The company is using the service Superfeedr to outsource its Hub management. Posterous joins WordPress, Blogger and TypePad among the popular publishing platforms to offer real-time feeds.

It's probably just a matter of time until Google Reader implements real-time feed consumption, but in the mean-time real-time blog feeds are quickly becoming a substantial portion of the real-time ecosystem. That ecosystem is best known for its high profile constituents Twitter and Facebook but now already includes far more than just those sources. These are very early days in the real-time web but the pace with which publishing platforms have adopted the paradigm demonstrates how easy it is.

Publishers making the move to real-time feeds not only offer their users a chance to appear first in front of readers, they also substantially reduce technical infrastructure requirements for publishers burdened by the need to poll periodically to check for updated content.

You can find my new curated blog on Posterous here.

Many people are only just coming to know the newer services like Posterous, so in this post we give you 5 tips to get the most out of them. The post is in the same vein as our earlier How to use Facebook one.

Blogging started out in the early days as a text-heavy medium; and to this day professional blogs (such as ReadWriteWeb) rely mostly on text. But the whole point of light blogging - sometimes called micro-blogging - is to be more casual and colorful. So post lots of media: photos, video, audio. Most light blogging services offer a browser bookmarklet, which enables you to post media at the click of a button.

Here's an example of easily published media from a Posterous blog called ReflectionOf.Me:

2. Subscribe to Other People (& Re-Blog)

One thing that hasn't changed about blogging is the sense of community. Half the fun of maintaining a blog is reaching out to your network. So be proactive in finding people who blog about similar things as you, then link to them and even re-blog their posts (copy and paste - it's much more accepted in light blogging than in professional blogging!).

At this stage, the market leader Tumblr still offers you the best chance of finding like-minded souls - due to the sheer number of people using it. Here's an example of community from a Tumblr user called rudie. Note the "following" panel on the right, which lists the other blogs that rudie follows.

3. Aggregate Content From Your Other Apps

With light blogging, you needn't even spend time actually blogging - because you can pull in content automatically from other apps. While FriendFeed and even Facebook are common methods for many of us to aggregate our content from across the web (a.k.a. 'lifestreaming'), it's just as easy to do so using Tumblr, Posterous or Soup.io.

To the right is an example from my own Soup.io blog. Every week Soup.io polls last.fm and automatically publishes the top 5 artists I've listened to in the past week.

4. Customize Your Theme

All of the leading light blogging services offer a variety of colorful themes. If you're handy with HTML and/or CSS, you can customize your template too - if you want to make it unique. Here's a cool MySpace-esque design from Tumblr user Juice in a Box:

5. Don't Take it Seriously

It's not called light blogging for nothing (actually it wasn't called light blogging at all, until we clumsily coined it!). Services such as Tumblr, Posterous and Soup.io make it very easy to experiment with blogging, have fun, see new things, meet new people. Why not give it go...

From Sween's Tumblr blog

We're curious to know which of these services our readers use. Let us know in the poll below, or make a comment if yours is not listed.

In the example to the right, I posted a video of a band I like to my Soup.io blog by simply inputting its MySpace video embed code and adding a couple of lines of comment. Much less effort than writing a post on ReadWriteWeb ;-)

Compete data shows that Tumblr is the clear leader in this market, with Posterous about to overtake Vox as number 2. Note: we didn't include wordpress.com or blogger.com, because they are much larger than all of these and are used for different purposes too.

Here is our poll, please select the light blogging service you use most often. There are many smaller services around, so the list below is certainly not comprehensive. If yours is missing, add it to the RWW comments.

We always liked Posterous, which launched last July, because of the simplicity of the service. Just one email to post@posterous.com will get you a new blog, for example. Over time, however, the company has added lots of additional features, including the ability to use your own domain name, track subscriptions through Feedburner, and embed a wider variety of media files. In addition, Posterous also launched a very nifty iPhone application (iTunes link) last month.

Given that Tumblr is probably Posterous' strongest competitor, it only makes sense for Posterous to give users an option to import their Tumblr blogs.

The new themes still follow Posterous' minimalist design philosophy, though given that users can edit the CSS themselves, they can now take control of their own designs.

