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FriendFeed’s New Design Is Live
FriendFeed has pushed out its new design to users. The lifestreaming service, which was beginning to get unwieldy, has been cleaned up. Friends lists are more customizable. Co-founder Bret Taylor explains in a blog post:
The new design offers friend lists to help you organize your subscriptions into groups. Now you can get updates from specific groups of people separately, or you can add an acquaintance to a list and remove them from your home feed.
Photos can be posted directly into your feed. The new design also detects duplicate links and articles from multiple friends, and only shows you the article once.
Before, the right hand column was cluttered with requests from friends to join them in special conversation “rooms” and groups. Now, all of that is thankfully hidden behind links in the left-hand pane. All that is left at the top right are three key navigation links that filter the best content from the last day, week, and month as determined by how many comments each entry has or ho many people “liked” it.
The design isn’t radically different. But it does rein in the chaos and reinforce the original concept of a simple feed for your entire online life.
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FriendFeed Releases New Set Of Customizable Widgets
FriendFeed, the social activity aggregator, has released a set of customizable widgets that will allow bloggers to make sure their readers can follow all of their activities across the web. While the site has provided some widgets in the past, this set includes some new widgets to facilitate story sharing and allows for more tweaking than was offered before.
Among the widgets offered are a new profile badge, a list of the most recent items in your feed, and a “Share on FriendFeed” chiclet that allows users to add an item to FriendFeed without leaving your site. You can grab the widgets here.
Here’s an example of the badge:
The new status widget:
The new features come only two days after FriendFeed rolled out support for photos and Friends List which have enabled the “Fake Follow“.
For more details, check out the FriendFeed blog.
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An Evolving Cultural Curiosity: We Need A Fake Follow
I’m going to take some criticism for this, but I think it’s something that needs to be said: We need a Fake Follow on Twitter and a related Fake Subscribe on FriendFeed.
FriendFeed and Twitter are different than normal social networks because they don’t require two people to mutually agree to become friends. Instead, you simply choose to follow someone and see the content they produce. That person is notified that you are following them, and can choose to reciprocate or not.
So far, so good. The idea is that you shouldn’t be pressured into following/subscribing to another person just so that they can read your content. The entire point is to reduce the stress to reciprocate friendship unless you actually want to.
And for the most part it works. But there are a lot of people who for some reason are greatly offended when you don’t reciprocate a follow/subscribe on Twitter or FriendFeed. When this happens (and it happens a lot), you have a choice - deal with the fallout (”that guy is such a jerk”) or just friend the person and avoid the pain.
Here’s the problem, though. When you follow too many people the service just becomes unusable. On Twitter I follow just 466 people that I find interesting, but the content stream is far too much to consume. On Friendfeed the problem is even worse because it aggregates so much other content (Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, blogs, etc.).
On Twitter I generally only monitor messages specifically directed at me (@techcrunch must be in the message), and I sort of peruse Friendfeed a few times a day to find interesting stuff. But what I really want to do is have a core group of friends that I watch.
That means Twitter and FriendFeed need to let me group friends somehow and let me watch just some of them if I like. Or a simpler approach: give me a Fake Follow.
The Fake Follow looks like a normal follow to the other person, but to me it’s like I didn’t follow them at all. This solves the ego stroking issue (and related problems) that so many people have, and it keeps the content stream clean and usable.
Eventually we’ll evolve online culture to the point where people adapt to these new systems (just like today people aren’t usually offended when an instant message isn’t returned, well, instantly). But until then we need to find a way to keep things under control, and anger at a minimum. And since Twitter and FriendFeed will become far more usable with it, it’s in their best interests to adopt it.
I asked Evan Williams at Twitter about this a few weeks ago and he said they may adopt different friend types to deal with the problem. FriendFeed cofounder Paul Bucheit says they are releasing new features in the coming weeks that will “make it easier to separate the people who you really want to follow from the rest.” They may not call it a Fake Follow, but we’ll all nod and wink when the features roll out. Thanks in advance, Paul.
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The Friendfeedization Of Facebook
As Facebook continues to roll out the full version of its new user profiles, it’s becoming clear that their primary goal isn’t, as they said in May, to simply create a cleaner user experience and allow developers to have more meaningful engagement points with users. It’s more about highlighting new content relevant to the user and fostering conversations about that content. And the result is that the Facebook home page looks an awful lot like the exponentially smaller activity stream aggregation service called Friendfeed.
