The World Series of Poker is a 39 year old annual event where thousands of professional and amateur poker players fight through 40 tournaments for tens of millions of dollars in prize money. The event is different this year, because Twitter has come to the world of poker and it's changing the way the whole industry relates to the game.

We talked about all this disruption with Joe Sebok, a poker player, the CEO of the Poker Road news site and a man with almost 330,000 people following him on Twitter. (He met with Twitter's business development department and while they wouldn't cut an official deal with him - they did put him on Twitter's high profile Suggested Users List.) All the major poker news sites are racing to integrate Twitter and Sebok says his site isn't one of the biggest - but as far as we can tell, Poker Road's use of Twitter during the World Series of Poker may be defining the state of the art better than anyone else in the industry.

"It's completely changing poker for the audience," Sebok says of Twitter. "Traditional poker media coverage is a lot of hand histories online. It's bland and basic. Now you get to hear players exclaim and interact - 'oh I feel so sick' or 'oh that player is a knucklehead.' They upload pictures and they reply to each other. It gives you a sense of the pressure these guys are under and what it's like to be here."

Poker is a psychological game - and you can imagine how the pros are strategizing about their use of this new method of communication.

"People are calling it Tweet bluffing," Sebok says. "It's a game within a game situation and it's effected the way the games go. It's enabling the fans at home to climb into the minds of the players but if they are smart they know they can climb into each others' minds too: to see who tilts, who rolls with the bad situations and who flies off the handle. Players spread misinformation like 'I'm going to play tight' when they are really going to play loose. We do that verbally but since Twitter is written, it seems more believable. But it's just the beginning of all this, it's blown up in last 2 or 3 months."

As if cautious that his enthusiasm could rock a boat that's fun to ride, Sebok also tempers his assessment of the new medium's impact, saying that "it's mostly a way to communicate with the larger community, but it's raised some questions about changing the game. Ultimately, I think if it's a tweet or a conversation out loud it's the same. As long as it's not within a hand the players can use their phones and the World Series has been pretty receptive. They haven't made any rules saying you need to get up or leave the room."

Big name players are Tweeting but small timers at the big show are too. Traditional poker reporting didn't shed much light on the experiences of amateurs, but Sebok says those players on the margins can now tell their families and friends to check Twitter for hand by hand accounts of their experiences in Vegas.

Sebok's company doesn't just point its audience at players' Tweets, though. Simple aggregators of messages from players are available elsewhere. His Poker Road Nation site adds several layers of value on top of the flow of messages. It marks up through hashtags and manual categorization each tournament and game for sorting. It shows threaded conversations. It lets site visitors login to Twitter and post live replies to the players right on the Poker Road Nation site. "Inline replies is the most exciting part to me." Sebok says. Soon, the site will add inline photo display and an in-house video hosting and embedding feature. It's an operation so full-featured that anyone interested in Twitter aggregation can appreciate it, whether you're a poker fan or not.

Sebok is a Berkley grad who crashed and burned through the dotcom era but aims to bring the best parts of a dotcom mentality to the world of poker media. Poker reporter Jeff Holsey approached him early this year with a proposed design for a Twitter section of the Poker Road site. The company already had a popular podcast and Sebok was very interested in trying to do Twitter integration well.

"Jeff said poker coverage could be done more effectively if it came from the players themselves," Sebok remembers. "He is always pushing the envelope. Even though reporting on poker is his job, he's always looking for the next thing."

Should journalists in this field not worry that direct public communication from the players, the sources, could threaten their professional reporting jobs? "They should look at how this will supplement their jobs," Sebok says. "Their jobs will change but not disappear. We can look at interviews to support those tweets we see, for example. It falls on us to figure out how this won't kill us, but it's going to change everything."

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.

First the Web, then email, then instant messaging and SMS all helped speed up the world we live in. Twitter made that rapid communication public and easier than ever for machines to mine for connections. Just as Facebook will never be Twitter because of the lack of clear access it offers outsiders to social data, so too does Twitter have its own limitations. A service called Status.net will launch in May that could overcome some of Twitter's limitations and make a significant impact on the world we work in.

Step One, People Will Want It

Laconica already allows anyone to install its software on their own servers, for free (see Leo Laporte's Twit Army for example), but the easy paid offering from Status.net could catch on much faster. The service provider will be responsible for maintenance, upgrades will come automatically, the URL is clear and dignified and the fact that the software is open source could enable a plug-in and extension community to grow around the architecture as soon as it gets large enough for that to be viable.

