Gelato is the kind of web site that's going to make married and attached folks almost wish they were single again - it's that much fun to use. Getting started is one of the simplest processes we've ever seen. Not only does it offer Facebook Connect as an alternative to creating an account, it actually imports your Facebook profile information to create an instant dating profile on Gelato. (You can select and deselect which items you want to import, too).

However, Gelato doesn't stop with just Facebook - the site actually supports eight social services in total and has more on the way. Obviously, there's Twitter support, a key component to any good lifestream, but there's also Last.fm, Netflix, Flickr, Hulu, Amazon, and Seesmic. By adding a mix of these sites to your profile, it's much easier for someone to get an idea of what sort of interests you have than by reading some sort of self-created profile list. Think about it: you may have a rather typical list of favorite movies which include everything from "Forrest Gump" to "The Godfather," but your recent viewing of Dollhouse Season 1 on Hulu will out you as the sci-fi geek you are at heart.

Your updates on these social networks are combined to form a lifestream of your activities, just like they would on FriendFeed. Also like FriendFeed, you can "like" and comment on the items posted. And if you don't know what to say, various "icebreakers" are available to help you be witty on the fly. However, because Gelato is focused on making one-to-one connections, those likes, comments, and icebreakers remain private. The only person who can see them is the recipient. They can then respond to your comment if they want to start a conversation with you.

Real-Time Search

A real-time search feature, another borrowed idea from FriendFeed, helps you find topics you're interested in. For example, if you're looking for someone who's talking about the latest Harry Potter movie, you can search for that using keywords. Of course you're also able to filter your searches by age, sex, and location, too, so you can find someone local to chat with.

Legit Accounts and "Friendships"

One unique feature to Gelato that didn't come from elsewhere is what they're calling your "SCOOP" rating, aka the "social confidence of online profile." The higher the "SCOOP" rating, the better chance you're legit. This feature is designed to combat those who post fake profiles on dating sites. To bump your rating up, you can post to Twitter or Facebook and ask your friends to confirm who you are. Obviously, this isn't foolproof, but it should help highlight legit accounts as being so.

The only area that may need a little finessing is the way friendships work on the site. As with Facebook, you can send friend requests to other users and they must accept your request before you can be friends. This in and of itself isn't so bad...or all that different from how many other sites work for that matter. However, since a lot of online dating interaction is typically of the "try-before-you-buy" sort (live chats, email messages, etc.), it could lead to some sticky situations when you decide that the person you "friended" isn't someone you want to get to know better after all. To get them out of your friends list, you have to unfriend them and they will know you've done so. Considering all the other smart features in Gelato, it would have been nice if they could have come up with a less hurtful way of saying "I'm just not that into you."

Still that's a minor complaint in what is, overall, a unique entry to the billion dollar marketplace that is online dating. Despite the fact that much of the site's inspiration comes from FriendFeed, we won't hold that against them. In fact, we applaud them for it. Taking FriendFeed's innovations and applying them to a marketplace decidedly lacking in such technical innovation is a brilliant idea.

If you're ready to give the "stream dating" of Gelato a try, you can join now at ge.la.to.

• First generation: was done on a single processor, usually for process control in military systems.

• Second generation: within a Local Area Network, usually for a financial trading room.

• Third generation: applied across the whole Web/Internet, what we call the real-time Web.

In each generation a stack has emerged, and secure messaging has been key to that stack. The names change and the scale of the prize and challenges certainly changes, but the basic issue remains the same: delivering messages reliably and quickly. In this post, we trace the steps from the second generation to the third generation to see how the real-time Web might play out.

Generation 2's Winner: The Teknekron Information Bus Story

I worked with the technology's second generation. My company took on the challenge of delivering market prices from multiple sources to hundreds of traders in a trading room, enabling new apps based on real-time calculation. The solution had to scale to maybe 2,000 traders, which is laughably small by the standards of the real-time Web. But you did not want to face a roomful of furious traders if your system was down for three minutes or delayed prices by 15 seconds. The reliability and latency requirements were very stringent.

The company that emerged as leader, Teknekron, coined the term "Information Bus." It did very well by coining the term, because it established Teknekron as a market leader; it followed the "get mindshare first, and then go for market share" strategy. Vivek Ranadive, the visionary founder and CEO, describes in his 1999 book "The Power Of Now" how the term came to him. He was schooled as a hardware engineer and was appalled by how much more chaotic (i.e. error- and delay-prone) software projects were compared to hardware projects. Looking at why, he realized that the concept of a "bus," which is the device that all hardware components connect to, could be applied to software.

Ranadive understood that real-time, event-driven systems would not be limited to financial trading, and he executed brilliantly on that insight. He sold Teknekron to Reuters, the company's main rival in trading systems, but retained the right to use the technology outside of financial markets. That offshoot became TIBCO (The Information Bus Company), which at the time of writing is a publicly traded company valued at $1.6 billion, with annual revenue of over $600 million.

But TIBCO did not leverage its position to dominate the third generation. Another company tried that and blew a lot of money in the attempt.

KnowNow: Lessons of a Blow-Out

KnowNow worked through $50 million in funding before throwing in the towel in July 2008. It was going to update the message bus to the Web using RSS. It was still an enterprise play.

It had a strong management team, top-tier VC (Kleiner Perkins), and strong technology. Why did it fail? Three big reasons stand out:

• Generation 3 is a tougher technical challenge. Generation 2's state of technology was perfect for local area networks using Ethernet, where the user device was always connected and where we measured users by the thousands. With generation 3, we are dealing with millions of users who are offline some of the time, and the network bandwidth available for messages is not under their control. In other words, it is one big bear of a technical challenge!
• Companies are reluctant to invest millions of dollars in closed software when open standards clearly always win on the Web. Companies can instead experiment very cheaply using consumer-centric RSS tools and open source.
• KnowHow was early. The hype on real-time enterprise did not last long enough, and it hit the trough of disillusionment.

Contenders for the Real-Time Web Message Bus

We have probably missed a few, so please tell us about them in the comments. These are very different types of solutions, but they are working towards a similar objective. First, we will list them and then attempt a bit of categorization:

• Gnip: an independent venture whose monetization model relies on it being a hub that different sites can connect to.
• Tornado (FriendFeed's Python-based Web server technology, which was open sourced by Facebook): this uses PubSubHubbub.
• RSS Cloud: promoted by Dave Winer, with WordPress as a marquee partner.
• PubSubHubbub: promoted by Google (and FriendFeed/Facebook), with SixApart as a marquee partner.
• XMPP The technology with which IM clients interoperate. Being used by Yammer, Present.ly, and Drop.io.
• Twitter.
• Facebook.
• TIB: an enterprise solution from TIBCO.
• MQ: an enterprise solution from IBM.
• Sonic: an enterprise solution from Progress Software.

