Feedlizr Launches Beta, Adds Support For Rooms

FriendFeed/Twitter AIR app Feedalizr has just launched into beta today. They had been previously been in a public alpha, but they now feel that their feature set is rich enough and enough of the bugs have been squashed to qualify their app as a beta.

Along with the launch, feedalizr has been updated with a few new features that make it worth a look, including support for FriendFeed’s rooms. With the new app, you’ll now get the messages that have been sent directly to the rooms you’re a member of and you, in turn, can also post directly to a room via a drop down box that lists all the rooms which belong to.

Another new feature is tab support. With this, you can choose to see just your Twitter messages in a tab, for example. To activate this feature, you only need to click on the service icon from your FriendFeed stream to show all the posts from that service. When you load more tabs than you have room for, feedalizr just adds an arrow so you to scroll over to the others that don’t fit on the app’s main screen.

In addition, this release improves support for Twitter DMs by adding a “direct” link underneath a friend’s tweet.

Of course, Feedalizr has always stood out from the other AIR apps by including support for Jaiku as well as support for flickr and video uploads. If you’re looking for a good FriendFeed desktop client, Feedalizr should be on your list.

You can download the latest version here.

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If you haven’t heard the news (where have you been?), a new Twitter clone service launched today called Identi.ca. (You can read the ReadWriteWeb coverage here). Of course, because the service just launched, there are still some Twitter-esque features that have not yet been added. However, according to this FAQ, they are all coming soon. Those upcoming features include:

• SMS updates and notifications
• A Twitter-compatible API
• More AJAX-y interface
• Maps
• Cross-post to Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc.
• Pull messages from Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc.
• Facebook integration
• Hashtags
• Image, video, audio notices
• Automatic url-shortening
• Multilingual interface (using Gettext)

Leave it to the early adopters to find ways around the service’s current shortcomings, though. In addition to some of the workarounds, here are more identi.ca tips, tricks, and other identi.ca news being discovered right now:

• @geekygirldawn made this Yahoo Pipe to track replies (hey, but this isn’t working for me at the moment – help?)
• @glenn explained how to set up Digsby to view your identi.ca conversations: go to http://identi.ca/settings/im, Add update@identi.ca as a buddy in gtalk, then add your gmail account on that page & it will send you an approval link
• @corvida hit 100 followers in 3 hours!
• @corvida found Adobe is on Identi.ca @Adobe
• SheGeeks has a poll up on what we should call the identi.ca “tweets” (dings? deets? dents?)
• @nowsourcing says ping.fm allows for identi.ca updates
• @susanbeebe is talking about a Fail Moose for identi.ca outages
• @scobleizer is being squatted on by someone who is not Robert Scoble

• @corvida sent me a greasemonkey script “Identica Reply” by 4fthawaiian which adds a reply button on identi.ca
• IM is only one way right now (1 AM ET)
• @gsw said that you can set up a Twitterfeed.com to automatically post to Twitter using RSS. Up to once/30 mins.
• @aaron noticed that XMPP might be broken – nope it’s just one way!
• shelisrael and 1938media are also being squatted just so that whole thing doesn’t flare up again
• Get your identi.ca stream via RSS by using this format: http://identi.ca/username/rss
• Whoa! 2 AM – IM 2-way turned back on! Bombarded!
• @Myriam reports that is the @leolaporte may be another fake one
• @cleverclogs reports that Google is indexing identi.ca (and you can see the results yourself at search results ranking, decide for yourself at http://snipr.com/identica_on_google)
• scabr notes Identi.ca looks Candadian: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/identi.ca
• 2 Threads of people to follow, thanks to the Inquistir: thread 1, thread 2 
• more to come…

I just recently saw that there’s a new blog widget which twitterers are going to love – the Twittercounter. This small graphic looks very similar to the RSS badge provided by FeedBurner, except instead of showing your subscriber numbers, it shows the number of Twitter followers you have. To get your own badge, go to twittercounter.com and type in your name in the box at the bottom. The site will generate a personalized button for you. Then, it’s just a matter of copying and pasting the embed code to your blog. Don’t overlook the small link on the main page of twittercounter which gives you access to the different button styles seen below:

Hmm….more twitter followers than blog readers – I guess that just goes to show which one of the two I update more often!

