The folks over at Facebook decided their social network's user interface needed to lose some weight. So, after a few weeks on a treadmill, Facebook Lite is now available for public preview. This new fat-free version of Facebook looks to put Twitter in its sights as far as simplicity is concerned; it's more straight-to-the-point and less "just in case you're interested."

On the inside, Facebook Lite seems to load and run significantly faster than the standard interface. It uses far less styling and scripting, and conveys simpler information to the user. In fact, after using the regular version for so long, Facebook Lite starts to feel somewhat like a mobile website. For on-the-go people, this should speed up the social networking workflow a little bit.

Facebook Lite isn't quite ready for full-time use, however. There are still some "to do" items. For example, six of the seven selections in the Options screen, and the advertisement on the left side of the page seems to be locked on Facebook Lite's feedback page. The rest of the interface seems to be functional, albeit lacking (though that is the general idea of a lite application) in some areas.

Facebook Lite is available for public preview to (currently) all US and India members.

[via Mashable]

In a quick post on their blog, FriendFeed announced that in addition to the themes already available to users, they would now be supporting custom themes.

Options have been added to let users upload a background image and choose colors for text, links, and more for their profile page. They also plan to add more functionality and customization options in the future but wanted to give users a taste right away. Themes are also supported for groups.

In addition to custom themes, FriendFeed also announced that, starting today, people visiting your profile will see the theme you've chosen or created. In the past, your theme was only visible to you. If you're not into this, they've has also given users an option to turn off theme visibility to viewers.

With Facebook's acquisition of FriendFeed earlier this week no one is sure what the future of FriendFeed is going to look like, but this is a pretty clear indication that they're not just going to let the site remain idle.

What do you get when you take a gaggle of enthusiastic, early-adopting online marketers and introduce them to one of the world's largest directories of job-seeking college students? We're about to find out, now that Facebook is acquiring FriendFeed. The move should mean improved versions of the real-time status and conversation features that Facebook was already moving toward, but that's not all Facebook bought. It's also getting most of FriendFeed's users.

It's not as if social media, um, d-bags, didn't know Facebook existed. Au contraire, they've been all over it for at least a year, begging people to become fans of their clients. College students, however, are about to find out that social media jobs exist, and are one of the best rackets going. Wait, you mean I can bother people online, using networks I was already signed up to anyway, and get paid for it? When do I start?

Social media isn't going away any time soon, and it has a lot of upside, but it also has a lot of our attention. It's one of the few places marketers can still get eyeballs, and members of the first generation that really grew up with it are about to enter the workforce and start selling things to one another. Maybe it was inevitable -- and maybe it will burn out after a while, to make room for new models based on new technology -- but I'm willing to bet we'll look back and point to the time FriendFeed met Facebook as the moment it really started to accelerate.

I was going to title this blog post with something funny like "FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request." But FriendFeed beat me to the punch by using the headline in the official announcement on the FriendFeed blog.

So here's the deal. Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, a site that few people have heard about, but which social networking nerds love. FriendFeed basically lets you keep track of activity on all of your social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, and dozens of others) from one place. Users can comment on one another's feeds, and nobody's limited to 140 characters.

Over the past few months, Facebook has implemented similar "lifestreaming" features into its own social networking site. The front page of Facebook looks a lot more like FriendFeed or Twitter these days, with real-time updates from your friends activity streams. And you can link some third party social networks to your Facebook account.

As part of the acquisition, the entire FriendFeed team will be joining Facebook, where they will likely bring more of FriendFeed's featureset to Facebook. For now, FriendFeed.com will continue to operate, but it's not clear whether Facebook will continue to operate FriendFeed as a separate site after the transition is complete.

Sharing pictures on FriendFeed is nothing new, but now it's just as easy to share other file types on the popular social network. You can either upload a file on the FriendFeed website, or email it as an attachment to share@friendfeed.com. The feature is intended for stuff like PDFs and spreadsheets, but you can also upload music files like mp3s and m4as.

Mp3s are playable and downloadable on the site, but there's a 3-a-day limit on the number of audio files each user can share. You can't upload movies, and limit on mp3s suggests that media files aren't the main focus here. Based on their blog post, FriendFeed mostly intends this feature for groups who use FriendFeed to collaborate and need to pass files around, and that's how the FriendFeed team has been using it internally.

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.

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]

Sometimes it seems that we're so plugged in to Twitter here @downloadsquad -- rather, at Download Squad -- that we don't even know FriendFeed exists.

Not true! In fact, I noticed that FriendFeed just released an official desktop notifier, built on Adobe AIR. It's pretty rough so far, but a lot of users are commenting with feature requests and improvements.

The main issue people have with the notifier so far is that it's a bit overwhelming. Right now, it just displays a pop-up for every new item in your feed. Useful, sure, but that can be a lot of items. Without customization settings to narrow down what you're seeing -- or slim down the size of the pop-up -- it's very obtrusive.

You also have to click through to take certain actions (like responding to comments) in a browser window, even though it looks like you should be able to do it right in the notifier. Despite these little annoyances, the desktop notifier is a good first step, and seems likely to improve in the near future.

Google Reader has added a new feature that makes reading RSS feeds a more social experience: You can leave comments on other users' shared items. In other words, if your friend clicks the share button next to a blog post or news item in Google Reader, it will show up in your Friends' shared items section along with any comment they've left. Now you can also comment on their comment. If multiple friends have shared the same item, you'll see multiple conversations.

