Social media aggregator Cliqset today announced a new beta version of its platform that aggregates activity feeds from 70 different social media sites, transforms them into normalized Activity Streams standard data and then pushes them out in real time.

The company's offers multiple ways to access the data through its API but also hopes that more users will stick with its own, now much improved, user interface. The first 200 ReadWriteWeb readers to click this link will gain access to the new beta version of the site.

The most important thing Cliqset is doing is probably transforming all these different update feeds into the standardized format called Activity Streams. That format is already being supported by Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live and Opera.

Michael Calore explains what Cliqset is doing with Activity Streams as follows:

A huge bonus is that Cliqset is using the emerging Activity Streams data specification to make all this happen. Activity Streams is an open-source XML-based format that uses a common actor-verb-asset model to report an activity on a social website. For example, "Amy shared a video" or "Mike rated this photo." It's a simple organizing principle that allows social web services to more easily talk to each other about what their users are doing.
But if not everyone is reporting their users' activity data using a common model, it becomes harder to get two services to talk to each other. And only a handful of sites are supporting Activity Streams right now.
As Cliqset co-founder Darren Bounds tells Webmonkey, Cliqset is actually re-writing all the aggregated data streams into the Activity Streams format, physically cleaning up the social web's mess as it goes.

Cliqset tells us that it's working on making a streaming API for this data available and let us in on some secret projects to bring real-time cross-platform data flowing to places around the web that it's not available today.

Right now you cannot easily pull Activity Streams feeds through Cliqset for people who have not signed up for the service themselves. It would be great if Cliqset began consuming the Webfinger protocol, for example and let me point at all my Google Contacts, discover their social media sites from around the web and then transform those into Activity Streams for consumption in other apps. That future isn't here and it may never be, but a web user can hope.

For now the company is using the long polling method and this newly normalized data to do some impressive things with its own user interface. Michael Calore goes into depth about that part of the project on Wired.com's WebMonkey blog. We'd like to recommend his post as our Real-Time Web Article of the Day, in fact. Check it out for a closer look at the innovative effort underway at Cliqset.

We're highlighting one article about the real-time web from off-site every day, leading up to the October 15th ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. Data normalization, Activity Streams, filtering and APIs are going to be big topics of conversation there. We hope you'll join us for those conversations.

At one time, FriendFeed clones like Lifestream.fm and Socialthing! looked like promising alternatives, but neither of them offered the same rich and innovative features that FriendFeed does - the very features which made FriendFeed the standout service that it is today. However, there is one service that may have an opportunity to capitalize on the FriendFeed exodus: social media aggregator Streamy.

When we looked at Streamy back in March of this year, we were more than impressed with what it had to offer. For some reason though, the service's social networking aspects never really became heavily used by the early adopter crowd. Everyone had their own reasons for this decision of course, with complaints which ranged from the service feeling a little too raw for everyday use to its RSS reader which couldn't (and still doesn't) provide a viable alternative to Google Reader. However, we think the main reason for the lack of uptake has more to do with the fact that Streamy's core audience was already busy interacting, commenting, and "liking" items over on their social media aggregator of choice: FriendFeed.

Now, with FriendFeed out of the way (or soon to be, that is), it may be time for us to give Streamy another look. There are a number of features which should appeal to today's FriendFeed users if they decide to make the switch. However, there are still some issues with how Streamy implements these features, and we'll make note of those too.

1. FriendFeed Friend Import

When you sign up for Streamy, you have the option to find your friends on other services. One of those services is FriendFeed. By clicking on the "People" link at the top of the page then selecting "Find Friends" you can import your friends from Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Google, and even Flickr. This is at least as good as FriendFeed's own friend import process which only imported from email, Twitter, and Facebook. Plus, it gives you the ability to easily re-create your FriendFeed social graph on Streamy without having to manually seek out your friends and re-add them.

