Want to see who’s getting talked about right now? How many people have mentioned the New York Times in the last hour? How about which brands, people, places and products are being discussed in conjunction with a certain keyword? Or cooler still, how about comparing the buzz around three competing products or brands?

SocialGadgets brings that kind of real-time Twitter analysis to your fingertips in visual form, and indeed to your website or blog – just select one of the four available gadgets, the size you wish to display plus a timeline for the analysis and you’ll get an iframe to plug right into your site.

You can find out more about SocialGadgets over at FUSE Labs.

Sign up with your state and license plate (US only for now) and you’ll be able to message other drivers via voice-activated commands on your phone (a mobile web app is currently available), or a photo snapshot of the license plate (taken whilst your both stationary, obviously). Voice messages, emails and texts can be swapped between users, and in the future the plan is for roadside discounts to be on offer to eligible drivers based on your location. With links to Twitter, Facebook and even Match.com, Bump clearly believe their service will put an end to angry driving and spread peace and love amongst American drivers. That is, as long as they’re all registered with Bump.

If this all sounds a little far fetched, Mashable report that the startup has recently received $1 million in a first round of funding and are seeking up to $8 million in round two. Your concerns on privacy, one handed license-plate photography and texting whilst driving are noted. But scarier still, Road Rage just went multi-channel.

ScholarLynk
Bing on Droid
FREE Halo Reach (Sorta)

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The platform lets you add in plugins of your choosing to the desktop application, which including everything from tracking breaking news from top sources like Techmeme or RSS feeds, accessing social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Foursquare and others, shopping at Zappos, listening to music via Last.fm, and so much more.

There are over 40 plugins available now and more to come. For now, all the plugins are free, but in the future, developers will be able to charge.

The plugins work in Seesmic’s Desktop 2 client software, a downloadable application designed for desktop operating systems, including both Windows and Mac. You can try it now from here.

On the Zoom.it homepage, there are a handful of examples, including a gorgeous high-res image of a galaxy snapped by Hubble, a panoramic view of an old map of Milwaukee, from the Library of Congress, an expansive panorama of Yosemite (via the Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project) and more.

The Zoom.it service runs on Windows Azure and uses Microsoft Silverlight. End users can try it now from http://zoom.it. Developers can access the API from here.

(via Steve Clayton)

Now there comes another Tour de France map, this one showing both the Tour de France course and tour updates via geo-tagged tweets. The new map, hosted here on Livestrong.com (scroll down), highlights Twitter updates by way of blue-colored pushpins which, when clicked, reveal the tweet’s text.

As the race continues, fans will be able to read these geo-tagged tweets, containing reactions and content from spectators, journalists and even some of the Tour de France competitors themselves, like Lance Armstrong of Team Radioshack, whose Twitter account is followed by 2.5 million fans.

The map interface uses the Bing Twitter Map App’s “embed” function for this custom creation dubbed “Tour Talk.” You can check it out here along with lots of other Tour de France news. 

(via the Bing team blog)

There’s nothing too complex about this mashup, it’s just tweets on a map, similar to the popular Twitter “mapplication” for Bing Maps. However, in this case, you can see the tweets for the current World Cup game unfold in real-time on top of a map of the game’s location. Plus, you can see tweets from the two countries playing, on top of their respective homelands. You can even see tweets from your own neighborhood, in order to tap into what those around you are saying.

All of these options exist as four separate, embeddable maps that you can place on your own website or blog.

Goooooaaaaaalll, indeed!

Described as the “first search experience integrating the full Facebook firehose,” the new search engine will retrieve both fan page updates and links plus links from individual Facebook users whose updates are set to “Everyone.”

However, unlike other standalone Facebook search engines, user names and photos from Facebook users will not be displayed, and neither will the text included the status update. In fact, the only thing that will be retrieved is the link itself, in aggregate. It’s a nice way to retrieve the data from Facebook, without violating user privacy. 

The Bing homepage is also being tweaked now too to show the “trending topics” based on both the Twitter and Facebook data. When you click on a topic, you’re shown info about why it’s trending, results from social search and then query refiners.

These changes will roll out starting today, June 9th.

Also included is what may be the standout feature for Windows 7 users: taskbar integration. A counter in the taskbar shows you how many unread messages you have.

Another notifications feature also lets you read experts from new tweet updates, replies and more as they cycle through in the notifications.

You can download MetroTwit from here. Note that the app is in beta, so all the usual caveats apply.

Unlike Spindex, which is currently in private beta, Emporia is open to anyone, despite it still being in alpha. However, only FUSE Labs employees have access to its “like/dislike” feature, which may be the key selling point for the app.

Emporia isn’t really a Twitter client for managing your own stream, friends, replies and messages, but is more of a specialized search engine that uses “lenses” that let you focus on areas of interest like “technology,” “news,” “sports,” etc.

Pick any one of the lenses and you’re shown two columns, one being a stream view of actual tweets and the other showing the top-ranked web link results. For example, clicking on the “Technology” lens shows the most popular articles from sites like GigaOm, CNET, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and others.

From within each lens, you can also search for specific keywords or terms and see a sidebar featuring popular searches. Those appear to be searches occurring within the app itself, though, not from Twitter.com.

