Intwition Relaunches - Now Tracks Online Chatter, Breaks News

The site Intwition, formerly a Twitter app, just relaunched yesterday as a whole new service. This new version of the site, only ten days old, aims to find and display what stories are being discussed on the internet right now. Initially, those stories come from Twitter as the primary source of that chatter, but as time goes on, other inputs will be added.

The way Intwition works is by listening to the online chatter, and when the chatter level is high enough, posting an unconfirmed story on the homepage.

Example: "Unconfirmed: Something Happening with Earthquake, China, Maginitude, 7.8, Felt"

After that initial posting, Intwition then scans the web looking for articles from verified sources as well as pictures and video. As these items are found, they are posted on the homepage in order of their popularity and relation to the story. Stories stay up as long as they are being discussed. Major stories are highlighted in red or orange and older and minor stories are in smaller text in the bottom of the homepage.

In addition, there is a "new scoop finder" on the right hand side of the page, a feature which updates every minute with the top phrases being discussed now. Click these items to be shown links to tags that are associated with that word or phrase. 

Assuming this all works as described, the site functions as an automated "breaking news" service for what’s being discussed on Twitter. That’s sounds hard enough (especially considering the Twitter outages as of late), but to then expand it to scan even more sources on the web sounds like a giant undertaking.

When I tried it tonight (OK, this morning 1 AM - thanks Starbucks, for the insomnia!), the top story was Senator Kennedy’s malignant tumor - a story picked up 11 hours ago, but still being hotly discussed as of 4 minutes ago. The word "malignant" also appeared in the sidebar linked to "brain," "senator," "tumor," "kennedy," and "malignant." I have to admit, I haven’t watched anything but a few minutes of local TV news for the past few days, so I don’t know how "old" or "fresh" this story really is, but on Google News, I found stories on this as old as 8 hours ago, and as recent as 31 minutes ago. Since Intwition picked up the story 11 hours ago, that sounds like they may have been faster than traditional media. However, I’ll need to watch this for much longer than a few minutes to know for sure that this is the case.

What’s really cool about the service is that you don’t have to visit the site to get the scoop on what’s being discussed - you have the option to subscribe to the Intwition RSS feed . You can also follow them on Twitter, but it doesn’t appear that the stories are being posted there - it’s more of a "what’s up with the service" thing there (bummer).

Can Intwition help change the way we hear about news? Only time will tell, but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.

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This is a guest post by Jarred Taylor who regularly blogs at Tropophilia on social networking and technology issues.

As it exists today, FriendFeed is probably the most useful social tool on the web.  I’m only a casual user, but its speed, simplicity, and solid feature set are impressive.  The combination of a wide spectrum of supported services, a large and active user base, and powerful comment and "like" system set it apart from its competitors.  However, it is destined to be crushed unless it is acquired by one of the bigger players.

The recent announcements by Google and Facebook with their respective "Connect" projects present direct and deadly challenges to FriendFeed.  These are but the beginning of much larger social strategies that these giants have been developing for years.  I have written on my own blog about the differences between Google and Facebook’s approaches to their projects, but in their essence they have the same purpose.

It is inevitable that the Internet is going to become more and more "social."  Not too long from now, social networks will cease to be useful as destinations.  Social networking will be a key feature for every website that takes itself seriously.  Already, though, we see a fragmentation of our social identity across the web.  We have a profile on Mashable, a profile on FastCompany, a profile on Twitter, a profile on Facebook, a profile on LinkedIn… you get the picture.  All of these sites ask versions of the same questions, all of which combine to ask you the single question: "Who are you and who are your friends?"

Facebook and Google realize that people are tired of filling out profile after profile, uploading user picture after user picture, connecting to friend after friend… on site after site after site.  In "the real world", we have one social graph of our friends and one identity.  Both are centrally located in our brain.  We block and expose different facets of our identity to different parts of our graph.  This is how the web should, and will, work.  Google and Facebook want to be our digital, social brains.

And so it is that those two have launched efforts to allow their users to transport the graphs that they’ve built from within their walled gardens onto the wider Internet.  If they succeed in this, Facebook and Google (or whichever wins over the other) will have succeeded in becoming the one-stop shops for your online identity.  When you visit a website, you’ll no longer have to create your identity — Facebook or Google will load it for you.  You’ll be able to concentrate on leveraging your identity in the context of the website you’re visiting and the services it provides.

