In theory, the idealism which infuses Lavva sounds like a good idea. "Search powered by the people," "results based on quality, not SEO," "transparency," etc. are the types of things Lavva likes to rave about when discussing their social algorithm. In practice, however, social search like this doesn't work. Obviously, it doesn't help Lavva's case that very few people know their startup even exists. Without users to rank the results, there's just no way Lavva can highlight the quality content.

Their idea just misses the mark, unfortunately. They would probably have had better luck if they overlaid their social algorithm on top of Google results, for example. That way the most relevant links would be retrieved first and then users could rank the results based on quality. (Rankings are done using little thumbs up and thumbs down icons beneath each result).

Do You Want to Chat about the News in Your Search Engine?

Another one of Lavva's hair-brained schemes is their "News Goes Social" page. Here, the engine aggregates top stories from a select few resources (CNN, Reuters, BBC, UN News, AP) and combines those with top search terms and the top links on Twitter.

While this in and of itself isn't entirely crazy (or entirely useful for that matter), how they want you to interact with the content sort of is. News stories have a "go social" link next to them which takes you to another page where you can chat, debate, and discuss the topic with other online searchers. After clicking through a number of these links, it was clear that no one was using this feature.

In a similar vein, users can sign into Lavva and click on the comment bubble icon under search results to leave their comments on the news story. Remember when Google tried this? Yeah, it was universally disliked then too. Frankly, this just isn't how people want to interact with search. And if Google couldn't make voting and commenting on search work, what hope does Lavva have?

Future Plans: Twitter and Facebook

While Lavva's service may get a little more interesting when they release their next update which plans to incorporate search results from sites like Twitter and Facebook, we doubt that alone will be enough for Lavva to make any impact. Even a startup as promising and innovative as the social search service that was Delver didn't make it, eventually selling out to Sears (yes, Sears!) in the end.

For now the best thing that can be said about Lavva is that it's powered by hydroelectricity, making it one of the greenest engines around. They plan to move to a solar-based system in the future, reports Seattle tech blog TechFlash. While we're happy that they're concerned about the environment, going green isn't going to be enough to make this social search attempt work.

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.

When we looked at Streamy back in March of this year, we were more than impressed with what it had to offer. For some reason though, the service's social networking aspects never really became heavily used by the early adopter crowd. Everyone had their own reasons for this decision of course, with complaints which ranged from the service feeling a little too raw for everyday use to its RSS reader which couldn't (and still doesn't) provide a viable alternative to Google Reader. However, we think the main reason for the lack of uptake has more to do with the fact that Streamy's core audience was already busy interacting, commenting, and "liking" items over on their social media aggregator of choice: FriendFeed.

Now, with FriendFeed out of the way (or soon to be, that is), it may be time for us to give Streamy another look. There are a number of features which should appeal to today's FriendFeed users if they decide to make the switch. However, there are still some issues with how Streamy implements these features, and we'll make note of those too.

1. FriendFeed Friend Import

When you sign up for Streamy, you have the option to find your friends on other services. One of those services is FriendFeed. By clicking on the "People" link at the top of the page then selecting "Find Friends" you can import your friends from Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Google, and even Flickr. This is at least as good as FriendFeed's own friend import process which only imported from email, Twitter, and Facebook. Plus, it gives you the ability to easily re-create your FriendFeed social graph on Streamy without having to manually seek out your friends and re-add them.

What Streamy needs to work on: One thing Streamy needs to improve in this area is the ability to "select all" the friends it finds and let you follow them in one fell swoop. At the moment, you have to click "Follow" next to each individual who you want to add. It's also really hard to see who's following you and then reciprocate. Although new followers appear on the homepage in the "new from friends" section, you have to "remove" each person from this box after following them only to have more new followers appear in their place. And there's no way to tell whether or not you were already following these people, which leads to confusion. There should be a centralized way of managing this activity and the homepage widget definitely needs to sync with your following choices made on the backend.

2. Comment on Stories

On the Streamy homepage, a section called "Stories for You" delivers personalized news based on your site activity like stories you and your friends are sharing and commenting on. However, since at first Streamy has no activity to go on, it simply recommends "popular" stories to you and those may not be stories you actually enjoy. Like FriendFeed, you can comment on these stories and those comments will be seen by others reading the same story. Also like FriendFeed, undesirable stories can be hidden from your view with the "hide" button. However, unlike FriendFeed, Streamy actually introduces a great feature here: threaded comments. Each comment has a "reply" button next to it, letting users reply to each other's comments as opposed to simply creating a new one.