What Streamy needs to work on: One thing Streamy needs to improve in this area is the ability to "select all" the friends it finds and let you follow them in one fell swoop. At the moment, you have to click "Follow" next to each individual who you want to add. It's also really hard to see who's following you and then reciprocate. Although new followers appear on the homepage in the "new from friends" section, you have to "remove" each person from this box after following them only to have more new followers appear in their place. And there's no way to tell whether or not you were already following these people, which leads to confusion. There should be a centralized way of managing this activity and the homepage widget definitely needs to sync with your following choices made on the backend.

2. Comment on Stories

On the Streamy homepage, a section called "Stories for You" delivers personalized news based on your site activity like stories you and your friends are sharing and commenting on. However, since at first Streamy has no activity to go on, it simply recommends "popular" stories to you and those may not be stories you actually enjoy. Like FriendFeed, you can comment on these stories and those comments will be seen by others reading the same story. Also like FriendFeed, undesirable stories can be hidden from your view with the "hide" button. However, unlike FriendFeed, Streamy actually introduces a great feature here: threaded comments. Each comment has a "reply" button next to it, letting users reply to each other's comments as opposed to simply creating a new one.

What Streamy needs to work on: Although FriendFeed's river of news was also personalized based on who you followed, the site offered a number of ways to surface popular content. When your friends commented on an item, it "bubbled up" to appear at the top of your stream, for instance. FriendFeed also had a "best of day" feature which displayed the most active stories that day. Streamy doesn't have anything like this so content with comments could easily become lost. For now, the best way to see stories your friends comment on is in the "New from People" homepage widget (also available in the "People" section) which is an activity feed of your friends' comments among other things.

3. Groups: Streamy's Version of FriendFeed Rooms

Streamy has a feature which lets you create groups which is somewhat reminiscent of FriendFeed's Rooms feature. As with Rooms, groups can be topic-based so you and your friends can discuss the news. You can browse through your own group memberships to see which groups you're a member of and you can access the admin features for the groups you own. Also like FriendFeed, groups can be public or private as you choose and you can invite members simply by typing their name.

What Streamy needs to work on: Unlike FriendFeed, groups can't be auto-populated with content like RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, YouTube videos, etc. Everything needs to be manually entered through a text box or shared with the group via Streamy's sharing features. However, sharing items from your subscriptions or recommended stories is more difficult than it should be. Despite Streamy's cool drag-and-drop interface for posting to external services, sharing with groups or individuals still leaves a lot to be desired.

When you first grab an item to share it, icons appear letting you save it (the star icon), share to other services like Facebook or Twitter (green arrow), or share with a friend (people icon). When you select the share with friends option, though, only a limited number of people appear and they're only identified with their avatar, not by name. Also missing is a way to share with the groups from here.

Instead, to share with a group, you have to click on the story's headline then access the share button from the top right of the article. Once here, it's very easy to share with either people, groups, or services. It's the sort of option that should be available directly from the homepage without any extra clicks.

4. Your Shared Stuff

Another sharing feature in Streamy is the one where you're able to share items by posting them to your profile. This feature is activated through the drag-and-drop interface and dragging the content to the Streamy service from the available list of services to post to (green arrow icon, once again). This posts the story to your profile which your friends can then see when they click on "Shared Stuff" from their own Streamy homepage. It also appears in the "New from People" homepage feed. In a way, this is a lot like FriendFeed's home feed which is comprised of all the shared items from your FriendFeed friends.

What Streamy needs to work on: Unlike FriendFeed, your own "Shared Stuff" isn't populated with the dozens of social media services that FriendFeed supports. Instead, Streamy displays all your site activity, including friends you added and groups you created or joined. Your friends will then see your Streamy status updates, shared stories, and stories you commented on mixed in with these other activities in their "New from People" feed. We're not sure that we want to see people's site-wide activity (like who they just friended) - we're more interested in the actual content they're sharing.

5. ...And So Much More!