The new site will likely launch publicly on Monday. Until then, anyone can log in at www.new.facebook.com to see the new profile. The biggest visual change people will see on the home page - the combination of status updates, wall posts and news feed items into a single content stream. On the profile page status updates and other mini-feed items are also combined, and users are shown a big text box at the top encouraging them to update their status. For more details on the updates, see Inside Facebook and All Facebook.
This is just the beginning of the news for Facebook this week as they prepare for their second developer conference on Wednesday. The company is clearly looking to fine tune the Facebook experience to spur growth, particularly in the U.S. and other mature markets where they still trail MySpace.
Many of the changes seem designed to put the year-old application platform on the backburner more than anything. Facebook has had to fight an ongoing privacy, spam and competitive battle with its more aggressive third party developers, using algorithmic and policy tools.
But it’s also clear that they like what they see at Friendfeed, which expertly combined the idea of an activity stream that was first popularized by Facebook with the microblogging trend introduced by Twitter. Users constantly add content that their friends read and comment on, which creates yet new content. The virtuous page-view creating cycle continues.
Facebook still silos most of this information, although they are more than happy to have users bring in third party data to the Facebook feed. This week facebook will also launch their Facebook Connect product, which is designed to let users get that data back out of Facebook.
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Moopz Merges Fragmented FriendFeed Conversations Into One Place
It used to be that if a user posted a link on FriendFeed, they would get a few comments and likes and that would be it. If someone reposted that link, it would have its own set of comments for the user who reposted it. If that was a popular link, there could be 10 reposts and 10 sets of comments. Then Moopz came along.
Moopz is a site that aggregates comments about the same link, and puts them into one place. The front page displays recent active FriendFeed posts and conversations. Instead of just showing the conversation that occurs on that posted link, it gathers and threads all of the the subsequent activity from FriendFeed. I’ve provided a before-and-after example with a recent active TechCrunch post.
The standard FriendFeed conversation looks like this:
The same post on Moopz (only a section, for the full page click on the image):
The FriendFeed conversation has 24 comments and 51 likes and the Moopz conversation shows 35 comments, 3 FriendFeed reposts, 7 Google Reader shares, a Digg, a Reddit, a Twitter post and more likes than I’d care to count.
Users can find the most popular content in the sidebar or in the Hot section (available by clicking “More” under the popular links section of the sidebar). This makes Moopz a very useful news source, like Twitturly has proven to be.
Moopz comes from developer Mark Carey, the creator of the FriendFeed MovableType plug-in, a bi-directional comment plug-in for FriendFeed and MovableType comments. Moopz is actually powered through MovableType, and largely by that plug-in.
FriendFeed was started so that users could keep track of what their friends were doing online. But like many other sites that were meant to do one thing, they’ve been used for something entirely different. It’s being used for content delivery and discovery and everyone knows it - except FriendFeed. Instead of adapting to be what users want, it’s trying to be something else, leading to excess noise and distributed conversations. But thanks to tools like Moopz and the many others out there, FriendFeed can become a little more usable.
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Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop Launches Frienderati: The Top Friends From FriendFeed
If you want to know what the “top people on FriendFeed” are saying, you can now see their feeds on a new Alltop page called Frienderati. It is just a list of the top 100 or so names on FriendFeed (actually, only 94, for some reason), listed in alphabetical order by first name along with their five latest Twitters, blog posts, and other FriendFeed items. Or you could just subscribe to those same people on FriendFeed.
All the usual suspects are included on Frienderati. Mostly bloggers and other Web celebrities like Dave Winer, Loic Le Meur, Kevin Rose, and Guy Kawasaki (who is also one of the founders of Alltop and last week sold his other project, Truemors, to NowPublic). The site does not explain how someone gets on the list, but it appears to be the most followed individuals on FriendFeed. (Compare to this list on User21). There is a lot of overlap here with another Alltop site, Twitterati, which (you guessed it) shows the latest Tweets of the “top” people on Twitter (Kawasaki, Winer, Robert Scoble, etc.). Since most of the content on FriendFeed comes from Twitter anyway, Frienderati is really is pretty much the same thing, with a few different names.
Like other Alltop sites (which aggregate top feeds in other categories), this one is kind of a head-scratcher. There is no way to sort, so I guess you are expected to scroll through all 94 names to get what you are looking for. It would be helpful if the names at least appeared in order of their most recent entries, like on FriendFeed itself. Or you could just browse Friendarati to see which, if any, of the top names you might want to follow on your own. (Even though the point of FriendFeed is to follow what your real friends are saying—oh, never mind).
