As Louis Gray points out, Google Buzz validates FriendFeed's ideas, but it also marginalizes the service even more. While some will look at Buzz as a Facebook/Twitter competitor, it also represents the final nail in FriendFeed's coffin. We will surely see a lot of FriendFeed's features appear on Facebook in the future, but FriendFeed as a stand-alone service has now lost its relevancy before it ever got a chance to go mainstream.

The real question, though, is whether Google Buzz will be able to succeed where FriendFeed couldn't. FriendFeed never made it out of the early-adopter phase and slowly became a self-referential community that was never quite accessible enough for a larger audience.

Looks Familiar?

If you are not familiar with FriendFeed, just have a look at these two screenshots:

Google's Advantage: Lifting FriendFeed's Best Ideas and a Huge Built-In User Base

Google Buzz has a number of advantages over FriendFeed. While FriendFeed tried to attract early adopters and mostly catered to their tastes, Buzz has a built-in audience already. While FriendFeed had to work hard on building a thriving community and never managed to attract a large mainstream audience, Gmail is one of the world's most popular email services and thanks to this, Buzz has millions of potential users from day one.

Also, while FriendFeed tried to allow users to connect to as many social services as possible, Google Buzz is just starting out with a few core Google and third-party services for now (Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader and Twitter). This will make it far more accessible than FriendFeed ever was.

Google is also putting a lot of emphasis on location-based and mobile services here, which is something FriendFeed never did. FriendFeed, for example, never offered a mobile app, while mobile apps and sites are one of the areas where Google is focusing on with Buzz.

The Buzz team has also been able to lift some of the best ideas from FriendFeed. You can "like" items, comment on them, you can see who liked a post (which looks identical to FriendFeed's implementation of this feature) and Buzz will recommend items that it thinks will be interesting to you because your friends also liked them or commented on them.

What do you Think?

Do you think Buzz's built-in mainstream user base help it to succeed where FriendFeed failed?

ViralHeat, a social media analytics firm, hopes to fill the space left empty by other, far more expensive services.

ViralHeat has been around for just over six months, providing a low-price but full-featured social media analysis for the budget minded. We had a chance to chat with CEO Raj Kadam and founder Vishal Sankhla today before the relaunch, which is unveiling support for Facebook monitoring, a new user interface and API support.

The fully Web-based app gives full analytics by monitoring an array of blogs, over 200 video sites, Twitter and now Facebook for mentions of your brand, which is set up as a profile. Each profile exists as a simple logic search, wherein you can keep track of your brand by searching for phrases, domains and hashtags, all in the syntax we've become accustomed to from using from sites like Google.

Champagne Tastes on a Beer Budget?

While ViralHeat compares itself on price to services like Radian6, there is a primary difference between the two services. ViralHeat offers a full set of analytics features, from standard mention monitoring to sentiment analysis using a natural language algorithm, but this is where it stays. It does not venture over to the content creation side, where we find the more expensive and extensive services like Radian6. Other services might offer workflow management, scheduled content delivery and other conversational tools, but this would be overkill for the users we imagine at this app's usability sweetspot.

We see that as an additional merit: ViralHeat has both the price point and the feature set fit for the company that wants to get on top of its image and perception on the social Web but can't afford to bring a social media expert on board - and on salary. The learning curve is suitable for the DIY set and the analytics it provides are self explanatory, not riddled with indecipherable, industry jargon.

For those of you that like the pricing but want to do a little more with the data, the service also allows you to export data into Excel format and access your data using the API.

The Price is Right

Speaking of pricing, this is a point that really brings it home for ViralHeat. With today's relaunch of the site, ViralHeat offers a three tiered pricing system, starting with a basic package for $9.99, a professional package for $29.99 and a business package for $89.99. The Basic package offers standard mentions analysis for 5 profiles, while the other packages offer sentiment analysis and API access for 20 and 40 profiles, respectively.

If we haven't drilled it in enough quite yet, here's the bottom line: ViralHeat looks like a solid social media analysis tool that is priced and designed for the more casual user, while offering simple features like export and API interaction that keep it flexible enough for the more serious user.

