As it turned out, the Path experience wasn't only compelling to me because I'm a professional nerd. Over the holidays, I showed Path to a bunch of my best friends, and they all fell in love with it. Now that I have close people there, Path has become important to me. It's on my home screen, and Facebook is not. Path is not on the Web; it's a place in itself, and that's why it matters.

All this closeness has apparently rubbed some the wrong way. It's attracting vibes of A-list exclusivity, a trope familiar from its version 1.0 days.

Rabble-rousing in rabble-free Path app, I'd link to my post there about app's elite community, but links aren't allowed.Should blog about it

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) January 8, 2012

The 150-friend limit (which used to be 50) reinforces this feeling. At the bottom of your friends list on Path, there's a gentle yet firm warning: "Share your Path with close friends." Since connections are scarce, Path has built into it a subtle tone of rejection.

You can't be friends with everyone on Path, and you might have to turn people down. You might get turned down. I really hope that doesn't hurt your feelings. If it does, I'm afraid the Internet has screwed up your mind.

Facebook people always say they're serious about the word "friend," but its interface constantly harasses you about adding more "friends," and makes it nearly impossible to say "no." When Facebook changed the button for rejecting a friend request to say "Not Now," I simultaneously laughed and barfed.

Path is not conducive to networking or discovering people. Twitter and Facebook are great for that. Google+ can dump thousands of new people on you without even asking. We don't need another place to network. What we need is a place for intimacy and trust that is still enhanced by the sharing power of the mobile Web. That's why my friends and I love Path.

@marshallk The only community on Path is the one each user makes for herself/himself.

— Jon Mitchell (@JonMwords) January 8, 2012

@marshallk Me, too. I use different apps for that.

— Jon Mitchell (@JonMwords) January 8, 2012

Marshall and I had the above conversation in public, on Twitter. That's what I love about Twitter. Sometimes people's conversations, even about little things, are useful, interesting or amusing to others. Twitter feels personal, but it's not intimate because other people are watching.

Facebook and Google+ allow "selective sharing," but it doesn't feel special. The interactions happen in the same old place with the same old crap-ridden interface, you've just chosen a different option from a drop-down menu. Facebook Groups are a bit better, but they're still not far removed from the cacophony of the Facebook feed. All these services want to be something for everybody, and they want to be everything for as many people as possible.

Path is not everything. For example, it's not the Web. People on the Web can see things you share on Path if you post them to Twitter or Facebook, but you can't use Path itself from anything other than the app on your phone. That's my why my dear friend Randall won't accept my request:

I'm sorry, I would (maybe), but I can't be your friend on @Path since @Path hates the web.

— Randall Leeds (@tilgovi) January 6, 2012

You also can't link to the Web from Path. URLs don't work. That's an intentional decision by the Path team, and a bold one. On all the everything-networks, linking to the Web is part of the experience. Google+ may suck at it, Facebook may kidnap your links and keep them inside its walls, and Twitter may butcher your URLs, but, in their weird ways, they let you bring in all the signal and noise of the Web. Path does not. That's one of Marshall's gripes:

@JonMwords well, don't try to share links there. Or copy & paste anything

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) January 8, 2012

Let this be okay. Path is its own place. It is constrained on purpose. It's smartphone-only because that's the computer you have with you when you're out living life away from the Web. It only allows 150 friends because it wants you to think carefully about what you share and with whom you share it.

It lets you share thoughts, photos, videos, songs, places, the people with you, when you go to sleep and when you wake up. It lets you live real life with people, even if they're far away. My best friend from back in the day is on a work trip to Liberia right now. Path lets him share some of that with me. He could share it on Facebook, too. Yes. But it would be swept up in a sea of other noise. Instead, it happens alongside the lives of several other dear friends of mine.

This same friend also told me the other day that Path is making him a better person. It's keeping him "on the path," as it were. Because sharing to Path means that one's trusted, close friends will see something, it makes one carefully consider what matters to them. Thinking about sharing his life with us makes my friend plan each day more deliberately.

I don't credit Path with that. I credit our friendship. But when Path uses the word "friend," I don't barf. I may laugh, but it's no "LOL." It's actual joy.

