New Avenues and Revenues

All right Tweetdeck fans, rev up your engines and prepare to update to Tweetdeck 0.33, which adds a slew of new features, better API management and more in-Tweetdeck media previews.

We could list all the new features in Tweetdeck 0.33, but the company was nice enough to make this little video that shows everything off:

Some of the highlights:

Tweetdeck Can Manage Your Twitter API Usage — This means that the program can delegate how to use your available API calls so that the most important info gets to you as easily as possible. Plus, Tweetdeck now uses OAuth and can request up to 350 API calls an hour, and that is expected to increase soon.

Better Column Management — You can now view Flickr, YouTube and Posterous media within Tweetdeck.

Tweetdeck is free. Don’t forget to check out the Mashable branded version.

Tags: software, tweetdeck, twitter client, web apps

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Each month, our partner Visible Measures compiles a list of the top ten most popular web video series, and we share those results with you and provide analysis.

In January, the threshold for entry into the list was the highest it’s ever been, but viewership for the top 10 shows dropped 26% as compared to the record-breaking month of December.

If you’ve been keeping track in previous months, you won’t be surprised to see that Fred and Happy Tree Friends have again topped the list. Also notable: CollegeHumor and video game-themed shows collectively took up half the list. There weren’t any new series on the list in January, but a couple that dropped off in the past made a comeback. We also learned that the majority of viewers for the top 10 shows were male.

Here’s the complete chart with video clips included for each series. We provide some deeper analysis below.

The Chart: January 2010

	Rank	Last Month’s Rank	Title	Studio	Genre	True Reach View Count	% Change in Views	Sample Episode
	1 1 Fred n/a Comedy 24,719,556 -28% Play 2 2 Happy Tree Friends MondoMedia Animation 17,697,316 -15% Play 3 4 Smosh Deca TV Comedy, Sketch 13,151,356 13% Play 4 5 The Station The Station Comedy 4,317,575 -24% Play 5 Back On Chart POV CollegeHumor Comedy 4,146,733 Back On Chart Play 6 10 Hardly Working CollegeHumor Comedy 3,562,906 32% Play 7 9 Jake & Amir CollegeHumor Comedy, Sketch 3,275,001 6% Play 8 Back On Chart Red Vs Blue Rooster Teeth Animation, Comedy 3,224,802 Back On Chart Play 9 8 The Guild n/a Comedy, Gaming 3,209,027 -17% Play 10 7 Key Of Awesome Next New Networks Comedy, Music 3,150,905 -39% Play

*The Visible Measures Top 10 Webisodes Chart focuses on digital studio-driven Web series that appear on Internet video-sharing destinations. Each Web series is measured on a True Reach™ basis, which includes viewership of both studio-syndicated video clips and viewer-driven social video placements. The data are compiled using the Visible Measures Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing repository of analytic data on more than 100 million Internet videos across more than 150 video-sharing destinations.

Note: This chart does not include vloggers, interviews, how-to series, news shows, or product review shows. View-count results are incremental by month.

To notify Visible Measures of an upcoming Web series, or for an end-to-end assessment of your campaign’s overall performance, please contact us directly.

If you’re interested in exploring this data further, go to visiblemeasures.com/mashable.

Consistently On Top: Fred

The teenager with the high-pitched voice has topped the list again, and he managed to do it even though he only put out one new video in January. That new episode garnered 1.7 million views, so the rest of the 24.7 million were all thanks to old content that people are still discovering or re-watching.

You can’t fault Fred completely for dropping from his December high of 34.2 million views; he didn’t have topical holiday content to work with this time. It’s still impressive that a 16-year old actor with a webcam is beating each and every show from web TV networks like Next New Networks and CollegeHumor.

We mentioned earlier that the majority of top 10 show viewers are male; it’s interesting to note that Fred has the highest ratio of female viewers at 45%.

CollegeHumor’s Mark Is Hard to Miss

CollegeHumor is straight up mainstream now thanks to two cable TV deals in the works with MTV, and its online performance is as impressive as ever. It’s the only network with three series on the list — POV, Hardly Working, and Jake & Amir. They’ve all appeared on the list before, and together they racked up just shy of 11 million views.

