ReadWriteWeb

If you're the kind of music lover with playlists strewn across multiple web services, then Twones is the tool for you. Twones is best described as Delicious or Friendfeed for streaming music. The early beta site allows users to bookmark and organize music from more than 23 music services including Last.fm, Hype Machine, MOG and even MySpace. The company offers an audio footprint of where you've been and once you install the Firefox toolbar, it will also track where you're going.

Dating sites haven't changed much over the years. Oh sure, there are new matchmaking algorithms that claim to have a better shot at connecting you to that "special someone," but a few basic concepts remain. You still have to upload a photo, fill out a profile, list your likes and dislikes, and so on. Doesn't everyone enjoy "long walks on the beach" and "playing with their dog?" How does that help you really get to know who someone is? Gelato thinks they have a better way. Using concepts happily copied from FriendFeed, the social site that seems to be the inspiration for all, Gelato brings the lifestreaming concept into the world of online dating. By connecting you with your social networks, site users can get to know each other in much more natural ways.

Real-time computing is not new. This is the third generation of real-time:

• First generation: was done on a single processor, usually for process control in military systems.

• Second generation: within a Local Area Network, usually for a financial trading room.

• Third generation: applied across the whole Web/Internet, what we call the real-time Web.

In each generation a stack has emerged, and secure messaging has been key to that stack. The names change and the scale of the prize and challenges certainly changes, but the basic issue remains the same: delivering messages reliably and quickly. In this post, we trace the steps from the second generation to the third generation to see how the real-time Web might play out.

Facebook just announced that it has released Tornado, the real-time web framework that powers FriendFeed, as open source code. According to Facebook's David Recordon, Tornado is one of the core infrastructure pieces that power FriendFeed's real-time functionality. The framework, according to Recordon, is similar to other Python frameworks like Google's webapp or web.py, but is faster and able to handle more simultaneous traffic than its competitors. On his personal blog, Bret Taylor, one of the co-founders of FriendFeed, explains the technical details behind Tornado in more detail.

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we report on and analyze the acquisition of lifestreaming company FriendFeed by Facebook. We also explore a new trend that may route around both companies: distributed social networking. In other news this week: Facebook announced that user updates will be searchable, Google unveiled a faster search infrastructure, Microsoft and Nokia announced a partnership around Office apps, Gartner released its latest Hype Cycle, and social networking statistics were revealed suggesting that younger generations keep track of their online friends better than offline ones. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

There's no end of talk about the benefits of the real time web these days, but what's going on behind the scenes? What do the nuts and bolts look like? Is it standards based code on scalable servers? Is it hyper-active little elves?

FriendFeed product manager Dan Hsiao and company intern Ross Miller released a short video today from deep inside the core of that innovative company that Facebook just paid $50m in cash and stocks to purchase. Now that FriendFeed has had its exit, the staff must feel comfortable opening up a little to the world and letting us see what really goes on there.

Maybe it's better to host your own. That's the thinking coming from a growing number of early technology adopters as service after service goes down, sells out or otherwise frustrates the users who have published their content online only to see the tools they use become broken or less desirable.

The prospect of a distributed, interoperable, self-hosted network of publishing, reading and discussion tools is nothing new - but the idea is gaining a lot more support as more people react to recent news like FriendFeed's sale to Facebook, Tr.im's up and down and Twitter's denial of service attacks. The tide may not be turning, but there's sure to be some new waves of innovation that come out of this period of frustration.

In wake of the news of the FriendFeed acquisition by Facebook, we're faced with the real possibility that FriendFeed.com will be shut down for good. According to the press release, "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being..." In other words, it's only a matter of time before the site is gone for good. What is the FriendFeed community to do?

At one time, FriendFeed clones like Lifestream.fm and Socialthing! looked like promising alternatives, but neither of them offered the same rich and innovative features that FriendFeed does - the very features which made FriendFeed the standout service that it is today. However, there is one service that may have an opportunity to capitalize on the FriendFeed exodus: social media aggregator Streamy.

It's going to be a little like the Brady Bunch, this union between Facebook and the just-acquired social networking service FriendFeed. Both families will influence each other a lot, though Facebook is far, far bigger. (The youngest one in curls!)

FriendFeed was co-founded by Paul Buchheit, the man who invented GMail, and by Bret Taylor, who co-founded Google Maps. They both made enough money from being early Google Employees that they never needed to work again and didn't need to sell to Facebook - but they joined Facebook because they wanted the work they'd done on FriendFeed to change the world of social networking. Here's what they bring to Facebook; it's probably going to change Facebook a lot.

Earlier today, rumors started to appear that FriendFeed had been acquired by Facebook. We now have confirmation that this is indeed true. Neither Facebook nor FriendFeed released any exact details about the acquisition, but we'll keep this story updated as we learn more details about this acquisition. According to a post by Bret Taylor on the FriendFeed blog, FriendFeed will continue to operate normally for the time being while the two companies figure out the long-term plans.