All told, the feature looks and feels a lot like FriendFeed. But there's one major difference: Google Reader displays the full text of any articles that make their full length items available via RSS. So if your'e someone who only clicks through to articles you've read in your RSS reader to see what comments other people have left, this new feature could keep you from ever clicking through to the original web site. And that might be fine for you, the reader. But web publishers who rely on advertising might not be nearly as happy about this development.

Right now Google doesn't import comments from blogs, so there's still original content on the original web site. But there's also currently no way for blogs or other web sites to import comments from Google Reader, as they can from FriendFeed. That may change in the future.

What do you think? Are you likely to use the new commenting system? Would you rather use FriendFeed? Or do you just visit web sites when you want to read and participate in the comments?

[via The Inquisitr]

First, there were blog comments. But then there were Twitter, FriendFeed, Disqus, Google BlogSearch, and a host of other ways people could attach feedback to a particular URL. YackTrack is a service that aims to help you see all of these different types of comments in the same place. Just enter a URL, and it will return every comment on that URL that it can find across multiple services.

YackTrack is just getting started, so new features are rolling out quickly. There's already a bookmarklet you can use to avoid unnecessary copying and pasting, and a FeedFlare you can use to track a given URL. On top of that, YackTrack features a "chatter" search, so you can see what people around the web are saying about any given search term. I tested it out with my name, and it looks like a fantastic ego-surfing tool. It's probably even more useful if you're in customer relations and want to track what people are saying about your product and service. You can even subscribe to the search results as an RSS feed.

When AlertThingy launched in April of 2008, the Adobe AIR-based application was a desktop client for social networking/micro-blogging service FriendFeed. The developers eventually added support for Twitter, which started an arms race between AlertThingy and Twhirl, a Twitter client that added support for FriendFeed.

Now AlertThingy has been updated to version two, and it supports the following services:

• Digg
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Jaiku
• TinyURL
• Tumblr
• Twitter

You can use AlertThingy 2 to upload images to Flickr, update your status on Twitter or Facebook, post messags to Tumblr, and so on. And of course, you can see what your friends on each of those services is up to. Users can also subscribe to RSS feeds to receive updates from blogs and news web sites.

If you prefer the classic version of AlertThingy that works with just FriendFeed, AlertThingy v1 is still available for download as well.

[via RefreshingApps]

Adobe AIR-based microblogging client Twhirl already supported Twitter, Friendfeed and Seesmic, and now its coverage of the world of mini-updates gets even broader with the addition of Identi.ca. Identi.ca is something like a less-popular open-source version of Twitter. This is a big deal for the Identi.ca folks, because Twhirl may actually be better-known than their service.

Along with potentially pumping up the userbase of a fledgling microblogging site, Twhirl has also position itself to be to these micropost what Trillian and Adium are to IM. Keeping several services readily accessible from the same app is a proven winner when it's done right, and Twhirl delivers on the usability and appearance side of things. It was already one of the most popular clients back when it could only handle Twitter, and its main competition is going to come from some of the better Twitter-specific clients that attract people who don't use the other sites Twhirl handles.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

3 out of 4 doctors recommend reading Download Squad every day. But if you've been a bit too busy to keep up, here are a few of our favorite stories from the past week. Read them over and call us in the morning if you don't feel better.

• Lesser known weapons to trick out your malware arsenal
  You probably know all the big names in antivirus, anti-spyware behavior. But just because companies like Norton, Symantec, McAfee, Spybot, and AdAware get all the attention doesn't mean they're the only games in town. We have a roundup of some of our favorite anti-malware applications you probably haven't heard of, but should definitely check out.
• 10 tools to pimp out your FriendFeed
  Apparently we've been feeling all listy this week, because in addition to a list of anti-malware tools, we published a list of 10 tools to spruce up your FriendFeed page. Whether you want to filter the info that shows up in FriendFeed, or to read FriendFeed on your mobile phone, we've got you covered.
• VLC Media Player 0.9.0 pre-release adds Last.fm support and more
  VLC is already one of the most full-featured video players around. And it happens to be free and open source to boot. This week the developers pushed out a preview version of VLC 0.9.0 with one new killer feature: integrated support for streaming music service Last.fm.
• Ask DLS: Web browsing for the color blind
  Between 8 and 10 percent of males have some degree of color-blindness, but surprisingly few web designers take this into account. If you have problems distinguishing colors on web pages, you might want to check out the Colorblind Web Page Filter, which attempts to adjust the color scheme of any web site to make it easier to read based on the type of colorblindness you experience.
• Opera Mobile 9.5 beta released
  Opera is doing its part to keep Windows Mobile users from throwing jealous glances at their iPhone-owning friends. Opera Mobile 9.5 beta hit the streets this week, and it offers a Mobile Safari-like drag, drop and zoom interface, super-fast page rendering, and other features to make browsing on a handheld device just a little bit more pleasant.

There's no shortage of desktop clients for Twitter and FriendFeed. But Posty goes a few steps beyond popular clients like Twhirl and Alert Thingy by adding support for Jaiku and Tumblr as well as Pownce.

Posty's main window features a list of supported services with check boxes next to each. Just enter a status update and select the networks you want to send the update out to, and you can post simultaneously to all 5 places. You can also select the individual tab for each service to see recent updates from your contacts or from the public timelines if they're available. You can also respond to comments or send direct messages directly from Posty.

One of the only complaints we had with Posty is that while the window is resizable, it starts out at 550 pixels wide and there's no way to make it smaller. Bigger, yes. But smaller? Not so much. So it takes up a fair bit of screne real estate.

Like most applications built on Adobe AIR, Posty is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

[via Sarah in Tampa]