If you choose to sign into the app (via your Windows Live ID), you’ll be able to “like” or “dislike” tweets…that is, when this feature becomes publicly available. For now, it’s limited to FUSE employees only. In the future, these actions will help teach the app’s built-in recommendation engine about your interests. (The engine is a product from Microsoft Research called “Matchbox.”)

To try the app now, head over to projectemporia.com

By default, the app supports multiple Twitter accounts and Facebook, plus it offers support for lesser known services like Google Buzz and Socialwok. You can add in even more plugins, too, like Bit.ly and Bing Maps, for example.

Also new to this version of Seesmic are unique backgrounds provided by Red Bull (and more will arrive later, we’re told). Directory and channels like those supported in Seesmic Look are now available too.

You can download the preview version of Seesmic Desktop here.

With Twitter’s Blackbird Pie website, you can paste in a tweet’s URL to general embed code to place on your site. The new plugin, however, makes this process easier for bloggers using WLW. You just click “Twitter Quote” from the Insert menu and then paste in your URL. It’s pretty much the same process as when using the website itself, but this way, there’s no back and forth between pages as you copy and paste URLs, embed codes and the like. You can do it all from within WLW.

Thanks to Scott Lovegrove for making this plugin – and thanks to Steve Clayton for suggesting he do so!

You can download the plugin from here.

Once you register an account with the service using Twitter authorization, you’re provided with a unique email address you can use to post to Twitter. When you have something you want to share, you simply email it to the private address and it will post to your account.

You can also use the service to receive Twitter updates via email. If you follow a lot of users, then you’ll probably want to choose the digest option, which includes all the updates posted during the time frame you specify.

This isn’t the only Twitter/Outlook type tool we’ve uncovered. Take a look at TwInbox for another option.

With Spindex, now available as an early technical preview, your social streams from sites like Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, and Bing are displayed in one interface, allowing you to easily see the personal trends among your own network of friends. Think of it like a News Feed for all the social services on the web.

Spindex has already been compared to Friendfeed, a company that was recently sold to Facebook. And it’s true – the idea of social aggregator is not new. But Spindex, by the looks of it, has a few interesting features, most notably the “trends” section that appears at the top of your stream.

It also shows you recently shared links, top posters, the most commented on post, and recent news from Bing on the “homepage” of the service.

You can filter you stream by service, search, save searches, reply, favorite, share, “remember” (save), like and retweet items within the stream itself.

Spindex is built on Windows Azure which is what provides its scaling and speed. You’ll need an invite to get in, but you can stay tuned to updates on Facebook and Twitter for more info on that.

(Image credit: Steve Clayton) 

Developers can also customize Seesmic entirely from the link shorteners it uses to its skin itself and then launch their version as an independent download.

The entire thing is built on Silverlight technology, too. If you’re interested in developing for the platform, you can get started here: http://platform.seesmic.com.

For other reviews of the platform and why this is so exciting, check out developer Jesse Stay’s post: “The Coolest Thing I Saw at Chirp? It Wasn’t the Twitter Platform” or Robert Scoble’s, The Seesmic Squeeze: how a company responds to market changes in Twitter’s ecosystem, both of which are great reads.

First up: the Tweetmeme “follow” plugin. This plugin adds the Tweetmeme follow button to your post. The button comes in three styles: compact, normal and square and displays your Twitter icon plus a “follow” button and follower count, depending on which version you use. With the new plugin, WLW users can choose the button style, size and placement. It only works on blogs that support Javascript.

One blog platform that doesn’t support Javascript is Wordpress.com. For these users, there’s a different WLW plugin that takes advantage of the Wordpress tag option that uses a ‘shortcode’ to place the ReTweet button into a blog post. This plugin lets you configure options like button version, placement, Twitter name, URL shortener and whether or not it should appear in the RSS feed.

Also, anyone using the original TweetMeme plugin should go upgrade to the new version which now supports hashtags.

Like its predecessor, the Twikini app for WP7S lets you read and respond to tweets, replies and direct messages. It will features a portrait mode and landscape mode, too.

The app looks pretty, but some say (check the comments) it too heavily focuses on usernames instead of the tweets themselves. Luckily for those users, there’s already another option available: Seesmic, one of Microsoft’s launch partners, will also offer a Twitter app for Windows Phones which has a more traditional layout.

You can read more about the Seesmic app here and the Twikini app here.

From the screenshot/mockup, it looks like the Twitter app includes the same font styles as the Metro UI as well as similar-looking buttons that show an icon in a circle. Another neat feature: links appear in blue but @usernames appear in green and hashtags are red.

No word on a launch date for this app but the feedback in the comments section is definitely positive.

If it sounds a lot like Yammer, the “private Twitter for companies” app, the that’s because it is. But OfficeTalk isn’t being launched as an honest-to-goodness commercially available application designed to compete with Yammer and the like, it’s meant to be more of a social experimental from which the Office Labs team can learn. There isn’t even a download of the app publicly available – just a slideshow of screenshots.

By analyzing the way OfficeTalk is used at the various companies that have signed up to demo the software internally, the team hopes to learn more about how different businesses and people adopt and use these technologies. (By the way, if your company is interested in testing OfficeTalk, you can reach the Office Labs team here).

However, like the previous concept project TownSquare, elements of which are now in SharePoint 2010, some of the technologies in OfficeTalk may also make it into a commercial product at some point further down the road, too.