Here are the categories they fall into:

1. Enterprise
   TIB, MQ, and Sonic all fall into this category, and there are more. They will find it hard to make the transition to the real-time Web for two reasons. The first is technical. Connecting millions of users over a low bandwidth network via HTTP is very different from connecting a few thousand users over a corporate network. The second is commercial: they monetize by selling licensing fees to enterprises. But that is not the primary way in which the real-time Web will be monetized. Still, these are big profitable companies with the right tech chops, so they cannot be dismissed.
2. Open source and open standards
   Tornado, RSS Cloud, PubSubHubbub, and XMPP fall into this category. They have differing purposes but also a lot of overlap. XMPP is low level and not affiliated with any big company. RSS Cloud and PubSubHubbub are most similar to each other. Tornado is a Web server. But they all face the issue that an open standard takes a long time to evolve and consolidate into a winner. Before that happens, we will likely see more entrants, making the choice even more confusing for developers. So, developers may hedge their bets and go for commercial/de facto standards.
3. Commercial hub
   Gnip is the purest example of this. It aims to get traction by being simpler to implement than the open-source/open-standards offerings. It is a bold strategy from a strong team of entrepreneurs and investors. For something as big as this - basic plumbing for the Web - it feels like a bit too much reliance on one company.
4. Traffic plays
   Twitter and Facebook are the major players here. They might become de facto standards because the biggest issue is traffic. Developers will build where there is traffic as long as two conditions are met:
   • It works technically (i.e. latency at scale). Twitter has some credibility issues here.
   • It is open and transparent - i.e. anyone can connect without fear of the game changing on them. Facebook has some credibility issues here.

The Technical Challenges

First, we have to address the question of "What does real time mean?"

In each generation, the gurus of the previous generation get sniffy about the definition of real time ("What do you mean one second is real time? We measure in micro-seconds!").

It depends on the usage case and technical possibilities. Real time within a single processor is obviously faster than real time over a LAN, which is faster than real time over HTTP for the whole Web.

Real time, practically speaking, means "orders of magnitude faster than how data has been delivered in the past, and faster than most people think they need today." So, RSS Cloud is faster than RSS, and Twitter search is faster than Google search, and IM is faster than email.

In generation 2, the thinking evolved through three approaches:

1. Polling. It soon became obvious that this would not scale.
2. Broadcast, which put too much load on the client.
3. Multicast, which became PubSub.

Most current Web HTTP-based real-time systems are still in the polling phase (i.e. subscribers poll publishers to see if they have an update), which clearly won't scale. The newer approaches fundamentally enable a publisher to say, "I will tell you, the subscriber, when I have an update, so you don't need to poll me." It's a geek's way of saying "Don't call us. We'll call you."

For a good technical primer on how this works and a discussion of the differences between RSS Cloud and PubSubHubbub (mercifully shortened to PuSH), check out this post.

Sticking My Neck Out to Guess the Winner

Twitter. Why? It has the traffic and is open and transparent enough to win confidence. But two big problems remain:

1. It has to reveal its business model. Only then will partners feel confident that they understand its strategic direction.
2. It has to prove it can get good latency at scale. Its early history of fail whales makes people justifiably skeptical.

The winner will likely be the platform that hosts the killer app. Most platforms get traction through a killer app. In the second generation of real time, that killer app was market data for financial traders. What will it be in the third generation? We will explore this in a future post.

What to Name This Generation?

"Message/Information Bus" worked for generation 2. It took a key concept from generation 1 - the hardware bus - and applied it to a local area network.

That does not work so well for generation 3, the real-time Web. For now, we talk about a Web-wide real-time message bus because there is no better alternative.

The new term may have something to do with "status," because the status update is a central concept in social media. Perhaps something like "StatusFabric" or "StatusNet" or "StatusWeb" will emerge.

Developers will now be able to tap into one of the core infrastructure pieces that made FriendFeed tick so well. While other services (like Twitter) tend to have a lot of trouble to scale up when they grow, FriendFeed never ran into these problems and Tornado was surely one of the main reasons why the site managed to stay up and running even when demand spiked during major events.

Here is what developers will get when they implement Tornado according to Bret Taylor:

• All the basic site building blocks - Tornado comes with built-in support for a lot of the most difficult and tedious aspects of web development, including templates, signed cookies, user authentication, localization, aggressive static file caching, cross-site request forgery protection, and third party authentication like Facebook Connect. You only need to use the features you want, and it is easy to mix and match Tornado with other frameworks.

• Real-time services - Tornado supports large numbers of concurrent connections. It is easy to write real-time services via long polling or HTTP streaming with Tornado. Every active user of FriendFeed maintains an open connection to FriendFeed's servers.

• High performance - Tornado is pretty fast relative to most Python web frameworks. We ran some simple load tests against some other popular Python frameworks, and Tornado's baseline throughput was over four times higher than the other frameworks

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We're excited to announce the availability of ReadWriteWeb's Q2 2009 VC Funding Report, our second premium report powered by data from ChubbyBrain. We have been tracking early-stage investment in Internet, mobile and SaaS since the financial crisis in September 2008 and we believe that this report is unlike anything else you've seen.

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Web Products

Facebook Acquires FriendFeed for $50 Million

The big news this week was Facebook acquiring popular lifestreaming company FriendFeed for about $50m, $15m in cash and the rest in Facebook stock. According to a post by Bret Taylor on the FriendFeed blog, FriendFeed will continue to operate normally for the time being while the two companies figure out the long-term plans. The purchase makes sense, as Facebook had continually copied parts of FriendFeed's feature set - including the 'like' feature and Facebook's new focus on the real-time stream.

Facebook Users: Here's What FriendFeed Brings to the Family

It's going to be a little like the Brady Bunch, this union between Facebook and the just-acquired social networking service FriendFeed. Both families will influence each other a lot, though Facebook is far, far bigger. FriendFeed was co-founded by Paul Buchheit, the man who invented GMail, and by Bret Taylor, who co-founded Google Maps. Here's what they bring to Facebook; it's probably going to change Facebook a lot.

Facebook Updates Are Now Searchable

Also this week Facebook announced that it's opened up search across all status messages, notes and shared links that users have marked as public. Searching across all users, whether you know them or not, requires a couple of clicks - but the availability of the feature marks a dramatic turning point in the history of Facebook. For months the company has been pushing users towards being more public and less private. This is why.

10 Ways to Archive Your Tweets

Did you know that your tweets have an expiration date on them? While they never really disappear from your own Twitter stream, they become unsearchable in only 1.5 weeks. That's bad for users and it's definitely bad for data-mining. Unless Twitter corrects this issue on its own, we have to find another solution for archiving tweets ourselves. Here are 10 ways to do so.

Caffeine: Google Tests New Search Infrastructure

Just as Facebook announces internal search for public notes, Google counters with an effort to improve on its existing services. In a blog post, the company unveiled its new Caffeine search infrastructure to web developers. The question is, will Caffeine enhance performance or lead to user anxiety?

See also: iGoogle is Now Social: Google Launches Social Gadgets

Tiny App Confuses, Delights: Check Out Robo.to, Next-Gen Animated GIFs

From "massively small products" shop Particle, itself a startup newly out of stealth mode, comes a new app: Robo.to, pitched to us as a digital calling card. Although the app first struck us as a skinnier Retaggr with an animated GIF-esque Flash avatar slapped on the top, something quirky and cute drew us back and elicited deeper digging.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

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Microsoft & Nokia: Not Just Office, It's the Whole Mobile Enterprise

This week news broke that Microsoft and Nokia were announcing a partnership that would take Office outside of Windows Mobile for the first time. It's now clear that this isn't just Word, Excel, and PowerPoint slapped onto Nokia smartphones: the world's largest cellphone maker will now support a whole slew of key enterprise software from Microsoft.

