While there’s something to be said about seeking out the best of the web that appeals to you, more often than not we now turn to our friends ““ be they close friends we know in real life, or like-minded individuals worldwide that share our tastes. You might receive a retweeted link to a video via Twitter, a shared post on someone’s Facebook wall, an IM message with a link to a funny news story, or perhaps an email forward from your grandmother. These pieces of shared content are vetted by your friends and family, and that’s ultimately why they have a higher chance of meaning something to you when they’ve deemed it to be something you might find interesting.

So now that great recommended content streams in from our friends, how do we divert the waters of information about the best of the web down into a single, digestible form that is both aesthetically pleasing and efficient? We’re used to venturing out to all of these various networks and locations to find content, but what if we can bring it all to us instead? Enter Redux, a self-branded “new way to watch the web”, which uses “friendsourcing” to tap into what your friends are finding interesting and delivering it to you in a whole new way.

The simplest way to describe what Redux is doing is to think of it as a mix of social news websites like Digg and Reddit, with a mix of Twitter content visualization services like Brizzly and the upcoming Twazzup beta.

Redux hooks into your social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, and pulls out the content shared within them ““ in real-time. You’ll see at a glance the best of the web – the links, videos, images, and stories from the people on these services that you’re friends with – in a single stream of content. You can also filter the content to just provide videos, links, or images alone, or narrow down to just one of your social networks.

The way in which it’s similar to social news is by way of Redux’s use of “props” and commenting to bump content to the top of your stream. As Redux’s users interact with the content, it deems it to be “fresher” and thus more interesting, popular, and deserving of your attention. There’s also a notion of “Channels” which allows you to focus in on particular topics that have user-moderated content streams which stick to the types of media that piques your interest the most.

One of the most creative ways Redux repackages this new funneled content is by use of a “TV mode” which shows a fullscreen display of your content stream with all of its associated comments and props from your friends and the rest of the Redux community. As you watch, you can easily provide your own comments, props, or share the content quickly to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or copy/paste a link to send along to other friends outside of Redux.

The proliferation of real-time media consumption is prodding developers to come up with elegant solutions to bring relevant content to consumers in a way that’s seamless and engaging. Redux is a great step towards achieving this goal, and provides one of the better ways to bring the best of the web to you, rather than the other way around.

Looking for other services that help you to find what’s hot on the web? Check out these other related articles on MakeUseOf:

• How to Turn Twitter Into Your One-Stop Lifestream
• Disstill: Digg RSS Feed Filter For Hot Stories
• 5 Social Aggregators To Keep You Updated

What do you use to find the best of the web? Do you rely on RSS, aggregators like FriendFeed or Cliqset, or new services like Lunch or Simler? Let us know with your comments below and tell us how you find the best content!

Here’s a rundown of eight of the best Twitter tracking apps to help you keep track of your friends and followers, and decide among them who are adding value to your usage of one of the world’s most popular social networking tools.

TwitterKarma

While it may not win awards for its aesthetics, Twitter Karma makes up for its simple design by providing a quick solution to see all of your friends and followers sorted in a variety of ways. You can follow and unfollow quickly and easily among your friends, followers, and mutual friends.

FriendOrFollow

Another Twitter tracking app for a simple sorted visualization of your friends and followers is FriendOrFollow. It’s a fast way to find all of the people you follow who aren’t following you back. If you’re curious, you can also see who the top 100 most followed users are, or the top 100 users following the most other users.

ReFollow

For someone who wants even more control over their Twitter account, ReFollow provides a slew of features for any power user. You can view not only your friends and followers, but those who are friends or followers of any other particular user, or any user who has ever @mentioned you. These can all be sorted by last tweet, tweet count, alphabetical by username, or their friend/follower counts. There’s also a ton of filterable options if you need to get very specific. You can show only users with unique keywords in their bios, their geographic locations, or even if they have a custom avatar or not.

