1FPS|by David Chartier

FriendFeed is, of course, a clever service that lets you aggregate all the content you create at various sites into one single lifestream. Basic social networking features allow users to follow each others’ streams, and comment on each item in a stream. Simple enough.

Something has bothered me about FriendFeed ever since I began tinkering with the service, and recently it finally clicked: In addition to aggregating all the stuff a user creates at various communities, FriendFeed should also aggregate the conversations happening around these items from those other communities.

A while ago there was a lot of talk about services like FriendFeed and Twitter hijacking “the conversation” because things like comments on blogs and Flickr photos are moving to these new, simple services. As FriendFeed, Twitter, and their lifestreaming and microblogging competitors increasingly become places for discourse about media published elsewhere, they can dramatically increase their value both to users and visitors by bringing all those external conversations along for the ride.

For example: when you publish a photo to Flickr, a thumbnail and link appear in FriendFeed. Perhaps someone shares a link to the photo on Twitter, most likely doing so with a TinyURL to leave room for their own comment in Twitter’s SMS-friendly 140 character count limit.

People can comment on the photo at Flickr, on the FriendFeed entry, or reply to their friend on Twitter who posted the TinyURL link. The conversation about that photo is in at least three places now.

FriendFeed, or a more useful competitor that has yet to emerge, could offer a major value to users (and perhaps charge a nominal “pro” account fee) by harnessing comment RSS, website APIs, and some clever Twitter magic to aggregate all these conversations. They could be syndicated and linked on each content entry, along with any other comments that users leave.

We already have more than enough lifestreaming services to chose from. Which one will be the first to add “convo-streaming” as a feature, and do it right?

As seen on this TwitPic page. Funny.

It’s an advertisement for BeenUp2, what looks to be a new microblogging service that lets users post pictures and videos from camera phones “while your friends and family chit-chat about it live!” Looks kinda interesting, but I’m already buried up to my eyebrows in both social networks, microblogging services, and socialmicrobloggingservicenetworks for now.

Inside the Tweet Factory. from John Moltz on Vimeo.

Good one to bookmark to show your kids when they ask.

Mathew Ingram on TechCrunch’s baseless—and, as it turns out, completely false—claim that Twitter was testing ads:

having editors is a great thing (mostly). But journalism is about speed as well. It’s a classic battle between going with the story because you’re out of time, and checking one more source or fact.

This is why I feel constantly conflicted with the world of blogging. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thankful it exists and there are a lot of great bloggers and sites out there. Hell, I got to Ars Technica—a 10+ year web publication with staffed editors—because Weblogs, Inc. gave me a shot. But there are certainly levels of professionalism and rationality missing from segments of a blogging world that allows anyone to have a voice.

The race to be first with any story all-too-often becomes a rabid obsession with many bloggers. The techniques of checking facts, verifying with sources, and considering ramifications before hitting “publish” are sometimes hurled out the living room window in favor of nailing a few extra AdSense views or, if you’re lucky, fifteen seconds (or less) of fame on digg.

Again I ask you not to get me wrong—TechCrunch is a fine site, and Arrington and company work their butts off (also: TechCrunch, as far as I understand, is generally known for checking; the staff is decently connected to begin with). But Wingram has a point regarding blogging in general: there isn’t enough homework or even good ol’ fashioned fact-checking going on.

Fortunately, this time it doesn’t seem to have done any damage (remember when Engadget knocked $4 billion off Apple’s market cap by printing a bogus e-mail and not waiting for verified confirmation?). But blogging is quickly gaining the power and recognition it wants—now it’s time to handle the responsibility that comes along with it.

It’s also worth noting that, while Twitter’s Evan Williams refuted even testing ads on the service (in conversation with TechCrunch’s Arrington, nontheless), and numerous commenters on TechCrunch’s post have asked for an update, it looks like Duncan Riley flat-out rewrote the post with almost entirely new and different content. The original screenshot used as “evidence” has been replaced with the Twitter logo, and the post reads more like a bland postulation about Twitter’s supposed need for some kind of advertising.

Not the best way to handle this mistake. Everyone makes them. It would’ve been better to leave the original and post an update. Now it’s just an attempt to sweep the mistake under the rug.

In fact, isn’t updating an original post with clarification one of the (un)written rules of blogging?

Nice illustrative video Twitter is promoting on its main page that does a great job of describing the service. Twitter is typically hard to explain to people who aren’t already using it, and while this video isn’t a short ‘n sweet explanation, it does a great job of introducing newbies to the fundamentals and the concept behind the service itself.

