This isn’t a rant. I actually think, by and large, that this is a good thing. CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets) allows precise control over the overall look of web sites, and when you are trying to walk that line between clean and detailed, CSS can be the razor that keeps your site from looking too busy or too cluttered. There are many precise tweaks that can enhance the presentability of a site, like the vertical spacing between lines of text.

But, as you have no doubt noticed, this site doesn’t employ CSS to force a particular font type, size, style, or color. Those are all left up to the choices you have made in your browser settings, and if you are anything like me, you probably haven’t even looked at your browser font defaults for years.

Then end result? 10-point Times New Roman, with blue unvisited links and purple visited links.

If you absolutely hate serif fonts (fonts that have little twiddly bits on the letters like Times New Roman), take a moment to go in to your settings and select a different font that is more pleasing. You can choose any font that you have installed, from Helvetica (or Arial for you Windows folks) to something more exotic like Calibri on Windows (the new MS Office default font) to Monaco on the Mac.

All the browsers except Chrome have a font setting in their options. Google Chrome, created with minimalism in mind, forces you to edit a configuration file to change your font defaults. I found where this configuration resides from a Chrome Help Discussion Board:

Using text editor to open:
   ...\Documents and Settings\User_Name\Local Settings
   \Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Preferences

You will find the "webkit": {  "webprefs": { in the file.
Those settings are for WebKit.

In my setting example:
   "webkit": {
      "webprefs": {
         "default_fixed_font_size": 11,
         "default_font_size": 12,
         "fixed_font_family": "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono",
         "minimum_font_size": 12,
         "minimum_logical_font_siz": 12,
         "sansserif_font_family": "Times New Roman",
         "serif_font_family": "Arial",
         "standard_font_is_serif": false,
         "text_areas_are_resizable": true
      }
   }

The minimum_font_size and minimum_logical_font_size prevent Chrome to use
very small font size for display.

Remember to close Chrome first before you edit the file, or the file you saved
will be overwritten by Chome after exiting.

If Google Chrome has the most annoying default font configuration, Safari 4 possibly has the best.  Not only is it easy to find, but if you are viewing a page that uses the default browser font (like this one) selecting a font will immediately update the page with that font, allowing you to see immediately if it’s a good choice or not.

Of course, as more and more sites adopt CSS-heavy themes in an attempt to give you a unique and identifiable look, these settings become less relevant. Maybe that’s the lesson we can take away about Chrome – they’ve already decided that default fonts should be set once (by the developer) and forgotten.

I would hazard to say that one of the biggest differences was the ability to do most operations in the OS in more than one way.  Sure, now we take it for granted; but back then it was huge.  There were a lot more right-click context menus.  The control panel was completely overhauled.  For the first time in Windows, you were able to tasks such as changing your background image either from the control panel or directly from a right-click on the desktop.

Keep this in mind as we explore Diigo, the web bookmarking research tool and community.  As I researched it for this review, I got the same feeling of having multiple paths to a goal.  The developers tried very hard to let you use the service the way that best fits your workflow.  And that isn’t a bad thing!

Overview

It’s an understatement to say that Diigo has a lot of features.  In fact, it’s so feature-packed that it’s hard to summarize accurately. But, I think using an iceberg as an analogy is apt here: It all starts with bookmarking and annotation.  But what Diigo wraps around that core functionality is its true strength.

Here’s a few of the features that Diigo provides just for signing up:

• Web bookmarking, including importing and auto-exporting to other bookmarking services
• Annotations via highlighting and floating sticky notes
• Manage saved bookmarks and web annotations using tags, list, or plain text search
• Huge number of content sharing options, including groups, shared lists, sticky note discussions, automated blog postings, a quick send-to-blog feature and email support
• A unique toolbar that enables Diigo features for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Flock.  A sophisticated bookmarklet for other browsers like Safari, Opera and Maxthon.  The Safari bookmarklet seems to work well with Google’s Chrome.
• A variety of widgets for use on a blog site including linkrolls, tagrolls, and a convenient add button
• An informational sidebar that can be opened within a browser with the Diigo toolbar installed
• Enhanced right-click menus within the browser
• A cached-page slide show feature
• An open API

I’ll group these features in to functional categories as I go in-depth: toolbar, information gathering, social features, importing/exporting and sharing.

Toolbar

All the magic with Diigo begins with a free download and install of the Diigo Toolbar.  Unlike browser toolbars of questionable usefulness, the Diigo toolbar enables all of Diigo’s research and reference features tightly within the browser.  Everything is customizable, from what tools you want to see on the toolbar to what menu options you want visible when you right-click on a highlighted portion of text.

The toolbar enables not only web page highlighting and URL bookmarking, but also exposes other folks’ public sticky notes, as well as their page descriptions and tags if you have the sidebar turned on.  Also from the toolbar, you can access all the different areas of the Diigo web site, such as the dashboard, books, lists, groups and friends’ pages.

Alternatively, you can use a bookmarklet that Diigo provides to highlight and bookmark web pages.  However, the Diigolet does not have all the capabilities of the toolbar, and it only lasts until you go to a new web page URL, after which you will have to select the bookmarklet again.

If you are having problems with the Diigolet, you can use the “Post to Diigo” bookmarklet which is a simple redirect to the Diigo bookmark page pre-populated with your current page’s information.

The toolbar also allows you to enable keyboard accelerators for toggling the sidebar, making a bookmark or quick bookmark, and creating a floating note.

Information Gathering

There are a number of ways to get a bookmark or annotation into Diigo.  The quickest is on the Diigo My Bookmarks page, on the right is a quick-entry text box for adding a bookmark URL.  This will bring you to a web version of the normal Diigo tagging page.

Bookmark

By far the most common and recommended way of bookmarking and annotating is via the Diigo toolbar or Diigolet.  In this mode you would browse the internet as usual, and when you get to a page you would like to bookmark, simply click the bookmark button.  This will bring up a bookmark pop-up window where you can add a description and tags to your bookmark, as well as some social options such as sharing the bookmark with groups, lists, or specific other friends.  You can also e-mail the bookmarklet.

All of the above is actually optional – if you click on the book icon, the Diigo toolbar will send the bookmark to the server as ‘unread’ and with no tags.  If your process involves you reviewing your bookmarks later, this can be a handy feature.

Highlight

If you prefer to use Diigo more as a clipping tool, you have the ability to highlight sections of web pages, and the page with the edits will automatically be sent to Diigo’s servers.  Think of this like using a yellow highlighter on a reference text – but the location and text you highlight is instantly searchable and reference-able.  For example, if you read a lot of articles with notable quotes, you can easily highlight the quote and you immediately get the text and where you found it stored on the server.

Highlights can also be tagged once they are stored on the server.  However, in order to do this you either have to click on the bookmark button and add tags, or follow up when you visit your bookmarks on Diigo bookmark list web page.

Comment

Using the comment button allows you to add a floating sticky note to the current web page.  Once the sticky note is in place, it will show up as a yellow “dialog bubble” that shows you the number of comments that have been left.  If you set your comment to be public, other Diigo users will see the comment when they visit the same URL and will have the ability to respond to it.

Both highlighting and commenting are considered as “annotations” in Diigo.  If you highlight multiple sections of the same page, each highlight region is considered a single annotation, as is each comment.

A final note about combining highlight and comment:  If you select a web site region, and then select highlight and comment from the highlight pull-down menu, your comment will pop-up whenever your hover the mouse pointer over any of the highlighted text.  Also, the highlight color is blue instead of yellow.  You can attach a comment this way at a later time as well, just select add sticky note from the pop-up menu when hovering over a highlighted area.

Also, keep in mind that adding a note to highlighted text depends on the text remaining the same on the URL you are referencing.  If you want to leave a comment on a frequently-updated URL (like CNN) if you create the floating sticky note outside of any highlights, it will remain there even if the text of the page completely changes.

Send

The send button is fairly self-explanatory on the surface.  This is a multi-purpose dialog that allows you to email a bookmark to any email address, or one of your colleagues on Diigo, a group, or just to leave a note without specifically sending it to anyone.

However, if you use the pull-down menu on the send button, you will notice you can also send the annotations to a pre-configured blog, Twitter, or Facebook!  Very handy if you are more invested in one of those other social tools for sharing information with your friends or colleagues.  If you select any of these options, you will be taken to a service-specific Diigo page where you can set up access to the service before sending.

Search

There are a few more options that the Diigo toolbar allows.  First, you can enable a customizable search window that defaults to Google.  However, it also allows searching for key terms across dozens of different services.  You can also get to this selection by highlighting a term on a web page and right-clicking on it, then using the search web menu tree to select the service to search in.

Filters

To the right of all of that are some default ‘filters’ that you can click on to get views on your list of bookmarks and annotations on Diigo.  The two defaults are recent and unread, which are fairly self-explanatory.  If you click on the Add a Filter button, you can create a new filter that combines a type of filter with a list of tags to narrow down the list.

Setting up a combination of tags and filters can be very handy if you want to segregate your annotations in a particular way.  Of course, you can use lists or groups for this, but that is the beauty of Diigo – there are always multiple ways of achieving a certain result – it is entirely up to you how you achieve those results.

Social Features

I’ve touched on some of the social aspects Diigo enables (if you wish to use them) in the previous section.  However, there are a lot so I will attempt to give a comprehensive overview of what is available. It all starts with friends!

Friends

Diigo, like pretty much every social-enabled web application, allows you to connect with other people on the service.  This works pretty much how you expect, you can allow Diigo to peek at your address book on one of a number of different web email platforms, or import a contact list from a standalone email application.  You can also let it look at your instant messenger account.  It also knows what people have already registered for the service, so there is a way of only asking to connect to friends and not spam everyone in your contact list.

Once folks are added as friends, you can add them to contact lists that you maintain.  This is great if you have different ‘sets’ of friends whom you might want to send different types of links or annotations to.  For example, you could group them into real life friends, Facebook friends, and social media friends.  Your real life friends might not be interested in your social media links, but they might be interested in LOLcats.

Once in a contact list, when annotating, you can choose to email the link or send it on Diigo.  Your login has its own mailbox on the site to keep track of annotations that others send to you.