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VC Series A Web Tech Deals in July

We have been tracking Series A deals in Web technology since the market mayhem in October 2008, and since May we have been working with ChubbyBrain, which tracks this kind of data full-time. Early-stage funding is important for the whole economy. The executive summary for July: steady progress and a lot of deals in the Boston area.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Trends

Is a Perfect Storm Forming For Distributed Social Networking?

Maybe it's better to host your own. That's the thinking coming from a growing number of early technology adopters as service after service goes down, sells out or otherwise frustrates the users. The prospect of a distributed, interoperable, self-hosted network of publishing, reading and discussion tools is nothing new - but the idea is gaining a lot more support as more people react to recent news like FriendFeed's sale to Facebook, Tr.im's up and down and Twitter's denial of service attacks.

Gartner Hype Cycle 2009: Web 2.0 Trending Up, Twitter Down

Analyst firm Gartner released its latest Hype Cycle white paper this week, detailing some of the biggest trends in technology this year. According to the report, cloud computing, e-books and Internet TV are at the "Peak of Inflated Expectations," while this year's biggest hit Twitter is said to have "tipped over the peak" and is just about to enter the infamous "Trough of Disillusionment." Interestingly, web 2.0 is deemed to be nearly past the Trough and entering the "Slope of Enlightenment."

Product Managers & Marketers: What The Internet of Things Means For You

Some of you may be reading our series on the Internet of Things and wondering: what use is this to me in my daily work? So one day my fridge will be able to tell me when the milk has run out, when I travel my luggage will have an RFID tag and not be lost, my home will be automated via Twitter. But will it affect your job? If you're a product manager or marketer, read on to find out how this will affect you.

Your "Real" Friends are Your Online Friends (or so Says Gen Y)

Is it easier to talk to your online buddies than your friends out there in the "real world?" Do you feel like you know more about what's happening in the lives of your Facebook and MySpace friends than with those who don't have accounts or don't bother to update them? According to a recent UK MySpace study, these sorts of feelings are common among today's younger generation.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

FriendFeed product manager Dan Hsiao and company intern Ross Miller released a short video today from deep inside the core of that innovative company that Facebook just paid $50m in cash and stocks to purchase. Now that FriendFeed has had its exit, the staff must feel comfortable opening up a little to the world and letting us see what really goes on there.

We thought it was elves, but this is probably the most scalable solution available. Just snap on more of the same infrastructure and you're ready to rock and roll.

The prospect of a distributed, interoperable, self-hosted network of publishing, reading and discussion tools is nothing new - but the idea is gaining a lot more support as more people react to recent news like FriendFeed's sale to Facebook, Tr.im's up and down and Twitter's denial of service attacks. The tide may not be turning, but there's sure to be some new waves of innovation that come out of this period of frustration.

One of the analogies people are drawing is that we need a WordPress.org-type version of Twitter to put on our own servers as an alternative to the Twitter-hosted version that exists now like WordPress hosts blogs on WordPress.com.

Why do we need self-hosted lifestreaming, microblogging or social networks though when we've already got the ability to host our own blogs, own our own data there and set our own rules? Simply because these technologies fill different needs. Blogs are good for longer-form, author-centric communication. Quick, very social conversations around objects like links or media items can best be had in other settings. Thus the interest many people have in both writing a blog and sharing and discussing items on sites like Facebook (social networks), Twitter (microblogging) or FriendFeed (activity streams).

Twitter's Down Time

Twitter went down again today, possibly for the second time in two weeks because of a Distributed Denial of Service attack. A swarm of zombified computers, distributed all around the world, is hitting Twitter's centralized infrastructure over and over again until it can't stay up.

If we all had a little piece of our microblogging network on our own servers and they spoke to each other, that couldn't happen.

We'd also own our own data, our archives, our interface design and more. It would be like publishing little messages... like grown ups.

The two systems could co-exist, a hosted service has its advantages and many people wouldn't use anything else. Realistically, no one is going to build something too much like Twitter if they could build a distributed version of something like FriendFeed or Facebook.

Facebook Eats FriendFeed

Social activity stream discussion network FriendFeed announced that it was selling itself to Facebook yesterday and many of its users were very upset. The acquisition is likely to change Facebook in interesting ways (FriendFeed's creators were the inventors of GMail and Google Maps) but FriendFeed itself was important to its users.

The feeling of betrayal that comes from a transaction like this makes it hard to trust a hosted social networking company again.

Fortunately, there's a long and growing list of ways to put all of your activity around the web in one place on your own website. When will those tools begin to include subscription to other peoples' activity feeds and posting comments from your social lifestream viewing page that will appear back out on everyone else's?

That's a big part of the vision articulated by Anil Dash in his recent essay about what he calls The Push Button Web. It's related as well to RSS pioneer Dave Winer's recent promotion of a part of RSS called RSS Cloud. Developers are actively building on RSS Cloud and a similar protocol with the humorous name PubSubHubbub.

That's also part of the vision of the Distributed Social Networking Project (DiSo). We haven't heard much lately from this project, probably because its founders are busy building the technical standards that will allow the information to flow from one social network to another.

Tr.im Your Expectations

This weekend link shortening service Tr.im announced that it was shutting its doors. It was too expensive and hopeless to run the service without the funding, hype and official blessing from Twitter that competitor Bit.ly had won.

Big deal, right? It turns out that people freaked out. Tr.im's biggest users were developers who were hip to the opportunities to do interesting things with the service. They had built on it and they felt a lot of frustration when they heard the news.

A dead URL shortener means dead links, broken content, lost data.

There are a number of different solutions being explored in response to this part of the problem. Developer Brian Hendrickson has already begun working on a service called rp.ly, a "community-owned URL shortener" based on cloning the Tr.im API.

There will, no doubt, be any number of other efforts that rise from the ashes of the trust that's been burnt over the last week or more.

Are all of these circumstances and conversations going to push the social web over the edge, toward a more distributed and less centralized model? Probably not in a big way, immediately, but we're pretty sure that some interesting innovation is going to come out of this. Dissatisfied engineers, working on a problem that a lot of people are interested in, can produce some fun and important work.

Some will hold out for Google Wave, the forthcoming open-source hyper communication head shift. We're hearing that Wave may be too complicated, though, and we suspect that the most important innovations will come from coders building the kind of software that many, many people can hack on and help evolve.

In the future many of us may be microblogging, lifestreaming and social networking over technology that we control and can customize ourselves, instead of inside the owned networks of major companies like Facebook or Google. Those companies are seeking to branch out as well, trying to colonize the web (in the words of Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang) with tools like Facebook Connect.

But many of us may decide not to trust them anymore, and to use the tools that are becoming available to build and host our own systems of communication. People who control their own systems of communication can innovate on them outside the boundaries of the financial interests of big communication companies and we can all benefit from those innovations.

This summer is an important period in answering those questions.

At one time, FriendFeed clones like Lifestream.fm and Socialthing! looked like promising alternatives, but neither of them offered the same rich and innovative features that FriendFeed does - the very features which made FriendFeed the standout service that it is today. However, there is one service that may have an opportunity to capitalize on the FriendFeed exodus: social media aggregator Streamy.