What Streamy needs to work on: Although FriendFeed's river of news was also personalized based on who you followed, the site offered a number of ways to surface popular content. When your friends commented on an item, it "bubbled up" to appear at the top of your stream, for instance. FriendFeed also had a "best of day" feature which displayed the most active stories that day. Streamy doesn't have anything like this so content with comments could easily become lost. For now, the best way to see stories your friends comment on is in the "New from People" homepage widget (also available in the "People" section) which is an activity feed of your friends' comments among other things.

3. Groups: Streamy's Version of FriendFeed Rooms

Streamy has a feature which lets you create groups which is somewhat reminiscent of FriendFeed's Rooms feature. As with Rooms, groups can be topic-based so you and your friends can discuss the news. You can browse through your own group memberships to see which groups you're a member of and you can access the admin features for the groups you own. Also like FriendFeed, groups can be public or private as you choose and you can invite members simply by typing their name.

What Streamy needs to work on: Unlike FriendFeed, groups can't be auto-populated with content like RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, YouTube videos, etc. Everything needs to be manually entered through a text box or shared with the group via Streamy's sharing features. However, sharing items from your subscriptions or recommended stories is more difficult than it should be. Despite Streamy's cool drag-and-drop interface for posting to external services, sharing with groups or individuals still leaves a lot to be desired.

When you first grab an item to share it, icons appear letting you save it (the star icon), share to other services like Facebook or Twitter (green arrow), or share with a friend (people icon). When you select the share with friends option, though, only a limited number of people appear and they're only identified with their avatar, not by name. Also missing is a way to share with the groups from here.

Instead, to share with a group, you have to click on the story's headline then access the share button from the top right of the article. Once here, it's very easy to share with either people, groups, or services. It's the sort of option that should be available directly from the homepage without any extra clicks.

4. Your Shared Stuff

Another sharing feature in Streamy is the one where you're able to share items by posting them to your profile. This feature is activated through the drag-and-drop interface and dragging the content to the Streamy service from the available list of services to post to (green arrow icon, once again). This posts the story to your profile which your friends can then see when they click on "Shared Stuff" from their own Streamy homepage. It also appears in the "New from People" homepage feed. In a way, this is a lot like FriendFeed's home feed which is comprised of all the shared items from your FriendFeed friends.

What Streamy needs to work on: Unlike FriendFeed, your own "Shared Stuff" isn't populated with the dozens of social media services that FriendFeed supports. Instead, Streamy displays all your site activity, including friends you added and groups you created or joined. Your friends will then see your Streamy status updates, shared stories, and stories you commented on mixed in with these other activities in their "New from People" feed. We're not sure that we want to see people's site-wide activity (like who they just friended) - we're more interested in the actual content they're sharing.

5. ...And So Much More!

What Streamy really has going for it, though, is what FriendFeed didn't - the dashboard aggregator, integration with other social media services, and built in chat. Streamy's layout is a lot different from FriendFeed - or from Twitter for that matter - and that may be good thing in some people's opinion. As opposed to a real-time "river of news" the site's homepage is a widget-filled dashboard with updates from your feeds, Facebook, and any other services you add. It also includes a friend list showing your IM buddies from Google Chat, AIM, or MSN. The Status update box lets you post to Facebook, Twitter, Streamy, or (for now) FriendFeed. As you delve into the dashboards for the other services using the small buttons at the top, you'll be surprised to find things like a full-on Twitter client complete with replies, DMs, and trending topics, for example. Digg's dashboard is a nice, consolidated view of what's hot on that service... and so on.

If you don't like the dashboard, you can also choose to have Streamy load up directly to your feeds or one of the other social media services Streamy supports.

What Streamy needs to work on: Adding widgets to the dashboard needs improvement. You have to first click on the widget (+) button from the top of the page to select the additional widgets. While simple enough in theory, there were some bugs when testing this out. For example, adding a Digg widget for the topic "Technology" was a dead-end. After you get the drop-down box to select a topic, there's no "go" or "add" button to actually complete the process.

Conclusion

In the end, Streamy shows a lot of potential for becoming a great service and they could certainly capitalize on FriendFeed's impending shutdown if they so desired. However, there's still a bit of work to be done to make the service as usable as it needs to be for ex-FriendFeed users. In Streamy's defense, however, they originally never had the goal of competing with FriendFeed which is why things are the way they are. Like us, they never imagined FriendFeed would be acquired and shut down. Now that it has sold, though, the company is interested in seeing how they could appeal to the community of early adopters who originally made FriendFeed their home.