Most importantly, Posterous' new bookmarklet automatically extracts videos from sites like YouTube, Hulu, ESPN, Revision3, blip.tv, and many others. It also recognizes music on imeem and SoundCloud, as well as documents on Slideshare, scribd, and Docstoc. The bookmarklet also picks up on photos from flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa, and you can even include live video from Seesmic, qik, and justin.tv. In addition, the bookmarklet also recognizes embedded documents from these services on other sites and allows you to post them to your Posterous.

Autopost

Thanks to Posterous' auto-post feature, you can forward your posts to Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook, as well as to most major blogging services, including Tumblr. Sadly, Posterous does not (yet?) support posting to FriendFeed and it can't save a copy of your links to more traditional boomarking services like delicious.

Taking on Tumblr

Sadly, Posterous still doesn't offer an API that would allow third-party developers to easily create applications on top of the service. Tumblr, on the other hand, has cultivated a rich ecosystem of third-party apps.

Posterous, however, has a dedicated fanbase and the simplicity of the service has served it well over the last six months. This new feature will surely help it to gain a lot of new users, as it massively expands the usefulness and functionality of Posterous.

Recommendations

In a tweet, the Noovo team told us that the app uses "state-of-the art deep graph mining and text extraction to recommend relevant content to users." A recent blog post explained further that Noovo uses "advanced algorithms to filter out the noise for you and recommends you the most relevant stories based on who your influencers are".

Further, Noovo recently deployed integration with dbpedia, the structured data version of Wikipedia. Noovo stated in its blog that this enables item-based recommendations, in other words pulling out topics from your user behaviour and that of your social network.

In many ways the recommendations part is like Digg's feature of the same name, in that it recommends interesting content from the site's community that you may like. And the more you use Noovo, the better the recommendations supposedly become.

Features Galore

Noovo is an interesting app and it sports a visually appealing interface. However, some of the main features are hard to find and then understand when first getting started. For example we had to hunt around to find out where the recommendations are (on the oddly named 'Cover' page, as it happens), and the hour glass icon is confusing at first glance (when you click it, it shows how the recommendations came about).

Adding content can also be cumbersome, unlike Tumblr where it is very simple and intuitive.

It's fair to say that these issues arise because Noovo has so many features - one could argue too many. But that also may end up its strength, because if you're looking for a central place to aggregate, share and discover cool content on the Web - Noovo could be a great choice for you. The community is small right now, but there is no shortage of colorful content to browse. Check out Noovo CTO Matej Pangerc's page, for example - you can see straight away that Noovo is very akin to Tumblr, Soup.io (my personal favorite) and other lifestreaming blog platforms.

We'll be keeping an eye on Noovo and testing it out some more. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Setup

Posterous' setup process takes minimalism to the extreme - you don't even have to register. Instead, after sending your first email to post AT posterous.com, you will receive an email with your new blog's address. Those addresses, however, don't always look too pretty (think chris-hr12.posterous.com).

While this is not necessary, it's probably best to actually create a login at posterous and register an email address with them. Thankfully, once you register your email address and chose your own URL, all your posts will be transferred over to your new one automatically. Registration is dead simple as well - just enter your email address and a password.

Posting to Posterous

When posting to posterous from the site itself, you are presented with a rich text editor, not unlike the editor in Tumblr or Wordpress.

The best way to post to posterous, though, is through email, especially because the web interface can't handle uploads (yet?), while email attachments are handled quite beautifully. Posterous accepts pdf, doc, ppt, jpg, gif, png, and mp3 files.

If you send an mp3 file, posterous will create a flash player for it in the post. If you send more than one photo, posterous will automatically create a gallery for you (see screenshot). This works especially well when sending pictures right out of a photo application like Google's Picasa.

Documents are displayed through Scribd's flash interface.

Posterous can also handle most HTML tags and when sending a YouTube URL, it immediately embeds the video in the post.

Networking Still Needs Some Work

Posterous has some social networking functions, with user profiles and the ability to follow other users. There is nothing revolutionary here. However, it isn't possible to search for users, making the ability to follow quite a bit less useful. Posterous will recommend you some users to subscribe to, but without the ability to search for your friends or even just for keywords, this part of the application clearly needs a bit more work.