When we looked at Streamy back in March of this year, we were more than impressed with what it had to offer. For some reason though, the service's social networking aspects never really became heavily used by the early adopter crowd. Everyone had their own reasons for this decision of course, with complaints which ranged from the service feeling a little too raw for everyday use to its RSS reader which couldn't (and still doesn't) provide a viable alternative to Google Reader. However, we think the main reason for the lack of uptake has more to do with the fact that Streamy's core audience was already busy interacting, commenting, and "liking" items over on their social media aggregator of choice: FriendFeed.

Now, with FriendFeed out of the way (or soon to be, that is), it may be time for us to give Streamy another look. There are a number of features which should appeal to today's FriendFeed users if they decide to make the switch. However, there are still some issues with how Streamy implements these features, and we'll make note of those too.

1. FriendFeed Friend Import

When you sign up for Streamy, you have the option to find your friends on other services. One of those services is FriendFeed. By clicking on the "People" link at the top of the page then selecting "Find Friends" you can import your friends from Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Google, and even Flickr. This is at least as good as FriendFeed's own friend import process which only imported from email, Twitter, and Facebook. Plus, it gives you the ability to easily re-create your FriendFeed social graph on Streamy without having to manually seek out your friends and re-add them.

What Streamy needs to work on: One thing Streamy needs to improve in this area is the ability to "select all" the friends it finds and let you follow them in one fell swoop. At the moment, you have to click "Follow" next to each individual who you want to add. It's also really hard to see who's following you and then reciprocate. Although new followers appear on the homepage in the "new from friends" section, you have to "remove" each person from this box after following them only to have more new followers appear in their place. And there's no way to tell whether or not you were already following these people, which leads to confusion. There should be a centralized way of managing this activity and the homepage widget definitely needs to sync with your following choices made on the backend.

2. Comment on Stories

On the Streamy homepage, a section called "Stories for You" delivers personalized news based on your site activity like stories you and your friends are sharing and commenting on. However, since at first Streamy has no activity to go on, it simply recommends "popular" stories to you and those may not be stories you actually enjoy. Like FriendFeed, you can comment on these stories and those comments will be seen by others reading the same story. Also like FriendFeed, undesirable stories can be hidden from your view with the "hide" button. However, unlike FriendFeed, Streamy actually introduces a great feature here: threaded comments. Each comment has a "reply" button next to it, letting users reply to each other's comments as opposed to simply creating a new one.

What Streamy needs to work on: Although FriendFeed's river of news was also personalized based on who you followed, the site offered a number of ways to surface popular content. When your friends commented on an item, it "bubbled up" to appear at the top of your stream, for instance. FriendFeed also had a "best of day" feature which displayed the most active stories that day. Streamy doesn't have anything like this so content with comments could easily become lost. For now, the best way to see stories your friends comment on is in the "New from People" homepage widget (also available in the "People" section) which is an activity feed of your friends' comments among other things.

3. Groups: Streamy's Version of FriendFeed Rooms

Streamy has a feature which lets you create groups which is somewhat reminiscent of FriendFeed's Rooms feature. As with Rooms, groups can be topic-based so you and your friends can discuss the news. You can browse through your own group memberships to see which groups you're a member of and you can access the admin features for the groups you own. Also like FriendFeed, groups can be public or private as you choose and you can invite members simply by typing their name.

What Streamy needs to work on: Unlike FriendFeed, groups can't be auto-populated with content like RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, YouTube videos, etc. Everything needs to be manually entered through a text box or shared with the group via Streamy's sharing features. However, sharing items from your subscriptions or recommended stories is more difficult than it should be. Despite Streamy's cool drag-and-drop interface for posting to external services, sharing with groups or individuals still leaves a lot to be desired.

When you first grab an item to share it, icons appear letting you save it (the star icon), share to other services like Facebook or Twitter (green arrow), or share with a friend (people icon). When you select the share with friends option, though, only a limited number of people appear and they're only identified with their avatar, not by name. Also missing is a way to share with the groups from here.

Instead, to share with a group, you have to click on the story's headline then access the share button from the top right of the article. Once here, it's very easy to share with either people, groups, or services. It's the sort of option that should be available directly from the homepage without any extra clicks.

4. Your Shared Stuff

Another sharing feature in Streamy is the one where you're able to share items by posting them to your profile. This feature is activated through the drag-and-drop interface and dragging the content to the Streamy service from the available list of services to post to (green arrow icon, once again). This posts the story to your profile which your friends can then see when they click on "Shared Stuff" from their own Streamy homepage. It also appears in the "New from People" homepage feed. In a way, this is a lot like FriendFeed's home feed which is comprised of all the shared items from your FriendFeed friends.

What Streamy needs to work on: Unlike FriendFeed, your own "Shared Stuff" isn't populated with the dozens of social media services that FriendFeed supports. Instead, Streamy displays all your site activity, including friends you added and groups you created or joined. Your friends will then see your Streamy status updates, shared stories, and stories you commented on mixed in with these other activities in their "New from People" feed. We're not sure that we want to see people's site-wide activity (like who they just friended) - we're more interested in the actual content they're sharing.

5. ...And So Much More!

What Streamy really has going for it, though, is what FriendFeed didn't - the dashboard aggregator, integration with other social media services, and built in chat. Streamy's layout is a lot different from FriendFeed - or from Twitter for that matter - and that may be good thing in some people's opinion. As opposed to a real-time "river of news" the site's homepage is a widget-filled dashboard with updates from your feeds, Facebook, and any other services you add. It also includes a friend list showing your IM buddies from Google Chat, AIM, or MSN. The Status update box lets you post to Facebook, Twitter, Streamy, or (for now) FriendFeed. As you delve into the dashboards for the other services using the small buttons at the top, you'll be surprised to find things like a full-on Twitter client complete with replies, DMs, and trending topics, for example. Digg's dashboard is a nice, consolidated view of what's hot on that service... and so on.

If you don't like the dashboard, you can also choose to have Streamy load up directly to your feeds or one of the other social media services Streamy supports.

What Streamy needs to work on: Adding widgets to the dashboard needs improvement. You have to first click on the widget (+) button from the top of the page to select the additional widgets. While simple enough in theory, there were some bugs when testing this out. For example, adding a Digg widget for the topic "Technology" was a dead-end. After you get the drop-down box to select a topic, there's no "go" or "add" button to actually complete the process.

Conclusion

In the end, Streamy shows a lot of potential for becoming a great service and they could certainly capitalize on FriendFeed's impending shutdown if they so desired. However, there's still a bit of work to be done to make the service as usable as it needs to be for ex-FriendFeed users. In Streamy's defense, however, they originally never had the goal of competing with FriendFeed which is why things are the way they are. Like us, they never imagined FriendFeed would be acquired and shut down. Now that it has sold, though, the company is interested in seeing how they could appeal to the community of early adopters who originally made FriendFeed their home.

Will Streamy be able to make the necessary changes in time before someone else lures the ex-FriendFeeders over to their service? Perhaps. The company, currently a small 3-person team, has made amazing strides so far and is currently looking into getting additional funding. In the next couple of months, if things go well, we may see a lot of changes happen very quickly - specifically to the social networking aspects of the service. The company also sees a lot of potential to incorporate new features which aren't simply FriendFeed dupes. Hopefully, we'll be able to update this post someday soon with details as to what those may be.

