Webware

The new Seesmic Desktop app lets Facebook fan page managers update them in sync with Twitter.

(Credit: Loic Le Meur / Seesmic)

There are a handful of Twitter apps out there that can also update Facebook statuses, and no clear market leader, but the new build (version 0.6) of Seesmic Desktop may soon be the app of choice for marketers who use Twitter and Facebook for brand promotion. That's because it can now manage activity on Facebook's "fan pages" as well as personal profiles, meaning that the operators of these pages can update them in sync with Twitter accounts.

"With the Facebook Page feature, you have greater control on how you market your business, oversee your brand, listen to your fans and build your community," a release from Seesmic explained. Facebook, it should be noted, has launched its own feature to push fan page updates directly to Twitter.

If you're an ordinary Facebook user who doesn't manage any fan pages, Seesmic Desktop can also track status posts from those that you subscribe to.

Seesmic Desktop was built after parent company Seesmic, which had previously built a video-commenting company, acquired Twitter desktop app Twhirl.

Founder Loic Le Meur also announced that 2.5 million people have now downloaded Seesmic Desktop, and that Seesmic has partnered with Twitter image-sharing app Yfrog to be its default image provider. It's the second partnership deal for Yfrog in a month, having inked a deal with URL shortener Bitly a few weeks ago. That's probably disconcerting news for Yfrog rival Twitpic, once the unequivocal big player in Twitter image uploads.

Here's a visual of how status tagging works on Facebook.

(Credit: Facebook)

Facebook on Thursday announced that members can now link to other members' profiles in their status messages by using the @ symbol. The move is clearly inspired by the popularity of Twitter's "@-replies."

This new feature basically means that you can link to the profiles of your friends and other pages on Facebook, and that your friends will be informed when they've been tagged. It's currently rolling out to members' profiles.

Engineer Tom Occhino explains it in a post on the Facebook blog:

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend's name to something you are posting, just include the "@" symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications, and (fan) pages.

The feature will soon expand to third-party services that let you update your Facebook status, presumably including status message aggregators such as TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop.

The development prompted some of my industry competitors to use the word "BREAKING" in their headlines (Really? Can we please leave this term for things on the level of earthquakes, election results, and stampedes at Jonas Brothers concerts?) because it's yet another big sign that Facebook is gradually but aggressively encroaching upon Twitter's territory in its attempt to own the Web's trove of real-time conversation. Twitter is nowhere near the size of Facebook, nor is it anywhere near as feature-rich, but it's enough of a disruption in the space to make Facebook keep trying to get the upper hand.

As you may recall, this back-and-forth has included Facebook's failed attempt to buy Twitter, the "real-time stream" upgrades to the social network's home page, and its acquisition of FriendFeed, a streaming feed aggregator.

On an unrelated note, for brands using Facebook's fan pages, this could result in an interesting analytics product. The company hasn't yet said whether or how the managers of fan pages will be notified that they have been tagged--for a brand with a lot of fans, this could be a lot--and you might imagine that some of the demographics regarding who's talking about them and how often could be packaged into a nice marketing tool.

It'd also be a formidable rival to the "analytics dashboard" that Twitter plans to start selling to businesses later this year, which would be the San Francisco-based company's first concrete revenue model.

When Facebook launched its latest redesign, it became evident that the company was putting a lot of emphasis on real-time information--inspired, undoubtedly, by the runaway success of Twitter. Now the company's rolled out two small but crucial new features that put instant updates even more front and center.

First, Facebook is aiming to use the "publisher" tool--formerly known as the status update box--as members' gateway to the Web at large. Starting Wednesday and rolling out gradually, according to a post on the company blog, a beta version of the new content-sharing box will allow members to select exactly how public or private to make each piece of content that they share. The post by Facebook engineer Ola Okelola explained that something shared on a profile can be visible by friends, friends of friends, friends and networks (school, region, or company), user-created custom friends groups--or everyone on the Web.

Facebook's probably hoping that this will spur people to share more content: if members know that sharing a video, a photo, or even a status message won't by default go out to everyone who can see their profile, they might be more likely to share things along the lines of party photos and videos of their kids.

But, wait. There's more.

In addition, a post on the Facebook developer blog Wednesday explained that developers can now take advantage of live-streaming status update boxes much like the one that CNN used during President Obama's inauguration this January. "With the Live Stream Box on your website, users log in using Facebook Connect and share updates that appear both within the Live Stream Box and on their Facebook profiles and in their friends' home page Streams," the post by Tom Whitnah explained. "Each post includes a link back to the Live Stream Box on your site so users can discover the live event and immediately join based on their friends' recommendations."

