News360 now personalizes the news using Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Evernote and Google Plus, providing a comprehensive picture of a user's interests. The developers found that the long, in-depth updates users post on Google Plus are rich in semantic data that can improve personalization. The personalization syncs between the tablet and the desktop Web version, but the mobile versions don't have it yet.

Rather than using social data to recommend stories just because your friends liked them, News360 creates a semantic map of what stories actually say, determining relevance to the user based on the content itself.

Flipboard also uses semantic data in this way, but it mainly presents content from feeds selected by the user. News360 is more analogous to Google News, except its personalization is much more closely tailored to the user's interest graphs, thanks to its integration with so many services.

After analyzing the services you add, News360 presents a list of topics based on the data it crawls. You can then manually remove topics or add more, and topics can be individually tweaked with more tags to make them more precise.

News360 pulls in stories from all over the Web, and it displays a preview of the story that comes highlighted with key terms, related photos, and coverage from other sources. Clicking to expand the preview takes the user to the original source page.

With the addition of Google Plus to the suite of crawled services, News360 now has access to a wealth of user conversations with a variety of audiences. There are so many services that recommend stories because your friends linked to them or liked them, but News360 is uniquely equipped to recommend them based on what they actually say.

Check out the free News360 app for all major device platforms, or try the Web version.

When News360 launched, it simply pulled in coverage of stories from multiple sources, like Google News does, as well as Twitter discussions of the topic. It offered a few ways for users to go more in-depth, with image galleries, great definitions of terms and the ability to manually add more personalized feeds by topic. It certainly provided more content than a human-curated service, like Newsy, but it lacked that human quality of editorial discernment. The new personalization layer in News360 is still automated, but it harnesses the user's own human qualities.

The personalization in News360 uses the semantics of the articles themselves. It builds a semantic map of each story, which it compares with the user's interest graph from Evernote, Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader in order to find stories that will interest the user. The team plans to make this interest graph shareable, too, so others can browse the stories that would interest you.

With news, there's always the concern that personalization will create a "filter bubble," preventing important stories from reaching the user due to an algorithm's determination that they won't be interesting. Recommendation-driven social networks tend to have this effect; Facebook and Google Plus tweak the stories in your feed based on your interactions with people, not necessarily your interest in the content.

But News360's kind of personalization looks at more factors, not just where you get your news but what the stories actually say. It will take time to see if this recommendation engine can keep up with the twists and turns of the news cycle and still deliver personal recommendations, but the technology feels powerful, and it seems to serve up an interesting list of stories that feels more tailored than Google News.

The user experience is improving, and the app has a consistent feel across platforms. There sure are a lot of rounded corners, but the dark interface helps the stories and images stand out. It's no Flipboard, as far as design goes, and that app also uses semantic data to drive its recommendations. But these apps are for different kinds of reading.

Flipboard, as well as the new AOL Editions, is just for pulling in your subscriptions to a nice reading environment. News360 is for discovering the news, which can come from any source. The outside aggregation combined with personalization is what makes News360 interesting.

There's no doubt that the lack of human curation is good for scale, because there's always something new to read in this app, but a small curated section, like an editors' picks box, would add a touch of authority.

Nonetheless, the new version is a powerful aggregator that can definitely deliver the stories of the day. The app offers a good range of sharing options, and the coming feature to share one's interest graphs could make for an interesting social layer on top of a personal yet informative experience.

Not everyone sees it that way, though - especially among the aggregated. Yesterday the popular but new iPad app Zite, which calls itself a Personalized Magazine, got a nasty Cease and Desist letter from 10 big media companies very unhappy with the way their original content was being aggregated. The companies said Zite is manipulating their content without their permission and stripping out the ads. Zite says it's respecting what's communicated in the code on pages it indexes and that it's willing to change on request. The tone of the industry letter is so noxious that I was immediately sympathetic towards Zite, but looking at the details and talking to the CEO of competitor Flipboard makes me think maybe this trailblazing startup took things a little further than it should have. I don't know, I'd like to know your opinion.