Companies will pay to have either public or private microblogging installations hosted and branded for them. They will do so because if they do not - their employees will have no group of allied professionals to securely cry out to for help with work problems. Their departments will remain out of touch and unfamiliar with the people and work being done around their own company. Companies without a microblogging system will seem as silly and disadvantaged in the future as companies do today that say "we don't need Instant Messaging, we have email," or "we don't need email, we have a fax machine."

Step Two, People Will Build on It

Some companies will use the hosted Status.net platform, others will decide to put Laconica on their own servers and others still will decide to use some other provider's business oriented but developer friendly microblogging service.

Once that fundamentally structured layer of social conversation has spread throughout a substantial portion of the business world, hopefully as interoperable Open Source software, here's what will happen.

These are the kinds of birds eye views through data parsing that an Open Source microblogging platform for businesses will enable. All of the following is based on nothing more than cross referencing user profiles, friend connections and public replies between users. Any parts of this vision that aren't simple will be simpler for someone to build once there's adoption and Open Source code.

In private networks, a company will be able to receive automatic notification when one of its employees has begun conversing with another particular employee more than they had before. Perhaps they'll consider putting them in the same work group.

If one sales person doesn't converse with the technical team as often as other sales people do, a company might wonder whether that salesperson is less comfortable explaining technical matters to customers. It will be trivial to determine which technical staff are friendliest and most appropriate to introduce a sales person to, because those kinds of connections will be fully graphable.

In public business networks, community managers will be able to identify the customers most engaged in conversation with diverse groups of other customers with the snap of the fingers. Those are the kinds of community members that companies hire. Companies will be able to see if groups of people with similar traits in their profiles are asking for customer service more often than other groups, and when they seek to engage with those communities in order to improve product usability for them - the contours of that community will be easier than ever to understand.

People say that the phrase Social Graph is too vague, but when it comes to structured, open microblogging - social connections through conversation and content are literally graphable. Here are the users, here are their friends, here are their public messages and here are their replies to one another - just drawn a line from one column to one row and a narrative will be formed by the data. Repeat that process and you'll be able to build stories around trends.

Is this creepy? It doesn't have to be. There's a whole lot of exciting potential here and if an increasingly open technology world can help the business world understand the value of open over control (as it is) then this kind of analysis could be democratized and used for good.

Let's look at this from the perspective of Twitter right now. When I'm away from my computer and think of a question I need answered, I can send that question out to my Twitter network by SMS. Three people might post a public reply answering my question. When I get back to Twitter, I see those three replies and I publicly thank one of those people in particular for providing such a good answer.

Now repeat. Again and again, throughout an organization, across multiple organizations. Knowledge sharing paths get worn in the virtual grass of the public field of microblogging. Smart companies want their people creating those paths and only a fool would neglect an opportunity to illuminate these connections in the eyes of management.

It won't happen on Twitter alone, though. It's too public, the company is too bound by its own limitations on how much data it really wants anyone else to pull out of the river of Tweets and relatively small groups are a very important part of the future of microblogging.

We expect that hosted or free company-specific microblogging installations will become huge sources of Business Intelligence data and we hope that happens through interoperable, Open Source software. We're excited to see what Laconica can do with Status.net.

Smashing Feeds happens to be just like any other news aggregator. It uses the Google AJAX feed API for feed creation and management to aggregate news from a ton of various sources. It doesn't require users to signup, but it's not customizable and the UI isn't something we're goo-goo gah-gah over. The aggregated news coverage sites are separated into categories such as Technology, Business, Productivity, Web 2.0, and more. None of these sections are new, but their "Tweet" section is a definite eye catcher.

Twitter and FriendFeed News

The 'Tweet' section of Smashing Feeds has a host of Twitter and FriendFeed related news. This section sports links aggregated from FriendFeed with usernames included in the headlines, links to what seems to be random tweets from Twitter, the latest links to make it on TwitLinks, Intwition, Tweetmeme River, TwitBuzz, Twemes, and the Techmeme Firehose Twitter stream. Basically, you can get the hottest and most popular Twitter links from various services all on one page.

Not Much To Offer

Bouncing from site to site that aggregates the hottest or most popular links on Twitter can be a chore. Users usually end up just picking on site and sticking with it. The 'Tweet' section of Smashing Feeds solves this problem. However, the randomness of some of the aggregated sites are weird. Why are random twitter messages and FriendFeed messages being aggregated as news? I'd suggest they stick to the sites that do most of the aggregation for them and aggregate those sites for the 'Tweet' section. Beyond that, Smashing Feed isn't offering anything better than the competition.

