ReadWriteWeb

3 key points you need to know about Facebook Timeline, gleaned from two previous "lifestreaming" products: FriendFeed and Memolane.

Facebook's new Timeline, currently in a limited developer release but set to be unveiled to its hundreds of millions of users any day now, is going to shake up the social networking landscape. It's going to bring lifestreaming - formally a geeky activity based around RSS feeds - to the mainstream. In my view, Timeline is the smartest and most significant thing Facebook has done since launching a developer platform in May 2007. I think it's that important.

So where did the inspiration for Timeline come from and why is it going to be such a big deal? We can see the future just by looking at two earlier lifestreaming products: FriendFeed and scrappy start Memolane.

Two-year-old social network enhancing service Friend.ly has been acquired by Facebook, announced the Friend.ly blog earlier today.

Friend.ly is a place where people can get to know each other based on random questions you might have in common. Answer a question posed by the service, and you'll be able to see how other people have answered that question. You can also search for a question by typing it into the site's search bar.

So, are you ready to get even more friend.ly with Facebook?

Today Socialcast has announced the beta of Strides, its first big launch since VMware acquired them earlier this summer. Just connecting everyone on an internal social network isn't enough - everyone has to actually use the network for their work activities. And Strides is bringing a lightweight Web 2.0 form of project management, layering it on top of the social networking tool.

Facebook CTO Bret Taylor says buying servers was a mistake. A very big mistake. At the time, he was chief executive at FriendFeed, which eventually was sold to Facebook for the tidy sum of a reported $50 million. But these were the early days. He and his team needed to decide between buying servers or using Amazon Web Services. They bought the servers.

Miio is a new microblogging service which is a bit like a mashup between Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and an RSS reader. Now typically, we don't like describing services as a "it's like a this plus a that," but Miio is precisely the kind of service that needs a little help in the "what this is" department.

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 Google announced the launch of the new Buzz API yesterday at the Google I/O developers conference, I spotted an application in their partner lineup which hadn't yet crossed my radar: Vinehub. After having initially spotted their logo in the Google blog post containing details regarding the official announcement, I clicked through to the Buzz Featured Apps page to check it out. But here, the service was nowhere to be found.

A visit to Vineub.com satisfied my curiosity, though. It appears that Vinehub is a new social network aggregation application, in the same line as FriendFeed or even Buzz itself, except with one major difference: it doesn't just pull in updates for liking and commenting, it sends them out too.

For entrepreneurs trying to form a startup, one of the first challenges they face that persists throughout the businesses life is how to find and keep talented partners and employees. From finding that first co-founder to finding the prolific programmers to fill your ranks later down the line, talent acquisition is always a major step in any business. Just look at some of the deals that have gone down in the Valley; Facebook didn't buy FriendFeed for their technology, that deal was mostly about getting FriendFeed's talented employees on the Facebook team.

How badly do people want Google Buzz fixed? Enough to submit over 7,000 votes in the first 24 hours since the launch of a Google Moderator page called "How to Fix Google Buzz." Google Moderator, for those that don't know, is one of the unsung heroes of Google's online services. Launched back in 2008, the tool offers a simply designed interface that lets participants vote ideas up or down. In this case, suggestions for Google Buzz features and bugs in need of fixing are the fodder for this new Moderator site.

The irony of the situation is that the new "How to Fix Google Buzz" site was created by Jyri Engeström, a former Google employee who was at one time tasked with "making Google more social."

Google just launched Google Buzz, the company's new social networking service which will be tightly integrated with Gmail. There can be little doubt that Google Buzz looks a lot like FriendFeed, the social aggregation service that was acquired by Facebook in August 2009. Today, FriendFeed's developers are Facebook employees and aren't likely to continue to improve the service in any meaningful way, while the active user community on FriendFeed continues to shrink rapidly. Given the similarities between the two services, we can't help but wonder if Google Buzz will be able to succeed where FriendFeed couldn't.

ShoZu Goes to Critical Path - Cross Network Publishing Doesn't Seem to Be a Stand-Alone Business

Hours after high-profile Silicon Valley social aggregation service Seesmic announced that it acquired angel-backed cross-network publishing service Ping.fm, a similar deal was announced in Europe. Identity management service Critical Path, maker of software called Memova, announced that it has acquired mobile uploading service ShoZu, a company that had received an enormous amount of venture capital.