At the Mashable party during the SXSW conference, I caught up with Cliqset founder Darren Bounds to learn more about where the social service is today and where it is headed. Louis Gray also spoke with Darren and recorded an audio interview that’s worth listening to. Lastly, check out the Cliqset SXSW mashup which pulls in content from Cliqset users from the following services: Brightkite, Flickr, Foursquare, Gowalla, Qik and Twitter.

Darren described Cliqset as a real-time conversation and aggregation service.  Currently they aggregate content from a variety of services from their users. Comparisons to Friendfeed are included in every Cliqset review although now that Friendfeed development has stopped, Cliqset could take over the tracks and move forward. Darren noted that their goal is to be more user-friendly than Friendfeed was.

Darren noted that the Florida-based Cliqset team is working hard to organize the social web. He also mentioned that they are looking to move to the valley soon. I think this is a smart move – when you are attaching yourself mainly to Twitter and/or Facebook, being closer to these companies is a smart move.

The company recently partnered with Evernote and the Cliqset application is available in a browser, as an Air app and also on the Boxee Box.

In terms of the Cliqset roadmap, Darren noted that they are working on a tighter integration with Twitter. The integration will become visible over the next few months. For the balance of 2010, they are focused on content people are interested in. I assume this means we will see more mashups like the SXSW mashup noted above along with pulling in additional content outside of content provided by Cliqset users.

Darren shared that they have 50,000 users and 85% of those users have created accounts since November 2009. Their overall goal is to create a place that works for both the bigtime sharers like Louis Gray and Robert Scoble while still providing a place that is comfortable for the average Facebook user.

(also note Darren’s awesome Voltron shirt – just like Voltron brought together the cats, Cliqset brings social services together. Darren wouldn’t comment regarding if there is a way to form blazing sword)

Find more stories about: cliqset, FriendFeed, social media, sxsw, SXSW 2010

By now most people within the sound of this blog post have already heard about Google’s launch of Google Buzz. The service, which is amazingly similar to Friendfeed, basically brings together a person’s (or brand) social activity from across the Web and allows their friends (or customers) the ability to vote and comment on items.

Most of the people I’ve had discussions with regarding buzz all seem to agree that Google placed Buzz inside of Gmail for the “instant userbase”. One of the reasons that Google Wave has seemed to not grab users interest is that it’s on a separate website which creates a need for Google to market the service to users. By jamming it directly inside of one of the most popular email services, Gmail, they instantly have the userbase that Friendfeed never was able to achieve. Even though many of us have talked about a social network inside of email for years, it still seems a bit odd. Perhaps it will become more familiar over time. Sadly now I need to use Gmail even though I very much prefer Yahoo Mail (except when they don’t deliver my mail for hours or days).

<begin crazy theory mode>

Back in November, Adam Ostrow from Mashable and Caroline McCarthy from Cnet wrote about a partnership between Twitter and Google which would allow Google access to the content on Twitter. McCarthy noted, “Google and Twitter have cut a deal where Google is essentially licensing a data feed from Twitter to get that information in search results.”

It appears that Google is paying several million dollars for this data feed. Now that Google has launched Buzz and you can add your public Twitter datastream into Buzz, is there a need for Google to pay for the data feed?

Naturally it’s easy to say that not every Gmail user will use Buzz and those that do may not include their Twitter feeds. But with Gmail having a larger installed userbase than Twitter and with (my speculation) a near 1:1 overlap in users, might the Buzz Twitter stream get Google pretty close to the data feed? In addition, by using the Google Buzz Twitter stream, it gives Google a better way to rank tweets in search results rather than just a person’s Twitter follower counts and simple usage patterns.

In addition, it would allow Google to basically push the search results into Buzz instead of to Twitter.

<end crazy theory mode>

So am I crazy or not?

Find more stories about: FriendFeed, Google, Google Buzz, social media, Social Networking

Last November I wrote that Twitter was slowly becoming Friendfeed. And in October, the Friendfeed team said the service wasn’t going away. They were right!

Well today we learned that another company wants to be Friendfeed. I’d like to welcome you to Google Buzz.

You can read Google Buzz reviews from Alex Wilhelm of NextWeb and Louis Gray.

I’ve been watching the live stream of the Google Buzz event and it looks and functions exactly like Friendfeed except that it’s inside Gmail versus a stand-alone Web application like Friendfeed was/is.

I can only hope that Google Buzz works as smoothly as Friendfeed does and I also hope that Google Buzz pushes out as much as they pull in.

