Name: Twimbow

Quick Pitch: Twimbow is a colorful, web-based Twitter client with a focus on filtering.

Genius Idea: This app embraces the concept that, for some of us, Twitter is the new email.

At first glance, the interface will remind you of Tweetdeckand Seesmic Web so much it’ll make your head hurt. The feature sets are almost identical, with both Seesmic and Tweetdeck having the relative advantages of age, stability, and a generally more thorough toolbelt for users, including multiple apps and multiple accounts.

(Note: While Tweetdeck doesn’t yet have a web-based client, we saw them demo one at Google I/O.)

Twimbow’s main distinction lies withing its bright and shiny interface, which lets you assign a different color to different users and groups and change the color of a tweet shown in the app by adding a #color tag. You can then sort and filter tweets by color. In the end, it works kind of like Gmail’s labels and folders.

In future iterations, you’ll be able to track and color-code keywords, too, making Twimbow an interesting and viable option for brand managers and social media marketers.

All your conversations, DMs, favorites and retweets are contained in a single column; the colored filters do the sorting for you, even turning certain people or “colors” on and off at your discretion. (This is a particularly great feature when a buddy is attending a conference and decides to start live-tweeting a panel that has no relevance to you. You can temporarily “mute” the chatterbox without unfollowing him or her.)

Twimbow’s creators used HTML5 and CSS3 to create this interesting and useful web app.

If you think this app is something you’d like to test or use, go to the Twimbow site to sign up for notification. The app is currently in a gloriously buggy pre-alpha with a proper alpha coming in a few weeks and a more stable public beta rolling out this fall.

How do you think Twimbow will fare in the competitive market of Twitter clients?

Name: BarCards

Quick Pitch: BarCards is an iPhone app/real-life social game that lets you go on scavenger hunts at bars.

Genius Idea: The BarCards iPhone app turns a night out with friends — or random bar patrons up for a game — into a social experiment that tests how far people will go for a free drink.

BarCards is essentially a modern-day bar game where players take turns to complete scavenger hunt-like tasks. During a turn, a player is presented with a card and a time limit (as set at the beginning of the game) that challenges him or her to find someone or something that satisfies the specified criteria.

For example, one card reads, “Get a woman to sing ‘Baby Got Back’,” and another, “Yell out ‘Marco!’ and someone must yell out ‘Polo’.”

Users can mark cards to denote whether the task was completed successfully or not. The idea is that losers buy winners drinks — but of course everything is on the honor system, and those rules will need to be enforced by thirsty friends.

The app is offered for free as a Lite version with impossible-to-avoid advertisements before each card. There’s also an ad-free paid version [iTunes link] that costs 99 cents and comes with more cards.

If you and your friends are open to embarrassing yourselves for the sake of a fun night out, then BarCards won’t disappoint.

[img credit: Will Montague]