Nevertheless, these designs look amazing. They have infinite scrolling, dynamic loading of graphics and new posts, easy re-sorting, keyboard shortcuts for navigation and, of course, one-click sharing to Google Plus "and other social sites." There are seven new templates, and they can be gently customized. More customization options will be added "in the coming weeks." The flagship Google blogs for Gmail, LatLong and Docs are getting dynamic makeovers, too.

From the Blogger Buzz blog, here are descriptions and examples of the seven new themes:

• Classic (Gmail): A modern twist on a traditional template, with infinite scrolling and images that load as you go
• Flipcard (M loves M) - Your photos are tiled across the page and flip to reveal the post title
• Magazine (Advanced Style) - A clean, elegant editorial style layout
• Mosaic (Crosby's Kitchen) - A mosaic mix of different sized images and text
• Sidebar (Blogger Buzz Blog) - An email inbox-like view with a reading page for quick scrolling and browsing
• Snapshot (Canelle et Vanille) - An interactive pinboard of your posts
• Timeslide (The Bleary-Eyed Father) - A horizontal view of your posts by time period

You can input the URL of any Blogger blog to preview it in Dynamic Views here.

Blogging Gets Complicated

Blogger is bringing the heat with this update. It builds on last month's overhaul of the blogging control panel and analytics dashboard, and its first native iPhone app launched earlier this month. I guess that rebranding effort we heard about in July isn't happening. Right now, the Blogger brand looks about as strong as ever. The move puts Blogger squarely in the camp of the bigger, louder, more intense new wave of publishing tools. These designs are not quite the full-screen blowouts of new ventures like Jux, but they certainly stretch the constraints of the term "blog."

It's a smart move, since competitors are going the other way. Tumblr designs aren't exactly minimal, but the tool is best suited for small posts that get re-shared into all kinds of different venues and layouts, and it pretty much owns that market. Posterous has tried to turn even sharper, rearranging its app around mobile posting and sharing, edging more into the territory of social media tools. And no one can forget WordPress, which is doing just fine, thank you very much, but its ecosystem rests on themes developed by third parties, and these new dynamic Blogger themes are a step or three above, technologically.

What do you think of the new Dynamic Views in Blogger? Tell us in the comments.

Originally called "Blog Networks," the creators decided to change the application's name to "NetworkedBlogs" when they purchased the external, independent web site at networkedblogs.com where an online blog directory is maintained. The application itself has not changed - it has only grown and improved. The company recently ramped up their infrastructure to handle pulling a lot more feeds and released a feature to pull the blog feed directly to your profile on Facebook. They're also continuing to improve their feed reader by adding more social elements to it.

Although we saw the potential for a simple but powerful community-building app such as this back in June, there was no way to know for sure whether or not it would catch on with Facebook users whose app preferences tend to favor games and other time-wasting applications.

As it turns out, NetworkedBlogs is fairly popular...at least among blog applications.  They currently boast nearly 450,000 active users - that is, people who interact with the application by reading, commenting, adding a blog, etc. And the total number of installs sits at just over 700,000. That's huge when compared to the other blogging apps out there. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't have a category just for blogging apps, but a search for "blog," "blogs," and "blogging" shows that their nearest competitor hasn't even cracked 100K, and, in many cases, other apps haven't even gathered 5000 users. 

Additionally, bloggers who are using the NetworkedBlogs application are adding about 500 blogs per day, bringing the current total to 125,000 blogs available via this Facebook blog network.

What's New: A Network Widget for Your Blog (+Invites)

The latest big addition to the network is a new Network Widget which can be added to your blog's web site. When the widget is clicked, a Facebook Connect window pops up allowing your visitors the opportunity to follow your blog on Facebook. The widget is currently in beta, but the first 50 ReadWriteWeb users interested in trying it out can let us know in the comments. You can see the widget in action here on this blog (see the column on the right).

Pull: RSS

Traditionally, RSS readers pull feeds at a regular interval (usually somewhere between 15 and 60 minutes). In a real-time world, that, of course, is far too slow. Services like FeedBurner introduce even more lag into this system, so that it can often take half an hour or longer before a new post appears in Google Reader. Notifixious itself polls every feed about twice an hour.