What Streamy really has going for it, though, is what FriendFeed didn't - the dashboard aggregator, integration with other social media services, and built in chat. Streamy's layout is a lot different from FriendFeed - or from Twitter for that matter - and that may be good thing in some people's opinion. As opposed to a real-time "river of news" the site's homepage is a widget-filled dashboard with updates from your feeds, Facebook, and any other services you add. It also includes a friend list showing your IM buddies from Google Chat, AIM, or MSN. The Status update box lets you post to Facebook, Twitter, Streamy, or (for now) FriendFeed. As you delve into the dashboards for the other services using the small buttons at the top, you'll be surprised to find things like a full-on Twitter client complete with replies, DMs, and trending topics, for example. Digg's dashboard is a nice, consolidated view of what's hot on that service... and so on.

If you don't like the dashboard, you can also choose to have Streamy load up directly to your feeds or one of the other social media services Streamy supports.

What Streamy needs to work on: Adding widgets to the dashboard needs improvement. You have to first click on the widget (+) button from the top of the page to select the additional widgets. While simple enough in theory, there were some bugs when testing this out. For example, adding a Digg widget for the topic "Technology" was a dead-end. After you get the drop-down box to select a topic, there's no "go" or "add" button to actually complete the process.

Conclusion

In the end, Streamy shows a lot of potential for becoming a great service and they could certainly capitalize on FriendFeed's impending shutdown if they so desired. However, there's still a bit of work to be done to make the service as usable as it needs to be for ex-FriendFeed users. In Streamy's defense, however, they originally never had the goal of competing with FriendFeed which is why things are the way they are. Like us, they never imagined FriendFeed would be acquired and shut down. Now that it has sold, though, the company is interested in seeing how they could appeal to the community of early adopters who originally made FriendFeed their home.

Will Streamy be able to make the necessary changes in time before someone else lures the ex-FriendFeeders over to their service? Perhaps. The company, currently a small 3-person team, has made amazing strides so far and is currently looking into getting additional funding. In the next couple of months, if things go well, we may see a lot of changes happen very quickly - specifically to the social networking aspects of the service. The company also sees a lot of potential to incorporate new features which aren't simply FriendFeed dupes. Hopefully, we'll be able to update this post someday soon with details as to what those may be.

This is an important subject for those companies looking to enter into the geo-locational space. Groups that encrypt their data are taking pains to reduce the threat of identity theft, illegal surveillance or for data to be subpoenaed by a court. These companies will be rewarded with customer loyalty when the unfortunate time comes for one or all three of the above scenarios.

Those critical of encryption might suggest that law-abiding citizens have nothing to hide, but that simply isn't true. What if you're in alcoholics anonymous? Or you've simply spent the night at a person's house? And honestly, do you really want your running club to see how often you eat at Arby's? Encryption allows us to ping our friends while maintaining an air of mystique, and at the end of the day, the companies that care about their customers, keep them.

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.

Perhaps best of all, it'll automagically import any of the services you link to through FriendFeed, making your new site setup time about 30 seconds:

Creator Jon Paul Davies has uploaded several other interesting and useful videos on using AmpliFeeder.

Certainly, the best features of the product for the end user are its slew of gorgeous interfaces. The themes differ not just in color/fonts/ridiculous design doodads; they mix up the information design itself.

For example, if the user prefers straight-up streams of data, there are several sexy options such as this:

For those who like their data with a little more segregation between services, there are themes such as these:

And then, a couple themes go all-out on the visualization:

Best of all, there's a custom CSS function that graphic designer-type users can use to style themes to their hearts' content.

Anyone can comment on posted content as comments "live" on the AmpliFeeder site. Items can be hidden or deleted. On the back end, a graph report shows what percentage of content comes from which services. AmpliFeeder also has its own microblog function; posts appear on the AmpliFeeder page and are pushed to the linked services. And AmpliFeeder can also generate a nice, data-portable XML file for users to backup all their social stream's data; XML files can also be used to restore data.

Burton Group analyst Mike Gotta wrote back in the mists of time (May 2007), "The term [lifestream] actually goes back to at least 1997, when Eric Freeman and David Gelernter saw it "as a network-centric replacement for the desktop metaphor. As their project page (last updated in 2000) at Yale put it: 'A lifestream is a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream.'"