The tech "world," or "scene," or whatever it is, is in love with this app. It tingled with excitement when Path went "stealthish" in 2010. It launched later that year weirdly lacking in features, and the blogerati still fawned over it. What is it about Path? How does "love" arise from Objective-C and 3.5 inches of glass? By evoking the people in your life, of course. And Path does that, just as Facebook does. It's a life stream. An ego trip. "Share life with the ones you love," especially yourself.

Path, in the exact manner as the conspicuously not-shipped Facebook Timeline, makes your life into a story, and your friends and family are the characters. You, of course, are the protagonist, the narrator, the star. Choose a profile picture. Choose a cover image. Share what you're doing. Are we talking about Facebook or Path? Exactly.

But Path's attention to detail puts Facebook to shame. Granted, that's easy to do when you don't have to bleed money out of your users' eyeballs yet.

Path is a closed network. You can syndicate to Facebook or Twitter if you choose, but within Path, it's for a limited number of close friends. It's full of cute signals of feeling and emotion, including emoticons and Instagrams - I mean, photo filters. The user interface is damn awesome, eye-poppingly original, soft and intimate. You can go to sleep and wake up in it, and the icon changes with the phases of the moon.

Doesn't that sound nice? Sure, it has that whole single-player-mode, where-are-my-friends problem, but it's so sexy and flattering, even when I'm alone! Just invite them all. They'll all join in. Right?

Stickiness & The Social Web

I didn't do a poll or anything, but crawling the blogosphere every day, I get the sense that people aren't satisfied with the Web. Why should we be? Bandwidth is expanding, interfaces are improving, the hardware is more responsive than ever. The Web is a communication medium that spans the globe, and by the measure of any engineer, we should be communicating better than ever. We probably are. But we aren't satisfied.

We've wound up with a social Web in which tools have to be "sticky" to catch on. Facebook is the stickiest, because that's where "everyone" is. But, - no offense, Windows people - Facebook is like the Windows of Web 2.0. It's the most broadly compatible system, but we all resent using it a little. Do you know anyone who loves Facebook? It keeps getting noisier, more confusing, and less secure.

But 800 million people use it anyway. It's "sticky." "Everyone" is on there. "I don't use Facebook" is the new "I don't have a cell phone," it is said.

So, here's Path. What Facebook should be, some say. It's for real friends, supposedly. not "friends" like the 2,000 people on Facebook. You can use Facebook like that, but then there's all the politics: can I unfriend this person, maybe I'll just mute them, what if I want to see their photos, &c, &c, &c. Sometimes it's nice to get a fresh start.

But then you have the Google+ problem. You have to convince your real friends to join in. And you, as the kind of person who would try an app like Path, say to them, "You guys. It's so cool. We can share everything with each other. Look at the moon!"

Then your friends go to the App Store or the Android Market and they peer into this uncanny valley of ego-streaming, and what do they do? Well, when Facebook introduced Timeline, what happened? A million or so (roughly 0.125%) users turn it on, Facebook looks at the data and panics. Launch date after launch date blows by. Facebook turns its attention to privacy concerns and doesn't mention Timeline.

Path is just like Timeline, only more elegantly constructed. Unlike Timeline, Path is readily available now. Go ahead. Try it out. Gaze at yourself. Does it make you want to share?

With this new Timestamp update, along with everything Timeline-related, Facebook is hoping you will share more on its platform. We're edging closer and closer toward real-live lifestreaming. Timestamping new posts with an old date not only brings you closer to your Facebook past, it also encourages you to differentiate less between your offline and online lives. Timeline urges you to share more personal content, and make that content more social than it was on your old Facebook profile. Like everything Timeline-related, this update is only available to those who have used the Facebook Developer Timeline workaround. See the Timestamp update after the jump.

Click on the clock icon and you can input a year, month and date. Once you publish the status update, Facebook will position the update on your Timeline profile accordingly.

You'll be able to easily differentiate between what actually happened on Facebook in the past, and what you've timestamped with a past date. Maybe you want to remind someone of what you were doing with them on a particular day in the past? Just tag that person, the date and location in a status update.

The actual Timeline rollout has been delayed from the expected September 22 launch date; it's expected to go live on Monday, November 7, 2011.

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.

One of the strongest inspirations for Timeline came from within Facebook itself, in the form of a startup it acquired in August 2009: FriendFeed. Co-founded by Bret Taylor, who is now Facebook's Chief Technology Officer, FriendFeed was a social media aggregator that was much beloved by Web geeks.

