ReadWriteWeb

Full Disclosure: this is an opinionated rant. Why do I have to go to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to send messages? Why do people insist on using these non-standard messaging systems? If people said, "Don't call me on the telephone -- I prefer the delephone," you would think they were crazy. For a while, this was a minor inconvenience, but now it is starting to get out of control.

FriendFeed opened up a new beta today that introduces a completely revamped real-time user interface, as well as a number of interesting new features, including direct messages, the ability to share posts more selectively, better searches and filters, as well as a number of other smaller changes that make the new user interface very different from its predecessor.

FriendFeed has regularly made changes to its UI, but this new design is clearly the biggest change yet.

Streamy, which calls itself a "real-time news reading and sharing site," opened its doors today after an 18-month long private beta. Streamy is a mix between an RSS reader, a social media aggregator, and a real-time search engine. You can connect your Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Friendfeed, and Flickr accounts to Streamy, and post status updates from Streamy directly to these services. Streamy will also recommend interesting stories to you, and, thanks to its innovative user interface, sharing stories with your friends on the supported social media services is extremely easy.

In December, Movable Type announced a new product called "Motion," which integrates activity streams, microblogging, and portable identities into a software package that can be installed into the company's hosted publishing platform, Movable Type Pro. Now, after much testing and feedback, Motion for Movable Type has become publicly available. With this software, built on open standards, blogs can add social activity streams to their site. These are similar in appearance to those from the social web aggregation service FriendFeed, but are entirely within the blog owner's control. Motion also adds a social networking element to online communities with its user profiles and authentication tools that permit signing in from any provider, including Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, or OpenID.

Friendfeed, the popular social media aggregator, just released an Adobe Air application that displays real-time updates from your friends right on your desktop. Whenever one of your friends posts a new item or leaves a comment, a message will appear on your desktop. Friendfeed is clearly making real-time updates a core feature of its service, as it already offers real-time updates in its web interface and through IM.

One of the most interesting trends on the Internet right now is a move towards a more real-time experience. We have seen a lot of discussion lately about how Twitter is leading the charge by creating a search engine for the real-time web, for example. However, there are also a good number of other services that already expose some of the promises of the real-time web. In this post, we will have a look at some of the most interesting ones.

Around this time last year, we were excited about a new Firefox extension called MySocial24x7 which brought FriendFeed activity streams right into your browser sidebar. Built on the Google App Engine platform, the add-on was one of the first to make use of the FriendFeed API. Unfortunately, the add-on's creator Sandosh Vasudevan stopped work on the extension and soon it became out-of-date. But now, with permission from Sandosh, a new developer has taken over and the add-on has returned.

Bebo, AOL's social network, added a lifestreaming feature today that allows users to pull in updates from Twitter, Flickr, and Delicious, as well as from Facebook and Myspace. Bebo also introduced another new feature called 'Lifestory,' which displays your updates in a scrollable and zoomable timeline that is somewhat reminiscent of ThisMoment. With LifeStory, you can quickly create new events on your timeline and add photos, videos, and text. This feature, however, is not integrated with your lifestream.

We can no longer call Feedly just "an alternative interface for Google Reader" as we once did. Since the launch of Feedly Mini, a new mini bar that hovers at the bottom of the screen as you surf through blogs on the web, the service has become more of blog reading companion than anything else. Today that bar, also known as Feedly Mini, has been updated to better integrate both Twitter and FriendFeed with your blog reading. The experience is incredible and makes Feedly a must-have tool for anyone who uses these services.

Recently, Facebook added a new feature to its News Feeds: a "like" button. Now, rather than leaving a throw-away or otherwise unnecessary comment on a friend's status update, you can show your appreciation by just clicking "like" instead. Sound familiar? If not, then it's clear you haven't tried FriendFeed FriendFeed, the social web aggregation service popular among early adopters.

As avid users of FriendFeed will tell you, Facebook's implementation of FriendFeed's features are nothing but a pale imitation of the real thing. Still, there's a growing concern among the service's fans about its sustainability. Although FriendFeed's founders believe they can still innovate to profitability, we're no longer sure that's true.