Since then, lifestreaming has become the must-have method for communicating with one's public. Look at Modernista; look at Skittles. Better yet, look at what independent designers and other creatives are doing with the medium. And all this time, aside from complicated and costly proprietary solutions, most lifestreaming sites have displayed unbearably ugly UIs.

Kudos to Davies for making a functional lifestream aggregator that looks like a real website. In fact, we imagine that since the current state of the web has given rise to more and more personal and enterprise/corporate sites of the lifestreaming persuasion, Davies' creation comes at a perfect time for designers and webmasters alike.

UPDATE: For our super-smart commenters, here's what we wrote last year about Sweetcron. Yup, I'm new here.

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."

Video features @JolieODell and @Dingman, camera work by @KurtyD.

I'm writing this now from the backseat of a moving car. We're rolling over the irrigated fields of Iowa about 30 minutes away from BIGOmaha and Gary Vaynerchuk's opening night party; we're getting calls from our metropolitan social media friends already there and excitedly sharing stories we've gathered so far. We tell them about the young St. Louis farmer whose local produce co-op was at capacity with a full waiting list, the tech scenesters still on fire from their town's first BarCamp or Startup Weekend, the fresh perspectives on the purposes and future of tech, the deliberate and intentional movements to live and buy locally, the strong online connections within physical communities (it's not just the geeks on Twitter out here; it's the waitresses, the baristas, the small business owners, and just about everybody else), and the focus on sustainability in the most pristine corners of our country.

We've seen communities full of optimism and energy and shockingly hip millennial folks, and we've been shown amazing hospitality by complete strangers. I credit this partly to traditional Midwestern kindness and partly to the radically cool nature of the Internet. You see, another big premise of the RoadTwip is that the online and offline each have the most powerful effects when combined. Relationships are strengthened; the social web grows thicker; value is enhanced.

@Dingman and @Giramonda at Arthur Bryant's Barbecue in Kansas City.

One of my favorite stories so far is about Kansas City, which wasn't even a planned stop on the RoadTwip. A few KC locals got wind of the 'Twip and reached out to me on Brightkite; their enthusiasm was so infectious that I ended up begging KurtyD and Dingman to allow for a drive-by meetup for the city's famous barbecue and a look at what residents were telling me was a tradition of microentrpreneurism. We had an amazing time there, ended up staying a couple hours longer than we should have, and are consequently late for Gary V's shindig. But we learned so much from the new friends we made that not one of us regrets a second of it. This, to me, is a perfect illustration of the value of social media. Next time anyone asks me why I waste my time on the Internet, this story is going to make an appearance.

The three of us have mapped out an arc through a lot of open space dotted with relatively small towns in order to hear new stories, challenge our perspectives, stop spinning on the NYC/SF/LA axis of the tech world, get outside the echo chamber, test the IRL capabilities of social media, and get a glimpse of something new and authentic.

@ax0n explains the madness and method behind his blog, KC-Bike.Blogspot.com.

So many young people will never have the extraordinary privilege of visiting the American Midwest.

Perhaps this is due to misconceptions about its nature, population, and culture. Perhaps it's because opportunities are perceived to be greater in more urban areas. Perhaps it's a simple lack of curiosity. Watching the youngest of my cohorts as he drives our packed-to-the-gills car through Missouri rain, exclaiming at the way the cars ahead fade into the bend of the road, I can't help but pity those who will never see this place or meet the many wonderful people who live here and love it.

To read about the rest of the journey, bookmark the RoadTwip blog or follow us on Twitter. The RoadTwip gang is @JolieODell, @KurtyD, and @Dingman.

@KurtyD putting the finishing touches on a RoadTwip video.

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.

The argument is that the News Feed RSS made it too easy to violate privacy conditions put on some users' Facebook data.