FriendFeed was always far too geeky for mainstream users, however to his great credit Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spotted its potential. At the time Zuckerberg called FriendFeed "a simple and elegant service for people to share information." (emphasis ours) Well, two years later and it just so happens that sharing information is a key reason why Facebook is introducing Timeline.

Yes, Facebook's Timeline is ostensibly focused on an individual's personal history - kind of like an online diary. But that's really just a front for the real purpose of Timeline: to expose your entire content history to your friends and public subscribers.

It's not just the sharing that's key, it's making that content more social. ReadWriteWeb did one of the earliest interviews with FriendFeed's founders, Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit, in February 2008. Something that Buchheit (who in the past had created Gmail for Google) said back then is more relevant than ever today, with Facebook's Timeline. Buchheit said that FriendFeed was "trying to go beyond simply aggregating to actually creating a pleasant social experience around the content." (emphasis ours)

So that's key point number 2 about Timeline: Facebook expects to make that content more social. That goal is supported by other Facebook initiatives this year, such as the real-time updates ticker and automated sharing from apps like Spotify and Washington Post.

Let's move now to a startup that wasn't acquired by Facebook, but which earlier this year launched a timeline service that is very close to what Facebook introduced later in the year. That startup's name is Memolane and we gave it a favorable review in January.

After Facebook announced its Timeline, Memolane CEO Eric Lagier tried to differentiate his service as a "Timeline of Your Life (more than just your Facebook posts)." Regardless of how Memolane is different from Facebook Timeline, he hit the nail on the head with his point that "time is the perfect tool to organize social media."

That's key point number 3 about Facebook Timeline: it organizes a lot of your social media activity, at least that which occurs on Facebook or on its third party partners like Spotify.

Incidentally, you have to feel for Memolane. An 800-pound gorilla just sat squarely on its little niche of the Web. Memoland is rather ominously "down for maintenance" as I write this, although its Twitter account reassures us that it is "preparing for some exciting things coming your way" this Tuesday. Here's hoping Memolane innovates itself into an exciting new direction with the timeline concept, because of course we love scrappy startups here at RWW.

Lifestreaming is Going Mainstream

There were many other products that Facebook probably took inspiration from for Timeline. Nokia Lifeblog and Six Apart's Vox are two that come to mind (to see how times have changed, read our mid-2006 analysis comparing Vox with Facebook). But the key points are clear from FriendFeed and Memolane:

1. Timeline is all about sharing personal content.
2. Timeline is also about making that personal content much more social than it is on your old Facebook profiles.
3. That's because a timeline is a highly effective way to organize social media content (making it easier to like, comment on and re-share).

The over-riding lesson from Facebook Timeline is that lifestreaming is going mainstream. At the beginning of this year, digital design consultancy Fjord predicted this would happen: "in 2011 we will see increasing numbers of people uploading aspects of their life to the cloud. They'll be able to combine this across multiple online services, generating meaning from data already online."

Of course Fjord wasn't to know that Facebook would implement Timeline and effectively position itself as the center of a huge trend. Which is what Facebook Timeline has done and why Facebook - and lifestreaming - is going to be very big.

Although sudoSocial would be suitable for curating any stream of content, explains the introductory blog post, in its early, still rather sparse format, it's better for personal homepages that aggregate your various feeds, like Flickr photos and blog posts, for example.

To create your own personal homepage using sudoSocial, you'll need to have an OpenID account and, the page reminds you, that's probably something you already have - even if you didn't know it. A link to OpenID's "Get an OpenID" page displays a collection of OpenID enabled services like Google, Yahoo, Blogger, flickr, MySpace, WordPress, AOL and others. For our own testing purposes, we used a Google Profile URL. Yours can be found here: http://google.com/profiles/me.

After signing in and filling out a little profile info (if it's the first time you've used an OpenID), you're taken to the Stream Editor where you can begin to add sources. Any URL, Atom or RSS feed is supported.

In the next tab, you can edit the design using CSS, JavaScript and Processing.js. (Oh, yes, did we forget to mention this tool isn't for the mainstream user?)

