But different Twitter developers have different needs for Twitter data, and different abilities to pay. The company has adopted a graded approach to allow developers access to its users’ tweets. Don’t have the big bucks to pay for the Firehose? Sign up for the cleverly named Gardenhose access level, which gets you 10 percent of public statuses for free but requires case-by-case approval by Twitter. Just want to get in and start playing around without waiting to be whitelisted? Try the Spritzer, which is available to any user and provides roughly 1 percent of public statuses.

(According to folks at Twitter, the awesome naming convention is the handiwork of tech lead John Kalucki. Also, the Gardenhose and Spritzer used to have a stronger spray, as it were; developers could previously get as much as 20 percent of tweets for free. But now that Twitter’s up to 95 million tweets per day, that portion was getting too big.)

What does it cost to drink from the Firehose? That depends. Twitter’s pricing plans appear to vary wildly, from the big search companies on down to folks prototyping a brainstorm. Multiple Twitter developers told me they felt Twitter’s pricing seemed to be totally arbitrary, and based on whatever Twitter thought they’d be able to pay.

Twitter business development guy Doug Williams said it’s true that Twitter has no structured way to price access between the 10 percent of the Gardenhose and the 100 percent of the Firehose, though the company is likely to develop more levels of pricing.

“Twitter is focused on creating consumer products and we’re not built to license data,” Williams said, adding, “Twitter has always invested in the ecosystem and startups and we believe that a lot of innovation can happen on top of the data. Pricing and terms definitely vary by where you are from a corporate perspective.”

It’s not only how big you are, but what you do with the data. According to a developer, analytics players are asked to pay the most, because they take Twitter content but don’t contribute it or drive content to Twitter. Those who display and process content in a way that drives traffic pay less, and those who help generate content pay the least. As I understand it, some developers who make Twitter clients don’t pay anything at all for streaming API access.

As of July, Twitter said it had given 15-20 developers/product access to the Firehose; the company declined to disclose the current number.

Twitter is also supposedly going to soon start giving away a free analytics dashboard for brands and other users. It’s not clear how much that will compete with existing premium Twitter analytics products that other companies offer.

Williams described the Gardenhose as something academics might use to do research, but I’ve talked to at least one company that makes a mobile app that displays topical Twitter content and feels the free Gardenhose is good enough for its needs. And it’s the right price.

If developers need something more specific than a random sampling of statuses, they can also access filtered content through the streaming API–for instance, tracking keywords, following user IDs and returning tweets from a specific location. There’s also a three-level partner program there. The base level for filtering by user ID is “default,” followed by the approval-required “shadow” and the paying-partner level “birddog,” said Williams. I prefer the cute stream metaphors.

Image courtesy Minnesota National Guard on Picasa.

Every year on Groundhog Day, my friends–such as Liz and Treby, from when I was but a wee BoomTown (well, I am still wee)–call me with holiday greetings.

Why? Because freakish child that I was, I actually threw an annual Groundhog Day fest at school, complete with a cake–I used a rabbit-shaped pan, cut off its ears and added slivered almonds as teeth.

My premise: There was no good holiday between Christmas/New Year’s and Easter. Also groundhogs were deeply misunderstood.

So, as I take off to bake another cake with the kids–passing on a noble tradition–here are some videos to enjoy.

By the way, groundhog No. 1, Punxsutawney Phil, did see his shadow, so winter continues!

Super Bowl ad featuring Troy Polamalu as Punxsutawney Phil:

Cat vs. Groundhog:

Tiger Woods vs. “Caddyshack” gopher (which kind of looks like a groundhog–see differences here):

The inevitable Best Scenes from the most excellent “Groundhog Day” movie:

Groundhog Day 2010 in Punxsutawney, Pa. (with the dude who played Ned Ryerson in “Groundhog Day,” who does a weird whistling bellybutton thing!!!):

I’ve been testing one of these new IdeaPads, a small, thin model called the U110, that’s sized to be ideal for travelers. It looks nothing like a classic black ThinkPad. It even comes in red, has swirls etched into its case, and can supposedly log you in by recognizing your face using its built-in camera.

