The move is an improvement in relevancy of information feeds in social profiles and it demonstrates an intelligent system for delivering information and encouraging interaction on the world's largest social network.

One format is an updates ticker that allows for joining real-time conversations based on customized selection options. The other is a news aggregator, which functions as a newspaper, to keep users informed of the most important events and posts they have missed while they have been away.

The ticker is the most simple and straightforward feature. It makes it very easy for you to select whom you want to receive news from, and how often you want to hear from them.

When those people post updates - and they are selected as someone you want to hear from more frequently - you will immediately be alerted to join the conversation. Less relevant people will not signal as often or immediately.

It's kind of like being able to predict frequency and then assign a value to the number of times your annoying Aunt Betty calls you to tell you again about the neighbor's cats. In this way, you are judging just how close you want to be to Aunt Betty - and her cats - regardless of how close Aunt Betty wants to be to you. It's a subtle move by the engineers at Facebook.

Facebook is also changing its news feed, moving away from the rather clumsy "Most Recent" and "Top News" tags.

Facebook has made it so that if you are one of those people who spends a few weeks away from Facebook at a time, the next time you log on, you will see all the most important things you missed while you were away, arranged like it was a magazine or newspaper, with big pictures and easy to navigate buttons.

The rollouts today bring some solutions that calm the information storm fired up after the company rolled out Subscriptions recently.

Once it became possible to follow anyone (if they enabled the feature), the noise to signal ratio went haywire. Suddenly, it was Aunt Betty updates to the nth power. With this new feature, I can pretty much customize my feed so that everything makes sense, and I am not overwhelmed by noise.

Finally, it appears that a social network with over 750 million users has finally figured out how to act socially.

Image via Facebook.

iMessage, which will be rolled out to iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch users when iOS drops this Fall, will apparently be available to users of OS X Lion via the iChat application, according to Mac Rumors.

Sending and receiving SMS messages has long been a source both of revenue for mobile carriers and pain for consumers, who tend to pay fees for texting that are disproportionate to the size of the data being sent.

Although it's not clear exactly when the feature will be rolled out to desktops, it will arrive for mobile and tablet users as part of the next version of iOS due to roll out in a matter of weeks. Other sought-after features in iOS 5 will include a new notifications system, wireless syncing of content and data across devices, deep Twitter integration and a native to-do list management app.

It's not clear how well that will help Chinese users in the mainland, since the service has been banned since 2009. It may not make much of a dent at all in Twitter's hopes to capture the hearts and minds of Chinese-language users of the microblogging platform.

However, there are other countries where the Chinese language is used in microblogging. Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong come to mind. But even taken all together they don't amount to the estimated 485 million Internet and mobile Web users in China.

Twitter has had some success with its Translation Center, with 200,000+ translators across all languages. It's hard to beat inherent scale, though.

Messenger is fairly simple. If you have used BlackBerry Messenger before then you should be able to understand Facebook's newest offering (without the confusing PIN system of BlackBerry). Messenger can also do group chat, which puts it in competition with the Google Plus Huddle function in its mobile app on iOS and Android. What do you think of Facebook's new Messenger initiative? Is it something you plan on using?

Zhang wrote the blog post on Facebook announcing Messenger.

"Messenger is a separate app, so it only takes one click to get to your messages or send a new one. Messages are delivered through notifications and texts, so your friends are more likely to get them right away," Zhang wrote. "You can use Messenger to reach all of your friends - whether they're on Facebook or in your phone contacts. All you have to do is type the person's name."

Dubbed "Project Titan" before it was announced, Messenger is another phase in the rollout of Facebook's unified inbox. Facebook's messaging philosophy has three main ideas: 1) seamless messaging, 2) conversation history and 3) the "social inbox."

Messenger fits well in this philosophy. Messenger updates will be in the "social inbox" but they will also be on the application and via text. It can also add location details in case you want to broadcast to your friends exactly where you are, in case you want to meet up for drinks, pizza, movies or coffee.

Expect more big news to come from Facebook in the mobile space as the details and features of the so-called "Project Spartan" are rolled out within the next several months. Messenger is an interesting, if unoriginal, move by Facebook. Yet, it may just be the tip of the iceberg.

