Mathew Honan

At one point in the very near past, if you wanted to track your speed and distance over a bike ride or run, calculate your calories burned, listen to music, share exercise data with friends, and view your route afterward, you'd need a cyclometer, a calculator, an iPod, an e-mail program, and, of course, a map. Today, however, all of these functions have been rolled into one device, the iPhone, thanks to great fitness tracking applications like Runmeter and Cyclemeter from Abvio.

Both apps offer advanced fitness tracking for the casual to intermediate runner or cyclist and for most intents and purposes, these are two versions of the same application. (That also goes for a third app offered by Abvio, Walkmeter, which is marketed toward walkers.) They sport largely the same interface, and both allow you to categorize workouts as either activity (as well as walking, hiking, skiing, swimming, or skating). Both will track your speed and distance, time traveled, elevation gained or lost, display your route on a map, count your calories, and share routes with others.

Sometimes chatting with your friends and colleagues on the Internet can feel like tracking down a great diaspora across continents and seas, with one person logging on at AIM, while another prefers GTalk, and a third refuses to touch anything other than ICQ. While programs such as Adium have long since resolved this problem on the desktop by allowing users to fire up one app and access multiple platforms, the iPhone is still new enough that these issues are just getting shaken out. Fring from Fringland is one of several apps attempting to resolve this, and better yet, it's also one of a handful of providers bringing VoIP to the iPhone. To date, it does both with mixed results.

Talk To Me: Not only does Fring integrate buddy lists from assorted chat platforms into one place, but it also lets you make voice calls to anyone with a phone--albeit with mixed results.Fring integrates your buddy lists from various chat and communications platforms into one interface. Currently, Fring supports accounts on Skype, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Twitter, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, while offering SIP support for a variety of VoIP providers as well. But it periodically adds new services based largely on user feedback, so if your preferred chat client isn't supported today, check back tomorrow.

Admit it, you're drowning in a sea of friends, photos and feeds and need a lifeline. Ziibii lassos updates from many of the most popular social networks and media sites, allowing you to check your feeds on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, as well as add feeds from the Web, on a single iPhone app.

The unusually-named app--"ziibii" is a Native American word for river, according to Zumobi--presents all your subscriptions in a "River," essentially a floating list of headlines, that links back to the original item. If you've used a desktop feedreader before, you'll instantly get how to use it. It's a great concept, but the execution is less than impressive.

In the future, your boss will always know exactly where you are. But why wait; sign on to Loopt, recruit your boss to do the same, and you're already living in Tomorrowland. Loopt is a location-aware social networking app--it uses the GPS chip in your 3G iPhone (or more crudely, with the cell tower location data in the first generation iPhone) to place you on a map and to show you where your friends are and what they are up to. It's essentially a social network for the mobile set, allowing you to link up with friends and contacts and then mutually share location information.

The first step getting started using Loopt is adding friends--without any friends, the app isn't much use. Loopt can scan your iPhone's address book to look for existing users, much in the same way Facebook or Twitter can scrape your Gmail contacts when you first sign up on those sites, helping you build a network with existing users. Since Loopt already supports the BlackBerry and has Android support on the way, you can even use it to link up with friends on other mobile devices.