Apparently there are two camps when it comes to the new retweets…one camp likes the consolidated concept and the other camp hates it because they can’t add their 2-cents to the conversation. My guess is that 90% of re-sharing on Twitter is either direct sharing of something Mashable posted or the addition of “lol”.

This past summer I wrote about how Friendfeed could generate massive income and also reach the mainstream. Sadly that never happened because Friendfeed sold out to Facebook. While it looks like Facebook wasn’t reading, this morning I started to think that perhaps Twitter was. What really got me thinking was something I read on Patricia Handschiegel’s blog. While she discusses the way Twitter defined their service in the beginning, she uses the word forum throughout the column.

Could Twitter be moving towards “threaded conversations” similar to what a forum offers? We know that the new retweet functionality will keep everyone’s “like” below the master/initial comment. We also know users want a way to add their own thoughts to the initial comment. Could the threaded conversation mechanism be a way to please both groups? Just like what any forum offers today. And just like the way Friendfeed and Facebook handle the conversation today.

All of this leads me back to the dip in usage. Forums are very sticky because the conversation is centralized and everyone wants “in”. As I’ve written about until my fingers fall off, the conversation is currently so fragmented on Twitter. If Twitter continues to move towards full-Friendfeed, it could mean increased usage.

You can join the discussion here and Paul noted, “First, FriendFeed is _not_ going away. (in fact, we’re working on switching it to new servers) Second, I know everyone wants to know what the team is working on, but we don’t pre-announce things, so for now all I can say is that there’s good stuff on the way. Re:”

I am glad to learn that they are moving to new severs – hopefully the service will be back to pre-acquisition speeds. Paul tells me in the thread that the slowness is due to growth of the userbase and the data storage.

I am also glad to learn that the service will not be disappearing. Johnny Worthington wrote a good letter to the Friendfeed team today.

While we don’t know what will eventually happen with FF, it would be smart for Facebook to keep it running smoothly as it’s a great way to introduce new Facebook features to the early adopters that live in Friendfeed.

Update: Many on the FF thread have been asking about the platform and whether development will continue. Paul responded with the following, “Jim, there may be a few new things, but as I said, the team is mainly working on fb platform and openness, so it’s unlikely that there will be any big new features of ff (except maybe one that I’ve been thinking about for a while…). – Paul Buchheit”

One of the wishes I had was that Friendfeed would provide a forums version of their platform where publishers could run an in-house version. I thought this was the way Friendfeed could generate massive revenue. While that revenue stream is gone, I still have hope that the forum software providers were watching how Friendfeed worked and picked up on some of the elements for their own future versions.

For nearly a decade, I’ve purchased the vBulletin software for our HTMLCenter forums. The software has always worked well and (I think) it’s only $30 a year for updates after you buy a permanent license. Last week I received an email that vBulletin 4.0 is coming soon and that I can pre-order an upgrade now. The upgrade price is $130 for the full suite; no discount is provided on the forums-only version.

I headed over to the vBulletin site and I was pleasantly surprised. They have updated their logo and created a completely Web 2.0-ish website. Now this is going to get good, right? I mean certainly they have heard me and the others calling for something more “today” when it comes to a forums too.. right?

Looking through the screenshots, I am pretty disappointed. The screenshots look cleaner but nowhere near as smooth and quick as Friendfeed. Naturally vBulletin is super-robust when it comes to community management. I’d wonder though, how many of the vBulletin-powered forums really need that level of management — I know I don’t.

There are some new features including the ability to create a blog post or article from a forum comment. This is similar to the reblog feature from commenting service Disqus. I continue to give vBulletin high marks for customer service — every question I’ve had over the years has received a response very quickly.

What I don’t see on the features list is anything related to social sharing. Where are the buttons for Digg, Twitter, Yahoo Buzz, etc.? In the current version, social sharing is available via a plugin. I assume the same will be required for the 4.0 version.

I don’t want to take anything away from vBulletin and the 4.0 release. vBulletin is one of the best examples of local software and revenue models out there. While the service doesn’t get the love from the web 2.0 blogs, I’ve always been happy with it. Unlike some other software which we won’t name, I’ve never worried going to sleep when using vBulletin.

I will have a full in-depth review once I receive the software and work on the installation. I am really hoping that it looks and acts more “today” than previous versions of the forums software.