It's intended so that people watching an event simultaneously can comment in sync on Facebook. And it's also supposed to be a no-brainer to create your own, meaning that Facebook is hoping a lot of developers and site owners will jump on this bandwagon.

"The Live Stream Box is easy to install and takes just a minute to set up," the post added. "To get the Live Stream Box on your website, get a Facebook API key, upload a small file to your website, and then embed a few lines of code into your Web page."

This is a move clearly aiming in the direction of Twitter, where real-time updates and discussions around events have become so commonplace that members regularly agree on a "hashtag" to flag related posts in advance of the event. (For the inauguration, for example, it was #inaug09.) The question is whether Twitter use has already become the standard for chronicling and commenting on events in real time--will enough people be willing to use Facebook widgets rather than apps built on Twitter?

Track and update all your social networks under Zensify's single roof

"All your networks are belong to us." That could be the tagline for Zensify, a new iPhone app that lets you view, update, and share content from multiple social networks.

In other words, Zensify aims to take the place of standalone apps for the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr--or at least to save you the time of bopping from one to another just to read and post updates.

In addition to those three popular networks, Zensify can connect you with 12seconds, Delicious, Digg, Photobucket, and YouTube. (Support for more services is in the works, according to the developer.)

After you sign into your various accounts (a slow but one-time procedure), Zensify lists all your friends' updates in a single, scrolling timeline. It also presents a scrolling tag bar (this one along the top) so you can quickly filter the timeline based on current trends.

Then there's also the Tag Cloud view, which displays the aforementioned "trendy tags" in a word cloud. I've never been a fan, but it's definitely a neat way to sift through updates.

Zensify's Track tool lets you search all your networks, complete with modifiers for things like tags, usernames, and types of content. It also provides a handy batch of saved searches so you can quickly look for updates that have, say, photos or links, or that come from Flickr or Facebook.

Want to keep an update for future reference? Tap the star icon to mark it as a favorite. Want to post an update or photo to one or more of your own networks? Tap the Post icon. (Finally, an easy way to update Facebook and Twitter simultaneously!)

Unfortunately, while Zensify lets you share or reply to others' Twitter posts, there's no easy way to do likewise with Facebook entries. You can "tap through" to the friend's Facebook page using Zensify's integrated browser, but that's a slow and awkward process. The app really needs to add a low-level reply option.

Of course, it's technically called Zensify Preview, so a few rough edges are to be expected. As it stands, Zensify looks very promising, and I suspect avid social-networkers will like it a lot.

On Friday, Yahoo let it be known they added a small tweak to Yahoo Messenger 9 for Windows.

When the latest version of Yahoo's chat application launched, it broadcast as secondary status messages certain activities within the Yahoo network, like refreshing your avatar. Now the service has expanded to record your doings on roughly twenty networks outside of Yahoo--like Twitter, Last.fm, YouTube, Pandora, and Yelp--as well as tracking your whereabouts more thoroughly within Yahoo's network, like the sports, movies, and shopping silos.

Here's how you sign up.

(Credit: CNET/Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt)

Sharing is optional, of course, but to get it, you'll need to make sure you've got a Yahoo profile set up. Then click 'Updates', then 'Manage my Updates' to pick share sites within Yahoo. To set up status-sharing from outside services, you'll need to add your login name via the 'Share More' tab. Set-up was fast and easy, especially with the search field that lets you enter a common username to find multiple accounts that share your log-in.

Is it notable? Not really. It's a small tweak that might take some work off the hands of obsessive status-updaters, but given Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz's vow to whip Yahoo's engineering corps into shape, this isn't the kind of 'news' we expect to see going forward.

Note, CNET's parents company, CBS Interactive, also owns Last.fm.

Related story: 10 days of IMing with Trillian Astra beta

Myspace on Wednesday is revising its status update tool, something the company estimates is used in excess of 15 million times a day by its members.

New to the feature is a way to sort people's updates by type. For instance, if you want to see only your friends who have listed their mood as "aggravated," you can do so. Likewise you'll soon be able to search for specific friends and see their latest status updates without having to visit their profile pages. This comes with other granular filters that let you see just the friends you've put on your "top friends" list, and any categories you've created such as "work" or "school."

There's also a new option to see just the latest update from just each one of your friends. MySpace hopes this will uncover updates that get lost in the noise created by users who post more often than others--something which can fill up the news stream quickly.

The new features are going out to users in English-speaking countries later today, with other countries "next week." In a future update, MySpace plans to let users comment on items directly in the update feed (like you can do in Facebook), as well as offer an alert option that can send you an e-mail or SMS text message when a certain user updates.

