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.

For users of Nokia phones, though, a new app will soon be revealed that does exactly what we always dreamed a mobile lifestreaming app should: geotag your media and upload it to the web.

The Nokia app is called LifeviNe (we don't know what's with the "N") will be available sometime in the next few weeks in Nokia's Beta Labs. With LifeviNe, everything you do can be recorded and uploaded to the web.

Based on the SportsTracker app, LifeviNe will geotag every image, video, and even your music (there are no details on the music aspect yet). The media will then be pushed to the web when you sync your phone, a process which can be done manually or automatically, depending on your preference. For security purposes, you may not want it to upload automatically since the geotagged images, videos, etc. will pinpoint your exact location on the map, but that's a personal choice you'll have to make.

Where the media ends up exactly, Nokia doesn't say, but we imagine that it will be on some sort of personal homepage within the online application. Here, you will be able to "share your journeys, filter by user, place or time," according to a post on Nokia Conversations.

There will also be a widget which you can add to your Facebook profile or blog which will display what you have been up to.

Lifestreaming Done Right

Since the app is not available yet, it's too soon to tell how usable it is or give it any sort of in-depth review. What we can say, though, is that LifeviNe looks to be one of the most promising lifestreaming apps that we've come across so far. That's exactly what lifestreaming should look like: mobile, geotagged, automatic, and inclusive of more than just text or just photos. This makes us want to run out and buy a new phone right now... Well, almost.

There are many different types of bloggers in the world today - new media journalists, "journalers," video bloggers, and others. One of the types - "diaryists" - record their innermost thoughts and feelings in a way that's very much similar to how people (yes, usually girls) once recorded their thoughts in small books kept under lock and key and stuffed beneath their mattresses.

Of course in this day and age, the thought of actually putting pen to paper seems like something from a bygone era. But the urge to create a diary hasn't been abandoned - it's just that the format has changed.

There are a few sites today that allow you to go private easily. LiveJournal and Vox cater more to the journaling crowd than WordPress does, for example, but there are many smaller sites like www.opendiary.com, www.mydeardiary.com, www.webbookdiary.com, and www.digitalexpressions.nu, that provide an online diary application.

Unfortunately, outside the larger blogging communities like LJ and the like, the quality of the online diary offerings is somewhat lacking. The digital scrapbook site, Kronomy, kicks it up a notch in terms of being a more modern tool than those previously mentioned sites above, but it's more focused on letting you share your digital, multimedia memories. And other sites like Our Story, Story Of My Life, dandelife, and My Family are more family-focused than private. None are really a quiet hideaway on the web for true diary writing.

Introducing Diary.com

But now online diaryists and diaryist wannabees can rejoice - there's a new site that's tailored just for them. With a big focus on privacy - it is your diary after all - Diary.com is a great starter blog for the little (over)sharers of Generation Z who are at the perfect age to begin their very own start blog, err, diary, right now.

Entries can be up to 1000 words max or you can paste in the URLs for photos or videos found elsewhere on the web. The site then displays the video or photo embedded in your diary. Amazingly, even just pasting in the URL of a YouTube video manages to post the video into the diary - no messing around with embed codes here - it's dead simple. Click the thumbnail of the video and you'll go to the permalinked page for the entry where the video can be played - all without having to leave the diary.com site.

Gen Z's First Lifestream

Diary.com isn't really very blog-like at all though. It's more like a lifestream than a blog, which furthers solidifies the argument that lifestreaming is encroaching in on blogging's territory. Here's a whole generation whose first blogging experience will be more like a FriendFeed sharing experience than an attempt at long, thought out writing. In fact, Diary.com's format is more like a cross between FriendFeed, Twitter, and Tumblr combined. It's like FriendFeed because of its multimedia capabilities and stream-like look and feel, but the structure also resembles Twitter with its entry box at the top and posted items below. Of course, the idea of posting multimedia along with text is a lot like Tumblr, except this Tumblog is for your eyes only - no peeking.

Shared Diaries

Private diaries aren't the only feature of the site at Diary.com. On today's social web, there is a desire to share with friends, so in addition to supporting private diaries, the option to create a shared diary is available, too. A shared diary can be sent to anyone you choose - you simply enter in their email address and share. You can create multiple shared diaries and they're available from a drop-down at the top of your screen. It's easy to envision the shared diary option used as the digital age slambook, filled with naughty observations about fellow classmates.