I wanted to make a note here and say that there are a couple of types of lists in Diigo.  Here I have been talking about contact lists, but there is also the concept of bookmark lists which we will get to in the next section.

Meet People

Beside direct adding of contacts as described above, Diigo has a number of ways to find new people you may not know personally.  These are grouped under the heading of Meet People on the Diigo web site.  From here, there are a number of helpful tools you can use to explore Diigo’s social network:

• People Like Me – This will analyze your recent bookmarks and annotations, and list people based on similarity.  When I tried this, no one listed was higher than 6% compatible.  I am guessing this could vary widely depending on what and how often you annotate web pages.
• New To Diigo – Pretty self-explanatory, this gives you a list of the newest registered Diigo users.
• Featured People – This shows you Diigo users who have been featured for some reason.  This is a new feature and consequently not well-documented, however, I believe Diigo employees will ‘feature’ particularly active or interesting users.  Consequently, these may be interesting folks to follow.
• Search People – This gives you the ability to search under a number of different criteria for Diigo users.  You can find everyone who uses a specific set of tags, by name, if they have bookmarked a particular URL or web site, and even (under advanced search) for people who have filled out their user profile categories such as industry, language, region or and city, or any combination of these.

Import and Export

Diigo tries to support many ways to import and export your data.  You can import bookmarks from many services such as Delicious, Magnolia, Simpy and Furl, and you can export your Diigo data into formats such as:  IE bookmark, Netscape bookmark, RSS format, CSV format, and Delicious.

In addition, you can import directly from your browser’s local bookmarks either via the toolbar or by uploading the file you generated from your browser by exporting your bookmarks.  You can also enable auto-synchronization of bookmarks to Delicious, Magnolia, Simpy, and/or your local browser via the Diigo toolbar.

Sharing

Diigo has a rich, somewhat bewildering range of ways to share your bookmarks with your friends and others on Diigo.  There are bookmark lists, groups, site communities and tag communities.  Each of these formats presents a different way to share organize and share information, and not only bookmarks and annotations (although those are usually the primary focus).  Also, there is a rich message center and even a wall a la Facebook!

• Bookmark Lists – This is the simplest form of sharing.  You can easily create any sort of list you want, and give it any name you want. You can make this list public or private, assign it a description and tags, and control which direction the list is updated (ascending or descending by date).  Your public lists can be viewed by anyone and you can hand out a special URL for people to view it even if they don’t have a Diigo login.  Even though they can be made public, what other people can do with them is limited.   This is the most like other online bookmark utilities like Delicious.
• Groups – This is Diigo’s version of a knowledge portal.  Groups can be created under a number of different categories, and you can invite people to your group if you create one.  Newly-created groups go in to the portal menu for others to find and join.  Group members can add annotations, make comments on same and create discussion threads within the group forum.  Bookmarks can also be ‘thumbed’ if they are particularly relevant or noteworthy.  This is a powerful social feature of Diigo and the best one if you are working within a research or study group which requires discussion and sharing of resources.
• Site Communities – This is an auto-generated list of bookmarks centered around particular web sites, like Wikipedia (community) or ReadWriteWeb (community).   Not only can you see what (public) annotations are being created for these sites, but also any bookmark comments and other Diigo users that have bookmarked a URL for that site.
• Tag Communities – Similar to site communities, this takes any tag or combination of tags and gives you a custom list of all public annotations that have been tagged similarly.  It also suggests ‘related tags’ in case you are not finding a particular bit of information with your current tag search.  This is a very powerful tool for honing in on web sites that share the same sort of information, based on the tags that Diigo users use.
• Message Center – This is similar to a site-based mail utility, where you can send your friends, contact lists, anybody or nobody a message.  You also have available a number of ‘views’ on to your saved messages and notes.  If you starred any bookmarks in a group or community, those will show up here as well.  Also, if you created a note to nobody either on an external site or from within the message center, this will also show up here under the notes tab, as well as any annotations you have made.
• Wall – If you want to scribble something on another Diigo user’s comment wall, you can do it here.  This is found at the bottom of the Diigo user’s profile page.  This works almost identically to Facebook’s wall.. if you are logged in, leave a message and go.

Other Miscellaneous Tidbits

• Linkrolls and Tagrolls are great if you want to give your Diigo profile more visibility, and provide readers of your blog or site with a convenient way to find you.
• Most pages on Diigo that has a list of annotations will also have a play webslides and a (on your lists mostly) RSS output button on the upper-right-hand side of the page.  This is handy if someone has made a ‘tour’ containing a number of URLs and/or annotations and they are best viewed in order.  RSS output, of course, is handy if you want to see updates to a particular list in a feed reader.
• Public bookmark lists can be sent via Diigo message or email to an individual or list, or it can be published on any of dozens of different sharing sites.
• There is a great, comprehensive help site here:  Diigo Help Center

Conclusion

Diigo is easy to get started with, and hides a huge amount of flexibility and functionality.  To get the most out of this utility, it is not necessary to use all of its features, but it is definitely good to familiarize yourself with everything that it can do, in case you may need that functionality at a certain point in the future.

Pros:

Diigo tries to be very open with the ability to import and export data from a variety of sources, going so far as to offer auto-syncing back to the browser and other popular bookmarking sites.  You can also set up automated compilation postings of your Diigo activities to your blog daily or weekly.

Diigo groups, in my opinion, is a game-changer in the area of online annotation utilities.  Groups bring a community portal with message forum support directly in the application, with the focus being the bookmarks and annotations.  For certain groups of people, say for librarians or researchers, I think Diigo groups will be a big hit.

Cons:

One feature that other sites such as Magnolia, furl and Iterasi have that Diigo is somewhat lacking in is making a ‘snapshot’ of a web page when a bookmark or annotation is created.  Thumbnail views seem to be non-existant and cached pages are only created in certain specific cases.  If you are a visually-oriented person that can quickly identify a site by its ‘look,’ this is one feature that would be good to have.

Diigo also can overwhelm the first-time user.  However, I believe this is why they bill the utility as a ‘research tool’ .. there is a lot of functionality and not much of it is fluff.  As I was researching Diigo for this article, it really started to click together with me and there isn’t as much overlap in the functionality as I initially thought.

My advice would be to start off treating it like Delicious and move in to the other features slowly.  Use the help center and this document as a guide to how to use Diigo to its fullest.

Bottom line?  Diigo presents a stunning amount of functionality for the low, low price of free!  Definitely recommended.

I do my best writing when I’m not in the middle of information overload.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I love information overload.  I have mild ADD so diving in to a vast cyclone of links, comments, entries and pictures is like taking a hot bath.  It is amazing and wonderful.

Me the Writer

However, while I am there, my short term memory shuts down and my mid-term memory is impaired.  I know this about myself.  It happens whenever there are a lot of bright, shiny distracting things in my environment.  Now, if I was a stockbroker, this wouldn’t be a problem.  But as a writer, it is pretty devastating to my ability to write anything cohesive.

I’ve been reflecting on my post quality from the point where I started my blog, 4 or so months ago.  At first, quality went up, as I got more comfortable with my writing and I came up with new ideas and new subject matter.  More recently my posts have become less frequent and sometimes lacking critical information, like references to similar posts, even sometimes key observations.

For me, There is definitely a strong inverse correlation between participation on FriendFeed and post quality.  I have to internalize the information I gather and make sense of it.  When I feel it is time, it isn’t hard for me to write a great article.  But if I try too hard, or try to write an article when I am distracted by a thousand other things, my article suffers.

And then, correspondingly, I also feel depressed because the work I have done seems wasted.

Stream or Digest… or Both?

They say there are two types of people in the world, those who organize things into groups, and those who don’t.  With that advice in mind, I am proposing that there are two broad groups of people divided by their ability to process information:

• Stream: Stream folks live in the now, the breathe in the information, they put things together as they happen, they can make use of the information right away.
• Digest: Digest people love to accumulate information, ruminate on what they have learned, and then when they are ready, can push out some quality analysis and insight.

Of course, nothing is that simple.  I’m going to turn this scalar into a vector by adding a different axis: critical thinking.  I believe people’s ability to think critically is also affected by what mode they are in when they receive information.  For example, I personally am not critical when I hear new information.  It is only when I have had a chance to mull what I have learned later that the critical thinking kicks in.

Speaking of modality by the way, I do believe we all have the ability to operate in either mode, or both simultaneously if we are lucky.  But I think we all prefer one mode over another most of the time.

To further illustrate my point, I have tried my hand at one of those popular domain graphs.  See it below.

Thus, I would consider myself a digest personality, at least when I want to write and contribute what know or have learned back to the larger community.  I definitely like playing in the stream mode though, but I’m definitely no editor.  I’m better at being the historian, and occasionally make a decent pundit.

Other People

Everyone is going to see themselves in the chart above differently.  However, I can gamely make a stab at a few standout folks on FriendFeed and in Social Media at large:

• Robert Scoble: Robert is always critically evaluating anything he absorbs.  I would say he’s usually an editor, and switches to pundit to write his blog posts.
• Louis Gray: I think Louis a strong archivist in the stream, and switches to historian or pundit when writing.. though, of all the folks on FriendFeed, Louis can move into direct critical thinking at times.
• Corvida: One of the few folks I really follow outside of FriendFeed, Corvida stays a lot in stream mode and uses her archivist talent to write about new stuff, or pundit when voicing an opinion.
• Mike Fruchter: Michael seems to be in stream mode most of the time, occasionally moving up to editor as needed and writes mostly from a historian persepective.
• Duncan Riley: Duncan stays directly in the pundit zone almost all the time.
• Cyndy Aleo-Carreira: Cyndy is almost always in editor mode, trending toward pundit when she writes.
• Steve Hodson: Steven definitely spends most of his time either as a pundit or an archivist.
• Franklin Pettit: Franklin can be very quiet (at least on FriendFeed) but I know he’s gathering info so I would say he stays in digest a lot, moving up to historian for his blog posts.
• Edythe (Polly): Edythe loves a very broad variety of things on FriendFeed, making her most comfortable in stream.  She will occasionally jump to editor.
• Mitchell Tsai: Mitchell is probably the most pure archivist I’ve seen on FriendFeed.
• Shey Smith: Shey is heavy stream and editor mostly, moving to historian for his blog posts.
• Sarah Perez: Sarah is finely tuned to write in editor mode, sometimes switching to historian, but usually not dwelling in pundit too much.
• Hutch Carpenter (BHC3): Hutch seems to spend a lot of time in stream and will dive into pundit as necessary.
• Allen Stern: Allen splits his time between archivist and editor, and jumps often to pundit for posting or video.
• (Jeff)isageek: Jeff loves the stream, and either hangs out there or archivist.
• Mark Dykeman: Mark comments a lot on things he likes, making him an editor in the stream, and a pundit when writing.

