The Social

At the risk of sounding like a complete tool, the best way to describe Twones, which launched Thursday, is "FriendFeed for music." The Amsterdam-based start-up aggregates a variety of social and not-so-social music services--currently a total of 28, including Imeem, iLike, Blip.fm, iTunes, Grooveshark, and Last.fm (owned by CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News)--through a Firefox browser plugin.

Once you've set up your account, Twones (which I'm guessing is pronounced "tunes," rather than rhymes with "phones") will compile your playlists and listening history but will also, much like iLike, provide artist information, upcoming concert dates, and photos and videos sourced from Flickr and YouTube. You can also bookmark favorite songs and find out what your friends are listening to.

Twones doesn't actually host licensed music and the company doesn't seem to want to, which is good to hear: streaming music start-ups are one of digital media's most troubled niches, plagued by both legal issues and difficulty making money.

The moneymaking prospects for Twones, which has already taken investment dollars from the Holland arm of concert and promotion giant Live Nation, aren't yet clear. The company will serve ads, but hopes to also make money by offering premium accounts down the line for users as well as business accounts for artists and marketers who want more detailed information about who's listening to their music and who could be untapped marketing targets (among other things). But these are all obviously dependent on an active user base, and relying on an installed browser plugin may deter some users--especially since it's currently Firefox-only.

Twones is in private beta but we have 500 invites available for CNET readers. Use the promo code CNET09 when you register.

Surprise! Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, a Bay Area-based social-network feed aggregation start-up.

"Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends," FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said in a release. "We can't wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users around the world."

TechCrunch reported the news on Monday, a matter of minutes before Facebook confirmed the acquisition.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it: This is not as ridiculously huge of a deal as the Silicon Valley hype machine is going to have you believe.

Basically, FriendFeed has been coasting on a lot of hype and not a lot of mainstream recognition, and it's not a bit surprising that it would be seeking an exit at this point. Facebook acquired it for its talent; prior to FriendFeed, Taylor was part of the team that helped launch Google Maps. So the real story here is that Facebook made the rather expensive hire (and we don't know the terms of the deal) of some very talented former Googlers. FriendFeed's co-founders "will hold senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams," according to the release, and the rest of the company's 12 employees will also join Facebook.

This would also be consistent with Facebook's minimal past acquisition history: the company bought little-known start-up Parakey two years ago with the primary objective of getting its founders, the creators of the Firefox browser, on board. It's also well-known that Facebook tried hard to acquire Twitter--which would've been a far more significant acquisition than FriendFeed--and was turned down. (Well, there was also ConnectU, whose assets Facebook acquired pretty much just to get that pesky lawsuit off the table.)

The release from Facebook repeatedly hinted that this is about talent more than product.

"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information," Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the statement. "As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."

Yup.

"As we spent time with Mark (Zuckerberg) and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they've built, and their desire to have us contribute to it," FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, another ex-Googler who was instrumental in building Gmail, "It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook's engineers are about creating simple, groundbreaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group."

But Facebook director of product Christopher Cox said to CNET News later, "I wouldn't call it a talent acquisition." He elaborated, "We really have a vision that's focusing on Facebook being not just a destination but being a service...We think FriendFeed's been focused on how that's going to work in an open way, and that's something we're excited about, not just the people but the product they've built."

FriendFeed earned praise from prominent voices in Silicon Valley--most notably Robert Scoble--but its aim to aggregate all of a user's social-networking activity feeds in one place didn't catch on with the mainstream. But Facebook eventually began to mimic the FriendFeed model through upgrades to its central "news feed" feature, letting members pull in select third-party updates.

Bret Taylor said that FriendFeed wasn't shopping itself around. "We weren't up for sale. We had a healthy amount of financing and a really efficient company," he told CNET News. "As we noticed our products were really converging in terms of product vision, we started having casual conversations with Facebook."

It's not clear what will happen to the FriendFeed service, because it sure sounds like Facebook is eager to get its team onto the engineering fast track. "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being," a post by Taylor on the FriendFeed blog read. "We're still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team."

Taylor elaborated more to CNET News later on Monday: "Anything that we would do would be more of a transition, not shutting down. I think our users have invested in our product by putting their data in it, sharing it with their friends...We absolutely wouldn't shut (FriendFeed) down."

More to come...last updated at 2:04 p.m. PDT.

There's some chest-thumping going on over at TweetMeme, a service that rounds up "retweets" of popular links--much like Digg buttons--and aggregates them into a central site. A rival site, ReTweet, just announced its impending launch, and TweetMeme thinks the two are too similar.

More specifically, according to a blog post by TweetMeme's Nick Halstead, ReTweet's "retweet button Javascript and the Wordpress plugin code seemed to have been directly copied from ours." He said that TweetMeme is "seeking further legal advice."

Halstead says he was spurred by a commenter on a TechCrunch article who claims to have found the matching code.

ReTweet is not yet open to the public but claims that its product will be "off-da-hook."