Facebook hasn't responded yet to our request for an official comment, but Facebook software engineer, Ari Steinberg, explained in an unofficial comment on the Activity Streams discussion group, "We're certainly not opposed to enabling you to export your own content (in fact, we're always trying to work on ways to make that easier), but exporting all your friends' content to a totally public place without their permission isn't cool."

But it was really useful. Sometimes privacy is at odds with innovation, and while we would never want to say that privacy is illegitimate - we're not happy to see it shut down major potential avenues for innovation either.

If the app published an authenticated feed (meaning you had to log in to view it) and if the apps around the web had better support for authenticated feeds, then the story would probably be different. That's not where we're at, though; even the very popular Google Reader can't handle password protected RSS feeds.

App developer, Teck Chia, says privacy issues and copyright violation in the use of the phrase "News Feed" were both cited by Facebook when the app was shut down. Chia understands the privacy concern but hopes to be able to find a solution shortly. One option may be to publish only a user's own items in a feed, perhaps folding in the updates of friends who have added the app as well and specifically opted-in, and perhaps sending items through the feed that say merely that "Your friend John updated his staus, click here to log in to Facebook and read it."

We're not sure how useful those options sound. It's not surprising but it is a real disappointment that Facebook shut the app down. The wall that keeps Facebook user data in and private by default feels too contrary to the fundamental nature of the internet for it to last. In a poll we performed last week, 40% of our readers said they wanted Facebook to open their data either a little or a lot. We're sure the percentage of all Facebook users who feel that way would be smaller, but a closed pocket of the web seems to us to be something that will be worn away in time.

There may not be an RSS feed for your Facebook News Feed today, but it sure seems like only a matter of time until there is.

Windows Live users will also soon be able to aggregate updates from MySpace, though according to Microsoft, this integration is still a few months off.

Just like before, your friends will be able to see your updates from these services on their Windows Live home pages, though your friends can also opt-out of your updates, or updates from select services. If you are a prolific digger, for example, your friends can choose not to see an update for every single story you dugg.

If you have a Windows Live account, this link will take you to a page with all the new web activities you can now import. As usual, Microsoft is rolling these updates out slowly, so your account may not feature these new services just yet.

Functionally, the biggest update to Windows Live is that users can now easily invite friends on other social networks into their Windows Live network (and vice versa).

Web IM for Hotmail

In addition, Microsoft also released Web IM for Hotmail today in a number of countries, including the U.S., Canada, Germany, and Brazil.

Looks Like This Strategy is Working for Windows Live

In many ways, this update makes Windows Live into even more of a mainstream version of the current non-beta, non-real-time version of FriendFeed. You can easily aggregate most of your online activity and your friends can easily follow all of your updates on their Windows Live accounts.

According to both Compete and Quantcast, Windows Live has seen its traffic grow rapidly since it updated its services last November, and the addition of these new web activities will surely not hurt the site's traffic.

Let's get back to Skimmer, now with our eyes open to the design side. We can mention that it's not extremely fast, that it lacks the ability to re-tweet, that the icons are small and somewhat mysterious, and that (in some modes) it takes up a large amount of screen real-estate. But those qualms are almost beside the point when you consider that it is presenting information from multiple sources in a way that has never been realized before. In fact, I am guessing the designers were going for the word unprecedented. The tile-based layout, the unique font that is both modern and legible, the smooth updates from one mode to another all belie a careful attention to detail that is all too often lacking on other tools in their haste to support everything under the sun.

We mentioned that Fallon is releasing Skimmer along with a broader image push, and you can see this on their site.  Each page carries over the same tile-based concept, cross-fading slideshow effects and generous space given to text areas. You might think all this design work is a waste of time, but think about the last time you saw the 'future crime' interface in Minority Report. You were impressed, right? I can guarantee you, that interface was not conceived as data-driven. It's pure, unadulterated design work.

We spent entirely too much time creating our own StoryTlr site (which you can see here) and, while the back-end is more traditional and lacking slick JavaScript-style drag-and-drop features, the UI is very solid and access to customization easy and rewarding. Both what shows up on any of the tabs you create and the overall site look and feel can be tweaked. And if you already have a blog and just want to add a lifestream page, they have you covered there as well with a number of free widgets you can use.

