Ever since Digg opened its API, talented programmers have built a ton of tools that utilize Digg. Some of these tools monitor upcoming and popular stories. Others tell you about your account statistics and your circle of friends. Yet others allow users to browse stories, videos, and pictures in very unique and flashy ways. Here are twenty-nine tools, with some being lesser known than others, but all of them having some pretty significant purpose in the life of a Digger.

1. diggwatcher is a simple application built in Flash that runs in the background and monitors a single Digg story of your choosing. You can receive sound alerts when you get new Diggs, comments, and when your story becomes popular. The script refreshes every 60 seconds.

2. The Digg Noise Filter is a tool that will let you watch upcoming stories before they become popular… that’s if you don’t want to use the regular Digg upcoming tool. (Developed by Russ Jones)

3. Digg Entourage was also developed by Russ Jones and shows you who is in your Digg social circle by avatar and also in table format (number of stories Dugg, percentage of stories Dugg, and whether they’re your friend or fan):

With the launch of the private beta of Pownce, the new microblogging network launched by Digg celebrities Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka, and Leah Culver, people are claiming that it is the Twitter killer. After a somewhat heated debate with a friend, I’m not so sure that’s the case. At the present time, each microblogging platform has its pros … and its cons. Let’s look at the benefits to each and evaluate to see who is the victor.

Round 1: Interface.

Part A: Layout

Here’s my cute little public page on Pownce.

Compare that with my cute little public page on Twitter.

At first glance, Pownce is the clear winner. The interface is a lot more sleek than Twitter.

Layout Results: Pownce 1, Twitter 0

Part B: Layout Personalization

Let’s take a look at the layout functionality and personalization options.

Pownce doesn’t give you much customization options. You can only choose one of four available themes.

On the other hand, you can upload a background of your choosing to your Twitter page.

As I promised in my earlier thread, besides answering the typical question, “What are you doing?”, Twitter has many additional uses. What are my top picks?

1. Twitter as a tool to communicate during conferences. After attending SMX (I’ll post something on that soon) and SES NY, I realized that Twitter is a useful tool for conferencegoers to communicate their whereabouts or to share breaking news and announcements. This was particularly prevalent during the South by Southwest conference several months ago, which helped fuel Twitter’s growth. The SXSW Twitter feed helped many communicate with each other and even allowed for individuals to meet for the first time. Similarly, Michael Twittered during SES in April. So did I. I also did so during SMX.
2. Twitter as a tracking device. This is an interesting and unconventional way of using Twitter. Personally, I haven’t seen it that often (with the exception of this cute little flight post Barry wrote about me), but I think it has potential. Last week, when I went to Seattle, I was in a timezone that put my family three hours ahead of me. Still, they were interested in my whereabouts and wanted me to email them. When email is unavailable, there’s almost always SMS. It’s much easier to send a text message to 40404 than to buzz your sleeping family member letting them know you landed. Have them check your Twitter page to see that you are safe and sound. If you’re someone who spams Twitter often, your family (and friends) should see a lot of updates from you.

In the past few months, Facebook has been attracting a plethora of new users, including people who vowed never to jump on that bandwagon. I guess that most people cave into peer pressure after all.

Especially online. Especially when it connects the older generations to the younger generations (like parents to their children and grandparents to their grandchildren). I can’t wait until my grandma signs up for Facebook. Her picture is already posted on it.

A lot of people among me have been overwhelmed by the recent changes at Facebook. On May 24, Facebook launched the F8 Facebook Developer Platform, allowing third-party application developers to integrate new applications and tools into their Facebook account.

For awhile, I feared that this would be MySpace. But as I saw the opportunities, this is hardly a MySpace at all. Facebook still has the clean look, but you can spruce it up a bit and personalize it even further.

And while people are posting preliminary results of their first impressions of Facebook applications, here is what’s driving me to Facebook:

Since I’m covering a lot more of the latest news lately, I noticed yesterday that there is proposed legislation that will possibly anonymize domain registration information. The reason? Spam. Spammers are apparently accessing WHOIS information and using this information to send individuals unsolicited messages. The proposed legislation would allow “domain name registrants would be able to list third-party contact information in place of their own.”

Note that I emphasized “apparently.” While I’ve seen this practice happen in the past in minute amounts, I’m pretty confident that spammers are not using the WHOIS database for the kind of spam that plagues our everyday lives. Spammers have bots that crawl regular SERPs for that. Furthermore, most WHOIS query databases have limitations on the number of domains you can look up in any given time.

Additionally, once your email address is out there, it’s out there. Perhaps, if you choose to hide it later, it won’t be accessed by new generation spammers (unless they buy an old list), but people will have those email addresses until you change to a new one (and protect that new one). The only spam I’ve received related to any domain names I’ve owned are from domain “hijacker” companies, like DROA (the Domain Registry of America), companies who think it’s perfectly fine to con users into believing that their domain is about to expire — so let’s go renew it with another registrar — me! (Do I sound frustrated?)