At the same time, I’ve been trying out another similarly sized little laptop, the U2E from Asus (23571.TWO), a Taiwan-based company whose products are relatively new to the U.S. This computer has its own distinctive design: It’s clad in real leather. It also has a camera, and it can be ordered with one of the new solid-state drives, which have no moving parts, instead of a hard disk.

Both of these small laptops are subnotebooks, meaning they weigh 3 pounds or less. Like many subnotebooks, they have small 11-inch screens and somewhat cramped keyboards. And, like most subnotebooks, they are costly — an $1,899 starting price for the Lenovo and $1,999 for the Asus.

Each can only be ordered with Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Vista operating system, which means you can practically walk your dog in the time it takes them to start up. Each has a standard battery so wimpy that it provides poor battery life, so both companies throw in bigger batteries that provide decent power, but make the computers larger and heavier.

I wish I could recommend a clear winner between these two contenders, but both are mixed bags. The IdeaPad is lighter, thinner, and has a slightly faster processor. The Asus has a built-in DVD drive, while the Lenovo’s is external. The Asus also has the new, faster “N” type of Wi-Fi networking, while the IdeaPad is stuck with the older, slower “G” type.

Lenovo’s small, thin IdeaPad model called the U110.

The IdeaPad has two big flaws, in my view. First, it has blown the biggest advantage of its sibling, the ThinkPad: a great keyboard. The IdeaPad keyboard has huge, flat keys with slick, shiny surfaces and almost no space between them. I found typing difficult with this setup. I asked two people who are faster typists than I am to try it: One liked it, one hated it. The IdeaPad also dispenses with the TrackPoint, the little pointing stick for moving the cursor that many ThinkPad lovers revere.

By contrast, the Asus U2E keyboard, while nothing to write home about, is more conventional and more usable, with traditional tapered keycaps that provide better key separation. The mouse buttons underneath the touch pad on the Asus, while thin, were sturdier than the ones on the IdeaPad, which had a cheap feel to me.

The second big flaw in the IdeaPad is its most hype-worthy feature: face recognition, which is meant to spare you the need to type in a password to log in. In a dozen tests, it recognized me only twice. I asked my wife to try it, and it never once recognized her. It did recognize a colleague successfully, but we tried it only once with her.

The Asus’s biggest flaw is its solid-state drive. It adds $700 to the price, for a total of $2,699, but is only 32 gigabytes in size, tiny by today’s standards. To compensate, Asus throws in an external hard disk, but that’s an inconvenient solution.

You can order the Asus with a standard 120-gigabyte internal hard disk for the $1,999 price, but that’s still $100 more than Lenovo charges for the IdeaPad with the same sized drive.

Each machine has three USB ports, a video-out connector, a slot for camera memory cards, and an ExpressCard slot, typically used for cellphone modems. Neither has a built-in cellphone data modem. The Asus has three gigabytes of memory, the Lenovo just two.

In my tough battery tests, where I turn off all power-saving features, turn on the Wi-Fi, and keep music playing constantly, the Asus got about 1.5 hours and the Lenovo a miserable one hour and three minutes. This means that, even with a more normal usage pattern, you’d be lucky to get two hours out of the IdeaPad and 2.5 hours from the Asus.

With the included bigger batteries, the IdeaPad clocked out at three hours and 10 minutes, which means you could probably stretch it to over four hours with more normal use. The Asus’s bigger battery delivered an excellent five hours and 29 minutes in my test, which points to nearly seven hours in more normal use. Asus says it has tweaked its machines to improve battery life somewhat.

However, while the jumbo battery on the IdeaPad barely protrudes from the machine, and keeps the weight under three pounds, the one on the Asus U2E is so huge it looks like a tumor and pushes the weight to 3.4 pounds, well above the subnotebook cutoff.

