The move is an improvement in relevancy of information feeds in social profiles and it demonstrates an intelligent system for delivering information and encouraging interaction on the world's largest social network.

One format is an updates ticker that allows for joining real-time conversations based on customized selection options. The other is a news aggregator, which functions as a newspaper, to keep users informed of the most important events and posts they have missed while they have been away.

The ticker is the most simple and straightforward feature. It makes it very easy for you to select whom you want to receive news from, and how often you want to hear from them.

When those people post updates - and they are selected as someone you want to hear from more frequently - you will immediately be alerted to join the conversation. Less relevant people will not signal as often or immediately.

It's kind of like being able to predict frequency and then assign a value to the number of times your annoying Aunt Betty calls you to tell you again about the neighbor's cats. In this way, you are judging just how close you want to be to Aunt Betty - and her cats - regardless of how close Aunt Betty wants to be to you. It's a subtle move by the engineers at Facebook.

Facebook is also changing its news feed, moving away from the rather clumsy "Most Recent" and "Top News" tags.

Facebook has made it so that if you are one of those people who spends a few weeks away from Facebook at a time, the next time you log on, you will see all the most important things you missed while you were away, arranged like it was a magazine or newspaper, with big pictures and easy to navigate buttons.

The rollouts today bring some solutions that calm the information storm fired up after the company rolled out Subscriptions recently.

Once it became possible to follow anyone (if they enabled the feature), the noise to signal ratio went haywire. Suddenly, it was Aunt Betty updates to the nth power. With this new feature, I can pretty much customize my feed so that everything makes sense, and I am not overwhelmed by noise.

Finally, it appears that a social network with over 750 million users has finally figured out how to act socially.

Image via Facebook.

The videos below are compelling. The consequences of a big splash by this $150 peripheral device could go far beyond the XBox, though.

The Boring Way to Look at Kinect

"The key challenge for Microsoft Xbox at this point in the console lifecycle is to reignite stagnating Xbox 360 sales and that is easiest done by expanding and extending the Xbox footprint beyond the hardcore gamer segment," wrote Martin Olausson of Strategy Analytics this Summer when the Kinect was unveiled. "Hence it is focusing on the social gamer segment with the Kinect platform. Strategically we believe Xbox has made the correct decision in focusing on non-traditional segments with Kinect (while at the same time strengthening the roster of hardcore games to appease the traditional segment) as this approach has the greatest potential for expanding its console footprint."

Olausson focuses on the short-term business implications for Microsoft and the company's marketing strategy. Do you think the videos below do a good job of speaking to the types of people Olausson says are being targeted?

The Very Excited Way to Look at Kinect

Some people look beyond the XBox right away, though. "Kinect is to multitouch user interfaces what the mouse was to DOS," Forrester's James McQuivey wrote this week in a post titled Get Ready For Kinect To Completely Change Our Lives. "It is a transformative change in the user experience, the interposition of a new and dramatically natural way to interact -- not just with TV, not just with computers -- but with every machine that we will conceive of in the future. This permits us entry to the Era of Experience, the next phase of human economic development."

Could this kind of technology be an important interface for the Internet of Things? That's an interesting argument.

Ready?

The first images of Internet Explorer 9 leaked last month and today's video confirms that Microsoft will likely use the stripped down, minimalist interface we saw in these leaked screenshots. As we noted last month, it looks like Microsoft has done away with the menu buttons and freed up even more space by combining the URL bar and tab bar into a single toolbar. While this frees up more space for displaying websites, it remains to be seen how effective this new layout will be when more than four or five tabs are open at the same time.

According to this new video, Internet Explorer 9 now also scores 95 out of 100 possible points on the Acid3 test, which measures how well the browser conforms to a specific set of web standards.

After looking at this video, do you think you will give Internet Explorer another try?

If you're anything like us, all you thought was "I can't wait to play with that." Well, your time is coming soon.

The interface has been tested for a number of applications, from virtual pottery-making at RISD, where you watch a user create a digital wire-frame pot as if using a spinning wheel, to the more intangible Tangible Media Group at MIT, where the g-stalt interface allows the user to "manipulate complex data sets with the hands".

"Starting today," reads the Oblong website, "g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles."

According to the article in the Times, this type of interface has already been in use in Fortune 50 companies, government agencies and universities, and it quotes Underkoffler as saying that "in five years' time, when you buy a computer, you'll get this".