One of the first broadcast companies to use this tool was MTV, which used the Curatorr platform to identify and publish tweets during the Hope for Haiti Concert.

For the time being, Wiredset will only offer Curatorr to on a limited basis and the company is mostly targeting TV networks and other media businesses. Pricing will depend on usage and scope.

Unlike similar projects like Arc90's TBuzz bookmarklet, the extension doesn't connect to your own Twitter account, so you can't tweet and retweet from within the extension.

While it doesn't offer any advanced features, Twitter Reactions is a quick and easy way to see what the twittersphere is saying about any site. If you are not using Chrome, also give TBuzz a try.

[via Lifehacker]

Until now, that is. In yet another case of "there's an app for that," there is, in fact, a new iPhone application that adds the "find within a page" feature to the iPhone browser. And it's well worth the $0.99 fee to finally have this function at our disposal again.

The application "Find in Page" (iTunes URL), which was released last month in the iTunes App Store, is essentially a browser bookmarklet that adds an extra feature to mobile Safari. Not only does "Find in Page" locate all instances of a word within the displayed Web page upon launch, it also counts them, highlights them and lets you move from once instance to the next (and back again) by tapping arrow buttons. Of course, there are other free bookmarklets out there that provide similar functionality, but this one feels very much like a part of mobile Safari itself. It feels built-in.

The key differentiating factor that makes this pseudo plugin stand out from the rest is the semi-transparent toolbar that appears at the bottom of the screen once the bookmarklet is activated. From here, you can access the arrow buttons, word count information and you can pull up the search window again if you want to edit your current search or start a new one. Also, if you perform multiple searches, you can do so without having to reload the page - a definite time-saver. Finally, an "X" button closes the toolbar when you're finished.

Although this small application may not sound as exciting as a revolutionary new feed reader or a brand-new interface for Facebook, it's arguably going to be one of the most useful applications you've ever installed on your iPhone. For that reason, we think it's well worth the $0.99 the developer is charging for the app. We've certainly paid far more for applications we've used much less than this. However, for those of you who balk at paying anything for apps, especially for ones that are essentially just a bit of code, you'll be happy to know that a free "lite" version of this tool will be coming mid-month. Stay tuned to the App Store for its release. Otherwise, you can grab the paid version here.

Interestingly, this launch comes just one day after Apple itself got a patent for a method of sharing location data during a phone call. While Apple's method is completely permission-based, though, AT&T's system isn't. Instead, any FamilyMap enabled phone - once you activate the service - will send location data back when requested, without prompting the receiver for confirmation. Given that AT&T is mostly marketing this service to parents, this makes sense, though some people (including children and teenagers) will surely feel a bit uneasy about this feature.

Using only HTML5 and Javascript, the service syncs your browser window with the browsers of viewers whether they're using IE6, Chrome, an iPhone or almost anything else. Transitions between images are super-fast and the service is a joy to use. It doesn't include things like markup or native voice support (you'll have to get on the phone) but for $15 per month, we think it looks like a great deal.

We've found very few shortcomings in our testing of the app so far and ReadWriteWeb's own designer Jared Smith enjoyed using it a lot. "It demonstrates an awesome use of standard technologies and real-time technologies," he says. Existing powerpoint decks will need to be exported as images and uploaded one at a time, but the company says it's working on changing that.

My favorite part of Black Tonic is the iPhone Safari view. Even when we switched from broadcast mode to review mode, where I was able to scroll through all the images in the presentation and click to zoom in a light-box - the whole experience worked very quickly on my iPhone. All I had to do was load a simple URL and we were rolling. (This is going to be a lot of fun to watch on an iPad.)

The company explained what it calls FLOW, its DOMcasting technology, in a blog post this summer. Presenting from Chrome works wonderfully. Presenting from Firefox is a little slower as Black Tonic is javascript-heavy, but it's still not bad at all. Watching a presentation in Firefox is no problem at all.

As we wrote in the profile of the then-unlaunched Black Tonic in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future:

The Black Tonic team believes that lightweight real-time technology is an opportunity to reconsider remote presentations, to add some structure to them and add the necessary control over presentation that they haven't had with the workaround of emailing PDFs.