Thanks

I wanted to thank NiceFishFilms (Michael Sean Wright) for writing about different perspectives on FriendFeed and giving me the seed for this blog post.   It’s great to see new faces and new blogs, and I’m definitely going to follow him!

If I didn’t list you above, I’m sorry!  I am really interested on knowing how you rate yourself (whether you are listed or not).  Keep your eye out, I am going to re-post this with the graph so you can rate yourself on FriendFeed.  Thank you!

What is LiveJournal?

LiveJournal (or LJ) describes itself as a journaling community, and they stress the tight-knit nature of the community.  Of course, anyone can create an ad-supported journal for free, and you make it as private or public as you like.  However, most of LJ’s features are designed specifically to keep the conversation between LJ users inside the community.

An example of this focus is their privacy settings.  In addition to public and private entries, by far the most common entry type is called friends locked.  This means only people who are listed friends of the person with the post can actually read it.  This allows more intimate details to be revealed without fear of the internet at large barging in.

Another tightly-bound feature unique to LJ are the communities.  These communities are groups that you can belong to (either by joining or by being invited) and act as moderated message boards that encourage conversation around a topic.  You can see what communities are being promoted here.

Of course, these features also give LJ and similar sites such as Vox and Blogger an insular feel.  People heavily involved in these sites tend to favor interacting only within them, and generally aren’t interested in interacting on more traditional blogs such as WordPress or Movable Type.

The Shout Out

Due to the community nature of LJ, it is really hard to become well-known across a lot of different circles of friends.  So there aren’t really any superstars I can point to and say, you really need to follow these folks.  Oh, LiveJournal has its share of drama queens.. it is, after all, a personal journal community.  But, oddly enough, there are certain feeds that are syndicated and widely read that seem to be the real cross-network stars.  Feeds like XKCD, PostSecret and Wil Wheaton dot Net (WWDN) are very widely read, even if those feeds see little or no reciprocity from their LJ readership.

So, most of the folks I read on LJ I have been following for years.  Like old pals that you play poker with once a week, I can count on them to be posting there indefinitely.

You can see a list of the folks I follow (and who follow me) on my profile page, down near the bottom of the page.  About two-thirds of them are people I know in Austin.  A few of them are friends I know in person.

I’d list them here – but honestly, they wouldn’t care about the attention.

Oh, I will mention Corwin, but only because he runs his own WordPress blog and is on Twitter.

When You Should Consider this Service

If you are looking for an established, sometimes-sleepy, sometimes-high-drama community that is very similar to the the old site The Well, LiveJournal is perfect.  There are hundreds of themes to choose from and quite a few customization options.  However, it does not allow advertising (other than its own) or special plugins to be run alongside your blog. 

Plus, gathering friends is not as easy as just following a bunch of people.  It requires interaction and having a shared pool of friends helps a lot.  LiveJournal has been known as a tough nut to crack at times, but the reward is having people you can call friends that are interested in your daily life.

However, for some reason Feedbooks was having trouble with my RSS feed for a while, so I dutifully flagged it for consideration and waited.  I checked every day.  And today, I can proudly say that the problem has been resolved!

The upshot of all of this is here, a little widget I can display in my sidebar. →

More About Feedbooks

Ok, so probably the most publicized feature of Feedbooks is its ability to take an RSS feed and convert it into a number of other eBook formats as well as a customizable PDF format.  Obviously, that is what I am using the service for.

But I believe this is a side business for them.. perhaps what you would call a loss-leader.  They know, smart marketers that they are, that if they provide a unique service for free to potentially millions of blogs out there, their name gets out there.

E-Books

And their name isn’t feed-to-PDF.  It’s Feedbooks.  Think e-books.  They are working hard to be your first stop for electronic books from any source.. public domain, news, RSS feeds.   In fact, here is the quote from their front page:

“Feedbooks is a universal e-paper platform compatible with all e-paper devices where you can download thousands of free e-books, publish and share your own content, and create customized newspapers from RSS feeds and widgets.”

So they are in the e-book business, pretty much.  Download them, read them, share them.  If you have written a book online perhaps, submit it to Feedbooks to have them convert it into an e-book, quickly and stylishly.

Newspapers

Basically, this takes individual feeds (like mine linked above) and aggregates them together into one, larger e-book format.  A good example is the BBC News Full Content Newspaper, which mashes together 4 different BBC feeds to bring you the news of the day.

Subscriptions

Once a newspaper, or single-feed e-book has been created, Feedbooks allows people to subscribe to the paper as well, invaluable if you are using a e-paper reading platform like the Kindle or the Sony e-book reader (or maybe their very own e-ink reader!).  This means when an updated newspaper is created, you are always on top of it.  Great for those devices that have less-than-stellar native RSS readers built in to them.

Conclusion

Feedbooks has neatly filled a niche that was lacking (either from the newness of the technology, the ineptness of the hardware manufacturers, or some deliberate oversight) in getting RSS feeds on your electronic reading platform.  They also have a nice platform for searching for great public domain books.  Definitely worth a look.

Besides, you should go and download the PDF version of my feed.  It’s simply gorgeous, it makes me feel like a real writer! The link is here:

Apparently, people assume too much and don’t promote enough.

You know what they say: If you assume, you make an a out of Su and me. And believe me, Su doesn’t like being an A. So don’t do it.

If you think a product is great, promote it! Tell people. Write up an article. Whatever. But don’t say, “Gee, yeah, I really loved that last week when I used it for 5 minutes and now you’ve missed the bus.” Because that is what you are saying. To me. And to Su.

Su doesn’t even have a car. Now he has to walk.

So what the heck is TinEye? Is it that decorating show, you know, the one with the people? Hardly.

If you assume that the Tin Man has eidetic memory and a talent for finding pictures that look like each other, you’d be getting close to what TinEye does.

In a nutshell, TinEye leverages some proprietary tech that Idée has been working on for creating digital fingerprints of images. This technology is mated with a high-speed matching engine and a database of hundreds of millions of public domain pictures to give you fast image matching based on a source picture.

You know what, I’ll just link in Scoble’s little QIK interview with Paul Bloore, the CTO of Idée, and you can see a little demo of the product in action as well.

After using the product for a while, I have to say I’m impressed. Currently, with its sub-set of all the pictures out there on the internet, it can’t find a lot of pictures uploaded to, say, Flickr. But if you do a Google image search and then drop the URL of the image you are interested in, it will find that picture wherever it resides on the internet.

For example, I searched for a picture of George W. Bush and dropped the URL in TinEye. Here is the result (click image for larger size):

It found the image in 272 different locations on the internet! It also gives the size of the image, and lists separate links to the same source image by domain. I do wish they would give you the option to re-sort the results by different criteria, such as image size, file size or bit depth.

So, if you want to know if a particular picture appears somewhere else on the image (say for copyright reasons), this is a great tool to have.

I’m really happening this comes out of closed beta soon, however, if you are clever you may already have noticed that the FriendFeed link at the beginning of the article has a special URL you can use.

That happens to me all the time.

But the great thing about most startups are their agility and drive to succeed.  If you take your eye off of them for a moment, when you re-visit them it seems like a whole lot of great new things happened during your absence.  Contrast this to some big, established web application companies where you are lucky to get a great new feature once a quarter or so.

Here are a few examples.  Please note:  Clicking on the logo will take you to the product blog page.

Socialthing!

Here’s an app that is really trying hard to make itself unique in an ever-growing pool of social-aggregator type apps.  When I first logged in to Socialthing!, right after SXSW Interactive this year, it was still struggling with performance issues, and services were being added and removed every few days.

In the interim, they have not been sitting still.  Performance is great.  Their interface has undergone some appearance improvements.  A couple services have been added.  You can view updates by user or by timestamp.  You can now post to several services a la Ping.fm.  You can reply to tweets from within their interface.  Here’s a big one:  They now have a public user feed page!  Here is mine.

So they aren’t focusing on supporting every service out there.  They are trying to get the big services integrated correctly.  In a nutshell, their drive to make Socialthing! your social dashboard is starting to come together.  Also, I apparently have 20 invites if anyone needs one.  Just leave a comment.

Spokeo

I wote a lengthy article covering Spokeo on SheGeeks a couple of months ago.  The core app and goal remains the same: you put in your friends’ email addresses, and Spokeo goes and finds them on social networks across the internet.

However, now it does it with a lot more style.  Their interface used to be, to be polite, a bit spartan.  The content was the focus and the interface was mostly left up to the user to figure out.

However, they have been polishing up their visuals quite a bit to the point that its now much more of a status dashboard when you login, sorting your friends by latest upates and the categories you have defined.  Support for customizable keyboard shortcuts are till there and work great.

Spokeo is apparently being positioned for HR staff to use to ‘help’ vet a new employee, at least from their home screen.

BlogRize

BlogRize is still a fairly small single-developer site that was developed to be a social media meme-tracker.  Still somewhat under-the-radar, it has nonetheless added a few new features in the past month or two.

The ability to notice if an article that is being tracked has been shared by one of the users in the database.  This used to be a manual process, where you voted an article as interesting, funny, insightful or lame.  Interesting seems to be marked automatically now, if you share an article.

I love all the memetrackers out there, but this one is fun and I’d like to see it become more public.

Shyftr

Shyftr is a new entrant in the social feed reading segment.  It got into a bit of a bruhaha because it was taking full feeds and aggregating them inside the interface, and there was some worry that if advertising was added, it would take eyes away from the originating blogs. Shyftr to their credit quickly changed to partial-text feeds and I’m still not seeing any advertising, so I think the fears may have been a bit premature.