Twittangle

For people who like to manually label their friends and followers to get a better handle on who’s who, Twittangle allows users to form groups to better manage who they follow, or who’s following them. It also displays your friends and followers with a unique column view. You can rate them, add and apply tags to each of them, add them to unique groups, or see other users’ groups.

Tweepler

To best sort your followers, Tweepler takes a different, visual approach by presenting two “bucket” columns that you “process” your followers into. This allows you to assign certain followers into an ignore state that you don’t wish to follow back. You also have many sorting and searching options to help determine who gets dropped into each “bucket”.

Twitterless

Are you looking for more statistics and visualized graphs to help you sort out your friends and followers? Twitterless will graph your follower history over time and inform you of the users that stop following you. You can filter your friends and followers with keywords, words in their descriptions, or their location in relation to you. Twitterless also has a notion of forming groups to help you better organize your network.

Tweepi

For the geekiest Twitter users, Tweepi delivers a mathematical breakdown to help you decide if you have spammers or deadbeats among your friends and followers that you need to purge. The four modules Tweepi showcases are a Follow, Flush, Reciprocate, and Cleanup – all of which help to manage your network quickly and with plenty of numerical detail to help you make your tougher decisions.

Twerpscan

The last Twitter tracking app in the roundup is self-dubbed “anti-fool contact management”, which serves as a concise description of yet another visual solution which assists you in listing and sorting your network of friends and followers. The “Drilldown” feature allows you to research more about users, while the management tools present lists with ratios, tweet counts, and other info to decide who stays and goes.

All of the above tools are good choices for doing a better job of managing your network than what Twitter.com provides. It’s really a matter of how much control you’d like, and how quickly and easily you want to make changes. There’s plenty of ways to look at the users on your lists, and these 8 web apps can provide simple solutions, detailed analysis, or fine-tuned management solutions that help improve your experience with Twitter, and get more out of the service by narrowing the amount of people you stay in contact with to only those that matter most – for you.

Looking for even more ways to utilize Twitter to its fullest? Check out these other related Twitter articles on MakeUseOf:

• Five Tantalizing Twitter Tools To Tickle Your Tonsils
• 9 Useful Sites For Finding People To Follow On Twitter
• 5 Hot Tools To Complement Your Twitter Experience

Do you know of any other Twitter tools that you find to be essential for organizing and managing your network? Let us know the ones you like best with your comments!

While there are plenty of places online to find the full movie downloads, going through the process of getting the whole film and editing the scene you want down into a short clip is a time-consuming process. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place online that already did that for you? Enter MovieClips (a service only available in the US & Canada).

When you visit the site, it has a minimalistic UI that puts the search, front and center. The ability to search for just about any of your favorite movie scenes in an instant is nice, but the myriad ways that you can focus your search is nothing short of a movie miracle.

Want an actor? Type it in. How about a line of dialogue? No problem. Genres, actions, moods, characters, themes, settings, props ““ there’s simply nothing left behind when it comes to finding the exact scene you want from a multitude of angles. What you get as your result is a well-designed grid of thumbnails of each matching clip that can instantly be previewed with a simple mouseover ““ a great way to quickly find the scene you want.

Not only can you search and view these select movie moments, but you can also save any clip as a favorite, buy related stuff for each movie the clips belong to, grab an embed code to drop any clip onto your own website, or hook into your social network to share around on Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Digg, Reddit, or email it to a friend.

Another fun element to the clips’ pages are short trivia games associated with each clip ““ often pulling from a related actor, the movie itself, or some other related metadata that accompanies it.

The only drawback of the site thus far is that all of the clips are from only 6 movie studios – 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros – but these six represent the largest studios in Hollywood. With 12,000 clips and the promise of thousands more, it seems that MovieClips is cementing itself as the premiere place online to find those hard-to-find movie moments ““ that is unless their upcoming competitor, AnyClip, has anything to say about it.

If you’re looking for more ways to find favorite movie scenes and information about movies online, check out these related articles here on MakeUseOf:

• ScreenTunes: Find Out a Name of a Movie Song by Words or Movie Title
• Top 5 Websites To Watch Old Movie Trailers You Forgot About
• Watch-Movies: Watch Full-Length Movies Online

Does this sound like a better way to find your favorite film scenes online? Let us know what you think about MovieClips with your comments!

