This week’s most talked about social media tools

This is the tenth of a weekly series, in which every week, we’ll look at five social media tools and platforms that have created some buzz over the last week. As usual, we’ve tracked down some great tools that can help you and your business do more in this ever evolving space.

This week’s post includes a Twitter dashboard for the ‘lazy’ in you, a YouTube and Spotify mash-up,  a snazzy social search engine and some other goodies.

Shall we dive in? Yes!

1. Strap on your Twitter X-ray vision goggles with Lazyscope.com – One of the more challenging aspects of Twitter, especially for new users, is determining which tweets require further interrogation. Lazyscope solves this problem by serving up an additional reading pane within a neat desktop application which gives you a fuller Twitter experience. It can also pull in content from other sources like Google Reader making it one of the more robust dashboards out there.
2. Discover what your friends are searching for with Wajam.com – Wajam works by taking the links your friends share on Twitter and Facebook and creates a ‘hand-picked’ search engine just for you. You can access your results direct from Wajam.com or via an extension within your browser. If you’d like an invite, you can access one here.
3. YouTube + Spotify = Youtify.com – YouTube is one of the best sources for music on the web but listening to it in a user-friendly manner is a little tricky. Youtify.com takes that pain away with an interface that is almost identical to Spotify. Fun times ahead!
4. Clean up your messy data with Google Refine or Data Wrangler –  It’s not very often we profile two tools that do similar things but both are worth a look if manipulating data is on your to do list. Google Refine is a desktop-based tool whereas Data Wrangler is web-based. You can find demonstration videos for both products here (Google Refine) and here (Data Wrangler).
5. Find out who / where website’s are hosted thanks to IsHostedBy.com – IsHostedBy is a website where you can lookup where certain websites are hosted. The information includes the exact geographical location and the name of the company that is hosting the servers. You never know when a tool like this might come in handy!

We thought we’d throw in a few bonus link this week, so make sure you also check out:

• SubJot;
• Helloo; and
• VoyURL [See our full story here: Voyurl: It’s time to look at your browsing data from a different view. [Private beta access inside]]