Finally, you can in fact use StoryTlr as your blog too. Although the blog tools are not as robust as, say, WordPress, StoryTlr supports short-form and long-form entries with attached pictures and other media. It supports creating a tab that links to a non-RSS-based standard web page as well. So you can actually prioritize the lifestream over the blog, which may be a plus if you are setting up a vanity domain where you want to make a priority of showing activity over blog posts.

One Photo per Day

As you would expect, you can upload your photos directly to the service, or you can send them to a personalized momentile email address. Whenever you upload a new photo, you can add a short message that will then be sent out to your followers (momentile calls them 'stalkers') by SMS, Twitter, or email. However, momentile stresses that this is only meant to inform your followers about a new photo upload and should not be confused with tagging or adding a caption to a photo. Indeed, you can't add captions to a photo yourself - only your followers can add these.

You can upload more than one picture per day, by the way, but momentile enforces its one-picture-per-day rule and will automatically discard the older picture. Every day, you have until midnight to update your picture. That constraint, of course, is the focus of the service and it does make you think twice about which picture you want to choose to represent a given day.

Not a Social Network

Momentile insists that it is not a social network, but it does have a number of social features like following other users or saving other users' photos in your own 'stash.'

365

In a way, momentile codifies the 365 meme that is pretty popular on Flickr right now into one coherent app, with a focus on the mobile aspects of sharing and taking these pictures.

Overall, momentile looks like a fun and interesting app. It does have some minor usability problems, but the core idea behind the service is pretty cool. A few weeks ago, the cool kid on the blog was Plinky, a web app that asked you a different question every day. In some ways, momentile is a logical extension of that idea and it will be interesting to see how momentile's users decide to utilize the service in the long run.

Invites

Momentile is still in private alpha testing, but we have ten invites to give away for now - just send an email to 'momentile AT frederic.otherinbox.com' and we will get one to you ASAP.

The app works on both the original 1G iPhone and the 3G iPhone, and is available in the iPhone App Store for $1.99

• Simple, comfortable user interface
• Camera and photo library integration
• All features supported in portrait or landscape orientation (for wide keyboard fans)
• View and repost from a history of your previous pings
• Easy location integration with location privacy controls ("fuzzing")
• Google Maps based viewer to see and modify your posted location

Pingle Limitations

As Zee points out on the The Next Web, the only problem with Pingle is if you're in an area that has no reception, there is no way to save an update for posting until you do get reception.

"I'm likely stick to using Mail until Pingle integrate one feature "Outbox". Using Mail, should I not have access to the web, the app will automatically save any emails (updates) in the outbox until there's sufficient a connection for the email to be sent."

Perhaps that will be in the next version. Until then, if you give it a try, let us know what you think.

Here are our favorite examples of some of the searches we've already found quite valuable.

As you can see from the screen below, the new FriendFeed Advanced Search options are quite granular. You can limit your search to particular sites like Facebook, Amazon or any of 50 other sites supported for import. You can search your network of friends or the site at large. You can set a popularity threshold by number of comments or "likes." There are lots of options. All searches have RSS feeds for their results.

Brand Monitoring

For most people, tracking conversations around a brand name will probably be the most useful function of the new FriendFeed search. We find that relatively boring, so we'll get it out of the way first.

Mentions of "Sun Microsystems," system wide, with 3 or more comments.

Obviously FriendFeed is quite small right now so this isn't a comprehensive web-wide conversation tracker, but these search results could help point to issues that are catching part of the public's imagination enough to discuss. There are less than 1 million people using FriendFeed so far.

There are other searches that can provide more tangible value right now, even without a large number of people yet using the service.

Well Placed People

Location declarations through Brightkite, from friends of Creative Commons Foundation CEO Joi Ito, where 3 or more people "liked" the location statement or description. Chris Messina excluded, in order to see more of other people.