FriendFeed was co-founded by Paul Buchheit, the man who invented GMail, and by Bret Taylor, who co-founded Google Maps. They both made enough money from being early Google Employees that they never needed to work again and didn't need to sell to Facebook - but they joined Facebook because they wanted the work they'd done on FriendFeed to change the world of social networking. Here's what they bring to Facebook; it's probably going to change Facebook a lot.

FriendFeed is a very unusual social network, but we've long suspected it represents the future of social networking. We got one of the first interviews with Taylor and Buchheit eighteen months ago and that podcast is still one of the best ways to learn about how FriendFeed works.

Now that the service has been live for some time, here are the most important parts of it that will likely influence the way Facebook works.

1. Public Profiles and Content

Facebook started out as a site where you couldn't see the pages and posts of people you didn't know. It still retains a lot of that flavor, but this summer Facebook started moving toward a much more public and less private experience.

FriendFeed is very public. Everyones' profiles and postings on the site are public and the software has a very interesting flow that prompts people to discover new users that they have no connection with other than conversation around a common topic. FriendFeed's innovations in managing very public conversation will likely come in handy for Facebook as that site opens up more and more too. It's a sensitive subject, as most Facebook users like the privacy orientation just like it is, so bringing in some top minds on fast, frictionless, public social networking is a smart move by Facebook.

2. In-depth Conversations

Conversations around shared items on FriendFeed make Facebook look like MySpace. It's not that FriendFeed has more sophisticated users - though by being limited to early adopters so far is part of that. it's because of a key difference in the architecture of FriendFeed.

When I post something to FriendFeed, all of my friends see it. If one of them comments on it or "likes" it, then two things happen that don't happen on Facebook. First, our conversation suddenly appears in the news feed of all the friends of the person who commented on my item - whether they know me or not. That doesn't happen on Facebook. I can see the names of people who comment on my friends' items - but if my friends comment on items shared by their friends I don't know - there's no notification of that in my news feed.

Second, whenever anyone comments on or "likes" any item that's appeared in my stream of friends' updates - it's pushed back up to the top of my FriendFeed page. That makes it all the more likely that I will comment on it again or for the first time.

These two features lead to one thing: big, diverse, thorough conversations around items shared on FriendFeed. It's a defining quality of the service and one that Facebook users might really like to have as an option.

When FriendFeed users complain that Facebook is stupid and filled with dumb apps (remember complaining about how ugly MySpace was?) it's in large part because the conversation on FriendFeed has a lot more depth to it.

Neither of these features are as simple as described above. FriendFeed's Buchheit told us by phone today that both have a lot of complex rules that have evolved around them based on the experience of having this kind of social software in the wild. Learning what kinds of content to cross over from one social group to another and how to decay the prominence of conversations over time are among the skills that the FriendFeed team can no doubt offer Facebook.

3. Cross Group Interactions

You meet new people on FriendFeed. They show up again and again in conversations with your friends until you make some of those new people friends of your own. That's very different from Facebook, where you connect with people you already knew from real life.

4. Multiple Network Aggregation

Conversation starters on FriendFeed don't just come from people inputting text right into FriendFeed - most of it comes from content pulled automatically in from other networks. Especially Twitter. (From a technical perspective, you have to wonder if Twitter is going to turn off full "firehose" access to FriendFeed this afternoon or if they'll wait until tomorrow morning. Twitter can't be excited about giving their crown jewels to Facebook all the sudden.)

Bookmarks, slide presentations, videos favorited on YouTube - all kinds of other social networks get synced up with your FriendFeed account and then get pulled in automatically to be discussed on FriendFeed. That's one of the best things about FriendFeed - you can follow a person and see what they are doing across all kinds of other sites, whether you participate as well in those other sites or not.

That's quite different from the way that Facebook has tried to pull items in one at a time through Facebook Connect.

Thousands of people are helping FriendFeed stay valuable even though they never use the service anymore - they synced up their other accounts and their activity there is still being pulled in automatically so their friends can view it on FriendFeed.

5. Real Time Updates

Facebook is definitely interested in real time updates, and they offer a version of real time streaming already. FriendFeed feels a lot more real time though. On FriendFeed you don't get notification that there are new messages - you get served up the messages, comments, likes and other information as they happen using a technology called Long Polling. It can be overwhelming for the uninitiated - but so was the Facebook News Feed when it was launched.

We wouldn't be surprised if some of the real time features of FriendFeed found their way into Facebook. FriendFeed's Buchheit told us earlier this year that he believes real time conversation is the next big step on the web.

How realistic is cross pollination?

We talked to Buchheit on the phone this afternoon in what was a nice but relatively superficial PR phone call. He cautioned that he "wouldn't read too much into future Facebook development" because the two companies "have different histories." But he also said that he was interested in joining Facebook's team because the companies have "the same long term view." When asked for specifics on what exactly that means, Facebook's VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer said he had to "decline to go into specifics." But said there was "a long standing mutual admiration, both products have evolved with each other."

We fully expect that Facebook gave up a respectable chunk of stock and cash to get the FriendFeed guys into their offices and not just to keep the chairs warm. FriendFeed will likely change Facebook in important ways and for now looking at how FriendFeed works is the best set of clues we have available.

Facebook had continually copied parts of FriendFeed's feature set, including the 'like' feature and Facebook's new focus on the real-time stream. Still, this acquisition took us by surprise. After all, while FriendFeed has been lingering in terms of users adoption, Facebook has been growing rapidly and doesn't really need FriendFeed's user base to continue this growth.

On the technical side, however, FriendFeed has a lot of expertise, especially when it comes to aggregation and real-time updates. Given that Facebook is also moving in this direction, this move does indeed make a lot of sense, as Facebook gains access to FriendFeed's talent pool.

FriendFeed's employees and founders will join Facebook.

What Will Happen to FriendFeed?

The question now, of course, is what will actually happen to FriendFeed. Will it continue as a separate service or will it be rolled into the Facebook ecosystem? For now, the two will operate as separate entities, but in the long run, chances are that Facebook will try to roll more of FriendFeed's services into its own offerings.

FriendFeed's API will also continue to operate normally.

FriendFeed's Users: Mostly Unhappy

The first reactions from FriendFeed's users have been relatively negative, as users are worried about what will happen to the service once it becomes more tightly integrated with Facebook. In an interview with Rober Scoble, FriendFeed's Paul Buchheit stressed that the company will not just abandon its users, though he didn't go into the company's exact plans.

Here is a copy of Facebook's press release:

Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- August 10, 2009 -- Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed's four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams.

"Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends," said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. "We can't wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users around the world."

"As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they've built and their desire to have us contribute to it," said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founders. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google's "Don't be evil" motto, added, "It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook's engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group."

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they've brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. "As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Installing Echo is just as easy as installing the plugins of its competitors like Intense Debate or Disqus - which is dealing with a major spam problem these days. JS-Kit provides plugins for WordPress and Blogger, as well as a code-snippet for other blogging platforms.