When you've finished your configurations, you could end up with a webpage that looks something like this: http://sudosocial.me/u/pattyokdemo, if you choose a more basic setup, or like this: http://ozten.com/homepage-demo.html if you design something a bit more advanced.

If you're interested, you can also contribute to the project by hacking the source code, found here: http://github.com/ozten/sudosocial.

A Better Option for Everyday Users: Flavors.me

However, if you were hoping that sudoSocial would provide a simple way to quickly set up a personal homepage, you're going to walk away feeling disappointed. A better option for that purpose, or really any stream aggregation of your choosing, is Flavors.me.

This lovely, user-friendly web service lets you customize everything design-wise, including typefaces, layouts and color schemes while also aggregating the feeds of your choice. And for most of the supported services (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, flickr, etc.), you don't even need to know the RSS's feed URL - you simply click "add service" and authorize the app.

That said, sudoSocial isn't designed with the mainstream user in mind. It's intended as a more advanced platform for designers and developers who know what they want and how to make it happen via code. For them, sudoSocial may be a good starting point, but it still needs quite a bit of polish and bug-quashing before it's fully ready for a wider audience.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mozilla_launches_sudosocial_an_experimental_lifestream_platform.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mozilla_launches_sudosocial_an_experimental_lifestream_platform.php Lifestreaming Wed, 02 Jun 2010 07:04:06 -0800 Sarah Perez What are you doing? How about now? Has anything changed since you started reading this blog post? Every story has a who, what, where, when, and why - but the event-driven nature of the social Web may be putting such a premium on broadcasting about what we're doing, that software designed to help us answer important questions like who and why are at risk of being neglected.

Reflecting on the human condition was once a popular past-time. A lot of people used to read poetry, as you may have heard. It may not be the Internet's fault that we're becoming less introspective - in fact the huge amount of activity data we're sharing online offers incredible opportunities for reflection, and for learning more about ourselves. It seems quite likely that we're going to miss those opportunities because our software is focused entirely on doing (and advertising) instead of on helping us think as much as it could. Of course that's much harder to do.

Burton Group analyst Mike Gotta wrote a blog post two years ago that articulated both the opportunities and some of the challenges to building meaningful value on top of our streams of aggregated data.

Stream processing systems (and associated analytical components) will become a critical underpinning for much of what is talked about in terms of workstreaming, lifestreaming, attention streams, collective intelligence and so on. Discovering patterns across people, interactions, information, activities and social networks and assessing those relationships is difficult enough. It becomes even more challenging when you also want the results to be communicated in a manner that is contextual, relevant and sensitive to attention (and confidentiality) needs.

Two years later activity streams are far, far more widespread than they were when Gotta envisioned analytics built on top of them. The analytics remain almost nowhere, though. That side of things just hasn't been meaningfully developed. Millions of people are farming for Facebook game makers, who are raking in millions of dollars, but all the social interaction that goes on in this increasingly social web remains otherwise under-utilized.

I want software that will tell me: "On Wednesdays you tend to post messages a lot in the morning, despite the fact that you have a lot of meetings. You post a lot about your health, too. Is work making you feel unhealthy?" Instead we get software like LuckyCal; it's cool but, instead it says to users "I see you're going to Denver next week, can I give you an affiliate link to buy tickets to a concert by one of the artists in your iTunes library?" That's a limited view of life and the world.

When ground-breaking service FriendFeed redesigned its site recently, it didn't build out more analytics than it initially offered each user about who connected most with their content, where their content was coming from, etc. Instead, FriendFeed shut that feature down. The API is still open and so little startups launch projects like FeedStats, but really - that's so limited it's nothing to get too excited about.

Twitter is a great, wide open platform of social data. Content, connections, time and user biographies can all be cross referenced there. The company hasn't allowed for really monster big data extraction for analysis, though.

Facebook is the most closed of all the social eco-systems, but they claim they are opening up. Firefox creator and now Facebook employee Blake Ross recently called our critique of Facebook's lack of openness dishonest but did offer this worthwhile explanation:

I believe it is disingenuous to summarize Facebook as 'fundamentally closed' because we have yet to build an API that would primarily be of interest to researchers and marketing companies. We've opened all of the information that users have granted permission to open, and that most developers have asked for.