Yesterday, when the big Apple iPhone hoopla and hype sent floods of traffic to popular technology news web sites, blogs, and services, we all expected Twitter to go down in flames. They didn’t do so, a feat so downright unbelievable that Michael Arrington of TechCrunch even took time to congratulate them via a blog post on TC, saying:

Well, they made it, and I applaud them. To be fair, they did have some minor downtime (minor by Twitter standards) - 4% of requests failed. But it was close enough to call it win, and I hereby give them their due. Twitter failed to fail, and I am a happy user today.

Well, maybe you didn’t see the FAIL whale of death yesterday on our beloved, but struggling, service’s homepage, but to call this a success it a bit of stretch. That’s because Twitter’s uptime came at the expense of just about everything else.

As the Twitter Status blog documented, they began with temporarily disabling the “replies,” “everyone,” and “archive” tabs. Then they dropped the API request limit to a painfully slow 10 per hour and asked everyone to configure their clients to not pull more frequently than once every 6 minutes. For a huge online event like the iPhone 2.0 announcement, occurring in real-time no less, having to deal with Twhirl timeouts was simply unacceptable.

After the “Stevenote” was over, they slowly began restoring functionality to the site, tab by tab, but turning off other features along the way like “track via SMS.” The API limit was bumped up to 20 per hour. Then, of course, there was a network problem.

Now, granted, none of this came as a surprise – Twitter at least had the decency to warn us of their impending “gray mode,” which let them shed load quickly during this peak time…but quite frankly, I couldn’t be bothered with them when there was iPhone news to be heard.

Instead, I followed the keynote in the VentureBeat WWDC Livestream FriendFeed room, where updates came fast and furious and no downtime was had. Now, sure, you could say that the FriendFeed service is more stable because it has fewer users, but I like to think that it’s because guys from Google know how to build things that scale.

It’s funny – when I describe Twitter to non-geeks, I often refer to it as sort of an “offline IM” – who knew how accurate that would be? For me at least, yesterday proved that when information matters, it’s FriendFeed for the win.

Oh, and in case you’re curious, I watched FriendFeed via my Firefox browser sidebar via the My Social 24×7 extension which is becoming my favorite way to track FriendFeed. If it had an auto-update feature, I would be complete.

Today, Colin Walker had a great, philosophical post on taking time out from social media to gain perspective. While on vacation, it was almost like he broke some addiction he had with social media services like Twitter and FriendFeed, realizing that:

“The further you drift away from the conversation the harder it is to become enthusiastic about the direction it takes and this is the curse of social media: it is addictive in the sense that you need to keep an involvement in order to maintain an overview and monitor the breadth of conversation rather than trying to control it in one location.”

This piece he wrote really spoke to me because I sometimes question my involvement in this entire social media/technoblogosphere niche. Monday through Friday, I blog here (OK, more occasionally here), but daily for Microsoft’s Channel 10 and ReadWriteWeb. These are real jobs and I try to treat them as such. I wake up at a decent hour, I read the news, I participate best I can on the social services du jour and I go about my day. I know here and there I’ve made contributions that moved a conversation forward or brought in some great pageviews, but while I may have ended up as a paid blogger by happy coincidence, there are other bloggers, both paid and unpaid, who are truly social media superstars. I know this because I certainly work with some of them. Plus, there are those who seem to have some sort of social media superpower (*cough* Louis Gray) or fresh voice that draws the crowd to them. The rest of us? We’re just moths to their flame.

Social media superstar I am not - when the weekend rolls around, I crave distraction. I want to trade the glow of my laptop screen for fresh air and sunshine and new activities…offline activities. Activities where Twitterberry may be there for me, but I don’t need to check it as obsessively as one would check Twhirl. This “taking a break” has become more and more of a trend as of late, leading me to wonder if I’m suffering from social media burnout or whether I’m secretly just a luddite who has somehow mastered the tools of an early adopter.

OK, I exaggerate. I’m far from a luddite - technology definitely excites me and writing about it for a living is a pretty good job as far as jobs go, but this constant trying to drink from the firehouse at full force is only knocking me out by week’s end….which led me to realize…I could be doing it wrong! Now, I can’t give up RSS, but do I need to check Twitter and FriendFeed 24/7? No. I’ll check and converse on them when I feel like it…and I’ll enjoy it more when I do. Like Colin said:

“the conversation will go on without you regardless of who you are. People will still have ideas and discussion will still develop around those ideas.”