Conclusion

Although Diary.com isn't doing anything dramatically new, it's taking some of the best features of the social web sites we grownups know and love and simplifying them for use by first time bloggers/lifestreamers. It's worth noting that the Diary.com folks seem to think their demographic extends beyond kids - they suggest their shared diaries can be used for anything from travel diaries to baby diaries, for example. We suppose they're right, but we're betting that their best customers will be a bit younger than that.

Facebook Hits 100 Million Users

Fast growing social network Facebook has hit the 100 million users mark, according to a statement this week by Dave Morin, the company's Senior Platform Manager.

How does that compare to MySpace's ascent? A guy named Rick appears to have become MySpace's 100 millionth registered user in 2006. MySpace took 3 years after launch to hit that magic number; for Facebook it took 4 years and 6 months.

Back to School: 10 Great Web Apps for College Students

For a lot of college students, the new semester is just around the corner. Last year, we created a long list of great Web 2.0 tools that we thought would be helpful for college students.

But given how fast things develop on the web, we thought we would revisit this topic again this year and look at some of the most useful Web 2.0 tools that have the potential to help students do better in school, collaborate with their fellow students, and save them time.

Online Accounting: State of the Market

Accounting software for small business and personal use is increasingly moving from the desktop to online. However, compared to other office software, this transition to online has been relatively slow. Partly that's due to user reticence: writing a document online and sharing it with others (via Google Docs, Office Live, Zoho, or whatever you use) is one thing. Entering sensitive financial information into your browser is harder to adjust to.

So what is the state of online accounting software? In this post we tell you about our awkward experiences trying out different packages. Also do check out the comments, because there's a lot of new info there.

Jaiku Returns With Unlimited Invites

When Google acquired the microblogging service Jaiku in October of last year, many people had high hopes for Jaiku's future. Would a Google-flavored Twitter soon show up everywhere from iGoogle to the upcoming Android handset, we wondered? Instead, news from the company slowed to a trickle and the doors stayed locked to newcomers - signs that many took to mean Google had essentially abandoned the service. But this week, things are happening at Jaiku once again - most notably, unlimited invites are now available. Is Jaiku poised to make a comeback?

Sweetcron: Your Lifestream on Your Server

We were pretty excited when we first heard about Sweetcron, a self-hosted lifestreaming application developed by Yongfook. This week, after a bit of a delay, Sweetcron has finally released its software and we immediately downloaded and installed it ourselves. While it is still pretty barebone, Sweetcron represents a great solution for those who don't necessarily want to participate in the discussions on Friendfeed, but still would like to set up a lifestream.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

RWW Live: Online Music (Special Guests From Imeem, Yahoo Music, Rhapsody)

In this week's episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, our topic was online music and we had 3 very special guests on the show: Dalton Caldwell, founder and CEO of Imeem; Lucas Gonze, founder of Webjay and until recently a senior member of the Yahoo Music team; and Rob Williams, Senior VP of Music Software at RealNetworks. Also on the show were Sean Ammirati (host), Richard MacManus and Marshall Kirkpatrick. The audio is archived below for your listening pleasure.

The show included many interesting factoids about Imeem, Yahoo Music and Rhapsody. But more importantly there was a lot of fascinating discussion of online music trends and where the music industry is headed.

You can listen to the entire show here (select Episode 6):

Along with the podcast show, we also ran a poll: What are your favorite online music streaming services? See the results below, and vote for your favorites:

Google Moves to Mainstream RSS With A Simple Name Change

For all its supposed simplicity, Really Simple Syndication or RSS has continued to confuse and intimidate millions of people online years after its introduction. What can be done to make RSS more mainstream? Google plans to roll out a small but simple feature that could go a long way. We wouldn't be surprised to see every blog publishing service follow suit.

"Follow this blog" is a clear call to action and those words will soon grace the header of every blog on Blogger.com around the web. When users click that link they'll be taken to either a tab on their Blogger dashboard, presumably if they have an account and are logged in, or be introduced to Google Reader, the company's RSS reader. It's a simple, brilliant plan and we wonder what took so long.

See also: Speed Up RSS? FriendFeed's Going to Try

"Facebook Helped Me Win," Claims Politician

In Tampa, Florida, a local politician is giving credit to Facebook for his recent win in the primaries for the local County Commission. On Facebook, the crowd is still very young, with an average age of 22.96 as of this February. Typically, the youth vote, although coveted, could not be counted on thanks to low turnout of young voters at the polls. However, this small time local election may prove to be one of the first examples of the huge impact Gen Y can have on the political process.

