O’Reilly's Alex Howard reports that both House floor summaries and bulk downloads of all House legislation are now available in XML. It doesn't mean everything Congress does is available yet, but it’s a great progression.

I really hope some enterprising developers make something cool with the newly-available data streams, and future offerings as well. I propose an app that provides push notifications when keywords of your choice are mentioned on the House floor.

Fred Wilson:

This morning I was at the gym listening to the Django Unchained Soundtrack on my phone in the SoundCloud android app. I decided I wanted to make Trinity my song of the day on Tumblr. I hit the share icon, up came a list of apps, I selected Tumblr, and I was taken to the Tumblr app but as a link share. I wanted an audio share.

This happens whenever I try to share something to Tumblr and it drives me crazy. Hopefully Mr. Wilson’s emails to SoundCloud and Tumblr will prompt resolution between their apps, and spur conversation about fixing this kind of thing overall.

Matt Brian writing at The Next Web:

In our tests, I had mixed results. Initially, my iPhone continued to remain in range, meaning that if I was to walk around the office or different rooms in the house, my Mac remained awake and usable. However, if I went outside a range of around 10-15 meters, Keycard did its thing without an issue.

I’m not sure $6.99 is a viable price for 1.0 app whose developers are still perfecting activation range and that is suffering from “random screen locks when the device is still in range,” but it’s a neat concept. I’d find it especially useful in an Apple-focused office environment or a co-working space. Here’s a direct link to the iTunes store if you want to check it out.

This is a brilliant and elegant use of Foursquare. It’s just a web app, at least for now, so it doesn’t really fit my use case. But it looks impressive and I’m going to give it a try.

Ars Technica reader jamieskella, contributing to Chris Foresman’s reader recommendation round-up for all those newly-gifted iPads out there:

How and why is Spotify still being recommended when Rdio (free) boasts 18 million songs and is available in so many regions globally? The supremely intuitive app experience leaves Spotify in the dust, the social features add to the already first-rate discovery options, while the method of cataloguing your favourite music is far superior.

Yup, it still pains me that so many people got hooked on Spotify via Facebook and never learned of Rdio’s obvious superiority.

People who prefer Spotify to Rdio either don’t know Rdio exists (Rdio’s problem) or are totally crazy (their problem).

What makes Rdio the better service:

• New release notifications for the music you love
• UI and UX don’t suck
• Web client is solid
• Album-focused approach instead of playlist-focused approach
• Remote control Rdio on one device from another

Drew Olanoff, at TechCrunch:

By not forcing you to log into your Tumblr account, the company could attract a brand new set of users who just want to pull photos together without the hassle of creating a page, tagging things or worrying about how to share them.

Maybe this will work, maybe not. But I like Tumblr’s people because of stuff like this.

Related

Kevin C. Tofel, writing at GigaOM:

This could mean vastly better tablet apps for the higher resolution Kindle Fires similar to the improved iPad apps that iOS developers made instead of scaled-up iPhone software.

I think he’s right: assuming developers embrace this change, it can only bode well for the quality of app experiences for consumers.

But that’s not the only angle here, is it?

I’m not a developer, so I have some questions. My questions imply their own answers, so correct me if I’m wrong:

1. How is encouraging the development and maintenance of multiple simultaneous versions of an app going to be helpful to developers?
2. Doesn’t each version come with its own bugs, complaints, and quirks?
3. Don’t developers want easier ways to incorporate device flexibility into a single binary?

Robins Wauters interviewed Seesmic founder Loïc Le Meur at The Next Web today on his company’s sale to rival HootSuite.

I have always thought Seesmic was the best multi-profile app for Twitter and Facebook on mobile, and I always preferred their web interface to Hootsuite’s. But Le Meur is a brilliant fellow, and, as long as his team is taken care of, via either jobs at Hootsuite or decent compensation, I can only be happy for Seesmic.

Further Reading

• After Long Startup Journey, Seesmic Is Bought By Social Media Management Service Hootsuite by Eric Eldon at TechCrunch
• HootSuite CEO: We’re Buying Seesmic For The Users, Not The Tech [Interview] by Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch
• I’m forty today by Le Meur at his Facebook page

Jeff John Roberts provides an update on Twitter’s latest legal battle over at GigaOM. I think it’s fascinating that Twitter is living two lives:

They’re vigorously defending the rights of their users to maintain control over what happens to their tweets with regard to the government. They’re also perfecting a a cold hostility toward third-party developers.

These two strategies feel, for obvious reasons, very different from one another. But they are both directed at achieving the same two goals:

1. to maximize the user-base, particularly to keep Twitter attractive to dissidents, protesters, journalists, and others whose use cases may involve sensitive or vulnerable action or information
2. to maximize Twitter’s control over user-generated content (mostly individual tweets) and how it is consumed by users

It’s a great time to be a Twitter user who is happy with the service’s in-house apps and undaunted by their increasing bloat. It is a very bad time to be someone interested in providing Twitter users with a better experience that Twitter itself is willing or able to do.

Rebecca Grant, writing at VentureBeat:

Restaurants can use this iPad app to keep track of available tables and alert customers with a text message when their table is ready.

This sounds like technology with the potential to go far beyond restaurant use cases.

If you’ve ever wanted your Mac to be louder (as I often did before buying this app), Boom is worth the money. Here’s a direct link to the App Store.

Frederic Lardinois, writing at TechCrunch:

The web app, says Pulse, is “designed for discovery” and while it’s still a very visual experience, Pulse did away with the row layout it uses in its mobile apps. Instead, your list of sources is now on the left and stories appear in a beautiful dynamic grid layout. The design is responsive, so the layout will automatically adapt itself to the size of your browser windows.

I’ve only tried it out for a few minutes, but it’s beautiful and functional, and it’ll be much easier to manage sources on the web than it is on mobile.

I cut a parenthetical in Lardinois’ headline referring to Microsoft’s part in bringing Pulse to the web. The end result certainly does look great for touchscreen devices generally, and like it fits right into the Windows 8 design aesthetic specifically.