Everyone likes their twitter.  Michael Arrington certainly does, hes twittered 62 times in the last 24 hours! That’s a Twit Per Hour Ratio of 2.583!  Was this spike in Twittering caused by Valleywag?

It’s not going to be SXSW, but be sure to check out Google’s I/O conference coming up in San Francisco on May 28th & 29th.

“Along the way, we’ve seen the power of collaborative web apps and become very familiar with the pain points of building them. To share that knowledge, we just announced Google I/O — a two-day developer gathering to be held May 28-29 in San Francisco. We want to move the web forward as a platform, and continue to invest in projects like Google Gears, OpenSocial, and the Google Web Toolkit to further that effort.”

Early Bird pricing is $300 through the 28th.    From the Official Google Blog

Google I/O Site

On their way back to wherever they came from, Mashable founder Pete Cashmore and guests had an impromptu FlashMashMeet (try saying that 10 times fast) in the Austin Airport. See the picture for proof.

Is it just me or does Pete always put his arm around the person he’s with in the photo.

You can view the entire flickr set here

Yesterday my RSS reader lit up with posts about a “big announcement from YouTube tomorrow”. Many were hoping the announcement would be about live video streaming since Steve Chen made a comment about this at a YouTube party recently. But when the news broke today it was about a new API and many were disappointed, but I was thrilled.

Now with these new APIs you can literally make your own interface to YouTube and have access to all their data and even customize the YouTube player to match your site’s design. I already have a project in mind that I’d like to use some of this functionality for.

Also look for Geoff Stearns talking about the new player in the video below. Geoff Stearns is the creator of SWFObject and I believe he hinted at these new features in a comment on his blog a few weeks ago where he said “Let’s just say you may be pleasantly surprised next week.”. This was in response to a comment about YouTube’s player.

This is a great move on YouTube’s part and I’m looking forward to seeing what developers will create from this new API/Data features.

List of new features ( Read the entire blog post here )

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

Watch the video announcement

Since we aren’t there this year, we can at least look at some pictures.

photo credit: b_d_solis

photo credit: b_d_solis

photo credit: b_d_solis

photo credit: b_d_solis

photo credit: b_d_solis

photo credit: b_d_solis

photo credit: b_d_solis

photo credit: b_d_solis

photo credit: b_d_solis

SXSW 2007 played a huge roll in Twitter’s success. The simple service has been in the buzz on a regular basis since their rise to fame and not always for a good reason either. The site has been plagued with downtime and performance issues since its popularity.

This year Sched.org is taking the SXSW spotlight. Sched is a simple calendar system which “brings order to the masses”. Created by Taylor McKnight and Chirag Mehta, Sched has been a hit among South by Southwest conference attendees. In fact shortly after its inception, Sched had 1,900 users already using the site. Not bad for an app that was built in 14 hours.

The 2 founders plan on creating unique versions of sched for other large conferences in the future.

Screenshot

Welcome to Heartlandish! In the next few weeks our pages will start to fill with the stories of tech startups throughout the middle part of the country, aka the fly over states! We want to provide an additional view on the emerging web 2.0 startup community. Look for some great posts in the coming days and weeks! Please give us some feedback and let us know what you think about our efforts.

Matthew Eber & Noah Everett

P.S. Add us to your reader, we promise it will be worth it! Subscribe in a reader