Group messaging threatened to become a breakout activity at SXSW, as tweeting and 'checking in' had done at previous SXSW events. It didn't quite pan out that way, partly because a giant (Facebook) acquired one of the leading scrappy startups before things got interesting. Also, there were minor but irritating glitches with the apps. A few months on and group messaging is no longer as hyped as it was at SXSW. Yet it's more than ever a key feature in the social and mobile products of Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

The SXSW Battle of Group Messaging Apps

Cut to late February 2011. A couple of weeks before SXSW Interactive, the biggest Internet technology event of the year. Many people are licking their lips in anticipation of the upcoming battle of the group messaging startups. Beluga vs. GroupMe vs. Yobongo vs. Kik vs. all comers!

And then Facebook goes and ruins it all by acquiring Beluga before a SXSW shot has been fired.

Beluga and GroupMe ended up the most popular of the group messaging apps in Austin, however neither caught on in a big way.

Enter... Google Plus

We mentioned yesterday that Google Plus, the new social network from Google, has forced Facebook to re-evaluate its privacy options. Google Plus has also upped the ante in group messaging.

Google Plus has two excellent group messaging features. The first is a group video chat feature called 'Hangouts,' which got a lot of attention on launch because it enables up to 10 people to participate. The second feature is much more akin to Beluga and GroupMe. It's a mobile-only group texting feature called 'Huddle.'

Facebook Responds... But Where's Beluga?

Just a week after Google Plus launched, Facebook announced its own video chat and group messaging features. The video chat part is powered by Skype, but it's limited to one-to-one video chat (so it's not a 'group' chat feature).

Facebook's group messaging feature is likewise underwhelming when compared to Google Plus. It's not available on their mobile apps, for a start. Also it's limited to chatting with official Facebook 'groups' (which aren't very well used, because they're a user experience mess) or by going through some unintuitive steps in the Facebook chat interface. In short, Facebook's group chat is badly designed.

Where is Beluga in all of this? So far nowhere to be seen. Ironically, there are reports of technical problems with Beluga on its Facebook Page. One assumes Facebook will integrate Beluga at some point though - surely it has to in order to keep up with Google.

We should also mention the group messaging functionality in Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's latest mobile offering. Its "People Hub" enables you to chat with groups of people, much like Huddle does.

What is Your Favorite Group Messaging App?

Overall, it's been a fascinating year for group messaging. It started out as a battle between several tiny startups, but by mid-year it's turned into a battleground for the big guns: Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. Let us know your favorite group messaging app in the comments!

Customer trials of the new service will begin in "the coming months," but no exact date was given for the service's wider launch, only that more details will be made available "later this year."

Comcast users who sign up for the Skype service will be able to make both audio and video calls from their TV, even while watching a TV show at the same time. They will be able to accept incoming calls during a TV show, too, with help from Caller ID.

To use Skype via the TV, an HDTV will be required, plus a broadband connection, an adapter box, a high-quality HD video camera and a specially designed remote control. This remote will allow customers to text on Skype as well as control their television. Everything but the TV will be provided by Comcast, but the price for this Skype kit has not yet been determined.

Customers will also be able to switch from the TV to compatible mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets) and back, the companies state.

This collaboration is a first of its kind for Skype, which has not yet had a partnership with a TV provider in the U.S., but it's not the first time Skype has been made available on the big screen. The company's website lists a number of compatible TVs from partners who offer Skype built-in to the sets themselves.

The new addition of Skype to the TV won't impact Comcast's own phone service, it seems, as the company is planning to disable the Skype feature that lets users call actual phone numbers ("Skype out"). Instead, according to reports, Comcast will bundle a limited version of Skype plus its own phone service to the adapter it provides customers, with plans starting at $20 and up. This feature will not be available at launch, however.

Last month, Microsoft agreed to acquire Skype for $8.5 billion. Under that deal, Microsoft plans to bring Skype to a number of new outlets, too, including TVs by way of the Xbox 360, plus Windows Phone, Lync, Outlook and other Windows devices and communities.