FlickPicks is a website that features a movie “fantasy football” game in which you create a virtual “theater” each week with a particular amount of “screens” to devote to the newest released films. Let’s take a closer look at how this can not only be educational in terms of how the movie industry makes its millions, but also how you can have a lot of fun while doing it.

Your job in this movie fantasy football game is to pick how many screens each film is worth in order to achieve the most amount of income from your theater’s sales. When you first sign up with a free account, FlickPicks drops you into the first division, the Drive-In Division, where you get your feet wet with other new users just starting out. The playing fields are leveled out this way to keep the high scoring veterans from competing directly with the brand new players.

You then have 7 screens to reserve for each film from the pool of new releases and other titles that are still playing in theaters. While you can choose between applying 1 or 2 screens per film depending on how you think they might perform, you also have the opportunity to gamble points on increasing the screen count for your theater to 3 for a particularly large blockbuster entry (Twilight: New Moon, or Avatar, for instance) and go for the best scores.

For the particularly brave risk-takers, there’s a weekly bonus challenge as well which lets you guess the movies with the lowest per-screen averages from the set of film releases ““ which are not always the easiest to predict!

In addition to the core mechanics of deciding which movies are bound for box office gold, there’s also an impressive amount of social communication surrounding these choices. Each theater is ranked by how well their predictions are made, and are put up on weekly and all-time scoring leaderboards for all to see. You can also form groups of up to 10 of your friends’ theaters together to compete as a team against other theater groups. There are comments for your theater, your group, and a “Buzz” forum where everyone playing can report in on how they might be playing each week.

On top of all the site’s networking features, FlickPicks also is prolific on Twitter, on Facebook, and on its own Tumblr-based blog ““ reporting the latest news on real-life screen counts, contests, and results.

Unlike the Hollywood Stock Exchange (which complicates the fun), and the Cantor Exchange (where real money is involved), FlickPicks is easy to understand, the stakes aren’t so high, and has near zero learning curve to begin playing and enjoying right away. It’s both entertaining and enlightening to see how some movies perform week to week ““ sometimes surprising you with their staying power from past opening weeks, or coming completely out of left field to take a much higher percentage of sales than you might consider when you’re formulating your weekly game plan.

If you’ve ever scoured the web to see how your favorite movies are doing, become addicted to fantasy sports games, or enjoy arguing the merits of art versus commerce with like-minded cinephiles, FlickPicks doesn’t disappoint in its execution and design to make movie fantasy football a wonderfully enjoyable weekly diversion.

If you liked this article on FlickPicks, you might also find these related articles interesting:

• The Awesome Internet Guide to the Movie Addict
• Create Your Own Top Movies of All Time List with Flickchart
• Jinni Recommends You Movies You Should Enjoy
• WhatTheMovie: Addictive Movie Quiz Site

Are you interested in these types of niche games and sites for movies and other entertainment? Sound off in the comments below!

Maybe you were a big fan of the beanie Will Smith wore in Hancock, or the sunglasses Angelina Jolie’s character “Fox” wore in Wanted, or you covet the slide-out Nokia cell phone Keanu Reeves’s character “Neo” used in The Matrix.

You certainly have the option to do a lot of online research, pour through brands and styles from countless designers, and hunt for these elusive objects of desire ““ but there is a better way. Enter Boxwish, a social shopping experience website for film fanatics where you can buy clothes from favorite movies. Boxfish centered entirely on these types of movie memorabilia that you’ve just got to have.

Let’s take a look and see how finding these scarce cinematic gifts might be made into a simple and enjoyable experience.

Boxwish makes finding paraphernalia from your favorite films a snap. The site offers several ways to seek out what you’re looking for; including searching by the movie you saw something in, searching by the actor wearing or using what you saw, or even searching by characters from the films. It’s an ingenious way to showcase the many product placements you may subconsciously see while you’re enjoying the latest blockbusters.