When you download Zite to your iPad, you can let it learn about what topics you're interested in from your Twitter, Google Reader or Delicious data. The app then creates a magazine-like interface for you to scroll through stories from a wide variety of sources online about those topics. You can give very specific feedback about what you like or don't like and then you get more stories like that. It's like Pandora for news articles. Not a lot of control but smart personalized learning. We reviewed the app in more detail yesterday and said that if you like Flipboard (Apple's iPad App of the Year) then you should try Zite because it's even easier to use.

What the Lawyers Say

Yesterday Zite received a Cease and Desist letter signed by ten lawyers from big, big media companies: Time, The Washington Post, McClatchy, E.W. Scripps, Getty Images, National Geographic, Gannett, Dow Jones, Advanced Publications and the Associated Press.

Here are a few excerpts from that letter:

"By systematically reformatting, republishing and redistributing our original content on a mass commercial scale without our permission in your iPad application, Zite directly and adversely impacts our businesses. Your application takes the intelletual property of our companies, as well as the hard and sometimes dangerous work of tens of thousands of people. It depreives our websites of traffic and advertising revenue. We do not know your intentions, but your actions harm our companies and the broader media and news industry on which your application relies for its content...

"The Zite application is plainly unlawful. Among other things, it intentially and pervasively infringes on our copyrights by reformatting and republishing substantial portions (and in many cases, the entirety) of our articles and large-scale reproductions of our photographs and illustrations. Further, it misappropriates and infringes our trademarks and falsely implies our affiliateion by prominently featuring certain of our logos on your home screen. Zite uses our content for commercial purposes in a manner that the law prohibits absent agreemnts with each of us. We demand that you immediately cease and desist all such infringing use of our intellectual property, both copyright and trademark, in or in connection with the Zite iPad application.

"We encourage and support the development of new technologies that facilitate innovative uses of our content - but those uses must be subject to our advance consent."

Emphasis on that last line was added by me - it so incredibly misses the point, I think. Technology innovations don't ask permission of the incumbents first. If they did, they would never be born.

That's my take on it, at least. Not everyone would agree with that, though.

What Flipboard Says

"Publishers are justifiably concerned with anyone showing entire articles minus ads," Flipboard CEO and Twitter Board of Directors member Mike McCue told me last night via Twitter when I asked for his opinion about the Zite C&D. Flipboard looks from the outside a lot like Zite does but is a bigger, better known startup.

"Better to partner with them and explore together. We've only displayed what publishers syndicate via RSS (including their ads, related links, etc). Sometimes full articles are used in RSS and sometimes it's just 1 line of text. We always respect that...True you can't partner with everyone. The best strategy is to ask 'would a publisher be happy with how we are displaying their content?'"

Hopefully McCue is right and publishers are generally supportive of the way his company aggregates content. Flipboard is also much better funded and better known than Zite, a smaller company and easier target.

What Zite Says

What does Zite have to say for itself? For context, I asked the company if it respected partial vs. full RSS feeds. It turns out Zite doesn't look at feeds at all. Ali Davar, CEO of Zite, offers the following:

We acquire our data via a web crawl rather than via RSS, so we do not currently take it into consideration. We already take steps to discern automatically what the publisher wishes in this regard (looking for a NO_ARCHIVE tag which indicates that they do not want search engines to serve up cached content), and we will look into using RSS as another potential clue in this regard.

First, some insight into how Zite works with content:

• Zite's content comes from a web crawl, the same way content is aggregated in the indexes of search engines like Google and Bing.
• Zite displays articles in reading mode, which changes how the page is rendered. Though we understand this can alter the layout and potentially eliminate ads, we made this design decision in order to give users a better reading experience. Reading mode is already common, e.g. Safari's Reader.
• We respect the decision of publishers who either use the noarchive metatag or explicitly tell us they want their content displayed in web mode - in either case, we render articles without reformatting.