Until now, the app has been available on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, WebOS, Windows Mobile, Symbian and even Java-based phones. Now, it is making its way onto the desktop via the Web.

"Most companies have a web project or desktop software first. Then some of them port the software to mobile. Shape is going another way: being a mobile company, we transfer our success and user loyalty to the desktop world," said Elena Dyatlova, the company's public relations manager. "When Facebook and Google fight for a name of an all-in-one communication hub, we think there's a demand for IM+ as a third party super-aggregator."

In its attempt to be a "super-aggregator", IM+ does manage to stand out by offering Skype support, something neither Pidgin, Trillian, Adium or a number of other desktop clients support. At the same time, it lacks Twitter, but there are enough Twitter apps out there as it is.

Just like these other clients, IM+ makes it so you don't have to decide between old friends on AIM and new friends on Facebook. The part we like is that it does that both on our desktop and on our mobile phone. Give IM+ for the Web a shot and let us know what you think.

CiviGuard is an inspiring example of how mobile and real-time web technologies can be used to bring about meaningful change. I spoke with the 3 founders to find out more.

The idea for CiviGuard "consistently got positive feedback" from people at Singularity University, said CMO Shawna Pandya. "The ability to be able to message civilians and tell them where to go and what to do next, in near real-time," she told me, "is something that has huge value."

According to CEO Zubin Wadia, the product came about due to a number of trends they had been tracking. These included "the rise of social media, mobile software, smartphones, increasing mobile data bandwidth and eventually in the future sensor networks."

"We want to make the world a little bit safer by providing clarity and context when people need it the most," added Wadia.

CiviGuard launched in March of this year, had its first customer by April (City of Manor) and went live for that customer in September. While its grand plan is to be useful to governments in civil emergencies, it is also being marketed to the likes of corporations, sports stadiums, religious organizations and more.

The following video shows its capabilities:

CiviGuard hasn't been tested in a real world emergency yet. But it has gone through scenario tests and the founders are confident they've built a platform that will withstand the rigors of a crisis. Kudos to CiviGuard for thinking big!

While the partnership may not be "official", it is yet another vote of confidence in the Twitter-alternative and the open Web.

As the web continues to change traditional media, we see two different and equally strong paradigms emerging. The emergence of sites like Twitter, Tumblr and the social web has been mirrored and tempered by the growing prominence of closed systems like the App Store and Facebook. Now, we like and use all of these platforms.

But we think it's equally important for brands and individuals to control their content and interactive experience with the social graph (Fail Whale, anyone?). To that end StatusNet provides a glimpse at the future of a distributed internet.

StatusNet also allows us to do some fun things with our content and experiment in ways that provide flexibility for errors (read: bugs!) and experimentation.

For now, Patterson says the site will be used for news distribution and audience engagement - the typical use of systems like Twitter and StatusNet - and will be available at abcnewsradio.fm. Earlier this summer, StatusNet received a push in the form of $2.3 million and just recently the company introduced an iPhone app. The decision of a major media outlet to use their service is, in our eyes, a major vote of confidence in something other than the norm.

Don't get us wrong, the concept itself isn't bad: a discussion board built around interests as opposed to popularity. It's just that the execution makes the service seem a little confusing.

So what is miio? That's what we're trying to figure out today.

When you first sign up for miio, you can search for friends across your social networks and email accounts or you can skip that step and just search for other miio users who share your interests. This is perhaps the key feature in miio that differentiates it from many other social networks: it's not yet another site where you have to (either manually or automatically) re-create your social graph. It's a place to meet new people who share your interests.

Now whether you're supposed to chat them up or hit on them when you meet them is something I wasn't too clear about, given that miio asks for your "relationship status" and what you're "looking for" (friends, dating, chatting, "whatever") via your profile page. Those seem like features borrowed from Facebook, and frankly, if miio just wants to be discussion site, it could do without them.

