ReadWriteWeb

Cliqset, a website that allows users to view and interact with streams of activity data from multiple social networks in one place, is losing its two co-founders after an unsuccessful run at growing the company. Darren Bounds and Charlie Cauthen led what might have been the single biggest show of startup support for bleeding-edge technical standards aimed at building a federated social Web, rich with consumer choice - but the company's business execution was insufficient to ensure its survival.

Leaders of the distributed social Web standards community, the effort to build interoperable competition for the big social networking silos, say that Cliqset's apparent demise is unfortunate, but that they look forward to seeing what Bounds and Cauthen do next.

If a thousand social networks bloom, with cross-network communication and real-time replies, how will you manage to find and share the best things that your friends put into your stream? Innovative social network aggregator Cliqset launched a new version this morning that offers a very interesting answer to that question. Cliqset is a service that lets you publish and subscribe to 80 different social networks, from Twitter to YouTube to Delicious to Foursquare.

Two companies outside Silicon Valley say they are the first implementers of a new open source protocol called Salmon, which allows comments to be sent over the walls of one social network to communicate with users of another. Imagine being able to post a message on Facebook to "@janedoe@twitter" and then seeing Jane receive the message in real time on Twitter. It's a vision comparable to being able to call any telephone number, whether it's part of your phone provider's network or not.

Facebook isn't implementing Salmon, but that's what Canadian open-source business microblogging service Status.net and Florida-based stream service Cliqset announced they have implemented between their networks this morning. Think of this as a technical foil for monopoly beginning to unfold.

Cliqset is a Florida-based technology startup that end-users have had a hard time understanding. The company just released a new product that developers should have no trouble with at all and that could send waves of innovation across the social web.

Called Cliqset FeedProxy, the service consumes user activity feeds from more than 70 online services like Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, Last.fm, Yelp and LibraryThing and then produces an outbound feed that's compliant with the ActivityStreams standard format.

Social media aggregator Cliqset today announced a new beta version of its platform that aggregates activity feeds from 70 different social media sites, transforms them into normalized Activity Streams standard data and then pushes them out in real time.

The company's offers multiple ways to access the data through its API but also hopes that more users will stick with its own, now much improved, user interface. The first 200 ReadWriteWeb readers to click this link will gain access to the new beta version of the site.

You can log in to comment here on ReadWriteWeb with an OpenID, via Facebook Connect or through various other methods. Imagine if you could make "friend" connections with other commenters on our site. That relationship wouldn't be reflected back into the OpenID or Facebook account that you then take to other sites.

If it did, that could be a real game changer. We'd love to introduce our smart and sassy readers to each other here and then see them be friends on social networks, mobile sites and all around the web. Just a pipe dream? That's what a brand new identity provider called Cliqset aims to make possible. We believe it's the first identity provider of its type that allows 3rd parties to change user profile information, not just read it.