I like the name, though. It sounds like a cabal, and maybe it is. But I guess Top Friends was already taken.
Update: In an email, Kawasaki says the list is “based on all the other articles about the top people to follow plus our gut. Did we say it’s 100? We just tried to find about 100.” And he notes in a comment below that it is just meant to be a starting point for FriendFeed.
(Full list after the break):
Top FriendFeedsters According to Frienderati
Aaron Brazell - Lead Editor at Technosailor
Adam Ostrow - Editor-In-Chief at Mashable
Aliza Sherman - Author, Producer, Blogger
Allen Stern - Editor of CenterNetworks
Amber Mac - New Media Journalist
Andrew Chen - Entrepreneur
Andy Beard - Niche Marketing
Annie Boccio - Founder of Pixel Currents
Becky McCray - Small Town Entrepreneur
Ben Metcalfe - Social Media, Web2.0 Consultant
Beth Kanter - Social Media Consultant to Non-Profits
Brian Solis - Publisher bub.blicio.us
Burt Lum - Digital Ronin
Cathryn Hrudicka - Chief Imagination Officer
Cathy Brooks - Genetically Engineered Communicator
Chris Brogan - Social Media Expert
Chris Pirillo - Founder of L0ckergn0me
Christine Lu - Founder of the China Business Network
Corvida - Mass Media Student of SheGeeks.net
Dan Farber - Vice President at CNET Networks
Dave Winer - Entrepreneur, Software Developer, Social Media Expert
David Sifry - Founder Technorati
Don MacAskill - CEO of SmugMug
Emily Chang - Award-winning Web Designer, Technology Strategist
Eric Eldon - Reporter with VentureBeat
Eric Rice - New Media Producer, Writer
Erick Schonfeld - Co-Editor, TechCrunch
Erin Kotecki Vest - Queen of Spain, BlogHer, Huffington Post
Francine Hardaway - Entrepreneur, Mentor, Investor
Fred Wilson - VENTURE CAPITALIST
Frederic Lardinois- PhD student, Web2.0 Writer
Gabe Rivera - Creator of Techmeme
Ginger Makela - Social Media Specialist
Guy Kawasaki - Author, Speaker, Online Magazine Editor of Alltop
Jason Kaneshiro - Writer at Webomatica
Jeff Jarvis - Writer, Consultant for New Media
Jeremiah Owyang - Sr. Analyst at Forrester Research
Jeremy Zawodny - Craigslist
Josh Quittner - Time Magazine’s Editor at Large
Justine Ezarik - New Media Connoisseur
Karen Padham Taylor - Product Manager at Google
Kathy Johnson - PR, Analysis, Results
Kent Newsom - Proprietor of Newsome.org
Kevin Rose - Founder of Digg
Kristen Nicole - Lead Writer for Mashable
Laura Fitton - Social Media Expert, Consultant
Leah Culver - Founder, Developer of Pownce
Leo Laporte - Author, Tech Broadcaster of TWiT Live
Loic Le Meur - Entrepreneur, Founder of Seesmic
Louis Gray - Corporate Technology Marketer
Maggie Fox - CEO of Social Media Group
Maki - Sole Writer of DOSHDOSH
Mari Smith - Relationship Marketing Consultant
Maria Reyes-McDavis - Social Media Diva
Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins - Associate Editor of Mashable
Mark Krynsky - Lifestream
Marshall Kirkpatrick - Lead Blogger at ReadWriteWeb
MG Siegler - Reporter at VentureBeat
Muhammad Saleem - Social Media Marketing Consultant
Nicole Simon - European New Media Specialist
Niniane - Google’s Engineer Manager
Paul Kedrosky - Investor, Writer, Entrepreneur
Pete Cashmore - Mashable
Philipp Lenssen - Google Blogoscoped
Rafe Needleman - Editor of Webware
Rebecca Briggs - Helping the World Heal from the Inside Out
Richard MacManus - Editor and publisher of ReadWriteWeb
Rob Diana - Regular Geek
Robert Scoble - Tech Evangelist
Roxanne Darling - Technology Trainer, Speaker
Ryan Ozawa - Father, Husband, and Web Geek
Sarah Lacy - Author
Sarah Perez - Blogger at ReadWriteWeb and Channel 10
Scott Beale - Publisher, Editor of Laughing Squid
Shannon Seery Gude - Geek Marketer
Stephanie Booth - Social Media Consultant
Steve Rubel - Digital Marketer
Steven Hodson - WinExtra
Susan Bratton - Podcast Publisher
Susan Reynolds - New Media Consultant
Tamar Weinberg - Lifehacker and Mashable
Tara Hunt - Online Marketing Professional
Thomas Hawk - CEO Zooomr Inc.