In addition to some of the real-life items presented, Boxwish also offers plenty of related novelties from all of the films as well that film fanatics will love.

To give you an idea of the breadth of items Boxwish has to offer, let’s take a look at Twilight as an example. Boxwish lets Twilight fans search for items as obscure as Carlisle’s ring, Alice’s choker, Edward’s wrist cuff, or even the dreamcatcher that Jacob gives to Bella for her birthday. These are in addition to the scores of t-shirts, trading cards, bookmarks, key rings, pens, socks, dolls, games, and countless other stocking stuffer candidates for any family member enthralled with Twlight.

They’re also currently featuring a significantly thorough “Christmas Shopping Guide” with ways to shop, broken down by gifts for the family, by price, by most popular films, by activities, for Christmas parties, and by gender ““ all directly related to the movies.

Another aspect of Boxwish that sets it apart as an online shopping destination is its many social features. Creating an account is simple using its Facebook Connect feature to log in directly through Facebook. You can rate products, make comments on any item on the site, and you can also share items you really like out to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.

While it’s not particularly difficult to find themed gifts for popular films, seeking out those hard-to-find items that eagle-eyed moviegoers spot can take up way too much of your holiday shopping time. With Boxwish, you can quickly find some of the coolest gear and fashion from recent popular films, sign up to keep track and share stuff from the cinema you’ve discovered with your friends, read their magazine-like blog, give feedback on their UserVoice-powered community support, follow them on Twitter, and become a fan of the site on Facebook.

If you’re on the lookout for more creative shopping options this holiday season, check out these related articles:

• Modista: Visual Shopping Site For Shoes And Handbags
• 5 Online Shopping Sites That Will Actually SAVE You Money
• Go Gift Shopping with Amazon Gift Central

Does Boxwish sound like a helpful way to find the perfect gift for your film fanatic friends and family members? Write a comment below and let us know!

The only drawback inherent with the way Twitter distributes these endorsements is that the person reading the message usually has to be there at the time it’s posted, otherwise they might miss it. It’s also less personal, since an indirect message sent into the public stream has the danger of getting lost in the noise of all the other tweets rolling past their screens.

Let’s Get Personal

Direct messaging takes care of the problem of making your message personalized and ensuring they don’t miss it, but Twitter doesn’t offer an easy way to directly message large groups of followers at once. Enter a new web service named PubliciTweet. PubliciTweet is Twitter ad marketing software that takes this problem head on with its ability to create social media marketing campaigns using Twitter to focus your personalized message to groups of your followers.

Let’s take a look and see how this product might allow you to leverage Twitter’s strengths to deliver your message efficiently and effectively to the most influential of your customers.

That’s Easy For You To Say

Setting up a campaign with PubliciTweet is about as simple as it gets ““ create a free account, write your tweet, optionally choose when it should be sent and to whom, and you’re done. By default, your message is sent to your 500 most popular followers (or all, if you have less than 500 followers), and it gets to work immediately sending your message directly to them as a Twitter direct message.

To stick to Twitter’s rate limitation guidelines, your campaign is throttled to 100 messages per hour, up to 1000 messages per day ““ automatically. If you’re inclined, you can set up groups of followers ahead of time and choose to send to more specific followers ““ perhaps localized in certain parts of the world, by age demographics, or to your most communicative followers. PubliciTweet claims that their calculations show click-through rates increase by up to 500% when sent as a direct message, and using their service might make you a believer.

How Do You Measure Up?

As PubliciTweet’s system sends out your targeted message to your followers, it is also compiling a list of incredibly useful and detailed statistics ““ such as the conversion rate showing exactly how many times a link in your message was clicked, graphs that illustrate the effectiveness of your campaign over time, and even a Google Maps mash-up pinpointing where in the world your campaign is reaching, and which of your followers are acting upon your message.

