Friendfeed News & Articles

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• FriendFeed Offers Up File Sharing
• New Zealand Mobile Facebook up 700% in Last Five Months
• Flickr Finally Embraces Twitter, Challenges TwitPic
• Small Brands Can Have Facebook Vanity URLs Also

How about something fun to top off your week? Combine an RSS reader like Google Reader, a Social Media aggregator like FriendFeed, plus a real-time search engine, and you’ve got Streamy.

The social news sharing mashup site, once upon a time called the Digg Killer, has finally come out of an 18 month long private beta period. Sign up now and you can toss all of your favorite services into one big Social Media salad. 

Social Media moves so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Here’s the week’s top stories in scan-friendly format.

This Week:

• Google Launches “Latitude” Geolocator
• Facebook Opens Status API
• Fake Dalai Lama Burns Twitter’s Servers
• YouTube Copyright Madness as Teen is Banned
• FriendFeed Search Enables Easy Business Intel

Google Launches Latitude Geolocator

For once Google has arrived at the party after Yahoo!, the party in question being geolocation. Its new Latitude service will pick up your location either via GPS-enabled handset or laptop (accurate), or via your WiFi connection (accurate-ish). When you sign up, which you probably won’t until you’re allowed to lie about your location, you can track the movements of your friends through your Gmail interface and avail of location-aware services like local-oriented search. Get the lowdown at the Google Latitude homepage , and read more about Google Latitude implementations at PC World . Yahoo! launched a similar service called FireEagle last August. 

You say (exasperatedly): Another lifestreaming service? Really? We say: Yes, but this FriendFeed-powered mashup is generating a lot of commotion and feedback due to one teeny, tiny difference -- it's a blogging service, too. 

Social Media moves so fast, its hard to keep up. Here’s the weeks news from the trenches in scan-friendly format.

This week:

• Facebook Flip-Flops Over New Design
• Enterprise Microblogger Yammer Scoops Techcrunch50 Top Prize
• New iTunes is Genius. Especially for those with half a brain.
• Google Apps on Blackberry (as discovered at RWW for Pastors)
• Google Mobile Search with My Location
• The Best of Friendfeed

Facebook Flip-flops Over New Design

The new Facebook UI is splitting opinion down the middle. Half of all users despise it. The other half merely really hate it. So it comes as no surprise that the company has postponed plans to impose the new design on all users from this week, and has murmered something about D-day being postponed for ‘a few more weeks.’

Lifestreaming, an idea stemming from the walls of Yale University, is getting more and more attention from the geeks and techies of this world. What’s all the hype about, we wonder.

What is lifestreaming compared to news feeds, dashboards and concoctions of random social media widgets? Is the idea still the same: share yourself, kill time, find long-forgotten friends and stay abreast of people’s status updates? Is it about tweeting, blogging, flickring, youtube-ing and digging it – all in one interface?

A good blog post is in essence a question; purposefully opinionated, or better yet, outright wrong. It demands interaction.

The blogger’s job is to provide the question, provoke debate, and invite the community at large to pool its immense knowledge and take the conversation further (a characteristic which distinguishes the blogger from the journalist). The conversation is the reason why we prefer blogs. If it weren’t for the dialog between writer and reader, we may as well just pick up a newspaper or listen to the damn radio.

This is how it was always supposed to be. But typically, either this conversation does not really happen at all, or else it is so slow and disjointed as to suck the life out of the whole process. Blogging platforms and the blogosphere as a whole have failed miserably at enabling effective conversation.

But it would appear that the landscape changing, and that the evolution of conversation is changing the nature of blogging itself. To demonstrate this, we look at a particular, regular post by Robert Scoble, and look at how the conversation now shifts from one forum to another (and more importantly, why). This will demonstrate how the blogosphere is becoming less about the blog, and more about the conversation.

This trend has wide-ranging implications, and points the way for future web communication, both in the blogosphere and beyond.

There are many out there attempting to rule the face of social web and provide an answer to the time consuming-ness of being social on the internet. Names such as Google, Facebook, and FriendFeed have been at the forefront lately. Enter stage left…SocialThing, the newest contender to facilitate being social online.