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?

Never mind all this 3G iPhone business: Brightkite now has some third-party widgets you can embed in your website or blog that let visitors know what you’re up to.

The first one is a Flash-based sidebar widget that can display recent pictures you’ve snapped from your location, or simply a map of your last check-in. I haven’t tried it out yet, and Brightkite says they have their own coming. Still, this one looks pretty cool.

The second Brightkite widget is a full-on WordPress plug-in that can display check-ins, notes, photos, your Brightkite avatar, or a Google Map with your check-ins. Its developer lists a few to-do features already in the works, so if you’re running WordPress, this is probably the Brightkite site tool to go with.

Satchel is a Palm OS client for web-based PIM Backpack. It’s $15, and if you’re still using a Palm, I guess it’s worth it.

I know 37signals is a web company, but I think this kind of client software is exactly what its products need to go to the next level. Working in a browser is cute ‘n all, but being able to drag and drop files, pictures, or contacts from real applications into something like PackRat, a Mac OS X Backpack client, would really unite the power and advantages of both the web and the desktop.

We need a Satchel client for iPhone (once that SDK hopefully lands this week), Windows Mobile (yes, even them too), and other platforms. Why haven’t more companies united the web and the desktop like this yet?

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.

ReadWriteWeb quotes Karim, one of its own commenters, who was responding to a pro-Google Docs piece on the site a few days ago. Setting aside the fact that the public barely knows about online office suites in general, there are just too damn many great quotes in here about the significant functionality problems that plague Web 2.0 apps, such as:

Open a Google doc. Paste an image. Oh, that’s right, you can’t Ctrl-C copy, Ctrl-V PASTE an image into a document. Ok, so INSERT an image. Now proportionally resize the image so it retains its aspect ratio. Oh, that’s right, you can’t. Now crop the image. Oh that’s right, you can’t.

and

Now type some text and select it. Choose one of the fonts on your computer instead of the six fonts Google licensed from Microsoft. Oh wait, you can’t. Create a new paragraph style. Oh wait, you can’t. Change the font color and background on some text. Now copy that formatting to another paragraph. Oh wait, you can’t.

and

People just love to use software where some incredibly basic feature like “search & replace” is marked with “WARNING! EXPERIMENTAL! Use eye protection! This could blow up in your face!”

and

Finally you tell us that “Google will win this battle” is because “they have the economic engine,” meaning, they have advertising in all their stuff. Yay capitalism. I know the last six times I used a word processor, I kept thinking it needed more advertising.

I know I quoted about half the entire comment, but head over and read the rest; it’s all good stuff. Karim’s right: Google Docs and similar offerings can certainly do the trick for people who need some of the absolute basic office features. But they consistently fall short when you get to the rest of the basic features, never mind anything even marginally more powerful that most of the real world uses.

Considering all this, and being the fan of desktop software’s power and integration, I see a lot more potential in services like Microsoft’s new private beta Office Live Workspace which I wrote about for Ars back in December. It’s more of an online conduit for sharing files and offline collaboration; there’s no web-based editing right now, though limited features are on their way. Never mind the fact that Office is one of Microsoft’s largest revenue generating products‚ÄîOffice Live Workspace provides an easy way for home and small business users to share and collaborate on documents, yet still harness the vast power of the desktop Office suite.

Sure, some day we’ll all have flying cars, ubiquitous, terabyte Internet connections, and web apps with all sorts of super powers. Until then, and web apps for making lists of things to get done notwithstanding, desktop software is where the real power for getting things done lies.