Security

The email interface, while posterous' strongest point in terms of usability, is also its weakest point in terms of security. Email addresses are easily spoofed. While posterous claims that they are able to filter out messages not send by you and will notify you if they suspect a security breach, there is probably a good chance that a nefarious user could send potentially incriminating posts to your blog.

Verdict

Security issues aside, posterous is a very cool new service. The ease of posting to it is going to make it very attractive to even novice users. While most blogging platforms always allowed for posting by email either directly or through a third-party service, few bloggers ever made much use of it, as the email addresses were always cryptic and the process often simply didn't work.

Posterous would also work very well for those who want to send quick updates from their mobile devices. There is, after all, no need to install any apps - simply send an email and be done.

While the microblogging/lifestreaming field is quite crowded, with Pownce, Twitter, Tumblr, Jaiku, and too many others to name, posterous might just be different and simple enough to set itself apart from the rest.

"MySpace was the original open platform, and the MySpace Application Gallery is the evolution of that vision, taking MySpace users around the world to the next level and empowering them to take control of their online presence in new and exciting ways," said MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe in a press release. While it's a bit of a stretch to call MySpace the original open platform (they apparently forget that nasty time a couple of years ago when they were blocking widgets left and right and thought the better strategy was to build competing service - see: MySpaceTV vs. YouTube), it is likely that apps will play well to the MySpace crowd.

We're not sure if they'll empower anyone to "take control of their online presence," but the same crop of silly, fun applications that have done so well on Facebook, should play to the MySpace audience as well.

When MySpace launched their app gallery in beta in March we noted that application spam, a problem that has plagued Facebook, may be a large hurdle to adoption unless the company can nip it in the bud. "MySpace has largely killed the messaging spam that plagued its user experience for so long, [so we] don't imagine users will be happy to see something like it back again," we wrote. MySpace has already started putting app notifications in their equivalent of the Facebook News Feed, with all of their 120 million exposed to applications, it will be interesting to see if app spam becomes a problem.

Today is an important day for the MySpace platform, though. We fully expect a quick uptake from MySpace users, who have already shown an affinity for widgets. The long term success of the platform may depend on whether MySpace can keep the noise to an acceptable level.

Big Opportunities:

1) web 2.0 in enterprise; "turning themselves inside out"
2) web 2.0 evolving into cloud computing
3) ambient computing (mobile phones and ubiquitous sensors)

e.g. dell ideastorm

real time user facing services based on data from customers -- your bank doesn't give u this, but google does

finding meaning in that data

google pagerank = meaning hidden in links (link is a vote)

other areas where "there is hidden meaning in enterprise data"

wesabe -- how people spend their money is a vote (nb: Tim noted he is an investor)

eg merchant pages give people collective intelligence about spending

2) cloud computing

Amazon got ahead of the curve by doing internet as OS; an ecosystem developing around Amazon's infrastructure. Google has got into the game with Google App Engine. Startups like EngineYard also interesting players.

Openness is key - programmable web

3) mobile / ambient

software above the level of a single device. So mobile does not equal the phone. He talks about Microsoft Live Mesh, noting that it is currently only Windows - but he's waiting to hear from Microsoft on its future.

new interaction paradigms - eg CNN's political coverage using mapping technologies

Megaphone in New Orleans

The Dash, turns cellphone into GPS

Microsoft Clearflow - sensors everywhere, puts in a "dispatch layer", aims to improve traffic reports

Quake-Catcher Network - uses motion sensors in your laptop

This all = Ambient computing; "web 2.0 not something we interact with on a laptop, it is all around us."

Conclusion

So are we done yet? NO.

Tim lists some examples of big goals that web 2.0 can still achieve:

Changing government structure

Publicmarkup.org

Everyblock

InStedd

Tracking illegal deforestation using Google Earth

Earth Day

An Inconvenient Truth

wattzon.org (how we use our energy)

To conclude, Tim urges us to "not follow the headlines" and the hot things, but go after "big, hard problems".

