“Liking,” the hot social trend, continues with Likaholix
“Liking” an item on a social network is all the rage right now. You can do it on FriendFeed, you can do it on Twitter (though it’s technically called “favoriting” a tweet) and you can even do it on Facebook now. It works because the concept is so simple: If you like something, click a button to mark that you do. You don’t have to say anything or do anything else. It’s a trend that… Continue Reading
Facebook gives FriendFeed’s “like” button a thumbs-up
Facebook has been watching “lifestreaming” site FriendFeed closely, and today the larger company’s attention has resulted in a new FriendFeed-like feature in its news feeds. It’s a button called “like,” and it’s a one-click way to show your friends that you liked a link to a news story or other item. On FriendFeed, it’s called “like” with a smiley face. On Facebook, it’s a thumbs up.
Glimpses of Facebook’s “like” button have previously appeared in a… Continue Reading
Facebook and Twitter: There’s blood everywhere, but no one’s dying
Here we go again. Over the course of the last several months, we’ve heard that FriendFeed was going to kill Twitter. Then Twitter was going to kill FriendFeed. Then Facebook was going to kill FriendFeed. Now Facebook is going to kill Twitter. But something odd is happening. Instead of any of them dying, they’re all thriving, each gaining traffic and users — and they’ll continue to. So what gives?
I hate to reuse my twisting of… Continue Reading
Roundup: Google sees results in Washington, sex offenders out of MySpace, Motorola’s big loss and more
Here’s the latest action:
Google is making friends in Washington — After Microsoft and AT&T’s lobbying power killed its Yahoo search deal, Google has proven to be the quick study in politics and now seems to have friends in high places…the highest places, the White House. The Wall Street Journal breaks it all down.
Sex offenders no longer welcome on MySpace — The social network banned some 90,000 of them — so they moved to Facebook? That’s what a… Continue Reading
Radar gets an iPhone app to better share media amongst friends
Let’s be honest, there’s a lot of websites and applications right now that let you share things with other people. Twitter does it, FriendFeed does it and Facebook does it, among many others. But while those are increasingly about sharing with as many people as possible, Radar has a sort of “less is more” approach. By sharing things with just people that are actually your friends or acquaintances, the items are more prone to elicit… Continue Reading
With Twitter friend imports, FriendFeed again devalues Twitter’s actual website
There’s much ado about Twitter’s site traffic today — is it bigger than Digg’s or isn’t it? But the reality remains that Twitter.com’s traffic doesn’t matter that much because there are so many services out there that can (and do) pipe in and use Twitter’s data. FriendFeed, a social data aggregator, continues to be one of the best at doing that. Today, it unveiled a Twitter friend importer — another feature that makes visiting twitter.com… Continue Reading
Twingly launches microblog search — Twitter search with a sprinkle of Jaiku and a dash of Identi.ca
Blog search tool Twingly’s new microblog search, as a concept, makes a lot of sense. You enter a keyword in one search box and get results from services like Twitter, Jaiku and Identi.ca. But in practice there’s a problem — and it’s not Twingly’s problem — it’s every service besides Twitter’s problem: Twitter overwhelms the results.
You see, Twitter is much more popular than any of the other services being indexed, so if I do a… Continue Reading
Facebook clearly likes FriendFeed’s “Like” feature
A sharp-eyed reader of the blog AllFacebook noticed something very interesting in a video that Facebook recently published — a “Like” link underneath a feed item. Sound familiar? It probably does if you’ve ever used the social content aggregation service FriendFeed.
This functionality doesn’t appear to be anywhere on Facebook yet, but as AllFacebook’s Nick O’Neil notes, the video in question probably showed a beta area of Facebook that the company uses internally to test features…. Continue Reading
Join us for some live Macworld Keynote coverage
Tomorrow at 9AM PST, Apple will hold its keynote address at the Macworld Expo. Myself and Dean Takahashi will be on hand to bring you any announcements from the keynote as they unfold live.
As usual, we’ll have a page on VentureBeat set up with a FriendFeed room embedded in it. What should make this even more interesting for you who choose to watch on venturebeat.com is that FriendFeed now has a real-time component to the… Continue Reading
FriendFeed says ‘SUP to some new services
We first wrote about FriendFeed working a new Really Simple Syndication (RSS) supplement that it was calling Simple Update Protocol (SUP) earlier this year. The idea was to speed up the way new content is pulled into the social aggregator. Today, FriendFeed has announced several updates to its SUP support.