Shyftr has been working hard on its interface look and feel as well.  It is responsive and easy to use, actually quite a pleasure to navigate.  It reminds me a bit of the interface design in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with lots of white space and clear, two or three-color icons.

I don’t think this upstart is going to kick Google Reader out of its throne anytime soon, but the social features are better integrated and its fun to use.

Others

I have my eye on a few other services that are staying under the radar but continue to improve, like  Whoisi (my entry), Noiseriver, Swurl (my site), and Aviary.

I’m going to try something new in this post.  Aaron Brazell wrote an article on Technosailor recently noting the differences between western and eastern writing styles, especially when it comes to a column or opinion piece.  In my never-ending quest to explore new avenues, I will try my hand at a more eastern-style column.

There is a difference between passive acquisition of knowledge, and active application and sharing of that knowledge.

We all learn, as we grow and explore our world.  We learn by experience, positive and negative reinforcement, and eventually, by the lessons learned by others.  This knowledge serves us to make better decisions and infer indirect connections.

Some people love knowledge for knowledge’s sake.  They love to acquire information, to store it, index it, put it into context, and that is fine.  However, the motivations of these people are only knowable to themselves, and perhaps some future historian or researcher who tries to replicate the mind-set of such an acquirer posthumously.  This type of person does not share what they have learned.

Thankfully, the more common type of person has a more workable approach to information gathering and synthesis.  In order to function in a modern society like ours, a lot of context and historical precedents must be learned to know why things happen the way they do.  Usually growing up in our society does organically get them ready for this, and any additional quests for information are relegated to more specific goals.   They learn to become more proficient or more skilled in a certain knowledge area.  They tend apply this knowledge more, for their own benefit and those around them.  They take a more active social role toward information and knowledge applications.

Our society has grown up with a unique social medium called radio.  Obviously, everyone has heard of radio, it’s been around for over a century at this point.  It has changed its role in relation to American society since its inception, having been relegated as a secondary entertainment medium next to television, and more recently being pushed even further back now with the advent of the internet.

It has, however, always offered a choice to the listener: They can passively listen, humming along to their favorite tune or listening to the news of the day, or they can take a more active role, tune in to a program that allows people to call in and contribute their opinion to a topic in real time.

This idea of opening up radio for the listener to contribute is extremely powerful.  This channel has been around since telephones have become ubiquitous and its popularity still allows radio stations to remain profitable (albeit on the cheaper AM band) even to this day.

With television, society mostly skipped the social feedback loop that exists between AM radio and telephones.  Although forays have been made to make TV more interactive, they have been largely unsuccessful due to expense, or lag, or technical difficulty.

The internet has neatly solved this decades-old conundrum of passive entertainment versus active involvement.  On the internet, there are a myriad of ways to become involved with discussion, knowledge contribution or redistribution, synthesis, and sharing of archived information.  Although the technical hurdles for participating on the global internet culture are high, they are not as disconcerting as those of interactive TV and they are actively being lowered all the time.

The social channel has existed on the internet since the beginning.  Even before what we call the World Wide Web, people were engaging in remote discussions about hundreds of different topics on services such as Usenet.  Unfortunately, when Tim Berners-Lee laid out his hypertext-enabled vision of the web, the intrinsic social element, the ability to mark-up the content of sites, was not universally adopted along with the other technologies.  If this was a result of fears over making web sites too malleable or vulnerable to defacement, or other reasons I can not say.

In the past few years though, there has been a steadily and perhaps even logarithmically growing trend for adding a social channel to more traditional publishing mechanisms that have already existed.  Where once you might have visited a web site to read the news of the day, you now can comment on the news, or read the comments of others.  This once-intrinsic ability is starting to come back into its own, and in a big way.

One such medium that was built from the ground up with an active social element is FriendFeed.  Presented with a mysterious grin perhaps, it bills itself as a social aggregator.  Getting started is simple – you merely feed it some of the other services you already use, such as Flickr or Digg, and it pulls these in to a river of news and updates from your friends and acquaintances.  You are then able to comment, enjoy or even re-share anything that you see.

This simple concept has seemingly been thought out from a small service to a burgeoning community with tens of thousands of folks interacting continuously with it.  It would seem to be a logistical nightmare, but on the surface FriendFeed does a very admirable job of maintaining a simple, responsive and, more importantly, engaging and addictive demeanor.

Forgive me for not providing a link, but recently I read in a FriendFeed comment that the service was no more than an AM radio call-in show for the internet age.  This comment, perhaps meant as dismissive, stayed with me.  The parallels between FriendFeed and talk radio are there – a comment or link is thrown out, the pundits and peanut gallery get a hold of it and provide their two cents.  The conversation turns, sometimes in a wonderful, exciting direction, sometimes darkly negative.

This result, though, is almost secondary to the actual point:  The coversation is there.  The conversation turns.  It breeds more conversation, more sharing of knowledge, and more synthesis.

In this light, I hazard to say that FriendFeed, while perhaps emulating the humble radio call-in show trades the local and redneck nature that tend to mark such shows with a national or even global community, revealing, yes, perhaps narrow views, but also extremely worldly and wise views.  It merges these worlds with apparent ease and a unique mechanism that seems to prevent the quick formation of cliques and walls – silos, perhaps – that seem to happen in other social mediums.

History will tell us if this bold experiment in to social knowledge sharing and synthesis will maintain its momentum, grow, or perhaps result in catastrophic failure.  It is however, quite in fact, unprecedented in its ability and scope.

In conclusion, you may be a gatherer of information, or you may not have a strong social interest, and that’s ok.  However, if you do think such a medium is worth your time and effort, I can virtually guarantee you, in terms of knowledge, information, and social contact, FriendFeed will reward you ten times for the effort you put in.

Taming the gator

The news from ReadBurner is anything but a joke, though.  In short, ReadBurner now supports direct sharing from all the NewsGator products: NetNewsWire, NewsGator Inbox, NewsGator Online, and last but not least, FeedDemon.  Of course, transparent support continues for Google Reader and Netvibes.

Full instructions for adding your shared articles can be found here, or by going to the home page and clicking on the light-gray Add Feed link.

Once your feed has been recorded in ReadBurner, your shared items will immediately start being tallied in the system.  ReadBurner is (what they call) a 100% democratic aggregator.  That means that the system does what it can to make sure each share is counted, but with no redundancy.  This means that, as you surf their site or subscribe to one of the aggregate RSS feeds (I recommend the climbing category), you will get unique stories that haven’t been gamed.

They have also added a new color to the share names.  Now, along with blue for Google Reader and green for Netvibes, you have RB orange for NewsGator folks!

The other bit of news is that ReadBurner supports ajaxed iframes to render a preview of any article on their site!

Slick Ajax Iframes!  .. Iwhats?

Basically, an iframe is an embedded web site or other formatted data inside of a browser window.  It is different from a popover or popunder browser window in that the frame is still part of the web page you are viewing.  Combine iframes with ajax (a fancy web enhancement that lets parts of web pages update without refreshing the entire page), and you have some really flashy effects.

So if you want to see an example of ajax, and you are reading this on my web site, you can click on the ReadBurner logo up at the top of this article to get a larger version.. in an iframe.

ReadBurner uses a similar effect in a couple of different places.  The new development is embedded in the story headlines on their site.  You can see an example by clicking on the thumbnail to the right.

To get the pop-up iframe, simply click on any bold headline on the page.  If you want to go to the original article, they have added a big red arrow next to each article that will navigate you to the article in question.

This feature has already generated a bit of debate, so no matter if you love it or not, they are ready to hear your side.  Just go to the official blog and leave a comment.

The other place, in case you were wondering, is the tabs across the top of the ReadBurner page.. the ones for NewsGator, Netvibes, and Google Reader. They will bring up those respective pages inside the ReadBurner page.  Smooth.

Now Go Enjoy

Hopefully, you will really dig the new functionality, especially if you are a NewsGator user.  Head over and see if you can’t find a few new blogs to follow or subscribe to.  And if you run a blog, be sure to get your chicklet (I actually call them widgets) and proudly display how many times your articles have been shared!

By the way, if you want to know where I stand you can see my chicklets on my contributors page.

Image via Wikipedia

This has been brought up in the past, but recently I’ve noticed that my Internet Service Provider (ISP), Road Runner from Time Warner Cable, has decided that when I typo on the location bar, it’s perfectly acceptable to send me to a not-so-helpful search result page.

The Problem

This usually happens to me when I typo my own domain, like this (or you can click on the picture for a bigger version):

As you can see, the result pages are pretty much bogus.  In fact, even legit-sounding sites like myspace resolve to blatantly different spam and link farm targets.  This page may look like a search result page, but it really isn’t.  It’s a huge advertisement for Time Warner’s nebulous affiliates.

I’m guessing that it should include my site, since I simply transposed two letters, but it doesn’t.  And I don’t think it ever will.

In the upper right corner, I noticed that Road Runner claims the search results are from Yahoo!  It also has a link entitled, “Why Am I Here”?  Which, when clicked, opens an ajaxy description:

Here’s the FAQ page.  The other blue text, the Preferences page, is interesting in that it doesn’t seem to have any sort of login or other means of knowing who you are.  I am guessing they log the IP I (or other Road Runner clients) are using, and use that as a basis for future URL typo preferences.

By the way, I also did a specific Yahoo! search for the same typo and here is the result:

Not helpful, but also not harmful.

The Obvious Solution

So, Time Warner doesn’t want to get in trouble for this practice, so the preferences pane is their way of allowing you to opt out of their crappy service.  And indeed, after updating my preferences, waiting the requisite 10 minutes, and trying my URL again, I got the standard Firefox page load error page, see over there to the right.

This would be the easy and perfectly adequate solution to this predatory practice.  However…

A Better Solution?

We can actually go a step further, and avoid using the ISP’s DNS service completely! You may think that you are stuck using whatever your ISP gives you via DHCP but you aren’t.

First, let me explain a bit.  DNS stands for Domain Name System and it’s what computers on the internet use to figure out what the real number address for a website is.  When you type in something like www.twitter.com, what your computer does is ask the DNS server what the address for that domain is.  The server looks it up from a table, and returns a number.. the IP address.  For Twitter, this would be: 128.121.146.100 .