Those are telling words. Marketers (and maybe a handful of researchers, though I'd argue that those are pretty important) are the only people who want Facebook activity stream data. Users don't want it. Developers don't, Ross claims. That's sad.

The patterns of activity in that data offer a unique opportunity to learn about ourselves - individually, in groups and as a society. Unfortunately, that opportunity may not be taken advantage of. A better title of this post might be If Web 3.0 Is Poetry, Will Anyone But Marketers Read It? The gleam of contextual advertising has shined so bright that targeted advertising is thought of as gold spun out of the straw of context. Context is being treated as otherwise worthless fodder for the creation of advertising. But the stuff of our lives isn't just a pathway to market to us.

Chris Messina is one of the leaders in the movement to create standards for Activity Stream data, so it can flow from site to site and be processed in interesting ways. It's the processing part that is most "3.0-like." Messina is optimistic. "I've made an assumption that somewhat richer feeds of what people are doing will lead to more aggregate analysis," he says.

"Blake may have a point, but I think the problem is that no one has access to the kind of data we're talking about at scale yet besides folks like Facebook or Twitter. Even FriendFeed is somewhat hamstrung with whatever comes out of these services and they have to try to pick out what's going on, in a somewhat arbitrary manner. Meanwhile, Myspace is trying to be as open as possible to maintain their position in the marketplace, and no one seems to want their data.

"I think there's a Facebook-sized opportunity to address the areas that you mentioned... to do something more subtle and intuitive based on these streams. We're really far off from it happening because the technology is so primitive still - but i do think that connecting the what that someone did with the why that motivated them will become a huge area of academic research. And yes, marketers will lead the way, and probably get a lot of it wrong. But then someone else (like Apple) will come along and synthesize all this data, and help people make better decisions by looking at everything that everyone else has done in the same situation before them...and then we'll start to see it pay off."

It may "pay off" - but if that just means in commercial terms we'll all be the poorer for it. Cool commercial apps sound great, but if that's all the further this goes that will be a real tragedy. There are technical challenges for sure, but hopefully developers will aim for the sky.

Odd "Fail" pic at top by Flickr user Nimbu.

Let's get back to Skimmer, now with our eyes open to the design side. We can mention that it's not extremely fast, that it lacks the ability to re-tweet, that the icons are small and somewhat mysterious, and that (in some modes) it takes up a large amount of screen real-estate. But those qualms are almost beside the point when you consider that it is presenting information from multiple sources in a way that has never been realized before. In fact, I am guessing the designers were going for the word unprecedented. The tile-based layout, the unique font that is both modern and legible, the smooth updates from one mode to another all belie a careful attention to detail that is all too often lacking on other tools in their haste to support everything under the sun.

We mentioned that Fallon is releasing Skimmer along with a broader image push, and you can see this on their site.  Each page carries over the same tile-based concept, cross-fading slideshow effects and generous space given to text areas. You might think all this design work is a waste of time, but think about the last time you saw the 'future crime' interface in Minority Report. You were impressed, right? I can guarantee you, that interface was not conceived as data-driven. It's pure, unadulterated design work.

New Homepages

One highlight of the new homepages is a new 'publisher' feature which looks almost exactly like a similar feature on FriendFeed. Users can now easily post updates, notes, photos, and videos right from their homepage without having to go to the specific application first. In addition, users will now be able to easily filter their streams by specific friends, the type of relationship they have with people (groups), or by the application that generated the update.

Just like on FriendFeed, users can now easily block updates from others if they turn out to be spammers or are simply posting too few interesting (or too many) updates.

Followers on Facebook

Facebook has also lifted the 5,000 friend limit, which, according to Facebook, might mean that the definition of 'friendship' on Facebook could change in the long run. According to Facebook, only a very small percentage (less than 1/10 of a percent) of users currently hits the 5000 friend ceiling, but the company wants to give those users who want to share info with more than 5,000 users the option to do so.

Thanks to updates to Facebook's privacy settings, users will now also be able to follow others without having to become actual 'friends.' This is basically the same 'friendship' model that Twitter has implemented on its service.

Changes to Pages

Facebook also announced the rumored changes to its Facebook Pages. These pages currently allow brands, businesses, and celebrities to create a branded presence on Facebook, but they are separate entities from Facebook's regular profiles. Today, the new pages are going live for CNN, U2, and President Obama and will open up to all Pages users by March 11th. In the long run Facebook wants to converge everybody on the site to have the same type of presence, no matter if they are brands, celebrities, Robert Scoble, or just regular users.