Tom Foremski - Founder Silicon Valley Watcher
Tony Hung - Blogger
Tris Hussey - Training Manager b5Media
Veronica Belmont- Host of Tekzilla on Rev3 and Qore on PSN
Wendy Piersall - CEO and Founder of Sparkplug
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Friendfeed v. Twitter: Half The Followers In Five Months
Twitter is still far larger than its much younger competitor Friendfeed in aggregate terms. But an interesting trend is developing - many longtime Twitter users are noticing that the number of followers they have on Friendfeed is growing far more rapidly than on Twitter. And the conversations at Friendfeed are better, too.
I joined Twitter when it launched in mid 2006 (about 24 months ago), and have, as of today, 20,464 followers.
I joined Friendfeed on February 9, 2008 (about 5 months ago), and I now have 10,177 subscribers, nearly half Twitter count in less than 1/4 of the time.
Like many others, I’m also noticing that the discussions occurring on Friendfeed are more more interesting (and longer) than the equivalent conversations at Twitter. It’s often 2-to-1 on the number of comments. Which means that those Friendfeed users are far more engaged than those on Twitter.
And over the last couple of weeks, as Twitter has been forced to turn off some of the conversational features of the service, I’ve seen this difference increase dramatically.
There are a whole host of reasons - Twitter downtime plays a big part, but Friendfeed is also good at recommending people for you to follow, and the commenting or bookmarking a post is very easy. Twitter’s inability or unwillingness to open up the data pipes is also a factor.
Is this a bad trend for Twitter? Yes, particularly since they are still struggling with their architecture and stability, while Friendfeed sails on in seemingly calm waters.
If the early adopters move on, there’s a reason (they never abandoned YouTube for the shinier competitors that popped up over the years, for example), and it doesn’t bode well for Twitter in the long run.
By the way, that dip in traffic on Twitter, if real, and coincides with recent downtime issues. Twitter’s runway may be shorter than people think. Open source/open standard competitors certainly don’t help things, either.
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FriendFeed Finally Gets iPhone-Friendly
FriendFeed, the popular social network feed aggregator, has released a new version of its site that has been optimized for the iPhone. While FriendFeed has always featured a relatively spartan design, the standard version sports small fonts that make text difficult to read on the iPhone’s screen. The new version has increased the font size, and has further tweaked link placement and picture sizes to make the site more accessible to mobile users.
The site also includes a new “Post photos from your phone” link that will let users submit photos to FriendFeed straight from their iPhone. Each user is assigned a unique email address (something like jason+nota483realone@mail2ff.com). To submit a picture, users simply send photos chosen from the iPhone’s integrated photo viewer to the assigned address. The feature works well, but you’ll need to manually enter the obfuscated email address - there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to save it to your address book.
You can read more details at the the official announcement here.
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Twitter Conversations Come To A Screaming Halt; Users Simply Move To Friendfeed
A key feature of Twitter has been down most of this week: Replies. The core Twitter service itself is alive, but the team took the Reply feature down on Tuesday when the service started to slow. As of now, Friday afternoon, Replies are still down.
Disabling certain features is Twitter’s recent attempt to keep their frail architecture from failing completely. They tried it out during Apple’s recent WWDC keynote and it worked, so they’re clearly using this approach more often now to deal with problems.
But here’s the problem - Replies was the wrong feature to turn off (whether there was a choice in the matter or not). The beautiful thing about Twitter is that spontaneous, diverse conversations erupt that are almost synchronous, or chat like (see our post about Quotably, which pulls these conversations out and highlights them). Conversations are what makes Twitter magic.
But that magic is created by the simple Reply feature - when you add “@TechCrunch” to a Twitter message, it tells me you are saying something directly to me, to start a new conversation or reply to an existing one. Without Reply, Twitter turns into a one way telephone conversation. Pulling the feature out is equivalent to a frontal lobotomy - Twitter is still walking around, but there’s a blank stare in its eyes.
So why aren’t people screaming about the feature being gone? Because this time, they’re just heading over to Friendfeed to have those very same conversations. Friendfeed for most users was just a place to bookmarks all their activities on other social networks. Now, more and more, it’s a place that people start conversations. The early adopters got that a while ago. Now, the not so early adopters are using it as a Twitter replacement, too.