Go ahead and try it… you can get to twitter with that number:  http://128.121.146.100

But who wants to remember a long string of numbers for each web site they go to?  Thus the existence of DNS.

Anyway, in order to distribute the load of all these computers doing DNS lookups all the time, what is set up is a tiered system of DNS servers, all pointing up to an authoritative name server (actually 5 or 6) up at the top.  They are supposed to know pretty much every IP address in existence.  Once the lower-level DNS server gets the result, it caches it, so that future lookups are faster.

Back to alternative DNS servers.  In the past, if your ISP had an unreliable, slow or suspect DNS server, you could use a different one, pretty much any DNS server on the internet.  In theory they are all supposed to give you essentially the same results.

But unless you really knew that the DNS server you were using was legit, it’s kind of scary to just start trusting random servers out there for your lookup results.  Remember — the DNS server can tell your computer anything and it would be trusted implicitly.  One second you are going to twitter, the next you might be going somewhere completely different.

So, a group called OpenDNS was formed to provide a safe, reliable way of getting DNS results that you can hold them responsible for.  Also, they are committed to speedy results.

If you are going to go through the trouble of re-programming your PC or router to use a specific DNS server,  I would recommend OpenDNS.  They have full instructions for changing your PC or router settings on their page, and they work with other organizations (such as Google) to help prevent you from accidentally going to a phishing or other nasty site.

Best of all, they will never send you to an advertising-laden pseudo-search engine spam result page!

My use of Toluu has grown these past few weeks to the point where it has become a permanent addition to the list of useful sites I hit almost every day.  So imagine how pleased I was to hear that Toluu was going to add some great new features today!

New Feed View Tabs

Caleb is the primary developer for Toluu and he’s been hard at work improving the service.  The big update is definitely the new feed page views.  Whenever you click on a feed (you can find mine here), there are now some additional tabs you can view:

The tabs are mostly self-explanatory.  Recent gives you a chronological view, starting with the most recently article.  Popular uses some Toluu magic to bring the most popular articles up to the top.  Finally, Subscribers lets you see who is currently subscribed to that feed in Toluu (I will ignore the fact that only three of you are subscribed to my feed through Toluu!  For shame!)

In addition to the tabs are the ability to add a feed to your RSS reader, recommend a feed, and add a feed to your favorites.  These options haven’t changed.

Speed Improvements

Caleb and company have also improved the speed on the contacts page.  Caleb says that it is now 3 times faster getting the list of contacts for your perusal.

In order to get to your contacts list, log in, and then on your profile page you will see a list of contacts on the right side.  Simply click on the word Contacts or View all and you will get there.  On an interface design aside: I just noticed that the word "Contacts” isn’t underlined – I will make the suggestion that it is to hint to users that it is, in fact, a link.

Benefit

These changes aren’t just cosmetic, they add real functionality and use to the site.  Caleb is all about enabling people to find interesting new feeds out there to read, and making those feeds easy to add to your reader.  To that end the new tabs add a new dimension to the feed browsing experience.  The Popular tab gives you a quick way to take a look at a selection of the best articles from a particular feed, and the Subscribers tab will enable you to find other followers of a feed that you may not have noticed before.  Once you add those people as contacts, you get to peruse their selection of feeds and find some great stuff!

I encourage you to go out and re-visit Toluu, sync up your OPML, grab the bookmarklet (found on the OPML import page) and make use of the new features!

25 Invitations

Don’t have an account yet?  Not a problem!  Caleb has hooked me up with 25 extra invites to use the service.  Please comment below with your email address or email me at phil (at) scribkin.com and I’ll be happy to send an invite your way!

I was looking forward to seeing the review, as Steven Hodson had promoted the series earlier in the day.  I just happened to be on FriendFeed when it picked up Steven’s tweet about the new article:

Of course, I replied immediately in utter disbelief, and rushed over to check out the article.

Overall, I am completely flattered and honored that Steven chose my site to be reviewed.  This attention really helps reinforce my resolve to continue writing solid, helpful posts and news into the future.  And with that resolve comes a new awareness of networking. 

While each of our blogs may be an island, its important to remember that when reading something interesting or useful, link it up if you write about that subject later.  It will add depth to your article and raise awareness for the other site.

Now, head over to WinExtra and check out the article!

This is the 35th FriendFeed post I have read in the past week!

And you are absolutely correct.

I Need A Fix

FriendFeed has been a big news item for a while and especially recently as a result of Twitter downtime.  Apparently, when (to use a crude metaphor) the heroin runs out, people start glumly looking at methadone, but not with any real sense of excitement.  Sure, it takes the edge off, but it just isn’t the same.*

In any case, this post isn’t going to be comparing the two services at all.  My goal with this post is to raise some questions I had about FriendFeed when I first started using it, and what I learned to address those questions.

So, on to the questions.

Why Use FriendFeed?

This is the elephant in the room.  Why, indeed?

Ok, let me turn it around: Why use Twitter?

Because it is paradigm changing? The future of the internet?
Web 3.0?

The answer is the same: Why indeed?

So basically, I can’t answer this one for everybody.  We all have a different reason for using Twitter.   Similarly, everyone has a different reason for using FriendFeed.

From personal experience, my reasons for using both services have changed over time, and respectively my involvement in both have fluctuated.

FriendFeed Doesn’t Consolidate Similar Items

Yuvi (also known as The Stat Bot) recently wrote a post grumbling about the fact that FriendFeed will not consolidate identical links from different sources, a major issue perceived by most who use the service.

Basically, it has a clever algorithm for consolidating all the posts on the same service within a certain small window (for example if you send a bunch of tweets you might get something like below.)  But, if you bookmark the same article in 3 different services, it shows up three times in FriendFeed.

Consolidated	Not Consolidated
	shamelessly stolen from Yuvi

I have to admit, this was a cause for quite a bit of consternation for me when I started using FriendFeed as well.  But now I am not as worried about it.  Not because it isn’t a problem, but because of a handy filtering feature FriendFeed has called hide.

See, what I wasn’t taking into account originally is that other people are smart enough to see what they want to see.  In Twitter, you don’t have a choice.. you are either following someone or you aren’t.  But in FriendFeed, you have a very flexible way of only seeing what you want to:

• View everything
• Hide an entry
• Hide all x service entries that don’t have any likes or comments from a specific user
• Hide all x service entries from a specific user
• Hide all x service entries from everybody with no likes or comments
• Hide all x service entries from everybody

This means all the power is in the hands of the FriendFeed user.  I should not need to care if I use 9 different social bookmarking services, because eventually my followers will notice that I bookmark everything to all of them, and filter out all but the one (or more) that they use.

And in fact, it could actually actually hurt me!  If I consistently link up the same URL to the same 9 sites, my followers will learn that they aren’t missing anything by hiding the other services.  If, on the other hand, I share one article to del.icio.us, another to tumblr, and a third in Pownce, my followers have to follow everything, and the moment I use more than one service to promote something.. what happens?  Annoying redundancy!

I Can’t Keep Track of It All!

This does indeed take some getting used to.  The key thing to remember here is that the flow of new links and updates is not set it stone.  It’s not like listing a directory or even watching tweets float past.

In FriendFeed, any entry that has a like or comment (that isn’t hidden) jumps to the top of the feed.

So there are actually two observations you can take away from this fact:

1. You don’t have to read everything the first time. For a number of reasons, actually, which I will go into below.
2. If you have seen the same entry more than once, it’s been noticed by someone. This is actually a good thing.  With time, you will get skilled at noticing where the conversations are happening.

Where Are the Conversations Happening?

That question has a complex answer that has just gotten more complex with the advent of FriendFeed rooms. Before late last week, I could have given you some fairly simple instructions to make the most out of conversation-hunting in FriendFeed.  Well heck, let’s start there anyway.

• The default method of (hopefully) getting some enjoyment or value out of FriendFeed is to follow a bunch of people and just refresh the main (friends) tab.  You will see a combined lifestream of what your friends are doing online.  Now, just look out for the postings that have a yellow smilie face (like) or dialog bubble icon (comment) under them.
• If you want to filter by service, the easiest way to get started is wait until you see the icon for the service you want appear, and click on it.  FriendFeed will refresh, only showing you items from that service, from the people you follow.
• If you notice someone posting some very interesting things, or making some insightful comments, click on their name.  This will bring you to a filtered feed specific to this user.  You can actually click on anyone, not only people you follow.  Also, you can hover over a name to get more info about that person and if you are following them (and they you).
• If you want to see who has liked/commented on your stuff, click on the me tab at the top of the window.  That will show you everything you have posted.  Unfortunately, there isn’t a way of showing just your entries with likes or comments.
• If you want to see what you have liked or commented on, or the same for someone else, look for the discussion links in the right-hand nav bar.  Click on see both.  Alternatively, you can add the word discussion to the end of any user’s URL except for rooms.

What Are Rooms?

A very good question, and one that is still being answered.  Rooms have just been added.  Currently, I can give you what I know about them, but you will have to draw your own conclusion about their usefulness.

• Rooms can be public or private.  If a room is private, a user will have to be invited to the room in order to join it and participate.
• Rooms have their own history and conversation space.  You will not see updates from a specific room unless you join it and check the box to see the updates on your home page.
• If you click on the rooms tab you will see a combined updated feed of all the rooms you have joined.
• Rooms use the same namespace as users.  This means you will never have a room and a user with the same nickname.  Think of a nickname as a handle.. just like your login name (or handle) is unique and often different than your name, a rooms nickname is unique.  However, the room name can be anything at all, including the same name as a different room or even a user’s name.
• If you use the bookmarklet to share an item in FriendFeed, you can choose where to put the link.. either in your main feed, or a room you subscribe to.

Random Stuff

I’m going to wrap with some other useful FriendFeed tips:

• If you want to follow a friend who is not on FriendFeed, you can make an imaginary friend with links to the services you want to follow.  That way, you can share or discussion things they have found in FriendFeed.
• Every page you see on FriendFeed has its own RSS feed. If you want an RSS feed with just the stuff that Joe Blow marked as liked, pull up that view and subscribe.
• FriendFeed has its own API and already there some enterprising developers making sites that take advantage of it.  For example, FF To Go or the FriendFeed Comments Wordpress Plugin.
• If you hide somebody’s FriendFeed entries, you will hide both links and comment-only entries.  Currently FriendFeed thinks of FriendFeed entries of all types as a single type.
• There is no way of blacklisting or blocking someone completely.  Even if you stop following someone, and hide everything they post, you will still see their comments.  If they comment on your updates, however, you can delete those.
• Your name appears as a link on every lifestream update, friendfeed post, comment or like.  Why does this matter? Read my article on FriendFeed and your personal brand over at SheGeeks.