Twitter Envy: Shifting Focus to Real-Time Updates

During today's press conference, Facebook's Chris Cox also talked a bit about how Facebook's focus has been changing from being a relatively static page to its users embracing the news feed as the central part of the site. Cox also strongly emphasized the real-time nature of the news feed. We couldn't help but think that Facebook is slowly moving towards combining some of the best features of FriendFeed and Twitter on its homepages as it has seen how quickly users latched on to Twitter and its real-time updates.

How Will Users React?

It will be interesting to see how Facebook's community reacts to these changes. It seems like Facebook purposely made this announcement a week before it is going live in order to prepare its users. After all, when Facebook first introduced the news feed in 2006, its users were anything but happy about this new feature. There will also be a preview site where users can familiarize themselves with the new homepage before they see it on their own page.]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_announces_new_homepages.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_announces_new_homepages.php Facebook Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:24:29 -0800 Frederic Lardinois When it comes to storing personal digital data in the cloud and serving it up in interesting ways - we're in the very early days of a brand new paradigm.

Today popular online storage company Mozy announced that it has been merged by the company that acquired it with another acquisition called Pi (Personal Information) - into a new forthcoming service called Decho (your digital echo). Pi was founded by Paul Maritz, who is now the CEO of virtualization powerhouse VMWare. What do you get when you bring these kinds of stars together into one service? Only a few clues are available so far, but we're excited to see what Decho becomes.

Pi Looks Cool

The storage side of this arrangement, Mozy, is interesting because the company has almost one million customers and has been innovating in its marketing and services for some time. Much more interesting, though, is Maritz's stealthy former company Pi. Now a part of the new company Decho, Pi's web site contains little more than a tasty description of an unlaunched data-centered personal information service. The site says Pi intends to build on the metaphors of search, subscription, aggregation and publishing for both manual and automatic consumption.

See this paragraph, for example:

"One of the failings of today's tools is that it is hard to get back the complete context of a task. Think of being in a meeting and all the items of information that are relevant: presentations, a list of attendees, private notes by you, notes you wish to share, notes by others, action items. Today it is surprisingly cumbersome to capture all this information in a way that is easy to get back to, and if needs be share with others.

At Pi we intend to solve this problem."

API Level Innovation

Not much is known about what services Decho will create when Mozy and Pi are brought together, but the following slide from the PR deck sure looks interesting.

Though vague, that looks pretty hot to us. It looks like a turnkey point of entry for a whole world of innovation built on top of our aggregated personal data. Presumably the security emphasis found on the Pi site and in online storage service Mozy will carry though here, so Decho will allow for data owners to have complete control over access.

We don't know for sure what to expect, but we'll be watching Decho and the surrounding ecosystem of services closely in coming months.

If you've never used FriendFeed before, it's a must-see application for sharing and discussing cool stuff on the web. This new feature addition is going to make it even better.

These simple, smart settings offer a whole lot of powerful possibilities. I've never set up particular bundles of friends on FriendFeed, but now that I could get just items from them on IM, I probably will for co-workers, trailblazers, etc.

The way that the company handled commenting on multiple items, by assigning a number to each and requiring an @# reply, is really smart.

Making it this friction-free to monitor and contribute to conversations has the potential to increase participation in FriendFeed by orders of magnitude.

The Down Sides

There's no way to get an IM when someone "likes" an item, which would be a nice option to have.

Unfortunately, there's still no ability to subscribe to searches inside FriendFeed. We would really like to get IMs from FriendFeed when anyone on the service mentions our new site Jobwire, and we'd like to be able to post a reply to them from inside IM as well. Not yet, though!

So come join us on FriendFeed and we can discuss the awesome things we find online - instantly!

The service is called Storytlr (a play on story teller) and it allows members to create their own lifestreaming service at their own URL. It's similar to the recently launched services Swurl (our review) and Sweetcron, but Storytlr has a few really neat tricks up its sleeve.

After you've signed up you are requested to complete the now predictable yet painless connecting of your twitter, flickr, last.fm etc. accounts. So far so good.

