Adobe AIR applications are typically well designed. They feature a sleek look and relatively fast response times. TweetDeck (Windows | Mac), a popular Adobe AIR app, has put the platform on the map. It has caused some developers to view AIR as a viable alternative platform to building a Web site.
Nomee (Windows|Mac), a company that helps users see what celebrities, prominent figures, or their friends are up to online, is one such app.
The basics
Nomee is based on "cards." When you first sign up for the site (you can use OpenID if you don't want to create unique Nomee credentials), you'll be presented with celebrities and prominent figures who currently have cards on the site. But before you start thinking that there are scores of celebs on Nomee, think again: for the most part, those cards were created by Nomee users, not the celebrities themselves.
When you view a card, it displays an image of the person, followed by several sites or services that are related to them. When you click on one of those services, you'll be brought to its respective Web page. For example, if you click on the Twitter logo on my card, you can view my Twitter page.
That's me on Nomee, even though I didn't create the page.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)If you like what you see, you can "add" the card to your Nomee Dashboard. From there, Nomee will track all the card updates. It will alert you when there's something new for you to check out.
Nomee's Newstream lets you view all the updates from every card you follow. Thanks to such a nice design and some filtering options, you shouldn't have any trouble finding exactly what you're looking for. It's arguably Nomee's best feature.
The Nomee Newstream in action.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Card creation
Of course, Nomee isn't just a place where you can see what your favorite celebrities are up to. You can also create your own card to share with friends. Those same friends can create cards and share their social profiles and links with you.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
On Thursday afternoon social aggregator FriendFeed pushed out its new look to all its users.
Several things have changed since the company launched its beta program late last month, with the biggest being the look and feel of the site, including a change in navigation from the top of the page to the left side. The heart of the service still lies in linking up various sites you use, but as part of the re-design the FriendFeed post box was also given an overhaul with the inclusion of photo hosting.
The biggest change besides the look is one of the most subtle, and smartest. It now figures out when your friends have posted the same item and will link them together. This serves two purposes: one to keep you from seeing the same thing multiple times, and another to condense conversation into one feed item that you don't have to hunt down. A big problem before this was completely missing related items your friends might have liked or discussed. The new system simply brings all of that together in one place and puts the latest items on the very top.
If there's another item that's somehow related to something that's shared FriendFeed will do its best to let you know. Multiple related entries are sorted by the time they were posted, letting you read through them like a stream of news.
(Credit: CNET Networks)One thing to note is that Beta.FriendFeed.com, which served as the test bed for the new design will no longer be any different from the regular FriendFeed. Site founder Paul Bucheit tells me they may use it once again to test new features, but for the time being it will simply re-direct.
Note: Yoono is in private beta. We've got invites set aside for Webware readers. To get yours see the link at the end of the post.
Tonight Yoono, a browser add-on for discovering and sharing Web content is launching several new features designed to help you track what your friends are up to online.
The tool now integrates with several popular social networks and microblogging services including Twitter, letting you access and interact with the communities of all of them in one place. Previously users were limited to sending links to friends via e-mail, or interacting more easily with in-network users (called "Yoosiers") than friends from outside social networks.
Users can now view related pictures, music, and videos from pages they're on. (click to enlarge)
(Credit: CNET Networks)The company is calling its plug-in a "remote control," but I'd argue to say that it's more a set of highly customized widgets that are interconnected and can share the same piece of content in different ways. Starting today there are just a few that cover different things like photos, videos, and music, but the company hopes to expand, adding more tools and services while letting people pick what they want to avoid an overload both in information and desktop real estate.
The pile on of services that are trying to do this is almost as fatiguing as the goal they're attempting to fix, however Yoono's newest offering is inherently stickier because of where it resides. It's not in your taskbar, it's not a separate application--it remains in your browser where you'll be hopping around from site to site.
As a recent user of Digsby, I've come to enjoy this kind of do-it-all functionality, but having one less thing running on my machine is an attractive proposition. If you're ever used Flock you'll know what I'm talking about, and in many ways Yoono now gives you some of Flock's best features without needing to hop over to a new browser.
While the new access to social and chat networks is nice, one of the newer features that lets you view photos off Flickr as an overlay of whatever page you're looking at is far cooler. You can casually search for any photos on the service using keywords, or you can click one button and have it parse whatever page you're looking at for related shots. Is this useful? Not really, but it's addictive and will have you browsing shots for hours. To see it in action, click on the screen shot on the left.
Other small additions include a scaling back of the "buzz it" feature I wrote about last year, a really slick bookmarking tool that lets you grab anything off a page and blog about it while bookmarking it in a set of personalized feeds. The team has made it considerably easier to use in the hopes that more people will take advantage of it. Users will also soon be getting access to their friends and information updates on Bebo, MySpace, Imeem, and Friendster.