This message, for example, is one that I would have written to Twitter if the Reply feature was working. Instead I posted it to Friendfeed, and the conversation picked up without a hitch.
If I was Twitter I’d be very worried about Friendfeed. Their young competitor seems to have zero stability problems, and is quietly in the process of pulling away all the special parts of Twitter.
Twitter was mentioned on yesterday’s Daily Show (at about the 10:00 mark). Let’s all hope that when we look back, that mention by Jon Stewart didn’t mark Twitter’s peak, just as Friendfeed ascended.
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Damnit…FriendFeed Gets Even More Useful With An Interestingness Filter
I still haven’t decided if FriendFeed, which aggregates activities from other websites like YouTube, Twitter, your blog, Flickr, etc., is the ultimate walled garden of our personal data or possibly the answer to the Centralized Me problem.
I keep pushing FriendFeed to take the lead in the DataPortability wars by allowing users to export all that stuff they gather. For now, their feeds and APIs allow access to that data, but it all links back to FriendFeed in one way or another. Over time I’m hoping they start to release the actual data in a responsible way. From my discussions with them, they seem to want to do that, and I believe them (I generally don’t believe the big social networks when they say the same things).
In the meantime though, the service just keeps getting more useful. Tonight they released yet another feature called personalized recommendations. You can now view the items posted by your friends based on how interesting the network thinks each item is. You can view results by the last day, week or month. No RSS feeds for now, but co-founder Bret Taylor says they’re coming soon.
This essentially slices data two ways. The first filter is people you’ve subscribed to, so presumably you’re somewhat interested in what they have to say. The second filter takes a look at how many people are commenting or bookmarking the items to determine if it should be highlighted.
A natural next step is for them to release the feature without the first filter, so results are shown across the network. Allow people to tag items, and you’ve got yourself a breaking news engine that may be incredibly useful. Taylor says this is something they might do in future.
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Add Google Reader, Techmeme, and TechCrunch Tabs to FriendFeed
Who knew Duncan Riley was such a Greasemonkey? My former colleague just made FriendFeed a lot more useful for people on Firefox. Using Greasemonkey, an add-on to Firefox that lets developers customize Webpages through the browser, he created some scripts that add tabs to FriendFeed and that make it even more of a super start page than it already is.
He got the idea from this app called FriendFeed Tabs that lets you add Techmeme as a tab. When you click on the tab, news aggregator site Techmeme appears within FriendFeed.
Duncan went further and added scripts to add tabs that show Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, Netvibes, Plurk, ReadBurner, and his own version of a Techmeme tab inside of FriendFeed. He also created scripts for TechCrunch and CrunchGear. (Thanks, Duncan!) You need to add Greasemonkey to Firefox before you can install any of these scripts. But once you do, and relaunch your browser, whenever you go to FriendFeed the tabs will appear and you can scroll through the sites at your leisure.
Some of these tabs are redundant with FriendFeed itself, which lets you bring in RSS feeds and your Twitter feed, for instance. But the tabs let you access these sites and services in a more traditional view, and you can always toggle back to the FriendFeed stream. And now, for people who check more than one of these sites on a daily basis, they can simply access them all from FriendFeed. (Note: these scripts are essentially a hack, and there may be some issues, which Duncan describes in this post).
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Blame FriendFeed
Robert Scoble. Blame FriendFeed. Steve Rubel. Blame FriendFeed. The Shel puppet. Blame FriendFeed. Dave Winer. Blame FriendFeed. Etc.
FriendFeed is a parasite service built on the back of Twitter. Let’s get this straight. No Twitter, no FriendFeed. Want to kill FriendFeed, as I certainly do? Cut off its oxygen. Take a page from Facebook’s incompetent UnFriend Connect gambit and refuse to pass Twitter posts through non-compliant ex-Google engineering scams.
OK, I’m way off my meds since the company has finally admitted on the Twitter Excuse page that they’ve figured out what the culprit is in the continual service meltdown. It’s the Track command, which as a result of my no-@-sign campaign to evangelize the Twitter XMPP Gtalk gateway, has now reached enough adopters to qualify as an actual threat to Twitter’s massive server farm or whatever access to Fred Wilson’s credit card and an EC2 account buys.
We found an errant API project eating way too much of our Jabber (a flavor of instant messenger) resources. This activity (which we’ve corrected) had an affect of overloading our main database, resulting in the error pages and slowness most people are now encountering.