One of the cool things that Storytlr surprises you with is that it allows you to manually insert your own content directly onto the site. This content can be a simple tweet-like message, a full blog post, an image or even an audio file. I love that Storytlr imports all Tweets but it automatically hides all @reply messages so they don't clutter up your lifestream and don't get published to the public unless you specifically request that the are.

The end result is essentially a blog, see mine here, where visitors can comment on your content the same way you would on any normal blog. Storytlr offers a number of widgets you can include or remove and four customizable themes.

And Now For Something Completely New

Storytlr brings something completely new to the lifestreaming game and this part is where it gets its name. We discovered the service in a post by Ernst-Jan Pfauth titled "No more standard lifestreams please, be creative!" This part is where Pfauth gets his wish. You'll notice a tab on your public profile where you can create "stories". You can think of "stories" as all the tweets, posts and media about a particular event compiled into one. A story is like a topical collection of items. To create a story is very straightforward, simply select the dates this "story" or event occurred and select which content you would like to have included. Storytlr puts all this together into a little slideshow showing all your selected tweets, videos and photographs. You can see an example of one by clicking the image below.

Storytlr really does bring something new to the lifestreaming fanatics out there and I plan to make the most out of it myself. There is still room for improvement and a few bugs to iron out. I would love to be able to customize the design of my Storytlr site entirely and I would also like to see my content added much faster (think Friendfeed fast). However, for a brand new app they've done a fantastic job with both concept and implementation.

FriendFeed had tweaked the beta design over the last few weeks and introduced 'friend lists,' which allow you to organize your friends into different categories and help you to tone down the noise in your main feed. Today, FriendFeed made this beta interface the default for all users.

You can find our review of FriendFeed's latest design change here.

Duplicates

Duplicate shares were always the most annoying aspect of FriendFeed. Whenever a story breaks, a large number of your friends are likely to share it through various services, which creates a lot of noise in your main feed. Now, FriendFeed will group these entries together. Your main feed will only show the first share, and then give you the option to click through to see who else shared the same item as well. Hopefully, this will also mean that discussions will now become less fragmented, as users will most likely gravitate towards those items that were shared first.

One really nice aspect of this grouping is that it works across services, so shared items from Google Reader, for example, are grouped with Twitter messages (and it works with tinyurls, too).

A lot of us here at RWW are FriendFeed users (we even set up our own room) and we are happy to see that the company is still working hard on improving its service by listening to its users.

Enhancements

FriendFeed has also updated the "All Rooms" page, which now hides any rooms that have been inactive for a while. This is especially handy now that a lot of people use FriendFeed rooms to live-blog events. Whereas before, these rooms would start cluttering your interface pretty quickly, they are now neatly hidden.

It's also now a lot easier to see who is subscribed to any given room, though the ability to search for rooms is still not available.

Also new is the option to immediately choose a friend list for any new friends you subscribe to (see screenshot).

Cleaner and Simpler

Overall, the new interface looks considerably cleaner. Our only complaint is that it is sometimes not quite clear if you are surfing the "Everyone" or the 'Home" tab. The color of the active tab changes from dark blue to black, which is just a bit too subtle.

In general, with very few exceptions, the reactions from FriendFeed users have been positive so far .

AOL is apparently going to put an RSS reader and a window for participating in multiple 3rd party social networks right onto its front page. This could change the lives of millions of people - snide commenters can take note that with 60 million unique visitors monthly AOL.com still gets 3X as many visitors as Digg. Check out these screen shots below.

Evidence these are real? Beyond the facts that the changes are a good idea and that TechCrunch posts things like this carefully - there's also a very savvy increase in visibility for AOL Radio on these screens. Regular RWW readers will remember our post last month about the how AOL Radio is the most popular streaming music service on the internet and is a huge asset for the company.

Why Would This Happen?

We're going to presume for the sake of discussion that these screen shots really have been leaked from inside AOL. The company has not been doing particularly well for some time. Its efforts to move away from its dial-up subscription business to an ad-based content business don't appear to have impressed anyone to date, including many of its own staff; we wrote about major upheaval in the ranks of bloggers from the acquired Weblogs Inc. network earlier this summer.