The new options let you filter status and mood updates. You can also now set it to only show one update per friend, which can weed out people who update their status 400 times a day.

(Credit: MySpace)

When is a Twitter user not a Twitter user? Well, according to a new study from Pew Internet, "Twitter user" is a broad definition.

The research firm released a study this week in which the results indicated that in December, "11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others." Wow! Twitter sure is catching on!

But then you read the fine print: The catch here is that "update your status" is also a feature of big social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and those features are counted in Pew's definition of status-updating services. Considering Facebook and MySpace both have well over 100 million members apiece, the what-are-you-doing features on those social networks eclipse actual Twitter user for sure. We adore social-network statistics like nobody's business, but these ones probably have much less to say about Twitter than meets the eye.

So, um, taking that into consideration, let's check out the numbers.

About 20 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 34 have used a status-updating service, the research found (considering Facebook's ubiquity, this actually is lower than I would have expected). Then it starts to drop off. Only 10 percent of those between 35 and 44 answered affirmatively, 5 percent of those between 45 and 54, 4 percent between 55 and 64, and only 2 percent of those over 65. Okay, not surprising.

There were a few tidbits about individual social-networking sites. The average Twitter user, the study found, is older than a Facebook or MySpace user: 31, compared to 27 for MySpace and 26 for Facebook. (The average user of professional networking site LinkedIn is 40, according to the same Pew data.) Well, that's kind of interesting.

Then, the survey goes on to talk about access. 76 percent of Twitter users (and Facebook status-updaters, and MySpace status-updaters, and users of other microblogging services that haven't yet shuttered due to recessionary constraints) use wireless Internet, whether it be Wi-Fi or a handheld device. That's in contrast to 59 percent of U.S. Internet users as a whole, indicating (unsurprisingly) that people who run around updating Facebook statuses or Twitter feeds are a more mobile, tech-savvy set.

Also, 82 percent of them own cell phones and use them to send text messages (compared to 61 percent of U.S. adult Web users as a whole), but there are no statistics as to whether they use text messaging to update their statuses. However, 40 percent of that 82 percent uses the mobile Web. They're not any more likely to read the news than the average Web user, but they're more likely to read it in a mobile form and are less likely (52 percent compared to 65 percent) to read print newspapers. Guess this whole Internet thing is catching on.

One more for you and then we'll let these mildly convoluted figures rest. "Twitter users" (in Pew's broad definition) are way more likely to have blogs of their own. 29 percent of them, compared to 11 percent of the general Web population, say they have ever started a blog. Guess if you overshare in one way, you'll do it in another!

Nerdz is a really simple way to manage a group of your favorite Twitter users. You simply drop in the names of the people you want to keep track of and it pushes their tweets onto a gray background with each tweet fading away as it gets older.

To add more names to your Nerdz list you just add them to the end of the URL, and they'll be re-ordered alphabetically. You can send this link to anyone else as a quick way to give them suggestions of people to subscribe to, or simply use it as a no-software standalone for something like TweetDeck, which is all about making custom lists. Missing, however, is any way to click on their user name or individual tweets to go right to the Twitter.com pages.

Nerdz was created by Aaron Boodman, who is currently a programmer at Google, and more notably the co-creator of the popular Greasemonkey extension for Firefox which is on the cusp of hitting 12 million downloads.

I've put together a quick Nerdz of CNET News people if you want to give it a spin. See also GroupStatus, another Twitter friend organizer which we blogged about back in April.

Nerdz lets you put together several Twitter usernames and see them in one simple stream.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

TweetDeck now incorporates 12seconds videos (click to enlarge)

Video sharing site 12seconds, which launched its private alpha late last month, has declared its intent to become the premier site for video status (the Twitter of video, if you will). To that end, the company announced on Thursday morning the launch of its first API as well as three launch partners who will be incorporating 12seconds into their own platforms.

TweetDeck, the Adobe Air client that helps you organize information from Twitter, will now let users follow 12seconds channels and play videos inside the TweetDeck client. Microreview site Blippr (review) is letting users record a 12second video review in tandem with (or instead of) a text review. And London-based Phreadz, which is still in invite-only beta, has integrated 12seconds videos into its threaded multimedia service.

A post on the company's blog emphasizes that the feature is still in the early stages ("think of it as an alpha API"); developers interested in adapting 12seconds feeds can find more information on the company's API page. Of course, the 12seconds service itself is still invitation-only, but you can leave an e-mail address on this page to request an invite.