What’s really impressive however is the way it brings to light the trickle-down effect that Twitter has, by listing the top referrers of your campaign ““ taking into account people who retweet, share your message, and act upon it among their followers. Of course, while you’re on the go, you’ll receive daily snapshot updates of these important statistics via (you guessed it!) a direct message on Twitter. You can quickly start to see just how powerful a targeted direct message can be through all of the metrics PubliciTweet provides.

Small Message, Big Results

PubliciTweet is currently free while it’s in public beta, and is available to sign up and use immediately at their site. You can follow them on Twitter (@pbct), and they also offer support using the ever-popular service, GetSatisfaction, to discuss new feature ideas, questions about the service, and report issues.

While composing a compelling message that convinces your followers to click your link in less than 140 characters is the hard part of an online marketing campaign, PubliciTweet makes the delivery of that message quick and effortless. The added bonus of measurable success shown through their many statistics makes it a no-brainer addition to your arsenal of Twitter tools for efficacious communication to your customers.

How Else Do I Spread The Word?

In addition to the PubliciTweet Twitter ad marketing software, you might like to check out these other related services and articles:

• TweetManager: Automate Your Twitter Account
• CoTweet: Twitter Management Tools For Business
• MakeUseOf.com’s “The Complete Guide to Twitter”

If you have used PubliciTweet, please let us know in the comments what you think of it and how it can be improved.

One such evolution in site analytics comes from a startup called Reinvigorate. Where Google has reigned supreme in delivering detailed statistics about site usage and traffic with their free analytics service, it’s fallen short on delivery of that information in real-time. Let’s take a look at the way Reinvigorate can be utilized to achieve a clearer picture of visitor behavior, and how it might work towards achieving the goal of increased awareness between website owners and their users.

Who Goes There?

While having the ability to see how many visitors you might have on a given day is helpful, being able to know how many visitors are on your site right now is valuable. It’s valuable for determining how and when to scale up your site’s infrastructure to accommodate higher loads of traffic. It’s valuable to determine if you’ve suddenly been linked from a high-profile blog or news outlet. It’s also the key metric Reinvigorate features at their core that set them apart from Google ““ showing exactly how many active visitors are on your site at any given time.

Re-Invigorating, Isn’t It?

Reinvigorate is a site analytics application that offers the ability to see not only how many visitors you have, but also their names, and where they’ve just come from. In addition, you can see the actions taken by these users as they happen. Some of these actions include posting a comment, or becoming a new user ““ activities that can even have an associated sound effect (such as a satisfying “cha-ching” any time a user makes a purchase) when viewed in Reinvigorate’s desktop tool called Snoop. Snoop is a quick, free download for Windows or Mac that instantly keeps you updated with the latest happenings occurring on your site.

Where Google sometimes lags behind, the web interface of Reinvigorate allows you to dig deep into granular metrics by not only the year, month, and day ““ but also by the hour. Referrals, session activity, visitor details, and navigation paths are all available nearly immediately as they occur. Features on the horizon for Reinvigorate include scalable charts and graphs of all of the immediate data, and heatmaps to pinpoint exactly where and how often your pages’ content is clicked ““ in real-time.

Reinvigorate is free to sign up for and use during their beta testing phase, and offers a tour of their offerings at their site so you can see for yourself how the real-time site analytics data it collects can be visualized. Installation is a simple Javascript code block added to pages you wish to track ““ or if you’re a WordPress or Drupal user, an even easier plug-in download is available to get you up and running immediately.

Isn’t It Time?

The bottom line is that if you’re not paying attention to your users’ actions and behaviors as they occur, you’re missing out on a wealth of information that can be the tipping point to lead your website’s success. Reinvigorate’s strength is its ability to discover more knowledge about your users than ever before. While Google Analytics remains an industry stalwart, new innovations from companies like Reinvigorate can offer cost-effective solutions to stay connected in today’s real-time web environment.

Consider The Alternatives

In addition to Reinvigorate, other companies offering real-time site analytics services include Chartbeat, Clicky, ClickTale, and Woopra. See also: Free Traffic Analytics Tools you Should Know About.

Which analytics service do you use and is it real-time?