If you're going to make a stab at survival - lunging for the future sounds like a good strategy. Aggregation of content from around the web is quite likely a key part of the future for almost all successful websites; the web is too large to pretend you're an island any more, even if your network is sprawling it just can't compete with the options offered by the web at large. While mainstream users used to think that AOL was the internet for years, they are not so naive any more.

Just as Yahoo! appears to be experimenting with integrating off-site blogs with their prized News site (see our coverage from earlier today) so too it makes sense for AOL to try something daring in this department.

Lifestreaming?

Aggregating multiple social networks on one page? Several years ago this would have seemed crazy, but who among targeted young audiences doesn't belong to more than one network today? It's becoming increasingly common. An estimated 62% of Facebook users also have accounts on MySpace, and 15% of MySpace users have Facebook accounts, according to one set of numbers from last year. Another set of numbers, illustrated by the graph below, show the same thing: there's market opportunity in both overlapping users and in pointing users of services like Facebook over to Bebo and AIM as well.

Given the incredible year of growth Facebook has had, it makes sense for both users and vendors to remind AOL visitors that other social networks still exist.

The primary reason most users don't use multiple networks regularly is probably because it's inefficient to do so. Give them one easy place to do so and keeping track of activity among friends on MySpace, Facebook and AOL's AIM and Bebo networks and such a task becomes much less daunting.

Just last month, AOL acquired 2nd tier lifestreaming startup SocialThing. It only makes sense that we'd start to see some of this functionality on the home page of AOL.

But Isn't RSS Super Confusing?

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is the most popular method by which users subscribe to news feeds from websites they are interested in. It's a relatively simple concept but the technology has struggled to find widespread adoption.

It doesn't have to be that way. The rumored AOL interface is pretty straightforward. It provides a list of pre-selected feeds for users to click on, it appears to offer subscription to other feeds and it says "Read the latest news, feeds and blogs from across the web." Put that in front of millions of people and there really is a good chance they'll figure out what to do with it.

It is a risk, but AOL is in a position to take such a risk. It's just a rumor right now, but we think it seems pretty likely to come true. We'd love to see it, in fact.

In the latest release of Socialmedian, you now have the ability to share content from other sites including Google Reader, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, and the RSS feed for your own blog. In a way, this is similar to the popular lifestreaming service FriendFeed, which brings in everything you do from across the social web. But where FriendFeed forces those that subscribe to you to hide and filter the items they don't find interesting or relevant, Socialmedian puts you in control of what is or is not shared and your followers on the service will only see those items that are relevant to them.

To determine what constitutes something being relevant, newsworthy content, Socialmedian matches the streamed content from the people you follow on the service with the topical keywords in the news networks you're a member of. Only those updates that match up will be displayed to you unless you configure the service otherwise.

The one exception to this rule is Twitter. Because that service tends to be noisy, only tweets deemed popular by the community are shared by default. If you want to see more tweets, a "noise volume" slider is provided which you can use to increase the number of tweets that appear.

Other Upgrades

In addition to the news streaming, Socialmedian is now also offering bloggers a way to promote their site on service. Their new "reverse blog widget" is a widget that promotes your blog on their site (instead of the reverse - a widget that promotes their site on your blog). When anyone is reading or commenting on your blog on the site, the widget displays.

The upgrade also includes improved ways to find popular discussions and stories. They've added a "Stories" option to the site's top navigation that will let you quickly access the stories in the following categories: Popular Today, Popular Week, Popular Month, Rising Fast, and Hot Discussions.

Is News Streaming Better Than FriendFeed?

Out of all the upgrades today, the most interesting addition is this idea of news streaming. Like a less noisy FriendFeed - and one that's pre-filtered for you based on your interests (as determined by the communities you join) - there is some appeal. But for those who are already heavily using FriendFeed, there is no chance that any new service can possibly replace their activities there. In that case, where does that leave a site like Socialmedian?

Perhaps then Socialmedian can appeal to those that want to locate and read interesting news, but don't want to spend half their day in Google Reader browsing through feeds. This puts Socialmedian in competition with sites like ReadBurner and RSSMemeinstead. But difference is that those other two sites only feature Google Reader shares. Socialmedian lets you share more of the social web with friends, and they see only the parts they find valuable; that could make Socialmedian a more relevant and useful service than the others.

What do you think of the new version of Socialmedian? Share your thoughts in the comments.