Tim finishes with a poem that is important to him, called 'The Man Watching' by Rainer Maria Rilke [thanks Sean for the link]. Very nice touch! His main message is to tackle big hard problems, with web 2.0. Make a difference.

Today we were emailed about a new GTD app on Facebook called Get Stuff Done. It's a solid group networking and task management tool, and in just a few days has over 200 users -- but prospects for long term success are bleak. Two other project management apps that we wrote about in Facebook last November, Projects and MyOffice, barely register on the platform these days. They have just 1,000 and 3,800 users respectively according to Adomonics.

Clearly, there is a potential for Facebook to be a useful productivity tool -- it is one of the web's best address books, and plays host to some of the richest social data, which could be used for very worthwhile purposes. But it has yet to shed its "fun" image. The top 40 apps on the Facebook platform are all of the "play" variety. And of course, Facebook doesn't want to completely shed its college clothing, it parlayed that core "fun" networking image into a $15 billion valuation.

About 5 months ago Stowe Boyd seemed to predict that in 6 months Facebook would be a viable competitor to LinkedIn. Since that time Facebook has taken some steps that clearly make the site better suited for business networking (granular privacy controls, friend groups, friend suggestions, etc.), but as we approach that half year threshold the "not for work" image remains.

A couple of days ago Nick O'Neill wondered if productivity apps would ever find a place on Facebook. It is hard to answer that question with a flat out no, because the opportunity is just too great. As Facebook's core audience of early college users grow older and enter the work force, if the company can retain their attention, then certainly Facebook could be a worthy platform for business networking. But evidence points to that being doubtful to happen any time soon.

But the problem is that Twimbler doesn't do enough to differentiate itself from a normal Twitter stream, nor enough to really be a very robust tumblelogging platform. Twimbler is built around links. You tweet links at it via a hashtag, and it parses those links into posts. It recognizes YouTube vidoes and embeds those, but doesn't recognize images (as far as we could tell), nor does it recognize videos from other services. That means that it's basically a Twitter stream with YouTube videos embedded.

Because it is based on links, Twimbler also misses some of the features that most tumblelogging platforms support, such as quotes, events, or regular posts.

The final nail in Twimbler's coffin, however, is that many tumblelogging platforms, including Tumblr, support the automatic posting of your Twitter stream (among other outside activity streams). So if you really wanted to run a tumblelog off your Twitter stream, Tumblr could do it for you and offer a complete tumblelogging platform to boot. It won't parse YouTube video links from tweets into embeds, but I don't think that's enough of a differentiator to make Twimbler worth it.

What Twimbler does do well, however, is illustrate how services can use hashtags to build utility on top of Twitter. While checking out Twimbler I couldn't help but think that a neat bookmarking tool could be build on top of Twitter that way -- maybe a service that used a #delicious hash tag to send bookmarks to your del.icio.us account, for example.