Update: There’s an excellent Google Buzz discussion thread started by Robert Scoble on Friendfeed.

Update 2: During the Q&A session, someone asked about the comparison to Friendfeed and the Google employee (sorry don’t know the name) replied with, ”we dont look at competitors, we just build what our users want”.

Update 3: Many on the Friendfeed chat and several of the questions noted that Google Buzz looks and acts just like Facebook.

Find more stories about: FriendFeed, Google, Google Buzz

It seems the hot Twitter news of the day is that the service might be slowing in U.S. growth. You can read the Twitter stats story on Mashable and TheNextWeb. Earlier in the week the big news for the so-called social media experts was the on and off status of the new “retweet architecture system”. Twitter turned it on for many users (I was not one of them) but then turned it off so they could fix some bugs.

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.

Find more stories about: Facebook, FriendFeed, microblog, Twitter

After my post last week about where Friendfeed might be headed and after several other blogs made posts, Friendfeed founder Paul Bucheit has responded today with a very short note on Friendfeed about the status of Friendfeed.

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”

Find more stories about: FriendFeed, social media, Social Networking

From the early days I’ve noted that the technology that Friendfeed created is great. Even though response times have slowled lately and now the service is going to become some sort of flower, the real-time nature and the ability to provide major page updates with no refresh are amazing. It’s the number two reason that Facebook acquired Friendfeed earlier this year.

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.

Find more stories about: Ajax, FriendFeed, vBulletin

Remember Friendfeed? The ultimate sharing service that was going to beat Twitter and reach the mainstream in a big way?

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.

Find more stories about: blogs, FriendFeed, microblog, rubel

The other day, Holden Page from Techgeist told me I needed to check out a new service called Brizzly. At this time, the service is still in private beta, requiring invitation codes to sign up. He sent me an invite and I signed up for the service. I’ve checked it out over the last few days, and have really come to enjoy it. There are, however, still a few more features I’d like to see added before I make the switch from Tweetdeck.

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

Find more stories about: Brizzly, Curtiss Grymala, FriendFeed, Twitter

When people ask me to describe FriendFeed, I usually begin by noting, “FriendFeed is a social bulletin board service”. At the most basic level, FriendFeed is a forum. The only difference is that instead of users starting threads, they typically suck in threads from other social services like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.

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.

Find more stories about: FriendFeed, money, revenue sources

Social bulletin board service Friendfeed has just announced the launch of file sharing within the application. Friendfeed employee Dan Hsiao explains how the file sharing feature works, “To share files on friendfeed.com, simply click the “Files” link underneath the post box and select which files you want to include. You can also share files by including them as attachments on emails sent to friendfeed. This has been an especially popular request from organizations and companies that collaborate using FriendFeed groups. We’ve certainly been using this feature internally and have found it extremely useful.”

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.

Find more stories about: FriendFeed, startups

One of the most interesting parts about the “real time Web” is just how much we all miss when we step away. I mean I know today I missed Jenny telling me about her manicure mixup, Bob telling me about how much he loves his new iPhone 3gS and I may have missed Louis’ kids racing. So how do you make sure that your item appears inside the feed as often as possible so the maximum number of users see the item and can visit or act upon it?

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.

Find more stories about: FriendFeed, social media, Social Networking

Friendfeed co-founder Kevin Fox has announced a new statistical addition to the Friendfeed service. Basically starting today you are now able to see how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed via Friendfeed. In the image below, you can see that “friendfeedagg” is now a listed feed service like Google Reader, NewsGator, etc. Fox is quick to note that no matter what the number is, more people may see your content in Friendfeed because of the “friend of friend” function which takes something I “like” and shares it with my subscribers.

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!

Find more stories about: FriendFeed, rss

Apologies in advance for a semi-technical post on a Friday night but I think it’s a topic worth discussing. Over the past few months I’ve noticed more and more sites that are copying pieces of content from one social service and placing it into another social service or blog/website. Is this a good idea?

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.

Find more stories about: data, Data Portability, FriendFeed, social media, Social Networking, Twitter

Over the past couple of weeks the chatter about search functionality with regards to Twitter has come up again so I thought it might make sense to take a look back at how search has evolved with this exploding worldwide platform.

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”.

Find more stories about: FriendFeed, Michael Arrington, social search, Summize, TechCrunch, Topsy, Twitter

Note: As you read this post, I’d ask that you read it in the mindset of a mainstream Internet user.

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.

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