Web trending service Compete shows Friendfeed down nearly 30% in September with 750,000 U.S. unique visitors.  This is down from just over 1 million unique visitors in August 2009.

Former Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang noted this past weekend, “To be honest, Friendfeed doesn’t have the same appeal it used to post-FB acquisition. I’ll just cut my losses and use Facebook instead.” Robert Scoble, the most popular Friendfeed user, is now using Twitter’s favorites feature to share content. Consultant Louis Gray appears to be using Google Reader to share content he finds interesting. I am unsure if the actual Friendfeed interaction usage for Robert or Louis has dropped.

These days I find myself only loading Friendfeed a couple of times a day. The service seems to load and react slower than pre-acquisition. I receive nearly zero interaction on my shares, feed posts and comments. The ability to drum up a conversation certainly has diminished post-acquisition. Why is this? If the service wasn’t acquired, would the level of interaction still be high? It is interesting to look at how quickly the early adopters packed up their carriages and started the horses after the Facebook acquisition was announced.

Twittercism provides additional analysis and metrics for Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook.  

Edelman VP Steve Rubel noted that blogging service Posterous has caught FriendFeed in terms of traffic. While comparing Posterous to Friendfeed is like comparing a bagel to a piece of fish, his graphs from Google Trends also show Friendfeed down big since the acquisition.

So what happens to Friendfeed now? My guess is that the service will continue to lose users and will eventually fade away with the popular features ported over to Facebook. Which is very, very unfortunate since I believe that the Friendfeed technology has the potential to create huge disruption in the forums provider arena.

The Good

A screen shot of the brizzly service A screen shot of HootSuite in single-column mode

On the surface, the brizzly interface resembles HootSuite when you have it set up to show only one column. However, the inner workings of brizzly are actually quite different (for good and for bad) from HootSuite.

Following are some of the really nice features of brizzly:

1. brizzly automatically locates and displays photos and videos people link to in their tweets. For instance, Chris Brogan linked to a photograph of a broken mirror in one of his tweets. Rather than just seeing the link to YFrog, I get to see the photograph he uploaded. So far, I’ve confirmed that brizzly displays photos from YFrog and TwitPic and that it pulls in YouTube videos. I’m not sure what other services it pulls into your feed, yet.
2. brizzly also automatically resolves shortened URLs. Any time a shortened URL is posted on Twitter, brizzly automatically converts it back to the full version of the URL. For instance, Alex Wilhelm posted a link to his latest story on Techgeist within one of his tweets. On Twitter, he posted a shortened URL (http://bit.ly/LDbej), but brizzly shows me the full URL (http://techgeist.net/2009/09/retweetcom-hits-million/). Unfortunately, this feature seems to be a bit inconsistent at the moment. Sometimes the URLs are automatically resolved; other times just the shortened URLs appear.
3. You can “mute” specific users. If one of the tweeple you’re following starts tweeting a bit too much for your likes, you can mute the person, causing their updates not to show up in your timeline.
4. You can save drafts of tweets, in case you decide you’re not quite ready to post it, yet.
5. brizzly automatically shortens URLs for you using bit.ly. Simply paste a link into the tweet you’re preparing, and it automatically gets shortened when you submit the tweet. As with many of the other Twitter clients that use bit.ly to shorten URLs, though, there doesn’t seem to be any way to associate your shortened URLs with your own bit.ly account.

Other than those features, much of what you see in brizzly is very similar to what you’d find in many other Twitter clients. You can save specific searches on Twitter, you can follow/unfollow users when you view their updates, you can upload photos and post them on Twitter and more.

One other neat feature in brizzly is the fact that the service attempts to provide you with an explanation as to why certain topics are trending. On the right side of the window, you’ll see a list of the top trending topics, and each one has a “Why?” link next to it.

The Missing

Unfortunately, there are still quite a few features that I feel are missing from brizzly. Following are a few of them. Since brizzly is still in beta, I’m hoping that at least a few of these will be implemented within the next few weeks or months.