• Tumblr - Tumblr is a microblogging application that also allows the inclusion of activity streams from other services.
• Onaswarm - Onaswarm, which is in private beta, is a dedicated lifestreaming app that supports a wide variety of other services.
• Jaiku - The chief function of Jaiku, as a presence app similar to Twitter, is enhanced by letting users aggregate activity from outside services.
• Lifestrea.ms - Lifestrea.ms -- in closed beta -- is a dedicated activity stream aggregator that quotes our review in the company line by calling itself a "standards based nerve center."
• Soup.io - Similar to Tumblr, Soup.io is a microblogging application. It also supports outside status updates for 11 services and any RSS feed.
• FriendFeed - Due to being founded by a bunch of ex-Googlers, FriendFeed might hold the crown for most talked about lifestreaming app. It supports nearly 30 web sites.
• MyBlogLog - MyBlogLog, which specializes in creating ad-hoc social networks around blogs, just got into lifestreaming with an update last night.
• Profilactic - Profilactic supports 135 sites. Yes, 135 sites. As well as the ability to add your own. Have fun.
• iStalkr - iStalkr is a hub for your social media activity and that of your friends and family, with a unique approach to lifestreaming that puts your life on a timeline.
• Correlate.us - Correlate.us creates a river of activity for a handful of supported sites, and graphs which sites you use the most, all with the design sensibilities of del.icio.us.
• ProfileFly - Focused on social networks, ProfileFly creates a replacement profile that mashes up status updates from your existing social profiles.
• Second Brain - Second Brain takes takes a slightly less automatic approach to life streaming by asking that you categorize and group your activity into collections. See our review.
• Explode.us - Explode.us is a social media search engine that also offers "a profile to consolidate your various online presences."
• liveZuu - A lifestreaming application that supports 28 networks and offer a Facebook app.
• OneSwirl - A newer dedicated lifestream aggregator that celebrated its first public release today.
• Socialthing! - Currently in closed beta, Socialthing! is a promising lifestreaming service that offers a nifty-looking iPhone optimized version. They're planning to release the service at SXSW.
• iminta - iminta keeps you up-to-date on what your friends are "in to" and lets you share your own activity stream.
• Plaxo Pulse - Most famous for helping to get Robert Scoble temporarily banned from Facebook, Plaxo's Pulse product lets you aggregate activity from a wide variety of third party services.
• Identoo - A fairly standard social streaming site.
• Escaloop - Escaloop is a free-form lifestreaming app that lets you combine up to 20 RSS feeds into a single stream (yeah, there are other RSS mixers out there, but Escaloop is notable on this list for specifically targeting lifestreaming).
• Hictu - Hictu is a video microblogging app that supports importing activity streams from outside services.
• Life2Front - Life2Front's LiFE-Line activity stream feature is a functional activity stream aggregator, if not the most attractive.
• 30Boxes - The online calendar app also has lifestreaming capabilities.
• Readr - Readr mashes 21 different sites into a single profile feed.
• Suprglu - Suprglu pulls content from the web services you use and then republishes them in blog format.
• Where is me? - A lifestreaming app that pulls from 11 services or RSS feeds.
• Slifeshare - Lifestreaming via a Mac OS X application (Windows promised soon).
• MovableType ActionStreams - For do-it-yourselfers, MovableType offers a lifestreaming plugin for their blog platform.
• SimpleLife - More for the DIY set, SimpleLife is a lifestreaming plugin for Wordpress.
• WP Lifestream - Another lifestreaming plugin for Wordpress.
• RSS Stream - You guessed it, a third lifestream plugin for Wordpress.
• oneConnect - Yahoo!'s oneConnect mobile service includes activity stream aggregation features.
• Facebook (?) - Rumor has it that Facebook will be opening up the news feed to outside service updates.
• Socialstream - Nothing has come out of it yet, but this Google funded academic project at Carnegie Mellon University into lifestreaming has garnered a ton of press attention.
• Jeremy Keith's Lifestreaming Script - Jeremy Keith's lifestreaming script was one of the first and inspired some of the services on this list.

Are there any we missed? Which is your favorite? Let us know in the comments below.

If general or specific are two ways to categorize social news sites, let's look at these two categories in terms of:

• Quality of news
• Speed of news
• Detail of news
• Community feel

Quality of news

In theory, big social news sites have the advantage of using large groups of people and correspondingly strong algorithms to discover and vet high quality content on any topic. In reality, though, this effect is often mitigated by the imperative to limit coverage to a single story concerning each news event. The big sites usually see the first good story on a topic promoted to the front page and subsequent quality coverage is left in the dust. The fact that something happened at all becomes much more important than deliberation over which coverage of that event is most worth reading.

The small niche social news sites don't suffer from this dilemma but depending on the breadth of your social network or niche userbase, important news may simply go unnoticed and not be covered at all. That's a risk you run on these kinds of sites, but on the other hand the wealth of resources that your friends can share is often much richer. Small social news sites don't care about repeat coverage of common events and don't revert to a "lowest common denominator" method of determining what's important.

From the outside niche sites may turn up a lot of content that doesn't look important at all, but the closer you are to a topic - the more important the details become.

If you can find a niche site for your niche, or an active set of like-minded contributers as contacts on a site like FriendFeed - then the quality of news will be vastly superior. Otherwise, and to supplement those small social news experiences, the big sites work well enough.

It's notable that Digg has been trying to create those kinds of small experiences within the big site, but I don't think it's worked very well so far. The Digg user experience is just not built for small communities of interest.

