Even if its not the most flashy of activities to do on your phone, chances are you are texting. Fully 72 percent of cell phone owners in a recent report from the Pew Research Center said they send or receive texts, so the common perception that texting is a feature monopolized by teenagers and other youth can be thrown out the window. But texting isn't that exciting, for the most part. Characterized by shortened phrases and cutesy emoticons hammered out on feature phones, it's no wonder you never see text in a commercial for the latest Android or iPhone.

What's missing with text is context. It's a major reason why texts and e-mails and chat are so often misinterpreted, as you can't see the look on the person's face, or hear the tone in their voice.

But TextPlus, who I mentioned in July when they added their support for communities around text topics, is looking to bridge that gap, bringing one of the most appealing features of Apple's new iPhone 4 (FaceTime) to text in a feature they call Face Texts - as part of TextPlus 4 for iPhone and the new iPod Touch (which has a camera).


The concept, like FaceTime, is simple. Just like FaceTime took a known medium (videoconferencing) and made it personal by not only making it simple on a one to one basis on the iPhone, but also tugging at one's emotions with a pointed series of commercials, TextPlus is moving emotion into text. With Face Texts, every text between friends contains a photo of you in that moment.

No posing. No positioning. No makeup. Just you and how you feel as you send that text.

Similar to Apple's PhotoBooth application, there is a 3-2-1 countdown, a quick flash and as Steve Jobs would say, "boom". Your photo is next to the text you sent. Have a long conversation with a friend? Expect the expressions to change, or you can change your face to best explain your mood. It could be the missing link between text-only and true videoconferencing.

Drew Olanoff, director of community at Gogii, the company behind TextPlus, and a good friend of mine, also linked the idea behind FaceText to DailyBooth, the popular startup where you are encouraged to document and share your life with others, leveraging daily photos - but instead of a one-time shot through a computer, Face Text is you at an unrehearsed point in time, through what he says is the "best social network in the world - the one in your pocket."

The new TextPlus 4 works on iPhones, the new iPod Touch, and actually works well on iPads too, but you'll have a really hard time trying to find a camera on any of the current iPads out there, so if you want to Face Text, you'll have to pick photos from an existing archive in your collection and make do. But it's a lot of fun, and its personal - much more so than a simple string of text, a smiley face, and a lol for good measure.

You can start Face Texting once you download TextPlus 4 at http://www.textPlus.com/download/.

Disclosures: Drew Olanoff is CEO of Qwotebook, where I am an advisor. He is also one of my BFFs.

Thursday night, I gained the opportunity to participate in the Android Guys podcast, ostensibly to talk about the launch of my6sense's new application on the Android platform, but the far-ranging call discussed the rise of Android vs. iPhone, the issues of privacy and next generation search.

Starting at about five minutes in to the recording (below), you can see how these aggressively pro-Android geeks are seeing the introduction of the digital intuition and personal relevance app. In the discussion, they drill me on revenue questions, partnerships and how the Attention API could be used to surface relevant content from all streams. Hope you enjoy the discussion, which lasts about 20 minutes.

There's no question the market for determining personal relevance is a hot one. In addition to my6sense, which you've no doubt heard a lot about from me on this week and last, one of the more interesting players in this space is The Cadmus. After debuting in November of last year as a real-time stream filter to eliminate duplicates, the company found a solid position determining personalized aspects of Twitter, including trending topics, which launched in February, and trends by list the following month. Now, the company is branching out with an API that lets other Twitter clients tap into Cadmus for personal relevance.
   
The Cadmus At Work in TweetAgora, Tapping Their New API

If this sounds a lot like what my6sense is doing - that's because it is! my6sense introduced an attention API earlier this March at the DEMO conference, letting partners order all streams, from RSS to Twitter and Facebook, by relevance. With information overload being a serious problem for most active social networkers, and few content sources and clients doing much more than offering streams ordered by chronology, there is clearly a gap to be filled.

Cadmus is also teaming up with a lesser-known Twitter client called TweetAgora to raise the visibility of the good stuff while hiding the rest. TweetAgora highlights the opportunity as "Find the goods." and "Filter the junk.", including muting tweets by keyword, muting individuals, conversations, and blocking specific services, including Foursquare, Gowalla and Formspring.

Muting individuals has been closely associated with Twitter client Brizzly, from ThingLabs, and SocialToo, Jesse Stay's company, who I advise, also offers the option to mute or unfollow people by keyword, and to unfollow people based on the service used to update Twitter.

Cadmus' ability to launch an API with an active partner is a solid start, and the company is actively seeking out partners. You just might hear about some of their news tonight during an event with Seesmic.

To download TweetAgora, featuring Cadmus, head to the iTunes store here.

Disclosures: I am vice president of Marketing at my6sense, an assumed competitor of The Cadmus. I am also an unpaid advisor to SocialToo.

Cliqset is the most feature-rich site aggregator on the planet, pulling in content from more than 80 separate Web services, going way beyond Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz, and acting as an unsung pioneer of open standards, especially around data portability, identity and speed. The amount of data flowing into Cliqset has now reached a tipping point whereby creator Darren Bounds is opening up a searchable database that finds trends and information across the entire system, not just one service at a time. The idea? A broad social search that any brand or curator can tap into to see what is happening across the real-time Web.

The new Cliqset Social Search is similar to that long offered by FriendFeed, which, once the deepest and most broad real-time search engine, has now atrophied since its acquisition by Facebook, not only not getting new features, but seeing sporadic uptime. But the service goes a step further in having a dedicated site focused on searching deep into content shared on these separate networks, rather than just burying it inside Cliqset itself. Now, should you choose, you can skip right on past Twitter Search and do so on Cliqset instead, seeing a true real-time flow of mentions, keywords, brands and whatever else is happening on the Web.


As with Twitter's well-known "trending topics", Cliqset Social Search displays "popular terms" that are trending in the different social networks. And you can search across any of the individual networks, or more than one, by choosing the checkboxes. This way, you can search just Facebook or Google Buzz, if you like, and skip Twitter altogether, should you be looking for more signal and less noise.


If there are holes in the new Cliqset Social Search, I found that the recency of the item being discovered didn't always correspond to the time the item was shared. For example, a TechCrunch article posted in March came up as "2 minutes ago", presumably because that's when Cliqset found it. But it's better to find content than not find anything at all!


The opportunity for data mining social networks is obvious. That we haven't gotten a perfect solution for searching Facebook outside of the network, and Google Buzz hasn't made external searches easy is unfortunate. But we know the world online is much bigger than just Twitter, and Cliqset gives us a start to dive deep into these multiple content repositories to find just what people are saying everywhere.

Additionally, for Cliqset users, when logged in, you can interact with the content, including commenting, curation, replies and shares, said Darren. This is clearly another way to get more users into the site, which recently found itself hit with an invasion of signups from Turkey, and remains popular outside the United States - even if most people are having a hard time seeing beyond Twitter and Facebook, to try new social networks with interesting capability.

Of note, you don't have to search to find my account on Cliqset. I am here: http://cliqset.com/louisgray.