1. At this time, you can only view one “column” at a time. Because of that, you can only view one account at a time. In order to keep up with what’s going on between multiple accounts, you have to continuously switch back and forth between them.
2. The interface works similarly to the way Twitter Search works. It automatically notifies you that new information is available by saying “Refresh to see newer updates,” but it doesn’t automatically update. I would really like to see an option to make brizzly automatically refresh your list of updates in specific intervals.
3. Only Twitter accounts can be pulled in to brizzly. It would be really nice to see the option to pull in Facebook updates and possibly even Flickr, etc. as you can with Friendfeed.
4. The saved searches are still rather simplistic. This appears to be an issue with the Twitter API rather than any specific Twitter client, as I don’t think I’ve found any Twitter clients on which advanced Twitter search works properly. What’s even more inconvenient than the fact that advanced Twitter searches fail is the fact that you don’t get any notification of the failure. Instead, the Twitter clients all seem to just tell you that there were no matches for your search.

The brizzly service also seems to be severely lacking in documentation. For instance, after searching the site for quite a while, I was never able to find any inference that brizzly automatically shortens URLs for you. In order to find that out, I had to test it. There’s also no real documentation on what types of searches can be saved through the service.

I also feel a little bit slighted by the service. When you arrive at brizzly’s site, the only information you see, other than a form you can use to request an invite code and a link to login if you already have an invite code, is the following (emphasis added by me):

“Brizzly is a simple way to experience the social web. You can request an invitation code below and we’ll let you know when we have them ready. (Soon!)”

With brizzly only supporting Twitter (so far, at least), I would hardly say that you can truly experience the “social web” with it. In addition, with that being the only information available to potential users, I just don’t see why people, other than those reading reviews like this one, would even be interested in trying it out.

Conclusion

Brizzly is certainly shaping up to be a nice service. With the inline display of photos and videos, the automatically resolved short URLs, etc., it really has the potential to turn Twitter into a service similar to Friendfeed. Unfortunately, however, with some of the major features of Friendfeed and other Twitter clients missing, it still has a long way to go. The service is very promising, but it’s going to take a bit more before I’ll make the switch.

Related: In-depth comparison of Tweetdeck and Seesmic

There are a variety of popular forum tools including vBulletin and phpBB. I’ve been using vBulletin on the HTMLCenter web development forums for nearly a decade. vBulletin isn’t free; a license costs $180 for life plus $60/year for product upgrades and updates. The software is very powerful, administrative panel is easy to use and the email support is always very responsive. There’s only one real issue with the software – it hasn’t moved into 2009. The software still looks and acts as it did 1,2,3, 5 years ago. You can always tell when a forum is using vBulletin without even looking at the footer. They continue to add improvements and bug fixes which is great but it’s time to update the look and the usability to today’s standard. The same can be said for phpBB and most of the other forum software packages.

This is where FriendFeed comes in. They have an awesome opportunity to take over the forum world. While forum software isn’t as sexy as creating a Twitter app, there is a real market opportunity which could be there for the taking.

Naturally FriendFeed would need to create a self-hosted version of their tool and modify it to allow for better “forum-like” thread creation. FriendFeed forum owners could also opt to allow their content to be indexed into Friendfeed’s new search engine. Take a moment to think about how much more “real-time” data would be included in the FriendFeed search if thousands of popular forums were included/indexed.

The FriendFeed forum service would also allow for better integration with Twitter, naturally Friendfeed and all of the other services FriendFeed will push to in the future. What this means is that forum owners would have new ways to get traffic to their forums.

In addition, there are loads of developers who build apps for vBulletin and my guess is that they might switch to building apps for the Friendfeed forum service. It could be a way to get developers excited about FriendFeed.

I know I would switch my forums over to this new offering and would pay the same price I do to vBulletin. Create a tie into Wordpress and it could became an even sweeter offering.

There is a file size and number limit but we are told that most should never hit the limit. It appears video uploads are not supported at this time. As you can imagine, the Friendfeed loyals are in love with the feature – you can track their responses here. I can’t decide if I like this feature as of yet as it may remove yet another reason to ever visit the source — in this case for the actual requested file.

I wonder if this will affect file sharing services including drop.io as you can now natively share files from within the Friendfeed interface.

The following tips are provided for educational purposes only. My hope is that the Friendfeed team can close a bunch of the holes so that the environment remains pure and doesn’t become a spammer’s paradise like Twitter is apparently moving towards.

Tactic #1 – the comment

Once your item is injected into your feed, it’s gone from the stream in minutes. One way to get it back to the top is to leave a comment. You can’t “like” your own items so the only option is to comment. The key is to make sure you comment at the right time. This means you shouldn’t comment immediately…instead give it some time and then leave a comment – blamo the item is back to the top of your feed and can be seen by a new group of followers who may have missed it the first time around.