A whole lot of options arise when a new computing paradigm emerges. Real-time doesn't have to only mean delivering a chaotic stream of social information to an individual at the center of the system. Black Tonic is a good example of looking outside the standard application of a new technology and instead taking advantage of the opportunity to reconsider standard practices [like emailing PDFs to design clients] that have been influenced by technological limitations that no longer exist.

Black Tonic is available today and includes a two-week free trial.

Today, the company is announcing the addition of Google Storage, a service nicknamed "GDrive" among Internet users, to its lineup of supported options.

Although Gladinet previously supported Google Docs, Google's online office suite, they did not yet provide an option to connect to Google Storage. This additional online storage space is provided to Google users who need more gigabytes than is provided for free via Google's programs. Specifically, Google Storage is shared between Gmail, Picasa Web Albums, and Google Docs. Affordably priced starting at $5.00 for an extra 20 GB per year and going up to 1 TB and beyond, Google Storage users have access to some of the most reasonably priced cloud storage available on the net today. And with the recent change to Google Docs, which now allows any file type to be uploaded, the storage space is more valuable than ever.

With the additional support now provided by Gladinet, you can drag-and-drop your files from your desktop to Google Storage using Windows Explorer. Once installed, the software allows you to map a virtual drive in Explorer to your online sites and services.

Why Bring the Cloud to the Desktop?

While some may scoff at such a hybrid approach to cloud computing - after all, the whole purpose of the cloud is to move away from desktop-based software - Gladinet is an incredibly valuable tool for both transitioning to the cloud and for managing cloud-to-cloud backups.

For those of us who have collected multiple gigabytes of files over the years, using the various cloud services' own uploading tools can be tedious at times, even painful, especially when attempting the initial upload to a new service. With Gladinet, though, you can upload everything you own with just a few clicks. That makes the final move from desktop to cloud much easier for those ready to make the change for good. Additionally, since multiple services are supported, Gladinet lets you backup your online files from one cloud storage provider to another. For example, you can backup your Google Docs to Amazon S3, EMC Atmos, Box.net, Windows Live SkyDrive, among others. Gladinet even allows you to automate this cloud-to-cloud copying procedure.

The backup feature and its related automation procedures are only available in the paid editions of the software. However, the basic drive mapping abilities are supported in the free version of the program which runs on Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 2003 computers only.

If you've been wondering what the future of web video looks like, look no further than here.

As exciting as both announcements were, neither project holds a candle to what SublimeVideo currently offers. The HTML5-based videos on both sites still feel slow - not exactly demonstrating the internet revolution promised by this new web standard. In addition, neither company is yet offering full-screen HTML5 videos.

However, SublimeVideo does full-screen videos and a lot more, too. Behind its attractive user interface much thoughtful design accompanies the HTML5 code powering their new player.

In the SublimeVideo demo, you can already maximize the video to full-screen (if you're using a WebKit nightly build) and it also offers other features like live-resizing when resizing the browser window, well-designed controls on a draggable plane, a keyboard shortcut (spacebar) to play and pause the video, effects like zoom-in and out transitions, and, of course - thanks to HTML5 - you can jump into the video at any point and have it play without wait for it to buffer.

According to the project's homepage, the SublimeVideo team is working on additional features that will arrive in the public release, said to be "coming soon." These include volume controls, IE support by falling back to Flash, and Firefox support. (At the moment, the player only works in Google Chrome, Safari, and IE with Chrome Frame installed.) Oh and it will work in mobile Safari, too.

More than any other technology demo currently out there, SublimeVideo showcases the future of web video in all its speedy, sleek, and plugin-free glory.

For more information on the software and the company's plans, you can follow their Twitter account here: twitter.com/Jilion. And for more great HTML5 demos, check out our previous post on the subject here.

Getting Started

To use Weave, you have to register for an account with Mozilla. The plugin will automatically prompt you to create this account after the installation. Advanced users who are worried about their privacy can also use their own servers as a repository for their data. It's worth noting that all of the data you transfer to Mozilla's servers is encrypted.