Pull Smarter

Thanks to FriendFeed's new Simple Update Protocol (SUP), some of the heavy lifting of regularly polling thousands of RSS feeds can be reduced, but as of now, only a small number of services actually support this new protocol. Notifixous also monitors the public activity of ping servers, similar to what PubSub is doing with its new (though still unreleased) product.

Push: XMPP

Currently, Notifixious can only get 'real' real-time updates through XMPP from Identica, Seesmic, LiveJournal, and Sixapart's TypePad and Vox blogging communities.  Genestoux notes that he would like to see every content provider use XMPP in the future.

Giving Back: Can Notifixious Replace Gnip's Abandoned XMPP Project?

Maybe the most exciting idea here, however, is that Notifixious plans to share an XMPP and SUP feed with the rest of the community. Gnip, of course, at one point promised to do something very similar, but, in the end, pulled the plug on this project.

Other companies like ZapTXT or Pingie offer a similar service - though we have also seen far too many promising services like Rasasa or Immidi.at close before they could ever live up to their promises. Our experience with these services has been quite mixed, however. We will have to wait and see if Notifixious can deliver on its promise.

Notifixious' Service Right Now

As for the Notifixious service itself, the company will send its updates to your cell phone, IM account, or email address. You can sign up for feeds individually, or import an OPML file.

If you want to send your own real-time updates from your blog to Notifixious, you can use the company's plugins and widgets for TypePad, Vox, Blogger, MovableType, and self-hosted Wordpress sites.

The most extraordinary venting against SaaS came from the CEO of Lawson who, in an interview with ZDNet, predicted that "SaaS would collapse within 2 years". Larry Ellison of Oracle also weighed in during a recent investor conference call, as reported in Information Week, saying that Oracle did not see any money to be made in SaaS.

Just this week, we saw the news that SAP, a company that is investing in SaaS, telling investors that they saw an extraordinary order slowdown in the last 2 weeks due the global credit crisis.

This Is Not Just The "Pooh Corner Debates"

There are people who really believe that SaaS is a passing fad, just Service Bureau 3.0. These people are like Eeyore, the old grey donkey from Winnie The Poo. They think the Tigger types who are constantly running around excited about new technology are just, well ridiculous. There are others, like Piglet, who are just scared of anything new and big. The Wisdom Of Pooh, is just humbly asking asking questions.

But the guys running large enterprise IT vendors are smart. They are just putting on the Eeyore act to appeal to Eeyore clients to keep buying the old stuff as long as possible.

Debunking The SaaS = ASP and Service Bureau Myth

There are similarities between SaaS, ASP and Service Bureau. All are centralized architectures where the hardware is managed by somebody else. But that is where the similarity ends.

The notion that SaaS is taking us back to the days of dumb terminals is simply ridiculous. Have they not heard about AJAX and all the other rich client stuff that actually uses PC cycles to enhance the user experience?

The SaaS detractors are right that the ASP model was really just a financing vehicle. It was the same software, leased and run by somebody else. Yes, the economics of that are lousy.

SaaS is not ASP. SaaS is Net Native software, built to run on the Net. What worries the heck out of the big vendors is that this new code costs a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost that their mammoth old code bases cost. Seeing the traction that 37 Signals have with Basecamp and then seeing that they have only 12 employees is worrying for any old style competitor. You cannot even buy them, they have no VC forcing an exit and they are profitable.

The New New Thing Is Social SaaS

If SaaS was simply doing traditional enterprise IT but with a Net Native design at a fraction of the cost it would be big. But that is only the start. What really differentiates the SaaS winners is that they have a social media/networking twist at the core of their value proposition.

This Downturn Favors The Innovators

Some old style vendors are hoping that this is like the Dot Com crash, when big, solid and reliable beat small and innovative. They are wrong. This cycle is different. The client's risk goes away with SaaS. Try it for free for a while and then start small. The size of your company is not an issue.

This is The Innovation Economy and some people don't like that.

While not yet publicly available, ESME aims to bring all the best things about Twitter to global business communication. Rapid collaboration, network effects leveraged for support, multiple interfaces and some advanced features that Twitter itself doesn't yet offer. Check out the demo video embedded below.

ESME was written up today by ZDNet's Oliver Marks, who believes such functionality will be ubiquitous in the near future but applauds the team for pushing the envelope. While the team publicly involved is very interesting, we hear also that consultant and mystery employee consultant at Twitter David Pollak is also a key player in ESME.

We think there's a whole lot of potential here.