Avid Twitter users are undoubtedly familiar with "retweeting," but here's a rundown: A retweet is a Twitter post (or tweet) that spreads around another user's tweet by posting "RT," the username of the account that originally posted the tweet, and then the content of the tweet (sometimes truncated so as to not push it above the 140-character limit).

TweetMeme has gained popularity because it makes Digg-like buttons that allow site visitors to send out retweets of articles or blog posts they may be reading, and industry blogs like TechCrunch and Mashable have begun installing TweetMeme buttons to count the number of retweets that a link has pulled in.

Halstead says the liaisons between the two Twitter app manufacturers go back a few months. "I had actually been contacted by their COO Tyson Quick in April to ask if we would support their plan to get Twitter to support retweeting natively on Twitter," he wrote on the TweetMeme blog. "At the time I responded that I would think about it, in fact what I thought was that they were obviously trying to get us to help them promote a service that would at a later stage turn into a competitor, so I ignored it."

ReTweet has said that the similarities in question came from the fact that the matching code was open-source.

Parent company Mesiab Labs responded in a blog post and says it has modified some code: "After some prompt discussions with our development team, we discovered that, indeed, one of our developers had based a prototype button and widget on tweetmeme.com's publicly viewable scripts and some of the same open source WordPress code," the post read. "As a company that prides itself on innovation and cutting edge development, we were a bit embarassed by the blunder, and promptly removed the scripts. Despite being well within our rights to use the publicly licensed code, we believe we can do better."

Since ReTweet has yet to even launch, this will have to be one to watch.

This post was updated at 12:52 p.m. PT.

Now here's one you don't see every day: Wordnik, which launched out of private beta on Monday and states its mission as "discovering all the words and everything about them." Taking the basic premise of a dictionary, Wordnik supplements each entry with Web 2.0's tastiest treats--relevant Flickr images, Twitter search matches, user-contributed tags and comments--and then invites users to add their own words, too.

Calling itself a "project" rather than a company, Wordnik's origins are sort of like a dot-com fairy tale. CEO Erin McKean, then serving as editor-in-chief of Oxford University Press' American dictionaries, was giving a talk at the elite TED conference when she raised an issue for lexicographers--dictionary scientists--that, in her opinion, the digital age hadn't solved yet.

"There are so many more words than dictionaries can handle," McKean said to CNET News about the issue she raised at TED. "There's no program for anyone to go out and try to find all the words. People have been conditioned to be more or less content with what they've got." She has a point: many online dictionary sites are little more than digital replicas of their print predecessors.

As is often the case with TED, some pretty important people were listening in, including Silicon Valley venture capitalist Roger McNamee--now one of the investors in Wordnik, which McKean promptly co-founded with two lexicographers and an engineer. Now the Bay Area-based company has six full-time employees, and is launching with 1.7 million words in its directory.

McKean says she isn't too concerned yet about dealing with the pranksters and vandals who give Wikipedia its more-than-occasional headaches ("people have tended to be well behaved with us, and we're not sure how long that's going to last") and says that copyright issues shouldn't be too much of a problem ("there's about 400 years of precedent in terms of fair use in a dictionary"). Right now the priority is expansion. On the way, McKean said, are smartphone apps, a developer API, and a cleaned-up version of Wordnik for kids to use.

The site's design and depth of information leave a little bit to be desired (it lacks the smooth, words-meet-visuals feel of something like news aggregator Daylife), and McKean said that bringing more interesting and unexpected information to Wordnik is also on the agenda.

But Wordnik faces one of the same concerns that pretty much any information- or search-focused start-up does: what if the likes of Google create a competing product? McKean said that Wordnik's advantage is its team's dedication. "Nobody's going to have as much money as Google," she said, "but nobody's going to be as interested in this as I am and my lexicographer colleagues are."

Now check it out and go look up "bacon."

Online-invitation service Socializr is hoping to be the FriendFeed for your social life. The site announced on Wednesday that it now aggregates invitations from MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo's Upcoming, Meetup, Google Calendar, and industry leader Evite (owned by InterActiveCorp) in addition to letting members send their own invitations. The new feature is called "Event Connect."

Socializr, which was hatched by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, also has implemented Facebook Connect and MySpaceID so that members of those social networks can invite friends to Socializr events. A third new feature of Event Connect lets members tap into their accounts on any photo-sharing sites to pull in pictures.

You can't yet auto-sync your entire Socializr event listing with a calendar service, but Abrams said Event Connect beta testers have been requesting it and that it will probably get implemented down the road.

"The vision for Socializr was always to do more than to be a better Evite," Abrams explained to CNET News. Aggregating other invitation and event-listing services was "sort of something that people have been asking, 'Why hasn't anyone done this?' for ages."

There are plenty of event-listing services trying to take a bite out of the market share that Evite--and now Facebook's invitation service--has dominated for years. Abrams said that while Socializr is small, it's still well-positioned to grow.

"We're doing OK. We haven't taken over Evite yet, but they've been around for 10 years," he said, adding that the company is still prerevenue. "We have a lot of interesting ideas about ad revenue, but it's still premature for us. We're still only five people, and still in the product development and growth stage."