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh Read more about this book…

* I have never taken IV drugs but I have read Trainspotting. And I am sure that’s about as close to taking heroin as I want to get.

Today I noticed an interesting new multi-browser plugin called Zemanta. Having both Firefox installed and a WordPress blog, I decided I would give it a spin and see what it could dig up for me with itself as the topic. So far, it found a nice screenshot and a few good related articles.

Plus, it scans the articles for words it can make link-able with anchor tags, which saves time.  And it suggests tags too. Ok, that’s pretty cool.

It looks promising.

For me personally though, I use Windows Live Writer almost exclusively when creating content for my blog. Zemanta works through the browser and only activates when it notices you are on a write post page for WordPress, Blogger, etc. So, I don’t know how much I will use it. We’ll see.

This isn’t going to be just any run-of-the-mill review from me. Why? Because the application I am going to review is different in several substantial ways:

• It isn’t a piece of software you install on your PC
• It isn’t a web application like Gmail or YouTube
• It really isn’t exactly meant to be a destination page like My Yahoo! or iGoogle

What is RSSmeme?

So, given all these things that RSSmeme is not, what the heck is it? It actually evolved, and continues to grow, from a very simple thought: Wouldn’t it be cool to tally up how many times a news post is shared in Google Reader and make a list of the most popular articles? And in fact, it wasn’t Benjamin Golub that originally had that thought.. it was probably the folks at ReadBurner or TechMeme.

RSSmeme sprung, virtually overnight, from a challenge Benjamin gave to himself to make a competing service, but written in Django, a development framework based on the programming language Python.

While all three services being similar in that they give you top news stories based on shared articles, they all have different directions that they are going.

• ReadBurner is a pure democratic post counter. Nothing gets special consideration.
• TechMeme uses a proprietary set of rules and contributions to determine the hot news of the day.
• RSSmeme not only counts shares, but also allows searching, parameterization, different views, and RSS everywhere. It also now has an API. I’ll dive down into these features in this article.

Default Home Page

When you first visit RSSmeme, you will notice that it gives you a default view — Most Popular Stories From The Last 24 Hours. A lot of people will find this to be a useful page, it simply shows you what has been shared the most in the last day. But, as you look more closely at the individual articles, you will notice that a lot of the article’s header and text are actually hyperlinks:

• The subject
• The author
• The site (or source)
• The tags
• The names of people who shared the article
• … and more

In fact, each of these hyperlinks (except the subject) sends a command back to the RSSmeme engine to refine your list of articles based on your selection. You can get a list of articles by author name, source, tag and sharer. There are really two reasons why this is awesome. First, it means you can easily refine how to view the list of shared articles.

Second, and this is the one most people don’t immediately notice (even though it’s in the site’s title), Every page you generate has its own special RSS feed.

Yes.. you get it now. Want to add an RSS feed for just shared articles written by Louis Gray? Nothing could be easier. How about the most recent articles from Gizmodo? Not a problem.

In fact, it’s almost addictively fun to link-surf through RSSmeme, pulling up different lists of articles by clicking on an author name here, a source there. And any page you can view in your browser, you can subscribe to as an RSS feed. Beautiful.

Searching

Searching has a couple of caveats in RSSmeme. You can search for article headline or text, or a user name. However, there isn’t a direct way to search specifically for an author or source name. And in fact, due to the nature by which RSSmeme compartmentalizes the data as it comes in, internally it refers to authors and sources with a specific ID number. If you know this number, it’s a cinch to pull up that info later.

What I recommend is, if you are looking for a specific author (say, yourself) or a specific source (web site), search for a recent article published by that author or source, click on the name, and then bookmark that search result for future reference.

For example, if you want a list of articles written by me, you can find it here.

Parameterization

Essentially, we have already been talking about this. Since RSSmeme analyzes the incoming RSS feeds for individual elements such as author, source and sharer, it naturally is able to generate a list based on any of these things. The user interface already holds a lot of this power. You can change the time period to search, and the minimum number of shares. If you watch the address bar closely, you can construct custom queries:

Want to find all stories in the last 48 hours by Gizmodo that have over 3 shares?
http://www.rssmeme.com/custom/48/3/?source=9

Want to find all English articles in the last 72 hours that have over 15 shares?
http://www.rssmeme.com/custom/72/30/?language=en

If you are running up against a wall with the UI, you can explore the RSSmeme API as well. In fact, let’s talk about the API a bit.

RSSmeme API

Benjamin just revamped the RSSmeme engine, and in the process added support for an Application Programming Interface, or API. What this means to you is that you can write your own code to query RSSmeme and extract information out of it in any format and sort order you wish. Some other features (not inclusive):

• Different output formats, including the RSS standard ATOM
• Limit the number of hours to go back
• A specific feed ID
• Share minimum and maximum
• Language
• Sort order
• Source ID

The API is very flexible. In fact, Benjamin has already created two very useful RSSmeme API-based tools that are very handy. The first is over on the sidebar of my site.. it’s the 5 Top Shared Stories. A few others:

• FriendFeed-Personalized RSSmeme – This one is great, I’ve been using it for over a month now.
• Creating a Most Shared Stories Widget for your Blog – See above
• Mobile RSSmeme – You can find the result at m.rssmeme.com

Other people are also starting to take note of the API as well. I found a post by Evaristo on his blog, Soliloquio, about how to combine RSSmeme Filters for custom output.

With the advent of Google Reader’s support of sharing with a bookmarklet and notes, RSSMeme is now extracting the notes as well. Although not officially supported yet, Benjamin has already started generating some notes-based statistics.

Other Features

As I just mentioned above, one big up and coming feature is Google Notes. So far, RSSmeme is out front with being able to manipulate the notes on shared items. It’s really very cool to look at an article that has been shared 50 times and see the 20-odd notes that people have tacked on to it.

URL Canonicalization is a fancy term for removing duplicate articles. Without this essential ability RSSmeme would be cluttered with dozens of slightly-different copies of each article.

RSSmeme supports the Google REST language API, to filter articles by language.

There is a handy FeedBurner FeedFlare that you can drop in your blog and FeedBurner Feed to show how many times an article is shared, and the number of notes.

Finally, RSSmeme also uses Disqus as a comment system. All articles allow a viewer to create a comment about that article, and I can tell you that Benjamin tends to read all of them. At least, I’ve left a random comment here and there and he’s noticed them all so far. Probably not used much, but it is there if you want to start a discussion or if you notice a rendering bug that you want to bring to the developer’s attention.

The Future

I believe that Benjamin is really working out on the edge of useful RSS feed data manipulation and social media. It’s hard to say where the service will go in the future, but it is obvious that it has a lot of potential and can be used in a lot of different ways.

If I were to make a blue-sky sort of hypothesis, I could see RSSmeme being used in a variety of ways:

• Canonicalized clipping service: This is a no-brainer. Find a keyword, source or author, construct an API query and you have an always-ready de-duped stream of articles.
• Trend analysis: With the amount of atomization RSSmeme does with RSS feed data, it would not be hard to get trending on any number of variables.
• Shared items corruption detection: I just thought of this. There is a big problem right now with Google Reader’s sharing bookmarklet, in that it lets you edit the text you cut and paste directly. So someone could completely change the content of a shared article. However, if RSSmeme has received this article shared more than one time, it would be relatively easy for it to diff the versions. Or go to the source to pick up the original text.
• Digg replacement: Ok, this one is really pie-in-the-sky, but Digg is not democratic. It can be gamed. Because of the way that RSSmeme collects its data, it is much more difficult to skew the popularity of a particular article or source.

Final Notes

Obviously I am very excited by Benjamin Golub’s free offering. It has had its share of rocky times, but Benjamin has not only worked through this but consistently improved how RSSmeme works. The features he adds are well thought-out and generally enhance the overall usefulness of the site.

Also, Benjamin himself is very responsive to questions or feature requests. He is open to suggestions and seems completely committed to making RSSmeme a great site. I am very excited to see where he takes this technology!

Update: Sarah Perez has written an article that goes into more depth on the RSSmeme API over at ReadWriteWeb. Check it out!

You think you have it covered with Trillian or Pidgin.

Perhaps you think you are a step ahead of your coworkers because you are using Meebo.

Think again.

There’s a new player in town, and its name is Digsby. I’m not sure what the logo represents (A rock? A blob?), but it wears a baseball cap and it knows how to talk in all dialects of IM. And that’s just the beginning. Add social networks like Facebook, Myspace and yes, even Twitter. Email checking for Yahoo, Gmail and more. Themes. Configuration sync. Contact merge. Facebook and embed-able flash site widgets for chatting. Cross-platform support. And more.

Let’s start from the top and work our way into the details.

Overview

When you first sign up for Digsby and get the client installed and running, it looks a lot like Trillian, or any other multi-IM client out there. Dock-able contact list, theme support, grouping of contacts, the works. You might notice (in Windows at least) that it puts itself in your icon tray. From there you can conveniently change your global status or get to the preferences pane. The real magic happens when you start adding other services.

Go ahead. Throw in your Twitter, your Gmail, your Facebook. New icons will pop up, indicating new activity on those services. Click on the icons and you can get details, click a link to open that site in a browser window. The Twitter icon opens a window that allows you to reply to a tweet, look at your replies, directs or favorites.

Ok, now we are getting somewhere.. we have our email and social media notification, along with a nice IM client.. but haven’t we seen this somewhere? Yes, it is reminiscent of Flock in some ways, except for IM of course. And no browser. You know what I mean. It’s like taking the social media sidebar out of flock and dropping it into a nice IM client.

Speaking of IM, let’s start with that.

