The reason why Steven Seagal's 80's movies lack relevance for modern day audiences is because if a group of creepy, rogue mercenaries were to abduct us now, we'd be able to ping 10 nearby friends for backup. If you're like us, you're using one or more location-based services that rely on GPS data, phone signal strength or visibility in relation to nearby wireless networks. In other words, through Twitter, Loopt, Brightkite, Foursquare or Google Latitude, your location is sitting in a database. Nonetheless, according to a recent report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you shouldn't have to forgo your locational privacy to find nearby friends or restaurants.
There are a slew of social media aggregation sites willing, waiting, and wanting to pull your updates, videos, photos, links, music, "shares," "likes," and other content from all around the web. A few of them work well, some have really cool features, and others have critical mass.
But none of them are as drop-dead good-looking - or as customizable - as AmpliFeeder, a free, open-source distributed social activity aggregator. The only major drawback: It's the kind of web app that needs to be installed on a server. But a hosted version is in the works, and the screen shots prove it's so worth the effort.
Forget all the On the Road, this-land-is-your-land hype. Here's what the RoadTwip boils down to: The gas money was less than the cost of a plane ticket to get to the BIGOmaha conference. Pure and simple stinginess.
I had been pitched on this interdisciplinary tech/creative conference in the middle of nowhere and decided to go out of perverse curiosity - because really, who in their right mind would have a conference in Nebraska? I had to find out. My good friend and FreedomSpeaks.com co-founder Kurt Daradics' curiosity got the best of him, as well; and when I told him I planned to drive, he booked a plane not to Omaha, but to D.C., so we could make the journey together. That was the start of the "road trip gone Twitter."
The Facebook Newsfeed: so much juicy information, so little access to it. Last week we wrote about a new Facebook app that turned your newsfeed into an RSS feed you could subscribe to outside of Facebook. It was really useful and now it's gone.
Even the app's developer agrees that the app crossed the line, overstepping Facebook's much celebrated privacy controls. We're still disappointed though, and we wish that this rich source of data could be opened up for developers and users to build value on top of. What kind of publishing system doesn't offer an RSS feed? A fundamentally closed one.
Windows Live received a major makeover last November, and part of this makeover included the ability to aggregate updates from third-party services like Flickr, Pandora, or Twitter. Today, Microsoft announced that its users will now also be able to import their updates from 20 additional partners, including Digg, Last.fm, SmugMug, and Facebook. In addition, users will soon be able to invite their friends on MySpace, Hi5, and Tagged to join their Windows Live network. In Europe, Microsoft Live has also teamed up with a number of popular local services like Hyves, Dailymotion.com, and Dada.
Skimmer is a design-focused new Adobe AIR application from Minneapolis Ad Agency Fallon. Part of a broader push for the company in revamping its image online, Skimmer is a very functional lifestream aggregator and media browser in its own right. Skimmer pulls feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Blogger and YouTube, and allows posting to Twitter, Flickr and YouTube as well. But focusing on the underpinnings of this application would be doing it an injustice - it's got a handsome face, and that's the point.
StoryTlr, a lifestreaming service that debuted to a lot of positive press last year, has (among several other enhancements) debuted a major new feature today: Pages. This is a new gallery format view of selected portions of a total lifestream, essentially as a slideshow. StoryTlr adds this new ability to its already rich aggregation support of different social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, RSS feeds and Digg. Also updated is support for tags and a new theme.
Momentile is a new photo sharing service with some very cool twists. There is, of course, no dearth of photo sharing services online, but momentile has come up with an interesting way to combine photo sharing and lifestreaming with the spirit of micro-blogging services like Twitter. The basic idea behind momentile is that you will upload one picture per day, so that after a year, you will have a collection of 365 pictures that represent that year. Momentile is still in private alpha testing, but we do have a few invites to give away. Instructions for how to get them are at the bottom of this post.
Curious Squid has released Pingle, an application for the iPhone which lets you update your status across a selection of social networks at once. Using Ping.fm, Pingle will update Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Flickr, FriendFeed, Delicious, Tumblr, and more including many blogging platforms.
The app works on both the original 1G iPhone and the 3G iPhone, and is available in the iPhone App Store for $1.99
FriendFeed, a cross-network activity aggregator built by ex-Googlers and more fun to use than the phrase "cross-network activity aggregator" might imply, launched a powerful new search tool today. Want to discover particularly interesting conversations or people in your networks? Want to pick out just the noisiest conversations online about your brand? Want to find some really crazy stuff that's only discoverable through FriendFeed? The investigative possibilities that FriendFeed now offers are quite impressive, if you can bring just a little creativity to your search query construction.
Here are our favorite examples of some of the searches we've already found quite valuable.