Tactic #2 – the social share

This one is another great way to get your item back to the top. Make sure before you attempt this strategy that you have added your social sites into your Friendfeed account. This includes Digg, Stumbleupon, etc. Once you are ready, head over to Digg or Stumbleupon and vote/like your story. This will immediately send a hit to Friendfeed which will once again push a new entry at the top of your feed for your content. You could actually use this tactic multiple times.

Tactic #3 – the offsite comment

On my feed, Fred Wilson is a great example of this tactic. I know Fred isn’t doing it for gaming purposes and he might not even know it’s happening. Basically what happens here is that every time that Fred replies to a comment on his blog (not on FF) it sends a hit to Friendfeed which pushes his story back up top on my feed. Fred does a great job of replying to comments on his blog so there are times that nearly my whole feed is Fred’s comments! Apparently this is due to the way Disqus (the commenting service Fred uses on his blog) sends info to Friendfeed.

Tactic #4 – the multiple blogger

This one doesn’t work for a blog like CN because I am the only writer. But on the larger blogs that have multiple writers, it can work really well. I am not going to name any specific blogs or bloggers who use this tactic. Here’s how this tactic works — all bloggers on a specific blog post the full RSS feed to Friendfeed. Then each time a new blog post is written by anyone on that blog, the link is fed into their feed and is viewable by all. I know many bloggers at multiple-author blogs actually only post their stories into their feed which is awesome but some use the full feed for maximimum opportunity. 

Tactic #5 – the Twitter tweet

This one is simple but effective. If you have your RSS feed tied into Friendfeed, then you will get a hit for each piece of content you post. But your followers on Twitter won’t see it because it’s on FF. So you post a link on Twitter to your piece of content – some big blogs only use their Twitter account for these type of links – and you get some hits from the link. But what’s really great about this Twitter posting is that it also posts to FF and gives you yet another top hit to your feed.

Again, these tactics are only provided for educational purposes and shouldn’t be used in real life. I am hoping that there might be ways to slow or completely remove these tactics before they get more widely adopted. If you have other gaming tactics, leave them in the comments so FF staff can have a look.

I tested the functionality this morning using my Feedburner account and it showed 17 subscribers. I’d like to thank each of you individually for subscribing! Your gift is on the way.

Rob Diana takes a look at the numbers and wonders if they even matter. Diana would prefer the counts are removed. He saw huge jumps in subscriber numbers for his blog along with the blog of Louis Gray. Sure makes my boost of 17 subscribers look tiny!

If I post a message on Twitter, it is instantly copied to my Friendfeed account. If I delete that twit message, it is not removed from Friendfeed. I selected to have Friendfeed read and aggregate my Twitter account so the behavior makes sense on the display side. Since Friendfeed can read and write to Twitter, can’t they just read the current status of messages?

I’ve also noticed more blogs sucking in content from Twitter and Friendfeed. It’s a smart move for the blogs because it makes for more monetizable content and can also make a blog appear more active. Some blogs appear to be scraping the content on their own, some are using comment aggregation services like Disqus. I asked Disqus about their social comment aggregation and was told that they store the aggregated comments on Disqus’ servers. Unlike Friendfeed where I specifically told them to aggregate my content, I didn’t authorize my comments to be aggregated on other blogs, etc. And with regards to Disqus, when I make a comment on Twitter or Friendfeed that is scraped back to the Disqus database, I don’t believe that it’s placed into my Disqus account. This makes it even harder for me to manage. Of course I have practically zero recourse for the blogs that scrape friendfeed/twitter directly.

My take is that it’s fine to display content from other social services but it should be a display only — not/never a store and retain. This way if the content creator decides to delete or edit the content, the updated version will be the one displayed across the Web.

Perhaps this is a data portability topic?

As more social aggregation services pop up and blogs look for more content to monetize, I believe this issue will become a hot topic this year.

The Early Days

While most of Twitter’s users today weren’t around in the early days, many of you were. These were the days of the whale of fail, the rat in your pc and the general fun. Back then, there was no search function. If you wanted to know what your friend had for lunch or if your friend’s cat made a #2 on your friend’s carpet, you had to go to the account for your friend or his/her cat and just page back and forth. It was a tough time.