Your Wittiest Friends

Comments by my friends, tracked by Backtype, with 3 or more "likes." I've subscribed to this feed as there are some important details here that I wouldn't have wanted to miss. If you haven't signed up for BackType, or haven't tied it to your FriendFeed account yet, you should. It's easy to do.

Hot and Topical

FriendFeed rooms are a place to discuss a wide variety of topics. Here's some of the most commented on items in the Green Tech room. Find someone who made a great comment here? You can also search for all the rest of their comments.

The Hottest Events

What events are the cool kids going to, that their friends think are particularly cool? Here's events that friends of crafty inventor Bre Petis have said they are going to on Upcoming.org and that their friends have "liked." Robert Scoble excluded for the sake of seeing other people.

What Else Can Be Done?

Those are our favorite examples so far, but we're sure we'll come up with some more in the next few days. The FriendFeed search back-end sometimes barfs if you search friends of very popular users, but it seems to be holding up much better than it was a few weeks ago.

We love FriendFeed here at ReadWriteWeb - you can see all our accounts there via this slideshow.

What are some of the most powerful queries you've thought up with the new FriendFeed search? We'd love to know.

Recently, FriendDeck developer Paul Kinlan released an Adobe AIR application of his FriendFeed tracking tool. Although still rough around the edges, this app has potential to become a viable alternative interface to FriendFeed for the service's heaviest users.

One of the best features of the new AIR application is how it syncs with the online version of FriendDeck. That means whatever changes you make within FriendDeck on the web show up in the desktop application and vice versa.(Side note: how we wish TweetDeck did this!)

But let's be clear. The Adobe AIR version of FriendDeck still needs a lot of work. The slider bars are hard to see, the columns can't be moved around, "un-like" didn't work in the first version we tested, pictures don't show along with posts, and performing searches requires the use of specific query syntax, like "friends:username." That last bit practically requires you to use a cheat sheet when building your columns. (For search query syntax, see the list provided here.)

Yet despite these problems - all of which are being addressed according to the developer - I still can't get enough of FriendDeck. Why? It's simple: FriendDeck gives me an eagle-eye view of the topics I care about on FriendFeed. Using the app, I can see a lot more information with a glance than when I use the FriendFeed web site itself.

Use FriendDeck to Follow Your Lists, Rooms, and Searches 

There are a couple of ways you can use FriendDeck. For me, a compulsion to organize things into groups has led to the creation of over 30 lists for tracking specific topical areas outside of my "home" feed. I don't check each list daily, but it's nice to have them there. I doubt that anyone else has embarked on such madness, but even if you have only a few lists, like "Favorites" or "Personal", you can add them to the FriendDeck application by typing in "list:list_name" (where, obviously, "list_name" is the name of your list).

Similarly, if you're less inclined to use lists and more inclined to track items by keyword, you can instead just type in the word or words you want to track in the search box. For rooms, you would just type "room:room_name."

Use FriendDeck as a More Advanced Feed Reader

Another great way to use FriendDeck has to do with one of the biggest secrets surrounding FriendFeed itself: you don't have to participate to use the service. Although community members will tell you this goes against what FriendFeed is all about, it's true. If you're the kind of person who could care less about "liking" items or leaving comments on the latest internet meme, you can alternately use FriendFeed as an aggregator on topics you want to track, no participation required. Instead, FriendFeed can simply become the framework you use to build the feed reader of the future: an aggregator which lets you follow much more than RSS feeds alone.

For example, take any subject about which you're passionate. You could build a private FriendFeed room that you fill with blogs, news sites, Twitter searches, Google searches, well-known Twitter users who post on this subject, and more. Within one interface, you can track it all. This is a million times better than just following blogs in an RSS reader or just tracking Twitter posts using Twitter's search engine because you're not limited to RSS alone.

You can share these rooms with others either by making them public or by inviting select users - like your colleagues - to join. Alternately, you can keep them completely private and only for your personal use.

You can then add these personalized rooms into FriendDeck by typing in "room:room_name" and soon you'll have one single application that tracks everything you care about on the internet - from blogs posts to tweets and so much more. And it's all in one window.

