friendfeed

Skimmer brings your social streams to the desktop

Skimmer (download) is a new social aggregator powered by Adobe AIR. It supports Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Blogger, and lets you stay abreast of the latest content from each of those services. Everything gets sucked up into a single stream (a la FriendFeed), which you can then sort out by service, keyword, or group of friends. Like Twhirl, Alert Thingy, and others, the idea is to casually keep an eye on all these places while getting real work done in other applications.

In addition to pulling in content, you can also use it to post to any of the included services. It has a built-in YouTube and Flickr uploader where you can simply drag in files and edit the metadata before it's sent off. It also doubles as a personal blogging platform of sorts, letting you combine your various feeds into a single page that can be customized, then embedded on a hosted page or social networking profile.

You can customize the look and feel of this page using a built-in editor, which turns all your feeds into a really slick-looking personal blog with cascading streams of information (I've embedded an example after the page break).

While the app is beautifully designed, I found the main content feed difficult to parse, which is a shame because that's all I'd use an app like this for. The Flickr photo browsing is elegant, and fast loading, but the text portions for places like Twitter and Facebook come in at a very small size. They can be resized to be a tad larger (or absolutely enormous), but the application will scale the text up and down to fit in each update slot, which makes reading hit or miss.

Skimmer has some tough competition coming out of the gate. FriendFeed recently began delving into desktop applications with its AIR-powered notifier, and existing apps like Twhirl and Alert Thingy are getting more and more services all the time. Skimmer has a chance to stand out with its Web site builder, which does a really great job at repackaging your content to go elsewhere.… Read more

Social RSS reader Streamy now open to everyone

Streamy, the personalized home page meets social feed reader, is now open to everyone. We originally profiled the company back in mid-2007. Since then it's been rebuilt and is noticeably faster. It's also streamlined the blog reading experience, which is the core of the service.

While I originally compared Streamy to Digg for the way it filtered up news stories based on who was reading and recommending them, these days it's a lot closer to FriendFeed. There's more of an emphasis on reading the content without leaving the site, and interacting with other users who have … Read more

FriendFeed launches AIR-powered desktop notifier

FriendFeed has a new way for users to keep track of conversations in real time, and it may be the first thing the company has done that I just plain don't like. It runs in Adobe AIR and pops up with small notifications every time there's activity on your home feed or a selected friends list. If you can catch the notification window in time, it even lets you post a response without having to fire up your browser.

The company introduced a similar system that does the same thing through instant messaging back in November of last … Read more

Google Reader gets its own comment system

Google Reader users can now leave comments on shared items. Google has introduced it as a way to have a discussion with friends outside of a site's main commenting system, and specific just to that shared item and their group of contacts.

To help manage this new stream of information, Google Reader now has a filter that shows you the latest conversations in one place. Here you can view all the latest chatter, and continue to add more comments just like a forum.

In addition to reading and adding comments through Google Reader in your computer's browser it … Read more

Facebook turns on its 'Like' button

Facebook has been taking a long look at FriendFeed and likes what it sees.

The social-networking site likes FriendFeed's "Like" button so much that--as widely expected--it added its own button that allows members to apply "Like" labels to messages, photos, and other content. The feature, which appears to be getting a gradual rollout, is tucked in between the "Comment" and "Share" options.

Likening the new feature to how one might rate a restaurant, Leah Pearlman of Facebook describes in a blog posting how the "Like" button works: … Read more

Daily Tidbits: Wikipedia users asked to edit 'Wikipedia' book

"Wikipedia: The Missing Manual" by John Broughton has been made available for free on Wikipedia, O'Reilly Books, its publisher, announced Tuesday. The book is being delivered in Wiki format, which means users can edit the text as they see fit. Peter Meyers, the "Missing Manuals" managing editor, said O'Reilly may use those edits in a second edition, if it's made available. If you want to read the book (or improve it), it's available now on Wikipedia's help page.

AllFacebook, a blog that covers the world of Facebook, launched a tool Tuesday … Read more

New FriendFeed feature gives my in-box a headache

Social-network aggregator FriendFeed announced Tuesday that it's built in a Twitter friend importer, and my e-mail in-box was sort of thrown into shock.

See, here's the thing: I have a FriendFeed account, but I don't really use it; not enough of my friends do, and I've never found aggregators to really fit my social-networking habits in general. I'm a big Twitter user, however. So when FriendFeed instituted its Twitter contact import feature, I was flooded with dozens of subscription requests from people I'd never heard of. Before I was clued into the new tool, … Read more

Twitter friend finder for FriendFeed gets official

If you were a user of the previously blogged about Twitter-to-FriendFeed Contact sync tool by Carter Rabasa, you'll be pleased to know similar functionality is now built-in to FriendFeed. On Tuesday the company quietly launched its own importer as part of its other friend-finding tools.

To find buddies from Twitter who are also using FriendFeed you simply type in your Twitter username and it does the rest. Unlike Rabasa's tool, there's no need to give the service either your Twitter password, or (obviously) the one you use for FriendFeed. As an added bonus, FriendFeed's import tool … Read more

Yahoo shares your tweets, other online activity

Yahoo has fired up a major part of its Yahoo Open Strategy, the ability to broadcast blog postings, tweets, photo uploads, Yelp reviews, and other activity to members of your online social circle.

The change to Yahoo Updates makes the company potentially more competitive with services such as FriendFeed and Facebook, which do much the same thing, though they also offer to show activity on other services including Amazon, Digg, and Google Reader.

Offering the 21 third-party services helps with part of Yahoo's chicken-and-egg problem; the other half is actually attracting people to use it. Yahoo has hundreds of … Read more

Facebook's fond of FriendFeed's 'Like' button

An instructional video posted recently by Facebook includes a link that will look familiar to anyone who has ever used the social content aggregation service FriendFeed: a "Like" button.

The video, which describes how to publish feed stories using Facebook Connect, shows the familiar "Like" button tucked between the "Add Comment" and "Read More" buttons. The button, which was spotted by an AllFacebook reader, doesn't seem to be appearing on other Facebook videos. As VentureBeat points out, the video probably includes beta properties for testing purposes, and while it makes sense … Read more