Of the 3 such products I've profiled so far - 43Things, PeopleFeeds and Suprglu - the easiest one to use is Suprglu. The step-by-step set-up process is user-friendly and includes a long list of possible content sources: 

43 Things
All Consuming
Blogger
Clipmarks
del.icio.us
Digg
Flickr
Last.fm
LiveJournal
Simpy
Wordpress.com

If anything, it made me feel guilty for not having enough content sources! :-) It did seem to take a while for Suprglu to fetch the feeds, but it was a relatively minor issue. All in all, Suprglu has a nicely designed and helpful user interface.

Style a big plus

The other feature that stands out about Suprglu is the ability to not only choose from a range of default page designs, but you can also customize your CSS and create your own design. I haven't had time to do that myself, but a good example is Emily Chang's Suprglu page. So in effect, you can create a brand new blog based on all of your content sources - and you can style it just as you would a Movable Type or Wordpress blog. I can see this becoming increasingly appealing, as more and more content 'buckets' appear on the Web for users to create content in. An aggregate blog to be a home for all that content would be very handy. 

It also strikes me that commercial websites like Edgeio and Amazon should be rapt with services like Suprglu and PeopleFeeds. Because it's so easy to aggregate using Suprglu, it encourages consumers to collect and 'own' the content they input into edgeio or Amazon - and that theoretically encourages people to input content into many places. Of course, that behoves commercial companies to offer RSS feeds for user-generated content (I know edgeio does, but not Amazon to my knowledge).

Suprglu is made out of open source technologies, including Ruby on Rails. Emily Chang interviewed the founders back in December and got this neat quote from them about what it does:

"SuprGlu is about allowing people to pick up the bits and pieces of themselves scattered around the web and being able to put it all together in the form of a digital scrapbook."

As far as my Suprglu page goes, I found the tags to be useful but minimalist (nowhere near as impressive as PeopleFeeds). It also only has one single RSS feed - for the whole page. No RSS feeds for tags/categories (that I could see) and no filtering options. So both 43Things and PeopleFeeds offer much more functionality in that respect. The main attraction to Suprglu is the ability to style your page - and in effect use it as your main blog.

Personal Content Networks

Finally I want to highlight a comment that Dick Costolo from Feedburner left on my previous post, about PeopleFeeds. Dick wrote:

"I love this concept. Let all the focused applications that are the best in their domains be the content management systems for that kind of content and then provide a framework for me to pull it all together. These kinds of Personal Content Networks will be a bigger and bigger part of the landscape. Very cool."

Personal Content Networks is a great term and neatly captures the value that services like 43Things, PeopleFeeds and Suprglu offer for users. Every day on the Web a new website turns up that wants "user-generated content" added to it - Flickr, delicious, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Digg, blogs of course, social networks like MySpace and Facebook, edgeio, Nooked, BBC - the list goes on. I have a feeling we'll be needing more of these personal Microcontent Aggregators before long.

a service that aggregates microcontent about a person (usually via RSS) and displays it on a new page/site for users to view in aggregate.

Peoplefeeds aggregates content from a variety of sources - a person's blog(s), Flickr feed, del.icio.us links and so on. They call this "personal content aggregation". Peoplefeeds also enables "discovery of other people's personal content" - and as with 43Things, users can filter that content.

Filtering by person and tags

Peoplefeeds has a nice concept called "watchlists", which allows you to subscribe to all - or just parts - of a person's content. You can filter what content you want to subscribe to - so e.g. you can choose to filter out a person's photos if you don't want to see their holiday snaps. But the real beauty of the Peoplefeeds system is that it allows you to filter content by tag. So if you're only interested in reading my content about Web Office, you can do so (provided I've tagged it as such - more on that in a moment). Here's a couple of screenshots illustrating the watchlist features:

This page shows my content that is tagged "WebOffice" across any of my sources. People can subscribe to it using the +W button (next to the RSS button).

Here's an example of Bosko's Watchlist - e.g. he's subscribed only to BlueCockatoo's content that is tagged "collaboration" and "development".

Theoretically then, it would be possible to only subscribe to a person's content on a single topic - no matter where they publish it to. For example, I post about Web Office mainly on my ZDNet blog, but occasionally on Read/WriteWeb. I may also decide to tag things in del.icio.us and Flickr with "WebOffice". So it's possible to use PeopleFeeds to filter all of those sources so you only get my content on the topic of Web Office - on one page and in one feed. 

