8 Webby Things That Are Now Sticking to Me

Chad Norman — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:25:00 GMT

Startup costs are at an all time low, ideas are everywhere, and there are millions of content-creating users out there ready to help out. It's never been a better time to be a webby guy who's into webby things. These are good times. These are the salad days.

New services, tools, and sites bubble out of the ether each week, and it's awe-inspiring to watch startups of all shapes and sizes roll down the front pages of blogs like ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch. It's safe to say that a lot of us are finding daily use for tools like Twitter and Facebook, even though they were mere distractions a year ago. While these may be the big box sites, I've noticed the adoption rate of smaller services is picking up - at least for me.

I signup for more sites than I know I'll ever use long-term, so the exodus often occurs as the new car smell fades. I just like to see the feature sets, check out the design, and get inspired. That said, lately some of them have been sticking, and I find myself using them on a regular basis. Here are 8 webby things that are living large in my world...what are you using?

Summize
If you want to know if people are talking about your organization, company, product, boyfriend, or favorite band/show/book/game, then this is the tool for you. Summize performs real-time searches of Twitter, and should have more streams coming soon. I initially used TweetScan, but Summize has a better advanced search and is just prettier looking. www.summize.com

Flock
Relatively new to me, Flock is pulling me in and I'm using it almost daily. It's basically a pre-customized version of Firefox geared towards the social media power user. The built in sidebar manages major social sites (cool!), a media stream bar pulls in content, integrated blogging and search is handy, plus it has all the Firefox goodness. And that's nothing - 2.0 is in beta! www.flock.com

SocialThing!
This is basically a social aggregator, but I love its look and feel. Seeing all your friends in one place is really useful, and Socialthing is especially handy if you are following a lot of Flickr/YouTube/Digg/del.icio.us junkies. And while FriendFeed may have threaded discussion and rooms, my friends don't need to join Socialthing for me to follow them. This type of tool could be useful to organizations following large groups, especially if they add the ability to tag and filter. www.socialthing.com
Plurk
This site could be called a Twitter-clone, but the similarities stop there. They have implemented this amazing horizontal scrolling timeline for updates, and it simply looks gorgeous (though, I've heard that when you're following lots of people, it gets crowded). Similar to FriendFeed, threaded discussions are attached to each update - this is great, and is one of the reasons early adopters are finding the platform handy for distributed online meetings. www.plurk.com

FriendFeed
Currently the darling of the early adopter set, FriendFeed is growing by leaps and bounds because of its nimble feature set. It feels effortless to use, and makes it easy to "like" updates, join threaded discussions, and form ad-hoc groups. The "Rooms" feature is something that both Twitter, SocialThing, and Plurk (they are using "cliques") desperately need. Beth Kanter did an experiment for NPTech folks that gave us a reason to play with the features - and now we're all hooked. Twitter, you're on notice! www.friendfeed.com

Twhirl
This was one of the first Adobe AIR apps that actually stuck for me, and I use this desktop Twitter client every day. Very functional, great options, and easy to deal with - I've had no problem turning other people onto this tool. www.twhirl.org

Alert Thingy
Basically like Twhirl, but for FriendFeed. You can do most of your FF business within this sidebar desktop app. www.alertthingy.com

Snurl, TinyURL, is.gd, etc
OK, when you want to post a big, long, nasty URL into a microblogging service, you've got a problem. That's why so many short URL generator sites have popped up, and why I continue to use them. I used Snurl for a long time, but lately I've been using is.gd, as the average URLs are a few characters shorter. www.snurl.com, www.tinyurl.com, and www.is.gd.

So, what webby things are getting sticky for you?

Google Friend Connect - The Last Social Migration?

Chad Norman — Tue, 13 May 2008 03:52:00 GMT

My brain has been buzzing ever since I read the big Google Friend Connect press release yesterday. Social networks form natural silos or walled gardens, and even FriendFeed may not be able to break them down (despite an AMAZING feature set - I've loving you FriendFeed). This is a big challenge, and Google's Friend Connect has arrived to take it on.

Friend Connect uses the open API access of existing social networks (Facebook, Orkut, Plaxo, hi5) and social standrards (OpenID, OpenSocial,oAuth) to bring social networking to any website. By adding some relatively simple code, your visitors can soon be bonding over their love for what you do - and who doesn't want that? Sure this thing looks a little unfinished (Where is the support for EVERY social network - come on, you're Google - get it done! And the widget better be highly customizable, because the demo didn't exactly look fetching.), but the idea is simple: connect the dots.

I've been really fascinated with all the lifestreaming/social aggregator sites like FriendFeed, Socialthing!, and Profilactic. The ability to have a real-time view of people's lives is powerful. But putting all the rich audience knowledge aside, even FriendFeed is not immune to social network whiplash (the sudden migration of users form one social network to the next). Friend Connect could make network migrations irrelevant, while also giving smaller sites an inexpensive way to leverage broaders social networks. With a strategy like this, we may not have to wait for friends to join us on the next "It Social Network"... they'll already be there.

I can't wait to see where this goes...how about you?

Geek Note:
As I'm writing this, I'm sitting through the presentation at Google Campfire One live from Robert Scoble's Quk account. Not only am I hearing all of this two hours before it will be publicly available, but it's a beautiful example the Twitter > Qik broadcast schema. Just a few clicks and I'm watching live coverage of an invite-only event from the perspective of an industry insider. Several jets flew over the outside gathering, leading to inevitable jokes about Microsoft spy planes...you can't make this stuff up. I mean, this would never have happened one year ago. Is this an exciting time for technology or what?!?

Chad Norman's Webby Things : OpenSocial

8 Webby Things That Are Now Sticking to Me

Google Friend Connect - The Last Social Migration?