We don't look at this as an adversarial situation. If the formal cease and desist we received from the big publishing companies yesterday was a one line email from the world's smallest blogger, we would treat it exactly the same: we would switch the content from reading mode to web view mode. That's it. This is not our legal position, it's just our policy. Zite is eager to work with publishers in a way that benefits everyone - most importantly end users.

It's good to know that Zite doesn't look at this as an adversarial question, but the lawyers who sent the letters sure seem to. Is Zite's approach fair? Will it satisfy publishers? Is it disingenuous for Zite to say what it is doing is comparable to search engines serving up cached content? Caches aren't intended primarily as methods of consumption - but Zite's copies are. Zite CEO Ali Davar is Canadian, and he deserves points for that, but I don't think I buy the NO ARCHIVE argument. The user experience argument, though, is more compelling.

Are publishers shooting the future in the foot by objecting? Maybe they should applaud any technology that helps them grow their audience, that people love to use to read their content, even if some percentage of them don't see the ads.

What do you think, readers?

Built-in social network integration also allows users to use the service a social dashboard along with the news and media browser. By connecting the app to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, users can monitor the activity of their friends and followers, as well as publish updates to their profiles from the app. The ability to share news items on these social networks is a feature missing from this release of the iPad version, but the company told ReadWriteWeb that more functionality such as this will come in future releases.

Users can also expect to see more visual magazine-style viewing options, premium dashboard branding and the ability to add, remove and change dashboard configurations in the near future. Personally I haven't found myself straying from good ole Google Reader for reading feeds online, and I feel that a web-based iPad-friendly version may not be enough to sway me away. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see Netvibes, or a similar service like Lazyfeed, develop a native application for the iPad that can fully leverage the device's features and APIs.

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 When Google announced the launch of the new Buzz API yesterday at the Google I/O developers conference, I spotted an application in their partner lineup which hadn't yet crossed my radar: Vinehub. After having initially spotted their logo in the Google blog post containing details regarding the official announcement, I clicked through to the Buzz Featured Apps page to check it out. But here, the service was nowhere to be found.

A visit to Vineub.com satisfied my curiosity, though. It appears that Vinehub is a new social network aggregation application, in the same line as FriendFeed or even Buzz itself, except with one major difference: it doesn't just pull in updates for liking and commenting, it sends them out too.

After testing the application, I can see why it wasn't included on Google's list. Vinehub is clearly still in beta. In fact, they should probably call it alpha, based on my experiences.

The service currently supports adding Facebook and Twitter accounts - at this point, the only Buzz integration offered is the addition of a "Buzz This" button on posts.

After announcing a partnership with the on-demand data center and hosting services company NetDepot in November, a press release went out promising MySpace integration, too, but that doesn't appear to have launched yet.

It took me four different tries over the course of two days to finally get the Facebook account added to my stream. For whatever reason, it simply would not take. I had to remove the application's Facebook permissions and the re-add my account again and again before it finally worked.

When at last I managed to get Facebook messages to appear in my stream, the "like" and "comment" buttons beneath the status messages were un-clickable. That is, I could click them, but nothing happened - I was simply redirected back up to the top of the page. Another feature that wasn't ready for primetime, it appears.

Some Facebook messages came in entirely blank, only showing an avatar, name and date.

On the other hand, Twitter functionality (reply and retweet) did work.

Could be Great, Too Soon to Tell

However, pre-judging Vinehub now based on these issues would be unfair. It's obvious that the service is still actively being developed, and isn't ready yet for everyday use. In fact, some of the links at the top of the Vinehub homepage don't even work yet - they display a "coming soon" message when clicked. Plus, the support email address is also non-functional - an email I sent them for more information was kicked back.

That said, the promised functionality is appealing. Instead of simply aggregating your networks like FriendFeed and Buzz do, Vinehub wants you to be able to post back to them and use the essential features they offer, including replies and retweets on Twitter, commenting and liking on Facebook and "buzzing" posts from one network to the next. In the future, the company plans to offer more functionality, too, including editing profiles, viewing friends' updates, viewing and sharing photos and adding contacts.