Several computer, PC and console makers are already getting ready to release gesture-based interfaces and consumers should start seeing them sometime within the next year, according to the Times.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Sixth Sense: Sixth Sense is an extremely inexpensive interface ($350 to build the prototype) and it consists of some colored finger markers, a projector, and a camera on a necklace. Demoed at the TED conference, this interface has amazing potential. We reviewed this product as part of our post The Wearable Internet Will Blow Mobile Phones Away.

Given Nikon's release of yesterday's first camera with a built-in pico projector and Mobileburn's demo of the Samsung Anycall Show phone, these little projectors are about to start popping up everywhere. For Minority Report fans, we may actually see these projector based interfaces used up for everyday tasks; however, it's more produce amazing entertainment for gamers.

Perceptive Pixel Multi-Touch Wall (Jeff Han's new project) and Microsoft Surface: In the world of alternative interfaces, these two workstations are extremely well known. Certainly not the inexpensive, mainstream touch interfaces we'd hoped for, their size and price makes them unobtainable to the average user. However, for commercial uses, they've certainly got that wow factor. The products are used for story boarding, geo-spatial command, broadcast media, museum exhibits, hotels and Surface is even in Disneyland's tomorrow land.

Scratch Input: Recently featured in Technology Review for his presentation at the SIGGRAPH Conference, Carnegie Mellon Ph.D student Chris Harrison created a gestural input interface using existing surfaces and an acoustic input technique. In other words, Harrison's interface uses scratches to communicate with his machine. By taping a modified stethoscope to a wall, Harrison got users to perform six scratch input gestures at about 90% accuracy with less than 5 minutes of training. If Scratch Input were utilized by a mobile manufacturer, a phone owner could simply rest their device on a table top and use it to scribble out messages.

Pulp-Based Computing: While there's little information on these projects just yet, one thing is clear. The folks in MIT's Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Group are exploring electrically active inks and fibers during the paper making process to create a new form of paper-based computing. Apparently the paper would react in the same way as regular paper; however, it would also carry digital information. While the project is only in its early stages and appears to be hooked up to a basic Arduino prototyping platform, theoretically this could be used to create a new type of Wacom tablet. Remember when Steven Levy wrote about losing his Macbook Air? A paper interface would take some serious getting used to.

Siftables: Created by David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, Siftables is a series of blocks that contain built-in motion sensors, graphical displays and wireless communication. The blocks can be programmed to interact with digital information and media to form a collective interface. Siftables have been used to create art displays, painting tools, calculators, games and even a music sequencer. Bug Labs also offers a similar open source block system for modular device interfaces.

For more on alternative interfaces featured during 2009, check out our articles on the BiDi screen and the wearable Internet.

Sixth Sense: Sixth Sense is an extremely inexpensive interface ($350 to build the prototype) and it consists of some colored finger markers, a projector, and a camera on a necklace. Demoed at the TED conference, this interface has amazing potential. We reviewed this product as part of our post The Wearable Internet Will Blow Mobile Phones Away.

Given Nikon's release of yesterday's first camera with a built-in pico projector and Mobileburn's demo of the Samsung Anycall Show phone, these little projectors are about to start popping up everywhere. For Minority Report fans, we may actually see these projector based interfaces used up for everyday tasks; however, it's more produce amazing entertainment for gamers.

Perceptive Pixel Multi-Touch Wall (Jeff Han's new project) and Microsoft Surface: In the world of alternative interfaces, these two workstations are extremely well known. Certainly not the inexpensive, mainstream touch interfaces we'd hoped for, their size and price makes them unobtainable to the average user. However, for commercial uses, they've certainly got that wow factor. The products are used for story boarding, geo-spatial command, broadcast media, museum exhibits, hotels and Surface is even in Disneyland's tomorrow land.

Scratch Input: Recently featured in Technology Review for his presentation at the SIGGRAPH Conference, Carnegie Mellon Ph.D student Chris Harrison created a gestural input interface using existing surfaces and an acoustic input technique. In other words, Harrison's interface uses scratches to communicate with his machine. By taping a modified stethoscope to a wall, Harrison got users to perform six scratch input gestures at about 90% accuracy with less than 5 minutes of training. If Scratch Input were utilized by a mobile manufacturer, a phone owner could simply rest their device on a table top and use it to scribble out messages.

Pulp-Based Computing: While there's little information on these projects just yet, one thing is clear. The folks in MIT's Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Group are exploring electrically active inks and fibers during the paper making process to create a new form of paper-based computing. Apparently the paper would react in the same way as regular paper; however, it would also carry digital information. While the project is only in its early stages and appears to be hooked up to a basic Arduino prototyping platform, theoretically this could be used to create a new type of Wacom tablet. Remember when Steven Levy wrote about losing his Macbook Air? A paper interface would take some serious getting used to.