The Best Things in Life Aren't Free

It's important to point out, though, that the most interesting features, including real-time updates and comment aggregation from third-party sites like Twitter and FriendFeed are not available in the free version of Echo. The free version includes most of the core features of Echo, including the ability to share comments on Twitter and Facebook, nested replies, moderation tools, and customization.

For $98 a year, paying users will get access to Echo's aggregation features and real-time updates. JS-Kit also offers a white-label solution with priority support, as well as OEM integration.

It's good to see some development in the blog commenting market again. After a flurry of announcement and product releases last year, development and new product releases markedly slowed down this year, even though the growth of Twitter and Facebook only intensified the problem of comment fragmentation.

To achieve this, we must first stop arguing over the different flavors of search.

Because the promise of social network integration with search is a current favorite topic, we'll focus in this post on that: a class of social search. This is also a response to the ideas brought up by Alex Iskold in his post on the future of search.

Alex proposes that we rank search results by a kind of Social Relevancy Rank, first displaying results from friends and people whom we follow and later displaying results from "taste neighbors" and influencers, etc. FriendFeed already filters results by your friends' content first. Twitter's Trending Topics, by contrast, shows the crowd's perspective. While one's personal social circle could improve the relevance of some search results (and I noted some months back that this is a promising model), this type of filtering is more challenging than it sounds.

First, as Alex points out, "trusted opinions are scarce." Our friends couldn't possibly know everything we're interested in, and the smaller our social circle, the worse the problem becomes. Even with large social graphs, sooner or later we will undoubtedly search for a topic that hasn't been indexed in our friends' activity streams, and then we'll get few to no results and suffer an inferior user experience. We'd be better off turning to good ol' Google... the very thing we're trying to best!

Secondly, getting Social Relevancy Rank right involves a lot of insight into what users care about. Alex comments that, "This is not difficult for FriendFeed to do because... it knows who you care about." But does it? On FriendFeed, I follow only a limited number of the people I actually care about. Do those people alone account for the things I care about? And when I perform a search, does the engine know what I'm caring about at that moment? True, we have to start somewhere -- as PageRank did -- and tweak the algorithm over time. But suggesting that even a smart Social Relevancy Ranking is clued in to what we care about at any given moment is presumptuous at best given the state of the art.

Yet, having different levels of social relevance is a good theory, and Alex's demarcations are sound, in essence. But each level more likely indicates degrees of social proximity than relevance per se; although in some cases closer proximity may very well indicate greater relevance. The problem is that relevance is highly contextual. It depends on many factors, such as your profession, your search query, your friends, your friends' knowledge about those topics, and the information that is publicly recorded in their activity streams.

For example, a financial analyst (i.e. an expert) wouldn't care if her closest circle of friends was Twittering about how complicated a new tax code is. As an expert, she'd rather know exactly how the new policies affect an edge-case client of hers. Filtering search results by "friends and following" at one end and "the crowd in aggregate" at the other may fail equally in uncovering the right piece of information for her.

For general users, the "it depends" factor may be the urgency with which information is needed. When the need is urgent, people will actively search for the information (in any number of ways); other times, information may be welcome but only encountered serendipitously or consumed passively. Browsing feeds, Twitter posts, and Facebook streams are all passive ways of discovering information. Putting these activities on a continuum in which information search is active but information discovery is passive could look like this:

But to actually achieve a "Social Relevancy Rank," we have to consider how layers of social proximity map onto this search-discovery continuum.

When people actively look for a piece of information (e.g. the best Barbary Coast Trail guide for tomorrow's hike), they likely require trustworthy, high-quality information that could at least inform their decision. "Friends and following" could serve as a reliable social filter at this stage. But as the urgency subsides (e.g. just poking around for a mint julep recipe a week before a get-together), we relax our requirements and even welcome a wider set of results. At this stage, filtering results by friends of friends, influencers, experts, and even crowds in aggregate is appropriate.

Of course, serendipitously discovering information from "friends and following" would be welcome in other instances. So, to actually improve social relevancy in search engines and discovery services, there would have to be a distribution of acceptable social filters whose levels depend on how active the user is and what the user is searching for:

What this still fails to address, though, is how to assess the urgency of a user's needs or how to derive that level of urgency from the user's known behavior. This is a problem that engineers, designers, and HCI researchers have been struggling to solve for a long time (and a million dollars will get you only so far).

The problem of effective search runs deep. You can have all the flavors you want -- social, real-time, semantic -- and tomorrow's flavor will be merely another riff on the same tune. Yes, social networks and the social graph have the potential to meaningfully filter millions of otherwise undifferentiated pages of results. But words like "meaningful" and "relevance" are so contextualized -- varying as they do from user to user and usage case to usage case -- that they can't be expected to mean anything unless they are anchored by context. Mapping social proximity to users' active and passive information consumption could help us create more contextualized user experiences on the social Web, resulting in less time spent naming the latest flavor of search and more time spent actually improving search.

Guest author: Brynn Evans is a PhD student in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego who uses digital anthropology to study and better understand social search.

Real-time Web search (of streams of activities) is a hot topic right now. Everyone, including Google and Microsoft, recognizes the value of using trusted contacts as filters. What was once called social search is now called real-time search, but this time it will really happen. First, it will be applied to streams and then to the Web in general.

What we are about to get is a Social Relevancy Rank. Whenever you search streams of activity, the results will be ordered not chronologically but by how relevant each is to you based on your social graph. That is, people who matter more to you will bubble up. How does this work? Well, there will be a formula, just as there is a formula for Page Rank.

Here is an idea so obvious that it is surprising Twitter has not implemented it already: front-load search results with people you follow. When you search for, say, "Wilco" on Twitter today, the results are in the chronological order. That is not really relevant because you do not know who most of these people are. But if instead you could see people you follow, the search results would be much more useful.

This is not possible on Twitter today, but it already works great on FriendFeed. There, results are filtered or ranked based your social graph. This is not difficult for FriendFeed to do because, on the one hand, it knows who you care about and, on the other, it applies its advanced feed search technology to your social graph:

This sounds awesome, but there is a problem. "Wilco" works well as a query because the band has just released a new album, but many other queries would return no results. Simply put, your friends on Facebook and people you follow on Twitter can't possibly have an opinion on every topic you may be interested in. This is a problem of sparse data: trusted opinions are scarce.

Small Worlds and Taste Neighbors

To solve the problem of sparse data, we need more data... obviously. One possible solution is to incorporate other sources that you trust (i.e. broaden your social graph). As a next step, search results could rank people you may not be directly following but who are being followed by people you follow. Or in Facebook-speak, friends of friends. You could argue that you are not familiar with their opinions and so cannot yet trust them, but given the small world phenomenon, their contributions are often just as valuable.

Another step could be to include people with similar tastes, so-called taste neighbors. This approach is common among vertical social networks such as Last.fm, Flixster, and Goodreads. These networks have ideas about which people, other than your friends, are like you. However, this is a costly calculation and takes time. In order for Twitter to do something like this, it would have to compare people based on links or perform semantic analyses of tweets over time. Yet even though this is a difficult problem, it will be solved in time.