Miio's Twitter-Like Dashboard

The miio Dashboard is reminiscent of Twitter, with its "replies" and "messages to me," the latter very much like Twitter's own DMs (direct messages). But unlike Twitter, you don't just follow tweets, err...posts, limited to 140 characters or less. Users can write as much as they want. And like Facebook, those status updates can be links, photos, videos, etc. as well. They can also be questions, which then puts miio up against Q&A sites like Quora, for example.

Miio RSS

In fact, updates can even be RSS feeds thanks to a profile setting which lets you publish RSS to miio. Already a number of "members" have created miio accounts with RSS feeds - as you can see here by searching for *rss*. However, given the high profile nature of some of these accounts (ABC, AP, BBC, CBS, Huffington Post, etc.), it looks like miio created these accounts itself for others to follow, which is actually a handy feature.

From the Public Timeline or Search page, you can filter out whether or not you want to see RSS updates or whether you want to see just text updates, just photos, just videos, just questions and so on. If you switch the setting to "RSS only," miio could effectively function as a lightweight RSS reader for those who don't really do RSS.

Miio Groups

There are also groups within miio, where you can discuss items of interest to you whether that's sports or iPads. But given miio's "early adopter" mindshare, the biggest groups seem to be tech-focused ones like those discussing iOS, startups or even miio competitor Google Buzz.

Final Thoughts: Too Much of a Good Thing, miio Needs to Diet

Although miio gets some things right, simplicity is not one of them. It's not clear yet what exactly miio wants to be when it grows up, why there's a need for this service and who should use it.

Our advice to miio, ditch the advanced feature set (it's overwhelming!) and focus on doing just one thing and doing it well. Groups, perhaps. Google Buzz lacks a "groups" feature and although FriendFeed has them, that service lost quite a few members after its Facebook acquisition. Do discussion groups and do them better than anyone else. And don't allow top followed members to dominate discussions like on Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter and every other "social" service out there today. Make it more democratic.

And simplify, simplify, simplify. Twitter worked because it was basic and easy. That's how miio should start too. It can add in advanced filtering, location-based services, metadata and all the rest later on, if necessary. (Or perhaps not at all).

With a redirected singular goal like this, miio could have a chance at attracting not just the tech geeks who sign up for anything shiny and new but those who just like to go online and chat about things they're into, no matter what those may be. Obviously, the folks behind miio have the technical know-how to build a great service, now they just need to establish a sharper focus. Good luck, miio!

Given the surge of interest in location-based apps, the choice to create a geolocating chat is not surprising. The utility of the themed channels is a bit less easy to grasp once you see what's there.

The next in line include "gayteen," "girls" and "milfs." Notably absent are "19th century French symbolist poets" and "chiasmus."

Since you can, apparently, create a new channel by adding a subdomain, we'll try to rectify the obsession with gettin' it on by creating a topic channel for a passionate but neglected group: Those who wish to engage in spirited debate over whether Robert Kagan or Francis Fukuyama is cooler. We don't think it will come as too much of a surprise when "Robert vs. Francis" overtakes "milfs."

Do you?

Read more Chatroulette coverage from ReadWriteWeb.

Trillian dovetails IM from a host of services into one platform, including Facebook Chat, Windows Live, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber/XMPP and MySpaceIM. It will support Android back to version 1.6.

"We took special care and respect to design and build the user interface to smoothly integrate with Android - this is not just a clone from the iPhone!"

"Think of SkypeKit as a 'headless' version of Skype - that is, a Skype client with no user interface that runs invisibly, not only on PCs, but also TVs, notebooks, and other connected devices," the company said in a blog Tuesday morning. "Developers communicate with SkypeKit through the SkypeKit API, surfacing Skype calls through their own applications."

What About Mobile? What About the Web?

The new SDK is only open for desktop app development and for integration by consumer hardware manufacturers. Skype says they are aware of demand for an SDK for Web developers, but has "nothing to announce at this time." As far as mobile goes, smartphone users can already download official Skype apps, but mobile chat clients may be left out of the development fun until the SDK is expanded.

It seems likely that Skype will make its SDK available on Web and mobile platforms eventually, since the company's idea is "that every connected device can become a communications device, with the addition of SkypeKit." For now, desktop developers and hardware manufacturers have the chance to create some interesting Skype integrations with the new SDK.