Too Complicated?

In explaining how FriendDeck works, it occurs to us that it may sound a bit complicated for the average user. That may be true, but then again, FriendFeed itself is an application that requires a lot of explanation, too. It's also quite possible that FriendFeed and FriendDeck will never cross over into "regular user" territory. That's OK, though. For anyone who has learned how to use FriendFeed - really use FriendFeed - applications like FriendDeck will hold appeal, despite their complications.

It's still far too early to call FriendDeck a complete success or failure, but it's not too early to use it. If you're geeky enough to learn its quirks, you may find the FriendFeed desktop application you've been waiting for. If not, then feel free to return to your browser.

Getting started with Dipity is easy. Simply start feeding the service your data: photos from Flickr or Picasa, blog entries, RSS feeds, music from Last.fm or Pandora, videos, or microbloging feeds. Anything that offers a publicly accessible feed is fair game.

And that means, that it's not just your data. It's any publicly accessible data. If you want to add data from other RSS feeds - say you wanted a timeline showing when the top tech blogs publish stories - you can do that, as well. Or maybe you'd like to add content from a Google alert or Yahoo! Pipes? Or build something with Dapper to populate your timeline? All viable options. Suffice it to say, there are any number of ways to feed Dipity.

But, the true value of Dipity is how it lets you visualize that data. Once the sources are added, the service plots each discrete element along a timeline. And that view of the data provides a very different perspective of "what's happening when." You can also zoom in and out of the timeline - down to hours or out to years - to help provide additional perspective.

It's a like a graphing engine for your lifestream - or any combined stream of reference data.

After only a few minutes, I was working to push all sorts of random collections through the tool. No doubt, you're already thinking of some very interesting data sets to run through it, as well. And if you're short on ideas, the folks at Dipity have compiled some interesting timelines to inspire you.

Interested in taking a different view of the data you're producing? Visit Dipity and register for a free account.

But there's another vast set of data many of us are creating on a daily basis that has little to no backup at all - beyond the services that host that content: our lifestreams. Now, a new service - named appropriately enough, LifestreamBackup - aims to provide the peace of mind that your lifestream data will always be just as accessible as the backup of your machine.

The most obvious example of this loss of access to lifestream data? The inability to access anything beyond beyond page 162 on Twitter. No matter how many times you've posted, you cannot go back any further than 3240 tweets. So, every new public message you send removes one from your history. (To see this in action, simply add "?page=162" to the end of any Twitter user's default URL.) Those who had seen Twitter as a journal of sorts for recording fleeting moments for posterity, suddenly found those moments just as fleeting online.

That's just one example. There are thousands of others: blogs crashing, videos being taken down, companies shutting down services. The list goes on and on.

The point being: saving the content you are producing elsewhere so that you always have access to it is going to become a bigger and bigger problem as time goes on - especially as more and more people move into the social Web. For that reason, LifestreamBackup seems to be ahead of the game with this proposed offering.

While not yet available, LifestreamBackup proposes to launch in the coming weeks. For a small fee, the service will take your various feeds and back them up on Amazon S3 - either your account or theirs. Current pricing is set at $6.95 per month for 10G of data.

"We will launch with the ability to backup Flickr and a blog (via RSS feed). Google Docs, Twitter feeds, Youtube and Facebook backup are all in the works and will come shortly after launch. If it has an API that allows us to pull data, we are happy to back it up for you."

For more, Lifestream Blog points us to a video from "Somewhat Frank" Gruber where a number of people - for the first few minutes - chat about the pros and cons of the concept.

Suffice it to say, it's a start. And, a step in the right direction. LifestreamBackup isn't likely to take the market by storm. But it's important to consider it, nonetheless, because it's definitely addressing a growing need.

We're still very early in this version of the Web. There's no doubt that saving the things that are important to us - our social interactions and our historical references - for future reference will become a very important business indeed.

(Image "Lifestream-Seaform" courtesy jemsweb. Used under Creative Commons.)