In an effort to lose weight before his own wedding, Alex Ressi, 33, launched TweetWhatYouEat.com in January 2008.

Unable to find a simple way to keep a food diary online, the New York-based developer created his own site that lets people keep a Twitter-based food diary by sending messages via mobile text or the Web.

Although people can choose to keep their messages private, by default the TweetWhatYouEat Web site broadcasts, in real-time, members’ messages about their meals and caloric intake. Now, the site has about 12,000 members, some of whom have lost 40 pounds, he said.

Ressi said the goal was to make users more aware of what they’re putting in their body. But he acknowledged that another force is also behind the site’s effectiveness: Shame.

“There is that component of shame,” he said. “Perhaps if your food diary is open and public, it may affect what you eat.”

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But If you’re tired of calorie counting, try eat stop eat lifestyle.

This widget lets you view your Twitter stream, as well as post updates, right from your 5800 phone!

If you do not know about Twitter, it’s a great way for people to stay in touch with others and a quick way of getting snippets of news and gossip. With Twitter, you can stay hyper–connected to your friends and always know what they’re doing.

With this widget you can get the twitter on fullscreen on your Nokia 5800. Stew’s functionality is limited to reading updates and posting new ones on Twitter. You cannot reply to a contact, nor can you follow any links that your friends might have posted.

Download Twitter Application ‘Stew’ for Nokia 5800

[ via - tube5800.com ]

During the beta period, voice chats will be limited to two minutes on Twitter, the company Jajah said.

A new third-party offering from Jajah known as Jajah@call is expected to go into beta Thursday morning that will allow Twitter users to initiate a two-way voice chat with other users by typing “@call @username” — where “username” is someone’s Twitter ID — into any Twitter client.

During the beta period, the company said, the calls will be limited to two minutes, but the company will evaluate that length during beta. However, it sees the two minute period, after which the call will end, as “the verbal equivalent of a tweet.”

According to Jajah, an Internet communications provider with tens of millions of users, the service will allow a user to place a call to any other user, so long as the second person follows the first on Twitter and both have Jajah accounts.

The service is free to use and is expected to work on any Twitter-enabled device, from PCs to smart phones.

[ via CNN.com ]

RankSpeed, a new search tool, announced today the launch of its public beta that does a sentiment analysis on the Twittersphere / blogosphere to find the best websites, the most useful web apps, the most secure web services, etc…

Users can search for any website category using tags and rank by any criteria: good, useful, easy, secure, etc. For each result a statistical analysis computes the percentage of twitterers / bloggers who have said it is good, easy, …

“Traditional search tools rank results by popularity“, said Florent Voignier, CEO of RankSpeed. “But sometimes the best product or service is not the most popular. A statistical analysis helps us find which result is more often associated with good, great or other synonyms in blog posts and tweets.“

Several sentiments can be entered to compare results by a set of subjective qualities defined by user: powerful, easy, secure, fast, etc. For each sentiment a bar graph shows the percentage of bloggers who have expressed this opinion.

RankSpeed tracks 3 millions of websites, selects the most commented in the Twittersphere / blogosphere and ranks them by any criteria.