Once upon a time, letting people know what you were up to online was simple. You'd just point your friends toward your blog, LiveJournal page, or MySpace where you posted all of your latest musing on life. But if you're an active netizen, odds are your social activity is spread out across a half dozen or more sites, ranging from YouTube to del.icio.us. Swurl is a new service that helps bring all of your status updates, bookmarks, watched videos and other activity together.
If Swurl sounds a bit like FriendFeed, it kind of is. Both services let you gather all of your social networking activity in one place. But Swurl is a lot prettier and more customizable. You can think of it almost as a meta-blog. If you have a blog on Blogger or WordPress, you can configure Swurl to display all of your latest posts in blog-like format. But it will also show your Twitter and Facebook status updates and other activity in chronological order. Or you can hit the search box to search all of your sites.
Anyone can comment on an item that shows up on your Swurl page just by hovering their mouse near the bottom of an update. And you can use Swurl as something of a start page by hitting the Friends tab to see what your contacts have been up to. There's also a nifty timeline view that shows your updates plotted out on a calendar.
Swurl was developed by Ryan Sit, the same guy who brought us Listpic, an awesome interface for browsing online classified sites.
Social web browsing plugin Yoono has emerged from private beta. The new version still wears a beta label, but it's available to the public. Yoono is basically a utility that hangs out in the Firefox sidebar and gives you quick access to instant messenging services, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, and Piczo.
The public beta adds support for Firefox. It also packs a few new features:
Filter your friends activity by network, group, or names
Add FriendFeed and Flickr comments
Send Twitter direct messages and replies
Upload pictures to Facebook or poke friends
Browse Digg video
Yoono will also be adding Google Talk and MySpace soon. There does appear to be a bug that prevents Yoono from working properly on Firefox 3 in some cases. The problem seems to show up if you've installed some other browser plugins. Yoono is expected to release an updated version addressing this problem within the next few days.
It's been a while since we've seen a compelling new browser start page. There was a real flurry of start pages a year or two ago when the likes of Google Personalized Start Page (now iGoogle), NetVibes, Pageflakes, and a myriad of other copycat sites launched. Strangely, even with such an amazing variety of start pages to choose from, we've never found any of them to be particularly compelling.
Then we were introduced to Feedly. Feedly is a start page that only works in Firefox, because it requires a Firefox browser extension to run. It's actually a locally hosted page that goes out and grabs information feed reader sites and social networks that you use, and presents it to you in a friendly magazine style layout.
Feedly can go through your Firefox bookmarks, as well as your My Yahoo! page, NetVibes, Bloglines, Twitter, FriendFeed, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail accounts to find relevant information to present to you. If we can offer one tip, it would be to choose carefully. When setting up our page, we checked every possible option, and ended up with far too many feeds, and too many feeds that we had lost interest in that were still in some account somewhere that Feedly found.
Feedly also has a very tight integration with Google Reader, and anything that you read in Feedly will be marked as read in Google Reader, and vice versa. This is cool, but it's also dangerous, since and feeds that you add to Feedly (or that it finds) are automatically added to your Google Reader account. So again, choose carefully what feeds you want to be seeing in Feedly, as they will affect your Google Reader account.
But once it's all set up, Feedly is a very useful and elegantly done start page - so much so, that we haven't been compelled to remove it. And since no other start page has captured our interest, that's certainly something.
Adobe AIR apps are the new hotness. We're seeing more and more pop up every single day. It's looks like the AIR platform is turning into the Facebook Platform on steroids.
Why? Because it's cross platform, and what a brilliant move by Adobe on that. You can install an AIR app on Mac or PC in a blink. Not only that, but it runs lightweight as all heck.
The latest app that has everyone talking is a desktop compliment to the increasingly popular FriendFeed. Introducing Feedalizr.
With FriendFeed's pretty neat Remote Key system, you can allow apps to access your FriendFeed stream. So getting Feedalizr going once you have Adobe AIR installed is a snap.
Some of the things that Feedalizr lets you do from your desktop:
Filter updates by service, such as Flickr, Pownce, and Twitter
Post videos - which is rather seamless, and records right from your cam in the app
Drag and drop photos and upload right to Flickr
Get instant updates in that nice slick slidey fashion on the bottom right hand side of your desktop
FriendFeed has a public API and has no official apps, but this appears to be as close as you could possibly get to one. It's very slick, and gets the job done.
What's your favorite Adobe AIR app? Drop a link in the comments!
FriendFeed has launched FriendFeed Rooms, a new feature where users can create private or public rooms to discuss various topics and share items with one another. Whatever happens in the room, stays in the room since only room members can see what comments are being shared by one another.
FriendFeed is a social network aggregator (which is growing wildly in popularity) that collects content from over 30 social networking sites and consolidates it to a customized feed.
