Augmented reality apps are clearly the awesome-o new thing. TwittaRound looks fantastic for being the most horrible idea of them all: Twitter taking over your reality.

It's pretty simple—nearby live tweets show up on the horizon, and you can see where they're coming from, as well as how far away they are. It uses the compass along with the accelerometer GPS to do its location thing, so it's restricted to the iPhone 3GS in this implementation, even if it is developed almost entirely in WebKit.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately in this case) augmented reality apps are forced to use non-public APIs to monkey around with live video, so they won't fly in the App Store. Hopefully, Apple will open these APIs up at some point, as much as the last thing the world needs is a Twitter-augmented reality, even if I am morbidly curious to see precisely which of his 7 bathrooms Chen took a poo in when he twittered about it. [i.document]