Services now using SUP on FriendFeed include Disqus, Brightkite, Identi.ca, BackType and 12seconds. “Whenever one of these feeds is updated, the new entry appears on FriendFeed… Continue Reading
FreundFeed? FriendFeed launches in six new languages
FriendFeed as a concept makes sense. You take your social data from all around the web and gather it in one place so as to facilitate conversations around your content. And so if a concept makes sense in English, it makes sense in other languages too — and that’s why FriendFeed is rolling out interface support for six new languages today.
German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and “simplified” Chinese will all now have their own version… Continue Reading
Google Profiles add another social layer: Pictures!
Recently, I wrote about the ability to search Google Profiles, single pages with Google user information similar to a social network profile. I also noted that with things like a voting widget and maps, the profiles were getting a bit more robust, despite Google never really promoting them. Now another new feature common on social networks has been added: Importing picture streams.
You can import pictures from either your Picasa stream (which Google owns) or a… Continue Reading
“Major failure” takes FriendFeed down
The social aggregation site FriendFeed is currently down as I write this. [Update: It's back up, more on that below.]
“We had a major failure with one of our backends. We are in the process of restoring. We hope to have it back very soon,” co-founder Bret Taylor tells me.
What’s ironic is that people used to switch over to FriendFeed to talk about Twitter being down, back when that micro-messaging service was having all of its… Continue Reading
FriendFeed goes where Twitter can’t: IM
Back in the day before people like Al Gore were using Twitter, users used to enjoy getting updates by way of instant messages. It was useful to get updates in real time through an application (some IM service) that you probably already had open. Unfortunately, during its attempt to make the service actually usable, Twitter had to suspend its IM service. At first it promised that it would be back shortly, but recently, it admitted… Continue Reading
FriendFeed puts location in a bit more context by auto-adding maps to the stream
FriendFeed quietly rolled out a pretty cool new feature tonight. Now, when you update a service that has location information included in it, such as Brightkite, a Google Map image of your location will be placed below the update.
When I inquired about this new feature, FriendFeed co-found Bret Taylor wrote back in a thread:
“We just pushed that change out. Should show up for all entries that have geo information, including RSS feeds that use GeoRSS.”
You… Continue Reading
FriendFeed lessens the ‘Post to Twitter’ echo by promoting the source
I made it pretty clear the other day that I wasn’t a big fan of FriendFeed’s new ability to push user updates to Twitter. As a few examples showed, too much of the same content was being repeated and it made the moderate-to-heavy FriendFeed users who turned it on very noisy on Twitter. It was like an extreme echo chamber — filled with too much noise.
Today, FriendFeed revised the feature to make it much more… Continue Reading
Publish FriendFeed updates to Twitter — a snake that eats its own tail?
One of the reasons that I really like FriendFeed is that it provides a single place to see and have conversations about updates from multiple services. The service that seems to be the most popular (based on my and other users’ statistics) in terms of updates on FriendFeed is the micro-messaging service Twitter. Now FriendFeed is turning the tables a bit, allowing users to automatically post FriendFeed entries and comments back to Twitter.
A few different… Continue Reading
Work be damned. FriendFeed now has an area that updates in real-time
The social content conversation site FriendFeed is a huge time suck for a lot of people. This includes me. I sit on the site throughout the day and constantly hit the refresh button to send me new information from my contacts. Now I no longer have to hit that button, as FriendFeed has launched an area known as “Real-time.”
As you might imagine, this is a constantly updating stream of information from your FriendFeed contacts. But… Continue Reading
Roundup: Brin’s blog, O’Reilly gets serious, Joost’s browser version goes live and more
Here’s the latest action:
Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin starts his own blog — Dubbed “too“, Brin starts off by detailing his fears of getting Parkinson’s disease since it runs in his family. Compelling stuff. Too bad it’s nearly impossible to read with his choice of light blue text on a black background. CNET has more.
O’Reilly gets serious — Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, used his keynote address at the Web 2.0 Expo in Las Vegas to call… Continue Reading
After months in hibernation, Twitter redesign finally goes live
We first caught a glimpse of the Twitter redesign in mid-July, when apparently an overzealous employee of the micro-messaging service jumped the gun on the roll out. Seeing its shadow, the redesign went back into hibernation for another couple months. Now it’s ready, and looking good, but really not all that different. Instead, Twitter focused on subtle changes to the site we all know and love (are addicted to).
Just as we saw in July, the… Continue Reading