On the small social news side, two things worth checking out are FriendFeed's fantastically executed friend recommendation feature (it just goes on and on with suggestions) and social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia's seemless implementation of groups. Both are great examples of how to nail a small social news feature.

Speed of News

Nobody likes being the last to know about important news, so speed is an important metric. Sometimes, very rarely, the big general interest sites see something burn up the charts and hit the front page in less than an hour after submission. Far more common, at least at Digg, is for news to take 6 to 24 hours to get to the most visible place on the site. Big social news sites are so reliant on explicit user validation of news as important, and require that this goes on in the context of a terrible signal to noise ratio, that these are not the sites to go to for early news if being early is important to you.

Traditional mainstream news sites beat big social news sites on stories all day long, and if our new web can't beat the old-school then I don't know what it's good for. Joking aside, there are many things more important than being fast, but it is important in a news source.

All those criticisms being as they are, check out the Propeller Tracker on the right hand side of that site for a good example of a big site tackling the speed problem.

Small social news sites are much faster at unearthing news, if someone happens to catch that news at all early in the news cycle. Different sites handle this in different ways, though.

FriendFeed gives you a firehose and doesn't privilege the important stuff over everything else. The new Tumblr looks like it is going to highlight content as soon as a handful of people have linked to it, that's great and something I'll bet other sites will start doing soon. Sphinnn, the online marketing version of Digg, falls somewhere in between. Less populated voting sites have a lower threshold for popularity but less energy driving good news forward fast, too.

Detail of news

Big sites ought to have rich discussions in comments and offer greater detail on the news, but they rarely do. Slashdot and Propeller might be the exceptions so far. How's discussion over at Newsvine? I don't know, perhaps someone can let us know in comments.

For the most part though, mainstream audiences are still often not used to, don't feel compelled to or are unable to leave high-quality comments on social news stories. That's where the richness in detail comes from in the current model. How hard would it be to pull in related content on these news topics from sites like Del.icio.us and Twitter? Not very hard. That would be cool.

Niche social news sites lose out on some detail because of the smaller sample set of contributors, but they are clearly better for detail overall. There are more and more finely grained links discoverable on topics of interest to you in a niche site that suits your needs. Like the question of quality, detail is a criteria that niche sites clearly win on if a healthy niche site is appropriate or available for you at all.

Community feel

I prefer to spend my time in the company of people who have the same interests and who already agree with me about things that are important. I'm just kidding about that.

That's the trade-off you often make when choosing to spend your time on a niche social news site. You trade opportunities to make new and diverse social connections for the opportunity to develop a closer connection to a smaller, more homogeneous group of news lovers. Both have their place, I wouldn't want one and not the other in my life.

Final Thoughts

The complimentary nature of community on big and little social news sites is a good snapshot of what's probably true in all of the above questions - getting the best of both worlds is ideal.

I find myself spending about 75% of my news consumption time in niche social news sites (Twitter and Ma.gnolia mostly) and 25% in big social news sites. I wish I had more time for both. I intend to spend some more time on FriendFeed and I'm jealous every time I see a good Tumblr blog.

We've been having some slow times at Digg lately, so I'm interested in checking out Mixx.

What does all this mean? I think it means that big social news sites are at risk of losing substantial amounts of user engagement once users discover that more targeted news environments are available to them. Big sites will probably always be big, but the social news landscape is quickly growing richer day by day.

Tumblr

For a recent episode of Read/WriteTalk Sean Ammirati sat down with David Karp, the founder of Tumblr. Tumblr is a platform that makes it easy to create Tumblelogs - which Wikipedia defines as:

A variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author's creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary. One of the many tumblelog sevices is tumblr.

Read more...

Onaswarm

Onaswarm is a new lifestreaming application from Toronto's David Janes and BlogMatrix. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote that Onaswarm is a smart, interesting service that combines groups, microformats and flashes of really good usability.

It's very text-centric and clearly better for geeks than it is for the artists who like Tumblr, for example. The Onaswarm site architecture and navigation need a substantial overhaul to improve usability, despite some nice touches.

Read more...

