AllHere.org

YCombinator-funded Cloudant, a database platform built around Apache’s open source CouchDB framework, officially launches after three years of hard work. Cloud-based like Cloudera and Amazon Web Services and part of the NoSQL movement, Cloudant scales your database on the CloudDB framework but also provides hosting, administrative tools, analytics and support so "You don't have to think a lot up front about what your database is going to look like." Going up against Goliaths like Oracle, Cloudant focuses on scalability, flexibilty, and high availability. Its method of data storage is ideal in any situation in which data is generated in a distributed way, such as with sensor networks, web servers, and mobile device services, in essence "small companies with big data."

It's hard to remember a product I've become so dependent on quicker than Gmail's new Priority Inbox. I'm so addicted, that the few times I've accidentally clicked on the old "regular" Inbox view in the past week have really annoyed me. So much so that I actually moved that view into my "more" drop down (you can drag any sidebar item in there). And now I have good news: you can all share in this addiction. While it began rolling out to users on Monday, Google is now saying that Priority Inbox should be available to all users (including Google Apps users) today. Look for the "New! Priority Inbox" message in red in the top right corner of your Gmail account to activate it. There's a slight learning curve with it, so you'll still probably want to watch Google's official video. But once you get started, it's unlikely that you'll go back.

When Six Apart launched Vox, a blogging/social network platform with strict privacy controls, in 2006, investor David Hornik had high hopes. Vox is an "amazing blogging platform," he said, because "Finally I have a place where I can post pictures and video of my kids without concern about who is looking at them." Vox will be shut down on September 20, says Six Apart. What they're not saying is why. Part of it is likely cleanup for a merger that the company continues to flatly deny - CEO Chris Alden will have fun explaining his way out of that one if it actually happens.

Heard of Tagged? Back in 2005 it was a teenager-only social network, catering primarily to U.S. high school students as Facebook charged through the college crowds. By 2007 they were profitable and worth over 0 million. Just one problem though. Facebook eventually started letting high school students in, and then everyone else. Tagged responded by opening up to everyone, too. But by mid 2007, CEO Greg Tseng tells me, Tagged knew it was in trouble. "Facebook beat us," he said. "We were just another social network...but not in the top five."

A/B testing, which entails running multiple versions of a site at once and tracking which one performs best with users, is a key part of launching a new version of any website.Visual Website Optimizer, which I'll just call VWO from here on out, helps users manage this often complex process. The service shares some similiarities with a Y Combinator-funded startup called Optimizely, which launched in July. Among some of VWO's features are multivariate testing (you can adjust more than one item on your site and VWO will run them in various combinations to determine which ones have a positive effect), heatmaps showing off where users are clicking (which are useful for visualizing where your visitors are clicking for different variations of a site), and split URL tests, which gives you the option to redirect traffic to two alternate versions of your website.

To many users, Twitter for iPhone (the artist formerly known as Tweetie) is perhaps the perfect Twitter client (though I'd argue that the new Twitter for iPad is right there with it). But the one thing it has been lacking and that users knock it for is the lack of Push Notifications. Well, good news. They're coming. Soon. Twitter is currently internally testing the feature, we've confirmed. Interestingly enough, we learned of its existence when the latest version of the app went out yesterday (the universal binary that included Twitter for iPad). It appears that users who have iOS 4.1 installed (which just hit Gold Master for developers, but won't be official out until next week) get the option to enable Push Notifications for Twitter. They don't appear to be working yet, but the feature is definitely there.

Last time we wrote about Notifo, we called it a "simple mobile notifications platform for anything" -- and really, that's probably the best way to describe it. Take your iPhone, install the Notifo app, hook it up to your favorite services (like Twitter, or GitHub) or any of the "Projects" (read: plugins, like Growl alert forwarding, or Chrome-to-Notifo ), and bam! You've got push notifications coming down to your iPhone from just about anything you could imagine. All that notification sending takes two things: users to send the messages to, and a message pushing backend to handle all the heavy lifting -- the same two things, as it just so happens, that one would need to create a basic instant messaging service. And so they have.

When I read Twitter CEO Evan Williams post tonight about the state of Twitter from a mobile perspective, the first thing that jumped out at me what that Twitter for Android, an app Twitter worked hard on, isn't even in the top 10 most-used apps for the service. But Williams also used the post to whip out some impressive numbers. Chief among them: Twitter now has over 145 million registered users (though presumably less than 150 million, or he would have said that). And there are now nearly 300,000 registered apps in the Twitter ecosystem. The latter number above is technically the number of registered OAuth apps in the ecosystem (and includes multiple instances of some apps). Twitter made the switch over from basic authentication to OAuth a few days ago, leaving behind some apps, such as the old Tweetie (which was reborn as Twitter for iPhone). Williams says this number of registered apps has tripled since their Chirp conference -- which was only this past April.

This evening Twitter CEO Evan Williams put up an interesting post about Twitter mobile usage. By just about every measurable metric, it seems to be skyrocketing. He also included a graph of the top 10 ways people are now using Twitter. This includes both Twitter's own apps and third-party clients, but notably, Twitter for Android is nowhere to be seen. I've confirmed with Twitter that this isn't a mistake. It seems that Twitter for Android is in fact not in the top 10 ways people interact with the service. That's incredible considering that Twitter for iPhone is number 4 and Twitter for Blackberry is number 5. Both of those were built by the Twitter team, just as the Android app was.

An interesting beneficiary of Apple's launch of music-oriented social network Ping—social status updater Ping.fm. According to Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur, Ping.fm saw a record number of accounts created yesterday (Seesmic acquired Ping.fm earlier this year). Could it be a coincidence? Definitely, not. When you Google "Ping," Ping.fm is the second result under the golf equipment site PING (this doesn't include News results). Apple's Ping is actually the fourth result (not including Video results). On Bing, Ping.fm is the third result, behind the golf company and the Wikipedia page for Ping. Clearly, as people starting becoming curious about Apple's Ping yesterday on search portals, they also found Ping.fm in results.