Another feature in the works is a pro-level account which will allow business and power users an ad-free version of Vinehub with up to 5 accounts per social network. That could be handy for those tasked with keeping track of the social media efforts within an organization. But today, there are several far more robust Twitter clients like CoTweet and HootSuite which offer more features than Vinehub. In its present form, Vinehub doesn't even come close to competing with those services. Unless Vinehub can ramp up its offerings to be on par with what's already out there, it will have a hard time gaining business users, despite the other services it offers.

Again, though, it's too soon to tell what kind of application Vinehub will be - it has to get built first. In the meantime, we'll definitely keep our eye on it, both on the site and via Twitter.

Focus on Mainstream, But With Some Nifty Advanced Features

While Regator's core features are mainly aimed at mainstream users, advanced users and news junkies can use more advanced features like Regator's trend graphs and blog monitor to stay updated about whatever topics interest them. The blog monitor, for example, allows you to keep up with news about your specific interests. Now, as part of the redesign, the blog monitor also features personalized RSS feeds for your topics, so that you can even use Regator to stay updated if you mostly use a feed reader.

To make use of these advanced features, you have to sign up for a free account or sign in to Regator with your Facebook account.

More New and Improved Features

Some of the major new updates to Regator also include grouped trends lists (currently, for example, Elena Kagan, Supreme Court and White House are grouped together), an improved search engine that also shows you which blogs typically cover the topic you are looking for, as well as integration with Facebook Connect. For new users, the site now also features a very easy to use sign-up wizard that gets you set up with a fully functioning Regator account in seconds.

As the Regator team told us at SXSW earlier this year, getting new users to sign up for the service and making the service more intuitive and easier to use were the driving factors behind this redesign. Judging from what we have seen so far, the team has definitely succeeded in this mission.

Aimed at bringing together the varied strands of a personal web at each point of a user's online experience, Spindex is currently only available in a tech preview.

Spindex seems learns from your online behavior, harvesting relevant information to a central page. It also links to Bing search information and allows you to use Evernote, another Labs innovation, within the application.

But before you rush to sign up with yet another activity aggregation service, it may be time to pause and think. Do the benefits of seeing your friends' purchases on sites like Strings and the online shopping tracker Blippy outweigh the risks of handing over login credentials to these third parties?

There are more than a few services out there today that allow you to share your activity with the world at large. FriendFeed and Google's new Buzz service, for example, are popular playgrounds for social sharing. Their aggregation capabilities offer combined activity streams from sites like Twitter, YouTube, flickr, Google Reader and much more. These social activity trackers aren't too risky except for the fact that they make you more of a public persona than you may have intended - something not everyone is comfortable with as was apparent by the recent Google Buzz privacy backlash.

However, some tracking services go beyond simple social activity aggregation. One of the more puzzling launches of late is Blippy, a service that tracks your "favorite purchases" made with any credit card used at a selection of online stores. Similarly, the web activity tracker Glue lets you share the results of your day's web surfing when visiting both social and non-social sites including Wikipedia, Amazon, NewEgg, eBay, BestBuy, Zagat and dozens of others.

The concept for the newly launched Strings fits it in nicely with the others of this genre. At this time, the service tracks 25 web sites from the more social Hulu and YouTube to more traditional sites like Nordstrom and Tiger Direct. And like its competitors, you can follow others on the service to see what they've been doing, where they've been shopping and what they've bought.

Strings: Let's See Where You Shop

Unfortunately, in Strings' case, the execution is somewhat lacking. The design leaves a lot to be desired with small, light-colored text and a slightly confusing flow. Should I add trackers first? Do I need the Firefox extension? Is the desktop app a necessary component? All these options are thrown at you on the front page with little explanation as to why they're needed.