Pownce quietly opened up its API last night allowing developers to build real apps and all sorts of other goodness. I don’t know too many developers on Pownce or who are interested in Pownce yet, but this should help change that (Iconfactory - we can haz Powncerrific plz?).

The first interesting thing I have seen appear, however, is a simple Pownce bookmarklet from Guillermo Esteves. He posted it early this morning, and it works pretty well.

I’m excited to see what else the community can come up with, as I still prefer Pownce and its features to Twitter’s over-simplification and constant growing pains. Developers, please start your engines.

HelloTxt is a great service for anyone who likes to interact with multiple microblogging communities like Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. I mentioned it earlier this month, and now a new post on the HelloTxt blog says posting via e-mail and chat is coming. This will definitely make the site easier to use, though the mobile version is also pretty handy and very functional, allowing users to toggle services on the fly.

HelloTxt’s blog post also hints at another secret new feature on its way. After a mobile site and e-mail/chat support, I’m having a hard time thinking of what else it could be. The one thing I’d really like to see from a service like this is a way to aggregate posts from the various communities at the HelloTxt site, so I wouldn’t have to visit Twitter, Pownce, etc. to see what’s going on. At the rate HelloTxt is growing, however, I think that might be a bit large of a leap for now.

For those interested in the nerdy backside of Twitter, the service’s developers run a technology blog with which they wax ecstatic about their trade. On it the team has already released Starling, a core component of Twitter’s operations, as open source. They’ve also been very open about their efforts to track a recent problem of missing updates. If you’re a developer or simply interested in dev-y topics, this will probably be a good blog to keep an eye on.

For those interested in the more typical user-friendly side of Twitter with general news, new apps and features, the team also maintains a regular blog that’s just as interesting.

Problems with Twitter’s current uptime aside, this is pretty cool. Till Kr√ºss, a well-known (at least within the community) Mint pepper developer, created a Tweets pepper for tracking your Twitter usage from within your Mint dashboard. I helped Till test the pepper by lending him my Twitter credentials for a bit (for the security conscious: I altered my password before handing them over), but sadly I can’t actually use the pepper right now because Twitter’s having another hissy fit. The fact that I have over 5,000 tweets may not be helping matters either.

The pepper isn’t up on Till’s main pepper page yet, but you can grab the Tweets zip file from this direct link. Be sure to give Till some feedback and donate for this and his other excellent peppers as well.

I’ve been playing around with Box.net’s robust features for a little while (click the image above for a larger view of the default signed-in area). You can sign up for a free account that allows you to store and share files online, as well as hook your files into services like Zoho (online office suite), Twitter, and even Picnik. This lets you do things like click a document in your Box.net account to instantly open it in Zoho for editing (Twitter for sharing), or click a picture to open it in Picnik for editing. You can also mount your Box.net account as a shared drive on a Mac or PC, making it even more useful for simply dropping files into for backing up and sharing.

Today while poking around at the site, I noticed Box.net offers not only a mobile version at m.box.net to access your stuff on most mobile phones, but a custom iPhone portal with all the fixings. iPhone users can go to i.box.net and tap on an MP3 to listen to it with the iPhone’s built-in media player, look at documents and even PDFs. It’s damn handy and impressive, and it’s making me rethink my strategy for sharing files via my .Mac iDisk. Apple certainly did a few things to the iDisk and its Mac OS X integration to make it perform better (i.e., not hog as many system resources when transferring files) than most shared disks like Box.net, but the plethora of sharing and other features Box.net offers are too juicy to pass up. I’ve even begun sharing my files via Box.net’s embeddable widget at my new 1FPS Public Files page, where I plan to store a few more mini-apps and other goodies I’m working on. This is just too cool.

Right now I have a free account which offers 1GB of total space, 10GB of monthly bandwidth, and a max file size of just 10MB. If I stick with this, I can see those limits getting pretty constricting. The next step up is to pay $7.95/month or $79.95/year for a Box Individual account which does unlimited bandwidth, password-protected sharing, and 5GB of total space with no file size cap. Of course, most hosting packages (like the discounted ones I offer at DreamHost) offer much better storage and bandwidth for prices like that, but the real value with Box.net seems to be its rich integration and sharing features.

Has anyone else been using Box.net longer or more seriously than I have? What has your experience been like? Are there any other companies doing similar things with rich sharing and an iPhone site? Sound off.