ReadWriteWeb

(Hint: It's Not FriendFeed)

Robert Scoble just admitted to spending 7 hours per day in FriendFeed. It's easy to see why. The more you explore that service, the more you find, and the deeper you fall down into the rabbit hole that is the social web. It's probably one of the most interesting and powerful social sties that we've seen develop over the past year. Yet it, like many other of today's social web services, seems to be a somewhat incomplete vision of what a real social web could be.

Over the past year, we've been inundated with social media. We've seen Twitter go mainstream, lifestreaming take over blogging, and we've tried what felt like a million different applications. We've joined then abandoned new services recklessly, leaving our accounts to wither away on platforms long forgotten. What more could we possibly do in 2009?

Even in this age of social media, browsing the web is still a solitary activity, even though a couple of services like Socialbrowse, Kiobo, or Me.dium have tried to to turn browsing into a more social experience.

Another social browsing service we like a lot is Browzmi. When we first looked at Browzmi earlier this year, it was basically a browser inside of a browser, which was a cool technical achievement, but the experience was held back by the fact that you had to log in to the service and use Browzmi's own bookmarking service. Now, a newly released Firefox extension replaces the 'browser within a browser' and greatly enhances the social surfing experience.

Freshly launched contact-amplifying service Zentact aims to solve one of the most enduring problems almost everyone faces in using the internet. We meet people, we intend to stay in touch, but we quickly forget and social connections go cold. This service lets you tag your contacts and then unobtrusively gives you an opportunity to send them an email any time you visit a web page that's related to their interests.

Zentact is the latest would-be blockbuster co-founded by Eric Marcoullier, one of the key players behind the Yahoo acquired MyBlogLog and the social media ping server Gnip. We really like this new service a lot and if some of the wrinkles get worked out we expect it to be a mainstay in our everyday use of the web. An invite link to the service is below.

"Leave your keys in your pocket," is the advice given by computer programmers at University of California San Diego who recently created 'Sneakey' software; an application that uses a digital image of a key to produce an exact copy in physical form within minutes.

According to Stefan Savage, the computer science professor who led the project, advances in digital imaging have made it so easy that even a low resolution photo from a cell phone offers enough information to decode and reproduce a key.

GoDaddy has just unveiled an amazing new service called SmartSpace which lets anyone register a domain name and then instantly turn it into a social web site which aggregates any of the following components onto one page: a blog, a photo album, a chat application, email, RSS feeds, and even components from social networking applications like MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn. All you have to do is register the domain name you want and all the technical work is done for you - the site builds itself automatically.