But here's the problem - this system is reliant on the publisher correctly tagging their content. I'm one of those 'lazy taggers', so often I'll forget to tag my content. I'm also a lapsed del.icio.us user (Web 2.0 father, forgive my sins...). 

Peoplefeeds has other goodies such as OPML support and RSS feeds for nearly everything. I'm told an API is on its way too. I like how developer Bosko Milekic summed up Peoplefeeds in an email to me:

"The most important idea behind Peoplefeeds was to use personal/generated (i.e., "write") content to improve the "read" (consumption) experience, and filtering is a big part of that."

...gee I wonder why that description appealed to me ;-) All in all, Peoplefeeds is a nicely designed service with a lot of potential - particularly in the filtering aspects. I suspect it's a bit ahead of its market right now and there is a concern about whether the system is too reliant on publishers tagging their content correctly. It would be even more impressive if Peoplefeeds had some keyword-matching algorithm to identify terms like "Web Office" across my feeds, instead of relying on me (the publisher) tagging it. In other words, get the system to automate some of those tagging/filtering tasks. Let's hope that kind of functionality will come, because Peoplefeeds is something I'd like to use more.

- Read/WriteWeb
- My ZDNet blog
- My Flickr account
- My del.icio.us account
- My 43Things account
- My Allconsuming account

The list could go on, but the point is I (like many others) publish my content in more than a few places. A Microcontent Aggregator brings all that content together in one interface - and feed.

I looked at a number of these people-focused mc aggregators and narrowed it down to 3 that were 'best of breed' - peoplefeeds, Suprglu, and 43Things. I'll profile these and others in a series of posts. My favourite currently is 43Things, because of its functionality and also unlike the other two it has an API.

43Things was built by a Seattle startup called The Robot Coop, formed by some ex-Amazon developers in late 2004. I had the pleasure of meeting them in person while I was in Seattle in January. 43Things has a number of subsites, which to be honest makes it somewhat difficult to navigate around. But the functionality and range of things you can do is top notch. You can publish your goals (43things), track people (43people), enter reviews (allconsuming), list cities (43places), create list of bests (a recent acquisition).

One of the great things about 43Things is that there are RSS feeds for everything. What's more, you can aggregate feeds on your People > Feeds page. For example my aggregator page is: http://ricmac.43people.com/feeds.

As you can see, I can view all my main feeds from the one page. Now to be honest, I don't use it very often - perhaps because I'm more of a 'professional' blogger than a social one. Which would explain why my Flickr account hasn't been updated for a while! But I can definitely see a use for this - and microcontent aggregators in general - for those people who use the Web for social networking and personal blogging. For example I know that a large number of younger people have both MySpace and Facebook accounts - not to mention Xanga, LiveJournal, etc. So a tool like 43Things is a good option to aggregate all those accounts together in one interface and feed (for those who want to subscribe to your activities).

Another plus for 43Things is the ability to filter the aggregate feed. People who have been reading R/WW for a while know that filtering is one of my hot buttons this year. With 43Things you can add and personalize feeds by going to your subscriptions page, e.g.:
http://ricmac.43people.com/subscriptions/add_feed

Robot Coop co-founder Erik Benson wrote a post earlier this year explaining the process:

"Now, some people (like me) probably are a little overzealous about adding content… so there’s a chance that you don’t actually want to see every blurry camera phone picture I post. For cases like this, you can unsubscribe from particular feeds within a person’s set of feeds and still be subscribed to the person as a whole. You do this by clicking on their name in the sidebar and selecting only the content that you want."

The filtering aspect is excellent and proof that 43Things is a forward-thinking app. The one thing that could be improved (imho) is the navigation, to make it easier to use and find your way around. But all in all, if you're looking for a fun and highly functional microcontent aggregator then give 43Things a go. I'll profile the other people-focused mc aggregators in posts to come.

Another observation - I originally entered my goals in my own words, but I found myself converting some of those into the words of similar-sounding goals that were already shared by a group of people.

One example is that I originally came up with this goal: "Build a Web 2.0 business." That's what I've got written down in my personal notebooks, but on 43 Things I converted it to: "Start a company that survives longer than 2 years.". I did that because 46 other people share that particular goal and I want to link up with those like-minded people. If you click on the above link and view the goal, you'll see a long - and very interesting - list of comments that folks have made about the goal. A lot of inspiring stories about starting a company, motivations, suggestions, support, progress reports, etc. In summary, a loosely-formed community has gathered around that one goal. That's social software in a nutshell. ;-)

So I'm looking forward to defining my goals more on 43 Things and I encourage you to check it out for yourself.