican party, was encrypted or not.

Open-source vendors start making money from their customer base precisely at the point that the customer base is least likely to renew.

Open source still needs to figure out the best ways to get paid without sacrificing the ideals that make it so powerful. I suspect that we’re actually not too far off from this ideal. We just need to find the moderate middle ground between competing extremes, as Dana Blankenhorn recently suggested. I’m confident we can.

commentary

I’ll leave it to you to read Howlett’s post to discover the three things, but even in the short blurb above Howlett unwittingly calls out a fundamental difficulty in open-source software revenue models, one that Savio Rodrigues has been banging on for awhile, and one that NBC iVillage CTO Jon Williams has also called out:

Howlett suggests that software vendors are right to charge a big upfront license fee as it helps to defray the high initial cost of supporting a customer’s deployment of the software. I hadn’t really thought of that before, but it makes sense. Open-source vendors chop off the license fee and only charge for maintenance and support, which means they assume pretty much all of the risk/cost in the first year of a contract.

It may be that open source can take care of itself, but history hasn’t been kind to that belief. History shows that noncorporate open-source communities have proved adept at getting code to a “good enough” state, and in some cases an exceptionally “good enough” state. But not usually. Usually, money has to get involved. See, people have to eat, and food generally costs money.

Dennis Howlett writes a thought-provoking piece on proprietary maintenance revenue, challenging the value that software vendors provide or, rather, the generic way in which it is provided. Howlett proposes a way to customize maintenance fees to the actual value provided by a vendor:

Yes, there will always be open-source software that doesn’t rely on corporate patronage, but it may not be the type and caliber of code that enterprises require. Even paragons of open source like Apache and Linux have heavily depended on corporate involvement (like IBM’s) to become mainstream, enterprise-class software, in many cases.

It is obvious for example that in the early stages, customers will consume a considerable amount of resource(s) as they learn and become familiar with the product. They should therefore pay an economic price that reflects the services they consume. However, the software vendors need (to) do three things in order to soften the impact and reduce the long term burden…

In software terms, we already know that (differentiation for customers) happens through software implementation, configurations and customizations that are a core part of delivering to customer needs. There is no reason why the same principles cannot be applied to the maintenance element of the business relationship. If you stand back and put aside the notions of the last 30+ years, it is blindingly obvious.

This latter tactic also becomes more inviting given that enterprises increasingly look to open source as a commons to be used but not replenished. This is one reason why Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has been evangelizing for enterprises to contribute code back to the open-source communities from which they derive benefit. Open source has the chance of becoming a nonrenewable resource if enterprises consume it without contributing cash or code back.

Open-source vendors get around this by pushing for multi-year agreements, which is a way of evening out risk and fairly apportioning it between vendor and buyer, but this is only one way to even out that risk. Other ways include adding commercial extensions to help compel renewals in order to make the vendor/customer relationship profitable for both parties.

Following the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, Howell erred when she said that the lobbyist gave campaign donations to Democrats as well as Republicans. Abramoff gave only to Republicans. The paper’s Web site saw more than 1,000 comments, many from people who accused the Post of conspiring with the Republicans.

Things got worse when Howell posted a clarification. When Brady saw that many of those comments violated the paper’s policy against the use of profanity or personal attacks, he blocked users’ ability to post. The decision was widely criticized. In defense of his decision, Brady wrote that many of the posts weren’t comments at all, but the kind of thing “you might find carved on the door of a public toilet stall.”

“I think part of the problem is that people aren’t held accountable on the Web,” Brady said. “People say things online they would never say when disagreeing with someone at the dinner table. I think heated debate is fine, but when there are (flame wars), many people won’t take part for fear they will be attacked and bashed over the head with the (Internet-equivalent) of a steel pipe.”

Brady also lamented that closing user accounts doesn’t keep bad eggs off a site. They just come back and create new ones. He said that his site can identify someone’s IP address, but it’s not an elegant solution because blocking them can be tricky. “You don’t want to end up blocking the entire Department of Energy or something like that,” he said.

But this isn’t a solution. Brady believes that in the next five years people will be required to identify themselves in some way at many sites. “I don’t know whether we do it with a credit card number, a driver’s license or passport, but I think making people responsible would raise the level of discourse.”

Brady knows how intensely many Internet users disagree with him. He made headlines in January 2006 after shutting down the comments area of a blog where outraged readers gathered to rebuke the Post’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell.

LOS ANGELES–If Jim Brady had his way, there would be no guaranteed anonymity for those who post comments to Washingtonpost.com.

I reminded Brady that many people feel strongly about their right to privacy online. He responded that he feels strongly about it too, but there are plenty of sites that take an anything-goes approach and that people who want to drop F-bombs and blast each other should go there. “We don’t want our site to be sanitized, but we have the right to create a different kind of community,” Brady said.

Greg Sandoval is a former Washington Post staff writer.