Summize

Then, like cream cheese on a fresh bagel, here comes NY-based Summize. Now we are talking! (well searching). Summize allowed us to search in near real-time for our friend’s messages. Want to know if that really was an earthquake? Pop “earthquake” into Summize. It was a real pleasure. Soon after the search engine was acquired by Twitter and renamed to Twitter Search and it still lives today. Twit messages are ranked by last posted in the results and there is no weighting to the results. The search functionality is also available within the Twitter site itself on the right side of a profile page.

Authority Search

Late last year during the “made up fights” between several valley bloggers and entrepreneurs, a discussion arose about creating an awesome Twitter search engine that would rank search results based on who has more followers. This was awesome…users who have lots of followers would appear higher in search. Bloody brilliant concept! Surely there would be no way to game the system to get more followers, right? Well, six months later and the rank by followers chatter has died out.

Note: somewhere in here Twitter introduced the Default List – this is the list that pumps certain celebs, FOT, fluffers, people who deliver cupcakes to twitter hq, etc.

Retweet Search

I thought I was excited to learn that they are remaking The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. But now I know what real excitement is when I saw the launch of Topsy. Topsy is the engine that has got Twitter Default User Mike Arrington really excited. Here’s how Topsy works…rather than displaying results by authority or post date/time, Topsy ranks the results by how many times a link or query has been retweeted. If you need a moment, take one please, I know I did. So now let’s get serious for a moment. It’s interesting that in Mike’s gushingly positive post about Topsy, he failed to mention that those on the Default List will have an overwhelmingly higher chance of getting better rankings than us mere-non-cupcake-mortals.

Louis Gray did a Columbo-style investigation and found that, indeed, the default list members do control many of the Topsy topics. Louis looks at search queries including the iPhone, Tesla Motors and more. Duncan Riley took a look at Topsy from the “short url” standpoint.

Could a retweet search engine work? Perhaps but certainly not the way Twitter is setup today.

What’s Next?

Robert Scoble and others have said that Friendfeed does a better job at searching Twitter. Will Friendfeed become the search of choice for Twitter users? Maybe…if Friendfeed can win over the mainstream crowd.

Will Google begin to index twit messages? My magic 8 ball says “all signs point to yes”. Google wants to get some of the “realtime” loving that’s going around now and once they can index Twitter messages in some fashion, users will have even more reason to remain on Google. Google has already added a time panel on search results pages. Although I am not even sure that realtime matters for Google. I could see the search engine starting with just relevancy first – I do hope they separate Twitter or any of the other services from traditional online content.

My only hope is that all of the search engines will allow me to filter “-user: -cat -dog -sheep”.

Currently it seems the top three services fighting for the “real time feed” crown are Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. Dave Winer recently asked what FriendFeed would be if it didn’t pull in Twitter – the answer is simple: a service with very little activity. But for all three services, I find that there is nothing but confusion over the structure of how the three services work together and can imagine that mainstream Internet users face the same issues. I will use Friendfeed in the examples below because it faces the most mainstream issues but there are similar issues with all three services.

In terms of initial content inflow, Facebook and Twitter mainly gather their content via comments (e.g. “my dog just peed on the carpet”, “i had a roasted turkey sandwich for lunch”) while Friendfeed mainly gathers content by pulling in the comments from Twitter and Facebook and then applying a layer of content aggregation on top of that. Of course many populate their Twitter feeds via aggregated links which complicates the issue even further.

Where to reply

Let’s assume for the purpose of this discussion that I enter my comment on Twitter or Facebook and then it replicates over to Friendfeed. The first issue is where to reply – if I see the comment first on Friendfeed and reply there, the person may never see the reply if they only are actively using Twitter. Then they may think I am an arse for not replying to their comment. If I reply on Twitter, the issue of content confusion begins as I’ve listed below.

Content confusion

On a typical message board or forum, when a person starts a thread, others reply to that thread and all of the content is easy to read within that one thread. With these new services that isn’t the case. Here’s an example – in the image below from Friendfeed you can see comments from me and Ninjamonk.

Our comments were made on Twitter but when they were aggregated into Friendfeed, they weren’t grouped together as they would be on a typical message board. So others who follow either me or Ninjamonk have no idea about the basis for the comments or what followed or preceded the current comment.