The conversation will always be there, I’ll join it when I can. I don’t need to be in on every thread, every time. These tools are supposed to be enhancing our enjoyment of the web - they’re not supposed to addict us, pressure us, or feel like work. If they feel that way to you, then you need to take a breather too.

And if admitting that I enjoy balance in my life means that I have to turn in my geek badge and get kicked out of the clubhouse, so be it. I want use these services and enjoy them without being overloaded - and that’s also how I need to evaluate them in order to gain insight into their potential for mainstream use…because what’s most exciting to me is how social media, new technologies, and new trends exit the early adopter crowd and trickle down into *real* life.

And by “real life” I mean when something that the early adopters rave about all of a sudden crosses over to the rest of the mainstream world or when a business starts implementing social features via Enterprise 2.0 software or when a brick-and-mortar company sets up a presence on Twitter. This is when technology is impacting the world as opposed to just impacting the twitterverse or the blogosphere. This is when it really matters. I’d argue that this is also when it really matters to the startup that introduced it to us too. Unless it’s a side project or pet project for the developers involved, then it’s an attempt by a business to make real money. And let me tell you, there’s a finite reach when you build a toy for specifically for the early adopter crowd.

Don’t get me wrong - the world needs early adopters. They’re the ones outing the newest, the latest and greatest. They’re the ones eating, sleeping, breathing, and dreaming whatever the latest addiction is. They’re the ones pushing things forward.

But are they…me? I don’t know.

So, for now, I’m just giving three cheers for moderate participation, taking breathers, and having a life…now get on over to FriendFeed and discuss. 

This is a guest post by Shane Perris who blogs at Techwhimsy, “a place for considered ideas, current events in review and explorations of how to do things not just because you need to but just because you can.”

What are the three hottest web 2.0 social services right now?  Judging by the latest buzz amongst early adopters, these services are Brightkite, FriendFeed and that perennial love/hate favorite, Twitter.  What’s interesting about each of these services is that Google is noticeably absent from the market. Or is it?

Brightkite is the latest in a string of “geo-social networks” that allows members to check in at real world places via SMS, notifying their Brightkite friends of their physical location - just perfect for those spur of the moment stalkings serendipitous meetings with your nearest and dearest. (You can read more about what Brightkite has to offer over at ReadWriteWeb.)

FriendFeed (for those living in the stone age or still pining for the days of Compuserve) is a ‘”social aggregator” start-up by a bunch of ex-Googlers that lets users aggregate the output of a large number of online services into a central point.  According to the FriendFeed FAQ, the goal of the service is to “make content on the Web more relevant and useful for you by using your existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information“.  While that sounds like a steaming pile of aspirational nothing to me, FriendFeed has been picked up enthusiastically by the early adopter crowd.  It can crawl websites for your publicly available information and it also supports a long list of sites with APIs such as YouTube, Flickr, Google Reader, Mixx and last.fm (here’s the full list ).  Part of the excitement - and controversy - around FriendFeed is that the service enables other FriendFeed users to leave comments on your items in FriendFeed itself, providing not just an aggregation of your content but an aggregation of comments on your content.

And as for Twitter… well, if you haven’t heard about Twitter by now you’re probably reading this page by accident anyway.

But What About Jaiku?

In October 2007 Google acquired Jaiku, the Finnish social network that was the brainchild of two ex-Nokia employees Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen . Jaiku first came to the attention of many when Leo Laporte announced on his blog in April 2007 he was moving over to Jaiku from Twitter due to confusion between Twitter and his TWiT podcast network.  The influx of new users was sufficient to actually crash the service (such is the power of the Leo effect).

Let’s check off what features Jaiku boasts:

1. A geo-aware mobile phone app that reads your location based on names reported by mobile phone towers

2. The ability to import information from a selection of website APIs as well as any RSS feed

3. 140 char SMS friendly micro-blog status updates

… not to mention a slick user interface and threaded comments.

However, following the acquisition by Google, the silence was deafening. The usually highly responsive dev team didn’t post nearly as often. The API went missing in action a number of times. The normally rock solid service often either crawled to a halt or regularly reported 503 gateway errors (a database problem).  The blog went quiet, although the developers raised their heads above the trenches in January of this year to proclaim “big things are coming” (‘We’ve joined Google. Now what?’).  In April it was announced that Jaiku was being ported to the Google App Engine, which goes someway to explaining the lack of development.  Unfortunately, the momentum was lost.  Users started to slip back to Twitter.  Developers just didn’t seem interested in taking advantage of the API so there no was no widespread developer ecosystem like the one that sprung up around Twitter.