Weave vs. XMarks

Of course, Weave isn't the only solution for syncing bookmarks and XMarks is currently the most popular bookmark syncing tool. Unlike Weave, XMarks isn't just compatible with Mozilla's browsers but also supports Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer. XMarks can sync bookmarks between these browsers.

Weave syncs a lot more than just bookmarks, however. Weave also syncs passwords and your browsing history, for example. In future versions, Mozilla also plans to allow users to sync add-ons and other browser customizations.

Last week we listed and categorized some of the leading topic-tracking tools on the Web (see also the follow-up post). The tools we listed were geared towards tracking news or media information on the Web. In this post, we look at a leading service that tracks more discrete, faster changing types of data.

Tracking shopping deals is the most immediate commercial application for alert services that go beyond 'topics.'

Trackle offers a large selection of feeds to subscribe to, including coupons, product price drops, deals on Amazon (tracking when the price for a product falls within a price range you're willing to pay), new product reviews, product recalls, daily deals, latest buzz in shopping, price protection ("...find out if the price of a recent purchase drops in time to apply for a rebate or partial refund.").

That selection from Trackle is impressive and will grow even more when data from sensors and RFID tags are added in the near future.

Imagine for example getting notified, when you walk into a bookstore, that a book you have on your wishlist is available on special in that store. Or you're doing your groceries and your phone alerts you to a deal in the store that day on blueberries, which you've marked as your favorite fruit and something that you want to track the price of. These kinds of scenarios could be achieved with a combination of services like Trackle, your smartphone, and RFID tags on product items.

Those examples are just a starter for ten, we can expect more sophisticated alert systems to evolve once Internet of Things ramps up in retail stores and elsewhere.

For now, let us know in the comments your favorite alert services!

Quix is an interesting application that allows users to create an all-in-one solution for bookmarklets and bookmarks, as well as a handy toolkit that will let users shorten links and post to multiple locations, all from any browser.

Check out the demo, give the app a test drive, and let us know what you think.

Commands run the gamut from basic web searches and functions to social utilities to searches and SEO/webmaster functions - the range of functionality for Internet power users is truly mind-boggling.

The Quix bookmarklet comes ready-made with a decent gallery of commands, but the best part of the app is that users and developers can extend its functions using custom commands files. Once a user has made his own custom commands file available online, he can simply go to the Quix extensions page to create a bookmarklet that will work with that file.

The only downside is having to remember all the commands.

In many senses, this reminds of of Mozilla's Ubiquity, the add-on/UI we raved about back in the mists of time and that allowed users to apply textual commands to any page they were browsing. Ubiquity isn't dead, but it seems to run silent and deep. We hope this conceptual revival from Quix will fare better.

Quix comes from Joost de Valk, a seeming one-man web dev shop based in the Netherlands. Let us know what you think of this app in the comments.

Once installed, HipLogic users can access the included free applications like Facebook, Twitter, CBS News and Sports, Entertainment Tonight, Disney, and WeatherBug as well as other various apps for monitoring news, finance information, and RSS feeds. As expected, the Facebook and Twitter applications allow for status updates, however they don't appear to be as robust as the applications found in either the Windows Mobile or Nokia Ovi stores. Take the Facebook application, for example. The Windows Mobile version integrates with the phone's camera for uploading of photos and videos. Nokia's app does the same. HipLogic's version, on the other hand, appears much more basic.

HipLogic, Before & After

In addition to the included applications, there's also a HipLogic app store where even more applications are found, both free and paid. The software also works as an alternative web browser of sorts as users can pull up a search box with a click and perform Google searches without ever having to launch the phone's browser.

Another App Store?

Given that some of the platforms HipLogic aims to support already offer their own application stores - and both Nokia and Windows Mobile allow background applications, too - it's somewhat confusing as to what problem HipLogic is trying to solve here. While it's true that HipLogic's software is designed to provide real-time notifications, those notifications will only appear when the alternative HipLogic UI is running.

On the plus side, however, HipLogic does provide one single access point for all your apps. When you launch HipLogic, you can get to everything that's been downloaded and when it's closed, you return to your phone's regular UI. And if the software, a JavaScript virtual machine platform, can be installed on more low-end "feature phones" in the future, it could indeed bring an iPhone-like app store to those who wouldn't otherwise have access to mobile applications.

