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Over the last few months, Crowd Favorite has had the privilege of working with Dave Pell to create a new search service: Addictomatic

Addictomatic is a search aggregator, a way to see results from lots of sources all at once. Want to see the latest on a presidential candidate? Or the newest iPhone rumors? Or perhaps an ego search? Addictomatic has you covered.

This isn’t a traditional search engine. It’s not designed to help you find answers about some error message or the cheapest flight to Aruba. Addictomatic helps you see what’s going on now on a given topic.

We’ve implemented a number of pretty nice features on the site. One of these is the ability to drag and drop the results boxes around to re-order them.

You can also click the little X to remove a source from a page, or you can drop down the Available Sources panel to remove and add sources.

When you make changes to the results page, either re-ordering the sources and/or removing the ones you don’t want to include, you get a nice bookmarkable URL as a result. That URL will bring you right back to your search, with the layout you specified.

In addition to being able to create new searches, Addictomatic also offers a collection of NewsFix pages that gather the top sources on a variety of topics. I’m mainly visiting the Election 2008 and Baseball pages of late, though I also enjoy hitting Thought 2.0 and Web 2.0 with some regularity.

Building this service has been an interesting experience on a number of fronts, but one of the most exciting has been discovering that it’s something I want to use myself. I liked the idea when Dave first explained it to me, but I wasn’t sure how much I’d use it. As it turns out, I now use it quite a bit - it’s sticky. Much like Twitter, it’s value is hard to explain but readily apparent once you use it for a while.

The design of the site was done by well known designer Bryan Bell, who did a terrific job. We received the Photoshop files from him and created the front-end XHTML+CSS+JavaScript and all of the back-end systems.

Many thanks to Dave for letting us help him bring Addictomatic to the web.

UPDATE: Dave’s blog post is here and Bryan’s is here.

Popularity: 9% [?]

No “Around the web” this week. Too much has been going on at Crowd Favorite and I just got through my week’s feed reading with too few links to share to be worthwhile.

Hopefully as things get back to a more normal state my feed reading will become more than a weekly event (and I can begin replacing some of my dead feeds). Until then, the Atw posts will be a bit inconsistent.

Popularity: 9% [?]

I’ve got a new version of Twitter Tools ready (I think) for testing. This version adds a number of often requested features and other enhancements:

• Show a link to the tweet being replied to for @replies.
• Option to exclude @replies from the sidebar tweets list.
• Make all @usernames clickable.
• Check that the tweets downloaded are indeed the user’s tweets - sometimes Twitter has hiccups.
• Don’t broadcast edits to old posts. Note: Twitter Tools always included code to only broadcast a post once. However edits to posts created before Twitter Tools was installed would be sent to Twitter because there is no “only when a post is first published” hook (that I’m aware of) in WordPress. Now a timestamp is saved upon installation to try to work around this.
• Ability to send blog posts to Twitter on a per-post basis (checkbox added to post authoring screen).
• Option to use jQuery instead of Prototype - useful if you like to tweet from your sidebar. The jQuery library is a smaller download than Prototype.
• Added post author setting.
• Added post tags setting.
• Added an option to make digest posts display tweets in either chronological or reverse-chronological order.
• Make URLs clickable in blog posts created from tweets and digest posts.

Note: after you install this version of Twitter Tools, you’ll need to go in and update your settings to take advantage of these new features - until you do, things will not work properly.

As you can see, there are many changes in this version, so I’m releasing this as a beta instead of a stable version. I’ve done about 5-6 hours of testing on it and I’m using it here, so I obviously think it’s probably safe for production, but it has not been widely tested… if I had to bet, I’d say there are still a few things still to be discovered. You’ve been warned.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.

Popularity: 24% [?]