I’m a huge fan of Brett Terpstra’s MoodBlast, a small Mac OS X Menu Bar utility that allows you to post your thoughts or status to Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, and Tumblr, as well as your choice of iChat, Adium, or Skype. It’s a killer donationware utility that I use daily and I think I’ve donated multiple times for, but it has a couple of shortcomings. The first is that I can’t use it if I’m away from my Mac. The second is that it doesn’t do Pownce (for now), a Twitter-like service that lets people share more things like events, links, and even files. Truth be told, I’m a bigger fan of Pownce’s features and UI (and the fact that we aren’t limited to 140 characters because Pownce left out SMS support in favor of a mobile/iPhone-optimized site) than I am of Twitter’s, but Twitter is really where the community is at right now, so I’m stuck with hanging out at both.

But I digress; back to trying to get one’s social status/microblogging groove on at multiple sites. If you need support for Pownce and other services, or you’re on Windows and can’t experience the wonders of MoodBlast, Hellotxt is a great new option for posting to all the major services, and then some. Hellotxt does Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Plaxo, Tumblr, Meemi, Beemood, GoZub, and Frazr, and it even supports some of the custom features of these services like a subject for Tumblr or tags for Meemi (which I’ve never personally used). Signup is simple, though you do have to hand over your credentials for each service in order to save them and make Hellotxt worth using.

Overall Hellotxt’s UI is nice and simple, though as far as I can tell, it doesn’t offer a version for mobile devices. This is a huge mistake in my opinion; I think the development team should’ve made a mobile site a necessity for going beta or public, whichever came first. Still, it’s a really handy site that makes it easy to post to all these communities, though I don’t see much of a revenue model in its future besides some kind of advertising or possibly inexpensive monthly subscriptions from users. While those subscriptions probably won’t get very far with most users, you can bet that anyone with a product or service to advertise would love to be able to reach all these communities with a simple tool like Hellotxt.

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.

Financial management site Mint.com now offers a handy way to split up ATM withdrawals and large purchases so you know exactly how you spent your money. It can also now sniff out ATM fees from transactions so you can track just how much money you’re forced to waste just trying to withdraw cash.

This is a great update to a site I now consider essential to managing my finances. Quicken is far too expensive and feature-overkill, but no other option I’ve found can do things like automatically pull down my transactions and automatically analyze and organize them for me. Mint.com can, and it has no shortage of seemingly exclusive, smart little features like these scattered throughout the site, making it a joy to use.

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Official Gmail Blog: The next evolution of labels

This is incredibly convenient for me, as just this weekend I finished rerouting all my addresses through Gmail IMAP so I can use either a desktop client or the web UI depending on my needs:

Today, we’re happy to announce the next evolution of labels: the colored label. Until now the label has been a little inconspicuous creature, subtly suggesting categorical associations in its simple green coat. Oh, we’ve seen the colored label here and there, its precursors surfacing in various experiments and Greasemonkey scripts; but the label has never before been so brazen, so bold. How will it use its new colors? Will it disguise itself with the chameleon’s camouflage or clamor for attention with the monarch butterfly’s vivid contrast?

This is also very coincidental for me too, as just earlier today I was kicking around reinstalling Greasemonkey and the Gmail label colors script. Now I don’t have to, or at least soon I won’t have to. I don’t see the feature yet, and the Gmail Editing labels support page that the Official Gmail Blog linked for more info on this new feature hasn’t been updated yet. The post hints that it’s simple though; sounds like it’s a click on “Edit labels” from the main Gmail UI and some sort of color choice/picker option for each label in the Settings area.

Either way, this is a pleasant surprise in my new Gmail/Apple Mail dual existence though, admittedly, I did this so I could send and manage most of my e-mail in the web UI. Things like those bookmarklets I found earlier this year make creating and sending e-mail a breeze, and I’m going to set up some kind of automation to start Mail at night to download and archive my Gmail just in case.

But I wildly digress: colors for Gmail labels. Fanfreakingtastic.

Update:

It’s actually even easier than I thought to colorize your labels. You can do it right on Gmail’s main page, and your changes are reflected in the current message view instantly:

This is excellent. If you don’t see it in Firefox yet like I didn’t, you might need to empty your cache (Tools > Clear Private Data) and/or refresh Gmail.