ReadWriteWeb

According to a post on the Facebook blog, Facebook will add the ability to comment on items in the Mini-Feed today, making it even more similar to Friendfeed. Within the last few months, Facebook started to allow users to aggregate their items from various external social media, photo, and bookmarking sites such as Flickr, del.icious, and StumbleUpon.

With this latest announcement, Facebook is starting to encroach even more on Friendfeed's territory.

Blogs, RSS, IM, Twitter and FriendFeed - the number of sources of sources of information online can feel like it's multiplying exponentially every day. It's easy, natural even, to feel overwhelmed. Especially when we are more familiar with the tightly controlled editorial policies of mainstream media.

The social media space is noisy, though. There are many times when filtering that noise effectively makes a lot of sense (some tools discussed below) - but there are also many times when noise is just what we need.

Unfortunately, there just aren't enough hours in the day. This seems to be especially true when you take on a lot of projects. Between blogging, researching, emailing, and real life, reading all of your feeds isn't something we can do all the time. Sometimes, we see something that we'd love to save it for later without cluttering up our bookmarks. Here are 6 tools to get the job done.

Whenever a new product comes out that has the early adopter set all atwitter -- like say, Twitter, for example -- there is a certain amount of discussion devoted to when or if the product will go mainstream. Sometimes we're not even sure if a new web app or service maybe already has reached the masses. A lucky few new web apps will cross the proverbial chasm into the mainstream, but most won't. Some those that don't will nonetheless see their ideas co-opted by a site that is already undeniably mainstream -- Facebook.

"Goodnight ma!" "Goodnight pa!" "Goodnight, John Boy!" That's what they used to say in every episode of the TV classic The Waltons (see below). That same kind of repetitive chorus has grown more frequent around the web announcing that yes, the Twitter website and API are down again.

What do you do when one homestead on the frontier range gets more leaky than you can bear? You pick up and move to another one. We'll discuss one particular alternative to Twitter below, but more important is the matter of data portability.

Last month, we reported the arrival of Facebook's version of a lifestream when they began offering you a way to import content from various online services into your Facebook Mini-Feed. At the time, the only services available were Flickr, Picasa, Yelp, and del.icio.us. (Digg was added later on). Today, a post on the Facebook blog announces that you can now import from several other services, including YouTube, StumbleUpon, Hulu, Pandora, Last.fm, and Google Reader.

There are thousands of new services that pop up every day. Too many services imitate, and only a handful innovate. With all of these services, one wonders what their plans are for success. Competition on the web is stiff and users are demanding more from the services they join. While there's no formula for success, there are three keys to a killer web service: search, aggregation, and conversation. In this post, we take a look at successful services that have integrated these keys just right.

There's no denying that the campaign of Barack Obama has embraced social networking and new media like no campaign in history. Obama has accounts on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, Flickr -- even on niche social networks AsianAve, MiGente, and Faithbase. And Obama, or someone in his campaign, actually uses the accounts and keeps them up-to-date. Could it be that likely Democratic nominee for president is actually using bleeding edge, early adopter-friendly lifestream aggregator FriendFeed? Actually, uh, no. That's not him.

There's an interesting, but tiresome discussion going around about whether FriendFeed contributes to the conversation or the noise. While we've already reviewed how FriendFeed can contribute to other problems such as information overload, the answer seems obvious that FriendFeed both contributes to the conversation and the noise. Here's a look at both sides of the coin.

At the end of April, we covered the launch of YackTrack, a new tool that helps fight the conversation fragmentation issues. The service provides a method for tracking the conversations taking place around your content. You just enter a URL and it searches sites like Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and WordPress to find who is saying what.