Lifestrea.ms

Lifestrea.ms is a powerful new lifestreaming service from Germany that you'll want to keep an eye on. Marshall checked it out and said that it's a real testimony to the potential of the new web that anyone would even try to create something like this company has. Currently in private beta, we hope the company will fix its usability issues and launch soon. Send an email to beta@lifestrea.ms if you want on the list for an account.

Lifestreaming aggregates all your inbound and outbound activity online, see Tumblr or FriendFeed for other examples. If everything under the covers at Lifestrea.ms can be made as good as the front page of the site, then we'll be in great shape. That page alone is a marvel to witness.

Read more...

Soup

Watch out Tumblr, here comes Soup. According to Josh Catone, Soup is an easy to use tumble blogging application that includes two killer features: social networking (kinda) and outside activity streams. It's sort of a cross between Tumblr, Pownce, and a social activity aggregator.

At its core, Soup is a microblogging app, and a pretty easy to use one. Their tumble blog set up supports text, link, quote, image, and video posts. Sign up is a snap (you can actually begin posting to your tumble blog before creating an account), and like Tumblr, Soup blogs can be mapped to an outside domain.

Read more...

Jaiku

Jaiku can aggregate and automatically republish stories from your other activity streams: blog posts, del.icio.us links, Flicker photos, even Twitter updates. In this regard, it is a lot like Tumblr (another service that has a huge lead on it traffic-wise). We think this is the part of Jaiku that Google was interested in when it purchased the site -- Jaiku as an activity stream aggregator, not Jaiku as a presence app.

We heard last summer about a Google sponsored project at Carnegie Mellon University called "Socialstream." Socialstream's goal was to "create a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple network." The idea was basically for Socialstream to be a hub for all of your social networking activity -- whether that was on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, or Flickr -- all of your attention data would be collected in one place where you could manage and share it.

Read more...

Finally, you may want to check out What's Next on the Web: a RWW Toolkit for 2008, which features Open Data as one of the 5 big trends Marshall Kirkpatrick compiled resources for. Lifestreaming is a type of web app that will benefit greatly from open data, so check out our toolkit to prepare yourself.

"As for Jaiku, it appears to have fallen through the cracks at Google and is rapidly sinking as a result of neglect," wrote Ars Technica's Ryan Paul on Tuesday. "Unless Google takes some decisive action soon, the service might not retain its existing user base for much longer."

While Engström's blogged response disputes that Jaiku is being neglected, there is no doubt that the service has lost considerable ground to Twitter -- ground it can't afford to lose. According to Compete, Jaiku's traffic peaked in October 2007, around the time of the Google acquisition, but has fallen steadily since (off nearly 30% last month). Twitter, meanwhile, has continued gaining, up over 10% last month. Though Jaiku's traffic is still way up on the year, it is off since the Google purchase and the service still attracts just a tiny fraction of the visitors that Twitter does.

Can Jaiku ever catch Twitter in the presence app market (or Tumblr in the microblogging market, for that matter)? That seems unlikely. But that's also not what I surmise Google wants to do with Jaiku.

What really sets Jaiku apart from Twitter, is that it can aggregate and automatically republish stories from your other activity streams: blog posts, del.icio.us links, Flicker photos, even Twitter updates. In this regard, it is a lot like Tumblr (another service that has a huge lead on it traffic-wise). I think this is the part of Jaiku that Google was interested in when it purchased the site -- Jaiku as an activity stream aggregator, not Jaiku as a presence app.

We heard last summer about a Google sponsored project at Carnegie Mellon University called "Socialstream." Socialstream's goal was to "create a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple network." The idea was basically for Socialstream to be a hub for all of your social networking activity -- whether that was on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, or Flickr -- all of your attention data would be collected in one place where you could manage and share it.

This is an ambitious project, and to work it means that social networks need to embrace data portability -- something that we're seeing begin to happen right now (maybe). If the Data Portability Working Group actually realizes their goals, and social networks tear down the garden walls and let users export their data, and if I'm right about Google's plans for Jaiku (which, I'll point out, is complete speculation on my part), then Jaiku could become a very important service this year.

What do you think? Would it make sense for Google to take Jaiku in this direction? Or have I completely lost it? Let us know in the comments below.