Content duplication

Most of the content duplication on Friendfeed seems to arise because users are pulling in multiple services that aggregate the same content. Here’s an example from a Friendfeed user:

In this example, posterous is aggregating to Twitter which is aggregating to Friendfeed. The user’s blog which comes from posterous is also aggregating to Friendfeed. Complicating matters even worse is that the user is aggregating from Facebook which pulls in the same comment yet again. Oh wait, posterous is also sending the image to Flickr which is then aggregated into Friendfeed.

If that wasn’t enough, look at the actual Friendfeed comments. Users have commented on multiple threads which makes the aggregation several layers deeper.

And if we take it a step further, Friendfeed users might comment on the actual blog or posterous and if they are aggregating BackType, we will get even more entries for the same item.

Here’s an example using Disqus investor Fred Wilson’s Friendfeed account. Each time Fred replies to a comment on his blog, it adds yet another unique entry in his Friendfeed stream. The arrows below don’t even include the initial entry for Fred’s post about YouTube. Here’s a partial example of duplicate content which I had to rotate just to fit it all on the screen – the arrows indicate the same piece of content.

Conclusion

The issues raised above seem to impact Friendfeed the most. For the average mainstream Internet user, Twitter is simple enough to understand when used as a simple broadcast medium. Same goes for the new realtime feed in Facebook. I am sure there are solutions to these issues that will simplify these new realtime feed tools. My guess is that services like Disqus and Posterous will need to also be part of the solution – just saying that you can send content to Twitter or Friendfeed isn’t enough to be a good community participating company.

While many Friendfeed users want Friendfeed to be the next service to get celebrity lovin’, the FF team will need to create solutions to the above issues before the service can enter the mainstream pack. (and no Kim Kardashian does not count)

Related: Jolie O’Dell reviews a variety of real-time aggregators.

Here’s the message:

As you can see it notes “shameless self-promotion” although I didn’t notice that when the item first loaded (didn’t have my glasses on so I may have missed it). Could this be the start of advertising in the “stream” for Friendfeed?

Update: Funny enough, the above “promotion” seems to be stuck to the page for a very long time – it seems like the last few items are hours old allowing the promotion to remain – something seems off.

Friendfeed user Tina wonders the same thing with her post asking whether tags and possibly advertising is coming. Tina took a look at the source and it also looks like some sort of promotions might be on their way. Others in the Frienfeed thread also believe ads are coming from this item. It looks like you can “hide” the item.

Could ads be on the way? Somehow I am betting Friendfeed users will be ok with ads because they want to support the Friendfeed team while the same ads on Twitter would bring upon a revolt.

If Friendfeed pushes ads to the content stream, you have to believe that Twitter and Facebook won’t be far behind. Last week I asked Mark Zuckerberg why he allows Facebook users to use desktop tools without ads.

As social aggregators like Friendfeed continue to grow in popularity, there are two basic types of users: passive and active. Once you create a Friendfeed account and add some feeds to it, you are now a passive user. Regular commenting and/or clicking the "like" button on threads moves you into active status. The other categorization puts a user into either the publisher category or the user category (you could fall into both categories). Publishers are looking to get as much traffic out of a service as they can while users are there to be part of a community.

If we look at the old style of forums, you basically had to be an active user. There was no other way to participate and even then it wasn’t easy as pimping your own stuff was typically a no-no. In the new world of forums 2.0 (i.e Friendfeed), you are welcome to pimp your own work as heavy as you like.

Let’s assume that one (or more) of the major tech bloggers has not already created an account (either as passive or active) on Friendfeed. Now he or she creates and account and adds feeds for their blog, videos, photos, etc. Because they are a big name in the tech world, people instantly begin to follow him/her on Friendfeed. Basically the work for that blogger is now done as a publisher. They will enjoy having their content shared, liked and commented on by other Friendfeed active users and will receive additional traffic to their blog.

I am not sold on why publishers who are using social aggregators as traffic drivers should participate. How does it benefit their blog? In fact, I wonder what percentage of high-profile bloggers signed up for a Friendfeed account early on, used it for a few days and then left but are still "participating" via other users.

In addition, if you are questioning how they might participate in conversations on the social aggregators around their content – there’s an easy answer for that. Commenting services like Disqus and blog plugins are pulling comments from Friendfeed back into the publisher’s blog. So it makes sense that the publisher comment on his/her blog and have their readers benefit from the responses. And services like Backtype will feed the comments back into their Friendfeed account, completing the loop.

