Although there's no doubt that Twitter is the current reigning social status update king of the hill, upstart FriendFeed is certainly a more than viable alternative. FriendFeed does everything Twitter can do and much, much more right out of the box, aggregating all of your feeds (including your Twitter stream) into a single unified online presence.

If you're already using FriendFeed, you might be interested in Feedstats, which shows you statistics about just what it is you get up to online, at least in terms of what you are funneling through the FriendFeed service. It also shows statistics about which other FriendFeed users you tend to interact with most, and which ones you are most compatible with, in terms of liking the same content.

Of course, all of these statistics are drawn from FriendFeed's openly available API, which means that you can snoop on your friends and see just what their habits are, as well. Or even better, check out a few A-list microbloggers to see just how much more social-networky than you they are.

If you use a lot of social networking sites, and different groups of your friends are scattered across all of them, it might be time to start a lifestream. AmpliFeeder is an open source platform that pulls in everything you share on other social sites and displays it in one convenient location. It works with tons of sites, including Twitter, Delicious, Upcoming, Last.fm and Facebook.

AmpliFeeder also has a handful of themes to choose from, and supports custom themes using XHTML and CSS. There are no hosted accounts, so you'll have to find a place to put it, but it's extremely easy to set up, once installed. Check out the video walkthrough on the documentation page for a step-by-step guide to getting AmpliFeeder up and running. If you need a solid, easy-to-use lifestreaming platform, this might be worth a look.

Without giving it a little thought, I don't recall when I got my first Athlon 64 mainboard and CPU. It's been a long time. AMD first released the chips in September, 2003. Here we are six years later, and we still haven't really begun to make use of the added processing power.

Six years is a pretty long time in computer terms. My tower at work is now equipped with eight times as much memory, 50 times more capacity on its hard drive, and four processor cores instead of one. All those improvements, and yet I'm still stuck running primarily 32-bit applications on it.

What a waste. Perhaps now there's a light and the end of the tunnel.

I was thrilled when Adobe decided to release an x64 build of CS4 for Windows. Days ago I installed the Office 2010 technical preview - also a native 64-bit version. With two of the most prominent commercial application suites making the jump, maybe we're finally going to see more widespread development of 64-bit apps.

Can you imagine our systems not taking advantage of other hardware technology that's been around for six years - like SATA or 802.11g wireless, for example? It just doesn't make any sense, does it?

One of the best things about Tumblr as a blog platform is how easy it is to try out new themes on your Tumblog. There's a wide selection of built-in themes, some of which are excellent, and many more that you can find elsewhere on the web and plug in with a quick copy-and-paste. Just go to http://www.tumblr.com/customize, turn on custom HTML, and plug in the code for your chosen theme, which you can usually find at the designer's page. Here are ten of my favorites to get you started:

Don't get me wrong - the people developing various cloud desktops like eyeOS and iCloud have created some very interesting apps with slick features. There are just a few nagging issues I have that prevent me from using one - or even thinking about using one any time soon.

First, there's my concern over data. I don't even want to consider the possibility of a company I don't control storing all my data. Heck, my GMail account doesn't even contain any really sensitive information and I've used it full time for five years. I just don't have any desire to place things like family videos, photos, and records in the hands of a business that could shut down at any time (screenshot?).

What if my cloud runs out of capital? What if they do something shady and their harware is confiscated? Where does that leave me?

Of course for that to be a dilemma, I'd have to be able to upload a significant amount of data somewhere at a reasonable speed. Which I can't.

Do you have a blog? Does it have a working RSS feed? Congratulations! You can now publish your blog on Amazon's Kindle platform, allowing users of the Kindle device (or the Kindle iPhone app) to subscribe to your blog for a small fee. You take a 30% cut, and Amazon takes the rest. It might be small potatoes, but more blogger-generated content could attract more users to the Kindle platform, which means more blog subscribers.

You don't have to do anything special to make your blog readable on the Kindle. Just put your RSS feed in over at Kindle Publishing for Blogs, and you should be good to go. As M.G. Siegler points out at TechCrunch, it would be really nice to give your blog away for free, but that doesn't seem feasible for Amazon. Right now, they decide what to charge your readers, and it's generally around $1.99/month.

There's a boatload of Twitter clients out there for the iPhone (it seems to be that everyone's wanting to write them nowadays) however the Iconfactory's Twitterrific was one of the very first to appear on the iDevices and now has hit version 2.0.

The original version of Twitterrific, which debuted at the launch of the App Store last summer, was a very slick app that let you read and update Twitter on the go. But since then many other clients such as Tweetie, Twitterfon and the likes have brought plenty more features to the table, and Twitterrific developer Craig Hockenberry has talked on his own blog about why the original Twitterrific didn't include them.

However that's all changed in this all-new version and Twitterrific 2.0 brings you pretty much every feature you've been using in the likes of Tweetie (a favourite amongst us here at Download Squad HQ). Read on for the low-down on some of the all-new features in Twitterrific 2.0 along with our gallery!

It shouldn't come to a surprise to anyone that Twitter is becoming a target for malicious activity. Even before the MIkeyy worm and its successor appeared there were already phishing scammers at work on the popular microblogging site. Now it appears that the bad guys are leveraging Twitter's popularity elsewhere to ensnare victims.