Stocktake time. Despite the fact that Jaiku has everything that the hottest 2.0 properties have, all tied up on one neat basket, Google has failed to get any mindshare at all amongst users and developers. Unless Google has some fiendishly cunning plan for world domination, it really looks like they’ve dropped the ball here.

Of course, Google does have some history doing the same thing before:  Dodgeball, anyone?

This has been a guest post by Shane Perris who blogs at Techwhimsy, “a place for considered ideas, current events in review and explorations of how to do things not just because you need to but just because you can.”

From Grooveshark there now comes a handy new tool called TinySong that lets you share music with your friends. To use TinySong, you enter in an artist’s name or the name of the song and do a search. From the Grooveshark database, a list of results will appear. When you see the one you want, click the link and the site will convert the link to the song into a TinySong-flavored TinyURL, which is then conveniently copied to your clipboard so you can share it with friends via IM, email, or Twitter.

Thanks to Leslie Poston at Profy, I’m alerted to a new Wordpress plugin that jumps on the TwitPitch bandwagon, allowing you to get PR pitches DM’d to you via your blog or web site. Nifty! If you missed the debut of the TwitPitch, it was an idea invented by Stowe Boyd, a business strategy and information technology consultant, when he was trying to figure out his schedule for this year’s Web 2.0 Expo. I posted about this concept further on ReadWriteWeb (“Twitpitch: The Elevator Pitch Hits Twitter”), however I think the idea got a bit lost since it came during the big brouhaha over how to pitch to bloggers, which then became that week’s bitchmeme.

Initially, the idea was to utilize the hashtag #twitpitch so everyone could access these micro-press releases, but, unfortunately, that concept hasn’t really seemed to have taken off. I’ve been watching a Summize RSS feed for the term “twitpitch” since that RWW post (and still do) and I’ve only found a handful of useful items there.

However, this new Twitpitch Wordpress plugin takes the elevator concept a little more loosely and allows for anyone to send you a pitch via a Twitter direct message. Unfortunately, being somewhat new to WP, I don’t know if I have the required PHP 5.2+…? But I do know that activating the plugin did this:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘}’ in /home/.tuffy/sarahintampa/sarahintampa.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-twitterpitch/wp-twitterpitch.php on line 26

Looks like a project for another day then.

Link: Author’s hompeage

Newstex, a content-on-demand company, serves news and commentary to companies and industries that require real-time information. Some of their customers include CNNMoney, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, LexisNexis, and The New York Times. For the different types of markets they serve, they offer specialized newsfeeds that deliver information from a wide range of sources. For example, for the financial industry there is a newsfeed containing only finance news.

Just recently the company announced a new service called NewsTwits. Similar to how their Blogs on Demand service operates, Newstex will license full-text Twitter content directly from Twitter users and then use its proprietary NewsRouter technology to aggregate and deliver this content to distributors and enterprises in real time. This Twitter-based feed can then being easily integrated as a headline feed into the enterprise-grade applications their customers use.

“Blog content has become a ‘must-have’ for millions of researchers and enterprise professionals,” said Larry Schwartz, President of Newstex. “Now, we are thrilled to be first in licensing and distributing the best user-generated Twitter content via NewsTwits on an editorially-selected, full-text basis for enterprise use throughout the world.”

The company decided to make the jump into Twitter syndication and licensing after seeing an increase in the Twitter activity over the past four months by many of the bloggers they already syndicate. Plus, the 140-character limit of Twitter made for an excellent "breaking news" style headline, just like the old "newswires" of the past.

What’s remarkable about this story is that Newstex’s Twitter licensing and syndication may very well be the first time that Twitter has made its way into the enterprise space. Many have said that Twitter was not ready for enterprise use, but I imagine they were thinking of users sitting at their computers sending tweets back and forth. Instead, the Newstex model shows that there is great value in Twitter’s ability to break news fast, a trend seen recently when the China earthquake occurred, and prior to that, the UK earthquake and the quake in Mexico last year.

Despite the scalability and downtime issues that Twitter has been struggling with as of late, VCs are right to keep throwing money at the service. Hopefully Twitter will be able to overcome their problems because, clearly, the business world is ready for some tweets.

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.