More importantly, for every site you add, you're asked to provide your username and password. Obviously, for online shops like JCrew, this makes some sense - there isn't exactly a public stream of your purchases there. However, for social apps like YouTube and flickr, there's simply no need to request a password. Your account activity can be imported into your stream simply by providing your username. That's how FriendFeed and Buzz do it and that's how Strings should too.

In fact, tracking services should make every attempt not to request your credentials unless absolutely necessary. Every time you provide this information to a third-party service, you're taking a risk. If their servers were compromised and their database of account information was accessed, the attackers would have your login information to a number of online sites - sites where you've often stored credit card information, phone numbers and addresses, too.

But is this risk acceptable? , you may ask.

Is Aggregating Your Credentials Too Risky?

Before we pick on Strings alone, though, it's worth noting that their request for your online shopping sites' login isn't unique to them. Blippy, too, requests your login credentials for the sites you want to add to their service. They also want your credit card information so they can track other purchases.

Now, one can argue that the fear of sharing your credit card info online is unfounded. After all, if you do any online shopping, then you've already shared this info with a number of companies, some of whom may operate servers with far less security than Bippy's.

That's definitely a valid argument. But there is something to be said for the increased risk due to the aggregation of your online accounts. While you may only store one or two credit cards at Amazon.com, Blippy lets you track all your cards. If their infrastructure was compromised not only would the potential hacker gain access to this information, they would also have your username and password to quite a few online web sites too. And if you're like 99% of the world, that's probably the same username and password you use elsewhere...like on your webmail account, your computer sign-on and maybe even your bank account or corporate VPN, assuming the password is complex enough to meet their security requirements.

Also, the risk in using these services doesn't necessarily have to come from an outside malicious attack - the services themselves may not have your best interests at heart either. Take for example, this text from Blippy's Privacy Policy:

Blippy may sell, transfer or otherwise share some or all of its assets, including your personally identifiable information, in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets or in the event of bankruptcy. You will have the opportunity to opt out of any such transfer if the new entity's planned processing of your information differs materially from that set forth in this Privacy Policy.

Most people would prefer their personally identifiable information to remain private. But if Blippy crashes and burns, it's up for sale unless you take action to opt-out.

Strings' privacy policy is different than Blippy's, but not much better. In their case, your personal information may be collected so you can be marketed to from other parties:

...we may invite you to participate in surveys, questionnaires or contests, contact us with questions or comments or request information, provide us with feedback, participate in chat or message boards, or complete a profile or registration form. Due to the nature of these Services, we may collect personally identifiable information such as your name, address, email address, phone number, age or date of birth, gender, and other contact information that you voluntarily transmit with your communication to us...

And they may use that information to contact you about:

software and/or Services that you may wish to contact and for targeted advertising.

Do the Benefits Outweigh the Risks?

For some people though, this new openness is the future of online sharing. By allowing others to peer into our lives this deeply, we're becoming, as a society and a culture, more transparent. And that's a good thing. Notes pro-openness blogger Louis Gray, "instead of keeping all my data internal to me, it opens it to the world for discussion." He also notes Wall Street Journal's review on Blippy which concludes that the biggest risk for people in using Blippy is that "their purchases are totally mundane and you're really super boring."

We would argue there are a few more risks than "boringness" to be considered here, but for some, those risks may be worth it. So whether you believe than aggregation sites are hacker goldmines, marketers' dreams or simply new stores of data that will enhance our understanding of the web and its users, they services are likely to stick around for a little while. The only question now is: will you be using them?

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

The Best Things in Life Aren't Free

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

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

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

When browsing through the available videos, you can choose to view the most popular or the newest, and you can narrow your selection by category. Currently, those categories include business, design, documentary, education, entertainment, film, humor, music, politics, sports, and technology.

As you surf through Nizmlab, you're more likely to find videos of unique animations, artistic inspiration, or - let's be honest - those offbeat and odd art films that frankly don't seem to have much of a point, but are pretty to watch. That's not to say that there aren't humorous videos on the site, but they're more likely to be a dub of a Billy Mays commercial, a comedic work of art in and of itself, than, say, the latest beauty queen to bomb when giving a speech.