The Influencers and the Crowd

Aside from using the "second degree" of your social graph or taste neighbors, a Social Relevancy Rank could front-load influencers. In the absence of any other metric, someone who is followed by hundreds of thousands of users is likely more relevant to you than someone you don't know at all. Using number of followers as a weight might be a good way to order the rest of the activity stream.

In general, combing through countless tweets from strangers is not terribly useful anyway. Just as people have stopped looking at anything beyond the first page of results on Google, sifting through pages of tweets in chronological order gets tedious quickly. What needs to be incorporated into the Social Relevancy Rank is the aggregate sentiment of the crowd: a score that tells you yay or nay and gives you an opportunity to drill into more results if you choose.

The Quest for the Perfect Filter

There is no such thing as a perfect formula. Even Page Rank isn't perfect. Yet we all use it and find it useful. Much as Page Rank has been adapted and tuned to search the web, Social Relevancy Rank will evolve over time to help us make sense of endless streams of activity. This ranking will have a profound impact on how we tap into our friends' opinions.

It will change the face of general Web searches in time, too. Today, results are automatically ranked by relevancy and freshness. Once Social Relevancy Rank is factored in, search results will be re-ordered based on social relevancy.

And now, as always, please tell us what you think? What would you expect from a search engine with Social Relevancy Rank built in?

Twitter has acquired two other companies so far, that we know of. Search engine and sentiment analysis service Summize became Twitter's own search engine and Values of N sold its assets so engineer Rael Dornfest could be brought into the company. Here are ten other startups we think that Twitter should consider acquiring next. Which kind of company would you most like to see become part of Twitter itself? We've got a poll below.

Some of these we think are likely acquisitions, some less so. In making this list we considered both functionality that would be helpful to have added to Twitter's own site and technology that would be worth buying instead of just building in-house. Whenever a platform company builds technology that a number of other startups offer, there is a risk of scaring other people away from investing in development that the platform could just reproduce. Acquisitions of startups on a platform probably increase the appeal of development though, as it's a chance to get in on the game.

Quite Likely, if It Hasn't Happened Already

Bit.ly is the most full-featured and popular URL shortener on the market right now and was recently selected as Twitter's own shortener of choice, dethroning TinyURL. Bit.ly offers all kinds of smart analytics, from real-time click tracking to semantic analysis of topic keywords from the links that people tweet.

One trusted industry source speaking on the condition of anonymity told us that Bit.ly servers "were moved into Twitter's racks months ago in preparation for this change" [of becoming the default shortener]. Bit.ly is becoming too important to Twitter to keep that functionality outside the company's own shop and the two companies share some investors. We will not be surprised at all if a Bit.ly acquisition by Twitter is announced sometime in the near future.

Could Happen...

Tweetmeme is another fast growing Twitter analytics service that tracks sharing on the service. With another chunk of new features just added today, the service is looking a whole lot like "Feedburner for Twitter" but with even more viral distribution possibilities. The Tweetmeme API is quite interesting and could complement Bit.ly quite well.

Twitpic is a popular way to share images on Twitter. The site faces a strong challenge from ImageShack's YFrog, but independent Twitpic would be a cheaper acquisition and is already well known among Twitter users. (Twitter should probably look at Enjoysthin.gs; it's got the best user experience.) An increase in imagery on Twitter would probably offer the company a lot more advertising real-estate.

Tweepz is a fascinating Twitter search engine that acts like a directory that lets you parse your results using various metrics gleaned from Twitter. Check out this search, for example. Twitter could benefit from making this kind of search available to users, advertisers and researchers - and Tweepz has already built it. See also Twazzup, another company doing interesting things with Twitter data.

Longer Shots

An iPhone app company could be a good buy for Twitter; there's certainly plenty of options. M.Twitter.com is a good mobile service already but someone specializing in super high-quality Twitter apps for the iPhone, Android and Pre could be good to bring in house. It could be AteBits, makers of Tweetie. There may not be enough reason for Twitter to buy one of these companies, though.

A desktop Twitter app company could help Twitter increase user engagement. Many of the most serious Twitter users (though not all) swear by desktop access. Twitter could acquire the most popular and arguably most innovative desktop app, Tweetdeck, or it could bring Seesmic in house. Tweetdeck would be cheap and shares investors with Twitter. Desktop apps may be too limited in appeal to be a compelling acquisition target.

Geo-location could be a good feature to add to Twitter. Search by user location could be made much more meaningful and the list of things that could be done with it is very long. Brightkite is popular and well developed, Shizzow is pretty and wouldn't be expensive. On the other hand, browsers themselves will likely all become more location aware in the near future and Twitter may be satisfied with its current location data.

A semantics company could bring structure to the Tweets, making them more useful and easier to advertise against. Right now links Tweeted are semantically analyzed by Reuters' Calais and sent to Bit.ly, but we wouldn't be surprised if Twitter was interested in scooping up a small semantics shop and helping it scale so that analysis was being done in house. Twitter may feel like semantics don't need to get that close to consumer users, though. (Disclosure, Calais is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.)

Topify is a widely loved service that intercepts your new Twitter follower notification emails and sends you much more useful ones. It's great but probably too easy for Twitter to just reproduce itself.

FriendFeed plus Twitter would be a match made in heaven. It would be an engineering powerhouse. It would be a step towards mainstream user adoption of FriendFeed, a service that can't make up its mind which end of the sophistication spectrum it's targeting. It's also quite unlikely to happen. If there's one related startup we can imagine turning down a Twitter acquisition offer, it's probably FriendFeed. (Though the investment-laden and highly ambitious OneRiot is a close second.) Nonetheless, it would be awesome if FriendFeed's cross-network aggregation, threaded conversations, groups, media support, search and more joined forces with Twitter.

Ultimately, it may be most likely that Twitter's next acquisition will be something vapid. A service that aggregates shopping Tweets, or celebrity Tweets, or something else that will fall short of taking advantage of the Twitter platform's huge potential to change the world. Twitter staff makes relatively simple use of its own service, so hoping that it will acquire companies that make it all the more powerfully sophisticated may be an early adopter's pipe dream. [Update: After some discussion this afternoon, I am thinking it's time to reconsider this position I've held for some time. Twitter staff is not full of dummies, I'm sure, and it has probably been inappropriate of me to write as if that's the case.]

Maybe not, though. We wouldn't be shocked to see Twitter pick up at least a few of the companies above. What do you think? Are there other services you'd like to see become part of the Twitter team even more than the above? It's a wild and woolly micro-content ecosystem out there - anything could happen.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Doug Coleman, Jolie O'Dell, Dana Oshiro , Lidija Davis and Steven Walling.

We think that would make a whole lot of sense. In fact we think that if real time search were turned into a business tool it could challenge social media monitoring services like Radian6, Scout Labs and Sysomos. Here's what we think needs to happen in order for that to become a possibility.

We think FriendFeed could offer some of the most sophisticated social media conversation tracking on the web, if it just took a few steps in particular.

Broaden the Index Beyond Opt-In

Right now FriendFeed tracks what users say and do across more than 40 different social media sites and any RSS feeds (like blog feeds) that users input as part of their profiles. It's a great way to track people and topics on networks you yourself don't participate in.

Because FriendFeed is such a high-profile startup, many people have set up accounts just to try it and have their activities pulled into the site automatically even though they no longer use FriendFeed itself. That adds to the richness of the site's search function.

