aggregators

Another way to manage online personalities: Profile Builder

Yesterday I recorded a podcast on the challenges of managing multiple social network profiles. Today I took a look at a new tool that's supposed to help you do that: Profile Builder. It's an aggregator service. You tell it where you blog, what your main social network is, what networks (like LinkedIn) you're on, and it creates a nice widget for you that you can set to pop up when people press a little "P" icon that you put next to your name, like this: Hi, this is Rafe Needleman . (Note that my profile is … Read more

Conduit improves its toolbar

Conduit makes a slick utility for creating browser toolbars. I covered the product back in April, and I had one main beef: Each toolbar you installed took up additional real estate in a browser. Conduit has just fixed that, and has added some other new features as well.

With today's release, when Conduit users add toolbars after the first one they have, each becomes an option on a drop-down item within the toolbar. Conduit is also releasing multitoolbar packs with preloaded combinations of toolbars. There's a Blogs pack (Webware is included in it) as well as Music, Sports, … Read more

CNET News.com feature: All the news that's fit to link

If you ask new-media pundit Jeff Jarvis, the humble hyperlink ought to be counted high in the ranks of digital-age phenomena that have transformed the face of news reporting and consumption.

"The hyperlink has changed everything," asserted Jarvis, who runs media criticism site BuzzMachine and political blog PrezVid. Citing the motto "do what you do best, and link to the rest," he said that news outlets can achieve new levels of efficiency through the ability to direct readers to click elsewhere for more information. In one sense, it's the 21st-century equivalent of a newspaper running … Read more

A look at Webwag, single page aggregator for your phone and PC

Webwag is a single-page aggregator that's been around for nearly a year now. Like other similar services, it lets users create one or more customized start pages, filled with modules of content that update continuously throughout the day. These feeds can be searched and browsed through a fairly large directory, along with the capability to drop in any old RSS feed. What's a little cooler, however, is Webwag's Widget-on-Demand tool, which will let you grab a live snippet of any Web page, and turn it into its own widget. If you're familiar with the Webclips service … Read more

Webware's new Web 2.0 reviews ticker

Since no one blog can keep up with all the new Web 2.0 products these days, we've added a new feature to the Webware site: More Web 2.0 Stories. You can see it in the right-hand sidebar, under the Categories box. It's a news stream that pulls headlines and links from other popular Web 2.0 blogs (currently: Center Networks, eHub, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, and TechCrunch). I hope you find it useful.

Our goal is to have this feed link to Web 2.0 product announcements and reviews, so we're only including blogs in the lineup … Read more

Feed your social network with Pageflakes Blizzard

Pageflakes has just updated their service this morning with a handful of new features. The company is calling this latest release "Blizzard." Users now get their own profile page and can link up with other Pageflakes users as friends. They can also browse through users by interest, based on items they've put together on their customized Pagecasts. The goal is to make the service feel like less of a solitary experience and make it easier to share user-created Pagecasts.

Also new is the option to completely customize a page. There are themes and simple color arrangements for users to pick from, and a tool to create your own. In the same vein, there are now media pages from third-party content providers and sponsors, nearly identical to what competitor Netvibes rolled out with their Universes feature in mid-April. Pageflakes is launching this feature with themed content pages from CNN, AOL, Rolling Stone, and the Washington Post, among others.

To help users find content to add to their pages, Pageflakes has also redone their widget gallery, which they call "flakes." There are about a quarter of a million widgets, which is about twice that of Netvibes.

The Blizzard release also opens up the door to users of Apple's Safari browser, who up until now have been unable to access the site. However, there's no news on whether an iPhone-friendly version of the start page service is in the works. To see more shots of the new features, click the read more link below.

Previous Pageflakes coverage: Pageflakes community gets traction Roundup: single page aggregators Pageflakes CEO wants to take on Yahoo Start here: Pageflakes meets the metagators

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Profilactic puts your multiple personalities in one room

Profilactic, which I covered previously, is now available to the public. It's a personal feed aggregator: You tell it where you post online, and it pulls all the feeds together. You can point people to this "mashup" page, or use one of the site's widgets to embed that info in your own profile page or blog.

Another social site I use, Jaiku, has a similar function--it consolidates personal feeds into one feed. Profilactic is much easier to set up, though. It has a list of sites it can read from (Twitter, Pownce, Digg, Flickr, and several … Read more

SportSnipe: A souped-up Original Signal for sports fans

SportSnipe is a new single-page aggregator the likes of Original Signal, PopUrls, and others, although it's focused specifically on sports feeds from all over the world. Users can browse through headlines and video thumbnails for various leagues, genres, and teams. Like Original Signal, SportSnipe has the option to hover over any headline to read the first few lines of the story, along with a comment button that lets registered users add their own commentary to the story--separate of the parent site.

The service claims to pull its headlines from over 1,300 different sports feeds. It also doubles as a regular old build-it-yourself feed aggregator similar to Netvibes and PageFlakes, albeit a little less flashy. Users can add RSS feeds as either text or video feeds. The video feed catcher is especially cool and gives you a little thumbnail for each clip. If you do this with a text feed, you won't get anything but a black box.

SportSnipe has a few ways to sort and share content. You can bookmark pages you'd like to share with others through a variety of social bookmarking sites. You can also turn off comments and hover over previews. With a quick toggle you can rearrange the feed boxes and extend the feeds to see more than just a few headlines. There are also embed codes for putting your feeds on a blog, Web site, or social networking profile (which I've done to the right.)

In many ways, SportSnipe isn't very original as a single-page aggregator. Pageflakes and Netvibes do a much better job with their presentation, and the resemblance to Popurls and Original Signal is unquestionable. However, SportSnipe has a really great directory of sports feeds that aggregate quickly and are far more comprehensive than what Original Signal offers. The video feed implementation is a nice touch as well.

More screens after the jump. … Read more

Thoof: Digg without community

There's a new content discovery site going into private beta today: Thoof. The concept is that it knows who you are, where you are, and what you like, and picks online sites and stories for you based on that information.

Thoof users still have to submit stories to the site, and right now the only way to do that is to paste a URL into the system. That will slow down submissions, compared to having a bookmarklet or a similar quick-add feature. But I like the idea of an aggregation site that treats me as an individual, not just part of a crowd of users.

CEO Ian Clarke says Thoof knows what you're going to like, "from the first moment you visit the site." There's a lot of information feeding into the system. For example, it takes all the information your browser passes to it, such as your platform and IP (which it uses to take a stab at your physical location), and correlates that with items that other similar people have clicked on. Of course, it also records what you click on, but it doesn't yet develop a profile based on your Web history outside of Thoof or from other clues you leave on your system.

… Read more