Of course, here and there, some less sophisticated videos slip into the mix - like this one of a soccer ball to groin and face - ouch! But, we suppose even sophisticates need a little base humor sometimes, too.

Still, our overall take on Nizmlab is that it easily fits right in with the other sites for visual inspiration, like We Heart It, FFFound, Vi.sualize.us, and others. In fact, we would even consider adding it to our list of sites for finding wonderful things.

The way that Nomee's CEO Kevin Mokarow describes his new Adobe AIR application is that it lets you follow "people, not web sites." This is accomplished through the creation and exchange of "Nomee cards." In your card, you enter in your contact information and your social networking profiles from sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and hundreds more - anything with an RSS feed is supported. By creating Nomee cards for select groups, you can specify who gets to see what information. For example, if you want to share your card by posting it to your blog, you may want to include your Twitter, FriendFeed, and MySpace information, but not your Facebook profile. For your close friends, however, you could share a separate Nomee card which contains your Facebook profile info, too.

Nomee also provides pre-built cards for certain high-profile persons including celebrities, sports players, and the occasional politician (yes, it's Barack Obama). Anyone can subscribe to these cards just as anyone can subscribe to yours - and you don't have to reciprocate by accepting their card in return. It's entirely a one way experience.

Within the Nomee application the cards can be organized into groups and clicking on any user's information will display the number of updates per service in a very iPhone-esque fashion. You can also view a stream of that person's most recent updates across all their networks.

Some Issues

Obviously, keeping track of all your friends and colleagues in Nomee could be very inefficient since you have to click on users one-by-one to see their respective streams. The only other option for seeing friends' updates is turning on the desktop alerts - a feature you'll either love or hate. If you only have a few contacts, it may be nice to get the occasional pop-up, but most of us would be overrun with alerts.

The company intended this application to be a way to stay tuned into what your friends and other contacts are up to, but outside of those pop-ups, its interface makes this relatively time-consuming and inefficient. However, in playing with the application ourselves, we saw the potential for it to become a social address book. Of course, transforming the app from a stream-based aggregator to an address book would require some additional work on the company's part.

Still, the idea is intriguing - an address book that's filled not only with traditional contact info, but also with the status updates and other social data produced by that contact across the social networking arena. That could actually be a useful desktop application. Add a mobile sync feature and there could really be something there.

In order for this to come to pass, though, Nomee would have to add a lot more features. For example, it would have to allow you to build contacts on your own and it should let you accept vCards from others which you could then customize by entering in things like their Twitter username, etc. Supporting a standard like vCard is important because you can't assume that everyone is going to be creating these "Nomee cards."

At the moment, Nomee is somewhere in between web-based aggregation portals like FriendFeed (or, these days, Facebook's stream) and desktop-based AIR apps like TweetDeck's Twitter-tracking tool. The company needs to decide how committed they are to being an aggregation tool versus a social contact organizer. If it's the former, the current iteration somewhat fails for anyone with a decent amount of contacts to follow because it's just inefficient to track updates with this app. But if it's the latter, after some work Nomee could become a useful way to pull up contact information while also seeing a person's latest social activity.

We suppose that, to a point, you can use Nomee in this way right now. However, you're restricted to those who already have Nomee cards - which includes very few "real" people at the moment. (All you have are celebrity "news makers.") And without real people to follow, there isn't much you can do with a social application.

As of now, LifeStory only displays your updates from within Bebo. While LifeStory features an interesting user interface, it would be nice if it could also (optionally) pull in updates from your activity stream.

In the long run, Bebo is also planning to allow its users to subscribe to updates from brands, bands, and celebrities, whose updates will then appear in their LifeStory timelines.