The campaign uses Travelocity's popular mascot, the gnome, who has previously shared his travels via TV commercials and more recently, on his Facebook page and Twitter account. (Travelocity also runs a number of other Twitter accounts for advertising their specials, publicizing their company blog posts, sharing news and more.)

During office hours, the gnome "surfs" Chatroulette with the help of a Travelocity chat specialist and after hours he appears alone, holding up a sign with a clever saying of some sort about how time may be better spent traveling that chatting. For example: "Traveling from person to person doesn't count. Travelocity.com."

Marketing on Chatroulette Worth It?

Travelocity isn't the only marketer to hop on the Chatroulette bandwagon. Previously, we covered clothing brand French Connection's use of the site, which involved a contest where chatters had to attempt to seduce another Chatroulette user, a more risky sort of marketing effort.

What hasn't been known, until now at least, is how successful Chatroulette marketing would be. It wasn't too long ago that marketers were warned to steer clear of the site, not only because of its unsavory element, but also because of the suspected lack of ROI. James Duthie, an Australian web strategist, recently warned marketers that Chatroulette fails to offer any tangible benefit. "There is next to no benefit for brands participating on Chatroulette," he wrote on his personal blog. Brands using the site have "no [social networking] profile and therefore no crawlable links, no history and no ability to generate real web traffic."

As it turns out (at least in Travelocity's case), Chatroulette may not be that bad of a marketing vehicle after all. "We've gotten a lot of positive buzz from this that we really weren't at all expecting," Frey told ClickZ. "The PR alone has totally captured the ROI."

If you've ever searched through your inbox for that email you just know you received..sometime...somewhere...and have come up dry only to find it later in your Facebook or Twitter inbox, then Silentale is an ideal solution for you.

The system is designed for those of us who consistently communicate over multiple channels and then can't remember where to find the information we need. This "information overload" problem is something many companies are trying to address whether by offering an email prioritization system, universal inbox, inbox CRM add-on or external contact management type service.

Yet no system is perfect. In fact, earlier today, Fred Wilson, venture capitalist and principal of Union Square Ventures, declared "email bankruptcy" via a post on his blog, despite his use of external contact management services like Gist and Etacts. He says that he has to perform 30 Gmail searches to find the messages from his top contacts. There are better ways to do this using just Gmail, of course, as the blog commenters pointed out, but Silentale could help him address another issue: what if the message wasn't sent as an email? Silentale can pull all the messages associated with a contact and present them in one view.

In the future, Silentale will continue to grow their search offering to allow for combination searches, the ability to save searches plus access to search history and last contacts viewed.

The Info Overload Problem

The problem with many of today's external email and contact management solutions is that they either expect you to use their inbox over the much more robust webmail or desktop-based email program you already have in place or they aggregate your messages, but don't archive them.

Silentale's closest competitor may be Gist and in many ways, it reminds us of that service. Gist retrieves contacts from your email and social networks and gives you a combined view of their activity, including related news, events, attachments and links. Silentale does much of the same.

But while Gist is more focused on being more of a business-ready social CRM tool, Silentale focuses more on being a searchable communications archive. "No one else provides your complete history of emails combined with tweets, Facebook messages etc., that you can search and access from anywhere," explains Silentale's GM, Shannon Ferguson. "We're a complement to the services you already use to communicate vs. a substitute."

Another difference between some of the competitive solutions out there and Silentale is the application ecosystem. You don't necessarily have to log in to the web service to use this system. It also functions by way of a Firefox add-on and search plugin and will soon arrive as an iPhone app, Android app and Outlook plug-in. An API for developers is also available for the creation of additional third-party applications.

Pricing and Sign Up Information

For those connecting five or fewer accounts, Silentale will remain free, although your message archive will be limited to six months. A "Pro" plan will backup 10 accounts and import 2 years of message history for $49/year and the "Pro Plus" plan supports 20 accounts and unlimited import. Enterprise plans are also available and will receive group discounts, depending on volume.

You can sign up for a free beta account here: http://silentale.com