We asked you what your favorite social media application were, and you responded en masse.  Here are the apps that you and your fellow PreCentral readers simply cannot do without in the social media scene:

Facebook for webOS, free:  Developed by Palm’s developer relations team, this Facebook app has seen rapid growth and is well on its way to becoming on of the best on any platform.

Tweed, $2.99:  One of the first and one of the best Twitter apps in the Catalog (and this blogger’s personal favorite), Tweed’s simplicity and speed have a good number of you hooked.

LinkedIn, free:  It’s like Facebook, but exclusively for your professional goings on.  It hasn’t been updated much since hitting the App Catalog last year, but it does the basics and it does them well.
 

Foursquare, free:  Zhephree’s excellent Foursquare client let’s you "check-in" to venues in style, all while updating your friends on your whereabouts via Twitter and Facebook and competing with them for mayorships at your favorite locals. 

Digloo, $1.99:  A great Digg app for webOS that does everything you’d expect Digg to do while mobile: Digg and bury stories and comment, browse individual topics relevant to your interests and other such Digg-ey things.

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While owners of the Palm Pre in Europe are still languishing with a few hundred apps (if that many) of the free variety, they can at least take heart that their carrier hasn’t abandoned them. As noted by teltarif.de, O2 is actually behind the creation of at least four German-language webOS apps: Mobile eBay, Xing, N24, and FriendScout24. Xing is a business social networking site similar to LinkedIn and popular in Germany, FriendScout24 is Germany’s top dating website, and N24 is a German news channel (News 24, eh). Mobile eBay, as you’ve likely deduced from its clever title, is eBay Germany formatted for your webOS phone. While Europe won’t be getting paid applications until March, webOS users in Germany can at least take heart that their carrier is still looking out for them.

Thanks to Hans for the tip!

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The year is winding to a close, so it’s time for all sorts of publications to put together their year-ending lists. And Popular Science, the gadget heads that they are, put together their listing of the ‘Best of What’s New 2009.’ Since you’re reading about it here on PreCentral, we think you can figure out what made the list. Yep, the Palm Pre.

What about the Pre was deemed to be cool enough to be among ‘the best’? It’s social aspects, specifically integration with social networking (i.e. Facebook and LinkedIn) as well as its integrated messaging combination of IM and SMS.

The Pre isn’t the only thing to make the list of coolness. Also in the gadgets category you’ll find the Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR camera, the Microsoft Zune HD PMP, Fujifilm FinePix Real 3D W1 stereo 3-D camera, and the Android operating system.

Thanks to amarub for the tip!

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Yesterday brought us a great many updates, and we suspect there’s a reason: remember how developers were given early access to future builds of webOS so they could tweak their apps to work properly? Yeah. But updated apps aren’t the only thing we got – there were some new apps in town too, enough to bring the total count to 320. The list is long, so take a gander after the break.

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In many ways, the Pixi is to the Pre what the Centro was to the Treo. In some ways it’s the same phone, in others it’s a different beast. And a svelte beast this one is. Like the Pre, the Pixi features EVDO Rev. A, the touch sensitive gesture area, a full QWERTY keyboard, GPS, 3.5 mm headset jack, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, 8 GB of storage space (~7 GB user available), a MicroUSB port, proximity sensor, light sensor, accelerometer, ringer switch, the same 1150 mAh battery, and the same complement of Sprint services (NFL Mobile Live, NASCAR Sprint Cup, Sprint TV, Sprint Navigation, etc).

Where the Pixi most obviously differs is in layout. The phone is a slate-style device, featuring an exposed keyboard up front with an 18-bit color 320×400 pixel capacitive multi-touch display measuring 2.63 inches across. For comparison, the Pre’s screen is a 3.1 inch 320×480 screen, while the iPhone’s is 3.5 inches. The below-screen gesture area from the Pre carries over to the Pixi (we can likely expect it on all future webOS phones), though the card view button is not present – you now tap in the gesture area to pop up to the card view. Finally, the Pixi has a 2 megapixel camera with flash, compared to the Pre’s 3 megapixel camera with flash. The Pixi also lacked the Pre’s "extended depth of field" camera functionality.

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Not everybody’s in love with Google, not all of you have an Exchange server that you can hook into, and the all-or-nothing Facebook sync approach leaves some to be desired. Thankfully, Palm’s seen fit to work with more cloud-based PIM repositories to expand the functionality of Synergy to include Yahoo! and LinkedIn sync support.

LinkedIn sync will allow you to access all of your LinkedIn contacts, including pulling down their job titles. Yahoo! support, meanwhile, will bring contacts and calendar synchronization, along with integrating Yahoo IM into the Messaging app alongside Google Talk, AIM, SMS, and MMS. Yahoo’s support also comes with push email.

This functionality will ship standard on the Pixi, but no word yet when the Pre will see it – perhaps it will come on the 1.2 webOS update, perhaps on a later build.  The version of the webOS I saw on the Pixi today was 1.2, but it was clearly a later build than the version of 1.2 that we’ve all seen before.

Palm also demo’d the new Facebook application. It unfortunately doesn’t look all that feature-filled.  It primarily works off your friends feed, letting you browse status and wall updates, look at photos posted (in a very nice gallery interface), and update your own status. In all, it’s a 1.0 product for sure, it definitely lags behind the iPhone app and in many ways lags behind the Facebook web interface. No word yet on when it’ll be available for the Pre.

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Palm has officially unveiled its second webOS phone, the ultra-thin Palm Pixi, just three months after the launch of the Pre. Coming in at just 10.85 mm, the Pixi is thinner than the Pre by 6.1 mm and even the iPhone 3Gs by 1.45 mm. Essentially slotted as Palms replacement for the aging Palm OS Centro, the Pixi will be launching exclusively on Sprint, though Palm has yet to reveal availability dates (by the holidays) or pricing (rumored to hit be $99).

So what makes the Pixi so special? For one, its really quite small, as mentioned above. Unlike as was rumored earlier (when we thought it was the Eos and Pixie was the internal codename), the Pixi will have a full 8 GB of storage and does indeed have a smaller screen than the Pre. Also notable, as you can see in the picture above, the Pixi is not a slider phone like the Pre. While it will feature EVDO 3G data on Sprint, the Pixi will not come with WiFi.

The Pixi will also launch with a variety of back covers available, coinciding with the New Work City Fashion Week. The special limited edition “artist series” covers will come in a variety of textures and designs and will be Touchstone-enabled.

Also coming with the Pixi will be an updated Synergy, which will bring LinkedIn contact sync and Yahoo contacts, calendar, and IM into the mix. A new webOS Facebook app is also in the cards (pun only partially intended).

Check out the full press release after the break!

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