Acer, currently the world's second-largest computer vendor, mentioned the application store among a series of initiatives designed to boost the company's profitability, according to a report on Bloomberg.com. From what it sounds like, Acer is glomming onto every major tech trend with plans that include everything from an e-reader to a Tablet PC. In fact, Acer chairman J.T. Want even admits this is the case: "We'd like to proactively purse any opportunity," he said.

One of those opportunities is the new Acer application store, an online venture that will offer hundreds of different applications, both free and paid. However, the company wouldn't share pricing details or name developers, noted the Bloomberg story.

Although application stores are typically associated with mobile phones, Acer wouldn't be the first vendor to launch an applications store designed for use on PCs. Earlier this month, chip maker Intel launched the AppUp site, an application store designed specifically for netbook computers. Interestingly enough, AppUp is meant to be a white-label offering that PC manufacturers can customize to their own needs. At the time of its launch at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Intel announced several partnerships with other PC makers to bring the AppUp store to consumers. Included among those launch partners was Acer. Gianpiero Morbello, Acer's worldwide marketing VP said that by accessing the AppUp catalog, their company would be able to distribute "innovative software downloads to Acer Atom processor-based netbook customers and move to easily support additional Acer customers on any device powered by an Intel processor."

So Is This Yet Another App Store?

However, despite the sparse details surrounding the upcoming Acer app store, it does sound like the manufacturer is planning their own venture of sorts. Intel's store only supports Windows netbooks and the Moblin Linux operating system - not mobile devices like Windows Mobile or Google Android and definitely not Google's new netbook OS, Google Chrome.

Intel confirms that the previously announced joint venture is still on, with their company providing behind-the-scenes support for infrastructure, testing, and validation of apps. And while Intel isn't privy to Acer's other plans, it does appear that this would be a separate store from whatever Acer is envisioning for the other platforms outside of Atom-based netbooks.

It's understandable that Acer wants to generate some hype surrounding their products by offering an app store to their customers, but at this point they may be simply confusing the issue. Many of the platforms Acer plans to support already offer their own application stores - even Google's Chrome OS, the Web-based operating system set to launch by year-end. And, of course, one could argue that the Internet itself has been the app store for Windows computers for many years now.

Where Are You?

Nick Bicanic, the CEO of Purpose Wireless, the company behind echoecho, told us that he came up with the idea for echoecho because he was tired of signing up to location-based social networks, just to find that none of his friends were on there anyway. Instead, Bicanic decided to harness the power of the social network that is already build into every phone: the address book. Thanks to this, you don't have to sign up for a new social network if you want to use the service - echoecho simply uses the contacts in your address book.

If your friend has already signed up for echoecho, the program will route your request through its own network and send a push notification to your friend's phone. If the service realizes that your friend hasn't signed up yet, it will send out a text message instead. On Android, for example, the text message will include a link to echoecho's mobile site, which will redirect you to the Android Market.

Once your friend has been located, you will get a notification on your phone, and a map that shows your location in relation to that of your friend will appear in the app.

Permission-Based Location Sharing

One problem that has hindered the widespread adoption of location-based services in the past is the fact that sharing location data with random people is something that a lot of people feel rather uneasy about. Echoecho routes around this problem by using a very nifty permission-based solution. Whenever you request somebody's location, your friend has the option to completely ignore your request. At the same time, if somebody responds to your request, that person will also be able to see your own location. This should help to alleviate some of the social issues that are often associated with location-based social networks.

The next version of the echoecho mobile app will also include an augmented reality view that will allow you to see where exactly your friends are. For now, echoecho only allows you to ping one of your contacts at a time. The echoecho team plans to implement a way to ping groups in future versions of the application.

Getting Started

To get started, you just have to install the application on your phone. You don't have to sign up for yet another social network, though the application will ask you for your phone number. On the iPhone, Echoecho will send you an SMS with a PIN code and once you enter this code into the application, you are good to go. On all the other platforms, you can skip this step.

For Developers: EchoEcho's API

Echoecho also offers a free and open API for developers who want to implement the company's service into their own applications. You can find more info about the API here.