Lifestream

The new lifestreaming feature was built on top of SocialThing, a small startup that AOL acquired last year while it was still in private beta testing. The new Lifestream looks like a very basic version of FriendFeed, though it doesn't feature too many functions besides the straightforward aggregation of updates from you and your friends. The simple fact that it also aggregates your friends' updates, though, does give it an edge over Facebook's newsfeed.

New Layout

In addition, Bebo also introduced a new layout for its user profiles, though Bebo's users seem to be rather unhappy about this change.

Differentiation through Aggregation

According to the Guardian, Bebo argues that it is different from Facebook, because "Facebook is a closed, proprietary network that brings friends together through one website."

Clearly, Bebo is trying to differentiate itself from other social networks by becoming more of an aggregator. Thanks to Bebo's SocialInbox, you could already aggregate your friends' updates on other services, even if they aren't Bebo members. Bebo also allows you to check your Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL Mail accounts from within the service.

McCarthy tends the gears of Techmeme, makes sure the content on the site remains of high quality and helps ensure the inclusion of new and important voices. It sounds like an awesome job and one that has probably never existed before - a half woman, half robot, news gathering machine. How can you get your blog on Techmeme? What's in the future for the site? We asked Megan in the following interview.

Marshall Kirkpatrick: What do you do all day? I imagine you standing next to one of the most awesome news discovery machines available, tending it, making sure it keeps running smoothly, and looking out beyond its reaches to feed it things it hasn't gotten to yet itself. Is that an accurate picture?

Megan McCarthy: That is fairly accurate, actually. I make sure that the news on Techmeme represents an accurate, current, and full overview of what's happening in technology right now. So, that's trimming back stories that aren't relevant, adding in viewpoints that ought to be heard, etc.

Marshall: Can you tell us a little bit about your personal background?

Megan: My personal background is a little varied. Prior to [writing for] Valleywag, I bounced around a few different jobs and places and never really found a niche. I lived in Hawaii for a few years, had various office drone jobs and other gigs to pay the bills (Nanny, bartender, coffee server). But I loved following technology and reading about what was happening in silicon valley - and I've been a news junkie since I was young.

News Selection and Twitter Tips on Techmeme

Marshall: So, did your coming on board "break" the "objectivity" of the site?

Megan: Techmeme is biased and has been so for a while. If you read Gabe's post announcing the addition of an editor, he makes that point.

What do you think, though? What changes have you noticed since I joined?

Marshall: I have noticed no changes to story selection, perhaps less wonky stuff. I've always considered Techmeme a very reliable source of news and I think you're doing a good job continuing that tradition - but there were certainly some people who grumbled about the human touch being formally introduced, an editor.

Megan: I think some of those people might grumble about anything.

Marshall: How can new bloggers get indexed on Techmeme?

Megan: We just introduced a program where people can tip relevant posts to us through Twitter. Anyone can tip any post they think is relevant to us.

Marshall: How is the new Twitter tips program working out? I see a lot of stories go up with thanks to Twitter, quite a lot - is it changing the face of the site substantially? Changing the content?

I see a handful of people getting thanks over and again, I imagine there's limited participation so far but how does the algorithm determine whose tips to accept and whose not to?

Also, a lot of people are sending tips regarding their own stories - is that ok? Even mainstream media outlets.

Megan: I don't think it's changing the content overall. Many of the stories that are tipped are ones which are worthy of a Techmeme headline. Not everything that gets tipped to us gets on the site. There are two situations that I can think of where the tip program does affect the content: It can help surface breaking stories faster, and if there are two similar stories from different outlets and someone cares enough to tip a certain one, that will probably effect which one ends up as a headline on Techmeme.

As for people tipping their own stories... personally I'm not completely opposed to it. If a writer has a breaking story that he or she wants to let us know right away, that's a good way to do it. But, they should keep in mind that their twitter handle will be credited with tipping us to the story. If "Thanks: Marshall" showed up next to every Techmeme headline you get, people might put two and two together and think that you really like your work.