"So," you ask, "wtf does this have to do with FriendFeed and its purported doom?"  The problem with FriendFeed is that it comes at the problem from almost the exact opposite angle.  Instead of wanting to be the base from which you launch your social actions (as Google and Facebook do), FriendFeed wants to be the destination to which all your social actions go.  In a way, FriendFeed encourages the social fragmentation of the web: fragmentation means more people will turn to FriendFeed to put all the pieces together in one stream.

The other problem is that, as far as I can see, FriendFeed doesn’t have any cards left to hide.  It’s strategy is fully revealed and really, quite obvious.  The only innovation that I can see is tweaking the UI, involving more services, improving the feedback system, and focusing on scalability and speed.  FriendFeed is, and can only be, a magnet to draw conversations unto itself.  Google and Facebook are not magnets — they are seeking to implant themselves in the user web experience from square one.  In this way, they’ll own both the identity and the aggregation.

FriendFeed is an amazing tool, and will become more mainstream in the coming months.  But the web is destined to coalesce around a central identity provider system, and the fragmentation will cease and reverse itself.  What will FriendFeed do then?

This was a guest post by Jarred Taylor who regularly blogs at Tropophilia on social networking and technology issues.

At one time when blogs were new, you could privately blog your thoughts and feelings on the web and be pretty sure that no one was reading them unless you gave them a URL. But today, blogging is all about openness and transparency: this is me and this is what I think. That’s an issue Logdit wants to address. Logdit is a new service that aims to be a place where you can privately blog without worry. In fact, the whole point of the service is to be a platform for private blogging. Unlike LJ or Vox, you don’t need to remember to set this entry or that entry to "friends only" - at Logdit, privacy is the whole point. If you set up an individual blog, it’s just for you to see. No one else.

What kind of things might you like to privately blog? Well, diary-like entries come to mind, obviously. Not every want to share their most personal thoughts - even if it is with friends. But you could also use the service to make lists, keep records of a personal nature - like your passwords to various services (if you trust the company that much), a diet log, etc. etc.

Alternately, a small group could use Logdit in the same way. Lodgit suggests it could be used for "neighborhood watch, recording nuisance, opinions, and events." For some reason, I’m picturing the modern-day equivalent of a teen girl clique’s slambook, but that’s just me.

You can blog on Logdit via the web site, a desktop widget, or SMS. There is a free service at the basic level, but the price increases from there for more features like the removal of watermarks from printed documents (???). They also say that the download of the blogging widget is "$X". OK, then. One of their big features is the ability to print out blog entries. I felt like I time-warped just reading that. Print them out. On paper….made of trees. With optional borders…..Wow, just use Microsoft Word then! It’s private, too.

While in theory, the idea of creating a really private platform for blogging is a good one, Lodgit has some stiff competition. Both LJ and Vox do this already, as does TypePad, and they do it much better. Although there may be more settings to tweak on those platforms, anyone wanting to blog should be able to figure them out pretty easily. Heck, even my own sister, who is not always the savviest of computer users, mastered Vox without any training…Well, I hope she meant for that blog to be public. Hmmm. (*Removing link*).

Additionally, the Lodgit web site looks…decidedly un-modern. For example, where on earth did they get those buttons on the right? My Geocities blog from 1998? I hate to judge a book by its cover here, but, boy, that could that use some work.

All that being said, I would love it if someone would build this sort of platform. There are many great features in Vox to make it easy on new bloggers, but when you desperately need a feature (like the ability to export your book collection for example - grr!!), you realize that there are still a lot of things lacking.

But Logdit doesn’t want to compete with Vox, or LJ, or anyone else - instead they’re offering very few features, seemingly intentionally. I just have to wonder…who’s going to use this?

*Note - found via #twitpitch.

Too Many Choices, Too Much Content

Sometimes it’s just hard to keep up. In this technology-focused niche we all live in there are new applications, new initiatives, and new platforms that spring up every day, not to mention constantly breaking news that fills our RSS readers. Take a day off and you’re behind. Take an hour off and you just missed 300 more blog posts. In addition to the everyday struggles of information overload the average computer user deals with - like the overflowing inbox, for example - those in the internet/new media/technology space aren’t just overwhelmed with new content, but also with new applications and choices to manage that content. What’s a web-app loving person to do? Keep Reading…