Some of the rooms that have already been created include Obamamania (note to Hillary and McCain staffs) and a room about the new season of The Bachelorette. Rooms are a cinch to set up - all you do is click on the Rooms tab on your FriendFeed page and name the topic and whether the room will be public or private.
There are several Issues that need to be addressed. How do you find rooms that are public? And what about those name squatters who grab rooms with the names of corporate registered trademarked names? For instance, Thomas Hawk opened Ars Tecnica, Chevron and Exxon rooms just to see what he could register. Will there be a way to transfer room administration?
In any event, rooms looks like it's going to be a hit with users. Be sure to check in and tell us what your favorite FriendFeed Rooms are.
Because it wasn't hard enough trying to decide which Adobe AIR-based desktop Twitter/FriendFeed client to use, MySocial 24x7 had to go and complicate things by releasing their own desktop client. MySocial 24x7 started out as a Firefox sidebar add-on, but if you value your screen real estate, standalone applications are the way to go.
The desktop client lets you track and engage in Twitter and FriendFeed conversations without a web browser. One thing that sets MySocial 24x7 apart from other desktop clients like Twhirl and Alert Thingy is the integrated browser that lets you view pictures and videos without launching a web browser.
The interface is clean and easy to use. But it's not very customizable. If you want to see detailed user information, or send direct Twitter messages, MySocial 24x7 might not be the desktop client for you. We also had a hard time getting the client to connect to our Twitter and FriendFeed accounts, but it did a great job of tracking public timelines.
When it comes to desktop alert clients for social networking feeds, there can be only one. Well, that's not really true, but when it comes right down to it, do you want to run one application to keep track of your Twitter updates, another for posting to Jaiku and Pownce, and still a third to track FriendFeed updates? Probably not, which is why Twhirl is such a nifty little application since it can now do all of those things, and support for video micro-blogging service Seesmic is coming soon.
That brings the total number of Adobe AIR-based desktop clients for accessing FriendFeed updates to at least two. The other day we told you about Alert Thingy, a new desktop client for keeping tabs on your FriendFeed information. But just as Twhirl was busy adding FriendFeed to its repertoire, Alert Thingy's developers were adding Twitter integration, which means the two applications are now fighting for the same user base.
At this point, Twhirl has a much stronger Twitter client than Alert Thingy and Alert Thingy has a much more elegant FriendFeed interface. And both applications eat up more RAM than we're really comfortable with. But development on these desktop notifier/communication clients is happening at a pretty quick pace and both tools are worth keeping an eye on.
The graph feature is pretty much self explanatory. You enter a term, and Facebook will show you how frequently it pops up on the site. Enter two terms, separate by a comma, and you can compare their popularity. The Mini-Feed update is a little more interesting, but only a little. Users can now associate their Facebook accounts with Flickr, Picasa, Yelp, and del.icio.us so that pictures, reviews, and links they post to those sites will be added to their Facebook feeds.
The move seems designed to help Facebook compete with a number of new "lifestreaming" services like FriendFeed and Socialthing! which allow users to track updates from across a series of social networks. The difference between Facebook and those other sites is that FriendFeeed and Socialthing! let you track far more than 4 networks. Where's Twitter, Pownce, Digg, Reddit, and YouTube?
It should be interesting to see if Facebook fleshes out its lifestreaming features in the future. It would seem to be in the company's best interest to do so. Because if users decide that it's easier to keep track of their social networking data while visiting a 3rd party site like FriendFeed, that means they'll be spending less time at Facebook's page, which means less advertising revenue.
FriendFeed is a service that keeps track of the activity of your contacts across pretty much every social network. The problem with FriendFeed is that people want to view different sets of contacts in different ways. There are third party desktop clients for Twitter and Pownce, for example, that let you follow along and respond to comments more easily. But when you lump those services in with less-immediate ones like Yelp, Flickr, or the RSS feed to your friend's blog, the slower stuff starts to gum up the works.
Alert Thingy to the rescue! If you use FriendFeed, and you've been looking for a faster way to read updates, you're in luck: a desktop version is here. Alert Thingy is an Adobe Air application, which gives it the advantage of being lightweight and cross-platform. There aren't a lot of bells and whistles to it, but it will display your feed and allow you post items directly to FriendFeed.
You're on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon, Digg, Flickr, and a thousand other social networking sites. But keeping up with your friends and contacts on each site could be a full time job. Or you could sign up for a single service that lets you view your contacts' activity on a single page. FriendFeed is a service that launched last week, which does exactly that. But the service didn't get hog the spotlight very long, as Yahoo!'s MyBlogLog has launched a feature this week that lets members track their friends' activity streams.
Existing MyBlogLog members should notice the change right away. Your new profile page will feature all of your recent blogging activity. And if you've already added other social networking service to your profile, you should see updates for those as well. When you click on the "my neighborhood" button you'll see an activity stream with updates from your MyBlogLog members who use those services.