Siftables: Created by David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, Siftables is a series of blocks that contain built-in motion sensors, graphical displays and wireless communication. The blocks can be programmed to interact with digital information and media to form a collective interface. Siftables have been used to create art displays, painting tools, calculators, games and even a music sequencer. Bug Labs also offers a similar open source block system for modular device interfaces.

For more on alternative interfaces featured during 2009, check out our articles on the BiDi screen and the wearable internet.

The most important changes to the interface are connected with the new ability to group your friends into different lists. While most of the navigational elements of the regular version were on the top of the page, the new beta moves all of these elements to the right.

Adding friends to these lists is done through a nifty text interface that auto-completes names as you type them. Of course, if you can't remember the names, you can also add friends through the subscription sub-menu (see screenshot).

Overall, these lists are a very nice feature that will make using FriendFeed a lot easier in the future, as it will allow you to create specialized feeds with relatively little noise. This way, for example, you can group political bloggers into one list and tech bloggers into another, while updates from your close friends can go into yet another list.

Home Feeds and Comments With Date Stamp

One other nice new features is that you can now see the actual home feeds of other users. This is a great way of discovering new people to follow.

Another good addition to FriendFeed's feature set is that it now displays how long ago a comment was made when you hover your mouse over the little bubble next to every comment. Before, it was impossible to tell when a comment was made.

Posting

Posting directly to FriendFeed has now become a bit easier and the old "Share Something" button has been replaced with a text box at the top of the page (though interestingly, as you search, this box turns into a search box, which is a bit confusing). One nice new feature is that you can now directly upload pictures to FriendFeed. While we really like universal uploaders like Pixelpipe here, sometimes you might just want to send a picture to FriendFeed. This has been possible every since FriendFeed acquired mail2ff.com, but this new posting UI makes it quite a bit easier.

Still Some Unfinished Business

As much as we like the new interface for how it makes dealing with a lot of friends easier, there are still a few areas where FriendFeed could improve. In this new version, for example, the FriendFeed rooms you subscribe to are always visible, but searching for interesting rooms is still not possible.

FriendFeed also still has to figure out a way to deal with duplicate entries, as many users tend to share the same link over and over again, even though a discussion has already formed around the link somewhere else on the site.

Becoming the Default

As FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor told us, the plan is to make this beta interface the primary FriendFeed interface after gathering more feedback from users and tweaking it accordingly. We think that this new interface is a great step forward for FriendFeed and we would assume that most users will switch over to the new interface long before it becomes the default.

Called The Concept Series, the project will track down and share future web concepts submitted through a very simple process. What would you like the web to look like in the future? We offer one of our favorite visions below.

There are few things more important to the user experience than the interface through which we interact with the web. There is SO much potential for improvement in user interfaces! We wrote about some cutting edge strategies in this post in March, User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload (see the awesome 2D/3D game interface at the end of that post). Lately we've been inspired by the interfaces of apps like Skitch (see video at the very bottom of the page) and Jive's ClearSpace.

The First Round of Ideas

As any good call to action should, Mozilla's Concept Series kicked off with some examples of concepts submitted. All three of the videos below are very well produced but Mozilla says that you can submit mockups, prototypes or ideas expressed with any degree of sophistication. For instructions on making a submission visit the Concept Series announcement or just tag an image "mozconcept" on Flickr. That's what we did with our vision below these videos.

What I'd Like to See

Here's my vision of an interface I'd like to interact with the web through, though it probably wouldn't take much Mozilla energy to make it happen.

I love the Adobe AIR newsticker Snackr but more than that what I want are big pastel-colored buttons that appear wherever I'm interacting with information that I can assign tasks to. As may buttons as I want, with tasks that will send URLs or the information in those pages to another application or webpage. I'd like the buttons to have rounded corners, too. :)

In the image above I've got buttons to bookmark the link I'm looking at in my social bookmarking tool (I use Ma.gnolia), to open tabs searching for the links present in one of my Custom Search Engines, to search for this link in social media discussion aggregator YackTrack and to IM the link to multiple co-workers via Adium. In time I might find that there are other functions I'd like to add, re prioritize or replace the above with. It that too muck to ask? I don't think it is at all. Let me know when someone has built it - but for now, I'll tag it "mozconcept" and cross my fingers.

What about you, what would you like to see the future of the web look like?