Yoono is a social networking tool that lets you access data and update your status on networks including Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, and FriendFeed. The utility started out its life as a browser toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer, but Yoono recently launched a desktop client that provides all the same features and then some.

Basically, the Yoono desktop client for Windows or Mac provides you with a single place to track your contacts, update your status, or chat on Google Talk, Windows Live, or AOL instant messengers. You can click an "All" tab to see all the latest updates from each network you register with the Yoono client, or you can click on an individual service if you just want to check in on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, or an instant messenger.

One nice feature of the Yoono desktop client is an integrated browser. Other applications that provide you with Facebook and MySpace updates require you to click a link and open a web browser to get more details. Yoono launches an integrated browser window that will show the full web page. You can also click a link on that page to open it in a browser window if you prefer.

Overall, the Yoono desktop client is pretty slick, but I'm a bit disappointed in the way Yoono handles instant messaging. Instead of opening new chat windows for each conversation the way virtually every other application does, Yoono places each conversation in a new tab. If a new message comes in when you're in another area, a notice should pop up at the top of the application, but that means you may have to spend a lot of time toggling between windows if you're chatting with more than one person at a time, especially if one is on AIM and another is on Google Talk.

There's also no support for file transfers, voice or video chat, or Yahoo! Messenger.

[via TechCrunch]

When Yammer first launched, I thought it wasn't going to last long. A Twitter for business? It sounded like an opportunistic idea to latch onto Twitter when it was clearly about to take off. Yammer has taken on a life of its own, though, and it's got the new iPhone app and threaded conversations to prove it.

The Yammer app has something that Twitter apps to date have been struggling to achieve: push notifications. These are especially important for a service like Yammer, because they alert you to new messages without using up texts on your iPhone. Yammer has also taken a page from the Facebook/Friendfeed playbook and created thread conversations that look similar to the ones you see in your Facebook activity stream. The threaded view is only available on the web, but it will come to Yammer's desktop app soon.

These are just the biggest new features. There are also countless small improvements - landscape mode and camera support for the iPhone app, for example - that you can check out on Yammer's blog.

[via TechCrunch]

If you've been on Twitter since the beginning, you know that @replies weren't always supported the way they are now. The @username convention started from the ground up, with Twitter's users, and the functionality was coded afterward. Now, the same thing is happening with retweets, according to a blog post by Twitter's Biz Stone.

Although the design hasn't been finalized, "Project Retweet" looks like it will include a "retweet" link next to each tweet. Instead of the conventional "RT:" in front of retweeted posts, they'll appear to your followers as they were written, with a "retweeted by" note at the end, next to the date and time of the tweet. At first, people will probably wonder why they're seeing posts by folks they don't follow, but I'm sure users will eventually learn to assume they're seeing retweets. Besides, "RT" was taking up valuable characters!

Project Retweet rolls out in "a few weeks or so," according to Biz. This way, app developers have time to support the functionality. Retweeting has been added to the API, so adding it to apps should only be a small hassle. I'm predicting iPhone apps will lag behind desktop apps in adding the new retweet feature, though, while their updates wait in Apple's App Store approval queue.

With the rise of social networking profiles and photo sharing sites, people are putting more photos of themselves online than ever. Retouching, Photoshopping and the infamous "MySpace angle" have all done wonders to make people look better in photos, and now we can add PicTreat to that list. It's a fast, easy way to give yourself a perfect complexion ... on the web, anyway.

PicTreat removes red eye and blemishes and adjusts brightness/contrast and color levels. A basic user of Photoshop could do the same thing, but Pictreat does it very quickly, and then gives you the option to upload the photo to several social sites. You can use PicTreat without registering, but you can also get an account, or sign in using Facebook Connect or MySpace.

There's a social network for just about everything these days, so it only makes sense that serious tea drinkers would get a social site of their own. It's called Steepster, and once you get your head around the idea that someone built a social network around tea, it's quite well-executed. Users can enter what they drink in a personal tealog, including comments or tasting notes that could come in handy for fellow tea aficionados.

Steepster has a Facebook-style activity feed, so you can see the latest from any friends you make on the site. It also has a shopping list, which seems to me like the site's killer feature. If you're reading about a whole lot of tempting teas, it only makes sense to have a place to keep track of the ones you want to try for yourself. You don't have to be a member to browse teas on Steepster, though. Each tea page contains info like caffeine content, ideal steeping time and temperature, and ingredients.