To my knowledge, the identity of the person tipping the story has no effect on whether or not it will show up on the page. It's about the post itself.

Marshall: Well, if shame and loads of people saying "you're an f*ing jackass" was sufficient deterrent to anti-social behavior in social media, then...[indecipherable, record of this part of the conversation lost forever.]

Megan: Ha. Is he though?

Marshall: Oh I'm sure he is. ANYWAY. Is accuracy taken into account on Techmeme?

Megan: Accuracy is absolutely taken into account on Techmeme. That's one of my goals, anyway. If there's a post which has a lot of buzz around it, which turns out not to be true...

Marshall: What does that look like? Are you like "Steve Jobs is NOT out at Apple, I don't believe those reports! Story...gone!"

Megan: Or, a story that says "Steve Jobs NOT out at Apple" gets published next to the earlier, erroneous rumor.

Marshall: Then you yank the false story?

Megan: Either yank it or surround it with stories pointing out *why* it's false. Sometimes the false rumor becomes a story itself and yanking it can be jarring. We want our readers to be able to visit the site and know what's going on in technology - to know what people are talking about. The earlier rumor would probably be replaced as the top story by one with the correct information, but yanking it without giving our readers full context of the overall arc might be a bit jarring.

Marshall: You have to be reading a lot of these stories in great detail. What time does your work day start and end?

Megan: I start around 7:30ish and end later than that. News never stops!

The Future of Techmeme and Other Aggregators

Marshall: So, everyone wants to be an aggregator these days. All the young kids are like "mommy, I'm going to grow up to find recommended stories for an online news publisher."

What kinds of things do you foresee becoming points of leverage for content aggregators and news discovers in the future?

Megan: I think a reliable real-time web is going to have the greatest impact on aggregation services. I'd love to be able to see stories from sites as they're published, without a lag.

I hope that quality, accurate, and speedy stories get rewarded by receiving more attention - and that new voices are discovered and make the media chorus sound fuller and stronger.

You were asking me about my electric sheep dreams.

Marshall: Are you a cyborg?

Megan: Depends on my mood.

Marshall: At least between 7am and 7pm?

Megan: That sounds about right. This is super-nerdy, but reading an overwhelming amount of news is something that I rather enjoy doing.

Thanks to Megan McCarthy and Techmeme for doing this interview and doing the things they do each day - help us find the hottest conversation in technology. We appreciate it. You can find Megan on Twitter as well. Photo at top by Scott Beale

When we say that semantic technology has a whole lot of awesome potential, this is a fun example of what we're talking about. If it can be done for restaurants, we expect similar analysis of online sentiment can be sold for all kinds of different real-world sectors.

Now restaurant owners can subscribe to receive a PDF of their monthly reports for an introductory price of $15 and a regular price of $25 per month. (Here's a sample report, in PDF format.)

Simple charts and a straightforward presentation can offer restaurant owners nervous about the Wild West of online opinion a bird's eye view of what's really going on, month by month. On the down side, the reports may enable those business owners to spot and track down negative reviewers to hassle them for the injustices they've no doubt done to a fine eatery.

Think many restaurants will go for it? That depends on how it's marketed, but we expect that today's coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle will help.

We first reviewed semantic and natural language processing review aggregation service BooRah this Spring and said we could foresee giving up Yelp for it. Then in December we called BooRah one of the Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008.

Now this latest offering has got us really excited; its simple utility and mainstream appeal are really compelling.

We love the idea of selling aggregate reports of online activity, intelligently analyzed, to mainstream businesses effected by online activity. Sales, marketing and PR firms have paid hefty sums for these kinds of reports, often clumsily gathered and presented, for years. Aim the semantic web at the problem, give it a good price point and offer it to a very large sector of businesses and we may just see some action in the semantic technology sector after all.

Update: Our original title for this story referenced Yelp, whom we mistakenly thought were included in BooRah's aggregation of reviews. Yelp contacted us to say that they are in fact not included. We hope that will change soon - it would only make both sites more useful.