I'm impressed with what Yoono is doing, but it's in a crowded market. Recent releases from Me.dium, Digsby and Adobe AIR apps like Alert Thingy are offering some compelling, and most importantly, simple solutions to trying to sort out the influx of information. However, I really do appreciate a service that's trying to add this type of functionality to an already useful do-it-all tool.
Yoono is still in private beta and currently the new functionality only works in Firefox. Internet Explorer users will be getting an updated version in about three weeks. We've got 200 invites for Webware readers. To get yours, just go here.
AlertThingy puts FriendFeed on your desktop, via AIR.
AlertThingy, the first (I believe) AIR application for FriendFeed, is now out. If you're a FriendFeed user just go and install it. It's probably what you've been waiting for: A desktop application that funnels all the things your friends are doing that make it into FriendFeed to your desktop. You can also post comments back to FriendFeed (and the sites FriendFeed then posts to) with the application.
Most of the content I see in my FriendFeed account comes from Twitter, but I don't find the application to be as clear or well-sorted as Twhirl, everyone's favorite Twitter client. There's a reason for this: FriendFeed is a more socially complex service, since it brings together your different networks. But on the positive side, FriendFeed, and by extension Alert Thingy, allows you track Twitter conversations better than straight Twitter clients themselves do. That's because FriendFeed collects "@" replies to Twitter posts under the banner of the thread starter. It's a bit like Quotably (review).
The application is marked version 1.0, but feels more like a 0.1. Sign up is unusual (it requires you get a key from FriendFeed); and the usually-configurable settings such as window transparency, update frequency, and colors can't be changed. But if you're into FriendFeed, this is the application you've been waiting for.
Related:
FriendFeed founders' interview.
FriendFeed announces API.
FriendFeed is not the new Twitter. Is it?
FriendFeed is a current Web 2.0 darling. The service performs the increasingly valuable job of presenting, in one place, all the online activity of the friends you want to follow. Twitter posts, blog entries, YouTube favorites, Last.fm listens, Flickr photos, you name it...FriendFeed lets you track it all (except Facebook updates). You can also talk about your friends' activities on FriendFeed itself, a clubbier environment than joining the fray on, say, a YouTube feedback page.
The service is not the only social aggregator, nor is it the first: Plaxo Pulse does a lot of the same stuff, as do smaller operations like Profilactic and Iminta. But FriendFeed is well-funded, and since launch the team has taken to rolling out new features quickly. So what's next? I visited the FriendFeed offices in Mountain View, Calif., to talk with co-founders Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor.
The vision
FriendFeed is currently a "social-network aggregator." It picks up the stuff you do online and tells your friends about it, saving them the hassle of visiting all your online hangouts to see what you are up to. But as many people have noticed, this leads to social overload. It's too much information to process. Buchheit and Taylor were clear with me that they have more work to do on FriendFeed to make the core aggregation feature more useful. In particular, they want to add intelligence to the service so it highlights what you're interested in, not every last thing your friends are doing.
One of the use cases that they have not solved for, Buchheit told me, is the infrequent user. Say you visit FriendFeed after an absence of a few weeks. Some of the "old" information will still be relevant to you--week-old photos of your nephew's birthday party, for example. But other, newer news will be irrelevant due to its age, like a three-day-old blog posting about a stock you're following. FriendFeed needs to a better job of differentiating content so old-but-relevant news can surface ahead of data that might be newer, but is less valuable.
"Aggregation is a mechanism, not a product," Bucheitt told me. The product was built so that, "You don't subscribe to sources, you subscribe to people." The founders told me, again, that their vision is only partly realized in FriendFeed today.
Expansion plans
The founders want FriendFeed functionality to surface in multiple places. One could argue that without a broad footprint on the sites that FriendFeed aggregates from, it will not likely get broad traction. The recent release of the FriendFeed API is a step in that direction. Also, an "add to FriendFeed" button will be released within a few days. Publishers or users of various social sites will be able to install this on their feeds, pushing the FriendFeed message to their followers.
FriendFeed has room to grow.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)FriendFeed's most popular request is for Facebook integration. While there is already a FriendFeed Facebook app, ironically FriendFeed cannot read Facebook data itself. Users want FriendFeed to follow Facebook photo updates, and the team is working to implement that, but Facebook doesn't make it easy, I was told.
Despite requests, the team is not working on a desktop app. But other developers are, as has been reported in TechCrunch. Buchheit and Taylor expect the first AIR-based FriendFeed desktop app to surface within days.