When Facebook first announced it would be allowing users to pick vanity URLs, a lot of people rushed to claim some version of their real names, but others just picked something they thought would be funny or clever. If you recall, the vanity URL would allow you to use facebook.com/johnsmith if you were John Smith. Of course, if you weren't John Smith you could still grab the name, hence the mad dash at midnight to secure your name.

• If you haven't claimed your vanity URL, you can do so here.
• If you want to change your username, you can change it here.

Now that some time has passed, I'm sure some people feel like they picked a username that doesn't sound so great anymore. In fact, some people picked terrible names, like the guy who just held down the 'a' key. To address the problem, Facebook is letting users correct their mistakes with one name change per person.

Why did Facebook wait until now to allow name changes? Perhaps the announcement that names would be permanent was a way to deter people from choose stupid names, celebrity names, or trademarked brands. The one-time change serves the same purpose. After the big Facebook land grab when usernames were first introduced, though, users switching now might find their top choices unavailable.


Other Facebook coverage:
Users Share Links More on Facebook Than E-Mail
What's the deal with Mafia and Mobsters on Facebook?
One city claims to require your Facebook profile to work for them
Facebook adds verification procedure for compromised accounts

Don't forget to check out our latest DLS 101: free tools to help you surf and download safely!

If you've ever had your Facebook account taken over and used to spam your friends, or if you've ever been on the receiving end of that spam, you might be happy to hear that Facebook is actually doing something about it. In a blog post on Friday, the social network announced the rollout out of new verification procedures for logging into an account that appears to be compromised. When Facebook thinks an account is being used to send spam, the owner will get an email directing him or her to a new verification page to confirm ownership of the account and log in.

The verification page serves the dual purpose of letting the user know how the account was taken over - likely through a phishing attack using a fake site that looks just like Facebook, according to the message. Moving the verification process to the Facebook site and automating it should streamline the process of getting your account back, and hopefully give you some tips to keep you from exposing it again in the future. It's a good new feature, but I can't help wondering about the extent of the increase in spam that probably prompted it.

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.

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.

Sharing your location via a mobile device is a great way to let friends and family know where you are, and encourage people you know to meet up with you. The challenge is in making it as easy as possible for the right people to see your location while hiding it from random Internet strangers. Glympse is a clever new approach to the problem, allowing location-sharing on a time limited person-by-person basis.

Using Glympse is as simple as picking a contact and a duration. Your contact will be able to see your location from their mobile device or computer for that duration of time. It's the simplest solution imaginable to a pretty complex problem. Right now, Glympse is only available for Android devices, but it's coming soon to Windows Mobile phones, iPhones and Blackberries.

Favorites are a dramatically underused feature on Twitter, but if you know where to look, you can use them to find some people you might be interested in following. Twitterbelle is a new site that makes that process easier. Just put in the username of someone you think is interesting and has good taste in friends, and you'll see a list of the people he or she has awarded favorites to.

This is a bit more effective than just going down someone's following list, which will be chronological, not ranked, and sometimes extremely long. Maybe someone's following thousands of people, but favorites point out who they're really paying attention to. You can obviously also use Twitterbelle to check out your own favorites and see who's getting the most gold stars from you.

As people discover that social sites can be pretty decent news sources, especially when it comes to event coverage, I think we'll start seeing a lot more projects like Almost.at. Almost.at uses text, photos, videos and links from sites including Twitter and Flickr to show as-it-happens coverage of everything from concerts to conferences to breaking news stories. Right now, for example, a Phish concert, the E3 expo and a missing Air France flight are all being covered.

Almost.at's three column layout and automatic refresh are nice, but the site goes beyond what you see on its web display. You can add usernames to an event on Almost.at, so others can see and follow people who are at the event, and you can also download a standalone Almost.at browser for OS X. If you're interested in a particular event, it beats opening sites and search results across different tab and refreshing them manually.

Twitter has a lot of untapped potential in the world of play. A fast, nimble social network could spawn all kinds of cool games, but I don't think it's there yet. Spymaster, a new game that quickly flew up the ranks of Twitter's trending topics this week, lets you play spy and assassinate your Twitter friends, but for those of us who aren't playing, the notifications for it are pretty annoying.

You may have already received DMs from your friends asking you to join their spy rings, or seen level up announcements and assassination attempts posted under the #spymaster hashtag. There's a way to turn the announcements off, but most people apparently haven't found it yet. As for the game itself, you score points and gain power based on the number of people in your Twitter network who are also on Spymaster, and by completing missions or attacking other players.

Spymaster is in private beta right now, but if my Twitter list is any indication, it's not that hard to get in.

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.