All three of these CollegeHumor series saw growth since last month; POV didn’t appear on the December chart at all, but now it’s back. Hardly Working is actually working hard; it cranked out several new videos in January and grew 32% as compared to last month. Jack & Amir experienced a modest 6% growth.

The Guild and Red Vs. Blue: The Gamer Niche

Video game-themed programming has always been a significant genre in web TV. Because web series are usually cheaper to produce and viewership expectations are lower than would be the case with over-the-air shows, web series find it advantageous to serve a deep and narrow niche. Gamers are a great audience because there are just enough of them, and because they have their own dedicated ecosystem of social media and blogs to spread the word.

The Guild and Red Vs. Blue aren’t performing as well as they used to, but the gamer audience is still obviously alive and well since these gamer shows take up two of the top 10 spots. Red Vs. Blue just started airing new content, so it returned to the list after a hiatus. Conversely, The Guild is off-season so its numbers have declined.

A greater portion of Red Vs. Blue’s audience is male than any other show on the list. That should be no surprise since the series is based on the science fiction action shooter Halo.

Tags: monthly top webisodes, video, visible measures, Web TV, web video

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There’s been a lot of hoopla the past week over Amazon’s fight with book publisher Macmillan. The main issue is that Macmillan wants higher prices for its e-books, while Amazon wants to keep prices down for its Kindle device. Amazon went as far as to pull all of Macmillan’s books from its store, but quickly admitted that they’d eventually have to give in to Macmillan’s demands. Why? Well the obvious answer is Apple, whose new iPad device with its iBooks Store is allowing publishers to set higher prices. But don’t forget Amazon’s other rivals too.

One reader wrote in to tell us how he was looking for The Politician, a new book by Andrew Young about John Edwards. The book, which is published by Macmillan, is not available on Amazon.com right now due to the dispute. When the man noticed that he turned to Amazon rival Barnes & Noble for the book — and from the looks of it, he’s not alone. The book is actually the number one best seller on Barnes & Nobles entire site. On another rival’s site, Borders, it’s the number five best seller.

Pressure from Apple aside, Amazon can’t afford to blackball these publishers because people can so easily turn elsewhere to get the book. Even though it’s not available on Amazon, The Politician is still the number 49 best seller on the site through partner sellers — even though they’re selling the book for significantly more than Barnes & Noble or Borders (or than Amazon would if it were available through them).

[thanks Shmuel]

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Textbook publishers have already enlisted the third-party services of developers to build adaptations of textbooks for the iPad, the Wall Street Journal reports.

McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin, Pearson and Kaplan have struck deals with iPhone and iPod touch developers ScrollMotion Inc. to build applications for the iPad that bring test preparation, study guides and new types of instructional materials to the classroom.

Among the many industries potentially revolutionized by the Apple iPad, the publishing industry has been one of the early front-runners. We’re already seeing that start to play out in the e-books market with the Amazon and Macmillan dispute.

But galvanizing publishers to re-envision textbooks for new interactive devices could have a huge impact not only on Apple’s bottom line, but on education as a whole. “People have been talking about the impact of technology on education for 25 years. It feels like it is really going to happen in 2010,” said executive Rik Kranenburg of McGraw-Hill’s higher education unit.

Despite Apple’s relative lack of commentary on the iPad’s potential for the educational sector during its iPad announcement last week, it appears that textbook publishers aren’t waiting to be invited. Still, it’s yet unclear how or even if the iPad or other upcoming tablet devices will achieve wide adoption in the classroom, considering the cost of employing new technologies and the competition with other portable computing tools, particularly netbooks. But no matter what device ecosystem ends up holding sway, it’s potentially great news to students who stand to benefit from an emerging renaissance in digital learning materials.

As a student, teacher or parent, what new kinds of teaching materials would you like to see in the classroom?

Tags: apple, education, ipad, scrollmotion, textbooks

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Today, Bantam Live, is launching the commercial version of its social CRM workspace and is rolling out premium features of its product. Bantam Live provides an online workspace for business teams that has “social CRM” features, which include a real-time dashboard stream of messaging and workflow activity along with a native CRM application. Members can share information, track activity, and manage contact and company relationships both inside and outside the organization via a real-time activity stream.