Another thing not being developed: a mobile version of FriendFeed. The founders note that the current site works acceptably well on an iPhone, and that other developers are working on a mobile app using the new APIs.
The team continues to work on the user interface, though, trying to balance readability with compactness. "Spacing is undervalued," Taylor told me, but he's still sensitive that using the site requires too much scrolling on the page.
FriendFeed recently launched the "Twitter back" feature that allows users to reply to Twitter messages from within FriendFeed. Similar functionality will be added to other services that FriendFeed handles. Next up will be 'Seesmic back." Other services will get "back" features as their APIs allow. "We are really open and eager to do these things," Taylor told me.
The money
FriendFeed is currently not bringing in revenues. While the founders have not settled on a business model yet, Taylor did notice that the FriendFeed philosophy--it's a site for finding things to read more on and has "very little actual socializing"--is consistent with advertising that works. Since users can include feeds that can be monetized (Netflix movies queued up; Last.FM music tracks listened to), it's possible that the site could make affiliate revenues when users follow up on friends' content recommendations. Standard in-line advertising (like Pownce has) is another possibility.
Meanwhile, FriendFeed's burn rate is low. There are only six employees, and the company is basically stealing office space with a 50-cent-a-square-foot rental in a Mountain View building that until recently was scheduled for demolition. The housing crunch has given the building owner a new perspective, however, and FriendFeed will have to move soon, since the landlord recently scuttled his development efforts and plans to raise rents closer to market level.
See also: Escape from social network frenzy? by Caroline McCarthy, and more FriendFeed stories on Webware.com.
I think we all saw this one coming. The hottest social aggregator out there today, FriendFeed, has launched an application programming interface, paving the way for third-party applications using its service. Full documentation for the API is available on Google Code.
This is certainly an important step for FriendFeed. The closely related service, Twitter, has benefited greatly from providing support for third-party developers, so FriendFeed should see a similar bump from the introduction of its API.
FriendFeed's API currently offers PHP and Python libraries, with support for OAuth apparently on the way. In making the API, FriendFeed also took feedback from some developer influentials, such as Dave Winer.
To give some examples of what its API can do, the FriendFeeders told us, "You can develop a FriendFeed interface for a mobile phone, build a FriendFeed widget for your blog, or develop an application that makes it easy to post photos to your feed from your iPhone."
It's going to be very interesting to see what developers can do with this API, given the wealth of quality data that FriendFeed brings together.
2007 was the year of platforms, and I'm just about ready to call 2008 the year of social aggregators, or services that help you group together and manage all the social sites you're a part of. Opening up (in private beta) on Monday is Socialthing, a new contender that joins the ranks of Plaxo, MyBlogLog, Spokeo, Iminta, Profilactic, Friendfeed, and Facebook in giving you a single place to aggregate and interact with all that information in one, centralized feed.
As with some of the others in this space, Socialthing takes your log-ins and usernames from each service and grabs data from each throughout the day. I give my kudos though, if you're already signed into any of the services, authenticating them in your browser doesn't even require a single keystoke--this is going to be incredibly helpful when you're adding in several dozen services at a time. It's also smart enough to seek out all the people who are your friends or contacts from each service without you having to add them on your own. It's a great feature that kept competitor FriendFeed from being as easy to jump into immediately.
In addition to its desktop browser experience, Socialthing has a slick-looking iPhone app. It looks and functions similar to Facebook and Plaxo's iPhone apps, with tabs and large streams of eyeball-friendly data. Unfortunately, it doesn't perform as well, or do as much as either of the two competitors, which double as massive, portable phone books with up-to-date contact information. Socialthing's CEO Matt Galligan says the company has much more in store for the iPhone app, including ways to post a message to several services at the same time. In its current form you can post to Twitter and Pownce with the same message. Facebook is being added later tonight.
Despite having the lowest number of integrated services (see chart below) Galligan tells me the team is on track to add about 200 others in the coming months. He believes Socialthing's implicit understanding that you don't want to track down people you're friends with will draw people who are using these services to make social data aggregation easier. To help that cause, the service will soon be adding a discovery feature that will automatically show data from networks your friends are a part of, even if you're not. This means that if a friend of yours is using a service you're not familiar with, you'll still see whatever he or she posted--something that might help you discover new sites. Friendfeed has something similar, and it's definitely helpful.
Socialthing was nice enough to give at least 1,000 Webware readers access to the service starting on Monday morning. You can sign up on this page with the invite code CNET.
Monitor your friend's activities from multiple social streams with Socialthing. Unlike some others, it will seek out people you're buddies with so you don't have to add them.
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