Webware

Skimmer (download) is a new social aggregator powered by Adobe AIR. It supports Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Blogger, and lets you stay abreast of the latest content from each of those services. Everything gets sucked up into a single stream (a la FriendFeed), which you can then sort out by service, keyword, or group of friends. Like Twhirl, Alert Thingy, and others, the idea is to casually keep an eye on all these places while getting real work done in other applications.

In addition to pulling in content, you can also use it to post to any of the included services. It has a built-in YouTube and Flickr uploader where you can simply drag in files and edit the metadata before it's sent off. It also doubles as a personal blogging platform of sorts, letting you combine your various feeds into a single page that can be customized, then embedded on a hosted page or social networking profile.

You can customize the look and feel of this page using a built-in editor, which turns all your feeds into a really slick-looking personal blog with cascading streams of information (I've embedded an example after the page break).

While the app is beautifully designed, I found the main content feed difficult to parse, which is a shame because that's all I'd use an app like this for. The Flickr photo browsing is elegant, and fast loading, but the text portions for places like Twitter and Facebook come in at a very small size. They can be resized to be a tad larger (or absolutely enormous), but the application will scale the text up and down to fit in each update slot, which makes reading hit or miss.

Skimmer organizes multiple streams of information from different services into one big feed you can filter and navigate quickly.

(Credit: CNET)

Skimmer has some tough competition coming out of the gate. FriendFeed recently began delving into desktop applications with its AIR-powered notifier, and existing apps like Twhirl and Alert Thingy are getting more and more services all the time. Skimmer has a chance to stand out with its Web site builder, which does a really great job at repackaging your content to go elsewhere.

Skimmer lets you create your own content widget with all your feeds. You can stick this on your blog or social-networking profile and it does all the heavy lifting.

(Credit: CNET)