We last wrote about Bantam when the startup debuted its product at TechCrunch’s RealTime Stream CrunchUp last July.

Bantam extends a company’s sales outreach and customer relationships out to the social Web. For instance, with Bantam, a user can search Twitter, import a new contact with one click, initiate task workflows with team members to engage this new contact, and then converse with the new contact for lead generation. All of this happens within the same application, integrated with Twitter and soon other social networks like Facebook. Bantam Live also allows users to search, monitor, and connect with people across the web for sales leads, business development, and marketing purposes. Members also can manage their calendars, file sharing and task management within the platform. Similar to the activity stream on Facebook, Bantam Live will now include co-worker notifications, workflow information, customer communications and other messages within a realtime stream in a dashboard.

Bantam Live also recently raised a second round of funding from angel investors, bringing the startup’s funding to $1.7 million. Of course, Bantam will face competition from Salesforce’s upcoming product in the social CRM space, Chatter. But Bantam’s CEO John Rourke maintains that his offering is not only comprehensive, but also more reasonably priced than Chatter. Plus, Bantam is entering the marketplace now, ahead of Chatter. That being said, Bantam is still entering a crowded space that includes many worthy competitors besides Chatter, including Jive, Cubetree and Socialtext.

Bantam Live charges a monthly subscription fee for a range of plans that range from $19 (for a Personal plan) up to $140 per month large groups/heavy use. We have a special offer for TechCrunch readers in the month of February; enter the promocode “TECHCRUNCH” when signing up for Bantam, and you will save 50% on your first two paid-months, after a free 30-day trial.

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To open the secret entrance to the cave, try left-left-up-left-down-down-right-left then a-y-y-x-b-a and then hold the d-pad down while clicking y-y-b-b. Press start twice, and you will get in. [Flopculture]

To open the secret entrance to the cave, try left-left-up-left-down-down-right-left then a-y-y-x-b-a and then hold the d-pad down while clicking y-y-b-b. Press start twice, and you will get in. [Flopculture]

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The most common charge leveled at the Xbox 360 by Playstation 3 devotees is that Microsoft dares to charge for its Xbox Live service, unlike the free PSN. Not for long!

Back in November, a presentation slide revealed that Sony had a paid subscription plan in the works for PSN. And now Peter Dille, the head of PSN, had this to say in an interview with IGN:

Will we charge for it or why don’t we charge for it? It’s been our philosophy not to charge for it from launch up until now, but Kaz recently went on the record as saying that’s something we’re looking at. I can confirm that as well. That’s something that we’re actively thinking about. What’s the best way to approach that if we were to do that? You know, no announcements at this point in time, but it’s something we’re thinking about.

Now the question is what exactly will they be charging for. Will they charge for online multiplayer, like Xbox Live? Or will they offer up some new premium goodies to entice people to pay up while leaving the current offerings up for free? In any case, it looks like there’s soon to be a little less ammo in the console wars. But don’t worry, Sony fanboys: you still have Blu-ray. No one can take that away from you. [IGN via TFTS]

The most common charge leveled at the Xbox 360 by Playstation 3 devotees is that Microsoft dares to charge for its Xbox Live service, unlike the free PSN. Not for long!

Back in November, a presentation slide revealed that Sony had a paid subscription plan in the works for PSN. And now Peter Dille, the head of PSN, had this to say in an interview with IGN:

Will we charge for it or why don’t we charge for it? It’s been our philosophy not to charge for it from launch up until now, but Kaz recently went on the record as saying that’s something we’re looking at. I can confirm that as well. That’s something that we’re actively thinking about. What’s the best way to approach that if we were to do that? You know, no announcements at this point in time, but it’s something we’re thinking about.

Now the question is what exactly will they be charging for. Will they charge for online multiplayer, like Xbox Live? Or will they offer up some new premium goodies to entice people to pay up while leaving the current offerings up for free? In any case, it looks like there’s soon to be a little less ammo in the console wars. But don’t worry, Sony fanboys: you still have Blu-ray. No one can take that away from you. [IGN via TFTS]

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This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Plan.fm

Quick Pitch: Plan.fm collects the plans you make on other services and organizes them into a single source that you and your friends can access from anywhere.