According to Trend Labs, poisoned links have begun appearing that use the Twitter worm hysteria to trick unwary surfers into downloading malware. I tested myself and wasn't able to turn up any links that resembled the one screen captured by Trend, so it's likely that search engines have already started blocking them.

However, Twitter's popularity will jump yet again thanks to Oprah's clumsy attempt to "join the 21st century," so both on and off-site attacks are likely to increase. It's important for new Twitter users - who likely won't be as computer-savvy as long-time tweeters - to be aware of the possible dangers.

To play it safe, make sure you're reading your news from a trusted source and that your system is protected by a capable antivirus program.

Birdhouse is a new kind of Twitter client for iPhone. Instead of focusing on keeping track of the most friends or supporting the most third-party services, Birdhouse is designed specifically for the composition and refinement of tweets. The app's developers, Adam "LonelySandwich" Lisagor and Cameron Hunt (who you might know as cameron.io.), are two guys who put a lot of thought into their tweets, and the design of Birdhouse really encourages users to raise the bar on their own posts.

Birdhouse isn't meant to be your main Twitter app. In fact, it doesn't display your Twitter feed at all. It's a minimal, no-fuss writing environment that's ideally suited to its medium. It neatly supports multiple Twitter accounts, storing your drafts for each and letting you give them a star rating, so you can get a quick visual read on how far along each one is. It also lets you manually back up your drafts to your email account for later use. Birdhouse also keeps track of your history of published tweets. It may not be for everyone, but I hope the mere fact that a tool like this exists makes people aware that Twitter can be more than another place to post your favorite links from Google Reader.

Social networking, life-streaming, and micro-blogging service FriendFeed has rolled out a new beta interface, which you can access by navigating to beta.friendfeed.com. The service still lets you link your Twitter, Facebook, LInkedIn, and other social networking accounts so that you can share all of your social media updates with your FriendFeed contacts who can then comment on them.

But the new user interface is both prettier and more functional than the old school UI (If you can call anything about a service that launched just over a year ago old school).

First of all, FriendFeed beta features real-time updates from your contacts. No need to hit the refresh button. There's also a new "My discussions" link that takes you to a page with every entry you've participated in, whether it's a conversation you started or a comment you've left on another person's entry. You can also create custom filters by using the advanced search tools and saving your searches. FriendFeed has also added the ability to send direct messages to other users.

The new design also makes more liberal use of user avatars, so you get a better sense of who's leaving messages instead of just indications letting you know which service they used to post the message.

[via Thomas Hawk]

There are many ways to share your content online with family and friends. From Flickr to Facebook to MySpace, YouTube and Twitter, there's no shortage of ways, or platforms, to express yourself via words, pictures and videos. Several months ago I was introduced to another of these type of sites called Posterous.

At Posterous, much like these other sites, you can post words, pictures and videos via email from whatever device you happen to be using -- be it iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry or desktop computer. At first, I was a bit skeptical about how Posterous would distinguish itself from the other sites and platforms I use regularly.

However, once I started using Posterous and had my own page, I was quickly impressed with its simplicity, its design and its usability. Soon it became my site of choice for posting images on the go from my iPhone and may very well replace Flickr as my photo site of choice in the near future.

Recently, I talked with Sachin Agarwal, one of Posterous' co-founders, to get all the latest info on the site, how it came to be and where its going.

CHRIS ULLRICH: First off, let's talk a bit about your background. Where did you grow up, go to school, work and develop the skills to do something like Posterous?

SACHIN AGARWAL: Garry and I both went to Stanford and majored in Computer Science. When I graduated, I worked at Apple on Final Cut Pro for 6 years which was all the way up to starting Posterous. I was building the real-time playback engine and effects architecture.

That didn't have a direct impact on the formation of Posterous, except that we're definitely Apple people at heart, and we want to be the Apple of blogging. We want to make the simplest, most beautiful site out there, and make it accessible to the masses.

CU: When did you first have the idea for Posterous, how is it put together and when did it first go live?

If you have a website, it's pretty likely that you want to know when people are linking to you, and what they're saying. This is a fairly straightforward process if you're not getting linked to every day, but if your site is relatively popular, keeping track of incoming links can turn into a bit of a chore.

Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software came up with an interesting tool to help make this process more bearable. It's an Applescript for Safari that modifies the formatting of the linking page to add focus to the paragraph and actual link, making it easy to find visually in a large document.

If you're not a fan of Safari or even just to check out some alternative implementations like bookmarklets, be sure to read the comments on Daniel's post.

The Moveable Type folks at Six Apart have officially released the cross-platform publishing package they announced late last year. It's called Motion, and it's available to Movable Type Pro users now. Motion lets you publish to multiple services at once, and it allows your community members to comment using their existing accounts on Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

You can quick-publish a microblog via Motion -- including photos, videos and other rich content -- and you can pull in your activity on other sites, including Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. This basically seems like a quick and easy way to do the kind of thing social networking geeks have been doing by hand on their own sites. If you're the sort of person who thinks of a website as a community, you definitely want to give Motion a look.