Digital Image Resources on the Deep Web

Sometimes you stumble across something that really makes you say "wow" and reminds you that there’s so much more to this internet thing than just the latest web app. Case in point is this article describing some of the visual resources available on the web. The deep web. These images won’t show up in search engines’ image searches or on Flickr (save one exception), but instead can only be accessed via the links below. Keep Reading…

Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web

Gen Y is taking over. The generation of young adults that’s composed of the children of Boomers, Generation Jones, and even some Gen X’ers, is the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers and three times the size of Gen X. As the Boomers fade into retirement and Gen Y takes root in the workplace, we’re going to see some big changes ahead, not just at work, but on the web as a whole. Keep Reading…

Wiiizzz offers a way to discover what people on Twitter have been listening to and sharing on Twitter by aggregating tracks and posting them in a random order on the Wiiizzz homepage. Right now though, only the band names display. You can click the play button next to the band name to listen to the song, but you can NOT download it and they have no plans to ever allow that. In the future, they will be updating the UI, currently black and white, and maybe even add the names of the songs. That would be nice. It would also be great if the songs were ranked by popularity.

I take it all back, I want to drown in awesomeness! It’s one thing for Twitter to be down (I wonder what Corvida’s doing now?), but for Twitter and FriendFeed to be down at the same time? Noooo….

Seriously! I got this:

Can everyone just please send me your tweets in the comments? Help!….Oh and by the way, did you see this? YackTrack Updated - New Feature Called "Chatter" Added! I was going to tell you on Twitter, but….

How excited was I when I heard that there was now a Google Reader Adobe AIR application that would let me browser through my feeds outside a browser? Pretty freaking excited! But then I thought "wait - why do I need this?" This doesn’t really help me solve a problem. With Twhirl, for example, I get easier access to all of Twitter’s features and it refreshes my tweets for me. Google Reader, though, isn’t really broken. (Well, except for NO SUBFOLDERS, which is literally killing me).

But, for the most part, Google Reader in the browser works just fine. ReadAir on the other hand, lacks a major feature: keyboard shortcuts. I don’t even think about it anymore, it’s just j, j, j, j, j, k, j all day long. I can’t imagine having to give them up just to use an AIR app.

That being said, it seems that adding keyboard shortcuts to the app is an upcoming feature, as is an offline mode, continuation, and alternate themes that don’t make it look like a Mac app (thank god). Maybe I’ll just have to check back later, then. (via DownloadSquad)

Neat! The World of Slippy blog recently posted some steps on how you can put FriendFeed into your Firefox sidebar in just a couple of steps. The trick involves using Christopher Finke’s Feed Sidebar extension. After it’s installed, you can just use Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature to add your FriendFeed atom feed (click here) to your Live Bookmarks. Wah-la!

Nice tip!

(img via)

I’m following the discussion around my latest rant on RWW (“Too Many Choices, Too Much Content”) using YackTrack. If that was your kind of post, you’ll want to check out these related articles too:

He Beat Me To It!

• Mark Evans Tech: “So Much to Do, Not Enough Time!”

More:

• Video: Merlin’s New Time & Attention Talk
• Content is King. Or should I say Tyrant?
• Our cup runneth over with Web 2.0 goodness. How much can we drink, though?
• Too Many Choices? I’ll Help!

Do you agree with this? If not, you can join the debate going on at the web site CreateDebate. The site aims to take the classic internet flame wars and turn them into a more civilized event. Debates can spring up around any sort of topic and the homepage features the hottest ones. Expect to see topics involving religion, politics, morality, and, yes even Mac vs PC. (PC is winning right now!)

Each user on the site has a profile, which automatically builds itself over time. Your allies, enemies and hostile relationships are tracked and a news feeds provides personalized updates. Debates can be sorted by most heated, most arguments, most recent, etc. and there’s even a handy "Research" section which can help you craft your arguments. Within "Research," there are articles you can click on to become the focal point of a new debate. Each article has a little RSS feed icon next to it - different colors for different blogs. It’s subtle features like this that make CreateDebate stand out as one of the better debate sites.

I’m opinionated, but I like debating via a blog platform myself. However, I can see where this site could appeal to casual internet "arguers," who like to just pick a topic and riff on it. The site is also well designed, so it’s easy to navigate through the myriad of debates going on as well as access the other features, like your own profile for example - a feature that’s often, surprisingly, hidden on some of today’s services. There’s also a Facebook app to check out, which extends CreateDebate out into your social playground. If this sounds like your kind of internet fun, you’ll definitely want to try it out.