Genius Idea: By collecting notifications and invites from multiple sources, Plan.fm has the makings of a very convenient service for people who have a hard time managing their various social calendars.

One of the best things about the social web is that it’s now incredibly easy to find out about events or parties and RSVP quickly. One of the worst things about the social web is that if you’re not careful, you can wind up with a million different calendars that don’t talk to one another. CalDAV is great, but not every service utilizes it, which makes it hard to reliably attach that data to iCal or Google Calendar.

That’s why the idea of Plan.fm is so appealing. If all your events could be aggregated in one place, it would be much easier than trying to figure out the export or subscribe options with each service. Right now Plan.fm supports Facebook, Meetup, Eventbrite and Twitter, plus iCal subscriptions URLs.

Facebook, Meetup and Eventbrite all have their own calendar systems, but what about Twitter? How does that work? You can make plans with Twitter by using the #plan hashtag, and you have the option of tweeting when you make or join other plans on Twitter.

Facebook is probably the best example of how convenient Plan.fm can be. When you allow it to access your Facebook account, all of your invitations and Facebook events come into your Dashboard. You can easily view what’s going on, make comments and respond to requests. It’s very streamlined and the data is displayed alongside all of your other events.

Plan.fm is still very much in its early stages, but the idea shows lots of promise. However, there are some bugs that do need to be worked out. While the service let me add an iCal feed to my dashboard, it didn’t actually read any of that data, even though it recognized the title and the URL went directly to that calendar.

Removing services from your dashboard (once I figured out how) also currently doesn’t work — although I’m sure that will be fixed soon.

What I’d like to see for Plan.fm would be integration with more services — LinkedIn and Upcoming, for instance — and either an export or CalDAV subscription option. I don’t mind going to a website to view all of my online social events, but if I’m on my phone, I’d rather have the option to sync to a calendar so that I can set alarms and e-mail reminders. A good export option is essential to any scheduling tool, at least for me.

Still, in these early stages, I like where Plan.fm is going. How do you manage your social graph calendar? Let us know!

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Tags: caldav, calendars, plan.fm

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A bunch of folks have sent in the news of a new law in South Australia that forbids any anonymous political commentary leading up to elections. Literally, the law reads:

“A person must not during an election period, publish material consisting of, or containing a commentary on, any candidate or political party, or the issues being submitted to electors, in written form, in a journal published in electronic form on the internet or by radio or television or broadcast on the internet, unless the material or the program in which the material is presented contains a statement of the name and address (not being a post office box) of a person who takes responsibility for the publication of that material.”

Apparently, things like The Federalist Papers would not have been welcome in South Australia. It’s clearly a method of censorship, though, of course, the guy behind it, Michael Atkinson, is spinning it as the opposite of censorship: “The real point of this legislation is not blocking or censoring freedom of speech — it’s just making sure freedom of speech is attributed to the right person.”

Reader cofiem points out that Atkinson has a bit of a history as being technologically reactionary, such as his strong support for banning video games that he feels are too violent even for adults. Cofiem also points to some of the legislative history behind this, which includes Atkinson making it clear that this law should apply to “blog sites, Wikipedia and internet newspapers” but thankfully he does “not want to go into twittering because that is too much like individual communication over a mobile phone. So, that is where we are putting the boundary.” Phew. Each political Twitter won’t need to be accompanied by your address.

That same report suggests that Atikinson has aimed this legislation at a particular online publication that he does not like:

It is being supported by Atkinson in the most appalling way — the news reports quote him apparently frothing at the mouth about ‘Adelaidenow’, which the law seems implicitly to target;

Nice use of elected office to try to stifle the ability of your critics to speak freely.

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DEF points us to a recent appeals court (federal circuit) ruling that held that the University of South Carolina cannot use the letters USC on its sports uniforms because the University of Southern California already claims those letters. Seriously. It’s hard to see how this makes much sense at all. USC is an accurate acronym for both schools, and it makes no sense to limit it. In an amazingly obnoxious gloating victory note, the lawyer for the USC from California “suggested that the letters were more deservedly linked to the Trojans’ warrior image than to ‘a goofy little chicken,’” by which he meant the logo of the South Carolina teams. The lawyer for the USC from the east coast noted that “Southern manners” kept him from responding to that point.

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