ReadWriteWeb

What are you doing? How about now? Has anything changed since you started reading this blog post? Every story has a who, what, where, when, and why - but the event-driven nature of the social Web may be putting such a premium on broadcasting about what we're doing, that software designed to help us answer important questions like who and why are at risk of being neglected.

Reflecting on the human condition was once a popular past-time. A lot of people used to read poetry, as you may have heard. It may not be the Internet's fault that we're becoming less introspective - in fact the huge amount of activity data we're sharing online offers incredible opportunities for reflection, and for learning more about ourselves. It seems quite likely that we're going to miss those opportunities because our software is focused entirely on doing (and advertising) instead of on helping us think as much as it could. Of course that's much harder to do.

Skimmer is a design-focused new Adobe AIR application from Minneapolis Ad Agency Fallon. Part of a broader push for the company in revamping its image online, Skimmer is a very functional lifestream aggregator and media browser in its own right. Skimmer pulls feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Blogger and YouTube, and allows posting to Twitter, Flickr and YouTube as well.  But focusing on the underpinnings of this application would be doing it an injustice - it's got a handsome face, and that's the point.

Facebook today announced a major update to its homepages that will go live next Wednesday. The new homepages will put the news feed front and center and have both a filtering feature as well as a sidebar that highlights the most popular topics and links that are currently being discussed by your friends. The news feed is now also updated in real-time, while the old feed ran on a schedule and only updated a few times per hour.

When it comes to storing personal digital data in the cloud and serving it up in interesting ways - we're in the very early days of a brand new paradigm.

Today popular online storage company Mozy announced that it has been merged by the company that acquired it with another acquisition called Pi (Personal Information) - into a new forthcoming service called Decho (your digital echo). Pi was founded by Paul Maritz, who is now the CEO of virtualization powerhouse VMWare. What do you get when you bring these kinds of stars together into one service? Only a few clues are available so far, but we're excited to see what Decho becomes.

Popular online activity-monitoring service FriendFeed just announced IM integration and the way they implemented it is really smart. I'm now getting an IM every time someone comments on one of my items in FriendFeed, and I can reply with a comment on that very same item from inside my IM client. It's a great way to keep on top of conversations and keep them flowing.

If you've never used FriendFeed before, it's a must-see application for sharing and discussing cool stuff on the web. This new feature addition is going to make it even better.

Straight out of Belgium comes a really interesting life streaming service, yes another one, but this one brings a few unique and much needed features to the market.

The service is called Storytlr (a play on story teller) and it allows members to create their own lifestreaming service at their own URL. It's similar to the recently launched services Swurl (our review) and Sweetcron, but Storytlr has a few really neat tricks up its sleeve.

In its early days, FriendFeed was known for releasing new features on an almost daily basis. That breakneck speed has slowed now that the lifestreaming and aggregation service has come out of private beta, but sometimes FriendFeed still surprises us with new features and user interface changes. Just a few days ago, we wrote about FriendFeed's new design, which came out of beta today. More importantly, though, FriendFeed finally solved one of the most annoying aspects of the service: duplicate shares. FriendFeed now groups similar items together, which is a major improvement and reduces the noise on the main feed significantly.

Just a few weeks ago, we reported that FriendFeed had released a new beta version of its site to test a new design for the popular lifestreaming service. Today, FriendFeed released a significant update to this design, which adds some much needed enhancements to the user interface. Specifically, the navigation of the FriendFeed beta site has now been switched to the left, and the post form can no longer be confused with the search form.

RSS and centralized integration of activity data from multiple social networks are the kinds of technologies that only early adopters are interested in, right? AOL has the exact opposite kind of audience, does it not? Those assumptions appear to be facing serious challenge, if what TechCrunch says are leaked screen shots of a forthcoming AOL redesign are real.

AOL is apparently going to put an RSS reader and a window for participating in multiple 3rd party social networks right onto its front page. This could change the lives of millions of people - snide commenters can take note that with 60 million unique visitors monthly AOL.com still gets 3X as many visitors as Digg. Check out these screen shots below.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've talked about how the hot new trend of lifestreaming has been taking off lately. Now the social news service Socialmedian aims to capitalize on that trend by releasing an upgrade to their service that features something they're calling "news streaming." Like lifestreaming, news streaming lets users automatically share their "newsworthy" content on the service without sharing their other more personal content. Think FriendFeed minus the tweets about the about cat or the favorited YouTube videos of the kids.