If you’re a frequent traveler, both of these models are worth considering, but each has its own flaws.

• Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Yes, more cars are making it easy to connect wirelessly with Bluetooth-equipped cellphones so drivers can make hands-free phone calls — but not hands-free text messaging. And that results in the dangerous practice of texting while behind the wheel.

And, yes, you can pipe the sound from your portable music player into the car’s speakers. But you usually have to control the song selection and skipping by handling the player itself, and that’s another dangerous distraction.

Some car makers solve this music problem with integration kits that transfer control of the music player to the dashboard or steering-wheel controls and display song information on a dashboard screen. But this option is most common in luxury cars and is typically designed only for Apple’s iPods.

Now, Ford Motor, working with Microsoft, has come up with a system that’s a big step forward in integrating cellphones and portable music players into cars. It’s highly versatile and works with numerous devices on a wide range of Ford models.

I’ve been testing the $395 option, called SYNC, with multiple cellphones and music players. It’s quite good and indicates that the digitally backward auto industry finally may be getting it.

SYNC combines the often separate cellphone and music-player functions into one unified interface that can be controlled by a voice-recognition system that works well. You can command it by voice to play a single song out of thousands on your iPod or other music player. With some phones, it will even read your incoming cellphone text messages to you, and properly pronounce text-message shortcuts such as LOL (Laughing Out Loud.)

Ford isn’t limiting this system to luxury cars. It’s available on a dozen models — including the company’s least-expensive car, the Ford Focus. I tested SYNC on a Focus.

SYNC simultaneously handles multiple cellphones and music players from a variety of companies. It imports and remembers the address books and song information for up to 12 phones and four players, so that as you connect and reconnect a remembered device, wired or wirelessly, it is ready to go. It doesn’t have a hard disk and doesn’t store your music.

Unlike other approaches, the Ford system doesn’t require a special cable or proprietary connector. It uses a standard USB port and the cable that came with your player. SYNC will even play music directly from a USB thumb drive. There’s also an audio-in jack for players that don’t support USB, or which require both.

SYNC can even stream music wirelessly, over Bluetooth, from the cellphones that support this feature. However, due to limitations in Bluetooth, it doesn’t transfer song selection controls, or the song information display, to the dashboard in this scenario. The same limitation applies if your player can be connected only with the audio-in jack.

I tested SYNC with two music players and four cellphones and the system handled them all effortlessly. I used a year-old iPod and a new Samsung P2 as my test music players, and SYNC quickly transferred their song information and allowed me to select playlists, artists, albums, genres and individual songs by voice command.

I tried the cellphone functions with an Apple iPhone, a Motorola RAZR, a RIM BlackBerry and a new HTC Shadow phone and, again, all worked properly. While phone calls and address-book imports were handled easily on all the phones, some of SYNC’s advanced functions, like the reading of text messages and the streaming of music, aren’t widely supported on all phones. For example, only the RAZR worked with the text-message feature.

The iPhone test was especially interesting because it is both a Bluetooth-equipped phone and a full-fledged iPod. The SYNC treated it as both, simultaneously.

I found the voice-command system surprisingly reliable. In four days of testing, I encountered only a few instances in which my commands were misunderstood.

SYNC has some limitations. While it can read text messages on compatible phones, Ford didn’t build in the ability to dictate and send text messages. You can send only canned messages, like “Be there in 20 minutes.”

But there are a lot of advanced features — too many to list here. And Ford plans to add others, which owners will be able to install at home. Detailed information on the system is available at syncmyride.com.

Alas, I did discover one glitch. Twice during my testing, SYNC mistakenly declared that a music player had been unplugged when it hadn’t been. The system recovered with a little fiddling, but Ford needs to fix this.

Still, SYNC is a very well done method for integrating digital devices into a car, and in a model that most people can afford.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.