Everything You Thought You Knew About the Business of YouTube Was Wrong

Have you turned up your nose at YouTube for being born from low quality, financially unsustainable, pirated content? If you've made that argument in conversation before (and we know many people do) - new claims from YouTube itself now indicate that you'd be wrong. Google claims that 90% of the owners of copyrighted content are now advertising against pirated video they own, when they find it using YouTube's new content ID technology. The news upends many long held beliefs about the site.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

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

Sweetcron is a self-hosted service, so you will need access to a server with PHP and MySQL running on it. After downloading the code, the install is pretty typical for that of self-hosted application. It's a bit more complicated than installing Wordpress or OpenTape, because you have to enter your data in numerous places and you have to edit your .htaccess when you want to install Sweetcron in a sub-directory.However, if you just follow the steps in the documentation, you should be able to install Sweetcron in less than 10 minutes.

After this, you just start adding your RSS feeds, and you are ready to go.

Final Result

The lifestream itself looks and works just like you would expect it, with a number of little surprises. One of the nicest features of Sweetcron is that it can format every new entry according to where it came from. A digg item, for example, gets a blue background, a Flickr items shows the photo on a green background with the caption underneath, and Twitter posts show in a blue box with your avatar in the top left corner (as long as you uploaded your avatar into the right spot in Sweetcron's directory structure).

By default, Sweetcron updates your stream every 30 minutes, but you can also set the cron service on your server to update more frequently.

You can write your own posts in Sweetcron as well, but the editor doesn't handle anything else but pure text and HTML code.

Bring Your Own Services

As of now, Sweetcron only creates your lifestream - if you want to add comments, Sweetcron recommends you install Disqus, and if you want to have a contact form on your site, it recommends you head over to wufoo to create one.

The two default themes are nice, especially the "Boxy but Good" one you can see in the screenshots here. Over time, others will surely start developing more themes and hacking the existing themes doesn't seem too hard.

Verdict

Sweetcron does exactly what it promises to do. It is important to note, though, that this is not a Friendfeed-in-a-box type service. Your lifestream stands completely separate from every other Sweetcron service (though you could create a master feed for a group by patching all the RSS feeds together and running them through another Sweetcron installation).

For those who just want to have a lifestream on their blog, for example, Sweetcron is a great solution, especially if you don't mind hacking Sweetcron to fit your own needs.

There are, of course, various other self-hosted applications that have a similar feature set (see Mark Krysnky's list here), and many of them come as Wordpress plugins, making their installation very easy. Few, though, give you the flexibility of Sweetcron.

SocialU is a half-baked, condescending, poorly designed, ad-ridden lifestreaming app built in Adobe AIR. We'd refrain from writing about it, but the things we dislike about it seem worth mentioning and with all the frothy clone-like startups flying around on the web, who doesn't like seeing one that deserves it get a good blog-lashing sometimes?

SocialU is an AIR app, so it runs on your desktop, but it acts as a single-app browser. There's no way to return to your home page, your friends' activity streams or any other logical place without scrolling down to the bottom of the page main. That's frustrating.

Almost all the links on the site throw you out into another browser tab and onto the home page of the various services aggregated. You can see when friends comment or like an item in your activity stream - but you can't interact with that information.

We'd have thought the service was just very unfinished, but the company has retained a PR agent, seems to have a fair sized staff and may be hiring some other support services as well, judging from who's on the site.

It's Hard to Look At

SocialU already has a big ad in the sidebar, annoying the handful of early users who have little reason to stay as it is. In the primary window of the browser you'll find all kinds of insipid "gifts" (McDonalds fries, Starbucks coffee) and stock-photo illustrated "give aways." Gifts on Facebook are icons drawn by Susan Kare, the woman who drew the original Mac icons. That's a classy operation. SocialU is probably pitching itself to ad networks as a company with a plan to use product placement and rounded corners to shovel money into the back of a big truck. It's awful and as the service looks today - it's not going to work.

The SocialU founder's blog is a giant block of undifferentiated text. Update: We deleted an inappropriate line here, commenting on a profile pic is pretty uncalled for and we won't do it again.

We see a lot of apps we think will improve peoples' lives and/or create a ripple effect of innovation around them. This isn't one of them.