Today's New York Times has a timely trend piece about the rise of "hyperlocal" news sites--those that aim to create or aggregate news down to the neighborhood (or block). The angle: will these sites take over as an increasing number of local newspapers go under?

If you read tech news regularly, you probably won't find much that's surprising in the article, since sites like Outside.in and Placeblogger have been around for years now. But the question of what will happen, now that struggling newspapers are cutting back on their print editions, or even shutting down altogether, is now a not-so-local issue.

The Times story raises the usual concerns: thoroughness and accuracy. It spotlights one hyperlocal news site, Patch, which was founded and funded by incoming AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong and which aims for a hybrid of the user-generated and traditional news models by hiring community reporters.

What it doesn't mention: that The New York Times Company itself has threatened to shut down one of its regional newspaper properties, The Boston Globe.

From what it looks like, the fresh, real-time streaming redesign of social aggregator FriendFeed is getting some accolades from already-avid users--but might not sway the masses.

Among existing FriendFeed loyalists, it doesn't look like there's much dissent about the redesign, which is currently available as a beta test. An "anti-FriendFeed beta version" group hasn't gotten much traction. But on Twitter, which some people see as a FriendFeed complement and others as a competitor, opinions were much more mixed.

"I have (Twitter client) TweetDeck to filter and organize noise. Why then would I still need FriendFeed?" inquired user @rbazinet.

"I'm not a fan of real-time scrolling sites like the new FriendFeed. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of history, but I find it distracting," said another user, @griner.

On the wrong side of history, quite possibly. Real-time streaming is the hot ticket in social networking these days, with "the stream" at the center of Facebook's controversial redesign.

And indeed, Facebook was first to the game. "Even after the redesign, I just don't find FriendFeed compelling. All of my 'friends' are on Facebook," said Twitter user @mikeee. Ever since it started introducing third-party information into its News Feed, Facebook has indeed been encroaching upon FriendFeed territory.

Twitter itself, meanwhile, doesn't live-stream your friends on its homepage, and third-party clients like Twhirl and Twitterrific tend to load incoming messages in groups rather than in real time because of Twitter's limits on how many times a third-party app can call up its servers. But if you run a query through Twitter Search, it'll keep hunting for the keywords and will alert you when new results have come in.

FriendFeed's redesign did get plenty of thumbs up. "Interesting to see FriendFeed focus on performance and UI (user interface) simplicity. They 'get it,'" said Twitter user @jimsimmons.

One thing we've seen with major social-networking overhauls--e.g. Facebook's last few redesigns--is that a swift backlash will often be met with eventual reception, whereas initial quiet can be deceptive if members start to gradually come across usability issues. This is still an optional beta, and often the particularly vociferous criticism doesn't come until after a new feature or design's public rollout.

From what it looks like so far, the reception to FriendFeed's redesign has been neither stellar nor terrible so far. But FriendFeed is a niche service right now; what it really needs to do is break out of Silicon Valley and start gaining quasi-mainstream appeal the way Twitter has. It's not clear that this redesign will be enough to accomplish that.

Social-network aggregator FriendFeed announced Tuesday that it's built in a Twitter friend importer, and my e-mail in-box was sort of thrown into shock.

See, here's the thing: I have a FriendFeed account, but I don't really use it; not enough of my friends do, and I've never found aggregators to really fit my social-networking habits in general. I'm a big Twitter user, however. So when FriendFeed instituted its Twitter contact import feature, I was flooded with dozens of subscription requests from people I'd never heard of. Before I was clued into the new tool, I wondered if there was a spammer problem or something; I can only imagine what it must have been like for really popular Twitter users with tens of thousands of followers.

The thing about having a Twitter friend importer is that following people on Twitter doesn't have the same kind of tie that comes from being Facebook friends (in which both members have to reciprocate) or being listed in someone's e-mail address book (which implies active communication). On the other hand, if you're both a Twitter user and a FriendFeed user, you probably will want to know what the people you follow on Twitter are up to on FriendFeed, so a contact importer makes sense in some cases.

Wednesday I went into my FriendFeed account settings and turned off e-mail notifications. Sorry, guys, but I needed some quiet. And if I want to find my friends on FriendFeed, I'm willing to dig in and look around for them.

Daylife, a news aggregation start-up that runs a pretty Web site but makes its money from licensing its software to clients, has launched a new product: Daylife Select. It's a tool for Web sites and online publications to add aggregated news and multimedia content (like YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, and Flickr images) from Daylife without requiring technical expertise.

With a point-and-click interface, participants can insert and place widgets, customize the theme, and even import the CSS design from their own sites. Access to Daylife Select comes along with a subscription to the company's API, which ranges from $10,000 to $30,000 per month.

The release of the product is more or less perfectly timed for news outlets that may be cutting costs in the light of the economic downturn--including laying off writers and editors. A cheaper and easier way to install an aggregate news page could be an option for small publications that have been feeling the pain.

"We're kind of a solution for publishers who are short on head count," founder and CEO Upendra Shardanand said to CNET News, adding that Daylife has been riding high on tighter budgets: the company said it reached halfway to its fourth-quarter projections two weeks into October.