We’re bringing services back online now. Some will be slower than others for a while, and we’ll be watching IM and IM-based API clients very closely. We’ll also be taking steps to avoid this behavior in the future.
Thanks for your patience!Update: We’re turning off IM services for the evening (Friday) to allow for the system to recover. We hope to turn things back on Saturday.
In other words, an errant API project sucking Track clouds out of the Twitter core finally reached the critical mass necessary to hip Jack, whoever that is, to the reality that without the XMPP real time gateway, Twitter could just as well be FriendFeed without the siloed conversation spamyards. Further, Twitter engineers are working to minimize slowness and error pages by turning off the only distinguishing, disruptive, essential part of Twitter until the audience goes away at which point the problem will subside and we can turn it back on on “Saturday.”
Remember: I blame FriendFeed for this, and Robert Scoble, Steve Rubell, Dave Winer, and all the rest of the puppets and ex-Techcrunch analysts who, by appearing to rationally debate the pluses and minuses of FriendFeed versus Twitter, suggest FriendFeed even exists in the absence of Twitter. Nik Cubrilovic doesn’t help either with his cogent (except for the Rails part) analysis of Twitter’s scaling problems. Nowhere in this debate (most of it mercifully hidden forever behind the FriendFeed black hole where conversations go to die) was there a word spoken about the fatal Track bug until Jack hit the Off switch.
Now, in the cool clarity of no pulse whatsoever can we begin to rationally approach a solution. Forgetting that Hillary has shown no indication of processing the similar lack of pulse in her White House aspirations, let’s put the blame for all this squarely on the parasite API suckers and their dark master FriendFeed. Good.
What is FriendFeed anyway? It appears to be an aggregator of all things social. For me that means my Twitter feed - which already is pumped indiscriminately and obliviously through my Facebook status updates - and my blog posts - which have completely ceased since I got sucked into Twitter in the first place. As the puppet says: Fascinating. FriendFeed is Twitter, only slower. Here’s my demo of the difference between FriendFeed and Twitter:
Twitter: Hi, I’m having Sugar Pops for breakfast.
Ten minutes later….
FriendFeed: Hi, I’m having Sugar Pops for breakfast.
FriendFeed value add: A conversation cloud forms around the Sugar Pops meme. Louis Gray is having a pre-release alpha bowl of Open Pops, but Dave Winer (who has just noticed there is no Block command in FriendFeed) is busy discussing the politics of breakfast cereal decentralization in the Why We Need Block for FriendFeed room and does not weigh in here because he blocked me some months ago and doesn’t care what I had for breakfast or any other meal thank you very much. Another comment refers to the Winer tangent, several folks debate whether Sugar Pops are still on the market, and Robert Scoble broadcasts the whole mess back to Twitter as a TinyUrl… 20 minutes later.
By the way, errant API suckstreams reamplify all this with even less coherence than @replies provide, since remember: FriendFeed conversations have no way of pointing at each other with the possible exception of a Twitter link… and around the horn we go again. The new Rooms feature has initiated an ICANN-like squatter crisis where we are all encouraged to grab our names before the puppets get to them, which of course spawns another shitstorm of completely hidden conversations - wait, there’s Bob and Shel’s sequel book title. They better hope Loren is reading this in FriendFeed ten minutes later.
Update: Well, it’s “Saturday” morning now and no real time stream. I’ve been using a nifty combination of Summize and its Realtime results page (click refresh to see 2 new posts, or wait until Summize engineers work out the computer doing the refresh for us thing) and Twhirl, whose point and click @reply feature is a joy to use to send irate messages to Jack, whoever that is. Except I don’t blame Jack. I blame FriendFeed. On Twitter.
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FriendFeed Launches Rooms
Activity stream aggregator FriendFeed launched a new feature called FriendFeed Rooms this afternoon, which are effectively topic-based accounts that anyone can create or join (depending on privacy settings). Users can then add links and messages to relevant content.
The main difference between Rooms and a normal FriendFeed account is the fact that multiple users can author it, and that you can’t pull third party feeds into the service.
FriendFeed usage continues to grow steadily, and has clearly gained from Twitter’s (a competitor of sorts) constant downtime. I still haven’t gone religious on it, though, as some have. That’s mostly because i don’t like having a third party service centralize all this data about me and then not let that data back out again. See my rant on the Centralized Me for more on that.
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MySocial 24×7 Launches FriendFeed/ Twitter AIR App
MySocial 24×7, a Friend Feed/ Twitter Firefox sidebar Michael wrote about in April has launched an Adobe AIR application.