Naturally for Friendfeed to grow, they need to register more active users not passive publishers. But if these passive publishers don’t participate on other blogs, what makes you think they will participate on Friendfeed? I do believe that everyone should have a Friendfeed account and participate as a passive publisher. There’s just no reason not to.

And every 3 seconds, a new app rears its shiny little head to offer centralization, aggregation, and status- or file-pushing for the dozen or more profiles and sites maintained by the average user.

For profile whores (guilty!), these sites tempt with promises of the ultimate tool for managing your online presence in a cohesive way, assembling the fragments of data into a unified front for your personal brand. Forgoing any commentary on the narcissism and navel-gazing of a fruitless generation, I’ll limit my overarching criticism of these services to two main points: They’re not sticky, and they cause redundancies.

With regard to my first point, it’s very common (for me, at least) to sign up for a still-in-beta site after being digitally flirted with across a few channels, only to discover that the range, scope, usability, and urgency (what I’d call the addictiveness factors) of the offering weren’t compelling enough to prompt return visits.

As for the second point, we’ll get into more specific detail in the reviews below; let it suffice to say that I’m connected to most friends across several networks. If you or I use a status-pushing or file-pushing service, I’m getting the same message from you on Twitter, Facebook, and likely the aggregating site, as well. And no one wants to see your TwitPics of breakfast three times in a row.

“But that’s not how it works!” you may cry. “Site X eliminates your need to go to those other sites!”

Welcome to the real world. Like most users, I still occasionally have to visit Facebook; and I even (gasp!) still use the Twitter.com web interface. So until your Super Magical Candy Mountain stream-aggregating site gains critical mass and actually fulfills its brand promise of being “the only social site you’ll ever need to use,” redundancies are an unfortunate fact, both redundancies in content and redundancies in services offered. In other words, don’t pitch your site as “the ultimate contact address book.” I’ve already got one, and it’s already got the critical mass to live up to that promise (here’s looking at you, Zuckerberg). Likewise, building an independent microblogging function into your service is pointless on top of pointless; God already made Twitter once.

Now, let’s get on with the roast!

FriendFeed: Like a Mao Suit for Your Social Streams.

The granddaddy of aggregators, FriendFeed is more commonly known by its street name, “Scoble’s lapdog.”

The ‘Feed pushes updates to Twitter, rounds up links you like, streams activity in any feed reader, and even generates a nice little widget for your blog or site. From FriendFeed, you can post text, photos, or links; you can also grab other RSS feeds and insert them in your stream.

The three problems I’ve had with FriendFeed since the Scoble pimping began are that it’s butt ugly (no objections, right?) and that it totally typifies the two abovementioned overarching objections.

Customization: Gives new meaning to the term “absolute zero.”

Content Posting: You can comment on and “like” posted updates or links, and you can share links through a bookmarking function. You can also post text and photos. Rather thorough!

Mobile Functionality: Email, MMS, and an “iPhone-optimized interface.”

Roasted: Well done, but could’ve been done much better. “Mmmm” for “missed opportunity.”

Chi.mp: Hollered Beta.

Chi.mp gives the best vanity URLs of any social site. Username.mp. So simple. So easy to remember. And the user interface stands out as one of the prettiest, most fleshed-out in its class. Still, customization is minimal; I can’t even suss out how to change my avatar. I’m guessing it’ll change when I update my Facebook avatar, but shouldn’t that be a bit more intuitive?

Also, the idea of “personas” has been employed to some effect here. Mom and your boss and your Friday night crew all get to see different sides of you, on the web as in life. But shouldn’t we have the ability to decide how many personas we get to have? And how do we know which users see which content? O’Dell is confused on this point; it seems like a great and necessary but complicated concept.

I can’t offer praise for Chi.mp’s “mini blog” or photo upload functions; on my profile, they push updates to Facebook and Twitter, but not to WordPress or Flickr, which would be the more intuitive choices and would eliminate the need for visiting other sites to repost redundant content. I also question the usefulness of the email forwarding; I can set up whatever@jolieodell.mp and have those messages forwarded to my Gmail account, but… Why?

And why in god’s sweet name do I have to fill out a profile for personal and professional information when the site’s already syncing with my Facebook and should be able to do the same with my LinkedIn? After bitching on said point on Twitter, Anthony from Chi.mp kindly “hollered beta,” admitting there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Customization: I can pick one of a few backgrounds. Or even a solid color.

Content posting: Mini-blogs and photos which update to Facebook and Twitter.