Instant Messaging Support / Customization

IM is core to Digsby. Here’s a feature run-down, in no particular order:

• It supports all the major IM protocols: AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber. Notably, there isn’t any support for IRC (yet).
• You can set universal away and available status messages, from the contact window a la Google Talk.
• It supports invisible mode.
• It can detect what music you are listening to.
• Hovering over a contact gives you more information about them, and gives you access to the user-specific menu.
• Separate theme and conversation window style support.
• Tabbed IM window, with support for dragging tabs out, or in to other IM windows.
• Fully-developed conversation log viewer, lets you choose by buddy and date (very nice!)
• The user-specific menu allows you to get info, send/receive IMs, transfer files (or check what files have been transferred), send a quick email to the contact via a pre-configured email account, send a text message (to any number), start an audio/video chat using a 3rd party flash app, look up past chats, block/add user and a quick link to the alert menu.
• Minimize IM windows and get a new IM popup. Reply from within the popup!
• Merge contacts. This is a great feature — you can combine multiple IM client contacts (say you friend’s AIM and Yahoo!) into one contact in the buddy list. Awesome.
• Sort your buddy list any way you want.

There are some novel concepts here, even in the jaded field of IM clients. I totally saved the best for last on that list. Being able to shoot off a quick reply in an IM popup window is sweet. Doesn’t take you out of context, great for snap replies. Also, the ability to merge your buddies’ separate contacts is super-handy. I have some friends who (like me) have a login to 5 different IM services, and then use a multi-client. So they all log in at the same time, and take up 5 lines of precious buddy list real estate. This fixes that issue.

The ability to sort the buddy list by group, status, service, service then status, etc. is fantastic. I found ways of viewing my buddy list I never even considered with other IM clients.

The buddy list skin and conversation theme support is nice, but isn’t quite there in terms of adding new skins and themes. It really should have its own theme handler like Winamp, but for now you have to unzip the skin/theme and copy the files to the correct sub-directory.

Digsby is notably lacking IRC support, which for really old-skool folks is a must. I always thought IRC was a bit heavy for most IM clients, and adding it to Digsby by itself would be a mistake, because Digsby also doesn’t support chat rooms. On the surface these don’t have much to do with each other — but think about it. If Digsby allowed people to make a spontaneous chat room for all their friends (like Meebo and Trillian do), they could re-use that ‘chat room’ implementation for IRC. So I’d like to see both make an appearance.

Also, I am personally disappointed that the IM chat window does not have a handy URL embed link that most clients offer. I use IM mostly to send links to my friends, and sometimes those links are HUGE. It would be much nicer if I could embed the URL in an anchor tag and spare my buddies the multi-line URL text, even if it is click-able.

Email and Social Networks

Digsby rolls robust support for multiple web-based and traditional email services into its application. You get Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, POP, IMAP, and AIM mail support. Digsby handles its email accounts a little differently than Trillian, though, allowing you to specify as many accounts to check as you like. That’s a definite plus.

You can mark a message read or as spam from within the notification popup window. It’s little touches like this that make you wonder why more mail monitoring clients didn’t do it first.

You can compose a new email from the IM conversation window, as stated above. Handy.

On the social networking side, you’ve got Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. That may seem like a fairly short list until you realize that each of these integrations is fairly fully featured.

Facebook gives you your river of news as well as your last status update. You can change your status from a link in the window. Also, it does a good job of making a link out of pretty much any Facebook page you could go to within the context.

Myspace is very similar to Facebook. To be honest, I don’t use Myspace so I can’t tell you if it does anything really cool/special. Let me know if you find anything!

Saving the best for last again, the Twitter notification window has a nice river of tweets view with shortcut icons to reply, fave or direct message on every tweet. You can also post a new tweet, of course. The posting window keeps track of your remaining characters and sets a hard-stop when you hit zero. There is also a URL shortening link that uses snipr without leaving the interface.

Personally, I still like Twhirl a bit more for its ability to stack individual tweet notifications as they come in. Digsby gives you a popup with a x/x in the corner. As long as your mouse is hovering over the popup, it won’t fade away. Great unless you get a new 1 of 5 twitter pop, and a separate 1 of 3 email pop simultaneously.. and one of them fades out before you can attend to it. Not a severe issue but still, annoying.

Unique Features

Digsby has a couple more tricks up its sleeve. The first, big one is synchronization. Yes, that does mean what you are guessing — everything you configure in Digsby, from the theme, buddy list sorting, window position, and preferences… are synced to the Digsby server. It uses a secure 128-bit blowfish (think SSH style) connection and means you can install Digsby on any system, on any platform (in theory), and be up and running quickly with only one login name and password. Meebo may gotten there first, but Digsby definitely takes it to a new level.

Speaking of any platform, Digsby’s beta platform is Windows, but they are promising builds on Mac OS X and Linux as well! If they get everything to work the same across all these operating systems, that will be a killer feature.

Another feature that Digsby supports thanks to its ASP-style implementation is a Digsby chat widget. Similar (again) to Meebo, this gives you a customizable embeddable flash widget that connects directly to your Digsby login. Put it on your web site, instant chat availability for your visitors. Use their Facebook widget and your friends can say ‘hi’ without having to leave the page.

Summary

I’ve been using Digsby for almost two months now, which in Digsby development time, makes me an early adopter. Overall, I find it very easy to use, especially configured where the buddy list is docked to a side and slides out of view, and I get my social network buttons in the tray. Perfect.

Digsby has a huge wish list on their community/theme site. For example, wishes for future support of FriendFeed, IRC, Pownce, etc. My wish for a URL embed is on there too, but near the bottom (they do say they are working on it.)

Bottom line — if you use IM, email and social networks in Windows, and don’t like that stuff residing in your browser, check out Digsby.

Credit

I blatantly stole not only the Digsby icon (from their press page, so that should be fine) but a bunch of their screenshots. You can find all the screenshots here.

I couldn’t find any screenshots of the app anywhere. But I shrugged and went ahead and installed it. You can see a thumbnail of what it looks like over there. I have to say, I’m impressed, even with this beta.

First, it has a nice, clean interface reminiscent of TweetBar (which I reviewed here), in a pleasant brown color (or is that colour) scheme. There are 6 tabs, and it defaults to the 2nd, user.

Public shows you everyone’s tweets. User shows you the latest tweets from your friends. Friends gives you a list of the people are you following. Followers shows you who is following you. @s are messages directed toward you and me gives you a handy stat page similar to the “about” page on Twitter.

Also on the interface page, you have self-explanatory refresh and clear buttons. Below that is your list of tweets. Now this is what gets my excited — as opposed to TweetBar, TwitKit has a tiny reply and favorite icon below each user picture. Perfect! Also, not shown, there is a red dot on the right side of your own tweets, which can be used to ‘hide’ an update. This feature doesn’t seem to work consistently, or well. But this is a beta so I am not too worried.

Aside from the main interface, there is also an options page that allows you to add the from application to each tweet, a refresh timer setting, the ability to change how names are shown, and a pull-down selection of 4 different color themes.

After using this add-on for a couple of days, I have to say that I find it fully as enjoyable to use as TwitterFox, but in a full sidebar form factor. It is stable and responsive. There are a couple of drawbacks, but they aren’t major: First, you cannot install TwitKit on Firefox Beta 3, it only works with FF2. Also, TwitterFox supports multiple Twitter logins in the interface, and with TwitKit you would need to sign out, and then sign back in to a different log in, which would be a pain.

Otherwise, it is stable and easy to use. I can definitely recommend this product!

Update: If you already have Tweetbar installed and active, disable or uninstall it before installing TwitKit.  Apparently the two plugins don’t like each other much.  Thanks tw3nty3ight for the heads-up!

Tweetbar

First let’s look at Tweetbar. This a brand-new plugin from Mike Demers that makes use of that sadly-underutilized sidebar to give you an almost-fully-featured twitter client, in the style of TwitBin. What this plugin does right is capture the essentials of the Twitter site in a sidebar-friendly format.

The essentials are all there — tabs to follow everyone, people you follow, people who follow you, and the vaguely-entitled tab friend which shows you who you are following, and their last tweet. You can also change your refresh timeout and clear out any of the tabs.

The bad part is that’s where the good bits stop. There is no “reply” or “favorite” or “direct message” buttons anywhere, not around the user icons, nowhere. So you have to do your tweet maintenance the old-fashioned way, typing it all in the input window. Also, if someone posts a link in their tweet, Tweetbar helpfully makes it a link, but when you click the link it uses the current tab. There doesn’t seem to be a way of changing that behavior. Worse, it does not honor ctrl-clicks to open a link in a new tab! For me, that’s makes it worse than the original Twitter interface, in all honesty.

TwitterFox

TwitterFox, from Naan Studio, takes a different approach to integrating Twitter on Firefox. It places a small, unobtrusive Twitter icon in the bottom status bar. From there you can left-click on the icon to log in and get tabbed window that defaults on recent friends’ tweets. You can switch to replies you have sent and a direct message window. There doesn’t seem to be any support for viewing all tweets, and you probably wouldn’t want to — the window is only 345 pixels high, good for about 4-5 tweets at a time. Also, it is not re-sizeable, which is definitely a drawback.

Each tweet has an “arrow” button in the upper-right-hand corner, making it easy to quickly shoot off a reply to incoming tweets. Also, TwitterFox keeps a tally of how many new general and directed tweets you receive. Another nice touch is a subtle fading of tweets you have already read, which acts as a sort of “bookmark” to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Finally, if you right-click on the TwitterFox icon, you can turn off TwitterFox popups, force an update, change Twitter accounts or set your preferences. The Preferences Pane lets you add/change a password for a selected account, change your refresh time and popup timeout, and assign hot-keys to TwitterFox actions. You can also enable/disable a notification sound.

Some people will find the tiny un-resizeable window a definite showstopper. However for me, and the number of tweets that I get, it seems to work and it’s fast. I definitely like this addon more than Tweetbar.

Firefox Compatibility

A final note about compatibility. I found that TwitterFox installed on pretty much any version of Firefox I had installed, but Tweetbar definitely was limited to versions older than Firefox 3 Beta. This might not be a big deal for you, but if you live on the edge it might make a difference.