Mobile lifestreaming is an process that isn't as easy as it should be. Although we highlighted some ways you can lifestream from your iPhone, in order to record video, your iPhone needs to be jailbroken - and that's not something everyone wants to do. For the iPhone-less, the options are even worse. Lifestream from your Razr? From your Blackberry? It just doesn't happen. (Unless you're counting Twitter as lifestreaming, which we don't. Lifestreaming is more than text).

For users of Nokia phones, though, a new app will soon be revealed that does exactly what we always dreamed a mobile lifestreaming app should: geotag your media and upload it to the web.

There are many different types of bloggers in the world today - new media journalists, "journalers," video bloggers, and others. One of the types - "diaryists" - record their innermost thoughts and feelings in a way that's very much similar to how people (yes, usually girls) once recorded their thoughts in small books kept under lock and key and stuffed beneath their mattresses.

Of course in this day and age, the thought of actually putting pen to paper seems like something from a bygone era. But the urge to create a diary hasn't been abandoned - it's just that the format has changed.

It's the weekend, so time to review the Web tech news, reviews and analysis we brought you this week on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we reported on Facebook hitting 100 million users, checked out 10 great web apps for school, looked at the state of online accounting, and reviewed the latest in lifestreaming. On the trends side we did a special podcast on online music trends, investigated RSS news from Google and Friendfeed, reported on Facebook being used in the US elections, and analyzed YouTube's business.

We were pretty excited when we first heard about Sweetcron, a self-hosted lifestreaming application developed by Yongfook. Today, after a bit of a delay, Sweetcron has finally released its software and we immediately downloaded and installed it ourselves. While it is still pretty barebone, Sweetcron represents a great solution for those who don't necessarily want to participate in the discussions on Friendfeed, but still would like to set up a lifestream.

Social networking overload - it's a common problem and one that it seems like it could be easy to solve. Thus there are countless attempts being made to build services that tie it all together. Some of those attempts are awful and one of those is a service we tested today called SocialU. RWW readers can try it out themselves via this link.

SocialU is a half-baked, condescending, poorly designed, ad-ridden lifestreaming app built in Adobe AIR. We'd refrain from writing about it, but the things we dislike about it seem worth mentioning and with all the frothy clone-like startups flying around on the web, who doesn't like seeing one that deserves it get a good blog-lashing sometimes?

FriendFeed, one of our favorite lifestreaming applications, launched the beta version of its new user interface today. The new version adds features that allow for organizing friends into different groups, which makes FriendFeed a lot easier to manage, especially for those who follow a large number of people. Also, you can now easily share photos on FriendFeed directly and see the home feeds of other users, which makes finding new friends a lot easier as well.

While there are many popular lifestreaming services out there such as FriendFeed and Profilactic, SocialThing! can be argued to be the more mainstream of them all, with a less geekier user interface and a more mainstream service focus. After snagging Bebo earlier this year, word spread that AOL was looking to buy SocialThing! Though it's only being confirmed again, we're wondering if lifestreaming is finally catching on to the mainstream masses.

Recently, we took a look at the growing trend involving lifestreaming and how more people are choosing to go this route instead of establishing a more traditional blog. But outside of certain celebrity lifestreamers like Julia Allison, the streams belonging to "regular folks" may serve more as a personal collection of content for your own reference instead of a site that's meant to draw traffic or readers. There's nothing wrong with that, though, and you don't need any special software to "lifestream" in this way either...all you need is a platform and an app. And there are at least a few apps from the iTunes app store that can help you get going.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the changing face of the blogging landscape. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger asked if blogging has lost its relational focus; Scoble explained why tech blogging has failed you; and even though not everyone agreed with his every statement, there was a renewed commitment in the blogosphere to return to blogging about what excites instead of just writing about "Apple's newest gizmo or the peccadillos of tech personalities." However, we're wondering if people even need to blog anymore...at least in the traditional sense.

SocialThing, a lifestreaming/social aggregation site, has been acquired by AOL, TechCrunch reports. We currently have no information about the final price of the acquisition, but given that SocialThing was still in private beta, we assume that it was relatively low. SocialThing was founded in 2007 with $15,000 in seed capital from TechStars. AOL seems to be rather interested in the lifestreaming and aggregation business these days. As AOL product manager Frank Gruber reported, AOL also just released its AIM BuddyUpdates yesterday.