Mobile Functionality: Uuuuh…

Roasted: Rare, but keep cooking. Put that shrimp back on the barbie, or whatever it is they say in New Zealand.

Retaggr: Thanks for the Widget.

Retaggr is a pure-as-the-driven-snow aggregator. Your custom URL is your social web “business card,” so to speak. Your Retaggr card can be emailed, tweeted, pinged, etc.; and the Retaggr widget makes a handy all-in-one stream feeder for your blog or website. Heck, even I use it. It also gives you a nifty ClicktoAdd.Me URL that allows users to quickly peruse their Internet-stalking options and (in some cases) instantly connect to you across those social sites.

But the widget’s rather ugly, the profile page is useless, and the functionality is limited. As a result, the odds  you’ll forget about the site shortly after you sign up are pretty high.

Customization: Users can choose themes, backgrounds, colors, and a vanity URL.

Content Posting: None; this baby’s a pure aggregator. You can tag images, but only on Retaggr-enabled sites.

Mobile Functionality: See above; so, none.

Roasted: Throw it on the coals and douse it in lighter fluid. It’s done.

Pixelpipe: Actually Doesn’t Suck!

For some cosmic/hormonal reason, I hated the Pixelpipe live demo I saw last week at SF New Tech. After TechCrunch’s review, I spewed some bile into the comments section about how there are already too many value-free aggregating/status pushing services and went on with my life. I now must nibble lightly on my words; Pixelpipe doesn’t suck.

The suprisingly simple three-click process for adding most “pipes” is among the fastest processes I’ve seen yet. Unfortunately, it’s giving me unidentifiable technical problems with pushing status updates to Facebook (mystery error message FTW?), and double-posting to TwitPic/Twitter (see the all-important redundancy note at the beginning of this gargantuan post). And I still can’t get the background image upload form to work.

Customization: Allows for custom or colored background/headline on a hosted page; but so far, I haven’t been able to make that work.

Content Posting: Uploads status updates/microblogs, photos, videos, audio, and other files; then pushes the content to any relevant social sites you’ve linked.

Mobile Functionality: Email, MMS, an iPhone app, an Android app, etc. Seems poised for mobile greatness.

Roasted: Medium rare. Stick a fork in it and send feedback to @brettb.

Cliqset: Back to the Drawing Board, Kids.>

This is literally the profile I forgot I had. I tried to sign up for a beta invite, only to discover my username had already been taken… by me.

Even the Cliqset blog seems confused on what the hell Cliqset is supposed to do. The product is unfocused and, currently, it doesn’t… do… anything. Wait, is that even possible?

Oh, right, it’s the social web. Ninety percent of these “revolutionary platforms” don’t do anything.

Cliqset, however, is particularly offensive, spurning existing aggregation services and data portability while offering the most grandiose and amibitious plan to offer users a single social identity on the web.

Unfortunately, Cliqset neither gathers data from my other social sites, nor does it push my updates to my existing profiles. Guess what it is? Just another microblogging service, but with less functionality and no mass of users.

Customization: None.

Content posting: Status updates that go nowhere outside Cliqset.com

Mobile Functionality: Kill me now.

Roasted: You can’t roast a turd.

Posterous: Emailing Like It’s 1996.

The setup process (sending an email to post@posterous.com) was delightfully novel, leading me to a super simple two-button service-adding process for linking my Posterous account to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, the ol’ blog, and… and…

Oh, wait. I guess that’s it.

No support for Last.fm, YouTube, Vimeo, Plurk (hah, ok, that was a joke), or anything like that. Users can send email to help@posterous.com to suggest more services.

Posterous offers an interesting bookmarking function for quick posting and commenting, and users can control what gets posted where by specifying an email address (Twitter-only posts go to twitter@posterous.com; but what if you want an update to go only to Twitter AND Facebook without having to send two emails?).

Overall, the functions are all tied to email and limited accordingly (good luck uploading that 3 minute video clip, dude!), and the “meh” factor is high.

Customization: I get to choose my avatar.

Content Posting: Borderline CMS-y. Can post videos, audio, photos, and text to a blog.

Mobile Functionality: If you can email from your phone, you’re golden.

Roasted: Medium. The blog part is tasty, but the constant repetition and redundancy can be a bit tough and chewy.

And that’s the lot!

Who did I miss? Did I leave out your startup? Do you have a better idea?