There are several features that differentiate StumbleUpon from its fellow bookmarking sites. The big difference is pretty obvious from its name: You “stumble upon” new, fresh sites. No need to do a Google search or look for a particular category or tag, all you do is install the free StumbleUpon toolbar and restart your browser. The toolbar is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox (and should work with Firefox derivatives like Flock). Once installed, the toolbar will direct you to the StumbleUpon registration page so you can get yourself a free login to StumbleUpon. Register, pick some categories, and you are ready to stumble!

To start stumbling you really don’t need to know anything about the toolbar, the web site, or anything else. You simply click the Stumble! button and you are directed to a site that StumbleUpon thinks you might like. That’s it! If it ‘read your mind’ and you love the page you landed on, just give it a thumbs-up. Your rating will be recorded on the site, so you can get to it later, and you have contributed to the community nature by giving the site a quick review. Whenever you are ready to move on, you can click the stumble button again and away you go.

It’s easy to lose an hour or two (or five) just stumbling from one site to the next. You’ll find that every once and a while, StumbleUpon will send you to a SU page to give you a tip or expose you to another feature. The process is educational and fun, and almost relaxing actually. But, if you are ready to get serious with StumbleUpon, it can help you out through its more advanced features.

Moving from left to right across the default toolbar, after the thumbs-up/thumbs-down, you have a Send to button that lets you email other SU members or email recipients a link to the page you are looking at. If you do send a link to someone who isn’t registered to SU, the email they will get will be in HTML and will also encourage them to sign up to SU.

Next, you should have a search box, to narrow what sort of sites SU will send you too, based on terms that you enter. This is good if you are looking for something, but don’t know exactly where to look. Try it with a term like sunset as a hint. After typing in your search term, hit ENTER and the SU button will be updated to reflect the search-term stumble. To the right of search are pre-defined channels that SU supports, like everything, pictures, video, and stumblethrough. This last term is specific — you can pick certain large web sites and SU will constrain its stumble results to that domain.

Finally, you have a pull-down menu to select a specific category (out of the list you made when you signed up) or other types of categories. After that you have a link to your favorites (more on this in a bit), your friends page, and a catch-all tools pull-down menu that lets you adjust account settings, modify your toolbar or report a site you stumbled across as “adult” or “spam”.

You will probably spend most of your time interacting with the SU toolbar. Almost all of the functionality you are likely to need can be accessed through the bar quickly and easily. However, SU also has a content-rich web site with full community integration that is worthy of exploration as well. In fact, this is one of the reasons why people use a social bookmarking tool — for the social aspect!

You will notice that on every page StumbleUpon sends you to, you should be able to go to a review page for that URL that has discussion and details. If you stumble on a page that, you’re not sure what it’s good for, this is a good place to start looking. Also, every SU site shows who made the initial suggestion.. if you think the page is especially fantastic (say for example a gorgeous picture) you can follow the SU user link to see what else they have suggested or have marked as their favorites.

Speaking of favorites and suggestions, you have complete control over your own profile! Just click on Favorites and you will be redirected to your account page, where you can see the pages you liked, the pages you discovered, and also pages you blogged. This last topic is another community feature — SU will maintain a blog page for you, so you can give your friends a URL (mine is here) that they can use to see what you have been up to. You can even add text blog entries, and include some HTML if you want to have an embedded image or other item. StumbleUpon then provides you a RSS Feed for you (or your friends) to keep up on blog entries & reviews, or favorites.

So, if you are stuck looking for something in those series of tubes we call the Internet and want someone else to do the driving, give StumbleUpon a try. It’s quick, easy, and I can guarantee you will find several new web pages or entire sites that are right up your alley. You will wonder why you never found them before.

So, why switch to a new browser? Isn’t it possible to do everything you want to do with the one you are using, via plugins or mods? Well, perhaps. But maybe you will find a browser that works just as well as the one you are using, and provides a level of integration and convenience with services and sites you already use. Maybe that web browser is Flock.

As you can see, Flock is betting that you will be intrigued by its additional baked-in features enough to give it a whirl. And once you get it set up, that you might just end up loving it. So how exactly is Flock different from, say, Firefox? Well, it is simultaneously similar and very different. The similarities lie in the core.. Flock is built on the Firefox core rendering engine. Almost everything that Firefox can do, Flock can as well.. addons, tabs, themes, extensions, etc. The Flock team has also stated their intention of moving to to the Firefox 3 engine once it comes out of beta.

Flock is also different from Firefox, mostly in what it has built in:

• Integration with social networks: Flock has support for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.
• Integration with media sharing sites: Photobucket, Picasa and Piczo is built in.
• Support for direct blogging: You can compose a blog entry and publish it to Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, Typepad, WordPress.com, Xanga and common blog APIs based on Movable Type, ATOM and MetaWeblog.
• Monitoring of web email: Google Mail and Yahoo! Mail notification are baked in as well.
• A fully-featured feed reader: You can add multiple news feeds, categorize them, and import/export

These services are integrated in a way that do not impinge on the core browsing experience, but give you a wealth of information just by summoning up a sidebar or a media bar. In addition, Flock has a very useful default home page called My World that integrates these disparate feeds of information such as new Twitter and Facebook entries, new photos and videos, and RSS feeds on to one page. The page is configurable as well, you can have as much or as little information on it as you like.

My World is nice, but when you are browsing, you probably won’t go back to it all that often. Honestly, how many times do you go to your home page, no matter what it is set to? At best, it is usually a launching-off point. No matter though, as Flock has more ways to get at that information, namely a custom sidebar and novel media bar.

The Sidebar

Let’s face it, in Firefox the sidebar is useful, but we generally avoid keeping it open. Unless you have a compelling plugin like Meebo or a Twitter app that fits nicely in a sidebar-sized window, it’s easier to just keep it closed. Flock’s developers realized this and built in some very useful apps. In order from left to right you have My World (not a sidebar app), People, Media Bar (more on that in a bit), RSS Feeds, Email, Favorite Sites, Accounts, Clipboard, Blog and Upload Pitctures.

Let’s start with the People sidebar. When you click on this icon, you will get another set of tabs listing the services you have provided Flock with a login to (it also picks this up by context, if you log in to Facebook it knows to cache your credentials for the sidebar), and lets you know if there is any new updates for each of those services, as evidenced by the red dot in the upper-right corner of each tab. If you click on All, you will get a “river of news” type display, showing the most recent 6 or 7 updates from all services flowing down the sidebar. You can then use this sidebar to perform actions such as send a message or view new media. It’s a nice way to catch up on your social networks without having to leave the site you are viewing.

Let’s skip the Media Bar for now and look at the RSS Feeds. While probably not as full-featured as a standalone feed reader such as NewsGator, this does allow you to add RSS feeds directly into Flock and them pull them up one at a time or as one big river of news. It is flexible in allowing you to set how much from each article you see (title only, some text or all text) as well as how you mark an article “read.” Personally, I think it a much nicer implementation than the RSS bookmark feature in Firefox, but doesn’t really compare to Google Reader or Bloglines in its feature set.

Next is the Email button. This doesn’t actually come up in the sidebar, but a dialog window will pop up and let you see what new messages you have waiting, or compose a new email if you so choose.

The icon with the stars is your Favorite Sites sidebar button. This is very much like Firefox’s bookmarks sidebar, except it also integrates sites bookmarked online in del.icio.us and mag.nolia as well. This is ver handy if you wish to quickly search through all of your online and offline bookmarks to find a web site that you have previously saved. You can also copy (or publish) your local bookmarks to your online site or make a local copy.

The next icon is Accounts and Services which lists what accounts Flock is currently keeping track of, and allows you to log in/out or remove that account from Flock’s memory. You can also see a list of services that Flock supports here if you wish to add it.

Next we have the Web Clipboard. This is actually very handy; you can compare it to Google Notebook in that you can drag stuff that you highlight on a web site into this bar, and save it for later. You can then view, edit, delete, email, or publish these clippings to a blog post.

Speaking of blog posts, the Open Blog Editor button, which looks like a feather quill, allows you to write a new blog entry and then publish it without ever having to open a different application. It is a fairly no-frills affair, on par with what you would get with a Firefox addon, but it does support multiple blogs and handles all the HTML for you.

Finally, we have the Upload Pictures button. This will open a new dialog window which will allow you to upload local pictures to any photo service you are subscribed to, such as Flickr or Picasa. It is designed to work with batches of photos and has tabs for batch editing as well as individual photo descriptions and tags.

The Media Bar

This is a horizontal bar that can be confgured to appear at the top of your browser window (inside the active tab) or at the bottom of same. This media browser is almost as flexible as the sidebar apps in what it does. Basically, it intelligently gathers media from many sources such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook and allows you to browse through either individual streams or full mashups across all your registered sites. When you see a photo or video that you like, you can hover over it to get a larger picture, or click on the arrow that appears to bring up an action menu.

From the action menu you can share the selection via email or blog, you can make a copy for yourself or, in the case of video, even view it in a mini-window. Very handy! There is also an integrated search field that allows you to search different services for specific images or videos. By the way, you can also drag a photo or video from this bar into your Web Clipboard to save it for later.

A Few Other Features

Flock has a few other tricks up its sleeve. On the main navigation bar, you will notice that it has the usual back/forward and refresh buttons, but no STOP button. Also, there is a giant button with a star on it! The refresh button actually turns into the stop button when a page is loading. As for the star button, that is your “add to favorites” button. By default, this allows you to save a bookmark locally, but unlike Firefox where you can only specify the location where the bookmark goes, Flock also lets you tag the bookmark (basically, categorize it) as well as optionally save it to an online bookmark service. You can configure it to always save local, always save online or both, or always ask.

There are more buttons next to the address bar that change color to indicate the page you are on having a media stream, a RSS feed or a custom search engine. When you click a highlighted button, you can view the stream or add the feed or search engine directly in to Flock.

There is one last thing that is built-in to Flock that I find handy, which you can add to Firefox via an addon. If you are on a site and you have Flock set up to open a new window as a tab (which I believe is the default configuration) Flock will open the tab right next to the tab you are viewing. In Firefox, the tab that opens is at the very end of your list of tabs, so logical grouping isn’t always preserved. It’s a small point but I really like that.

Well, I am sure there is more I missed but that covers the big differences between it and Firefox. If you want a browser that is social media savvy, look no further than Flock.