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.

Steve Frank on Twitter:

Most gas station marquees only allow 3 digits for price per gallon. Such optimism!

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?

twhirl | a twitter client

Good client, and one of the most feature-rich AIR apps I’ve seen overall. It certainly does a lot of things right: it has built-in URL shortening so you don’t blow away your character count, cross-posting to Pownce and Jaiku, easy image posting/sharing via TwitPic, tweet searching, timeline filtering (i.e.—show just favorites, DMs, friends, your own archive, etc.), color schemes, simultaneous multiple account support, and it can check for updates. I also thoroughly appreciate the fact that it includes a character count while allowing you to type past the 140 maximum. A negative character count appears to help you craft exactly what you want to say. Knock knock, Twitterrific.

Since it’s an AIR app, however, it also gets a number of things wrong. It can’t live in the menu bar or integrate with other apps like NetNewsWire -> Twitterrific (correct me if I’m wrong). Also because of its sandboxed AIR nature, Twhirl can’t be toggled by a system-wide shortcut (again, sound off if I’m wrong), and text looks like absolute shit. Twhirl is also a little RAM hungry, though I couldn’t tell you whether that’s an AIR or Twhirl thing specifically. Twitterrific, at startup, snags about 18MB of RAM. Twhirl, even with just one account window open at startup, leaps to 50MB, and rises to 70+ if I open three more.

The good and the bad said, I think Twhirl is a pretty strong client, especially for an AIR app. I’ll keep it around for the times when I have long periods of sharing links or images. I fully hope that Twitterrific, my default Twitter client, picks those features up as sharing long URLs and pictures is a pretty standard Twitter practice these days. Shortening URLs when pasting into the app doesn’t seem like that difficult of a thing to do, and it’ll help users save precious characters.

Twhirl runs on Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X (just like Adobe AIR), and it’s donationware. I donated $10.

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.

Insightful post from Daniel Jalkut, the developer behind MarsEdit and FastScripts, on the convenient and simple power Twitter provides for user-powered marketing:

The point, to me, is that the kinds of conversation being facilitated by Twitter are exactly the kinds of talk that foster product endorsements, explicit and otherwise. While publicly blogging your affection for a product takes some deliberation and determination, it’s easy as heck to quip “FastScripts, FTW!” in a moment of delight, or “I’m really digging the new FlickrExport” as you put a product through its paces. Spontaneous declarations of truth are a major part of Twitter culture, and this works perfectly for word of mouth marketing.

New services for tracking topics and conversations over Twitter appear almost daily, it’s really quite a spectacular phenomenon. It’s equally interesting to hear exactly how people like Jalkut are using these tools.