Like the Firefox sidebar, the AIR app allows users to filter the view by type of data, comment or bookmark any entry, and users can also reply via Twitter.
The big selling point for the new app is an inbuilt movie/picture viewer, allowing users to view content without the need to revert to a browser window.
Hands on its definitely one of the nicest looking desktop apps in this space, content is rendered clearly and attractively, compared to say Twhirl which isn’t super pretty out of the box. The app though does lack many of the features that have made Twhirl popular, such as click support for direct messaging in Twitter, color customization, and easy access to archives and user details. In its defense it is an alpha release, and not all users will want for the extra features provided by Twhirl. Definitely worth a look if you’re a Twitter and FriendFeed user.
disclosure: Michael is an investor in Seesmic, which owns Twhirl
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Alert Thingy 1.3 Released: Single User Interface For Twitter And FriendFeed
Note: Unless you are a Twitter and/or FriendFeed addict, this post isn’t for you.
Twitter/FriendFeed desktop client Alert Thingy just released version 1.3 of the software.
It is now a fully functioning client for both services (reading and writing). They’ve also added an easy Flickr uploader - just drag a photo into the application and upload it to Flickr.
The thing I like most about the new version of Alert Thingy though is that you access Twitter and FriendFeed in a single window and a single interface (Twhirl, a competitor, requires two windows). That means less desktop space is used. They are also de-duping Twitter messages (since they also appear in FriendFeed), a nice touch.
Switching between Alert Thingy, Twhirl and even the newer browser sidebar with similar functionality is trivially easy - there are no real switching costs. That means all of these products will be in a constant battle over features. That’s great for us users. And since Alert Thingy and Twhirl are more side projects for their parent companies (Alert Thingy is built by Howard/Baines, Twhirl is owned by Seesmic (a company I invested in), there’s little danger of one app driving the other out of business.
Im now planning to switch back to Alert Thingy based on the new features. The current version of Twhirl is freezing periodically as well, requiring regular restarts.
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MySocial 24×7 Is An Excellent Tool For FriendFeed Junkies
MySocial24×7, which launched early Tuesday morning, is a Firefox extension that allows users to access most FriendFeed functionality via their API directly from the browser sidebar.
Users can filter the view by type of data (Twitter, RSS feeds, YouTube, etc.), can comment or bookmark any entry, and can also reply via Twitter.
This is one of many desktop based solutions coming out for FriendFeed (we’ve covered two Adobe AIR applications, Twhirl and AlertThingy, as well). Some people will love the sidebar functionality, although I use it for bookmarks so the AIR applications are a better fit.
But this is certainly a nice tool for the FriendFeed junkies. Thumbs up.
The application, created by Sandosh Vasudevan, is built on Google App Engine.
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German Startup Community Makes Us Proud Once Again: Freundefeed
You haven’t arrived until your web application has a German clone, it seems. Web innovation in that country too often distills down to “copy/paste innovation.”
And now, Freundfeed, which doesn’t appear to be a joke. Not only is it a ripoff of the FriendFeed name, they also use the same logo. The service hasn’t launched yet, but I’m willing to make an educated guess and say that it will likely rip off the rest of FriendFeed, too.
This guy is either the founder or an investor. Thanks for the tip, Jodi.
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Look Out Twhirl, Alert Thingy Adds Twitter Support
Alert Thingy, the FriendFeed desktop application that launched just three days ago, just launched v 1.2 of the service, with Twitter support.
In addition to viewing FriendFeed data streams and posting directly to FriendFeed, users can now also post directly to their Twitter account as well. Users cannot directly view Twitter streams through AlertThingy, although they can get that information by following FriendFeed users who include Twitter data.
This makes FriendFeed even more useful. Twhirl, a competitor that was recently acquired by Seesmic, works with Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku, but users rarely use more than one of those services. Lots of people use both FriendFeed and Twitter, however (FriendFeed often to read information, Twitter to post), and they may find Alert Thingy a nice alternative to Twhirl.
I’m finding that I use FriendFeed a lot more now than I have Alert Thingy installed. And if they continue to innovate this quickly, I may find I uninstall Twhirl for good. Things they need to add - the ability to view Twitter directly, outside of friendfeed (including replies and direct messages), and integration with snurl to easily shorten included URLs.
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Facebook Opens Up Mini-Feed To 3rd Party Services
As we predicted in February, Facebook has opened up the Mini-Feed so users can import updates from other web services, starting with Flickr, Picassa, Yelp and Delicious.