Will Streamy be able to make the necessary changes in time before someone else lures the ex-FriendFeeders over to their service? Perhaps. The company, currently a small 3-person team, has made amazing strides so far and is currently looking into getting additional funding. In the next couple of months, if things go well, we may see a lot of changes happen very quickly - specifically to the social networking aspects of the service. The company also sees a lot of potential to incorporate new features which aren't simply FriendFeed dupes. Hopefully, we'll be able to update this post someday soon with details as to what those may be.

Using a tool called the Moment Maker, you create each "Moment" (as the shared media is called) by adding notes, assigning an emotion, adding the date, location, and the names of the people who were in the moment, in addition to the media itself. You can choose to add the photos and videos either from your computer, from publicly shared content on the web via a search tool, or from your own accounts at various online services including flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and Picasa.

A Few Stumbles

The Moment Maker tool is relatively easy to use, but could use a little simplification. For example, the first time you go to use flickr, the service needs to authorize your account. Although you're in the middle of "moment creation," thisMoment doesn't perform the authorization using a separate tab or pop-up window. Instead, you're forced to save the moment as a draft, head to your preferences, and authorize flickr from there. Had I known that I'd have to drop what I was doing to configure these settings, I would have headed to my preferences first, then created my Moment. Even better, some sort of walkthrough or prompt to set up your associated services in the beginning would have been useful. UPDATE: The company tells me that you won't see a prompt to link your services if you log in via Facebook Connect from a "moment" page, which, of course, is what I did. You might do the same, so I stand by my assertion that this process needs to be easier. Even the prompt you're supposed to see isn't as obvious as the link to "add a moment" at the top of the screen.

Another slight drawback was the search feature once connected to my flickr account. Although a search box is displayed, entering in a query returned photos that were clearly not mine, but pulled from the public stream. Considering that flickr Pro users like myself probably have hundreds of photos (or thousands!) to sift through, being able to search your own images is a critically important feature. There is a way to search your own images, but it's odd that it wouldn't be the default setting. Instead you have to click the link that says search images "from me" to find your own photos. I didn't even see this option the first time I used it!

Still, when you get through the challenges of locating your content, the end result is an attractive, side-scrolling slideshow of photos and videos which you browse through using the site's timeline feature. These slideshows can be set to public or private as you choose.

Social Sharing

If simple slideshow creation was all the site did, it would probably languish in obscurity since it's already somewhat competing with other photo slideshow creation tools like flickr and Slide. The addition of video and an attractive UI would only take thisMoment so far.

However, the beauty of thisMoment is that it lets you push the content out across the web. After creating a moment, you have the option to post it to Facebook and/or Twitter or email it to friends. Thanks to thisMoment's integration with these social web services, it also automatically identified certain contacts of mine already using the site and allowed me to select them from a list of "my connections" instead of having to type in email addresses.

Another change since the service was in private beta is that it now allows you to access embed codes for publicly shared moments and you can promote them on social sites like Digg, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, and others through a "share" widget located at the bottom of the slideshow.

Premium "Momentos"

At launch time, thisMoment announced content licensing agreements with The New York Times, the Time Inc. Lifestyle Group and Road & Track. These companies will offer branded versions of thisMoment called "Momentos." Surprisingly, these moments weren't featured on the company's homepage nor were they easily accessible via site navigation or search. That's an odd choice - you would think that if they have access to premium content, they would find a way to highlight it better.

In the future, thisMoment plans to expand their offerings to include an iPhone application - it should arrive in the App Store in a few weeks. A Facebook app is available now.

Just login with your AppUseful account or with Facebook Connect, and you're magically transformed from a disgruntled social media fanatic to a pithy tech reviewer with a vengeance. Remember that time in 2008 when you couldn't get a beta invite for that one startup? Here's your chance to let it all out.

Here's why we find this interesting: There's an awful lot of back-channel chatter and blog pontification about any social media app. Gauging overall public response is a matter of either guesswork or metrics analytics, neither of which are our particular specialty. For startups, for journalists, and for users, it's helpful to know what people are saying without having to troll all around the Internet to find out.

As an aside to the AppUseful creators: Since the site is new and there's not a lot of UGC for the time being, how about fleshing it out with quotes from and links to bloggers' reviews for the time being?

Second, AppUseful is a catalog of the social web that can direct users to new apps they might find, well, useful. E.g., I want to know more about how musicians can market themselves online. AppUseful has a music category. I already knew about Last.fm and Pandora, but what about Grooveshark? If the word in the user review is that it's more useful and flexible and allows indie musicians to sell tracks, then it's right up my alley. And I might not have heard of it otherwise.

With featured (Bing, Wolfram Alpha), recent (Google Wave), and popular (Gmail, Digg) sections, user-oriented discovery and review of apps is simple and fun. Also, it takes a lot less time than trolling tech blogs and flaming the comments because a particular beta app didn't work for you.

