The gadget startup gdgt, with Peter Rojas and Ryan Block at the helm, has launched. It is something of a gadget-focused community, mixing in traditional editorial content and reviews, with user generated content and a wiki-like gadget database. That wiki is the killer app, is my bet, although gdgt could do just as well with just its content. After all, they clocked in 4.7 million pageviews with their liveblog from WWDC, pre launch. The power of Rojas and Block is not to underestimated.

And gdgt might very well be an interesting site, surely one to follow. It is not like the predecessors, Engadget or Gizmodo, but more of a social beast, which is interesting. read more

Despite getting rave reviews from bloggers like Scoble and TechCrunch, there are still very few iPhone apps available for Friendfeed. While six iPhone apps have appeared for Friendfeed, only half of them seem to have any active development upon them (at least where the quality is worth the price).

While Buddyfeed seems to have dominated the Friendfeed market (especially with the roll out of Buddyfeed 2.0), it looks as if they may have a new challenger on their hands by the name of Amigo.

Developed by David J. Hinson (of Summer Systems Management), Amigo reminds me of an app in eternal Fiesta, mainly because of its vibrant colors that do not leave one feeling totally relaxed. Priced at $2.99, Amigo costs about the same as Buddyfeed, although the app does have a few features lacking when compared against is main rival. read more

Happy Monday, folks! The big news this week is the launch of Melody, an open source fork of Movable Type. Several long-time MT developers are contributing to the project, and a 1.0 release is expected this year.

It’s unclear at this point how this project will differ from the existing open source version of MT. Certainly, a different leadership is going to have different priorities. The Melody folks seem to be bending over backward to show this is not a break from MT, but just a separate development branch. And, similarly, Six Apart has welcomed the new project. So I doubt we’ll see any of the commercial MT features rewritten as open source modules, at least in the near term. It’s more likely we’ll see features that are useful to independent developers (and, consequently, small to medium size businesses) instead of the enterprise-level development that seems to be 6A’s focus. read more

The death of pop icon Michael Jackson is dominating the web right now. TMZ broke the story, went down under the strain, but is back up now. Meanwhile, various sites and tweets talk about Twitter getting some fail whales and massive traffic spikes, which isn’t all that surprising after all. The King of Pop has been in the limelight for so long, it is just huge. At a time, the trending topics on Twitter was more or less exclusively dominated by his death, with people forgetting all about Iran for a little while at least.

People rush to Jackson’s Facebook page, currently sporting 880 991 fans, but expect that number to grow tremendously. Facebook overall is performing sluggishly now, possibly due to the artist’s death. It will be interesting to follow up on traffic spikes and surges later on. read more

Wired editor Chris Anderson is soon to launch his latest book/theory, following up on The Long Tail, titled Free!. There’s definitely nothing wrong with his ideas if you ask me, and you can read them for yourself on Wired, but the book seems a bit, well rushed perhaps?

First there was the WordPress incident, where Anderson probably was making the famous wordpress.org/wordpress.com mixup. He should know better, and a technical reviewer should have caught that.

Now there’s copy-pasting from Wikipedia.

Fast Company found the Virginia Quarterly Review blog post detailing how Anderson copy-pasted an entry from the Free lunch entry on Wikipedia, and illustrates it with side by side comparisons. Just look at all that yellow text marking the similarities! read more

It seems that not a week goes by without something interesting happening within Steve Jobs playground (i.e. the iTunes App store). The same could be said for the numerous twitter apps, especially now with Tweetdeck hitting the scene (which TechCrunch has a glorious review of).

While most Tweet apps like Tweetie, Twitterfon, etc. support image uploading (via services like Twitpic and TweetPhoto.com), Twittelator goes one step further by allowing users to attach an audio message or even video to their tweet, a feature that may not make the mullahs in Iran very happy. read more

Happy Monday, folks. Only a couple of items on the agenda for this week. First, Movable Type 4.261 was released. This is a very minor update, mainly to fix the schema upgrade issue we told you about last time. If you upgraded to 4.26 and you’re not having any problems you can safely hold off on this update.

Finally, Dan Wolfgang released a new plugin for Action Streams. Dan’s Delicious Tags plugin lets you pull any Delicious tag results into your Action Stream. It’s particularly handy if you’re tracking search terms related to your industry.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.

Despite Twitter’s lack of a business plan, many third party clients are still trying to figure out a way to generate revenue from the service.

While giants like Dell are able to generate $1 million by linking to their products, others are attempting to lure “tweeple” by advertising products on ones account to the point of spamming your followers to death.

TwitPub has a different model where instead of sending out random links that your friends could care less about, they are encouraging users to provide a subscription service similar to the Wall Street Journal. read more

Twitter is back after the delayed planned maintenance, and they are now back online as most of you have probably noticed already. No problems have been reported, so we can assume that all went well. Meanwhile, the rescheduling of the planned maintenance of the service might in part have been influenced by the US State Department, according to a Reuters report. Biz Stone comments this in a blog post:

However, it’s important to note that the State Department does not have access to our decision making process. Nevertheless, we can both agree that the open exchange of information is a positive force in the word.

For more on Iran, see the #iranelection hashtag. Unconfirmed reports are coming in (via Twitter of course) that Iran is filtering out said hashtag, so you might want to try some other ones as well.

Happy Monday, folks! The big news from the past week is the release of Movable Type 4.26. This is a performance release — it improves search performance and reliability of the job queue. It also includes a handful of other bug fixes, and some new configuration directives that help you tweak performance.

However, you may choose to hold off on this upgrade. People on the MT mailing lists noticed that it did not seem to be performing a full upgrade. Turns out the schema version was not updated, so the intended changes to the database are not made. Six Apart has assured everyone that has already upgraded that the problem will not cause anything to break. The schema changes were only to increase performance, so they are not required for the code changes. A fix is expected this week. read more