If FriendFeed wants to offer full-service conversation tracking, though, it is going to need to go beyond the early-adopter crowd that has opted in to having their activities imported into the site. FriendFeed is going to need to proactively discover and import feeds from users of Twitter, Delicious, SlideShare, BrightKite, etc., and bloggers who have not set up FriendFeed accounts. This will increase the usefulness of the site's search function by an order of magnitude.

That's no small task! Many startups have tried to do social-media-wide search in the past but few can achieve the scale and speed needed to pull it off well. Two things make us think FriendFeed can do it. First, who better than the creator of Gmail to achieve new heights in rapid, scalable information delivery? Buchheit isn't the only former Googler on the team, either. Second, FriendFeed has been engineered from the start to import massive amounts of data. A number of the streams FriendFeed pulls in aren't even from RSS feeds as you'd expect; the company's co-founders told ReadWriteWeb in an early interview that they import from a wide variety of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) beyond RSS.

Spam Control

Right now there's a fair amount of spam on FriendFeed and we imagine it's only going to get worse. There's also a lot of people who use the service as their RSS reader - so blog posts and search results show up in your search results even though no one has touched them.

This wouldn't be a difficult problem to solve. FriendFeed is just a few steps away already from allowing searchers to query all sources other than manually imported RSS feeds except when a feed item has one or more comments or "likes" added by a user.

Apply Business Savvy

There are all kinds of ways that FriendFeed could become more business savvy. One way we would suggest is through making more use of LinkedIn.

FriendFeed users have been able to associate their LinkedIn profiles with their FriendFeed accounts since the start of the service, and job changes used to be displayed right along with Tweets and other online activity. It was great. Unfortunately, LinkedIn knows what a pot of gold it sits on and took the noxious step of cutting off these kinds of importing functions by obscuring the HTML on its profile pages. FriendFeed was scraping those pages for changes and it was a great service for everyone. It was pure folly by LinkedIn; it wasn't specifically targeting FriendFeed, but as a result FriendFeed users no longer see when their friends change jobs and so no longer click through to LinkedIn to learn more.

Fortunately FriendFeed hasn't removed LinkedIn as a field that can be viewed by users; it just doesn't update anymore. When you see that someone has said something in your search stream, you can often click through to their LinkedIn profile to see what they do for a living and what their job title is. FriendFeed could display job titles by default on a business version of FriendFeed if LinkedIn was more agreeable, or FriendFeed could look to the much friendlier and social media-savvy Google Profiles instead.

Knowing the job titles of people who have bookmarked your web page in Delicious or shared it in Google Reader would be really valuable.

Some other business-oriented rules, like alerts when certain discussion thresholds have been reached, would go a long way too.

Bring Back Aggregate Analysis

When FriendFeed launched, it offered some great data visualization, showing you the users whose content you "liked" the most and who "liked" your content the most. It showed in a pie chart which services most of your content came in through.

Unfortunately, in a recent redesign aimed to make the service more mainstream-user friendly, those visualizations were eliminated.

Bring that and more back and you've got a viable competitor for services that businesses pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for. Add some sentiment analysis, made easier by FriendFeed's "like" feedback function, and you've got a really desirable product.

Will FriendFeed take these steps though? That depends on whether it continues its Quixotic quest to capture more everyday consumer users for a cross-network, real-time conversation aggregator (!) or finds audiences that appreciate its value and starts building out features that they will pay for.

But instead of continually pointing out the problem, maybe it's time for the innovators in our community to start thinking up solutions. Here's one we just thought up...let us know what you think.

The pseudo-anonymity of the internet - or at the very least, the ability to write something cruel without having to face the person eye-to-eye - often leads people to express themselves in ways that are far from how they would behave in real life. In the past, this typically led people to hide behind pseudonyms and screen names so they could post whatever they wanted without fear of repercussions.

That's why I recently proposed that some communities put an end to online anonymity, thinking that if you removed the masks from people's identities, they would start behaving properly. Of course, this led to a lot of debate in the comments. Obviously, I never meant that anonymity needed to be banned from the internet entirely - the world isn't ready for that! - but there are some places where it doesn't serve much of a purpose. (Tech blogs, for instance.)

People still hated the idea.

As a blogger who writes every day using my real name, it's hard to sympathize with the need to post tech blog comments anonymously. Everything a blogger writes, we're held accountable for. Why shouldn't other community contributors be treated the same?

But as it turns out, there was a huge flaw in my reasoning in that post. I focused on whether or not someone should use their real name when posting, but that's not the issue at all. It's not really anonymity that's to blame for the troll-like behavior we're seeing in online communities, it's the lack of accountability.

That's why (some) people seem comfortable posting mean-spirited comments on sites like FriendFeed using their real name and their real identities to do so. You see, when you post on FriendFeed, your comment quickly disappears into the site's "real-time flow" of information. Someone watching the stream sees it only momentarily, before it's replaced with others. Even within the "angry mob" threads themselves, a single comment easily gets lost among hundreds of others.

So although the comment is attached to a real name, it's a single needle in a haystack of opinion. There's no way to see, at-a-glance, what that person's commenting history was like. Were they usually nice and this angry post was an exception? Or did they make a habit of trolling? There's simply no way to know.

What's the Solution?

We don't have any answers yet, just ideas. But maybe it's time that we started focusing on solutions instead of pointing the finger at the web services...as if somehow FriendFeed itself (or Digg or YouTube for that matter) are to blame for this shameful aspect of human behavior.

Jason Kaneshiro of Webomatica proposes that FriendFeed implement threaded comments with the ability to rate comments up or down. While I agree that would be a good first step in helping the community moderate the vitriol, it certainly doesn't stop hateful comments from occurring in the first place (just look at Digg!).

Perhaps what we need is a rating system for the personalities of community participants. Think of it like eBay's "star" ratings, but instead of grading a seller on how quickly an order was shipped, etc., you'd rate each others' contributions to a community.

Imagine how this could work on FriendFeed, for example. People could rate others' comments and the aggregation of the communities' ratings would give overall insight to that person's personality. Was the comment insightful? Kind? Spammy? Mean? Were you helping a newbie feel included? Were you answering a question or participating in a poll? Do you tend to leave positive comments about X company while being negative about Y? The list could go on and on.

The system should also show not just how a single comment was rated, but what that person's overall rating is along with a history of their contributions.

If participants knew that their every action, whether "anonymous" or not, was adding up to paint an overall picture of who they really were, would this be enough of an equivalent to the kind of accountability we have in real life? The sort of accountability where people are judged on their behavior over time, and not for a single uttered statement?

Rating systems are hardly a new idea - many online communities use badges and other methods for rewarding helpful participation. But rating systems that extend beyond simply rewarding good behavior to publicizing the bad, too, don't really exist today...at least when it comes to comments and communities.

It's hard to imagine exactly what a system like this would look like, but that's where UI designers would need to flex their muscles and create something that didn't take away from the overall experience while also encouraging people to rate comments both positive and negative, not just the ones they hated.

Is this a terrible idea? If so, we know you'll set us straight. That is, after all, what the comments are for. But if you think it's awful, at least be so kind as to suggest a better alternative.

Image credit: flickr user takingthemoney