For casual Internet users who are all over the social web but don't have the knowledge, resources, or desire to set up and market full online storefronts, there's PutACart, which democratizes the long tail of e-commerce, allowing users to peddle their wares from a plethora of the most popular social destinations online.

Here's what the carts look like on Facebook, MySpace, and WordPress, respectively:

Since this is for casual social-web users, Paypal is the only payment method for both buyers and sellers. And if a user makes changes to certain parts of his product list or account, he'll also need to update the embed codes on his social sites.

Mostly, though, it's a great idea with a kind of bad interface. Here's a look at my web-based store. Unfortunately, I can't customize the look and feel of this page, and I have no options for customizing my social web shopping cards other than toggling between thumbnail and extended product views. I have no control over how it looks, and social web users are very big on customizable GUIs. Especially for something that will be the commercial side of their personal brand, users need to be able to choose images, colors, typefaces, and layouts. They should probably also have some level of access to style the page/widget as they like. On this site, I didn't even have the option to crop my thumbnail, which came out distorted because the creators didn't give me any dimensions, either.

Also, the message sent out after a Paypal purchase is confirmed should without question be customizable. I, Jolie O'Dell, would never write something like, "We can't tell how much cooler you are for having bought something from us. Your friends will be jealous. Thank you!" And I'm sure a great many other vendors wouldn't, either. If you're sending out a message on my behalf to people in my social graph, it's imperative that I have control of what the message says.

Customization issues aside, it's a fantastic service for social web peeps who want to throw a few marketable products into the digital universe without committing to an online store, and we look forward to seeing what the PutACart team does in the future.

Also, this is a test store, so please don't try to buy anything I've posted! Do you really think I'd sell out all my tech scene bros for $0.99? That's my retirement plan.

Angel investor Dale Okuno gave founders Kurt Daradics and Jason Kiesel an undisclosed sum in April 2009, and the company has already reported marked success with their first client, faith-based media conglomerate Salem Communications.

"FreedomSpeaks' commercial-use API allows organizations to white-label our service," said Daradics. "Talkpac.com is an example. They've sent over 100,000 letters this month in their radio tax campaign."

There are a few competitors in the space, such as CapitalAdvantage, which offers online advocacy to representatives and media, and Convio, a comprehensive advocacy system. From the user side, FreedomSpeaks differentiates itself by offering more access to representatives on the micro level.

"The main point that sets us apart is the breadth of our data set," said Keisel. "We go down to the county and city level. In addition, they do have a SaaS thing they offer. If I'm signed up with Convio and I put a link on my site to send a letter, the link goes to Convio. We allow an embed, which makes the whole process smoother for users and consolidates traffic for clients."

"We're also set up to integrate with social media," Keisel continued. "We currently have integration with Twitter and are working with Facebook, MySpace, and the other social networks. Complete integration will follow in the coming months."

Money and politics combine to form an issue no less confounding and controversial than that of monetization and startups.

Although user accounts are free, the site charges politicians a monthly fee to maintain a custom profile. Fees run along a sliding scale that ranges from $1,000 per month for federal politicians to $100 per month for city representatives. The site also uses display ads as a revenue stream and sells non-identifying demographic data to news organizations, research firms, and marketing agencies.

From CRM via Twitter to Facebook live video contests, the folks at Threadless have knocked online engagement out of the park and created a community around a brand while building a great reputation for responsiveness. Watch on and be schooled.

Catch a whiff of the Threadless social aroma on their Twitter and Facebook pages.

SocialMedia.com has raised millions of dollars in financing and says it's seen excellent results in previous campaigns on Facebook and other social networks. Now it's going to bring its strategy to Twitter, dedicated microsites and elsewhere around the web. The strategy is essentially to track, highlight and prompt casual conversations online about an advertiser's product. Do you want to be part of those kinds of conversations?

Now the company is going to roll out a service that tracks Twitter mentions of a company, product or keyword. The discovered search results will be filterable, can be limited to a particular group of users, and can then be displayed in a widget or microsite. For an additional fee SocialMedia will purchase ads in popular Twitter clients that prompt users to Tweet about an advertiser. Twitter users don't get paid for doing so, they just get the opportunity to offer public feedback, perhaps with a common hashtag so all the related tweets can be viewed publicly with ease. We can imagine people going for that. RSS readers can click here to participate in a poll on this topic and view the results.

Other new products being rolled out today include branded embeddable polls and activity stream publishing microsites that will function a little like Twitter but will stand alone on an advertiser's site.

"I came here to talk about my thoughts, feelings and experiences with friends and a global network of diverse people - and you want me to write about your product?"