We all went ga-ga over Google Wave when it was announced back at Google's I/O conference in May, but except for a very fortunate few, we really don't know what it will be like to use. Today online productivity suite developer ZenBe released a new product called Shareflow, which has a number of similarities to Google Wave.

Shareflow is a collaboration tool that ZenBe says is not email, IM, social networking, or instant messaging, but has elements of all of them. Sound familiar? The idea is that you can organize conversations around topics by creating "flows" and inviting people to collaborate on them. This maps directly to Google's concept of creating "waves" and inviting people to them.

Obviously Shareflow and Wave are not identical, and as with anything their respective implementations will have many differences. Beyond implementation differences, there are three fundamental differences between Shareflow and Wave that are worth noting:

1. Wave will be a free and predominantly open-source product, while Shareflow is a closed-source commercial product (albeit with a free account as one of the various plan levels)
2. Wave has the strength of Google behind it
3. You can't use Wave today, but you can use Shareflow

You can sign up for a free account, or use the promo code FREE30 to get 30 days free of either their Basic, Plus, or Premium plan.

Top Twitter Friends is a web service that creates a visual map for any Twitter account of the other accounts it is most frequently used to converse with. The site uses the Mailana social network analysis system to analyze Twitter conversations and come up with the data for the visualization.

Marshall Kirkpatrick recently used the Top Twitter Friends web application to generate an analysis of a series of popular twitterers, complete with lists of each Twitterer's most frequently contacted friends, and a screenshot of their visualization. Marshall's perspective is that the openness of this information gives us some pretty intimate insight into the inner circle of influential people in our social networks, and those of notable people.

Not only can you see who people most frequently converse with, but clicking the info link beside a person's account name reveals a tag cloud of the most commonly used words in the conversations between the two Twitter accounts in question, plus an additional link to actually go and read the conversations between them.

I find it strange that while I'm perfectly happy having public conversations with people over Twitter, it makes me feel slightly uncomfortable that those conversations can so easily be searched out and read by anyone that wants to do so. The conversations were public, after all, so it shouldn't feel strange, but somehow it does.

What's your perspective? Does it make you uncomfortable that there are powerful tools for analyzing your social network and the content of your conversations? Let us know in the comments.

Google today released 5 new features for Gmail, ranging from simple UI improvements to handy "embarrassment-reducing" conversation upgrades (though since they're counting the recently released Gmail app for your phone, it's really 4 new features today). First up is a new Reply button at the top of messages, allowing you to give a shout back without having to scroll endlessly through long messages for the previous Reply button at the bottom. This new Reply button and its drop down menu actually replaces the previously clunky 'more options' button at the top of all messages.

Second is a slick new 'Update Conversation' button for when you're in the middle of replying to a conversation, and new messages arrive mid-reply. A notification will pop up now, with the option of updating the conversation in-line to see what others said in case you need to edit your response.

Third is a new button to Forward All messages in a conversation, not just the one you happened to click the Forward button on. This is another great and innovative feature I haven't seen done with other web services or even desktop clients.

Last but not least is an offline chat feature for when someone you're chatting with goes offline for one reason or another. Now, when your friend returns online, they can see whatever you said in their absence. You'll really have to watch what you say when connections get dropped now.

All in all, these are great functional updates to a web based email client that is still trumping all the desktop clients I'm trying out. Nice work Google.

I track and comment on a lot of blogs, and if you're reading this I'd bet there's an even chance you do, too. The trouble with blog comments is that it's hard to remember what conversations you're interested in, and even harder to actually keep track of all of them, especially when old posts pass below the fold. co.mments is a cool web service that makes doing so a whole lot easier. The meat of the thing is a bookmarklet that you click on when you're viewing a blog post. The post is added to your co.mments page and from then on you can track its new comments from the co.mments site, or subscribe to an RSS feed for comments on all the posts you're tracking. co.mments is also among a growing number of web services that you can use without registering a user account (a cookie identifies you instead), which makes it easy and tto try out without giving up any privacy. If you decide you like it and want to use it from multiple computers, then you can fork over your e-mail address and get an account.

[Via TechCrunch]