According to a company blog post, users just need to click an import link at the top of their mini-feed to import data from other services. Imported updates will show up not only in the mini-feed on your profile but the News Feeds of your friends as well. Digg and other services are expected to be added soon as well.
While this new feature is a direct threat to FriendFeed and others that aggregate social networking activity from across the web, Facebook isn’t making it easy to access the aggregated information outside of its site. There are still no RSS feeds for the Mini-Feed and News Feed, despite feeds for other data like updates.
It would sound reasonable for Facebook to claim it can’t open this information up because of privacy concerns (who knows where your life will be broadcasted if available via RSS). But FriendFeed has already gotten around this by adding a special token to its RSS feeds.
This isn’t technically the first time the Facebook activity feeds have been opened up to 3rd party services. The infamous Beacon project also allows web services to import updates, but that takes the initiative of these other companies themselves. With this new feature, services like Flickr don’t have to opt into sharing data on Facebook - consumers are left with making that choice themselves.
News Feed recently made headlines for a privacy issue that distributed user stories that they had not approved. As far as we know, the issue has not been resolved.
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AlertThingy, The FriendFeed Desktop Application, Launches
AlertThingy, the Adobe AIR desktop application for FriendFeed that we previewed last month, has just launched. It is one of the first applications built on the new FriendFeed API.
The application allows users to see the data stream from people they follow on FriendFeed, and post new messages directly to the service. Users can also comment on posted items, and bookmark them. And possibly the best feature: it includes FriendFeed search.
Alert Thingy is now the second Adobe AIR application that is running full time on my desktop (the other is Twhirl, for Twitter). I expect it will be very popular with the Centralized Me crowd.
The application was created by Howard/Baines.
See Sobees for another desktop FriendFeed application, although it runs only on Windows machines. AIR applications are cross platform.
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Adobe AIR Desktop App For FriendFeed Coming
FriendFeed released their API just a few days ago, but third party developers are already scrambling to build on top of the service.
We just heard that Howard/Baines will be releasing an Adobe AIR application for FriendFeed in the next week or so. So far all we have is the screen shot and a confirmation from Baines that his team is working on it. The application will be called Alert Thingy (I assume the site will be here).
If this is anything like Twhirl, an AIR application for Twitter, it’s likely to be a hit. Since it’s AIR it will work on both Windows and Macs right from the start. If the application also allows users to comment on items, post directly to FriendFeed, flag items as “liked,” etc., users will have little need to visit the FriendFeed site directly. And that should be fine with FriendFeed, since users will have persistent interaction with the service on the desktop.
Other early applications built on the FriendFeed API are coming out, too. See this Wordpress plugin and FriendFeed Stats.
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Finally, FriendFeed Answers The Twitter Conundrum
One of my largest issues with FriendFeed has been the duplication between commenting on Tweets (Twitter posts) which make up nearly half of all entries on FriendFeed, when Twitter itself is a two way communications tool. The folks at FriendFeed seem to have been listening.
Available now is the ability to respond to Tweets via FriendFeed on both Friendfeed itself and have those responses (complete with @user) posted to Twitter. FriendFeed fans will undoubtedly welcome the feature. Heavy Twitter users are unlikely to switch to FriendFeed full time quite yet (as someone said to me recently: FriendFeed needs its own Twitteriffic), but this is certainly a step in the right direction.
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BlogCatalog.com Adds Cross-Network Search
BlogCatalog, one of the oldest operating blog directories is expanding with a with the beta launch of Social Search, a cross-network aggregation search engine that searches multiple social networks.
The Social Search feature is built on top on BlogCatalog’s Social Dashboard, which (like many services lately) aggregates member activity across other popular networks. The search feature allows users to search by single user, friends, or by anyone who has opted in to use the Social Dashboard feature.
I haven’t visited BlogCatalog in a long time, so I was surprised by some of the other features they are also offering. Personal news feed widget SocialStream allows members to broadcast their personal aggregated social network activity, wherever they place it, a similar function also available from Plaxo Pulse. This on top of a decent enough social networking platform that is built around a members blog listing and includes friends a topical group discussion.
Ultimately any site is only as good as the number of users it is attracting, and BlogCatalog is pumping through some great numbers, with comScore reporting just over 2 million unique visitors a month for the site on 6 million page views for both January and February. As the chart shows, this is significantly more than Plaxo, who offer some similar services. Newer aggregation services (including Friendfeed) were either not available or too small to be recorded by comScore so could no