Brady, executive editor of The Washington Post’s online division, said during a panel discussion at the Digital Hollywood conference here that he would like to see a technology that could identify people who violate site standards–and if need be–automatically kick them off for good.

Brady has a notable history with this issue and I’ll get to that. First, his position must be made clear. In an interview following the panel discussion, Brady said he doesn’t want people’s personal information for any other reason but to hold them accountable for what they post. He said he’s not–as he has been accused by some–an enemy of free speech. He just wants to oversee a site where readers engage in civil discourse and debate without fear of it degenerating into a “back alley environment.”

Pluck, a company that provides social-networking software, helps maintain some of the Post’s blogs and has implemented a “bozo filter,” which can isolate comments that include banned words or phrases, according to Brady.

Like many of you, I’m a geek, and it extends well beyond my interest in technology. I still read an occasional science fiction novel and look forward to the release of superhero and James Bond movies.

What I’m interested in is early academic, defense, medical, or even hobbyist applications. Remember, that’s where computing and communications started, and look where we are now.

(Credit:
www.phasers.net)

Handheld laser weapons. In late 2005, the U.S. Air Force demonstrated a prototype nonlethal, green-laser weapon. It’s big and heavy, and intended to be used for crowd control or to temporarily blind an enemy, but hey, it’s a start. And yes, I know there are lots of lasers in use out there; I’m talking specifically about handheld weapons. Why? Because, I believe this inevitable transition will drive advances in energy beam technology that might be used for who-knows-what applications.

Colonizing a second planet. I watched a special on the History Channel the other day called “The Universe: Colonizing Space.” It was both encouraging and discouraging. The good news is that NASA is working on a program to send humans to Mars for an extended stay and eventual colonization. The bad news is that they want to test everything out on the moon first, which means it’s not going to happen for a long, long time.

Lately, I’ve been wondering how close we are to achieving some of the scientific “miracles” that had previously belonged solely to the realm of science fiction. Advances in nanotechnology, biotechnology, and other fields are certainly making lots of exciting things possible in the laboratory, but that’s just the beginning.

Commercial human space travel. Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and Paul Allen’s Mojave Aerospace Ventures recently announced a joint venture to take tourists up into space for about $200,000 apiece. I guess that’d be fun, but I’m thinking more along the lines of mining asteroids and stuff like that. You know, commercial business. Perhaps the technology developed for colonizing Mars could help in that endeavor, as well.

Human bionics. In April, I wrote a post about Bluetooth implants that got some attention. My half-serious thinking at the time was more along the lines of implantable gadgets, but now I’m wondering about human bionics such as electromechanical organs. The first applications already exist in the form of artificial hearts and bionic ears, and there’s a long way to go, but I see this as a field that will explode over the coming years.

Kirk and Spock wield their phasers

U.S. Air Force Capt. Drew Goettler demonstrates prototype laser weapon

Time travel. Come on, Einstein, get real. Seriously, I read a paper in Scientific American the other day about a new approach to quantum relativity that, unlike prior attempts, does a decent job of predicting the observed characteristics of our universe on both quantum and cosmic scales. And they did it by introducing causality into the equations. So much for the laws of physics being indifferent to time travel. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it does take some of the wind out of its sails.

Here are six off the top of my head. And yes, some of them are out there, but my goal was to leapfrog all the usual stuff, like virtual reality, robotics, and the like, which I’ve written about previously. Some of it may surprise you.

(Credit:
U.S. Air Force)

Well, those are a few that came to mind. If you’re like me, you read about this stuff from time to time and wonder why we’re not further along. What’s your pet fantasy technology, and where is it today?

Invisibility. On August 11, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley reported a giant leap forward in invisibility cloaking. Using newly developed nanomaterials, scientists were able to successfully bend light around 3D objects, albeit not quite at visible wavelengths yet, though they’re getting much closer. The first application for this technology is in telecommunications, so Harry Potter and the Klingons may have to wait a bit.

If you think Tweetburner sounds like a way to track the uptake in the online world of your Twitter posts, you got it in one. Tweetburner does three things you probably want if you’re using Twitter to tell the world about web sites:

Shortens URLs. Twitter’s 140 characters make many Web URLs unworkable. Tweetburner, like other URL shorteners, squeezes verbose URLs into bitsize links like http://twurl.nl/p6rtus.
Tracks which of your Twitter links get clicked. To test this, I twittered Friday about “Twittin’ Secrets: The 100 World’s Greatest Twitter Tips” via a Tweetburner link. I got 10 clicks within an hour. For marketers and consultants this is pure gold. Better example: Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting has created 275 Twurl links via Tweetburner and gotten a staggering 22,257 clicks.
Tells you what’s hot. While there are a variety of ways of seeing what subjects are getting twittered about, such as Tweetdeck’s keyword tag, Twitterburner shows you on its home page the most popular Twurled links clicked in the past hour and the Twitters they came from.

Integration with another online social network, FriendFeed, is planned for rollout next week.